Little Man: Is Your Governor Being Urged Or Compelled To Tyranny?

mises |  As of April 6, forty-one states have statewide "stay-at-home" decrees in place. These orders vary widely from place to place. In some states, there are long lists of exempted industries including marijuana dispensaries, liquor stores, hardware stores, and of course, grocery stores. In some states with these edicts, public lands, state parks, and beaches remain open. In some states, city parks are more crowded than ever as local residents, with little else to do, attempt to recreate. In other places—such as California—one can be arrested for paddleboarding all alone in the ocean.

Yet in all of these places, the current regime of rule by decree will have—and already has had—a devastating effect on many small and medium-sized businesses and their employees. As governments have created new arbitrary definitions of what constitutes an "essential" business, some businesses find themselves forced to close. Employees have lost these jobs. The owners of these enterprises will likely lose far more as debts mount and business investments are destroyed. As unemployment and poverty increase, the usual pathologies will arise as well: suicides, child abuse, and stress-induced death.

Yet the politicians—mostly state governors, mayors, and unelected bureaucrats—remain popular. In New York State, where the lockdown orders are among the most draconian in the nation, it is now claimed that 87 percent of those polled approve of Governor Andrew Cuomo's handling of the situation. As Donald Trump's administration has recommended ever harsher government limits on the freedom of Americans, his poll numbers have only improved. 

Meanwhile, among critics there appears to be a misconception of these lockdowns (which are very often only partially imposed or enforced) as being imposed over the howls of the local population, which is being silenced and cowed by jackbooted local police.

If only that were true. In most places, it appears clear that a great many residents approve of the lockdowns. We see this support in the form of all the local scolds who complain on Nextdoor.com about neighborhood children who don't properly engage in "social distancing." We see it in the people who call the police to report violators of stay-at-home orders. We see it in those who report local businesses for allowing too many people inside.

Viewed in this way, it may be more likely that state governors and other politicians are afraid of being seen as doing too little, rather than as overstepping their authority to impose public safety measures.

Controlaspecies: Gain Of Function Research And The Blame Game

harvardtothebighouse |  we have Peter Daszak.  His company, EcoHealth Alliance, which is a non-profit that depends largely on multi-million dollar government grants to function, has been partnering with Chinese researcher for years in an attempt to secure funding for more and more research into coronaviruses. At least they’re not really even pretending to be philanthropic.

And in one of the more transparent attempts at blatant PR-spin, Daszak was featured alongside one of the researchers who learned how to create hyper-virulent bat coronaviruses at UNC back in 2015, Zhengli Shi. Their article insists we should take Zhengli at her word when she claims to have not found a match after she checked COVID-19’s genome against everything in her lab. As if someone responsible for releasing the most virulent pathogen to hit humanity in modern history, one that’s already killed thousands and is projected to kill millions and millions more all across the globe, would simply fess-up to it, torpedoing her career and the years of research performed by her and her colleagues? And possibly opening all of them up to legal and other repercussions?

If you still aren’t sure whether the scientists involved with kind of research are being forthright, there’s Dr. Ralph Baric. It was in his lab at UNC that a hyper-virulent bat Franken-virus was created by splicing a new protein-spike on an existing coronavirus, creating a monster so vicious that a virologist with the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris warned: “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.” It should also be noted that several years prior to tinkering directly with bat coronavirus spike-proteins, Baric orchestrated research that involved isolating a coronavirus from civets and then passing it through mammalian ACE2 receptor cells that were grown in the lab from kidney and brain samples – serial passage through host cell lines instead of entire hosts, which imparted a strong affinity for ACE2, and presumably created an airborne strain of coronavirus. And if cells derived from kidneys and brains were used for the serial passage development of COVID-19, that might help explain its affinity for attacking the kidneys and brains of its human hosts.

So if he was being honest, you might expect him to warn the public about the lethal potential coronaviruses pose during our current outbreak. However, when he was asked if the public should be worried about COVID-19 he said that people should be more worried about the seasonal flu. Pretty bizarre statement from a scientist who knew full well how dangerous coronaviruses could be, especially given the fact that not only was Zhengli Shi working in his lab on that project in 2015, but Xing-Yi Ge was too. Both of whom returned to Wuhan where they’ve continued their work for years.

Xing-Yi Ge is especially notable since in 2013 he became the very first scientist to isolate a bat coronavirus from nature that uses the ACE2 receptor, which is found in human, tree shrew, and ferret lungs and allows coronaviruses to become airborne. And as you might have learned by now, that’s the exact receptor used by COVID-19 to enter human cells – if anyone would know how to finagle that part of the coronavirus genome, it’d be him. So both Xing-Yi Ge and Zhengli Shi were part of the research team that created this hybridized hyper-virulent bat coronavirus under Baric, who’s actively downplayed the risk posed by COVID-19, and then returned to work in Wuhan, where funding provided in part by Daszak’s company allowed them to continue their work on coronaviruses with plenty of research to cut-and-paste into their work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Disease Engineering Technical Research Center.

And as Dr. Ian Malcolm puts it in Jurassic Park, it is never a good idea to futz around with science and research when you don’t fully understand it, nor its possible implications.

However it wasn’t just Daszak funding their work, Zhengli also secured millions of dollars in grant money from various American institutions including our Department of Defense as well as the U.S. Biological Defense Research Directorate, and millions more from other foreign governments.

So although the Chinese Communist Party deserves its share of the blame for attempting to cover the outbreak up, arresting the heroic scientists trying to warn us and issuing gag-orders and the destruction of evidence, this research likely wouldn’t have occurred at all if the NIH hadn’t lifted the ban on gain-of-function research in the first place. And it was funded directly by American tax dollars, by government officials willing to let others play god at their behest.

But now that the virus is out of the lab, are the private entities responsible for its creation going to bear any of the blame at all? Or will America and China continue to point fingers at each other until the worst happens?

“Mars will accuse Earth of using a bio-weapon. Earth will claim it was Mars. The Belt will blame the other two. It’s a good way to start a war and cover it up.”

One last spoiler warning… okay, so in The Expanse the central plot device pushing things forward is the discovery of a mysterious substance dubbed the protomolecule, which seems to have a mind of its own and seek out radiation as sustenance before then beginning “the Work,” a mysterious intergalactic goal that isn’t revealed until later seasons.

