When you listen to math and science, COVID-19 loses its monstrous scariness.
When you listen to math and science, COVID-19 loses its monstrous scariness.
The answer to the question is “YES.” The large bailed-out creditors will end up with the property of the non-bailed-out debtors who are being pushed deeper into debt with “bail-out loans” and fees and penalties for missed debt payments. Write-offs for the One Percent, and more indebtedness for everyone else.
Turn your mind to the economy. The US has a work force of 164,000,000. The unemployment forecast from the work closedowns is 30%. That would mean 49,000,000 people who are potential rioters. (We are half way there with today’s report of a 16% unemployment rate with 22 million unemployed). Many of these people were already living paycheck to paycheck, could not raise $400, and their debts leave them no discretionary income. As they could barely service their debts when employed, how do they service them when unemployed and when their small businesses are closed and incurring costs but have no revenues? Loans further indebt them. The cash payouts to the unemployed might cover food and housing but will not service their debts.
Fast food franchises and stores in malls are saying they are not paying their rents for three months. Mall owners won’t be able to pay their creditors. The bailout works for no one except those who caused the problem. As they are being bailed out, they will have the money to buy up or foreclose on the bankrupted businesses. More property will be concentrated in fewer hands.
The bail-out scheme concocted by the New York banks and Trump’s Treasury Secretary, who earned the name “the foreclosure king” during his Wall Street career, leaves creditors whole and debtors deeper in debt.
The more debt is concentrated in fewer hands and the more indebted everyone else becomes, the less consumer purchasing power there is to drive the economy. The foreclosed assets become less valuable as their profitability declines with consumer purchasing power.
The destruction of the US economy has been underway since global corporations moved middle-class jobs offshore. It has been underway since the financial sector diverted a larger share of consumer income to the service of debt. It has been underway since corporations invested their profits in buying back their own shares instead of expanding their production capabilities. It has been underway since Quantitative Easing inflated stock and bond prices beyond realistic values. It has been going on since the rules against concentration were set aside and the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed. It has been going on since endless wars crowded out infrastructure investment and social safety net expansion.
Is this a plot or stupidity? Whatever the answer, the economy is being destroyed.
The economic problem is that private sector debt, both personal and corporate, is too great to be paid. This problem existed prior to the closedown. The closedown means that there is even less income with which to service the unsustainable level of debt. This is not a problem that can be fixed with more debt.
The problem is that banks lend to finance the purchase of existing financial assets, not to expand the economy’s productive potential.
The problem is that corporations use their profits and borrow money in order to buy back their own equity instead of investing in their businesses. The executives indebt the corporations while decapitalizing them, and they are rewarded for doing so with “performance bonuses.”
The problem is that global corporations thinking short-term moved high-productivity, high-value-added US jobs to Asia, thus reducing earned income in the US, impairing state and local tax base, and causing the Federal Reserve to substitute a growth in consumer debt in place of the lost consumer income growth.
The people in charge of the fix are only fixing it for themselves and in a short-sighted way. There is only one way to fix the situation, and that is to write down private sector debts to levels that can be serviced. As the creditors are being bailed out regardless, their loan losses don’t matter.
The bank and corporate bailouts are an opportunity to fix the economy in other important ways. In effect, the bailouts amount to nationalization. The government should accept the ownership that it is purchasing. Then the government can break up the “banks too big to fail” and separate investment from commercial banking without having to pass new Glass-Steagall legislation and without having to battle against financial lobbying in Congress. Once broken up, the banks could be sold off. This would take enormous vulnerability out of the financial system and restore financial competition. With corporations in government hands, the jobs could be brought home from overseas. The middle class would be restored.
These measures together with a debt writedown would restore consumer purchasing power. Pent-up demand would propel the economy to higher growth as occurred following World War II.
This is a real solution to a real problem. But with the One Percent in charge of the problem, we are not going to get a real solution. We are going to get more money used to push up prices of financial assets and paper over unsustainable debt and a dying economy with an artificially-inflated stock market.
The elite have failed us too many times. It is time to dethrone them.
Please, remember that this is a question-everything blog. A thinking blog. A conspiracy blog. If you want confirmation of your beliefs, do go visit the mainstream media. I am still a scientist (social sciences) at heart and I need to know the truth, not the pre-packaged manufactured crap that passes as journalism, etc.
Anyway, If Dr. Kaufman is right, we all have to re-think what is going on. This is starting to look like population control. The old method repeated ad nauseam: Create a problem, wait for the reaction, and come up with the solution, which you had since the beginning. The old propaganda game.
If the virus is a hoax, it is being done at the same time that the entire planet is deploying the 5G infrastructure. That’s antennas every 500 meters in your neighborhood. Something like that. Think about it, if people die because of extra sensitivity to 5G microwave radiation, you can blame COVID-19.
David Icke was deleted on Youtube and (pretentious) Vimeo last week just for making that connection. 5G and COVID.
What’s next? Forced microchipping? Forced vaccinations?
C= Certificate
O= Of
V= Vaccination
Id
Dear friends, I am not categorically stating that this Covid-19 virus is a hoax. I suspect it is, just like the previous flu scares, but in any case, I follow the rules and wash my hands and beat people with a stick who get near me.
Too many questions come up. For example, I still smoke cigs. Yes, terrible habit. I buy them cheaply where the poor congregate downtown. $5 vs $14. It’s a no brainer, as I know that the taxes on cigs do not go towards any cure whatsoever. The sums of money go to overpaid people who don’t need it: doctors (average income ~ $300,00), hospital administrators (useless parasites), and nurses (already earning over $50 per hour), Etc.
Anyway, I mingle with these poor bastards when I go buy the cigs. I sit with them. Sometimes there is one person smoking crack on my left, another with a needle in her arm on my right, and another one behind me doing the crystal meth dance routine. These people are within inches of each other and share everything. You know what? There has not been one Covid-19 case in that vulnerable population.
