Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 16

Why We Don't Use "Natural Immunity" To Combat Novel Viruses

 "Smallpox killed more people than the Black Death and all the wars of the twentieth century combined; about five hundred million people died from the disease. And it changed the course of history. The virus claimed the lives of Queen Mary II of England, King Louis I of Spain, Tsar Peter II of Russia, Queen Ulrika Eleonora of Sweden, and King Louis XV of France. In Austria, eleven members of the Hapsburg dynasty died of smallpox, as did rulers in Japan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and Myanmar. When European settlers brought smallpox to North America, they reduced the native population of seventy million to six hundred thousand. No disease was more feared, more destructive, or more loathsome than smallpox."

----------Paul A. Offit, M.D. Deadly Choices - How The Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All

American Democracy: Buying & Selling Elections

 By Frank Scott

 

"In the US, voting is the adult version of writing a letter to Santa."   Patrice Greanville

 

This was the most important election in American history, as was the previous one, the one before that, and all previous exercises of marketing that pose as democratic rule in our great example of how to fool most of the people most of the time. Of course this election, as all others, cost more money than the previous marketing fiasco, when more than 14 billion dollars were spent on the 2020 purchase of the white house and congress which rose to more than 16 billion for this cycle of shopping center lesser evilism that cost even more just to purchase congress. Clearly, democracy survived its most serious assault in the history of marketing, at least according to our mind managers and consciousness controllers who make pimps and sex workers seem like poets of love. The only thing that is consistent in our one corrupt system with two corrupt parties is the rising profit margin as all manner of advertising, insurance, polling and other marketplace hustlers feast on the profits available in marketing capitalist democracy while claiming to stand for truth, beauty and other forms of mass hallucinations.

 

 

The entire world was recently being shamed by any claim to international democracy when the United Nations once again voted overwhelmingly to end the murderously cruel American boycott of Cuba by a vote of 185 -2, as usual to no avail. Despite more than 95% of the world's nations voting against the vicious policy, two shining democracies outnumbered by a global margin of hundreds of millions of people and seen as the most dreaded nations in the world according to numerous polls, the USA and Israel, gave examples of how democratic freedom flourishes the way pus flows through healthy veins. This foreign disaster mimics the national one in which 8% of American wealth rules 92% of non-wealth and people who might as well be stoned, drunk or otherwise mentally disabled incur a national debt by borrowing more than 31 trillion dollars from private finance in order to defend ourselves from thinking and assure that we send plenty of money to the Ukraine to kill Russians, to Israel to kill Palestinians and other incredibly murderous methods of defending ourselves from having health care, housing and other luxuries that might make survival more comfortable and life more worthwhile for most of us.

 

Of course we do offer heartfelt democratic rights to raving American maniacs who can stride into any weapons shop in the nation or use mail order and buy a gun, bullets and then march off to a school, movie theater or shopping center and murder as many un-defended Americans as possible before either killing themselves or being killed by a relatively helpless-to-defend Americans from Americans police force. To be sure, all the freedom loving participants in our great democracy were and are very well protected from any foreigners who would attack us, especially China and Russia who have no such plans but are necessarily geared up to retaliate if and when one of our ruling class lunatic servants to the warfare state rich bring on a nuclear war that destroys most of us while most of them hide in some lead lined shelter hoping to regovern the ruins that remain if anything does, which is unlikely.

 

Of course there were elements, as in every election, on which localities and specific identity groups were able to achieve victories, in the way that the house Negros of slavery days were able to achieve Saturday night fish fries and Sunday morning church services to alleviate the incredible pain of the field negroes who picked the cotton and absorbed most of the physical abuse. Just as an antidemocratic supreme court made abortion legal fifty years ago a new anti democratic court made it illegal again and voters expressed their opposition to one form of anti-democracy by supporting another. But we still have no relief for the much maligned minority of disabled polish American gay Jews of color who remain unrepresented in congress, the white house or perhaps in reality.

 

Lesser evilism has passed for democracy among most people for so long it now passes for the real thing and voting for polio rather than cancer while forgetting they are both diseases has set people against one another in a national state of disgrace and contempt which finds many needing letters to Santa calling for death and destruction for those who dare to vote for what they are manipulated to see as the worst disease while making good health available only to those who can afford it. While marketing sets up investments depending on the cost of votes our shopping mall that passes for democracy among poor souls who might find some pig who upon finding out his wife or girlfriend was pregnant would demand she immediately abort and thus be cheered as being pro-choice. Are we confused? Does a snake have wings?

 

 In the desire and desperate need for real democracy and the majority of Americans taking control of our country out of the hands of a warfare state owned and operated by a minority rich, we need a political party that represents the 92% of us who are not millionaires. We work hard to survive – with millions holding two jobs and dependent on credit cards in order to pay rent, eat and have shelter thereby incurring crippling personal debt with attention paid to the disgrace of student loans but still forgotten when it comes to survival among the great majority who are not attending college unless they are employed to clean its toilets or deliver food to its cafeterias. How about a party, not simply a lone voice unable to get on the ballot for lack of wealth, demanding that, say, all debt incurred by the vast majority living on much less than 100k be cancelled? Difficult to achieve while the market forces of capital profit from creation of the armed forces of mass murder while the incredible loss to humanity is alleged to be the work of evil demons like Hitler, Putin, Trump, Clinton, Gore and more, all of whom are paid employees of rich capital.

 

 Ultra rich donor-investors purchase the votes of their working subjects in "our democracy", a phrase entertained by good people still having some food clothing and shelter to show for their labors and who would have referred to their hovels in time of slavery as "our plantation". As largely corrupt representation in the employ of minority capital still get away with preaching more private profits as the way to save a crumbing natural environment from continued economic rape and plunder, the vast majority reduced to gasping for breath and survival need to activate and not simply repeat as a prayer a form of global and not simply national democracy that confronts the threat to all of us and not just some in one or another poverty-stricken-by-colonialism nation. Americans have a long way to go but so does the rest of the world and it will only be able to do so if the threat of continued marketing of everything necessary to survival so that only a shrinking minority and grossly expanding and unpayable debt for the rest enable some form of material comfort for the few while the vast majority suffer ends, once and for all. That means capitalism, whether in its idiotic reactionary form here or in relatively progressive attempts being made in China. Ending capitalism will not end all of humanity's problems but it certainly will end most of them, while its continuation will guarantee increasing all of them until nothing is left. That calls for real democracy of a global nature and not the criminal sham which makes most religious mythology sound like critically arrived at material analysis of reality. We need to stop acting like pathetic children begging Santa for peace, clean air and a thriving environment and actually create those things and more by voting for democracy with our bodies, minds and souls. Before it's too late.

The Most Meaningless Elections Of Our Lifetimes (Until the Next Ones)

Outside MAGA circles we're all supposed to cheer the "Blue" victory in the elections just past, largely due to backlash against the repeal of Roe v. Wade. But an annoying thought inevitably spoils the victory party. In the U.S. abortion was taken away by the same process through which it was initially granted - by a highly undemocratic Supreme Court. So what grounds are there for complaint? 

If democracy is the issue, and it clearly is, why can't we notice that we have more and more elections and less and less democracy? There may have never been an emptier ballot than that of the California November 8 elections this year. Absolutely pathetic. No Green Party, Peace and Freedom Party, People's Party, Fusion Candidate, not even a Ron Paul libertarian. Unlike previous years, there was no token peace candidate anywhere in the Democratic Party, just perfect unity in unrestrained funding for the Ukraine slaughter that has brought us to the brink of nuclear war. 

The prime function of voting is to fool people into thinking they have a voice in government. As Patrice Greanville of The Greanville Post noted, it's like sending a letter to Santa Claus - as an adult.

False Libertarianism Left and Right: The Covid Drama

In a recent e-mail to “Patriots” Ron Paul's Campaign For Liberty hysterically claims that the legal basis for Covid vaccine mandates is a lie, a fraud, and an outrage. 

 

"The so-called 'legal' basis for vaccine mandates," they claim, "always rested on one thing: stopping the transmission of the virus to others." But, horror of horrors, "the Covid vaccine was never designed to stop transmission of the virus, and it was never even tested to see whether it did."

 

This claim is followed with a by now familiar volley of indignation rooted in fantasy:

 

"Words cannot describe the evil that was done to America and the whole world by this fraud. Pfizer profited tens of billions of dollars selling its ill-tested and ineffective vaccine to the world, and it lied to use governments to force their vaccines upon people who rightly distrusted them." 

 

This is all quite wrong, and even absurd. Initially, the vaccine makers were focused on whether or not the vaccines could prevent people from getting so sick they couldn't breathe, a natural and quite reasonable priority. Only after this hurdle was cleared did transmission to others become a concern. And when investigated it turned out that the vaccines did indeed reduce such transmission, though they did not eliminate it, which was not a surprise. This performance has persisted through the omicron era.

So there is no scandal.

 

Furthermore, the Covid vaccines are overwhelmingly effective at preventing severe disease and death, which, from a strictly medical point of view, is sufficient justification to mandate that the public takes them.

 

The Campaign For Liberty rejects vaccine mandates, however, because they don't stop transmission in its tracks, a curious insistence on setting the success bar impossibly high. After all, no vaccine offers perfect protection. Polio vaccine, for example, doesn't guarantee you won't get polio, only that you won't be paralyzed by it. Ho hum. Medical science has learned how to prevent mass paralysis with vaccines, but the important thing is our "liberty" to prevent such miracles from being widely shared. 

