04/22/20

We Have a Safe Way to Restart the Economy NOW

An exciting new tool has been created to assist decision-makers in the effort to restart the economy in stages, quickly and safely, right down to the county level. It provides a myriad of information regarding the economic, social, and health impacts of the virus itself but more importantly, those same impacts accruing from the shutdown itself. Currently available for California, Idaho, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Texas, this tool needs to be developed for every state and expeditiously incorporated.

I learned about this tool watching Kevin Freeman’s War Room presentation, 7 Steps to Restart the Economy. In the second half of the show, he had Benjamin Nieuwsma of Navigo, Inc. on the show to explain how the tool Navigo has created works. It is called RestartNOW and analyzes the risk factors to the economy from COVID-19 down to the county level. When you know the risk factors, you can assess the risks of opening and spreading the virus versus the heavy cost of remaining shut down. It turns out that the vast majority of counties all over the U.S. are at low risk for opening but have faced the greatest economic damages in the shutdown.

At my request, the company has created a tool specifically for Maryland. Maryland’s low and medium-risk counties represent over 80% of the state in number and are the counties losing the majority of the almost $16 billion dollars lost in the shutdown to-date. These counties comprise many farmers and small entrepreneurs. They should not be going out of business because the other 17% of the state has a high-risk profile.

Will opening up low-risk counties spur more COVID-19 cases? Perhaps, but growing evidence suggests the real threat has been dramatically overstated. And how many will be lost if the shutdown continues? What about all those denied “non-emergency” medical services during the shutdown? How many will be lost from increased suicides and crime, already on the rise as a result of the shutdown?

The financial contagion is spreading fast. Forbes just reported that less than half of Los Angeles County remains employed. Suicides are spiking in many places. Knox County, Tennessee, recently reported 8 suicides within 48 hours — 10 percent of all suicides in 2019. Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs stated, “We have to determine how we can respond to COVID-19 in a way that keeps our economy intact, keeps people employed and empowers them with a feeling of hope and optimism – not desperation and despair.”

RestartNOW! calculates the elevated suicide risk and other factors that are often not considered in the decisions to shut down the economy — right down to the county level. In the meantime, the wisdom of a continued shutdown is increasingly being called into question as more and more tests are conducted.

A recent survey from Stanford University, for example, found that the infection rate in Santa Clara County, California, could be as much as 50-85 times larger than the measured rate. If true, that would bring the U.S. COVID-19 Case Fatality Rate (CFR) into line with a typical influenza season (0.1%), as opposed to the current rate which exceeds 5 out of every 100 of those diagnosed with the illness.

Chicago’s Roseland Community Hospital conducts 400-600 tests per day and has found that between 30 and 50 percent tested positive, but most had gotten over it. These people can go back to work. In Bonn, Germany, a study of 1,000 people found that 15 percent were infected, suggesting a CFR of 0.37 percent, less than one-fifth of Germany’s current estimated rate. A smaller test conducted in Sweden found that 11 percent of those tested were positive.

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University has studied infection rates in the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain. He found that regardless of whether a nation chose the shutdown model or remained open, infection rates remained essentially the same – with cases peaking in about six weeks then declining thereafter. This seems to be what is happening in the U.S.

The model provided by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) was clearly flawed. The administration’s current projection of 60,000 is probably a pretty good estimate — but vastly lower than the IMHE model’s predictions on which the shutdown rationale was based. The engine of our economy is small business. Business owners who believe in the American dream, are having that dream shattered by these extended shutdowns. The Federal Reserve is spending a million dollars a minute from our children’s’ future to prop up business revenue. This has to stop. If it does not, the cure will be more devastating than the disease.

Whole industries are threatened. For example, the very survival of the brewpub and bar industry is in question. The Brewers Association for small craft breweries predicts a majority of brewers will fail if things don’t change soon. But the entire economy is at risk. We are losing jobs to the tune of nearly 1 million every day. Over the past month, more than 22 million people filed claims for unemployment.

