Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Pandemic Shock Doctrine Divide & Rule Tactics Are Real Even Without Hoaxes

Intentional or not the elites are using Shock Doctrine tactics to rig the economy and elections even more at a time where it's increasingly obvious that we need major reforms to stop their epidemic fraud.

At a time when it should be clearer than ever that we need to reform our media economic system, stop fighting wars based on lies, and especially the health care system with Single Payer that is much more effective at handling a pandemic, as demonstrated by many other countries, the establishment is using the pandemic as an excuse to complete the rigging of the Democratic primaries for a candidate that's devoted to opposing any major reforms, ensuring both nominees will be incredibly corrupt and incompetent, if we allow them to complete the process of rigging the elections.

But instead of standing up to our corrupt leaders many of us are to busy fighting among ourselves, although in many cases with some degree of good reason. But still we need to stop this if we're going to stand up to the oligarchy. We're playing right into their divide and rule tactics.

Amazingly, it's not even in their own best interests to cause a collapse of our society, if they push the government and the economy to bizarre fanatical extremes, which many of them, including both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, among a lot of other establishment politicians and corporate leaders; however, regardless of why, that's exactly what they're trying to do.

Naomi Klein described how they've been using this tactic for decades in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine and they continued to use these tactics since then. On at least one occasion since she wrote this book she's argued that the grassroots could use the same tactics in reverse, to undo the damage being done by corporation. In the long run, we should try to do away with major reforms being done in a panic, since they often backfire and rarely work well, although there have been a few exceptions like during the depression which is one of the most notable examples Naomi Klein used in her argument for a reverse Shock Doctrine; however, in the short run we may have no choice, and trying this is much better than allowing corporations to continue with their absurd and corrupt practices. More recently she warned that corporations would be using this pandemic as part of their Shock Doctrine practices, rightly so and advised others to stand up to it and reverse it in “Coronavirus Capitalism”: Naomi Klein’s Case for Transformative Change Amid Coronavirus Pandemic 03/19/2020

Unfortunately, even though I don't agree with many extreme right wing protests, they're often doing a better job getting their views across, even if many of us are outraged by some of their tactics. Most progressives are more concerned with standing up to them, than standing up to the oligarchs, but fortunately some recognize the need to so something different like Ben Burgis, who wrote the following:

The Left Can’t Just Dismiss the Anti-Lockdown Protests 04/23/2020

The anti-lockdown protests may currently represent a Trumpian minority — but that could easily change if the choice becomes going hungry or going back to work. We need a real alternative that refuses to accept the false trade-off between economic security and public health.

Michigan has been hit hard by COVID-19. Roughly 2,700 people have died so far, and that number continues to rise. Last week, amid this unprecedented medical emergency, the quasi-fascist “Proud Boys” blockaded a key intersection next to Sparrow Hospital in my hometown of Lansing.

The group was participating in an anti-lockdown protest branded as “Operation Gridlock” and organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund. The latter is linked to the wealthy, hyper-conservative DeVos family, which has played an outsized role in funding reactionary political organizing in Michigan long before Donald Trump even appointed Betsy DeVos to his cabinet.

Many on the Right have cheered on the protesters. Centrists have mostly just rolled their eyes. The Left needs a better response. While the lockdowns are necessary, it’s unacceptable to ask everyone to continue paying their bills without far more robust government assistance. We should offer genuine solutions to legitimate economic worries even as we acknowledge that much of what was said and advocated at the protest was irresponsible and absurd.

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Governor Whitmer has made some of the right moves, like waving co-pays for Medicaid recipients getting tested for the virus and temporarily suspending evictions, but we shouldn’t forget that her campaign for governor was supported by Blue Cross Blue Shield. She ran against her Berniecrat primary challenger Abdul Al-Sayed’s plan to establish a state-level version of Medicare for All. And as centrist Democrats go, Whitmer is one of the good ones. In New York, Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo is trying to cut Medicaid as the pandemic rages. Complete article

We can expect governor Whitmer to continue her efforts to defend the health insurance companies after the pandemic is over, and Andrew Cuomo even tried to cut medicaid while it was still going on, backing off at the last minute to ensure they get federal dollars, but indicating that as soon as the pandemic is over he'll continue trying to cut medicaid. This is the governor that the mainstream media is trying to portray as the science oriented alternative to Donald Trump doing a better job defending the working class despite his actions.