 

One might as well repeal drunk driving laws because they fail to prevent all car accidents. 

 

Unsurprisingly, the Campaign For Liberty admired the Great Barrington Declaration, which urged an end to so-called lockdowns, with "focused protection" for the elderly. Its goal was to achieve "natural immunity" for the non-elderly population by converting the U.S. into one huge Covid party. Now that waning immunity is a well-established fact, it's easy to see how this plan would have worked out in real life. There would have been a tsunami of infection and re-infection, a collapse of the public health system, and general chaos. 

 

It shouldn't be as difficult as it appears to be for libertarians to realize that if everybody catching Covid over a two year period has proven to be an extremely trying experience, as it has, then everybody getting it in a two monthperiod would have been an outright disaster.

And the obvious political conclusion is that if governments can't mandate the prevention of millions of unnecessary deaths by preventable disease, then no government of any kind can ever be legitimate. 

  

Unfortunately, false libertarianism is almost as common on the political left as it is on the right. Consider Christian Parenti's long review of Covid policy: "How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy," published by the Grayzone Project last year. 

 

A prolific author and very savvy observer of politics and society, Parenti has previously authored a critical book on the U.S. prison industry called "Lockdown America," so he is in a good position to know the difference between real and imaginary repression. Unfortunately, he fails to maintain the distinction in his article.

 

A jarring resort to propagandistic terminology greets the reader from the start. Parenti refers to punitivevaccine mandates. Why punitive? By definition a mandate means there will be consequences for failing to adhere to it. So is Parenti opposed to all mandates? He doesn't say.

 

He criticizes invasivevaccine passports. What makes them invasive? Is it invasive to require we show a driver's license in order to legally operate a car? Parenti doesn't give an example of what he would consider a non-invasive passport.

 

He refers to socially destructive lockdowns, as though restricting human circulation during a pandemic were inherently evil. Though less important than other measures (contact tracing, N95 masking) restricting human movement (i.e., "lockdown") is a legitimate pandemic response measure. The most destructive aspect of its use in the U.S. was the failure to offer replacement income, as other developed countries routinely did. Parenti makes no mention of this, in preference for pretending that Covid 19 is no big deal. 

 

But a million American dead speaks for itself.

 

Elsewhere, Parenti condemns unscientific and oppressivelockdowns. However, there was nothing unscientific about the idea that restricting human movement to flatten the curve of cases would help keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. Nor was there anything inherently oppressive about trying to lock down until an infection wave subsided. Again, the objectionable part was the lack of replacement income, which was unjust, and guaranteed that lockdowns wouldn't be strictly adhered to.

 

Parenti calls out radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. As opposed to what? Moderately accountable censorship? He gives the impression of trying to bolster a weak argument with meaningless adjectives.

 

He makes the familiar that the lockdowns and mandates constituted "unprecedented levels of repression," which is frankly absurd.  Cell phone data show that lockdowns were at best haphazardly complied with in the U.S., and no legal consequences were imposed for the failure to obey. Repression consists of beatings, incarceration, torture, murder, and the like. It's laughable to include Covid policy on that list, especially the weak version practiced in the U.S., which is not to say that actual repression was called for.

 

Parenti smears dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky, claiming that Chomsky advocated letting the unvaccinated go hungry, when in fact Chomsky stated the opposite: that if they ran out of resources while isolating themselves, then the state would have to step in and help them. Note that Chomsky claimed that they should be helped even though they were committed to harming others (by remaining unvaccinated and continuing to publicly circulate).

  

Parenti also chides Chomsky for allegedly taking at face value Covid data provided by "Big Pharma," but does not counter Chomsky's observation that an international network of scientists replicating each others' published results is the actual source of Covid data, not a faceless cabal of shills and sellouts dedicated to corrupt self-enrichment.

 

Pivoting away from the scientific community, Parenti refers to a Covid consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, and Berkeley as though these were immunological research centers responsible for our understanding of Covid. But they are not. However objectionable liberal attitudes may be in these cities, it is scientists around the world who are responsible for our knowledge of Covid, not affluent liberal ideologues. 

 

Throughout his long critique, Parenti implicitly assumes that unvaccinated people have no obligation to help slow the spread of Covid 19 so as to relieve the pressure on nurses and doctors (workers!) and prevent a bad situation from becoming disastrous. What could possibly justify such a unique entitlement?

  

Only on censorship does Parenti offer a reasonable take. Censorship is wrong in principle and the state obviously has a large enough megaphone to be heard above the anti-vaxxer din, not to mention that it controls public education, which in a democracy should mean that the general population already knows how to separate propaganda from fact. Obviously, this is far from true, but only because the government fails to take its democratic responsibilities seriously. Censorship just makes the problem worse.

 

 

Parenti downplays masking while deploring the plight of delivery workers whose health and even survival was put at risk by the lack of a sound mask policy. N95 masks properly fitted work. They should have been stockpiled in the hundreds of millions long before Covid appeared on the scene. But they weren't, because "just in time" production refuses to maintain an inventory that does not contribute to short-term profit. Supposedly making a radical critique, Parenti misses this chance to criticize capitalist misallocation of resources.

 

Parenti says we "should be encouraging workers to unite and fight the bosses for better conditions," but arbitrarily opposes this to requiring masking, vaccines, and physical distancing," as though Covid posed no risk to working people. Has he not heard of Amazon union organizer Christian Small? Small successfully organized a union in an extremely hostile environment precisely because he criticized Amazon's not protecting workers against Covid while management protected itself.

 

Parenti claims that "Big Pharma has thoroughly captured our public health agencies." But this is not true. Far more Big Pharma applications are rejected than accepted by the FDA. Rejections carry with them substantial economic costs that Big Pharma would obviously prefer to avoid. So if Big Pharma is in full control, why doesn't it have a 100% approval rate on its applications?

 

Parenti claims Anthony Fauci has a "dangerous conflict of interest" in that he is allowed to receive royalties for patents on top of his salary. But this is a bad example. Fauci gets roughly $18,000 a year  in patent royalties, while his government salary was $434,312 in 2020. It's difficult to see how this is evidence of corruption.

 

Parenti claims public health pronouncements have been contradictory, but the examples he offers are without context. Do not wear masks, do wear masks. The first statement was made at the start of the pandemic, when personal protective equipment was in extremely short supply for doctors and nurses and Fauci wanted the few masks that existed to go to them. (Which is not necessarily a justification for lying, however.) Do wear masks was said later, when the contagion had gathered momentum. In any event, Parenti entirely misses the main point, which is that the quality of masks is what counts, not whether or not they should be worn. Obviously, they should be. Properly fitted N95s widely worn would have saved countless lives. (Unfortunately, these masks were unavailable until well into the pandemic because of decades of neo-liberal cutting of public health budgets.)

 

The vaccines stop the disease, no the vaccines merely blunt its lethal edge. Scientists might quibble about Parenti's wording here, but that aside, the first message referred to the person taking the vaccine, not people with whom that person might come in contact; the second message referred to infections in general, and came after Delta appeared. But with all variants the vaccines have reduced transmissibility vis-a-vis remaining unvaccinated. Parenti makes no mention of this.

 

Parenti claims that "the young have very little to fear from this disease, while the old face very real risks." He seems not to have considered the fact that the young are related to the old, and killing Mom or Dad or Grandpa with Covid while one's own case remains asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic has very definitely been something to fear.

 

Furthermore, if only the old are at risk of severe illness, then why has life expectancy fallen by almost three years in the United States over the past two years? If U.S. life expectancy is 78 years (Parenti's figure), then Covid deaths of the very old cannot account for a decline in life expectancy. In order for there to have been such a decline many middle aged and younger people also had to have died of Covid.

 

Parenti claims that "lockdowns also kill" and "have wreaked massive destruction," specifically that delayed medical care due to over-focus on Covid produced an increase in non-Covid deaths. Intuitively this seems reasonable, and fortunately we have solid data derived from investigating the possibility. According to Israeli statistician/economist Ariel Karlinsky, co-author of an international study of Covid and excess deaths, the graph of reported Covid deaths in the U.S. is almost identical to the graph of excess deaths for 2020 and 2021, meaning that virtually all excess deaths in this period were Covid deaths, not deaths caused by lockdown or some other factor. Karlinsky also found no evidence that Covid deaths were misclassified deaths from other causes, as Parenti suggests may have been the case. Karlinski found evidence of under-reportingCovid deaths (Russia, Egypt, Byelorussia etc.), but not over-reporting.

 

Parenti defends the fatalistic Great Barrington Declaration, which called for isolating the elderly while letting everyone else go about their business as though there were no pandemic, letting a large majority of the population quickly get infected, which inevitably would have produced much higher hospitalizations, deaths, and long Covid cases, even at a 1% death rate.

 

Such policy would have been justified, Parenti says, on grounds of cancer, heart attack, and stroke prevention, since overreaction to Covid prevented timely screenings and early medical interventions that in non-pandemic times are routinely carried out. But, as already noted, the expected increase in deaths from such causes was not confirmed by the study of excess deaths, the gold standard of mortality data. Furthermore, Parenti nowhere indicates how swamped hospitals could have simultaneously handled Covid surges and all of their other normal obligations as though no pandemic were occurring.

 

Lost in all of Parenti's claims about what should not have been is any recognition of the fact that when huge numbers of people are getting severely ill at the same time the health care system cannot function properly, society cannot function properly, and people inevitably die who ordinarily might live. In other words, it is absolutely pointless to demand a return to normality in the midst of highly abnormal circumstances.