This creates an immense human toll, that none of the citizens of this great nation ever voted for. The unprecedented economic revitalization during the first three years of the Trump administration is seriously threatened. The U.S. economy will struggle to recover for months or even years. Unemployment causes stress, health issues, and suicides. The shutdown has ended most non-emergency doctor visits and elected surgery. How many will die because their “elected” heart bypass surgery was postponed? People need to work, to exercise, to be outside of their homes, both for mental and physical health.

The shutdowns were initiated hastily without a serious cost-benefit analysis for businesses and citizens. The shutdowns must be lifted as quickly as possible, and can be accomplished using the data RestartNOW has built, opening first the low and almost no-risk counties (low population densities, low preconditions, healthy lifestyles) without complicated phase-in processes. Low-risk counties are in every state and have been harmed by the statewide mandates disproportionately because they usually have the weakest economies.

After the low-risk successes, we must proceed to the medium and higher risk counties, getting everything reopened as soon as possible while we carefully protect those who are at high risk. The data available in the tool provided by RestartNOW, combined with balanced freedom policies will open a lot of the riskier counties, without putting the truly at risk in additional harm’s way.

We are a nation founded on individual rights — but those rights carry responsibilities with them. Most of us are now fully cognizant of risks and will take prudent measures to protect ourselves and our loved ones without the heavy hand of government arbitrarily dictating what we can and cannot do. Let’s be careful but let’s get to work. We now have a tool to help us do it safely.

04/22/20

Saving the Planet as People Perish

By: Cliff Kincaid

“With Crisis Comes Opportunity” is how the organization Voices for the Earth Summit sees the death and destruction from the coronavirus. “This global pandemic is one of the greatest tragedies of our time, but it is also revealing opportunities that have not been so clearly seen before,” it says. “We are awakening to the fact that our current systems are not working, they are failing both humanity and the planet.”

This time they mean it – the New World Order can finally be implemented. Or so they think. They can use two global crises at one – the virus and so-called climate change. “Earth Day,” on Wednesday, April 22, is a great opportunity for them. Expect the same kind of propaganda that was broadcast on Saturday night, in support of the U.N.’s World Health Organization.

On cue, Time magazine has published former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s column, “When The Pandemic Is Over, The World Must Come Together,” urging an emergency special session of the U.N. General Assembly, with “revising the entire global agenda” as the main topic, leading “toward a new consciousness, a new civilization.”

But the former Soviet president, considered a “reformer” by our media, had declared his commitment to a one-world communist state, even during the period of Glasnost and Perestroika, saying on November 2, 1987, “We are moving towards a new world, the world of communism. We shall never turn off that road.”

We always knew the left would exploit the virus but their “vision” of the New World Order is now coming into clear focus. They think China’s mass murder is not the time to hold China responsible for death and suffering, but to save Mother Earth from greenhouse gases. They think this will usher in a global one-world socialist state, a development that could find China as the head of the New World Order and Russia serving as the world’s gas pump, with American energy independence a thing of the past. These are the stakes.

One online Earth Day event on April 22, featuring “former” communist Van Jones, is sponsored by the Pachamama Alliance and is designed to demonstrate “Resilience and Possibility in These Times.” The online gathering will help “regenerate our planet and social institutions” and that we can look forward to a “future of sustainability and justice.”

Standing in the way is the Trump Administration and spontaneous and growing protests of Americans who want their country and its free enterprise system restored to economic and financial health. They are condemned by the major media as hicks and hayseeds but they understand that the globalists have been trying for decades to cut American down to size. They won’t stand for it. America will reopen in the face of the global assault.

With Obama’s former Vice President Joe Biden hoping to ride this wave of death and destruction into the White House, you may remember that Van Jones was supposed to be a key figure in Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America. He had been deeply involved in a Marxist group, Standing Together To Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), which sent some of its members to Cuba. In Cuba, thanks to the U.N., they were working on “Pig Power” to run a modern economy, based on using excrement from pigs eating “high off the hog.”

Van Jones was appointed “Green Jobs Czar” in March 2009 at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, an important job, established within the Executive Office of the President, and designed to coordinate “federal environmental efforts” and work closely with agencies and other White House offices in the development of environmental policies and initiatives.