The Shock Doctrine is being implemented even more at the corporate level as indicated in this article:

Frontline workers are taking pay cuts and being furloughed while hospital CEOs keep their seven-figure salaries 05/03/2020

Frontline workers who care for critically ill coronavirus patients are now taking pay cuts and going without paid time off while the hospital executives continue to make seven-figure salaries.

The pay cuts are meant to offset lost revenue from fewer elective and lucrative procedures that have been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, The Daily Beast reported.

In Denver, executives at Denver Health got April bonuses between $50,000 and $230,000, while doctors, nurses, and other personnel were asked to work fewer hours or take unpaid time off to reduce costs.

In an April 3 email, CEO Robin Wittenstein said the policy, along with a hiring freeze, was meant to "reduce our total salary expense without the need to lay off employees or implement mandatory PTO/furloughs."

Stanford Health Care system has taken a similar approach, asking its workers to take 20% pay cuts for 10 weeks starting on April 27, Palo Alto Online reported. In response, 16 employees wrote a letter to executives and called the pay cuts "extremely disrespectful."

"Stanford Health Care is now turning its back on front-line health care workers and refusing to acknowledge our input when it comes to furloughs. Your refusal to work collaboratively and negotiate is extremely disrespectful to all of us who have been coming to work every day, often without proper protection, putting our lives at risk to care for patients," they wrote.

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"These people are making millions of dollars and they're going to give 2 percent back?" Jeff Morawski, a registered nurse at McLaren Macomb, told The Daily Beast. "I think it's a joke. I think it's a slap in the face... They're not walking into the hospital every day as a frontline worker." Complete article

This is just one of dozens, if not hundreds of examples where the multimillionaire and billionaire class has advised the working class to "tighten their belts," while refusing to make any sacrifices themselves. One larger class of people dies all the work while one much smaller class of people rigs the system so they can take all the benefits! Another brazen example is described in Coronavirus: Hobby Lobby billionaire keeps stores open after ‘God spoke to him’ – but won’t pay sick leave 04/25/2020 where they write,

Sure enough, in the 19 March letter to employees, Mr Green wrote that when his wife Barbara prayed for guidance the week before, “God put on [her] heart three profound words to remind us that he’s in control: Guide, Guard and Groom.

“While we do not know for certain what the future holds, or how long this disruption will last, we can all rest in knowing that God is in control.”

I'm a little skeptical of this claim like many others but if it's true, Mr. Green might want to think carefully,especially when considering Exodus 14:4:

I shall then make Pharaoh stubborn and he will set out in pursuit of them; and I shall win glory for myself at the expense of Pharaoh and his whole army, and then the Egyptians will know that I am Yahweh.' And the Israelites did this.

I would have to wonder what could possibly be the motive for this "God," assuming he exists, be? This verse is brazen entrapment, but if the "God" Mr. Green worships does exist he could conceivably be doing the same thing to him; not that I think we should count on this. However, even though most rational skeptics wouldn't take this hypothesis too seriously, there's an enormous number of multimillionaires and billionaires flaunting their wealth participating in epidemic levels of fraud; and instead of holding them accountable, politicians are taking their campaign money and looking the other way, or worse giving them tax cuts and bailouts while giving the public broken promises and spin.