 

Parenti repeats propaganda that the Covid vaccines are "leaky," "non-sterilizing" vaccines, finding fault that once injected in the bloodstream they don't miraculously prevent virus from lodging in one's nose. But how could any vaccine do that? As noted before, polio vaccines don't make transmission impossible either, but they do prevent paralysis, a rather important achievement one would think. Amazingly, Parenti only grudgingly concedes that Covid vaccines "lower the probability of hospitalization and death," but declines to mention that they do so by 90%!

 

Instead, he worries about things like vaccine disruption of menstrual cycles (which has been demonstrated to be real, but slight), linking to anecdotal claims of such disruption including the passing of "golf ball" size blood clots. Seriously?

 

Parenti criticizes the granting of immune liability to pharmaceutical companies, but fails to mention the reason for doing so. Contrary to much mythology, Big Pharma does not like to produce vaccines, as pandemics last only a few years and lawsuits alleging vaccine harm are guaranteed, whether valid or not. In a country like the U.S. this means being bogged down in expensive litigation for years, with scientifically illiterate lawyers convincing scientifically illiterate juries to award gargantuan judgments whether or not a complainant's injuries actually had anything to do with vaccines. Big Pharma prefers the more stable and profitable path of dedicating itself to producing medications that people will need more or less permanently. Who in their position wouldn't?

 

Parenti suggests that raw data entered into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is somehow a useful indication of vaccine injuries, though anyone can enter a false or mistaken report into the system, and many vaccine opponents do. Until the claims are investigated - a process that often lasts years - no valid conclusions can be drawn even about an individual report, much less about thousands. Parenti claims that "despite its limits, (VAERS) sends signals that are deserving of further investigation," without noting that that is exactly what they receive.  

 

Parenti erroneously suggests a parallel between long Covid and long term adverse effects from the vaccines. But long Covid is a reality, whereas adverse effects from (non-live) virus in a vaccine occur in the short term or not at all. The short term effects have been noted, and are far less serious than the effects from catching the virus unvaccinated.

 

He draws another mistaken parallel between "bodily autonomy" in abortion rights and the right to refuse a vaccine. But the two cases are dramatically different. A woman's decision to have an abortion does not affect the public health. On the other hand, the decision to remain unvaccinated and continue circulating in public maximizes the infection rate, affecting countless others.

 

Parenti laments "the public health response to Covid and the left's inability to offer a critique of it," but in fact the Left has offered such a critique, just not the "populist" critique favored by Parenti. In Economics and the Left - Interviews with Progressive Economists, (Verso, 2021) editor C. J. Polychroniou presents an array of left economists critiquing public health response to Covid around the world. 

  

The crucial elements of a proper policy response are an effective infrastructure of test-and-trace, quarantine, firmly enforced physical distancing, and high quality masking in public (N95s). And, of course, vaccines and treatments.  

 

The importance of the first item on the above list can't be overstressed. Economist James K. Boyce (Amherst) claims that "99 out of every 100 lives lost could have been saved" had the U.S. had an effective infrastructure of test-and-trace in place when the pandemic broke out. "The (Covid) death toll has been exceptionally high in nations with extreme inequality," Boyce observes, which "in a society is much like blood pressure in an individual, "a pre-existing condition that raises the likelihood of severe outcomes."

 

Though medically justified, mandates may or may not be used depending on tactical considerations, but there is no reason the term should take on an ominous meaning, as it has for too many people in the U.S.  Mandates are a necessary part of modern life, and the principle underlying their legitimacy isn't particularly controversial. Nobody is too exercised about the mandate to use a seatbelt when driving a car, for example, or to pay bills in a required currency, or to go to school from age five to late teenage, or to pass a driving test in order to get a driver's license, or to take out a social security number (a federal ID) in order to be part of the public retirement system. These are simply sensible measures taken to facilitate living in complex societies. There is nothing inherently authoritarian about them. Yes, any mandate can be abused, but that does not mean that there should be no mandates. 

 

Mandates that can lead to loss of employment are obviously more serious, but this is because of the required job more than the required jab. Decent societies would not require their members to prostitute themselves to monopoly interests (directly or indirectly) in the first place, which would take a lot of the sting out of vaccine mandates. However, the principle of restricting access to public space until people have verified they are doing everything possible to reduce the risk of infecting others with deadly disease is entirely reasonable. There is no "bodily autonomy" when every set of lungs is linked to every other set by virus-laden air.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See Roni Caryn Rabin, “U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Again in ‘Historic’ Setback,” New York Times, August 31, 2022[1][1]

[1] 

See Karlinsky interviewed by molecular biologist Greg Tucker-Kellog on Biotech and Bioinformatics with Professor Greg, You Tube, May 14, 2022

 

See “French study of over 22m people find vaccines cut severe Covid risk by 90%,” The Guardian, October 11, 2021

Boyce cited in Economics and the Left – Interviews With Progressive Economists, (Verso, 2021) p. 56

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False Libertarianism Left and Right: The Covid Drama

Here we go again. Ron Paul's Campaign For Liberty is hysterically claiming that the legal basis for Covid vaccine mandates is a lie, a fraud, and an outrage. 

"The so-called 'legal' basis for vaccine mandates," they claim, "always rested on one thing: stopping the transmission of the virus to others." But, horror of horrors, "the Covid vaccine was never designed to stop transmission of the virus, and it was never even tested to see whether it did."

This claim is followed with a by now familiar volley of indignation rooted in fantasy:

"Words cannot describe the evil that was done to America and the whole world by this fraud. Pfizer profited tens of billions of dollars selling its ill-tested and ineffective vaccine to the world, and it lied to use governments to force their vaccines upon people who rightly distrusted them."

This is all quite wrong, and even absurd. Initially, the vaccine makers were focused on whether or not the vaccines could prevent people from getting so sick they couldn't breathe, a natural and quite reasonable priority. Only after this hurdle was cleared did transmission to others become a concern. And when investigated it turned out that the vaccines did indeed reduce such transmission, though they did not eliminate it, which was not a surprise. This performance has persisted through the omicron era.

So there is no scandal.

Furthermore, the Covid vaccines are overwhelmingly effective at preventing severe disease and death, which is more than sufficient justification to mandate the public takes them. But such trifles are unworthy of note to fake libertarians.

The Campaign For Liberty finds Covid vaccine mandates illegitimate because they don't stop transmission in its tracks. They fail to note, though, that this isn't true only of Covid vaccines. Polio vaccine doesn't guarantee you won't get polio, only that you won't be paralyzed by it. Ho hum. Medical science has prevented mass paralysis with vaccines, but the important thing is our "liberty" to be imbeciles and prevent such miracles from being widely shared.

Sure.

One might as well repeal drunk driving laws because they fail to prevent all car accidents.

Unsurprisingly, the Campaign For Liberty admired the Great Barrington Declaration, which urged an end to so-called lockdowns, with "focused protection" for the elderly. Its goal was to achieve "natural immunity" for the non-elderly population by converting the U.S. into one huge Covid party. Now that waning immunity is a well-established fact, it's easy to see how this plan would have worked out in real life. There would have been a tsunami of simultaneous infection and re-infection, a collapse of the public health system, and general chaos.  

Everybody catching Covid over a two year period is one thing; everybody getting it in a two month period quite another.

Bottom line: if governments can't mandate that we prevent millions of unnecessary deaths by preventable disease, then no government of any kind will ever be legitimate.

Unfortunately, fake libertarianism is almost as common on the political left as it is on the right. Consider Christian Parenti's long review of Covid policy: "How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy," published by the Grayzone Project last year. 

 

We should take note that Parenti has previously authored a critical book on the U.S. prison industry called "Lockdown America," so he is in a good position to know the difference between real and imaginary repression, which he unfortunately fails to keep distinct in his article.

 

What grabs one's attention initially is his curious resort to propagandistic terminology. Parenti refers to punitive vaccine mandates. Why punitive? By definition a mandate means there will be consequences for failing to adhere to it. So is Parenti opposed to all mandates? He doesn't say.

 

He criticizes invasive vaccine passports. What makes them invasive? Is it invasive to require we show a driver's license in order to legally operate a car? Parenti doesn't give an example of what he would consider a non-invasive passport.

 

He refers to socially destructivelockdowns. Though less important than other measures (contact tracing, N95 masking) restricting human movement (i.e., "lockdown") is a legitimate pandemic response measure. The most destructive aspect of "lockdowns" in the U.S. was the failure to offer replacement income, as other developed countries routinely did. Parenti makes no mention of this, in preference for pretending that Covid 19 is no big deal. 

 

Elsewhere Parenti condemns unscientificand oppressive lockdowns. But there was nothing unscientific about the idea that restricting human movement to flatten the curve of cases would help keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. Nor was there anything inherently oppressive about trying to lock down until an infection wave subsided. Again, the objectionable part was the lack of replacement income, which was unjust, and guaranteed that lockdowns wouldn't be adhered to.

 

Parenti calls out radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. As opposed to what? Moderately accountable censorship? He gives the impression of trying to bolster a weak argument with meaningless adjectives.

 

His claim that the "lockdowns" and mandates constituted "unprecedented levels of repression" is frankly absurd.  Cell phone data show that lockdowns never really occurred in the U.S., and no legal consequences were imposed for this failure to obey. Repression consists of beatings, incarceration, torture, murder, and the like. It's laughable to include Covid policy on that list, especially the weak version practiced in the U.S.

