Paul Craig Roberts – The American Free Press June 3, 2020
What do we make of it all? I just read an article in The New York Times that reports that President Donald Trump lied and hid from the public the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic. On the other side, I encounter endless internet rage that Covid-19 is a hoax, that New York City’s hospitals are empty, and no one has died. It is nothing but a Rothschild-Rockefeller-Bill Gates plot. Perhaps the most stunningly inconsistent claim of all is that it is a bioweapon that is so harmless that there should have been no lockdown. Why make a harmless bioweapon?
Where one stands on the closedown depends on where one stands on other issues. If you are a libertarian, you oppose the closedown because it interferes with your freedom and keeps useless old people alive who cost you payroll tax dollars. It you are a Trump-hater like The New York Times you blame Trump for understating the threat and not closing down soon enough. If you are a Trump supporter you blame China and expect China to pay for it by forfeiting their trillion-dollar holding of U.S. government bonds.
Those decrying the closedown are unaware of the mischief they are making. They have set it up for the elites, who have taken us for another “bailout the one percent ride,” to blame the resulting economic depression on the closedown. The U.S. economy has been in a long-term recession. Growth in income and wealth has accrued to the top few percent who own the majority of stocks and bonds driven up in price by the Fed’s money printing. The rest of the population has been hurt by the offshoring of their jobs and by the financialization of the economy that leaves them little or no discretionary income after they pay their rent or mortgage, car payment, credit card payment, and student debt.
The economy was already in a debt deflation with 40% of the population unable to raise $400 cash, according to the Federal Reserve. The inevitable consequence of a debt deflation is economic depression, as debt deflation precludes sufficient consumer aggregate demand to drive the economy. GDP growth has received no help from business investment, because corporations have used their profits to buy back their own shares.
The closedown is not responsible for the debt deflation, the foundations of which were already in place. But the closedown has given it a push. Small businesses were not bailed out like larger ones such as Boeing. For small businesses, the closedown represents a period when their costs exceed their revenues. For the unemployed that resulted from the closedown, their living expenses continued but their paychecks did not. The Trump checks help, as do temporary moratoriums on evictions to delay the inevitable, but for the majority of the already heavily indebted, the closedown adds to their debt.
Economist Michael Hudson and I believe that an economic system that enriches the rentier class by converting as much of personal income as possible to the service of debt is an economic system that is dead in the water. One possible way out is a debt write-down in order to create some discretionary income. Keep in mind that when the replacement of offshored manufacturing jobs with Walmart jobs stopped U.S. GDP growth, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Green-span substituted growth in consumer debt for the missing income growth, and by this substitution created discretionary income by loading up the consumer with debt.
That load is now full. We are in the unenviable position of having very high stock prices in an economy that has no growth potential. The high stock prices are the product of trillions of dollars injected into financial asset prices. If the reopening spreads the virus and produces a second wave that overwhelms the healthcare system on a broader basis, the economy could be shut down again, or if kept open could be disrupted by widespread illness or reluctance to accept exposure to the virus. On the other hand, if the virus has run its course, or the threat was exaggerated, the existing stifling debt burden remains.
The danger in the shouting and finger-pointing is that a sick economy will be blamed on the closedown, not on the debt burden. Reopening the economy does not make the debt burden disappear.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury under President Ronald Reagan and was associate editor and columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He has been a professor of economics in six universities and is the author of numerous books available at the American Free Press bookstore
“Perhaps the most stunningly inconsistent claim of all is that it is a bioweapon that is so harmless that there should have been no lockdown. Why make a harmless bioweapon?”
PCR talks with the same moron language used by the fake news – Did they land on the Moon? They didn’t land on the 20th of July 1969, but they may have landed on later dates.
South Africa apartheid ended in the early 1990s, so South Africa and Israel were working on biological genetically selective weapons in the 1980s, maybe even the 1970s. This was over 30yrs ago & I have no doubt that the UK and US were also working along the same lines.
It is quite probable that China, Iran, and North Korea were given similar but targeted bioweapons. We know that the Italian strain didn’t come from China, we know the Iran strain didn’t come from China and the fake news quietly suggests that the UK had Covid in December, if not earlier & there are similar reports this was the case in Amerika.
The UK regime has been totally secretive about its test and search & I suggest this is because it could reveal that most people in the UK were given a much weaker strain of Covid or that it simply wouldn’t infect the majority of the UK gene pool.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to reach the conclusion that core Western states have rigged the data. I believe the UK is behind Covid, but this doesn’t explain the willingness of other Western states to play along with the data ruse. As I have pointed out in other comments. Trump didn’t want this in his election-year even if you hold the view that the current field of play helps Trump, it is very risky. The EU would never countenance the destruction of two large member economies. The Chinese didn’t want their global markets closed & Russia didn’t want an oil price collapse & neither did the US want an oil price collapse.
I can only speculate that the reach of the City and UK deep state runs deep in the US and EU. We must also keep in mind that in both the US and EU, healthcare and testing regimes are private enterprises linked with big pharma and the two big financial centers which want an end to the rise of China and the EU model that has become so successful… this being the Brexit feedback loop.
Just as Putin has never moved against the Russian Central Bank and other Russian financial groups which are City and Wall Street aligned, we know that many EU politicians are UK/US assets. This became clear when the EU played along with the disastrous post-2008 policies.
I used to admire PCR a lot – I even donated to him. I half-regret that now – because his stance on the Covid hoax is very silly This article is especially ridiculous – he never once attempts to justify his dismissal of the Pandemic sceptics with facts directly relating to the official scare narrative – but instead focuses on proving that the US economy was tanking before the “pandemic”. In the great scheme of things this is a red herring – and does not in any way prove the pandemic story to be true. Even though I previously admired PCR, I always found him something of an hysterical catastrophist – he is, for example, forever predicting that WW3 is only a matter of days or weeks away. He eagerly embraced the catastrophist position on the phoney “pandemic” very early on and I suspect that like many other catastrophists he’s now too proud to admit that he got it all disastrously wrong.