And its not individual nations who first attempt to harness the protomolecule, but their Peter Daszak, the aforementioned scientist and CEO named Jules-Pierre Mao, who attempts to weave it into the genomes of immuno-compromised children to create hybridized super-soldiers. Not for his own private army, but as a game-changing bio-weapon he’ll sell to whichever government is willing to pay the most for it. So in The Expanse, it takes amoral scientists as well as the collusion of officials affiliated with both governments for this research to happen and be hidden, and when these Hybrids are eventually dropped between both armies the carnage is immense.

Luckily, we haven’t gotten that far on earth yet, but the rhetoric between America and China has been heading in that direction – it’s been growing increasingly hostile as each blames the other for starting the pandemic and covering it up, with China even going so far as to threaten to cut off our supply of antibiotics and other life-saving medical goods.  Meanwhile Daszak, Baric, Zhengli, and others sit back counting their lucky stars and their money, since both governments and the public at large seem to have bought their story that there’s no way this virus leaked out of one of their labs, and every government on earth now wants to harness their research to help create vaccines and treatments.

And these researchers have been assisted by scientifically spurious and journalistically vacuous articles which mindlessly regurgitate claims from the Chinese government, and its scientific propaganda arm, the WHO, about how bad the outbreak was in the past and how contained it is now. As the Chinese government arrested whistle-blowers and sent agents out into the street in bio-hazard gear while carrying automatic weapons to detain anyone suspected of breaking quarantine, while literally welding apartments buildings shut, the American media fawned over China’s “decisive and heroic” actions.

Please take a moment to consider the fact that almost everyone reading the news to you on television was selected due to their connections or how photogenic they are, not because of any actual journalistic chops or ability to think critically.

So as two superpowers are pushed closer and closer to conflict, the research that’s almost certainly the source of COVID-19 not only continues unabated, but if anything talk of more funding to stop this sort of supposedly natural pandemic from happening again is pouring into the pockets of the people who, if they weren’t directly responsible, should certainly have been at the forefront of warning the world about the risks posed by lab-altered coronaviruses, and been disclosing the existence of this sort of research in the first place.

Oddly, each and everyone one of them is pretending that viral dual-use gain-of-function research has never occurred at all. Or not so oddly, when you stop and think about how much they have to lose if their role in this pandemic is revealed.

“The hardest part of this game is figuring out who the enemy really is.”

Other than the fact it doesn’t bear the direct marks of genetic tampering, just like the engineered hyper-virulent H5N1 Bird Flu, there’s literally nothing natural about COVID-19’s behavior or clinical presentation. And hauntingly, peer-reviewed research has noted that a crucial region of its genome “may provide a gain-of-function… for efficient spreading in the human population.”

Not only is it so distant from any other coronavirus that it forms its own clade, but there isn’t even a natural path for it to have emerged through – assertions about pangolins have always been dubious at best, but were even further debunked when analysis of COVID-19’s genome at the regions that most accurately show heritage made it “very unlikely” that pangolins had ever been involved at all.

Beyond that is the fact that its affinity for the ACE2 receptor is somewhere between 10 and 20 times higher than SARS, and it also creates viral loads thousands of times higher than SARS. These two characteristics point towards COVID-19 using antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE, to enter human cells. This is when the virus is able to hijack white blood cells to more easily enter into the rest of our body’s cells, allowing it to seep deep into its hosts’ nervous systems, creating permanent neurological damage in the hosts it doesn’t kill outright. ADE could also explain why between 5% and 10% of once “recovered” patients in Wuhan have been showing up with fresh infections, since that phenomenon allows a virus to hijack the antibodies created by a previous infection to re-attack an old host. And curiously Zhengli Shi, of UNC and Wuhan fame, co-authored a 2019 paper which used inert viral shells to figure out exactly how SARS, with its affinity to the ACE2 receptor just like COVID-19, was able to harness ADE to hijack white blood cells for enhanced cell entry. A gain-of-function extension of this research would be exactly the kind of experiment that could’ve given birth to COVID-19, especially considering that 2019 paper managed to fine-tune the exact concentration of antibodies that would best facilitate ADE.

Both HIV and Dengue Fever use antibody-dependent enhancement to boost their virulence, however its generally a phenomenon that takes a long time to occur when it happens in nature. However COVID-19 looks like it may have had its ADE jacked into hyper-drive as it was passed between a series of animal hosts, since it has the aforementioned much stronger ability to bind to host cells and creates viral loads orders of magnitude higher, and also appears to immediately to be able to enter its hosts nervous systems, killing many of its victims by attacking the region of the brain that controls breathing, drastically lowering white blood cell counts early on in infections, and apparently re-infecting individuals who had already appeared to clear their infection.

Further increasing the possibility that COVID-19’s unique clinical presentation may be due to its ADE being juiced by laboratory engineering are the observations from an ER doctor who’s stated that I have seen things that I have never seen before… I have witnessed medical phenomenon that just don’t make sense in the context of treating a disease that is supposed to be viral pneumonia. In an interview with Medscape, Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell went on to say that the closest thing to the symptoms he was witnessing in his emergency room.

Can You Build An Architecture Of Oppression Without A Totally Debased Political Class?

medium |  This isn’t the first time Gillum has been accused of poor behavior as a public official; I recall him being subjected to an ethics inquiry after he accepted tickets to the Broadway show Hamilton from an undercover FBI agent. Granted, there’s a hell of a gap between free tickets and whatever this shit with the drugs and escorts is (allegedly), but a pattern emerges: Even when Gillum has a good thing going for him, he may do something that could jeopardy his ambition — ambition he no longer shares just with himself, but with so many others.

That’s why I continue to struggle. Andrew Gillum already knew what it was like to have a target on his back. He knew that his professional prospects, as well as the people in his life — his wife, his children — could all be jeopardized by something like this. I just don’t understand the carelessness — down to the type of people he allegedly was associating with that night.

As bad as I feel bad for him, Black men also need to hold a mirror up to each other when need be. Not to induce shame; not to make them feel lower as we feign being better; simply to say, you need to look at yourself and how you move. You need to see how that shit impacts you.

Yes, as Black men there are a lot of people against us. Yes, there is a conservative media complex designed to take out politicians like you, and the mainstream media has enough suckers in it to magnify whatever those crazy folks on the right dredge up — but why give them material?