In the end, however, thanks to White House Reds author Trevor Loudon, who was sniffing around the Obama White House, Jones was forced to resign because the investigation of his communist connections was getting too close for comfort for Obama and his inner circle. Sacking Jones was a way for the White House and the major media, just beginning to take an interest in the story, to move on. It was apparent that Jones was thrown “under the bus” because too many of Obama’s close associates, including adviser Valerie Jarrett, were implicated in his hiring. Jarrett had said that “we” had recruited Jones. Obama himself obviously approved the decision to bring him aboard.

His involvement with the Pachamama Alliance is significant.

You may recall that a major controversy developed when a video showed Pope Francis blessing a statue of Pachamama, a “goddess” revered by some indigenous people holding on to their pagan traditions and considered a female fertility figure representing Mother Earth.

Traditional Catholics who regard Pope Francis as a heretic believe such pagan displays are a violation of the First Commandment prohibition of idols.

Seizing the moment, the Pachamama Alliance declares, “When society emerges on the other side of this [coronavirus] challenge, we will be forever changed. We can’t go back to the way things were. We need a new way forward. Knowing this, what can we do to be ready to not just rebuild our world, but to build a sustainable, thriving, and just world?”

Also taking advantage of the situation, the Committees for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) understands that “systemic disaster or shock can open possibilities for social change not available in the US during normal times” and that “the COVID-19 pandemic is such a crisis.” The Marxist group thinks the left can exploit the crisis in order to promote pet projects such as socialized medicine, also known as single-payer health care, or a Green New Deal program of heavy-handed socialist control of the economy and massive new taxes.

The CCDS, as well as other left-wing and Marxist groups, believe time and attention must also be devoted to whitewashing Communist China of its role in releasing and spreading the virus.

Another group with Marxist roots, the Lyndon LaRouche movement, issued a press release through its Schiller Institute “regarding the vicious anti-China campaign being promulgated in the West, especially in the United States,” over China’s role in coronavirus. The group was founded by the late Lyndon LaRouche, who served prison time on financial fraud charges and was considered the intellectual author of the 9/11 truth movement because he started questioning whether Muslims had staged the attacks right after they occurred. LaRouche started out as a Marxist and, in a 1976 lecture, titled, “What Only Communists Know,” declared his desire to bring into being “a new Marxist international…” This is their moment.

The Schiller Institute press release said that his widow, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, was invited by China in 2017 to attend an International Conference on China’s “Belt and Road” Initiative. It said that during her trip she appeared on a Chinese English Language dialog show, “Dialogue with Yang Rui.”

One can occasionally find members of the LaRouche movement on street corners selling literature and claiming to be defending President Trump.

But a Schiller Institute document, which calls for a “World Health System,” reveals that their objective is precisely the same as some other far-left groups – strengthening the World Health Organization and creating new socialist structures for the world. The document declares, “This global pandemic emphatically requires a global response, as reservoirs of the virus in any part of the world could cause resurgences for years. It requires a World Health System covering every part of the planet.”

Zepp-LaRouche defends the U.N.s World Health Organization, which initially claimed the virus was harmless to humans, and declares, “China is not an aggressive force.”

Not surprisingly, the United Nations has embraced an “unprecedented all-day digital Earth Day” on April 22, with another group with a50^th Anniversary Global Advisory Committee that includes Lisa Jackson, Obama’s former EPA Administrator and current Vice President of Environment Policy and Social Initiatives at Apple; John Kerry, Obama’s former U.S. Secretary of State; and David Levy, Vice President of US Government and Nonproﬁts at Amazon Web Services. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, has announced that he will be committing $10 billion to fight climate change.)

UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a “message for International Mother Earth Day,” saying, “We must act decisively to protect our planet from both the coronavirus and the existential threat of climate disruption. The current crisis is an unprecedented wake-up call. We need to turn the recovery into a real opportunity to do things right for the future.”

Offering various “green” initiatives, while saying that “Greenhouse gases, just like viruses, do not respect national boundaries,” the release was issued in the form of a “demand” for a new “Green Economy.”

Guterres is a former head of the Socialist International, a worldwide group with “consultative status” with the United Nations that promises “Progressive politics for a fairer world.”

If you think Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is a tyrant, wait until Donald J. Trump is deposed and a world government dictator arrives on the scene.

Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survval, Inc. www.usasurvival.org.