According to 'Grotesque Level of Greed': Owned by World's Richest Man Jeff Bezos, Whole Foods Wants Workers to Pay for Colleagues' Sick Leave During Coronavirus Pandemic 03/13/2020 Bezos is asking the working class to donate for each other while he coninues to supress wages so they have little or nothing to donate, and he refuses to sacrifice anything taking all the money while others do the work; and, the same goes for Tim Martin owner of Wetherspoons, worth $450 million, billionaires Mike Ashley, and Richard Branson (See video for details) who all stiffed their workers, put them at risk, and even asked the government for bailouts while refusing to dip into their own net worth or help their employees. And there are many more stories like this including 'Outrageous': Major US Companies Hand Shareholders Hundreds of Millions in Dividends While Slashing Thousands of Jobs 05/06/2020

And the supposedly progressive politicians that ran on promises to defend the working class are routinely betraying those promises and one of the most blatant examples is the Governor they're portraying as a national superstar, and possibly even potential replacement for Biden if his campaign collapses due to sexual harassment charges, epidemic levels of corruption, and his inability to make a coherent argument, virtually guarantees that he'll lose to Trump. The following excerpts show how Governor Cuomo has betrayed his promises:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) has struck a deal with state lawmakers to enact a budget that cuts billions of dollars a year from the state’s Medicaid system and other social programs, and punishes his political enemies in the progressive Working Families Party.

Cuomo, whose daily press conferences about the COVID-19 pandemic have turned him into a national media darling, had endured some pushback in recent days for his plan to take $2.5 billion a year out of the Medicaid program. As they were initially structured, the cuts would have made the state ineligible for $6.7 billion in emergency federal assistance for the state’s Medicaid program for the duration of the pandemic, since the money requires states to preserve existing program standards and eligibility guidelines.

At the very end of Cuomo’s press conference on Thursday, though, Cuomo’s budget director, Robert Mujica, announced that they had found a solution: Putting a delay on the cuts until after the pandemic crisis passes so the state can get its share of federal money and slash the program later. Andrew Cuomo Uses Budget To Cut Medicaid, Settle Political Scores 04/03/2020

The man who summarily disbanded the corruption commission he’d ran on creating when it began to investigate his allies. The man who made a host of videotaped promises in exchange for the Working Families Party’s endorsement only to turn around and break them all. The man who secretly worked for years to ensure Republican control of the State Senate, protecting himself from the flak that would come with having to veto progressive legislation.

And lest you thought he had turned a new leaf, Governor 1 percent is insisting on taking an ax to the state Medicaid budget even at the cost of $6.7 billion in emergency federal aid — and lying about it. In the most unequal state in the nation, he is fighting to protect the rich and impose austerity on everyone else. Make no mistake: even in a pandemic, Andrew Cuomo is not your friend. Even in a Pandemic, Andrew Cuomo Is Not Your Friend 03/27/2020

Centrist governors and other politicians around the country have been doing similar things; and they're in the process of rigging the primary for another incredibly corrupt nominee, who's suddenly making lots of promises during the campaign that he opposed his entire career. Are we supposed to believe that Joe Biden would keep his promise to make health care for all, assuming that he can actually beat Trump? He already promised to veto Medicare For All if it comes to him.

The political establishment is relentlessly trying to stop Medicare For All, even if they have to temporarily increase availability of quality health care at a time when the pandemic is overwhelmingly adding to previous evidence to show that it's far more effective and will save an enormous amount of lives. The following study, which doesn't take into account the pandemic, shows that Medicare for All would save an estimated $450 billion per year and over 68,000 lives:

Medicare for All Would Save $450 Billion and 68,000 Lives: Study 02/22/2020

Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan would save the country about $450 billion a year on total health care spending while preventing nearly 70,000 deaths, according to a study published over the weekend in The Lancet.

In the analysis, a team of epidemiologists led by Alison P. Galvani of the Yale School of Public Health applied the provisions of Sanders’ plan to real-world spending in the U.S. in 2017. They concluded that Medicare for All would have cost just over $3 trillion that year, or $458 billion less than the actual total. The analysis found that per capita costs would decline, resulting in lower costs overall, even with millions more people covered. And providing universal coverage would save 68,531 lives per year, the researchers.