People have their secrets; some just keep them better than others. That’s not an endorsement of lying — merely speaking to the point that Andrew Gillum has long been a man of great promise who, like many men of great promise, fell short out of ego. This man was moving like someone who had nothing to lose. I don’t hate this man the way they do. I just hope this man becomes a better one because this has brought pain to people. I understand the factors why, but patterns must be broken. We all should do our part.

Gillum says he has voluntarily entered rehab for what he described as “alcohol abuse” and “depression.” Additionally, he “will be stepping down from all public facing roles for the foreseeable future.”

Edward Snowden: PanicDemic Building The Architecture Of Oppression

vice |   Smith: Why does it seem like we're so ill-prepared?

Snowden: There is nothing more foreseeable as a public health crisis in a world where we are just living on top of each other in crowded and polluted cities, than a pandemic. And every academic, every researcher who's looked at this knew this was coming. And in fact, even intelligence agencies, I can tell you firsthand, because they used to read the reports had been planning for pandemics.
 

Are autocratic regimes better at dealing with things like this than democratic ones?I don't think so. I mean, there are arguments being made that China can do things that the United States can't. That doesn't mean that what these autocratic countries are doing is actually more effective.

 If you're looking at countries like China, where cases seem to have leveled off, how much can we trust that those numbers are actually true?

 

I don't think we can. Particularly, we see the Chinese government recently working to expel Western journalists at precisely this moment where we need credible independent warnings in this region.

It seems that [coronavirus] may be the greatest question of the modern era around civil liberties, around the right to privacy. Yet no one's asking this question.

As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world. Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what’ is being built is the architecture of oppression.

Why Is The Microsoft Death And Infection Model So Exponentially Wrong?

NationalReview |  To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the coronavirus would not do this development justice.

In a space of just six days starting April 2, two revisions (on April 5 and 8) have utterly discredited the model produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I wrote about the IHME’s modeling at National Review on Monday, the day after the first revision — which was dramatic, but pales in comparison to Wednesday’s reassessment. This was not immediately apparent because the latest revision (April 8) did not include a side-by-side comparison, as did the April 5 revision. Perusal of the new data, however, is staggering, as is what it says about government predictions we were hearing just days ago about the likelihood of 100,000 deaths, with as many as 240,000 a real possibility.

As I noted in my last post on this subject, by April 5, the projection of likely deaths had plunged 12 percent in just three days, 93,531 to 81,766. Understand, this projection is drawn from a range; on April 2, IHME was telling us cumulative COVID-19 deaths could reach as high as approximately 178,000. The upper range was also reduced on April 5 to about 136,000.

 On April 8, the projected cumulative deaths were slashed to 60,145 (with the upper range again cut, to about 126,000). That is, in less than a week, the model proved to be off by more than 33 percent.

My use of the term “off” is intentional. There is no shortage of government spin, regurgitated by media commentators, assuring us that the drastic reductions in the projections over just a few days powerfully illustrate how well social distancing and the substantial shuttering of the economy is working. Nonsense. As Alex Berenson points out on Twitter, with an accompanying screenshot data updated by IHME on April 1, the original April 2 model explicitly “assum[ed] full social distancing through May 2020.”

The model on which the government is relying is simply unreliable. It is not that social distancing has changed the equation; it is that the equation’s fundamental assumptions are so dead wrong, they cannot remain reasonably stable for just 72 hours.

And mind you, when we observe that the government is relying on the models, we mean reliance for the purpose of making policy, including the policy of completely closing down American businesses and attempting to confine people to their homes because, it is said, no lesser measures will do. That seems worth stressing in light of this morning’s announcement that unemployment claims spiked another 6.6 million (now well over 16 million in just the past couple of weeks), to say nothing of the fact that, while the nation reels, the Senate has now chosen to go on recess, having failed, thanks to Democratic obstinacy, to enact legislation to give more relief to our fast-shrinking small-business sector.

LITTLE MAN! We're Goople - And We're Here To Help (What Could Possibly Go Wrong?)

bloomberg |  The technology, known as contact-tracing, is designed to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus by telling users they should quarantine or isolate themselves after contact with an infected individual.

The Silicon Valley rivals said on Friday that they are building the technology into their iOS and Android operating systems in two steps. In mid-May, the companies will add the ability for iPhones and Android phones to wirelessly exchange anonymous information via apps run by public health authorities. The companies will also release frameworks for public health apps to manage the functionality.

This means that if a user tests positive for Covid-19, and adds that data to their public health app, users who they came into close proximity with over the previous several days will be notified of their contact. This period could be 14 days, but health agencies can set the time range.

The second step takes longer. In the coming months, both companies will add the technology directly into their operating systems so this contact-tracing software works without having to download an app. Users must opt in, but this approach means many more people can be included. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have about 3 billion users between them, over a third of the world’s population.

The pandemic has killed more than 100,000 and infected 1.63 million people. Governments have ordered millions to stay home, sending the global economy into a vicious tailspin. Pressure is building to relax these measures and get the world back to work. Contact-tracing is a key part of this because it can help authorities contain a potential resurgence of the virus as people resume regular activities.

Controlavirus: The Chinese Communist Party CCP Virus And The Great Blame Game

SCMP |  In October, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence noted in the first line of its report on Russia’s use of social media to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election, that “information warfare [is] designed to spread disinformation and societal division”. Zhao’s tweets accom­plished both. The disinformation was obvious. Critical thinking in abeyance, plenty of people will believe a claim that the US Army planted Covid-19 in Wuhan; even more will want it to be true.

When US President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others began fighting back by loudly and repeatedly calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus”, social division in the US grew, if that is possible. The media accused Trump of being racist and xenophobic, and inciting more of the same towards Chinese-Americans. This only caused Trump to say it louder and more often.

One wonders how much longer Washington will conti­nue fighting the information war against Beijing with one arm tied behind its back. Chinese media enjoy free run of the US, including on Twitter. The US has no such freedom in China.

Not a few pundits in these past few weeks have predicted Covid-19 will end globalisation, or even “life as we know it”. That seems unlikely, given the short-term nature of people’s memories and how profitable “life as we know it” has been for so many. But given the mischief Zhao’s tweets caused, Beijing’s days on Twitter might be numbered.