How come these useless vapid celebrities are getting it and not the poor in ghettos?
I am one of the “lucky” ones because I have been tested, see next post, and I don’t have the virus.
COVID-19: Certificate Of Vaccination ID. What do you think?
may at first glance not seem to be connected. One is a tiny invisible virus, and the other is an issue as big as the planet itself. However, there are some eerie similarities. Firstly, look at their propagandistic value – they are both false narratives being used to manipulate your perception and centralize power in a NWO (New World Order) Global Government. Secondly, they are both hyped threats which play upon your emotions (fear, care, etc.). They create what is ultimately a fake emergency (even if there are legitimate problems connected to them). Recently Pope Francis has both implied and outright stated that the coronavirus outbreak was “nature’s response” to humanity ignoring ecological issues, and that “nature is throwing a tantrum so that we will take care of her.” Francis has long been a mouthpiece for Agenda 2030 sustainable development plans, a way to usher in global governance while pretending to care for the environment. Are the NWO manipulators achieving in just weeks and months with the coronavirus hoax what was taking them years to achieve with the manmade climate change hoax?
The key feature of the manmade global warming/climate change agenda is to convince you that the carbon dioxide (CO2) made by humanity is ruining the planet. This is in spite of the obvious biological fact the CO2 is a gas of life; plants breathe it in and need it to live, and we need plants to live to produce our oxygen, so without enough CO2, we would be dead. As I covered in the article Good Hearts, Fooled Minds: Top 4 Fallacies of the Hijacked Environmental Movement, the green movement has been hijacked. The Club of Rome is one of 6 groups that are close to the center of the Rhodesian Round Table (ultimately funded by Rothschild) which also includes The Bilderberg Group, the CFR, the RIIA, the UN and The Trilateral Commission. The Club of Rome’s 1991 document entitled The First Global Revolution? contains this passage:
“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together … all these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”
Did you catch that? The real enemy is humanity itself. The NWO controllers want this insidious idea to infect people’s minds, erode their self-love and self-worth, and introduce the subsequent idea that you need to feel guilty just for being alive on this planet (after all, you’re breathing CO2, you traitor!).
Now compare this to what is going on with the fake pandemic of the moment, Operation Coronavirus. As I covered in 2 earlier articles (Deep Down the Virus Rabbit Hole – Question Everything and COVID-19 Umbrella Term to Operate a Fake Pandemic: Not 1 Disease, Not 1 Cause), we are still, amazingly, yet to have solid scientific proof that this virus exists. We have RNA fragments from lung fluid samples, but that doesn’t meet the standard of proof. The new coronavirus has failed Koch’s postulates; it has not been isolated; it has not been proven to exist. Thanks to work of Dr. Andy Kaufman and others, it has become apparent that certain organizations have taken an exosome and falsely claimed it is a new virus. Exosomes are secreted by cells as a natural response to toxins; they are pleomorphic and can turn into viruses. Exosomes are part of human body itself, as are viruses.
Thus, all the hype and hysteria has been generated by claiming that an exosome/virus is the new enemy, even though the exosome and virus are parts of the human body.
So we come full circle: the (human-produced) exosome/virus is the enemy (and thus humanity is the enemy, again).
You can find some examples of the absurd nonsense being written and spoken about coronavirus and climate change in James Corbett’s video here. Corbett exposes the propaganda and highlights how people are using the pandemic to further the AGW agenda. Some of the propaganda gems he exposed were how the so-called “climate crisis” is making the spread of infectious diseases like coronavirus more common and how a “study” found that climate change is releasing new and previously trapped viruses. So now, in addition to all the other NWO agendas (I’m at 21 and counting) that are being rolled out using COVID-19 as a pretext, you can add another layer to it: humans are “double plus bad” because we warmed the planet with CO2 and therefore helped release and exacerbate the spread of a killer virus. Wow. Do you feel so bad you want to kill yourself yet?
These hoaxes are designed to hack human psychology by exploiting its weaknesses. The propensity for care and compassion for our fellow human being is naturally a wonderful thing that makes us human. Sadly, it can be exploited. The ruling class at the very top of the pyramid – the 1% of the 1% of the 1% – are characterized by their criminal, psychopathic and Satanic mindset. They don’t care. In fact, some of them even perform Satanic rituals to eliminate empathy and compassion (e.g. the cremation of care black magic ceremony at the Bohemian Grove). All their care is fake care, since they have suppressed it within themselves. However, they know how to pull the heart strings of the mass population, so they pretend they care and make deceptive appeals to “care for the environment” and “care for the elderly” to make people sign on to their agendas. While claiming they care for the planet, their corporations pollute the air, land and water with chemtrails, GMOs, heavy metals, microplastics and more. While claiming they care for the elderly, they think of them as useless eaters with no productive worth and constantly try to change the culture and the laws to make it acceptable to kill off the old people as soon as possible (see Dr. Richard Day’s account where he reveals the elite plan for a demise pill for the elderly).
Exploiting the natural human propensity to care is one side of the equation; the other side is ginning up and then exploiting fear. The NWO controllers are masters of this. The best types of propaganda mix truth with fiction, so they tell you that species are going extinct (true, except for the lie about polar bears declining), the planet will have more catastrophes, the planet will warm uncontrollably, you’re going to infect your loved ones, the planet’s going to die, you’re going to die, and on and on and on. They hire soul-for-sale scientists to “find” and “conclude” the theories the NWO paymasters want. It’s funny how you can “find” anything that you’re being paid to find. People can’t think rationally or clearly when afraid, since they are in their amygdala (fight-or-flight reptilian brain) not their pre-frontal cortex (the higher center of reason and logic). Plus, most people will believe anything as long as it’s repeated loud enough and long enough. Manipulating people is a piece of cake, really.