 

Parenti smears dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky, claiming that Chomsky advocated letting the unvaccinated go hungry, when in fact Chomsky stated the opposite: that if they ran out of resources while isolating themselves, then the state would have to step in and help them. Note that Chomsky claimed that they should be helped even though they were committed to harming others (by remaining unvaccinated and continuing to publicly circulate).

  

Parenti also chides Chomsky for allegedly taking at face value Covid data provided by "Big Pharma," but does not counter Chomsky's observation that an international network of scientists replicating each others' published results is the actual source of Covid data, not a faceless cabal of shills and sellouts dedicated to corrupt enrichment.

 

Throughout his long critique, Parenti implicitly assumes that unvaccinated people have no obligation to help slow the spread of Covid 19 so as to relieve the pressure on nurses and doctors (workers!) and prevent a bad situation from becoming disastrous. What could possibly justify such a unique entitlement?

  

Only on censorship does Parenti offer a reasonable take. Censorship is wrong in principle and the state obviously has a large enough megaphone to be heard above the anti-vaxxer din, not to mention that it controls public education, which in a democracy should mean that the general population already knows how to separate propaganda from fact. Obviously, this is far from true, but only because the government fails to take its democratic responsibilities seriously. Censorship just makes the problem worse.

 

Parenti refers to a Covid consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, and Berkeley as though these were immunological research centers responsible for our understanding of Covid. But they are not. However objectionable liberal attitudes may be in these cities, it is scientists around the world who are responsible for our knowledge of Covid, not affluent liberal ideologues.

 

Parenti downplays masking while deploring the plight of delivery workers whose health and even survival was put at risk by the lack of a sound mask policy. N95 masks properly fitted work. They should have been stockpiled in the hundreds of millions long before Covid appeared on the scene. But they weren't, because "just in time" production refuses to maintain an inventory that does not contribute to short-term profit. Parenti omits mention of this important point.

 

Parenti says we "should be encouraging workers to unite and fight the bosses for better conditions," but arbitrarily opposes this to requiring masking, vaccines, and physical distancing," as though Covid posed no risk to working people. Has he not heard of Amazon union organizer Christian Small? Small successfully organized a union in an extremely hostile environment precisely because he objected to Amazon's not protecting workers against Covid while management protected itself.

 

Parenti claims that "Big Pharma has thoroughly captured our public health agencies." But this is not true. Far more Big Pharma applications are rejected than accepted by the FDA. Rejections carry with them substantial economic costs that Big Pharma would obviously prefer to avoid. So if Big Pharma is in full control, why doesn't it have a 100% approval rate on its applications?

 

Parenti claims Anthony Fauci has a "dangerous conflict of interest" in that he is allowed to receive royalties for patents on top of his salary. But this is a bad example. Fauci gets roughly $18,000 a year  in patent royalties, while his government salary was $434,312 in 2020. It's difficult to see how this is evidence of corruption.

 

Parenti claims public health pronouncements have been contradictory, but the examples he offers don't bear that out. Do not wear masks, do wear masks. The first statement was made at the start of the pandemic, when personal protective equipment was in extremely short supply for doctors and nurses and Fauci wanted the few masks that existed to go to them. (Which is not necessarily a justification for lying, however.) Do wear masks was said later, when the contagion had gathered momentum. In any event, Parenti entirely misses the main point, which is that the quality of masks is what counts, not whether or not they should be worn. Obviously, they should be. Properly fitted N95s widely worn would have saved countless lives. (Unfortunately, these masks were unavailable until well into the pandemic.)

 

The vaccines stop the disease, no the vaccines merely blunt its lethal edge. Scientists might quibble about Parenti's wording here, but that aside, the first message referred to the person taking the vaccine, not people with whom that person might come in contact; the second message referred to infections in general, and came after Delta appeared. But with all variants the vaccines have reduced transmissibility vis-a-vis remaining unvaccinated. Parenti makes no mention of this.

 

Parenti claims that "the young have very little to fear from this disease, while the old face very real risks." He seems not to have considered the fact that the young are related to the old, and killing Mom or Dad or Grandpa with Covid while one's own case remains asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic is very definitely something to fear.

 

Furthermore, if only the old have anything to fear, then why has life expectancy fallen by almost three years in the United States over the past two years? If U.S. life expectancy is 78 years (Parenti's figure), then Covid deaths of the very old cannot account for a decline in life expectancy. In order for there to have been such a decline many middle aged and younger people also had to have died of Covid.

 

Parenti claims that "lockdowns also kill" and "have wreaked massive destruction," specifically that delayed medical care due to over-focus on Covid produced an increase in non-Covid deaths. Intuitively this seems reasonable, and fortunately we have solid data derived from investigating the possibility. According to Israeli statistician/economist Ariel Karlinsky, co-author of an international study of Covid and excess deaths, the graph of reported Covid deaths in the U.S. is almost identical to the graph of excess deaths for 2020 and 2021, meaning that virtually all excess deaths in this period were Covid deaths, not deaths caused by lockdown or some other factor. Karlinsky also found no evidence that Covid deaths were misclassified deaths from other causes, as Parenti suggests may have been the case. Karlinski found evidence of under-reporting Covid deaths (Russia, Egypt, Byelorussia etc.), but not over-reporting.

 

Parenti defends the fatalistic Great Barrington Declaration, which called for isolating the elderly while letting everyone else go about their business as though there were no pandemic, letting two thirds to three quarters of the population quickly get infected, which inevitably would have produced much higher hospitalizations, deaths, and long Covid cases, even at a 1% death rate.

 

This would have been justified, Parenti says, on grounds of cancer, heart attack, and stroke prevention, since overreaction to Covid prevented timely screenings and early medical interventions that in non pandemic times are routinely carried out. But, as already noted, the expected increase in deaths from such causes was not confirmed by the study of excess deaths, the gold standard of mortality data. Furthermore, Parenti nowhere indicates how swamped hospitals could have simultaneously handled Covid surges and all of its other normal obligations as though no pandemic were occurring.

 

Lost in all of Parenti's claims about what should not have been is any recognition of the fact that when huge numbers of people are getting severely ill at the same time the health care system cannot function properly, society cannot function properly, and people inevitably die who ordinarily might live. In other words, it is absolutely pointless to demand a return to normality in the midst of highly abnormal circumstances.

 

Parenti repeats the anti-vaxxer talking point that the Covid vaccines are "leaky," "non-sterilizing" vaccines, finding fault that once injected in the bloodstream they don't miraculously prevent virus from lodging in one's nose. But how could any vaccine do that? As noted before, polio vaccines don't make transmission impossible either, but they do prevent paralysis, a rather important achievement one would think. But no.  Parenti only grudgingly concedes that Covid vaccines "lower the probability of hospitalization and death," (by 90%, a stat Parenti chooses to leave unmentioned).

 

Instead, he worries about things like vaccine disruption of menstrual cycles (which has been demonstrated to be real, but slight), linking to anecdotal claims of such disruption including the passing of "golf ball" size blood clots. Seriously?

 

Parenti criticizes the granting of immune liability to pharmaceutical companies, but fails to mention the reason for doing so. Contrary to much mythology, Big Pharma does not like to produce vaccines, as pandemics last only a few years and lawsuits alleging vaccine harm are guaranteed, whether valid or not. In a country like the U.S. this means being bogged down in expensive litigation for years, with scientifically illiterate lawyers convincing scientifically illiterate juries to award gargantuan judgments whether or not a complainant's injuries actually had anything to do with vaccines. Big Pharma prefers the more stable and profitable path of dedicating itself to producing medications that people will need more or less permanently. Who in their position wouldn't?

 

Parenti suggests that raw data entered into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is somehow a useful indication of vaccine injuries, though anyone can enter a false or mistaken report into the system, and many anti-vaxxers do. Until the claims are investigated - a process that often lasts years - no valid conclusions can be drawn even about an individual report, much less about thousands. Parenti claims that "despite its limits, (VAERS) sends signals that are deserving of further investigation," without noting that that is exactly what they receive.  

 

Parenti erroneously suggests a parallel between long Covid and long term adverse effects from the vaccines. But long Covid is a reality, whereas adverse effects from (non-live) virus in a vaccine occur in the short term or not at all. The short term effects have been noted, and are far less serious than the effects from catching the virus unvaccinated.

 

He also erroneously suggests a parallel between "bodily autonomy" in abortion rights with the right to refuse a vaccine. But the two cases are dramatically different. A woman's decision to have an abortion will not affect anyone else's bodily health. The decision to remain unvaccinated and continue circulating in public maximizes the infection rate, affecting countless others.

 

Parenti laments "the public health response to Covid and the left's inability to offer a critique of it," but in fact the Left has offered such a critique, just not the "populist" critique favored by Parenti. (See Economics and the Left - Interviews with Progressive Economists, Edited by C. J. Polychroniou, Verso, 2021). The crucial elements of a proper policy response are an effective infrastructure of test-and-trace, firmly enforced physical distancing, and high quality masking in public (N95s). And, of course, vaccines. 

 

But dogmatic insistence on an illusory "personal liberty" to do whatever one likes heedless of the consequences for others is simply not part of the formula.

 

See Roni Caryn Rabin, “U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Again in ‘Historic’ Setback,” New York Times, August 31, 2022[1]

 

See Karlinsky interviewed by molecular biologist Greg Tucker-Kellog on Biotech and Bioinformatics with Professor Greg, You Tube, May 14, 2022

 

See “French study of over 22m people find vaccines cut severe Covid risk by 90%,” The Guardian, October 11, 2021

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The Confusion of Liberty and License, Part 2

Fake libertarianism is almost as common on the political left as it is on the right. Consider Christian Parenti's long review of Covid policy: "How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy," published by the Grayzone Project last year. 