The Covid-19 Economic and Political Restructuring Narrative In The Light Of Preference Falsification

Thanks to Eric Weinstein, this year's curriculum kicked-off with an introduction to the concept of "preference falsification".  The ongoing and encompassing tsunami of current events make it exceedingly germaine for you to revisit this little-known - but nevertheless determinative concept.

voxeu |  We characterise the motivations central to the workings of civil society by a series of other regarding or ethical values including reciprocity, fairness, and sustainability. Also included is the term identity, by which we refer to a bias in favour of those who one calls “us” over “them.” We draw attention to this aspect of the civil society dimension to stress that in insisting on the importance of community in fashioning a response to the pandemic, we recognise the capacity of these community-based solutions to sustain xenophobic, parochial, and other repugnant actions.

Figure 2 illustrates the location in “institution-space” of different responses to the epidemic. At the top left is the government as the insurer of last resort. Neither market nor household risk-sharing can handle an economy-wide contraction of activity required by containment policies; and neither can compel the near-universal participation that makes risk pooling possible.

Closer to the civil society pole are social distancing policies implemented through consent. The triangle opens up space for modern-day analogues of the so-called Dunkirk strategy – small, privately owned boats took up where the British navy lacked the resources to evacuate those trapped on the beaches in 1940.  An example is the public-spirited mobilisation by universities and small private labs of efforts to undertake production and processing of tests and to develop new machines to substitute for scarce ventilators.

These examples underline an important truth about institutional and policy design: the poles of the institution space – at least ideally – are complements not substitutes. Well-designed government policies enhance the workings of markets and enhance the salience of cooperative and other socially valuable preferences.  Well-designed markets both empower governments and make them more accountable without crowding out ethical and other pro-social preferences.

Much of the content that we think is essential to a successful post-COVID-19 economic vernacular is present in two recent advances in the field.

The first is the insight – dating back to Hayek – that information is scarce and local. Neither government officials nor private owners and managers of firms know enough to write incentive-based enforceable contracts or governmental fiats to implement optimal social distancing, surveillance, or deployment of resources to the health sector, including to vaccine development.

The second big change in economics gives us hope that non-governmental and non-market solutions may actually contribute to mitigating problems that are poorly addressed by contract or fiat.  The behavioural economics revolution makes it clear that people – far from the individualistic and amoral representation in conventional economics – are capable of extraordinary levels of cooperation based on ethical values and other regarding preferences.  

As was the case with the Great Depression and WWII, we will not be the same after COVID-19. And neither, we also hope, will be the way people talk about the economy.

But there is a critical difference between the post-Great Depression period and today. The pandemic of that era – massive unemployment and economic insecurity – was beaten new rules of the game that delivered immediate benefits. Unemployment insurance, a larger role for government expenditures and, in many countries, trade union engagement in wage-setting and the introduction of new technology reflected both the analytics and the ethics of the new economic vernacular. The result was the decades of performance referred to as the golden age of capitalism, making both the new rules and the new vernacular difficult to dislodge. 

It is possible, but far from certain, that the mounting costs of climate change and recurrent pandemic threats will provide an environment that supports a similar symbiosis between a new economic vernacular and new rules of the game yielding immediate concrete benefits. 

AG Bill Barr Say He Still Tryna Bring Coup Plotters To Justice

CTH |  AG Bill Barr notes John Durham will bring criminal charges against those in the previous administration: “he is looking to bring to justice people who were engaged in abuses if he can show that there were criminal violations; and that’s what the focus is on.”

INGRAHAM – John Brennan was smashing the President’s firing of Inspector General Michael Atkinson, let’s listen:

BRENNAN – “By removing Mr. Atkinson, and I think also sending a signal to others, Mr. Trump continues to show his insecurity in terms of trying to stop anybody who was going to expose, again the lawlessness, that I think he not only has allowed to continue, but also that he abets.”

BARR – “I think the president did the right thing in removing Atkinson. From the vantage point of the Dept. of Justice, he had interpreted his statute; which is a fairly narrow statute that gave him jurisdiction over wrong-doing by intelligence people; and tried to turn it into a commission to explore anything in the government, and immediately report it to congress without letting the executive branch look at it and determine whether there was any problem.  He was told this in a letter from the department of justice, and he is obliged to follow the interpretation of the department of justice, and he ignored it. So I think the President was correct in firing him.”

INGRAHAM – “An it’s the second inspector general he’s fired since the beginning of this pandemic. And of course that’s used to say: ‘well, the president doesn’t want a watchdog’.”

BARR – “No, I think that’s true. I think he want’s responsible watchdogs.”

INGRAHAM – What can you tell us about the state of John Durham’s investigation? People have been waiting for the, the final report, on what happened with this, what can you tell us?

BARR – “Well I think a report y’know, may be, and probably will be, a by-product of his activity; but his primary focus isn’t to prepare a report, he is looking to bring to justice people who were engaged in abuses if he can show that there were criminal violations; and that’s what the focus is on. And, uh, as you know, being a lawyer yourself, building these cases, especially the sprawling case we have between us that went on for two or three years here, uh…, it takes some time, it takes some time to build the case.”

“So he’s diligently pursuing it, uh.. My own view is that, uh, the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness, there was something far more troubling here; and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. And if people broke the law, and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted.”

AG Bill Barr Don't Remember Voting For No Bill Gates

dailywire |  LAURA: Bill Gates, the Gates Foundation are in favor of developing digital certificates that would certify that individuals, American citizens, have an immunity to this virus and potentially other viruses going forward to then facilitate travel and work and so forth. What are your thoughts from a civil libertarian point of view about these types of – what some would say tracking mechanisms that would be adopted going forward to reopen our broader economy?

BARR: Yeah, I’m very concerned about the slippery slope in terms of continuing encroachments on personal liberty. I do think during the emergency, appropriate, reasonable steps are fine.

LAURA: But a digital certificate to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has – of people who’ve received it. That’s his answer in a Reddit ask me anything. They had a little forum.

BARR: Yeah, I’d be a little concerned about that, the tracking of people and so forth, generally, especially going forward over a long period of time.

LAURA: Are you surprised at how wildly partisan a response to this pandemic has become in the United States? I know everything’s political, but this is about saving lives and saving the broader life of America, and yet from a drug like hydroxychloroquine that’s been around for 65 years, 70 years, to other measures the president’s taken, working with Democrat governors quite well, looks like, it never seems to be good enough.

