Sunday, May 3, 2020

May 3, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

“To Whose Benefit Is It?”  COVID-19, Our Elites, and the Selling of America

Ilana Mercer Writes

Friends,

The Latin phrase “Cui bono?”—meaning “To whose benefit is it?”—is often used in a legal or philosophical sense. Things, events, actions occur according to the great Roman legist Cicero because of something specifically we will get from them happening, a benefit to us. Whether in our everyday lives or on a global level, this question always lurks, often just below the surface but never that far away. And the answers to it often explain a lot about why we—or a business or corporation—or government have done what we or they did.

Who stands to gain.

Presently, in the midst of a nationally-proclaimed pandemic, a pestilence that is said to threaten our very existence as a nation and a people, in which governments from the court house to the state house to the While House have arrogated unto themselves enormous and unprecedented political and social authority, “cui bono” must be asked.

But not only “to whose benefit is it?” in the present tense of just now what is happening in the United States and most Western countries, but more broadly, how did we reach this point in government and business operations: to whose benefit was it that conditions were created and engineered so that we reached this situation?

Yes, it’s a question essentially of responsibility for what has occurred, but why and to whose benefit were those conditions first created and set in place on the national (and international) level?

“Follow the money” is a saying, a phrase that I first remember from the 1970s film, “All the President’s Men.” And it parallels closely, in a sense, what Cicero wrote 2100 years ago: power and money go hand-in-hand.

One-hundred and forty years ago writer Mark Twain, commenting on the headlong rush into and triumph of industrial capitalism in the post-1865 United States, sardonically remarked of its architects: “Brisk men, energetic of movement and speech; the dollar their god, how to get it their religion.” 

Erected as a global principle in our world increasingly—and perhaps fatally—without borders, given their praxis of obtaining power and wealth, thus the origins of what we behold engulfing us become clearer. And the future prospects and designs, as well, of those who first manufactured this crisis become more terrifying.

“Cui bono?” indeed.
*****
I pass on two columns addressing both points: first, an eye-opening column by Ilana Mercer focusing on the origins of our situation, and to whose benefit was it, how our American elites actively worked with the Chinese communists to fundamentally enable what has befallen us.  And, second, my column of April 29, now published by LewRockwell.com (May 1): “Will COVID-19 Bring Full Totalitarianism to America?” which looks sullenly to the future. Again, who is and will benefit from all the new executive orders and government power?

Read on:

Who Invited The World To Infect America?

Hate the Chinese government if you wish, but hold your own government responsible for hollowing America out like a husk.

By Ilana Mercer • 
On March 31, the number of Americans dead from the Chinese coronavirus stood at 3,900! A mere month on, at the time of writing, and 63,801 Americans have perished.
American deaths by COVID-19 account for a quarter of the world’s, including those in the undeveloped world. To ignore this Third-World-like specter is to dismiss the dead and the dying. It’s tantamount to cancel culture.
China sucks. But if the United States must rely on the Chinese government to keep its citizens safe, then what kind of a Mickey Mouse country are we?
If the American people can be convinced by their government to saddle a foreign power with the responsibility for their existential welfare—what kind of people are we?
China didn’t force the traitors of the American economy to shift crucial production lines to its country and strand Americans without surgical and N-95 masks and medication; homegrown turncoats made that decision, all by their lonesome.