Here are some key details and assumptions from the study:

A new analysis: Previous estimates of the cost of Medicare for All have reached significantly different conclusions, ranging from a roughly 16% increase over current national health-care spending levels to a 27% decrease. This latest study relies on a new analytical tool to measure the impact of different provisions within Medicare for All as applied to real-world data (you can review and adjust the parameters of the analysis in the Single-Payer Healthcare Interactive Financing Tool).

Big savings with a single-payer system: The researchers found that the proposed system would reduce total health-care expenditures by about 13% based on 2017 spending levels. Savings would come from a variety of sources. Here are some of the major savings the researchers found with Medicare for All, based on the 2017 total health care expenditure of nearly $3.5 trillion:

Reducing pharmaceutical prices via negotiation: $219 billion
Improving fraud detection: $191 billion
Reducing reimbursement rates for hospitals, physician, and clinical services: $188 billion
Reducing overhead: $102 billion
Eliminating uncompensated hospitalization fees: $78 billion in savings. Complete article

If you accept the current numbers about the death toll from Corona-virus in the USA compared to the rest of the world, including many countries with Single Payer Healthcare, Universal coverage, and/or state run health care then it's overwhelmingly obvious that the vast majority of countries with better health care, and many with worse, are having a much smaller death toll than the United States. At times I've had doubts about the hype surrounding the pandemic, especially since the hype began weeks if not months before the massive spike in deaths, which is why I wrote Fake Corona-virus Apocalypse? 03/29/2020 just before the death toll spiked over a thousand per day and continued to rise until it peaked at over 2,500, although the average for any week, except the third week of April didn't climb above 2,000.

I was careful to say that I didn't recommend dismissing the advice of medical experts, even though there was little doubt that the media was misrepresenting it. At the time they shut down my local library there were fewer than 11,000 infections and only 160 deaths in the United States, and none in my state of any of the surrounding states, the last three days they were open prior to this, they were implementing bizarre social distancing policies discouraging people from spending to much time there or getting close to each other. By the time I posted my article that had risen to almost 124,000 infections and 2,229 deaths, which came to an average of just over 200 deaths per day, in that period; but the worst by far came almost immediately after that, and even though I was skeptical at first, the CDC has confirmed a large portion of this with their own data based on death certificates, which seems more reliable that the statistics the media is using.

I'm still not completely ruling out a hoax; however, it would have to be enormous, and the CDC and many other people would have to be involved in it, making it extremely unlikely, although they're still not doing a good job covering it in the media. One suspicious thing is that the vast majority of the deaths happened after the governments shut down the economy, and the biggest spike, over 1,000 deaths per day didn't happen until almost two weeks after shutting down the economy. With the government shutting down the economy with fewer than two hundred deaths This is certainly suspicious.

By the time I wrote my previous article on the subject there was a high enough death toll to show that the United States was being hit harder than most of the countries with better health care, and a few countries with much lower quality of health care, including even China and India. Although we've been hearing about how bad Wuhan has been hit they only have about eleven million people and the vast majority of China wasn't hit nearly as bad. Since then, the USA has been hit worse than almost every other country with a few exceptions like France and Italy. Of the 22 countries that I examined with Single Payer Healthcare, Universal coverage, and/or state run health care, which included France, but not Italy, which doesn't have these, only four of them were hit harder than the United States and fourteen of them, including Cuba and Venezuela weren't hit nearly as bad with only a fraction of the deaths per capita that we are having, overwhelmingly adding to the evidence of how many lives will be saved with Medicare For All; yet, instead of

I still don't want to recommend that we ignore the most credible medical experts; however, at times we should also be skeptical of some people that go to the opposite extreme of the right wingers in Michigan, including some sources that are almost always much more credible like Juan Cole at Common Dreams who wrote Right-Wing "Reopen" Fanatics Would Kill Nearly as Many Americans as Died in All US Wars 05/05/2020 "A new simulation by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School predicts that if all the states completely reopened today and all Americans ceased all social distancing measures, a million people would die in this country by June 30." It doesn't take much math to figure out that if he means total counting the 70,000 or so deaths before this article was written that this would come to over sixteen thousand deaths per day, on average, from the time it was published until June 30th.