BARR: No, I have been surprised at it. In fact, it was very disappointing because I think the president went out at the beginning of this thing and really was statesman like, trying to bring people together, working with all the governors, keeping his patience as he got these snarky, gotcha questions from the White House media pool. And it – the stridency of the partisan attacks on him has gotten higher and higher, and it’s really disappointing to see. And the politicization of decisions like hydroxychloroquine has been amazing to me. Before the president said anything about it, there was fair and balanced coverage of this very promising drug, and the fact that it had such a long track record, that the risks were pretty well known, and as soon as he said something positive about it, the media’s been on a jahad to discredit the drug, it’s quite strange.

LAURA: There’s a lot of concern now, given the — again, the length of this time, the concern when you hear Dr. Fauci say, well we probably can’t go back to normal life until a vaccine, would be like 12 months, 18 months, that if things don’t open up pretty soon, over some gradual reopening with new protocols and all that, there’s a concern about social unrest. You’re seeing a lot of stores boarded up in San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and you’re seeing more of that, small businesses affected, especially by theft and — and other criminal activity. How concerned are you about the social unrest and criminal activity in an ongoing shutdown?

BARR: I mean, I think if we extend a full shutdown, that’s a real — that’s a real threat in some of our communities. But, I don’t think it’s limited to that. I think the president’s absolutely right, we cannot keep, for a long period of time, our economy shut down. Just on the public health thing, you know, it means less cancer — cancer researchers are at home. A lot of the disease researchers, who will save lives in the future, that’s being held in abeyance. The money that goes into these institutions, whether philanthropic sources or government sources, is going to be reduced. We will have a weaker healthcare system if we go into a deep depression. So, just measured in lives, the cure cannot be worse than the disease. But when you think of everything else, generations of families who have built up businesses, for generations in this country — and recent immigrants who have — who have built businesses, snuffed out. Small business that may not be able to come back if this goes on too long. So, we have to find, after the 30 day period, we have to find a way of allowing businesses to adapt to this situation and figure out how they can best get started. That’s not necessarily instantaneously going back to the way life was —

LAURA: Well, people are going to be afraid to go out for a long period of time.

BARR: A period of time.

LAURA: And they’re going to be afraid to restaurants, not — maybe won’t go to the re-up at their health club —

BARR: Right. Right.

LAURA: — but people have to have confidence that it’s decently safe out there to move around.

BARR: Right. And that’s why they have to be given accurate information. But also we have to make PPE more broadly available. Restaurants have to change their protocols, perhaps, or other businesses —

LAURA: A lot of them can’t stay in business if they can’t pack it in. You know D.C., and they’ve got to pack — that’s the only way they make money paying these jacked up rents.

BARR: That’s — right, that’s a danger. That’s a danger. So, I think we have to allow people to figure out ways of getting back to work and keep their workers and customers safe. I’m not suggesting we stop social distancing overnight. There may come a time where we have to worry less about that. So, you know, I don’t know when that will be.

LAURA: One question I didn’t ask before — federalism, states rights, the president has been very clear on that during this health crisis. Are you surprised that certain states, New Jersey, in particular, had come in to say that gun stores are nonessential, gun shops are nonessential, but abortion facilities are essential, given — given what we’re facing?

BARR: Well, I’m not surprised. I mean, that’s where our politics are these days. But, obviously, the federal government agreed that gun stores are essential.

LAURA: And abortion facilities in Texas deemed nonessential by the governor, lieutenant governor very strong on that, that saw a lot of legal challenges. Do you foresee —

BARR: I think it was just upheld.

Little Man: Why Wall Street Gets A Bailout And You Don't!!!

mattstoller |  Three weeks ago, the government passed a giant multi-trillion dollar bailout. Supposedly, it was money for a host of stakeholders, including hospitals, states, Wall Street banks, big business, the unemployed, and small businesses. Today the Federal Reserve built on top of Congress’s framework, announcing yet another multi-trillion dollar set of facilities, on top of what it already put out, to help cities, states, small businesses, main street businesses, and so on and so forth. 

So what has happened so far? This is today’s change in stock price of a real estate venture run by one of largest private equity funds in the world. 

A thirty five percent jump in a day is… a lot. The reason the stock skyrocketed is because investors believe the new measures from the Federal Reserve will bailout the debt of this private equity fund. There’s a ‘monetary bazooka’ aimed at the economy. And yet there’s a puzzle. If there’s money for the entire economy, why is that normal people and small businesses can’t access unemployment insurance and lending programs? To put it another way, why is the money meant for everyone only showing up in the stock market? 

The reason is because money has to travel through institutions, and right now, the institutions for the powerful function well, and those for the rest of us are rickety and broken. So money gets to the rich first. Eventually, some money will get to the rest of us, but in the interim period before that money fully circulates, the wealthy can use their access to money to buy up physical or financial assets.

An 18th century French banker and philosopher named Richard Cantillon noticed an early version of this phenomenon in a book he wrote called ‘An Essay on Economic Theory.’ His basic theory was that who benefits when the state prints a bunch of money is based on the institutional setup of that state. In the 18th century, this meant that the closer you were to the king and the wealthy, the more you benefitted, and the further away you were, the more you were harmed. Money, in other words, is not neutral. This general observation, that money printing has distributional consequences that operate through the price system, is known as the “Cantillon Effect.”

Rape Culture: $6-10 Trillion Additional Federal Debt Taken On To Bailout Predatory Speculative Parasites

sicsempercomments |  Below is a link to the growth in the Fed's balance sheet over the past few months. You will note that the Fed began expanding its asset purchases by $500 billion in the last quarter of 2019 even before the China virus hit our shores and shutdown our economy. Credit was already leaking and the Fed which has given itself the mandate to backstop financial speculation was already delivering on the Fed put. The China virus has brought out the bazooka adding nearly $2 trillion to their balance sheet just in the last 30 days.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=qGqH

The Fed has announced several new programs in addition to the repo program it had already initiated last year for liquidity squeezed banks. One is the purchase of investment grade corporate bonds many trading close to junk. The second announced today is the purchase of junk bonds via ETFs. This allows financial investors holding these credit instruments to sell them to the Fed enabling them to essentially not take or reduce their losses. The Fed will now hold credit instruments that could default. The third is to provide dollar liquidity to foreign banks with dollar liabilities through their central banks. Essentially the Fed is now willing to buy assets no matter how dodgy with significant credit risk.