Check out this propaganda piece Time magazine, a very tenuous argument where the author even admits he has no evidence:
“I have no evidence that climate change triggered this particular virus to jump from animals to humans at this particular time, or that a warmer planet has helped it spread. That said, it’s pretty clear that, broadly speaking, climate change is likely to lead to an uptick in future epidemics caused by viruses and other pathogens. Scientists have understood for decades that climate change would change the way diseases spread, but, as the planet warms, those hypotheses are being tested and scientists are learning in real time. There are many links between climate change and infectious diseases, but I’m going to focus on one particularly novel—and concerning—area of knowledge: how rising temperatures are making our natural immune systems less effective.”
Here’s what MSM outlet NBC has to say about the coronavirus and climate change phenomena:
“And that is why, in the long term, the coronavirus will one day be seen as a fire drill for climate change.”
Here’s where this YouTube manmade climate change believer is taking it. The dangerous implication here is that if we can do all this for the coronavirus, why can’t we do the same for the climate; in other words, why can’t we utterly transform the shape of society because of climate change:
“The world jumps into action to deal with pandemics like the Coronavirus outbreak. But why don’t we respond in the same way for climate change?”
The coronavirus and climate change hoaxes have a lot of similarities, based on the way they make humanity – i.e. they make you – the enemy. They exploit emotions such as care and fear to modify mass behavior. Hopefully by reading this you can begin to see the pattern of these propaganda narratives so that they lose their effectiveness on you. Despite all the similarities, there is one big difference: the NWO have been able to achieve far more in far less time with the coronavirus hoax than with the manmade climate change hoax. We need to stay perpetually aware and vigilant if we hope to remain free.
*****
Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Steemit and FB.
Sources:
*https://www.technocracy.news/pope-francis-is-pandemic-natures-revenge-for-ignoring-climate-change/
*https://thefreedomarticles.com/category/conspiracy/agenda-2030-agenda-21/
*https://thefreedomarticles.com/hijacked-environmental-movement/
*https://thefreedomarticles.com/deep-down-virus-rabbit-hole-question-everything/
*https://thefreedomarticles.com/covid-19-umbrella-term-fake-pandemic-not-1-disease-cause/
*https://www.corbettreport.com/coronavirus-and-climate-change-propagandawatch/
*https://thefreedomarticles.com/5-nwo-agendas-accompanying-coronavirus-epidemic/
*https://thefreedomarticles.com/satanic-black-magic-rules-the-world/
*https://thefreedomarticles.com/3-most-chilling-conspiracy-documents-accounts/
Microsoft is the company that funds Mark of the Beast digital identification company ID2020, and now they are promoting New Age witch Marina Abramovic who is best known for the satanic practice of spirit cooking. Is this really someone you would want to enter into holographic mixed reality with?
I suppose you can get away with just about anything if you call yourself a ‘performance artist’ instead of what you actually are, in this case we are talking about a High Priestess of modern-day Satanism, Marina Abramovic.
She is a wicked woman whose ‘performance art‘ usually revolves around snakes, pig’s blood, images of Baphomet, [pebtagrams] and all the rest of that garbage. But nothing to see her, people, Marina is just an ‘edgy performance artist’, that’s all. Yeah, right.
“And he caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom: also he observed times, and used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger.” 2 Chronicles 33:6 (KJB)
Take a look at an article published by the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies back in 2018, where they calmly and rationally discussed the rise importance of witchcraft in Hollywood. It’s not simply enlightening, it’s a stunning eye-opener, and of course we see Marina Abramovic featured prominently in it.
“We seem to be living in bewitched times. Witches are everywhere, or rather: victims of alleged witch hunts pop up all over the place, preferable on Twitter or other social media outlets. Pop-stars perform as witches, like Katy Perry in her performance at the 2014 Grammy awards, where she appeared in a cowl before a crystal ball, while later dancing with broomsticks as poles.
“Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade” (2016) made several explicit references to black witchcraft rituals. Azealia Banks proclaimed on Twitter that she practiced “three years’ worth of brujería” (witchcraft) and tweeted, while cleaning the blood-smeared room used for her animal sacrifices, “Real witches do real things” (2016).
“Marina Abramovic’s performance piece “Spirit Cooking” (1996) was used in the infamous Pizzagate conspiracy theory of 2016 accusing Abramovic and the Hillary Clinton campaign of practicing witchcraft rituals and occult magic. Meanwhile, thousands of people coordinate binding spells against political leaders (#bindtrump) and Silvia Federici’s seminal book “Caliban and the Witch” moved from the bookshelf to the bedside table for many art professionals.” READ MORE
But do your own research, we have done ours and are satisfied that Marina Abramovic is exactly who we think she is, a New Age witch who hides behind performance art to promote Satanism, witchcraft, and all the rest of her demonic nonsense. So with that, let’s take a look at what Microsoft, the same company who is funding ID2020, is doing with Abramovic. Of course, me writing all these words are actually completely unnecessary, because when you watch the promotional video Microsoft has produced to promote her, it’s lights out and case closed.
Now if you have half a brain, after everything we present to you here, the last place you want to be is in a virtual world with a New Age witch known for satanism, gore and cannibalism. But this is where evil end times company Microsoft wants to take you, don’t go.
FROM MICROSOFT: Marina Abramovic is likely the most acclaimed performance artist living today. Known for risky performances that push the limits of human endurance, it’s difficult to overstate her importance within the art world and pop culture at large.
So on Good Friday Bill Gates’ new Microsoft ad dropped featuring prominent satanist Marina Abramovic who makes “art” out of blood, gore and cannibalism. #SpiritCooking
From the 1970s through to the present, she has created dozens of incredibly impactful works that explore themes of courage, ego, endurance, and spirituality. In 2010, her iconic work The Artist Is Present, was the biggest exhibition at New York City’s MoMA ever. In the piece, she sat still for eight hours, every day, for nearly three months, sustaining eye contact with whomever sat across from her.