 

We should note right at the start that Parenti has previously authored a critical book on the U.S. prison industry called "Lockdown America," so he is in a good position to know the difference between real and imaginary repression, which he unfortunately fails to keep distinct in his article.

 

What grabs one's attention initially is Parenti's propagandistic terminology. He refers to PUNITIVE vaccine mandates. Why punitive? By definition a mandate means there will be consequences for failing to adhere to it. So is Parenti opposed to all mandates? He doesn't say.

 

He criticizes INVASIVE vaccine passports. What makes them invasive? Is it invasive to require we show a driver's license in order to legally operate a car? Parenti doesn't give an example of what he would consider a non-invasive passport.

 

He refers to SOCIALLY DESTRUCTIVE lockdowns. Though less important than other measures (contact tracing, N95 masking) restricting human movement (i.e., "lockdown") is a legitimate pandemic response measure. The most destructive aspect of "lockdowns" in the U.S. was the failure to offer replacement income, as other developed countries routinely did. Parenti makes no mention of this, in preference for pretending that Covid 19 is no big deal. 

 

Elsewhere Parenti condemns UNSCIENTIFIC and OPPRESSIVE lockdowns. But there was nothing unscientific about the idea that restricting human movement to flatten the curve of cases would help keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. Nor was there anything inherently oppressive about trying to lock down until an infection wave subsided. Again, the objectionable part was the lack of replacement income, which was unjust, and guaranteed that lockdowns wouldn't be adhered to.

 

Parenti calls out RADICALLY UNACCOUNTABLE CENSORSHIP by large media and technology corporations. As opposed to what? Moderately accountable censorship? He gives the impression of trying to bolster a weak argument with meaningless adjectives.

 

His claim that the "lockdowns" and mandates constituted "unprecedented levels of repression" is frankly absurd.  Cell phone data show that lockdowns never really occurred in the U.S., and no legal consequences were imposed for this failure to obey. Repression consists of beatings, incarceration, torture, murder, and the like. It's laughable to include Covid policy on that list, especially the weak version practiced in the U.S.

 

Parenti smears dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky, claiming that Chomsky advocated letting the unvaccinated go hungry, when in fact Chomsky stated the opposite: that if they ran out of resources while isolating themselves, then the state would have to step in and help them. Note that Chomsky claimed that they should be helped even though they were committed to harming others (by remaining unvaccinated and continuing to publicly circulate).

 

Parenti implicitly assumes that unvaccinated people have no obligation to help slow the spread of Covid 19 so as not to overwhelm nurses and doctors (workers!) and crash the public health system, preventing everyone from getting health care for whatever ailment. What could possibly justify such a unique entitlement?

 

Only on censorship does Parenti offer a reasonable take. Censorship is wrong in principle and the state obviously has a large enough megaphone to be heard above the anti-vaxxer din, not to mention that it controls public education, which in a democracy should mean that the general population already knows how to separate propaganda from fact. But this quite obviously is not the case, as many people exercise their freedom irrationally by promoting effectively pro-virus viewpoints.

 

Parenti refers to a Covid consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, and Berkeley as though these were immunological research centers responsible for our understanding of Covid. But they are not. However objectionable liberal attitudes may be in these cities, it is scientists around the world who are responsible for our knowledge of Covid, not affluent liberal ideologues.

 

Parenti downplays masking while deploring the plight of delivery workers whose health and even survival was put at risk by the LACK of a sound mask policy. N95 masks properly fitted work. They should have been stockpiled in the hundreds of millions long before Covid appeared on the scene. But they weren't, because "just in time" production refuses to maintain an inventory that does not contribute to short-term profit. Parenti omits mention of this important point.

 

Parenti says we "should be encouraging workers to unite and fight the bosses for better conditions," but arbitrarily opposes this to requiring masking, vaccines, and physical distancing," as though Covid posed no risk to working people. Has he not heard of Amazon union organizer Christian Small? Small successfully organized a union in the most hostile environment precisely because he objected to Amazon's not protecting workers against Covid while management protected itself.

 

Parenti claims that "Big Pharma has thoroughly captured our public health agencies." Not true. Far more Big Pharma applications are rejected than accepted by the FDA. Rejections carry with them substantial economic costs that Big Pharma would obviously prefer to avoid. So if Big Pharma is in full control, why doesn't it have a 100% approval rate on its applications?

 

Parenti claims Anthony Fauci has a "dangerous conflict of interest" in that he is allowed to receive royalties for patents on top of his salary. But this is a bad example. Fauci gets roughly $18,000 a year  in patent royalties, while his government salary was $434,312 in 2020. It's difficult to see how this is evidence of corruption.

 

Parenti claims public health pronouncements have been contradictory, but the examples he offers don't bear that out. Do not wear masks, do wear masks. The first statement was made at the start of the pandemic, when personal protective equipment was in extremely short supply for doctors and nurses and Fauci wanted the few masks that existed to go to them. (The focus of Parenti's critique should have been on the decades of neo-liberal cutting of public health budgets prior to the pandemic, which left pandemic preparedness in such a dismal state). Do wear masks was said later, when the contagion had gathered momentum. In any event, Parenti entirely misses the main point, which is that the quality of masks is what counts, not whether or not they should be worn. Obviously, they should be. Properly fitted N95s widely worn would have saved countless lives.

 

The vaccines stop the disease, no the vaccines merely blunt its lethal edge. Scientists might quibble about Parenti's wording here, but that aside, the first message came out as the data on Delta was still coming in, while the second message was for an era of increasing contagiousness. But with all variants the vaccines have reduced transmissibility vis-a-vis remaining unvaccinated. Parenti makes no mention of this.

 

Parenti chides Noam Chomsky for allegedly taking at face value Covid data provided by "Big Pharma," but does not counter Chomsky's observation that an international network of scientists replicating each others' published results is the actual source of Covid data, not a faceless cabal of shills and sellouts dedicated to corrupt enrichment.

 

Parenti claims that "the young have very little to fear from this disease, while the old face very real risks." He seems not to have considered the fact that the young are related to the old, and killing Mom or Dad or Grandpa with Covid while one's own case remains asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic is very definitely something to fear.

 

Furthermore, if only the old have anything to fear, then why has life expectancy fallen by almost three years in the United States over the past two years? If U.S. life expectancy is 78 years (Parenti's figure), then Covid deaths of the very old cannot account for a decline in life expectancy. In order for there to have been such a decline many middle aged and younger people also had to have died of Covid.

 

Parenti claims that "lockdowns also kill" and "have wreaked massive destruction," specifically that delayed medical care due to over-focus on Covid produced an increase in non-Covid deaths. Intuitively this seems reasonable, and fortunately we have solid data derived from investigating the possibility. According to Israeli statistician/economist Ariel Karlinsky, co-author of an international study of Covid and excess deaths, the graph of reported Covid deaths in the U.S. is almost identical to the graph of excess deaths for 2020 and 2021, meaning that virtually all excess deaths in this period were Covid deaths, not deaths caused by lockdown or some other factor. Karlinsky also found no evidence that Covid deaths were misclassified deaths from other causes, as Parenti suggests may have been the case. Karlinski found evidence of under-reporting Covid deaths (Russia, Egypt, Byelorussia etc.), but not over-reporting.

 

Parenti defends the fatalistic Great Barrington Declaration, which called for isolating the elderly while letting everyone else go about their business as though there were no pandemic, letting two thirds to three quarters of the population quickly get infected, which inevitably would have produced much higher hospitalizations, deaths, and long Covid cases, even at a 1% death rate.

 

This would have been justified, Parenti says, on grounds of cancer, heart attack, and stroke prevention, since overreaction to Covid prevented timely screenings and early medical interventions that in non pandemic times are routinely carried out. But, as already noted, the expected increase in deaths from such causes was not confirmed by the study of excess deaths, the gold standard of mortality data. Furthermore, Parenti nowhere indicates how swamped hospitals could have simultaneously handled Covid surges and all of its other normal obligations as though no pandemic were occurring.

 

Lost in all of Parenti's claims about what should not have been is any recognition of the fact that when huge numbers of people are falling sick at the same time the health care system cannot function properly, society cannot function properly, and people inevitably die who ordinarily might live. In other words, it is absolutely pointless to demand a return to normality in the midst of highly abnormal circumstances.

 

Parenti repeats the anti-vaxxer talking point that the Covid vaccines are "leaky," "non-sterilizing" vaccines, finding fault that once injected in the bloodstream they don't miraculously prevent virus from lodging in one's nose. But how could any vaccine do that? Polio vaccines don't make transmission impossible either, but they do prevent paralysis, a rather important achievement one would think. But no.  Parenti only grudgingly concedes that Covid vaccines "lower the probability of hospitalization and death," (by 90%, a stat Parenti chooses to leave unmentioned).

 

Instead, he worries about things like vaccine disruption of menstrual cycles (which has been demonstrated to be real, but slight), linking to anecdotal claims of such disruption including the passing of "golf ball" size blood clots. Seriously?

 

Parenti criticizes the granting of immune liability to pharmaceutical companies, but fails to mention the reason for doing so. Contrary to much mythology, Big Pharma does not like to produce vaccines, as pandemics last only a few years and lawsuits alleging vaccine harm are guaranteed, whether valid or not. In a scientifically illiterate society like the U.S. this means being bogged down in expensive litigation for years, with scientifically illiterate lawyers convincing scientifically illiterate juries to award gargantuan judgments whether or not a complainant's injuries actually had anything to do with vaccines. Big Pharma prefers the more stable and profitable path of dedicating itself to producing medications that people will need more or less permanently. Who in their position wouldn't?