An example is the shale patch debt. Shale companies raised junk bond financing to explore and produce oil & gas. With the crushing of the oil price, much of that debt got downgraded. Investors holding that debt were sitting on significant losses. The Fed will now buy that debt from investors with an opaque pricing essentially making them whole.

This is very similar to what they did during the 2008 mortgage credit crisis when they purchased mortgage-backed securities from investors enabling them to get out from their underwater positions. At that time Bernanke said that it was emergency action to prevent the collapse of the financial system and they would reduce their balance sheet by selling all the securities they acquired when the financial system was able to stand up again. Now they're significantly higher than at the peak of the 2008 crisis.

Chamath and others like Jack are upset because if the Fed really wanted to help the actual economy they could monetize (print money to buy up) infrastructure bonds issued by the various state, and local municipalities that could run various construction projects. They could also monetize Treasury, state and municipal debt that could be used to pay all those locked down and unable to earn a paycheck. What they're doing here as they did in 2008 is to backstop speculative losses of the financial sector.

The other story is that post-2008 it became clear to large speculators that risk taking is rewarded as long as the scale was large enough. The use of debt to buyback stock to the outsized benefit of management was immense in scale. So too was the revived CLO and other structured debt product financings. The impending downgrade of much of this corporate debt to junk meant that all those securities would have to be ejected from the portfolios that could only hold investment grade. Like most pension funds and life insurance portfolios. This was a huge crisis for the massively leveraged funds.

I work at an investment advisory firm providing services to pension funds and insurance companies. The word on the street is to expect the Fed balance sheet to be expanded by $6-$10 trillion.

Unfortunately Mom & Pop businesses most hard hit by the shutdown have no ability to get a Wall St bank to underwrite a junk bond offering that could be sold to the Fed.

Finally, I'd like to leave you with this story. This is why some are getting angry.

https://prospect.org/economy/hospital-bailouts-begin-for-those-owned-by-private-equity-firms/

Gynocracy: Nominating A Demented Rapist Puts Democrat Contempt For Wymyn #MeToo On Fleek

jacobin |  When it first became clear that Joe Biden was launching a 2020 campaign for president, a lot of us were amazed that centrist Democrats would, in the #MeToo era, be stupid enough to back his candidacy. But we shouldn’t have been surprised: their feminism is fleeting and opportunistic.

This week, Tara Reade, a former Biden aide, detailed her 1993 experience of sexual assault on “The Katie Halper Show” after trying for years to get someone to listen. Reade has, predictably, been smeared as a Russian agent, because that’s how mainstream Democrats respond to anything they don’t want to hear. But she’s just one of seven women who have accused Biden of horrible behavior, charges that have been public for years.

Democratic elites have known for years about Biden’s shabby, boorish treatment of Anita Hill, the dignified law professor who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991. Hill brought workplace sexual harassment into the public eye years before #MeToo. Biden was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time. He has since said that he “wished he could have done something” to ensure that her claims got a fair hearing, a pretty inept apology considering he was in charge of the proceedings.

From mainstream feminists, we’re hearing little about Biden’s #MeToo problems. In fact, some have flatly declined to be involved. As the Intercept reported this week, the feminist legal group Time’s Up had refused to take Reade’s case. In a twist, Anita Dunn, a top Biden adviser, is managing director of Time’s Up’s PR firm, SKDKnickerbocker. In another twist, Dunn also advised big Democratic donor (now convicted rapist) Harvey Weinstein on how to handle his own rape allegations. Another partner in SKDKnickerbocker, Hilary Rosen, has also been advising Biden’s presidential campaign.

The allegations aren’t getting much play in the mainstream media either. Sure, it’s a busy news cycle. And everything about Biden is boring, even his sexual assault allegations. But the day Reade’s charges went public, CNN ran an “analysis” by Chris Cillizza about Biden and gender. Its theme? “The Top 10 Women Joe Biden Might Pick as VP.”

By contrast, we’ve heard for years from these same quarters about the supposed mean, sexist tweets of the Bernie Bros, and about Bernie Sanders’s alleged tone-deafness on gender issues. But Sanders is the only candidate now running for president with no sexual assault or harassment charges against him. That’s obviously a low bar, and it’s unfortunate we have to mention it. But, perhaps relatedly, Sanders is also the only one in the race who has always been pro-choice, has always been committed to full abortion access regardless of income, and has been fighting for universal childcare for decades, as well as for advancements that benefit working-class women even more than men, like the $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All. Yet if you relied on the mainstream media for information, you’d assume that Biden was the feminist candidate in the primary, while Sanders was “problematic” for women.

A New American Deal?

mattstoller |  Since 2016, the Republicans, long a party supportive of free trade with China, began changing their relationship to both China and big finance. Trump is a protectionist who loves tariffs and closing down borders. But behind him, there is a notable new thought collective of populists who pay attention to China, which includes figures like White House advisor Peter Navarro, Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, Senators Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and Tom Cotton, American Compass founder Oren Cass, Rising anchor Saagar Enjeti and United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. The shift is not party-wide by any means, but it is substantial enough to massively influence policy.

This new populist thought collective includes some of the first major political figures to really get the impact of the Coronavirus, and it also includes some of the more assertive influencers of the policy debate. There is a deep streak of raw nationalism here, with Tom Cotton almost seeking great power conflict and acting reflexively hostile to multilateral institutions. But the nationalist rhetoric and jingoism of Trump can obscure a more sophisticated recognition by some people in this new populist world that the core dynamic of the China-US relationship isn’t two nation-states opposed to one another, it is an authoritarian government in China that is deeply aligned with Wall Street, against the public in both nations.

One way Rubio has tried to deal with Chinese control in the American economy is through industrial policy, meaning the explicit shaping of industrial enterprises by state financing and control. One of Rubio’s initial goals was to meet the security threat from Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant that is threatening to take over the global communications apparatus. But he’s also gone more broadly into manufacturing in general, and small business, which is a more Brandeis-style frame.