“Any medium—visual, aural, even material—is really just a conduit for the energy of the artist to reach the understanding of the audience. In mixed reality we’ve achieved the first medium capable of presenting a recorded performance as an event happening now,” says Todd.
“The artist is forever, in this case, which changes the very nature of what the conduit means. But for the audience with The Life, it’s my hope that they never think about such things. Instead I want them to walk away feeling like they were just in the room with Marina.”
Marina’s most recent piece, The Life, further solidifies her unconventional and innovative approach to performance art—it’s her first artwork to harness mixed reality. Brought to life with the HoloLens 2, the 19-minute performance follows Abramović, whose phantom-like virtual image appears in a vibrant red dress as she explores the space and its borders. Viewers become mesmerized by her mindful movements, her virtual image dissolving as she interacts with the installation’s borders.
For the first time, viewers are able to experience performance art without boundaries—and without the artist technically being “present.” As soon as they don the HoloLens 2 headset, Abramović’s fully realized form takes shape before their eyes. READ MORE
If a picture says a thousand words, how many words is this video telling you? Watch and find out. But at the very least you will instantly see why we call her a New Age witch and a satanist, oops, sorry, performance artist.
I am working on the next blog but I am stuck. Everything is changing so rapidly presently that I am left aghast and sometimes devastated. We have been talking about this, the current bio scare, for so long that we never thought we’d see the day when it would be real. Anyway, I have not given up. I am just wondering which direction to go. After all, this effort will be 10 years old next August. Wow.
Stay strong and healthy,
Lou
I wonder how long it will take us, the vast majority of real humans, to remove or recycle these useless parasites that have prevented the evolution of the species since the beginning?
“London is to billionaires what the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. It is their natural habitat”—Boris Johnson, Conservative Party Mayor of London, 2014.
“I welcome the fact that we have got 140-plus billionaires in London. That’s a good thing. I welcome the fact that there are more than 400,000 millionaires. That’s a good thing”—Sadiq Khan, Labour Party Mayor of London, 2016.
London, the centre of grotesque inequality in Britain before the COVID-19 pandemic, has inevitably become an epicentre of the pandemic within the UK. The city is a concentrated example of the class divisions cleaving through the whole of British society.
On the evenings of March 26 and April 2, as millions of Londoners joined a country-wide applause for the self-sacrifice of grossly underequipped NHS staff, where were the super-rich that Johnson and Khan lauded as essential to society’s wellbeing? While the Tory government bailed out big business to the tune of £380 billion, the multi-millionaires and billionaires escaped to secluded islands and safe havens in private jets, climbed aboard luxury yachts for extended vacations, settled into their country retreats, or bunkered down in their mansions and luxury apartments.
A few weeks ago, private jet booking service PrivateFly said it saw a huge increase in bookings as clients evacuated back to the UK from disease-hit countries. Others were arranging private flights out of Britain to avoid planned lockdowns.
Those poorer multi-millionaires who could not afford private jets were using concierge company Quintessentially. The company’s spokesperson said, “Members who are travelling commercially are choosing to book elite services at airports, not your typical first-class lounge. For example, private terminals where guests are greeted and given their own suite. Check-in, customs and security are all done privately, and guests are then taken to the doors of the aircraft. Members can request for the jetty to be cleared so they minimise the interactions with other passengers on their way to their seat.”
Luxury retail agency Quintessentially Estates said that early in the crisis their phones were hot with inquiries about “Scottish castles, mansions with bunkers, Cotswolds manor houses with moats, uninhabited Caribbean islands to buy, superyachts for a long charter and private jets to get clients home from abroad without their having to go near international airports.”
The London rich who could not escape buy designer face masks and attend eye-wateringly expensive Harley Street practices for private testing and expensive intravenous vitamin infusions. Others have moved to country homes or leased them for up to £50,000 a month, according to the Daily Mail.
As reports began to emerge that London doctors, hospital workers, bus workers and a 13-year-old child were dying of COVID-19 across the capital in horrific circumstances, the elite had other concerns. One London financier is reported by Forbes to have complained that the lockdown was preventing her showing off her expensive jewellery: “I’m just not sure when my next ball will be.”
While the super-rich complain of being bored in their gated mansions, masses of workers in London have lost their jobs or are forced to work in unsafe conditions with next to no protection from the virus. Every journey on London Underground has turned into a nightmare. Poorly paid workers wrap scarfs and handkerchiefs around their faces and crowd into train carriages. Labour Party Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has closed 40 out of 265 tube stations due to the numbers of staff self-isolating at home with COVID-19 symptoms because no serious safety measures were put in place.
Among those travelling on packed transport systems are tens of thousands of the capital’s construction workers—many on their way to build high-value apartments and houses. Both the Tory government and Mayor Khan have made deliberately vague statements about what constitutes “essential work,” allowing construction firms to decide for themselves. Twitter has been rife with the barbed comments of construction workers questioning why the luxury flats they must build were considered “essential.”
Another thriving industry is private tutoring. Tutors International, which provides elite tutoring services, says it has seen “a massive upswing in requests” since the COVID-19 outbreak.
While the super-rich carry on with their luxurious lifestyles as normal, the situation facing the working class is indicated by the Nightingale field hospital, officially opened on Friday in east London. The effort put in by workers to construct a facility from scratch has been tremendous. But the need for a 4,000-bed facility at such short notice highlights the gutting of the National Health Service (NHS) in London—leaving the population perilously exposed to the pandemic. Two new mortuaries, one in Newham and the other in Hillingdon, are also being built.
