Why the left should oppose lockdown (and would, if it really were devoted to the interests of the underclass)
Today's "left" has not opposed lockdowns because it's not really "left" at all,
but just another outlet for the COVID-19 propaganda, as it's long since been
corrupted by the CIA funds poured into it through pass-throughs like the
Ford Foundation.
For example: Amy Goodman started today's "Democracy Now!" with a gloating
bit on the now-infected Jair Bolsonaro, who had "for months downplayed the severity
of the crisis," lately developing "a high fever and a cough"—and taking hydroxychloroquine,
"even though it's been proven ineffective against COVID-19, and sometimes deadly."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ggv5Y2Gd0
Thus Amy Goodman serves as a prolific vector of the propaganda hatched by the
Big Pharma/WHO/Gates/Fauci syndicate, to denigrate HCQ—a cheap and most
effective COVID-19 treatment, as has been "proven" all around the world—so as
to set the stage for that vaccine.
What authentic leftist would thus prostitute herself, and lie baldly, and repeatedly,
about a treatment that's demonstrably been saving lives—including many of those
black lives so dear to Amy Goodman—in favor of a rushed vaccine, that's now being
tested on poor people in Brazil, South Africa, and other Third World countries?
If Eugene Victor Debs had been a "leftist" like the amply funded Amy Goodman,
he would have been out giving speeches on "the rape of Belgium" by "the Huns,"
and urging workers to enlist in Woodrow Wilson's "war to end all wars," instead
of bravely speaking out against it, and going to federal prison for it.
Amy Goodman is, in short, a lethal fraud, like countless other "leftists" who
should have been opposing the disastrous lockdown policies, for all the reasons
that Phil Shannon sets forth here.
(To see who's funding Amy and her fellow "leftist" stars, check out this chart:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/funding+left+/QgrcJHsBtQfswrvfGJvXzbKbMFvCsxVcPxg?projector=1.)
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Why the Left Should Oppose Lockdown
21 June 2020
by Phil Shannon
https://lockdownsceptics.org/why-the-left-should-oppose-lockdown/
The Durham Miners’ Gala
Preamble
The contemporary left’s support for an economically devastating, authoritarian lockdown, which doesn’t even achieve its limited public health aims, is one of the more remarkable developments in current politics. With its support for extreme ‘social distancing’, the left has reached a new nadir in the ‘political distancing’ between it and its traditional working class constituency, a relationship that has been fraying badly since the democratic, national, working class populist upsurge of recent years as symbolised by the Brexit referendum, the thumping Get-Brexit-Done electoral victory of Boris Johnson, and the surprising Trump miracle.
The left’s lockdown betrayal of the working class further accelerates its decline into political irrelevance. This is not a cause for celebration, especially for someone like myself, a four-decade Australian veteran of working class socialism including as a trade union activist, and member of the Communist Party of Australia and more Trotskyist grouplets than you could shake a Program of the Fourth International at, who still cooks on the left burner (see author’s page here).
What follows is an attempt to understand how and why the left has got into such a pickle over lockdown and how it can begin to resurrect its political integrity.
Why the left (and not just the left) should oppose lockdown
Science
The virus is not the virus to end all viruses. The herd immunity threshold is apparently much lower than expected because of cross-immunity due to the common cold and other coronaviruses. Most people (other than the aged with specific comorbidities) who contract it are either asymptomatic or have only mild symptoms. Panicked by one spectacularly bonkers epidemiological model, however, health authorities and politicians across the planet have done their most flamboyant ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!’ impressions, and massively overstated the virulence and lethality of the virus to justify the lockdown lunacy they rushed to institute in order to be seen to be doing something. The virus did not herald the End Times, there never was a curve to be flattened, it never gave cause for draconian lockdown measures.
Public Health
Lockdown simply doesn’t work on its own terms. Regardless of if, or when, lockdown was implemented, or how draconian its scope, within and between different countries, the trajectory of the virus, as of other viral pathogens, has followed a natural bell curve of exponential rise, plateau and rapid decline (over just a month or two for the current one) as it hits the limits of natural or acquired herd immunity (Farr’s Law – still going strong since William Farr formulated it in 1840!).
Lockdown will kill many times more people (from health conditions left undiagnosed and untreated, and from the so-called ‘diseases of despair’ that accompany economic distress) than the virus could ever manage.
The Economy
Quarantining the healthy is economically catastrophic, with Depression-era levels of unemployment, business closures, and mind-numbing long-term government debts and deficits. A demographically-targeted, strategic approach of protecting the vulnerable would have had far better financial (as well as health) outcomes both for the vulnerable and for the whole population.
Click on the link for the rest. |