 

Parenti suggests that raw data entered into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is somehow a useful indication of vaccine injuries, though anyone can report a false or imaginary injury into the system, and many anti-vaxxers do. Until the claims are investigated - a process that often lasts years - no valid conclusions can be drawn even about an individual report, much less about thousands. Parenti claims that "despite its limits, (VAERS) sends signals that are deserving of further investigation," without noting that that is exactly what they receive.  

 

Parenti erroneously suggests a parallel between long Covid and long term adverse effects from the vaccines. But long Covid is a reality, whereas adverse effects from (non-live) virus in a vaccine occur in the short term or not at all. The short term effects have been noted, and are far less serious than the effects from catching the virus unvaccinated.

 

He also erroneously suggests a parallel between "bodily autonomy" in abortion rights with the right to refuse a vaccine. But the two cases are dramatically different. A woman's decision to have an abortion will not affect anyone else's bodily health. The decision to remain unvaccinated and continue circulating in public maximizes the infection rate, affecting countless others.

 

Parenti laments "the public health response to Covid and the left's inability to offer a critique of it," but in fact the Left has offered such a critique, just not the "populist" critique favored by Parenti. (See Legalienate blog post for August 3, 2022 "Left Economists on Covid Policy"). The crucial elements of a proper policy response are an effective infrastructure of test-and-trace, firmly enforced physical distancing, and high quality masking in public (N95s). And, of course, vaccines. 

 

But dogmatic insistence on an illusory "personal liberty" to do whatever one likes heedless of the consequences for others is simply not part of the formula.

 

See Roni Caryn Rabin, “U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Again in ‘Historic’ Setback,” New York Times, August 31, 2022[1]

 

See Karlinsky interviewed by molecular biologist Greg Tucker-Kellog on Biotech and Bioinformatics with Professor Greg, You Tube, May 14, 2022

 

See “French study of over 22m people find vaccines cut severe Covid risk by 90%,” The Guardian, October 11, 2021

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The Confusion of Liberty and License, Part 2

Fake libertarianism is almost as common on the political left as it is on the right. Consider Christian Parenti's long review of Covid policy: "How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy," published by the Grayzone Project last year.

We should note right at the start that Parenti has previously authored a critical book on the U.S. prison industry called "Lockdown America," so he is in a good position to know the difference between real and imaginary repression, which he unfortunately fails to keep distinct in his article.

What grabs one's attention from the start is Parenti's propagandistic terminology. He refers to PUNITIVE vaccine mandates. Why punitive? By definition a mandate means there will be consequences for failing to adhere to it. So is Parenti opposed to all mandates? He doesn't say.

He criticizes INVASIVE vaccine passports. What makes them invasive? Is it invasive to require we show a driver's license in order to legally operate a car? Parenti doesn't give an example of what he would consider a non-invasive passport.

He refers to SOCIALLY DESTRUCTIVE lockdowns. Though less important than other measures (contact tracing, N95 masking) restricting human movement (i.e., "lockdown") is a legitimate pandemic response measure. The most destructive aspect of "lockdowns" in the U.S., was the failure to offer replacement income, as other developed countries routinely did. Parenti makes no mention of this, in preference for pretending that Covid 19 is no big deal. 

Elsewhere Parenti condemns UNSCIENTIFIC and OPPRESSIVE lockdowns. But there was nothing unscientific about the idea that restricting human movement to flatten the curve of cases would help keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. Nor was there anything inherently oppressive about trying to lock down until an infection wave subsided. Again, the objectionable part was the lack of replacement income, which was unjust, and guaranteed that lockdowns wouldn't be adhered to.

Parenti calls out RADICALLY UNACCOUNTABLE CENSORSHIP by large media and technology corporations. As opposed to what? Moderately accountable censorship? He gives the impression of trying to bolster a weak argument with meaningless adjectives.

His claim that the "lockdowns" and mandates constituted "unprecedented levels of repression" is frankly absurd.  Cell phone data show that lockdowns never really occurred in the U.S., and no legal consequences were imposed for this failure to obey. Repression consists of beatings, incarceration, torture, murder, and the like. It's laughable to include Covid policy on that list, especially the weak version practiced in the U.S.

Parenti smears dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky, claiming that Chomsky advocated letting the unvaccinated go hungry, when in fact Chomsky stated the opposite: that if they ran out of resources while isolating themselves, then the state would have to step in and help them. Note that Chomsky claimed that they should be helped even though they were committed to harming others (by remaining unvaccinated and continuing to publicly circulate).

Parenti implicitly assumes that unvaccinated people have no obligation to help slow the spread of Covid 19 so as not to overwhelm nurses and doctors (workers!) and crash the public health system, preventing everyone from getting health care for whatever ailment. What could possibly justify such a unique entitlement?

Only on censorship does Parenti offer a reasonable take. Censorship is wrong in principle and the state obviously has a large enough megaphone to be heard above the anti-vaxxer din, not to mention that it controls public education, which in a democracy should mean that the general population already knows how to separate propaganda from fact. But this quite obviously is not the case, as many people exercise their freedom irrationally by promoting effectively pro-virus viewpoints.

Parenti refers to a Covid consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, and Berkeley as though these were immunological research centers responsible for our understanding of Covid. But they are not. However objectionable liberal attitudes may be in these cities, it is scientists around the world who are responsible for our knowledge of Covid, not affluent liberal ideologues.

Parenti downplays masking while deploring the plight of delivery workers whose health and even survival was put at risk by the LACK of a sound mask policy. N95 masks properly fitted work. They should have been stockpiled in the hundreds of millions long before Covid appeared on the scene. But they weren't, because "just in time" production refuses to maintain an inventory that does not contribute to short-term profit. Parenti omits mention of this important point.

Parenti says we "should be encouraging workers to unite and fight the bosses for better conditions," but arbitrarily opposes this to requiring masking, vaccines, and physical distancing," as though Covid posed no risk to working people. Has he not heard of Amazon union organizer Christian Small? Small successfully organized a union in the most hostile environment precisely because he objected to Amazon's not protecting workers against Covid while management protected itself.

Parenti claims that "Big Pharma has thoroughly captured our public health agencies." Not true. Far more Big Pharma applications are rejected than accepted by the FDA. Rejections carry with them substantial economic costs that Big Pharma would obviously prefer to avoid. So if Big Pharma is in full control, why doesn't it have a 100% approval rate on its applications?

Parenti claims Anthony Fauci has a "dangerous conflict of interest" in that he is allowed to receive royalties for patents on top of his salary. But this is a bad example. Fauci gets roughly $18,000 a year  in patent royalties, while his government salary was $434,312 in 2020. It's difficult to see how this is evidence of corruption.

Parenti claims public health pronouncements have been contradictory, but the examples he offers don't bear that out. Do not wear masks, do wear masks. The first statement was made at the start of the pandemic, when personal protective equipment was in extremely short supply for doctors and nurses and Fauci wanted the few masks that existed to go to them. (The focus of Parenti's critique should have been on the decades of neo-liberal cutting of public health budgets prior to the pandemic, which left pandemic preparedness in such a dismal state). Do wear masks was said later, when the contagion had gathered momentum. In any event, Parenti entirely misses the main point, which is that the quality of masks is what counts, not whether or not they should be worn. Obviously, they should be. Properly fitted N95s widely worn would have saved countless lives.

The vaccines stop the disease, no the vaccines merely blunt its lethal edge. Scientists might quibble about Parenti's wording here, but that aside, the first message came out as the data on Delta was still coming in, while the second message was for an era of increasing contagiousness. But with all variants the vaccines have reduced transmissibility vis-a-vis remaining unvaccinated. Parenti makes no mention of this.

Parenti chides Noam Chomsky for allegedly taking at face value Covid data provided by "Big Pharma," but does not counter Chomsky's observation that an international network of scientists replicating each others' published results is the actual source of Covid data, not a faceless cabal of shills and sellouts dedicated to corrupt enrichment.

Parenti claims that "the young have very little to fear from this disease, while the old face very real risks." He seems not to have considered the fact that the young are related to the old, and killing Mom or Dad or Grandpa with Covid while one's own case remains asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic is very definitely something to fear. Furthermore, if only the old have anything to fear, then why has life expectancy fallen by almost three years in the United States over the past two years? If U.S. life expectancy is 78 years (Parenti's figure), then Covid deaths of the very old cannot account for a decline in life expectancy. In order for there to have been such a decline many middle aged and younger people also had to have died of Covid. (See Roni Caryn Rabin, "U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Again in 'Historic' Setback," New York Times, August 31, 2022)

Parenti claims that "lockdowns also kill" and "have wreaked massive destruction," specifically that delayed medical care due to over-focus on Covid produced an increase in non-Covid deaths. Intuitively this seems reasonable, and fortunately we have solid data derived from investigating the possibility. According to Israeli statistician/economist Ariel Karlinsky, co-author of an international study of Covid and excess deaths, the graph of reported Covid deaths in the U.S. is almost identical to the graph of excess deaths for 2020 and 2021, meaning that virtually all excess deaths in this period were Covid deaths, not deaths caused by lockdown or some other factor. Karlinsky also found no evidence that Covid deaths were misclassified deaths from other causes, as Parenti suggests may have been the case. Karlinski found evidence of under-reporting Covid deaths (Russia, Egypt, Byelorussia etc.), but not over-reporting. (See Karlinsky interviewed by Professor Greg Tucker-Kellog on Biotech and Bioinformatics with Professor Greg, You Tube, May 14, 2022)

Parenti defends the fatalistic Great Barrington Declaration, which called for isolating the elderly while letting everyone else go about their business as though there were no pandemic, letting two thirds to three quarters of the population quickly get infected, which inevitably would have produced much higher hospitalizations, deaths, and long Covid cases, even at a 1% death rate.

