The Long Term Effects of Covid On the Economy Are Going To Be Devastating

Well, the plan hasn’t changed. The goal is to “remove” the “marginal” populations (global south), accelerate climate change, and control the entire world’s energy supplies. By doing so they can force any country not already under neoliberalism into neoliberalism by withholding energy.

Thanks for this reminder, Ian, but I guess I’m just reiterating again that this is not a problem for those in power and won’t be fixed. It isn’t so much the system is broken, or even beyond repair, it’s that the system is working exactly as designed. This is what they want. Sick people means profit and “economic growth” for the few, and maybe a quicker death.

Yet, I hope China wises up, and spends the money for better air handling. An alternative to this deliberately planned dystopia is needed.

Just want to note that there is no way to change these people. There is no argument that will appeal to their better nature, because there is no better nature there. That’s why the Inuit used ice floes. They probably learned the hard way that rehabilitation doesn’t work.

All I have to offer is the hope that we can objectively examine credible statistics which rank nations ala covid.

I prefer a mask mandate over a push for vaccines. Ideally, I’d like both, but it bothers me how much Westerners, in particular, are so against masks. I still wear a mask, and even “liberals” think I’m going too far by wearing it whenever I’m indoors and not eating. They were against it when Trump was anti-mask, but they don’t realize they’ve also been brainwashed by the Biden administration into believing that they will be okay without a mask as long as they’ve been vaccinated. I care more about people with the virus spreading it without a mask than those people getting a vaccine to protect themselves.

I told a woman who still wears a mask that if she wants her children to have an advantage, tell them to keep wearing a mask. There will be tens of millions of children today who Covid will debilitate long term because, by the time they are young adults, they will have gotten it likely dozens of times without the protection of a mask. Those who keep themselves safe will be better positioned to get into top schools and rise through the ranks at work because millions will die or be out sick with long Covid.

I grew up in the brief period of history when the USA had a government by and for the people. After WWI and the Great Depression, the New Deal was the only way the North American Empire could survive and win WWII. But as a horrid side effect, the Atlantic Alliance became a global hegemon afterwards. The Western Empire went off fighting unwinnable colonial wars, confiscating resources, and defending the US dollar. G.I. Joe and his families were trashed. The voluntary army made them expendable. All that is left are individuals crowed together in an unequal money pyramid ruled by the corrupt corporate state. Basically, everyone is on their own. Profits outweigh human life.

To fight COVID, governments must care about public health. Coronavirus can be mitigated. Everyone must work together. The triumph of the global money caste over the lower classes makes this impossible. The Boston Brahmins could care less. The for-profit healthcare system simply exists to extract wealth, not to make people healthy. This was clear even before the coronavirus pandemic struck.

An Armistice and a DMZ are needed, right now, before the continuous escalation of the Ukraine proxy world war ends up in a global nuclear war. The world is in the same situation as Korea in 1953.

Only a restoration of enlightened sharing and the rule of just laws can restore the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to the people.

Don’t know about much of the rest of the West as I don’t get out much anymore, but in this area, the hospitals (closest about 40 miles away) are starting to set up “triage tents” in front of the ERs because they don’t have room in the buildings for the enormous increase of respiratory patients showing up –many of them children.

Respiratory conditions include COVID, but are not limited to it as just about anything you can think of that affects the lungs is exploding. No one quite knows what’s causing it. But of course poor ventilation is a likely suspect as that has been one of the leading COVID vectors. Probably flu and everything else, too.

I saw one report that a local hospital had filled all ICU beds and 18 of 22 pediatric patients were intubated. What horror.

While I was hospitalized over the summer, I had excellent care, but I asked about staffing shortages that we’ve heard so much about. The word I got was that some departments were short staffed, but overall, there was an abundance of personnel; traveling nurses were taking up the slack, and schedules allowed three 12 hour days on duty and four days off which gave plenty of time for family or another job if people wanted it.