Regardless, the intellectual ferment on the right is real, and fascinating. The first fruits of this philosophical discourse is the massive SBA Paycheck Protection Program, which is a $349 billion lending program to small business negotiated with Democratic Senators. So far, the program excludes private equity-controlled corporations, and though that may change, such legislative design implies genuine skepticism of the role of high finance. That’s a significant shift from traditional Republican orthodoxy.

Operationally speaking the PPP is a mess, and Republican populists will have to confront the many institutional challenges involved in trying to get large amounts of money through the ‘rusty pipes’ of our banking system. But it’s still a remarkable achievement.

SMDH@Caitlin Johnstone Pretending That The Little Man Fitna Get Woke....,

caitlinjohnstone |  If you ask a leftist what the west’s sudden uptick in anti-China hysteria is about, they might say racism, xenophobia, and/or anti-communism. If you ask a rightist, they might tell you it’s because China lied about the virus, or because of communism, or because of China’s economic relationship with the US, or because it’s a backwards culture of people who eat different animals from us. If you ask someone who occupies the mainstream so-called “center”, they might tell you that it’s because of humanitarian concerns about China’s oppressive government, along with racism or some mixture of the aforementioned claims.

Ultimately though, it’s not about any of those things. While racism, xenophobia, anti-communism, free trade deals, authoritarianism and the virus are all real concerns which play a real role in the propaganda campaign, it’s not ultimately about any of them. Ultimately, like so much else, this is about power.

 There can only be one top dog in a unipolar world. After the fall of the Soviet Union the prevailing philosophy slowly coalesced among US policymakers that the world’s only remaining superpower needed to remain that way at any cost in order to preserve the so-called liberal world order. This philosophy rose to dominance when the neoconservatives took over the Executive Branch during the George W Bush administration, and from there their ideas simply became the mainstream orthodoxy. Now the “unipolarity at any cost” ideology of neoconservatism is so pervasive that when you see someone like Tulsi Gabbard basically just advocating for pre-9/11 US foreign policy, you see them demonized as though they supported child cannibalism.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world.” Preventing the rise of China (and its loose network of other unabsorbed allies like Russia) has been a lasting agenda of the western world for generations, and the continuation of this agenda has set the world on a trajectory toward aggressive confrontation. The US has been surrounding China with military bases, many of them nuclear-armed, in preparation for a confrontation that it sees as ultimately inevitable, since China has no interest in being absorbed into the US power alliance and the US has no interest in allowing China to surpass it as a superpower.

What this means for us ordinary people is that we have found ourselves smashed between steadily increasing escalations between two nuclear-armed nations and their nuclear-armed allies hurtling toward a confrontation which benefits none of us in the slightest, while propagandists spoon feed us narratives about why this is something we should eventually support.

And That No Man Might Buy Or Sell, Save He That Had The Mark…

straightlinelogic  |  Anyone who thinks that “emergency” measures will be rescinded or will not serve as future precedents is referred to Draconian Emergency Measures Enacted By Governments Throughout History That Have Been Rescinded and Not Served as Precedents. It’s available for free on Amazon and takes only four seconds to read; the title is longer than the book.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of this whole ordeal is that Americans have surrendered to panic and propaganda without a shot. Molon labe and They’ll take my gun when they pry it from my cold, lifeless fingers patriots—bumper-sticker freedom fighters—are cowering in place, living off their 3, 6, 12, 24, or 60 months of provisions, lest they encounter a germ. Neighbors are reporting on neighbors who leave their houses, take a walk, clear their throats, or other heretofore legal activities (they would still be legal if the Constitution had any remaining relevance). Apps have been developed to monitor and report people’s locations, coughs, sneezes, sniffles, and runny noses. Can one that monitors and reports social distances be far behind? If only one life is saved…

With a few noteworthy exceptions (lewrockwell.com) takes the gold medal), the alternative media has been a disappointment. Bloggers who would normally cast darkly skeptical doubts if the government announced the sun will rise tomorrow have accepted official statistics, projections, propaganda, and draconian measures without a peep of skepticism or doubt. Prepper sites have perpetuated and profited from the panic, selling face masks, sanitizers, and reusable toilet paper. More alternative media sites are glomming on to what’s happening to civil liberties and the dark designs behind it, but their warnings are too little, too late.

Surrendered without a shot—they’ve got us by what’s left of our balls. The men and women who risked probabilities of death far higher than some small fraction of one percent and paid the ultimate price to defend our freedom and our lives are spinning in their hallowed graves.

STOP CLENCHING LITTLE MAN!!! Just Let It Happen...,

strategic-culture |  In the Book of Revelation [13:16-17], there is a passage that has attracted the imagination of believers and disbelievers throughout the ages, and perhaps never more so than right now: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark…”

Was John of Patmos history’s first conspiracy theorist, or are we merely indulging ourselves today with a case of self-fulfilling prophecy? Whatever the case may be, many people would probably have serious reservations about being branded with an ID code even if it had never been mentioned in Holy Scripture. But that certainly has not stopped Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has been warning about a global pandemic for years, from pushing such controversial technologies on all of us.

In September 2019, just three months before the coronavirus first appeared in China, ID2020, a San Francisco-based biometric company that counts Microsoft as one of its founding members, quietly announced it was undertaking a new project that involves the “exploration of multiple biometric identification technologies for infants” that is based on “infant immunization” and only uses the “most successful approaches”.

For anyone who may be wondering what one of those “most successful approaches” might look like, consider the following top contender for the contract. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed what is essentially a hi-tech ‘tattoo’ that stores data in invisible dye under the skin. The ‘mark’ would be delivered together with a vaccine, most likely administered by Gavi, the global vaccine agency that also falls under the umbrella of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“The researchers showed that their new dye, which consists of nanocrystals called quantum dots… emits near-infrared light that can be detected by a specially equipped smartphone,” MIT News reported.

And if the reader scrolls to the very bottom of the article, he will find that this study was funded first and foremost by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Today, with the global service economy shut down to prevent large groups of infectious humans from assembling, it is easier to imagine a day when people are required to have their infrared ID ‘tattoo’ scanned in order to be granted access to any number of public venues. And from there, it requires little stretch of the imagination to see this same tracking nanotechnology being applied broadly across the global economy, where it could be used to eliminate the use of dirty money. After all, if reusable bags are being outlawed over the coronavirus panic-demic, why should reusable cash get special treatment?