Trade Goods, Not Places

Decades ago, the political, corporate and industrial leaders of the West chose to enmesh the fate of their pliable people with that of the vigorous, voracious Chinese.
Like the United States, another hard-hit region—Northern Italy, so progressive and tony—had swung its toll gates open. Italy outsourced whole production lines to China.
Free trade in goods is great. But trade goods, not places. The toll gates were swung open to human trade, or population replacement.
Since the Chinese had begun settling in Northern Italy and buying up assets, I hazard that, much like youngsters of King County, in Washington State—local Italian girls and boys have had a hard time affording life in their homeland. 
And now, their grandparents and parents are dying.
Italy constructed gleaming tarmacs to accommodate the many direct flights to and from Wuhan. More than 100,000 Chinese citizens moved to Italy. As the Chinese accrued wealth over the past two decades, still more took up residence in Northern Italy, and bought up Italian firms.
See if you can spot the trend. New York City, by Wikipedia’s telling, is home to far and away “the highest Chinese-American population of any city proper.”
Courtesy of an Italian strain of COVID-19, the New York metropolitan area has been as badly struck as Italy. In early April, it was said that “coronavirus was killing a person roughly every four minutes in New York state, and about every six minutes in New York City.”
In my state of Washington, the overwhelming majority of Chinese reside in King County and Snohomish County, where the infection was seeded and from where it spread.
The West’s political and corporate leaders, not China’s, had opened their borders to the world’s flotsam and jetsam. Agreements to exchange goods and people reflected the choices of these gilded global elites, not those of their people.

Economic Elephantiasis

The sphinxly Bill Gates, we are told, foresaw the pandemic. Gates also pioneered the outsourcing of American lives to China (and India). I say “lives,” because, as it has become abundantly clear, in the wake of COVID, the very stuff of life has been outsourced to China. Not mere jobs; but careers, not just some products, but entire production lines; not one or two manufacturing plants, but the entire means of production.  
Engineers who can think hate Gates. America’s best and brightest have done time supervising and titivating squalid, sub-par Chinese factories, when they knew full well that, instead of cheap, nasty, and disposable, their colleagues back at home could have delivered classy, attractive, durable and sustainable products and production capability, around which real communities would have coalesced.
Instead, Gates’ vision has given us transient labor that flits between Wuhan and Washington, for, these “global beasts with their vast balance-sheets” aren’t interested in the kind of economic growth around which authentic, organic, enduring communities congregate.
The attitude of American business toward economic growth is rooted not in healthy, community-based practices (stateside and abroad), but in some aberrant economic gigantism; in an economic elephantiasis undergirded by hubris and greed.
Bill Gates, the point man, the pinhead who pontificates about pandemic best practices, was among the powerbrokers who decided, with his benefactors in D.C., that the “new economy” would hum not in America, but in China and India.
And it’s not merely for profit. Tech superstars like Gates are true believers in the borderless multicultural state. These arrogant CEOs and their minions are social-justice warriors, first; giants of industry, second. They are cosmopolitans who believe consumption alone makes the world go round. Community? That’s when you press flesh with George and Amal Clooney at the World Economic Forum in Davos!

No Multiculturalists in China

To the gilded globalists, America is not a country to be bound by strictly controlled borders and to be patrolled and policed against viruses and villains. Rather, Bill Gates’ America is a territory for trade, not a nation.
A “shopping mall with nukes,” as a reader put it. 
Whereas China has positioned its cohesive people for success, the American ruling class, Democrat and Republican, have long since sold their countrymen out. It is American leaders, left and right, who’ve convinced their population that Americans are nothing unless strangers are streaming into their country at a rate of 2 million a year, speaking in tongues and inaugurating wet-markets in New York City. This is who we are, they tell us.
No such thing did the Chinese government perpetrate on its people. It doesn’t welcome immigrants; the Chinese don’t want immigrants. Several [Chinese] “women vow to leap off the Great Wall rather than marry a foreigner,” reports The Economist with consternation. Indeed, the Chinese people have no qualms or fear about expressing Han racial superiority, this, as the West embraces a multicultural mess of pottage that is now killing it and consigning us to years of penury.
Stupidity is not a virtue.
Ironically, and although almost all reinfection in China involves Chinese nationals, “curbs on foreigners are tightening,” and the “border has been shut to most of them.” Conversely, the American travel ban—I hope you know—was nothing more than a rerouting of the Chinese influx to allotted U.S. airports, where thermometers were pointed at foreheads, and tens of thousands of Chinese were sent on their merry way, entrusted to go home and self-quarantine.
The outcome of future pandemics hinges on the American people’s ability to strike fear into the hearts of their leaders, irrespective of party affiliation—a fear that will make it impossible for these shiftless characters to shift blame for their failings.