I was told that much of the staff had had COVID, some several times, and I’m pretty sure I got it when I was in the ER in July. I heard nothing about Long COVID.

Don’t know whether the situation has changed since the summer.

If the statistics I’ve seen are right, then almost all the current labor shortage in the US is due to people out sick and/or dead due to COVID and its follow-on effects. The efforts of our rulers and banksters to force more people into the labor market (at lower relative wages) are futile. There are no additional workers available. And without much greater immigration, the workforce will continue to decline.

So look for some startling immigration reform before too long. But then note how a “surplus” of workers will be declared forcing (aw, how sad) a further reduction in wages leading to a marvelous increase in poverty — and likely deaths due to poverty.

Our rulers have this pretty well figured and plotted out. It’s nasty. To those who rule us, we are disposable excess population (product), to be exploited and discarded. There is no alternative in their view, and for our part as a collective community, we haven’t found one. The internet is one of the assurances for our overlords that we never will as personality and circular arguments dominate thought, consideration and action.

And yet, and yet… I still preserve some wan hope…

Two main things get to me most about the current pandemic. Frustration isn’t remotely an adequate word for how I feel.

The first thing is how our leaders and institutions have completely given up. Now an argument, already made in these comments, is that this is all going according to plan. But even if the intention is to cull the population and further solidify neoliberalism, that isn’t how pandemics work. The elite are also screwing themsleves personally, as well as the long term economy. Elites keep getting sick with covid, and they’re rolling the dice on how much damage they suffer each time. There’s some genuine stupidity going on here at a deep level when even the elite won’t wear masks or quietly put in air filtration systems in their homes and offices. There’s an ideological refusal to accept basic tenets of medical reality.

And the second point is how most of the population is either just accepting it, or actively cheering it. Or convincing themselves that somehow a liberal covid tyranny, which never remotely existed in the first place, is still around and needs to be resisted, at the exact same time as the actual liberal leadership is running away from doing anything meaningful at a full sprint.

NPCs or sheep or whatever, choose your dehumanizing term of insult. But at times it becomes very hard not to view many people as these. We’ve turned a plague into an insipid culture war battlefield, only both the major sides are wrong and the battlelines are stupid and invalid.

We need to cause the transition from mass killer to common cold, faster than happened with OC43. We had SARS 150 years ago and called it the Russian or Asiatic Flu. It was probably OC43, and gradually transitioned to one of the common cold virii.

The only way out of this is to create&seed a variant that does not kill, using our widely-vilified bio-weapon research capabilities.

From Hoover to Carter, things improved for mostly everyone living in the US, not just some mythical 30%. Not just for the supposed “middle class,” which was mostly working class people with union jobs. Not just for whites either.

Everyone. Then Carter started deregulation and oil price shocks hit. Reagan was elected and it’s been seriously downhill since.

Not a reference to Long Vaccines and the damage the mRNA spike protein vaccines are doing to the vaccinated population?

I learned today from a former coworker who has long Covid that she probably has lupus. She has dealt with blood clots, fatigue, and a host of other issues since getting Covid several years ago. COVID can trigger autoimmune disorders and it’s not as rare as the media, CDC, and our politicians want us to believe.

CP

So look for some startling immigration reform before too long. But then note how a “surplus” of workers will be declared forcing (aw, how sad) a further reduction in wages leading to a marvelous increase in poverty — and likely deaths due to poverty.

This is the essential problem of trying to solve problems within the context of an economic system (capitalism) that DEMANDS that the rich must be the ones who call the shots. Any development which might work out for the betterment of the peons will be turned into something that makes them worse off. Shortage of workers?–we’ll increase prices faster than pay to make sure that Wall Street doesn’t lose out. If we had, say, housing subsidies to help the poors pay for housing, or some universal guaranteed income, our betters would figure out ways to eat up nearly every last cent of that money.

You cannot solve the problems of capitalism (more than temporary fixes) within the framework of capitalism, for this reason. The rich will always find out ways to best game the system for them as long as they’re the ones left calling the shots.