Little Man - All You Have Learned From This Emergency - Is That You Must Relax And Let It Happen....,

economicoutlook |  Today we consider the claim by the Financial Times editorial the other day that “Radical reforms are required to forge a society that will work for all”. It was an extraordinary statement from an institution like the FT to make for a start. But it reflects the desperation that is abroad right now – across all our nations – as the virus/lockdown story continues to worsen and the uncertainty grows. But I also think we should be careful not to adopt the view that everything is going to change as a result of this crisis. The elites are a plucky bunch, not the least because they have money and can buy military capacity. Changing the essential nature of neoliberalism, even if what has been displayed by all the state intervention in the last few months exposes all the myths that have been used to hide that essential nature, is harder than we might imagine. I think hard-edged class struggle is needed rather than middle-class talkfests that outline the latest gee-whiz reform proposals. The latter has been the story of the Europhile progressives for two decades or so as the Eurozone mess has unfolded. It hasn’t got them very far.

Financial Times goes all radical 

Fear has a way of changing peoples’ minds. Ask any torturer.

On April 4, 2020, the Financial Times editorial – Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract – seems to have struck a nerve.

Here is an essentially conservative voice and a doyen of the financial press coming out and saying:

1. “Radical reforms are required to forge a society that will work for all”.

2. The virus is shining “a glaring light on existing inequalities”.

3. That just like during the Great Depression and World War 2, which moulded the social democratic era in the post-war period, maybe the “current feelings of common purpose will shape society after the crisis”.

4. How? To repair the “brittleness of many countries’ economies” – their unprepared health systems, the lack of collective spirit that neoliberalism has fostered as a way of redistributing income to the top and depriving millions of jobs and opportunities for careers and material security.

5. That the precarious labour markets are now making it more difficult for governments “to channel financial help to workers with such insecure employment”.

6. And while central bankers are hell-bent on saving the financial system with even greater QE interventions, the FT thinks that they will only help the “asset rich” while “underfunded public services are creaking under the burden” of past austerity.

7. We have culled support mechanisms where cost-sharing (the FT call it the sharing of “sacrifices”) can be accomplished with any sense of equity. “Sacrifices are inevitable, but every society must demonstrate how it will offer restitution to those who bear the heaviest burden of national efforts.”

8. And then we start talking about:

Radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

Feminization Of Popular And Institutional Culture? Sure! Gynocracy? Don't Be Ridiculous!!!

theburningplatform |  If you think about it, the timeout has now become the go-to move from the gynocrats in charge of our culture. If you use the wrong word or phrase on social media, you get put in timeout for 12-hours. If you repeat the error, you end up in detention. Since the gynocrats have replaced the parents, there’s no parent conference for those who can’t conform to the rules. Instead, you are relegated to the trailers out back, which for the internet means setting up an account on Gab or Telegram.

This is just one reality of the world run by women. Since women have come to dominate the workplace, the fastest growing parts of the economy are those where women have the dominant position. For example, while STEM jobs get outsourced to barbarians, either imported from tribal areas or through outsourcing, health care, which is dominated by women, has been booming. Tech workers have seen declining wages, but registered nurses have seen their wages grow.

Of course, the feminization of society has been hardest on the working classes, as the jobs for working class men are replaced by jobs for women. The rise in death from despondency has been acute among working class males. A man with no way to support a family, relegated to living off a woman, has no reason to live. Inevitably, drugs, alcohol and eventually suicide become the answer. The white death that has afflicted our people is not all that different than what happened to the Indians.

The middle-class males have not escaped the ravages of the gynocracy. We’re onto at least the second generation of middle-class males raised by women in a female dominated society. The process began with the liberalization of divorce, which spread through the middle-class like a plague in the 70’s and 80’s. By the 1990’s, the feminization of America life was well underway. We’re onto our second generation of young middle-class males raised to live in the gynocracy.

You see it in marriage and dating. With scrambled sex roles, the males are ill-equipped to play their role, so they are less marriage worthy to females. On the other hand, men instinctively suspect a career woman will be a poor mother and mate. The subsequent drop in marriage and fertility is hardly a surprise. For the young men in the gynocracy, life is a bachelor’s ball on-line, punctuated by mock battles in video games and mock intimacy in the form of pornography.

As an aside, this is why someone like Richard Spencer was so appealing to young men in the alt-right days. He is the non plus ultra of gynocritic male. He is reckless, feckless and irresponsible, but immune to the consequences. Mom is always there to make everything better. He is the perpetual adolescent, unable to care for himself, but always in rhetorical revolt against the gynocracy. As a result, many young middle-class white males saw him as the ultimate expression of themselves.

Blacks Truly Do Hate Ni**ers - But "Black Privilege" Is As Preoposterous As "Gynocracy"

wsws |  Intended as a pilot for a potential full-length series, Black & Privileged is set in a neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. Upon its July release on Netflix, the film reached the top 10 most-viewed list on the streaming platform and has been featured prominently at a number of award ceremonies focused on African-American filmmaking.

While in reality a seriously impoverished community, the fictionalized version of Englewood in Black & Privileged is a well-off neighborhood whose residents are mostly upper-middle class African-American businessmen and women. One of the film’s central characters explains, in regard to the neighborhood’s composition, “We searched through the city of Chicago for folks who not only cared about this community, but they cared about the people. And they had to understand the value of money. So yes, we have our own schools, we have our own banks, we hired our own police force.”

In Harris’s film, the lives of Englewood’s happy residents are disrupted when a nearby housing project is torn down, causing low-income blacks to turn up in the wealthy gated community. This sets off an existential crisis among the well-heeled African Americans.

“If this happens, like, everybody’s going to leave—the doctors, the lawyers, entrepreneurs like myself … They’re all gone,” warns Eldon (Hendrix), on learning the unsettling news. The prosperous, self-deluded denizens of Engelwood ludicrously choose to interpret the influx of lower-income people as a scheme hatched by the “the [white] man” to break up their idyllic community.

Black and Privileged is at its best when it skewers the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of these layers. Another main character, Dawn (Halfkenny), initially supportive of the new neighbors, quotes W.E.B. DuBois: “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” She insists it is the community’s job to lend a “helping hand” to these poor souls. Her enthusiasm turns to panic and hostility overnight, however, when she discovers her new neighbors “standing in the middle of the street drinking 40-ouncers.” Dawn demands that her husband (Henderson) call the police on the new residents!