In the words of one health chief, a “tsunami” of cases is set to overwhelm London’s hospitals. On March 19, well in advance of the expected peak of cases, Northwick Park hospital in north-west London declared a critical incident after it ran out of ventilator capacity. One senior figure told the Health Service Journal, “Given we’re in the low foothills of this virus, this is f***ing petrifying.”
On Thursday, it was reported that one London hospital had nearly run out of oxygen over the weekend. NHS trusts in England have been given an urgent warning to limit the number of people on mechanical ventilators and continuous positive airway pressure machines.
Health chiefs are warning that an already overstretched London Ambulance Service will be unable to cope with the hundreds of extra patients needing hospital admission. Vehicles used to transport patients to non-urgent visits are being commandeered, but do not have the same medical equipment as an ambulance.
These conditions are putting London’s healthcare workers in danger. The lack of personal protective equipment and testing available to medical staff has become a national scandal. On Sunday, Thomas Harvey, a healthcare assistant at Goodmayes Hospital, London, died after treating a patient with COVID-19 with only gloves for protection. Across the capital, some hospital trusts have staff self-isolation rates of between 30 and 50 percent.
This Monday, a nurse in her 20s at King’s College Hospital, where eight COVID-19 deaths have occurred, committed suicide. Although the investigation into her death has drawn no conclusions, the experience in Italy where several health workers have committed suicide during the pandemic points to a similar trend beginning in the UK. Shortages are forcing medical staff to work incredibly long, harrowing shifts and make the traumatic decision to deny treatment to the most vulnerable.
The World Socialist Web Site reported on the crisis at Kings College Hospital Trust in January this year: “King’s hospital has a vacancy rate of 19.4 percent for nursing posts in cancer care, 15.4 percent in children’s care and 12 percent in operating theatres. At the Princess Royal hospital managed by the King’s Trust, 26.3 percent of nursing posts in acute and emergency care and 12.4 percent in the children’s care unit are vacant.”
The terrible personal consequences of such sharp social inequalities were summed up last weekend by the contrasting fates of Prince Charles, tested and cared for while presenting only mild symptoms of the disease, and Kayla Williams, a 36-year-old mother of three from Peckham, south London. Williams, the wife of Fabian, a refuse worker, died in her flat of suspected COVID-19 a day after calling 999 and being told to look after herself at home.
Fabian said, “I called 999 because my wife was breathless, she was vomiting, and she had pains in her stomach. As I was talking to them, she was getting worse and they told me to put her on the floor and to make her body flat. She [the paramedic] told me the hospital won’t take her, she is not a priority.” Williams was dead the next day.
Twitter erupted as Londoners contrasted the brutal inequality in treatment between Kayla and Britain’s royalty. The lesson has been burned into popular consciousness that we are not “all in this together,” as the government claims. There is the pandemic experienced as an inconvenience by the super-rich, and the pandemic experienced as a catastrophe by the working class. Only a revolutionary overturn can protect the population from the virus and remove from society the cancerous growth of multimillion and billion-pound wealth threatening its very existence.
It is seriously astounding how fast the economy is crumbling. No infusion of funny money will save the American people from the historically severe depression now evolving.
State and federal governments are becoming more authoritarian in response to serious influenza (critical data on the transmission of the disease is absent, muddled, contradictory, and the corporate media feeds a frenzy of fear and paranoia based on conflicting, revised, and often speculative numbers).
Critical supply lines foolishly based on the globalist profit-maximizing concept of “just in time” are now breaking down. How long do you suppose unemployed service industry and gig-economy workers will tolerate a serious shortage of food and other essentials before looting stores like the poor and hungry of Palermo? How long before armed citizens begin taking what they need and the military is called in to restore order and confiscate weapons like they did during Katrina? All hell will break loose from Baltimore to Seattle and the government may impose martial law (it can be argued we are already under a soft form of martial-medical law, half of us confined to our homes, the equivalent of house arrest, scared to death of a virus they now say can spread by merely opening of one’s mouth and speaking and thus allowing viral-laden breath to drift in the air).
I don’t believe the state will be able to meet the needs of a third or more of an unemployed workforce—angry, desperate, and eventually violent as a dystopian nightmare spreads across the land. Congress and Trump’s onetime $1,200 check will certainly not satisfy the unemployed for long—in many cases, that’s not even a month’s rent. Millions of Americans stood by and watched as the Federal Reserve dished out a trillion and a half bucks to the banks and the financial elite.
Mark Twain said something about history rhyming. It looks like a big fat sonnet is about to unfold and knock us flat. Historians argue whether FDR did or did not secretly agree with Churchill to get the US involved in the war in Europe and thus put an end to a stubborn depression. It did—and the military-industrial machine returned prosperity to depression and war-weary Americans while building a sprawling national security structure behind the scenes to face an exaggerated enemy, a critically flawed Soviet Union and the virus of Lenin’s version of communism.
While we are obsessed with life, death, and the coronavirus, the Trump administration is moving to re-ignite the war in Iraq, a war that has as its final objective the destruction of Iran.
From the corporate propaganda media:
President Donald Trump warned Wednesday that Iran was planning a “sneak attack on U.S. troops and/or assets in Iraq” and later cited unspecified intelligence he said indicated potential plots by local Tehran-aligned forces there.
“Don’t do it,” the president warned at a press briefing that evening, threatening that his “response will be bigger” this time after U.S. airstrikes last month targeted Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah positions but also reportedly killed Iraqi troops, police officers and a civilian.
It was soon reported Trump ordered “Patriot surface-to-air missiles and a variant of the Navy’s SeaRAM and CIWS, or close-in weapon system, which fires 3,000 rounds a minute” be sent to Iraq to protect US bases.
Lost in the latest reportage is the fact the rockets fired at US soldiers were a direct response to Trump’s Mafia hit on Iran’s Qassem Soleimani.
