Friday, May 1, 2020

Lockdown

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (painted portrait).jpg

- We know big business benefits from economic crises,* grabbing cash bailouts from the government and using them to buy up small businesses unable to sustain lost income. We know politicians love to exercise power. But what about the people? Why are they so unanimously going along with it? What's in it for them?
- They were told it was necessary. Probably it was a good idea at the beginning for lessening the pressure on hospitals.
- But why did they believe? Quarantine the sick, yes, but quarantine the healthy? In epidemics those who can, move away. But there's no precedent for this move, this enforced lockdown.**
- What's your explanation?
- Healthy people have been quarantined not only from the sick but in much larger numbers they are quarantined from each other. Think about those words. Is it going in public we fear, or the public itself, society, where we enter innocent and well but in time all are made sick with the same loss of innocence? People have been willing to lock themselves down to recapture their innocence, while power mad, mostly senile politicians and depraved with greed big business ravage the world outside their doors.
- Do we hate society that much?
- You tell me. Rousseau wrote in 1750:
Sincere friendship, real esteem and perfect confidence are banished from among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate, and fraud lie constantly concealed.***
- As true today as it was then.

Further Reading:
The Trump Look
Jump To Repression
Totalitarianism & The Lesser Evil
Convergence
Stanford Professor Michael Levitt: 'Lockdown is a huge mistake.'

Watch:
Fun & Games
___________________
If with hugely extended financialization - more and more income going to debt and rent, the result of higher prices themselves the result of monopolization, privitization, and speculative, fraudulent, Ponzi scheme investment on credit - a crash is on its way, or has already begun, why not deliberately super-crash the economy with a lockdown and assign the blame to the Novel Corona Virus? See: 'Despite low unemployment rates and a rising stock market, 3 out of 4 economists are expecting a recession by 2021.'  and: Wall Street Had Cut 68,000 Jobs and Received Trillions in Emergency Loans Prior to COVID-19 Anywhere in the World, and: Another Bank Bailout Under Cover of a Virus, and: Congress Sets Up Taxpayers to Eat $454 Billion of Wall Street’s Losses, Where is the Outrage? and: This.
** According to the Center For Disease Control's website: 'Isolation separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick. Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.'
*** Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (The First Discourse)