They also estimate that without reopening that we would have 116,000 additional deaths by June 30th which comes to just over 2,000 deaths per day on average. We've only had one week where the average was slightly above 2,000, which was over two weeks ago; if anything the daily deaths have gone down since then, instead of up, and some states are already opening back up; so even this lower estimate is probably high. Furthermore, remember the vast majority of deaths spiked after the economy was shut down, not before.

The right wing is doing a far better job protesting against the government; either that, or they're just getting much more media coverage as a result of their divide and rule propaganda tactics, which might be more likely. However, there were large protests on May Day, as there usually are and they may have much more support, but without fair media coverage, even if they do most people won't know about them.

Either were going to have Shock Doctrine tactics to destroy the last shreds of our democracy or we're going to have a reverse of this controlled by the grassroots, to prevent it.

There's no doubt that the political establishment rigged the primary for Joe Biden however, what's incredibly hard to understand is why they did such a bad job at it, and why they couldn't have picked a candidate that isn't so seriously flawed, or cover it up better. Regardless of why this is a seriously flawed candidate who has little or no chance of beating Donald Trump, partly because he's not much if any better than Trump, and partly because he can't even speak coherently, without making an enormous amount of gaffes.

In addition to being almost as corrupt, if not as corrupt, as Trump he also has plenty of sexual assault allegations and routinely breaks as many promises as Trump does.

The political establishment has repeated an enormous amount of propaganda to try to convince us that Biden is the most electable candidate despite many of their own polls and the fact that he has never had any grassroots support. And some of them know it and are even throwing out the possibility of replacing Biden with another centrist candidate because he's so seriously flawed. One recent poll Democrats want to drop Joe Biden for Andrew Cuomo, poll finds without mentioning the fact that these polls are controlled by the establishment and can often be manipulated by them; however, Andrew Cuomo Wants Everyone To Know He Won't Replace Joe Biden, although the establishment clearly seems to prefer him to someone supported by the public who supports popular policies like Bernie Sanders.

And an even more absurd possibility was A Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama ticket to replace Joe Biden? Is it even possible? The political establishment clearly knows that their candidate is pathetic! Despite all their deceptive propaganda to convince us he was electable he has little or no popular support. Furthermore replacing him with another candidate who is as disliked as he is like Hillary Clinton or someone who isn't as well known like Cuomo will enrage many of the supporters they need to win the general election. If they're going to consider replacing Biden with someone that can win the general election, the only one they can choose that will win is Bernie Sanders! However, even though this scenario which gets less likely the longer they continue with their insane activities, even this is flawed.

However, as I right this article, new evidence is coming out supporting Tara Reade's accusations of sexual harassment, Exclusive: 1996 court document confirms Tara Reade told of harassment in Biden’s office 05/07/2020 This is just one of many scandals the media has been trying to sweep under the rug, and many of them are going viral already at the grassroots level, even if mainstream media is trying to sweep them under the rug, which may make it a little more likely that they're replaced this incredibly bad candidate at the last minute, who they had to rig it for, and the only way they can defeat Trump, assuming they really care about that, is to nominate Sanders. They come up with lots of rhetoric to pretend they oppose Trump but they routinely support the interests of their corporate financiers, and so does Trump!

Sanders might be the best chance the Democrats have of winning the general election; but many people should ask why he remained silent about epidemic election fraud and even endorsed a candidate that opposes everything he stands for! Biden and Trump are both so atrocious that many of us can't possibly support either one of them. Even though it's increasingly obvious that even Bernie Sanders is now a flawed candidate supporting him to avoid these two incredibly corrupt candidates is better than allowing the oligarchy to rig the election again. However, we have to keep the pressure on, not only to ensure that he has support from Congress, but to ensure that he won't cave assuming he gets elected!

But if they do rig the nomination, which is almost guaranteed, then it would be far better to support Howie Hawkins, or another independent, especially since Biden is virtually guaranteed to lose anyway.

Every time we fall for the lesser of two evils scam they get worse; but we still keep doing it!