A second establishment propaganda mill reported:
It was not immediately clear what intelligence Trump had obtained to prompt him to issue his tweet on Wednesday… [during a] subsequent press conference he indicated the US’s likely target would be Kata’ib Hezbollah, saying the US had “very good information on the group planning the attack”. He added: “It was led by Iran, not necessarily Iran, but by groups supported by Iran, but that to me is Iran.”
President Trump now has the distraction of a virus and the unfolding of a government-engineered depression to cover what the neocons plan to do in Iraq and Iran.
Considering Trump had zero reluctance to murder Soleimani in high-tech mob boss fashion, it is entirely possible he will go after Iran’s expeditionary Quds force commander Esmail Ghaani. He is scheduled for a meeting in Baghdad this week. “Ghaani is hoping to unite the Shia factions, and the visit is seen as a test of whether he can match the famed influence of Suleimani.”
Then again, taking into account Trump’s recent vacillations on Iran, he may decline to start another war in the Middle East. He believes the impending depression is “V-shaped” and America will bounce back after increasingly authoritarian COVID-19 measures are put into place and never rescinded.
If he believes there will be a bounce to prosperity, he is surely deluded. Before the middle of June, it is likely the US will be in a full-blown depression with hyperinflation, food shortages, mass protests, political violence, and the possibility of military rule as laid out in the state’s continuity of government plans for “national emergencies.”
Oliver North, now handsomely compensated as a patriot-celebrity, in the early 1980s under a compromised Reagan helped put into motion a plan to round-up and intern millions of “troublemakers,” most listed on the Main Core database established by FEMA under National Security Directive (NSD) 69 and National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 55. Main Core is now held by the NSA, FBI, CIA and more than likely the national security state’s corporate public-private partners (a classic example of Mussolini fascism-corporatism).
The severity of the depression and the reaction by the state will result in the final and complete destruction of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This will be of little concern to folks facing poverty, eviction, homelessness, and the disease, mental illness, alcohol, and drug addiction, and early death that invariably accompanies the fall of managed economies and the failure of government.
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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Iran has suffered immensely from the virus, Stone noted in an op-ed published by the New York Daily News, but due to US sanctions the Islamic Republic is “reportedly the only country in the world that cannot buy medicines needed to fight the pandemic.”
The outspoken Hollywood legend similarly condemned Washington’s decision to maintain – and in some cases, increase – its economic chokeholds on countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as coronavirus strains healthcare systems across the globe.
In the case of Venezuela, US “coercion” led to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) denying the South American state’s request for a $5 billion loan to help fight the pandemic, Stone contended. The US has ratcheted up its pressure on Caracas amid the global health crisis, accusing the government of drug trafficking and calling for a “transition government” to replace President Nicolas Maduro.
The award-winning filmmaker and activist said that the health crisis has shown the inhumanity of Washington’s foreign policy.
The current pandemic is exposing not only our government’s utter failures to protect its own citizens, but also its profound lack of human decency in dealing with other nations
Stone called for “serious moral self-reflection” in the US, warning that countless lives were at risk unless there is an “immediate change in course.”
Iran has registered nearly 3,500 Covid-19 deaths, with 19,700 confirmed cases, according to a tally maintained by Johns Hopkins University. President Hassan Rouhani said last week that the crisis is “a great opportunity for Americans to apologize… and to lift the unjust and unfair sanctions on Iran.”
I don’t know where the truth is right now but I will not stop questioning everything. I will especially question anything that comes from the media or the medical /Big Pharma establishment, as the narratives from both are constructed with fake ideologies and fake statistics. For example, what is the leading cause of death in North America? Wrong. Most will answer heart attacks and cancer. Medical error and overdose deaths from legal drugs are the number cause of death in North America. (See John Rappaport)
By the way, I hope these experts are right and that this is another false flag but I am following the rules of isolation like everyone else. The whole situation scares me. The unknown is the worse. Lou
off-guardian.org
March 24, 2020
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Dr Sucharit Bhakdi is a specialist in microbiology. He was a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene and one of the most cited research scientists in German history.
What he says:
We are afraid that 1 million infections with the new virus will lead to 30 deaths per day over the next 100 days. But we do not realise that 20, 30, 40 or 100 patients positive for normal coronaviruses are already dying every day.
[The government’s anti-COVID19 measures] are grotesque, absurd and very dangerous […] The life expectancy of millions is being shortened. The horrifying impact on the world economy threatens the existence of countless people. The consequences on medical care are profound. Already services to patients in need are reduced, operations cancelled, practices empty, hospital personnel dwindling. All this will impact profoundly on our whole society.
All these measures are leading to self-destruction and collective suicide based on nothing but a spook.
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Dr Wolfgang Wodarg is a German physician specialising in Pulmonology, politician and former chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. In 2009 he called for an inquiry into alleged conflicts of interest surrounding the EU response to the Swine Flu pandemic.
What he says:
Politicians are being courted by scientists…scientists who want to be important to get money for their institutions. Scientists who just swim along in the mainstream and want their part of it […] And what is missing right now is a rational way of looking at things.
We should be asking questions like “How did you find out this virus was dangerous?”, “How was it before?”, “Didn’t we have the same thing last year?”, “Is it even something new?”
That’s missing.
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Dr Joel Kettner s professor of Community Health Sciences and Surgery at Manitoba University, former Chief Public Health Officer for Manitoba province and Medical Director of the International Centre for Infectious Diseases.
What he says:
I have never seen anything like this, anything anywhere near like this. I’m not talking about the pandemic, because I’ve seen 30 of them, one every year. It is called influenza. And other respiratory illness viruses, we don’t always know what they are. But I’ve never seen this reaction, and I’m trying to understand why.
[…]
I worry about the message to the public, about the fear of coming into contact with people, being in the same space as people, shaking their hands, having meetings with people. I worry about many, many consequences related to that.