Where Accountability Goes to Die

The U.S. government and its proxies would like to gull Americans into blaming China alone for the litany of suffering Americans are enduring.
A free people takes responsibility for its own welfare. Federalism dictates that this ostensibly free people delegate certain responsibilities to the state, national, and local levels. This is what the U.S. Constitution compelled. Defined duties have been delegated to our governments. Repelling invaders is one of them.
Thus, the same free people must saddle their own leaders, in D.C. and the Centers for Disease Control, with mass deaths ongoing.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has ordered that China be investigated for concealing “information early on about the novel coronavirus.”
Fine. I’m not here saying there is no merit in the allegation or the investigation.
Just so long as Americans understand that government committees are where accountability goes to die. Governments create committees to conceal their own culpability.
Just so long as Americans know that the Chinese will continue to settle this country by the thousands, while their relatives back in China supply Americans with essential goods.
Just so long as Americans know that the federal government and its corporate cronies do not intend to repatriate life-sustaining supply chains.
Hate the Chinese government if you wish, but hold your own government responsible for hollowing America out like a husk by inviting the world to invade it and infect it.

LewRockwell.com anti-stateanti-warpro-market
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
By Boyd D. Cathey 
My Corner   May 1, 2020
It all came together last night. In less than ten minutes all the major points were sculpted and fit, and the massive tomes of explanation and interpretation were summed up in a few chilling words: it was the opening monologue of April 28 offered by Tucker Carlson in his primetime program, the one figure left on Fox News who occasionally gets it right (as most of the others featured on that channel have at least made peace with the Deep State, if not been co-opted by it).
Carlson’s monologue, like his riveting book, Ship of Fools, pulled no punches: this present COVID-19 epidemic is being consciously used by our major tech media—Facebook, Youtube—and government to greatly increase power and control over us and stanch and suppress any dissent, even the most mild and cautious. Hugely increased censorship, executive orders (many of dubious legality) spewing out the wahzoo, newly enforced speech codes, and open calls by so-called respected academics to, in fact, suppress free speech—that is, speech which doesn’t fit the Establishment’s idea of “norms and standards” (which are assuredly not those of traditional Americans): these exist increasingly all around us and threaten to engulf and submerge us.

Finally, then, is it not the full appearance of the sullen face of rank totalitarianism, something that has lurked very near the surface for years, for centuries, but always kept at bay by law, by common sense, by our constitution and its protections…and by our civilization’s faith in God? Now it bids fair to emerge from its fetid cave and ask, as English writer Thomas Carlyle’s “many-headed, fire-breathing monster” in his volume, The French Revolution: “What think ye of me?”

Once again Hilaire Belloc’s quote about the “modern barbarian” from a century ago comes to mind:
“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.” [This and That and the Other, 1912, 282]

Those large and awful, unsmiling faces are the faces of Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, of the media personalities at CNN, at The New York Times, in academia, and in our Federal government and in our statehouses across the United States.

You know Carlson has hit a nerve, has hit his target when apparatchik card-carrying Deep Staters like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes come out and slam him and avoid almost totally Carlson’s point about censorship and totalitarian control. For they cannot contest that, so they must dissemble and target something else: instead Hayes attacks Carlson on his views on re-opening the economy, certainly a major point but not at all the overall emphasis of the monologue.

As I wrote recently, truth dies in the darkness…and so do our liberties. Our enemies—for that is what they are—are trying desperately to keep the lid on while they vastly increase their power. This present pestilence for them presents a capital opportunity, and they are utilizing it up to the hilt, in every way.

It is up to us to stop them.
*****
Here is the Youtube of the Tucker Carlson program for Tuesday night, April 28; please watch at least the first nine minutes—before the censors take it down.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

Copyright © Boyd D. Cathey

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