This would have been justified, Parenti says, on grounds of cancer, heart attack, and stroke prevention, since overreaction to Covid prevented timely screenings and early medical interventions that in non pandemic times are routinely carried out. But, as already noted, the expected increase in deaths from such causes was not confirmed by the study of excess deaths, the gold standard of mortality data. Furthermore, Parenti nowhere indicates how swamped hospitals could have simultaneously handled Covid surges and all of its other normal obligations as though no pandemic were occurring.

Lost in all of Parenti's claims about what should have been is any recognition of the fact that when huge numbers of people are falling sick at the same time, the health care system cannot function properly, society cannot function properly, and people inevitably die who ordinarily might live. In other words, it is absolutely pointless to demand a return to normality in the midst of highly abnormal circumstances.

Parenti repeats the anti-vaxxer talking point that the Covid vaccines are "leaky," "non-sterilizing" vaccines, finding fault that once injected in the bloodstream they don't miraculously prevent virus from lodging in one's nose. But how could any vaccine do that? Polio vaccines don't make transmission impossible either, but they do prevent paralysis, a rather important achievement one would think. But no.  Parenti only grudgingly concedes that Covid vaccines "lower the probability of hospitalization and death," (by 90%, a stat Parenti chooses to leave unmentioned). (See "French study of over 22m people find vaccines cut severe Covid risk by 90%," The Guardian, October 11, 2021)

Instead, he worries about things like vaccine disruption of menstrual cycles (which has been demonstrated to be real, but slight), linking to anecdotal claims of such disruption including the passing of "golf ball" size blood clots. Seriously?

Parenti criticizes the granting of immune liability to pharmaceutical companies, but fails to provide the reason for doing so. Contrary to much mythology, Big Pharma does not like to produce vaccines, as pandemics last only a few years and lawsuits alleging vaccine harm are guaranteed, whether valid or not. In a scientifically illiterate society like the U.S. this means being bogged down in expensive litigation for years, with scientifically illiterate lawyers convincing scientifically illiterate juries to award gargantuan judgments whether or not a complainant's injuries actually had anything to do with vaccines. Big Pharma prefers the more stable and profitable path of dedicating itself to producing medications that people will need more or less permanently. Who in their position wouldn't?

Parenti suggests that raw data entered into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is somehow a useful indication of vaccine injuries, though anyone can report a false or imaginary injury into the system, and many anti-vaxxers do. Until the claims are investigated - a process that often lasts years - no valid conclusions can be drawn even about an individual report, much less about thousands. Parenti claims that "despite its limits, (VAERS) sends signals that are deserving of further investigation," without noting that that is exactly what they receive.  

Parenti erroneously suggests a parallel between long Covid and long term adverse effects from the vaccines. But long Covid is a reality, whereas adverse effects from (non-live) virus in a vaccine occur in the short term or not at all. The short term effects have been noted, and are far less serious than the effects from catching the virus unvaccinated.

He also erroneously suggests a parallel between "bodily autonomy" in abortion rights with the right to refuse a vaccine. But the two cases are dramatically different. A woman's decision to have an abortion will not affect anyone else's bodily health. The decision to remain unvaccinated and continue circulating in public maximizes the infection rate, affecting countless others.

Parenti laments "the public health response to Covid and the left's inability to offer a critique of it," but in fact the Left has offered such a critique, just not the "populist" critique favored by Parenti. (See Legalienate blog post for August 3, 2022 "Left Economists on Covid Policy"). The crucial elements of a proper policy response are an effective infrastructure of test-and-trace, firmly enforced physical distancing, and high quality masking in public (N95s). And, of course, vaccines. 

But dogmatic insistence on an illusory "personal liberty" to do whatever one likes heedless of the consequences for others is simply not part of the formula.

Adolescent Libertarianism and the Confusion of License with Liberty

Ron Paul should rename his Campaign For Liberty, "The Campaign For Stupidity."

Paul finds public health mandates to restrict movement and mandate vaccines during a pandemic completely illegitimate. No matter that the Covid vaccines have saved millions of lives, letting everybody do whatever they felt like doing would have been even better, yielding even greater mass deaths than the million plus we have seen so far (in the United States) but preserving individual "liberty" (actually license).

The Great Barrington declaration urging an end to lockdowns, (which cell phone data show never were much complied with) was a campaign to essentially do nothing while the pandemic raged. One of its authors ended up writing for the Epoch Times, a lunatic anti-Communist paper.

The Campaign For Liberty finds fault with the government for mandating vaccines that don't completely prevent transmission. They fail to note that other vaccines don't completely prevent transmission either. Polio vaccines, for example, don't guarantee you won't get polio, only that you won't be paralyzed by it. Ho hum. Vaccine mandates that prevent mass paralysis are no great achievement, as they infringe on our liberty to be complete fucking imbeciles.

If governments can't mandate us to prevent millions of unnecessary deaths, then no government of any kind is legitimate.

Fascism: The F Word For Capitalism

 

 

 

Fascism: The F Word For Capitalism

 

By Frank Scott

 

 

 

 

By Frank Scott

 

 

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini

 

 

Even if corporatism didn’t mean quite the same thing back when Benito popularized the now over-used label of fascism it still, then and now, referred to capitalism. Currently being used by neo-liberals the way neo-conservatives use socialism, to ignorantly describe what they don’t like or understand, the stupidity and animosity being provoked is exactly what we don’t need in a time that calls for Americans to come together and actually create a democratic nation but just as much for the dominated world to do the same before not only America but the world itself suffers damage beyond what is survivable.

 

While American ears ring with what can justifiably be labeled the over-used term “hate speech” that finds evangelical Christians, alleged white supremacists, members of the working class and people whose only experience of college is cleaning its toilets or delivering it consumer goods all roundly decried as fascist. This by neo-liberal college graduates whose prime mental acuity is having hopefully been toilet trained. As if this isn’t enough, neo-conservatives with brains shrunk smaller than their nipples by the same media scream socialism and communism at any attempt to see that people are able to find food, clothing and shelter without having to murder foreigners or cripple neighbors. An election looms in which lesser evilism has never been more blatant as supposed democracy with people reduced to panic over Putin/Trump babble on the one hand and charges of Marxism on the other, these being programmed by alleged civic leaders frequently less informed than their followers but possessed of the tools of mass induced ignorance: major and minor anti-social media and supposed democratic government involving the richest hired upper class government servants ever before purchased by ruling wealth.  

 

8% of Americans are millionaires, multi-millionaires and billionaires, yet large portions of the 92% relatively helpless majority are programmed to proclaim “our” democracy in the way that the house Negros of slavery days might have claimed “our” plantation. * They certainly lived much more comfortable lives than the field Negros but were no more than domestic  slaves taught to keep their lower ranked field slaves quiet in times of stress. That’s the economic position of average Americans compared to those who buy, rent and own the state which does their bidding, only making some room for the house negroe citizens of any and all skin tones, sexual preferences and religions when it fits their plans and avoids uprisings or revolutions. Thus, social democracy, like what followed the Second World War to protect some set-upon members of the population but has been in a state of collapse since the 1970s.

 

As for our democracy, the first president of this nation was elected by a handful of property owning slavers, Indian killers and other ruling class members, while more recent elections involve far more voters but with far less powers than our original ancestors possessing neither property nor any real rights until they conducted a small rebellion when the constitution reflected the religion of markets and property owners with no place for the majority who enjoyed neither labeling. In fact, Shays rebellion may have been not only an early cry for equality in America but also the most successful at reform, making it necessary to add amendments to the ruling power’s constitution that at least paid lip service to equality with what was called the Bill of Rights though the full document continues to legalize wrongs up to the present moment.

 

That moment finds the sinking USA global ruling class blindly flailing at the world in a death rattle that could drown out all life and limb unless Americans come to their senses or the rest of the world, led by China and Russia, exert non-nuclear force to bring the beast under control before it destroys everything.

 

 

At present, Russia is conducting what our stenography class of alleged news reporters label a “brutal” war on Ukraine. This is unlike the loving, gentle, considerate ways in which we make war, splitting skulls, reducing bodies to bloody pulp and burning people to death in assaults all over the Middle East and Europe over the period after the Second World War. That historic bloodbath has been reduced in popular conception to the slaughter of only one group of Europeans, Jews, but all euros were allegedly rescued by D-day. That’s when the allied powers, Britain assisting the USA, finally acceded to Russia’s desperate request to open up a second front in the east as Russians were being murdered in the tens of millions. In fact, the Russian counter attack was so successful many believe the use of nuclear weapons was to destroy Japan before Russia got into the war against Japan, which it soon did after destroying Germany.

 

 

 

 

While alleged news reporting on the Russia-Ukraine conflict makes the average comic book or TV sitcom seem like doctoral study realism, USA and its western lap dogs of NATO threaten nuclear war while screeching Putin is about to take over the planet and force feed everyone piroshkies. * This as America approaches the mass marketing election mall which puts the two parties owned by capital against one another pitting identity group people against therapy group people with a potential outcome to further savage all the American people.