[…]
In Hubei, in the province of Hubei, where there has been the most cases and deaths by far, the actual number of cases reported is 1 per 1000 people and the actual rate of deaths reported is 1 per 20,000. So maybe that would help to put things into perspective.
Audio Player
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Dr John Ioannidis Professor of Medicine, of Health Research and Policy and of Biomedical Data Science, at Stanford University School of Medicine and a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences. He is director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS).
He is also the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation. He was chairman at the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine as well as adjunct professor at Tufts University School of Medicine.
As a physician, scientist and author he has made contributions to evidence-based medicine, epidemiology, data science and clinical research. In addition, he pioneered the field of meta-research. He has shown that much of the published research does not meet good scientific standards of evidence.
What he says:
Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.
The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.
[…]
Could the Covid-19 case fatality rate be that low? No, some say, pointing to the high rate in elderly people. However, even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes.
[…]
If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average.
– “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data”, Stat News, 17th March 2020
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Dr Yoram Lass is an Israeli physician, politician and former Director General of the Health Ministry. He also worked as Associate Dean of the Tel Aviv University Medical School and during the 1980s presented the science-based television show Tatzpit.
What he says:
Italy is known for its enormous morbidity in respiratory problems, more than three times any other European country. In the US about 40,000 people die in a regular flu season and so far 40-50 people have died of the coronavirus, most of them in a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington.
[…]
In every country, more people die from regular flu compared with those who die from the coronavirus.
[…]
…there is a very good example that we all forget: the swine flu in 2009. That was a virus that reached the world from Mexico and until today there is no vaccination against it. But what? At that time there was no Facebook or there maybe was but it was still in its infancy. The coronavirus, in contrast, is a virus with public relations.
Whoever thinks that governments end viruses is wrong.
– Interview in Globes, March 22nd 2020
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Dr Pietro Vernazza is a Swiss physician specialising Infectious Diseases at the Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen and Professor of Health Policy.
What he says:
We have reliable figures from Italy and a work by epidemiologists, which has been published in the renowned science journal ‹Science›, which examined the spread in China. This makes it clear that around 85 percent of all infections have occurred without anyone noticing the infection. 90 percent of the deceased patients are verifiably over 70 years old, 50 percent over 80 years.
[…]
In Italy, one in ten people diagnosed die, according to the findings of the Science publication, that is statistically one of every 1,000 people infected. Each individual case is tragic, but often – similar to the flu season – it affects people who are at the end of their lives.
[…]
If we close the schools, we will prevent the children from quickly becoming immune.
[…]
We should better integrate the scientific facts into the political decisions.
– Interview in St. Galler Tagblatt, 22nd March 2020
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Frank Ulrich Montgomery is German radiologist, former President of the German Medical Association and Deputy Chairman of the World Medical Association.
What he says:
I’m not a fan of lockdown. Anyone who imposes something like this must also say when and how to pick it up again. Since we have to assume that the virus will be with us for a long time, I wonder when we will return to normal? You can’t keep schools and daycare centers closed until the end of the year. Because it will take at least that long until we have a vaccine. Italy has imposed a lockdown and has the opposite effect. They quickly reached their capacity limits, but did not slow down the virus spread within the lockdown.
– Interview in General Anzeiger, 18th March 2020
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Prof. Hendrik Streeck is a German HIV researcher, epidemiologist and clinical trialist. He is professor of virology, and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research, at Bonn University.
What he says:
The new pathogen is not that dangerous, it is even less dangerous than Sars-1. The special thing is that Sars-CoV-2 replicates in the upper throat area and is therefore much more infectious because the virus jumps from throat to throat, so to speak. But that is also an advantage: Because Sars-1 replicates in the deep lungs, it is not so infectious, but it definitely gets on the lungs, which makes it more dangerous.
[…]
You also have to take into account that the Sars-CoV-2 deaths in Germany were exclusively old people. In Heinsberg, for example, a 78-year-old man with previous illnesses died of heart failure, and that without Sars-2 lung involvement. Since he was infected, he naturally appears in the Covid 19 statistics. But the question is whether he would not have died anyway, even without Sars-2.
– Interview in Frankfurter Allgemeine, 16th March 2020
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Dr Yanis Roussel et. al. – A team of researchers from the Institut Hospitalo-universitaire Méditerranée Infection, Marseille and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Marseille, conducting a peer-reviewed study on Coronavirus mortality for the government of France under the ‘Investments for the Future’ programme.
What they say:
The problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated, as 2.6 million people die of respiratory infections each year compared with less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.
[…]
This study compared the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries (1.3%) with the mortality rate of common coronaviruses identified in AP-HM patients (0.8%) from 1 January 2013 to 2 March 2020. Chi-squared test was performed, and the P-value was 0.11 (not significant).
[…]
…it should be noted that systematic studies of other coronaviruses (but not yet for SARS-CoV-2) have found that the percentage of asymptomatic carriers is equal to or even higher than the percentage of symptomatic patients. The same data for SARS-CoV-2 may soon be available, which will further reduce the relative risk associated with this specific pathology.
– “SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data”, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, 19th March 2020
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Dr. David Katz is an American physician and founding director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center
What he says:
I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near-total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long-lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.
– “Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?”, New York Times 20th March 2020
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Michael T. Osterholm is regents professor and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
What he says:
Consider the effect of shutting down offices, schools, transportation systems, restaurants, hotels, stores, theaters, concert halls, sporting events and other venues indefinitely and leaving all of their workers unemployed and on the public dole. The likely result would be not just a depression but a complete economic breakdown, with countless permanently lost jobs, long before a vaccine is ready or natural immunity takes hold.
[…]
[T]he best alternative will probably entail letting those at low risk for serious disease continue to work, keep business and manufacturing operating, and “run” society, while at the same time advising higher-risk individuals to protect themselves through physical distancing and ramping up our health-care capacity as aggressively as possible. With this battle plan, we could gradually build up immunity without destroying the financial structure on which our lives are based.
– “Facing covid-19 reality: A national lockdown is no cure”, Washington Post 21st March 2020
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Dr Peter Goetzsche is Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen and founder of the Cochrane Medical Collaboration. He has written several books on corruption in the field of medicine and the power of big pharmaceutical companies.
What he says:
Our main problem is that no one will ever get in trouble for measures that are too draconian. They will only get in trouble if they do too little. So, our politicians and those working with public health do much more than they should do.
No such draconian measures were applied during the 2009 influenza pandemic, and they obviously cannot be applied every winter, which is all year round, as it is always winter somewhere. We cannot close down the whole world permanently.
Should it turn out that the epidemic wanes before long, there will be a queue of people wanting to take credit for this. And we can be damned sure draconian measures will be applied again next time. But remember the joke about tigers. “Why do you blow the horn?” “To keep the tigers away.” “But there are no tigers here.” “There you see!”
– “Corona: an epidemic of mass panic”, blog post on Deadly Medicines 21st March 2020
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APRIL 3, 2020
The poet Langston Hughes once wrote, “I wish the rent was heaven sent.” With 10 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Hughes’ words resonate now more than ever. As we hurtle toward a public health and economic catastrophe, we must reckon with the sobering fact that our federal government is helmed by landlords, real estate developers, and financiers whose fortunes have been made – and whose worldview has been shaped – by years of predatory and extractive business practices. These practices prefigured the federal response to the pandemic and overdetermine the nature of the state-led economic rescue that is already underway.
Jared Kushner is widely regarded as the Trump administration’s behind-the-scenes point person on the coronavirus. Kushner, like Trump, inherited his family’s real estate holdings, updating the business model and expanding its geographical footprint. A New York Times expose from 2017 sheds light on the day-to-day workings of Kushner’s properties in the Baltimore area, where tenants live amidst chronically poor conditions and are subjected to a relentless pattern of petty and meritless litigation. In New York City, Kushner’s residential real estate portfolio has benefited from generous tax incentives and exploited loopholes in the state’s rent laws to remove units from regulation, in the process converting affordable apartments to luxury goods.
The extraction of value that is at the core of Kushner’s business model is based on the multiplication of rents-debts and the intensification of inequalities.
The business practices of Kushner – like those of the real estate industry more broadly – are emblematic of the shifting relationship between the state and the market economy over the past four decades. Beginning in the 1970s, after years of intellectual mobilization by right-leaning economists, neoliberal policies began to take hold in the US and Western Europe. The redistributive functions of the state, established during the New Deal and expanded during the Great Society, were whittled down to a nub, resulting in a tattered safety net and exploding inequalities. At roughly the same time, capital began to move more freely across borders, and once-vibrant economic centers saw massive losses of stable, relatively high paying industrial jobs.
During this period, the power of finance capital grew and real estate became a motor of economic growth. In fact, global real estate now comprises the majority of the world’s assets. The economic centrality of real estate is inextricably linked with financialization, which refers to the expansion of financial services and technologies, and denotes the process through which financial markets have been unleashed, empowering creditors and expanding private debt. Across the country, private equity landlords have bought up swaths of residential properties, preying on tenants of meager means, in the name of short-term value maximization. Though the spread of financialized real estate seems bland and technocratic on the surface, its effects – rent hikes, harassment, evictions – are dislocating and violent. In the words of economic geographer Desiree Fields, the end result is the plundering of “the spaces of existence of the working poor.”
For decades, the bipartisan commonsense has been that government should be run according to market principles. The current administration takes this logic a step further, governing the country like the financialized landlord of a recently purchased ‘distressed asset’: seeking immediate, short-term gain wherever possible – via massive tax cuts and the gutting of already-depleted social programs; nickel and diming workers and poor people; exploiting racist and xenophobic tropes to erode solidarities; seizing on – and expanding – regulatory loopholes; allowing vital public infrastructure to decay, particularly in poor and Black and Brown communities; and casting itself as the insurgent populist that is cutting through entrenched and inefficient bureaucracy.
As it turns out, this mode of governance is particularly ill-suited to deal with the type of crisis we currently face. Despite having a clear window into the near-term trajectory of the coronavirus (see Italy) and a blueprint for how to contain it with relative success (see South Korea), the Trump administration – reportedly under the guidance of Kushner – initially viewed it as a hoax. Then, like a slumlord confronted with well-founded complaints about serious structural conditions, the administration failed to take action. Little to no testing was done initially, leaving the scientific and medical communities at an information deficit regarding the pace and scale of the virus’ advance. This problem was exacerbated by the interplay between our profit-driven healthcare system and our under-resourced medical and public health infrastructure.
In late February, the precipitous decline of the stock market and the inevitability of the virus’ spread left the administration with no choice but to act. The federal response – uneven and incoherent as it has been – can be viewed as a reflection of the worldview of financialized real estate. President Trump’s first instinct, apart from repeatedly referring to the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus,” was to slash the federal payroll tax – this would have given workers in much of the formal economy a small infusion of cash; it also would have starved social security of funding. The $2 trillion bailout passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump is a boon to large corporations and Wall Street. The idea – held by some progressives – that Trump would outflank the Democrats from the left was belied by the paltry benefits offered to workers: a modest one-time check for $1200, extended unemployment benefits, and no relief for renters.
During a stay in New York City in the midst of the Great Depression, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, shaken by the inequality and alienation of his host society, wrote, “[t]he terrible, cold, cruel part … is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it.” In recent years, these rivers have coursed with lucre from the real estate industry, whose representatives wield state power in much the same way that they made their fortunes – through predation, extraction, grift, racism. As a global pandemic bears down on us all, disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable, the bankruptcy of that project is on full display. And death comes with it.