 

Meanwhile neo-liberals desperately attempt to put Trump in prison so that he might become the first American president elected from the slam or at least trigger the supposed civil war brewing between vidiots, online junkies and their stark raving mad leadership. If charges of alleged rape don’t get him watch for his public shaming at leaving the seat up in the toilet as a privileged class cause even greater chasms between the overwhelming majority of distressed Americans and the small and shrinking group who can afford luxury animal health care and personal therapy while clipping their coupon bonds and planning their next vacation.

 

 

The lesser evil global capitalist trend has obviously been from the east, which is acting like the post depression "new deal" by comparison to the frenzied return to market forces fanaticism of the west. With all its inherent wretchedness of dependence on private profit before the public good and with all the flourishing criticism born of the obvious to most breakdowns of the social and natural world, that eastern pressure must increase and grow to ultimately help lead to ending the destructive forces of capital once and for all. Some 70 years before the Russian revolution and nearly 100 before the Chinese, Marx, Engels and others back in the 19th century clearly forecast the long-range danger for humanity ruled by the private and anti-public values of capitalism and we need to see what should be far, far, far more obvious in present day reality.

 

Seeing a forest as lumber and seashore as real estate is part of the process of treating people and all other aspects of nature as profit making market commodities. No matter how benign and humane the proprietor of a business may be or seem, if all depends on private profit humanity will show the loss and that loss now threatens to be almost infinitely beyond what Marx and Engels foresaw. International humanity needs to hurry and transform political economics to lead in the right direction for the human race and not just American, Chinese, Russian, or other capital. All of us or none of us? We’d better believe it, and more importantly, act on it.

 

 

 

* “Back during slavery there were two kinds of Negros. There was that old house Negro and the field Negro. And the house Negro always looked out for his master. When the field Negros got too much out of line, he held them in check. He put them back on the plantation.”

 Malcolm X

 

 **“The West is invited to become more civilized”

Putin

 

 

 

 

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“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini

 

 

Even if corporatism didn’t mean quite the same thing back when Benito popularized the now over-used label of fascism it still, then and now, referred to capitalism. Currently being used by neo-liberals the way neo-conservatives use socialism, to ignorantly describe what they don’t like or understand, the stupidity and animosity being provoked is exactly what we don’t need in a time that calls for Americans to come together and actually create a democratic nation but just as much for the dominated world to do the same before not only America but the world itself suffers damage beyond what is survivable.

 

While American ears ring with what can justifiably be labeled the over-used term “hate speech” that finds evangelical Christians, alleged white supremacists, members of the working class and people whose only experience of college is cleaning its toilets or delivering it consumer goods all roundly decried as fascist. This by neo-liberal college graduates whose prime mental acuity is having hopefully been toilet trained. As if this isn’t enough, neo-conservatives with brains shrunk smaller than their nipples by the same media scream socialism and communism at any attempt to see that people are able to find food, clothing and shelter without having to murder foreigners or cripple neighbors. An election looms in which lesser evilism has never been more blatant as supposed democracy with people reduced to panic over Putin/Trump babble on the one hand and charges of Marxism on the other, these being programmed by alleged civic leaders frequently less informed than their followers but possessed of the tools of mass induced ignorance: major and minor anti-social media and supposed democratic government involving the richest hired upper class government servants ever before purchased by ruling wealth.  

 

8% of Americans are millionaires, multi-millionaires and billionaires, yet large portions of the 92% relatively helpless majority are programmed to proclaim “our” democracy in the way that the house Negros of slavery days might have claimed “our” plantation. * They certainly lived much more comfortable lives than the field Negros but were no more than domestic  slaves taught to keep their lower ranked field slaves quiet in times of stress. That’s the economic position of average Americans compared to those who buy, rent and own the state which does their bidding, only making some room for the house negroe citizens of any and all skin tones, sexual preferences and religions when it fits their plans and avoids uprisings or revolutions. Thus, social democracy, like what followed the Second World War to protect some set-upon members of the population but has been in a state of collapse since the 1970s.

 

As for our democracy, the first president of this nation was elected by a handful of property owning slavers, Indian killers and other ruling class members, while more recent elections involve far more voters but with far less powers than our original ancestors possessing neither property nor any real rights until they conducted a small rebellion when the constitution reflected the religion of markets and property owners with no place for the majority who enjoyed neither labeling. In fact, Shays rebellion may have been not only an early cry for equality in America but also the most successful at reform, making it necessary to add amendments to the ruling power’s constitution that at least paid lip service to equality with what was called the Bill of Rights though the full document continues to legalize wrongs up to the present moment.

 

That moment finds the sinking USA global ruling class blindly flailing at the world in a death rattle that could drown out all life and limb unless Americans come to their senses or the rest of the world, led by China and Russia, exert non-nuclear force to bring the beast under control before it destroys everything.

 

 

At present, Russia is conducting what our stenography class of alleged news reporters label a “brutal” war on Ukraine. This is unlike the loving, gentle, considerate ways in which we make war, splitting skulls, reducing bodies to bloody pulp and burning people to death in assaults all over the Middle East and Europe over the period after the Second World War. That historic bloodbath has been reduced in popular conception to the slaughter of only one group of Europeans, Jews, but all euros were allegedly rescued by D-day. That’s when the allied powers, Britain assisting the USA, finally acceded to Russia’s desperate request to open up a second front in the east as Russians were being murdered in the tens of millions. In fact, the Russian counter attack was so successful many believe the use of nuclear weapons was to destroy Japan before Russia got into the war against Japan, which it soon did after destroying Germany.

 

 

 

 

While alleged news reporting on the Russia-Ukraine conflict makes the average comic book or TV sitcom seem like doctoral study realism, USA and its western lap dogs of NATO threaten nuclear war while screeching Putin is about to take over the planet and force feed everyone piroshkies. * This as America approaches the mass marketing election mall which puts the two parties owned by capital against one another pitting identity group people against therapy group people with a potential outcome to further savage all the American people.

 

Meanwhile neo-liberals desperately attempt to put Trump in prison so that he might become the first American president elected from the slam or at least trigger the supposed civil war brewing between vidiots, online junkies and their stark raving mad leadership. If charges of alleged rape don’t get him watch for his public shaming at leaving the seat up in the toilet as a privileged class cause even greater chasms between the overwhelming majority of distressed Americans and the small and shrinking group who can afford luxury animal health care and personal therapy while clipping their coupon bonds and planning their next vacation.

 

 

The lesser evil global capitalist trend has obviously been from the east, which is acting like the post depression "new deal" by comparison to the frenzied return to market forces fanaticism of the west. With all its inherent wretchedness of dependence on private profit before the public good and with all the flourishing criticism born of the obvious to most breakdowns of the social and natural world, that eastern pressure must increase and grow to ultimately help lead to ending the destructive forces of capital once and for all. Some 70 years before the Russian revolution and nearly 100 before the Chinese, Marx, Engels and others back in the 19th century clearly forecast the long-range danger for humanity ruled by the private and anti-public values of capitalism and we need to see what should be far, far, far more obvious in present day reality.

 

Seeing a forest as lumber and seashore as real estate is part of the process of treating people and all other aspects of nature as profit making market commodities. No matter how benign and humane the proprietor of a business may be or seem, if all depends on private profit humanity will show the loss and that loss now threatens to be almost infinitely beyond what Marx and Engels foresaw. International humanity needs to hurry and transform political economics to lead in the right direction for the human race and not just American, Chinese, Russian, or other capital. All of us or none of us? We’d better believe it, and more importantly, act on it.

 

 

 

* “Back during slavery there were two kinds of Negros. There was that old house Negro and the field Negro. And the house Negro always looked out for his master. When the field Negros got too much out of line, he held them in check. He put them back on the plantation.”

 Malcolm X

 

 **“The West is invited to become more civilized”

Putin

 

 

 

 

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Putin Calls Out Washington's Plundering Global Empire

"When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West decided that the world and all of us would permanently accede to its dictates. In 1991, the West thought that Russia would never rise after such shocks and would fall to pieces on its own. This almost happened. We remember the horrible 1990s, hungry, cold and hopeless. But Russia remained standing, came alive, grew stronger and occupied its rightful place in the world. Meanwhile, the West continued and continues looking for another chance to strike a blow at us, to weaken and break up Russia, which they have always dreamed about, to divide our state and set our peoples against each other, and to condemn them to poverty and extinction. They cannot rest easy knowing that there is such a great country with this huge territory in the world, with its natural wealth, resources and people who cannot and will not do someone else's bidding.

"The West is ready to cross every line to preserve the neo-colonial system which allows it to live off the world, to plunder it thanks to the domination of the dollar and technology, to collect an actual tribute from humanity, to extract its primary source of unearned prosperity, the rent paid to the hegemon. The preservation of this annuity is their main, real and absolutely self-serving motivation. This is why total de-sovereignisation is in their interest. This explains their aggression towards independent states, traditional values and authentic cultures, their attempts to undermine international and integration processes, new global currencies and technological development centers they cannot control. It is critically important for them to force all countries to surrender their sovereignty to the United States.

"In certain countries, ruling elites voluntarily agree to do this, voluntarily agree to become vassals; others are bribed or intimidated. And if this does not work, they destroy entire states, leaving behind humanitarian disasters, devastation, ruins, millions of wrecked and  mangled human lives, terrorist enclaves, social disaster zones, protectorates, colonies, and semi-colonies. They don't care. All they care about is their own benefit."

--------------------------Vladimir Putin