By Martin Love
NORTH CAROLINA - One of the more absurd claims is the assertion by a kook rabbi in Israel (where there are many of the same ilk) that the coronavirus (Covid 19) that is sweeping across the world won’t halt creating its trail of devastation and dislocation until the so-called “third temple” is built in East Jerusalem, presumably atop the rubble of a destroyed al-Aqsa mosque and the Qubba al-Sakra. This rabbi, one Aryeh Lipo, a “religious studies” teacher who is a Likudist, apparently gave a lesson on the Haram esh-Sharif with a bunch of other unwelcome Zionists saying a “third temple” is a powerful cure for the coronavirus pandemic which now even Iran is struggling to corral and eliminate.
Better this kook might have suggested that the most damaging virus in the Middle East and beyond is Zionism itself, which is the deep root cause of most all the various conflicts in West Asia spawned by Israel and its U.S. partner in the Trump administration and by previous U.S. administrations in the Middle East? Lipo said he was sending up a prayer for the “healing of the entire world”, a joke if ever there was one and equivalent to giving a murderous psychopath a loaded UZI machine gun.
At any rate, the virus seems to be just beginning its spread, and one Harvard University epidemiologist has said that it could infect 70 percent of the world’s population before an adequate vaccine exists, which has been estimated anywhere from six months to more than a year away. Currently, the only possible palliative that may have some very modest promise is infusing some blood of those who have survived and recovered from the virus into those who are ill since some antibodies may be present there.
In the U.S. where the virus has not yet widely disseminated itself in the population, and this may not occur until later this year, there exists the potential for chaos such as one can read about in China (and other countries, like South Korea, rising). The financial markets are just beginning to reflect the threats of this disease with the stock market finally trending lower and possibly about to crash, an inevitability that existed before the virus emerged but which the virus has undoubtedly speeded up.
In a move that has become acutely important this year in the U.S., the citizenry is learning that in 2018 Trump fired the entire then existing chain of command for a response to any pandemic. This president apparently thought, as with so many other now fired remainders from the Obama years, they were not loyal enough to him.
While Trump continues to claim that the virus is something like a marginal, minor irritant to the country that is not going to get out of hand, it’s almost as if he does not want his fellow Americans to know of, or even do much about, this critical issue threatening not just Americans but the entire world with radical disruptions such as we are now seeing in China, where hundred of millions of people can’t go back to work for fear of infecting many more people and deepening the already deep dislocations. China has been paralyzed and nothing like it has ever been seen before on such a scale.
Worse, economic and business supply chains are being broken willy nilly, and the U.S. in particular is at risk for, dare it be said, an economic Depression not seen since the 1930s. Procter and Gamble, one of the largest U.S. consumer supply companies with many thousands of products, asserted this past week that the production of some 17,000 items it sells could become unavailable because many of the critical components of its goods are dependent on failing production in China. It probably was a grave mistake that U.S. companies, in the pursuit of higher profits from cheaper labor in Asia, were allowed to offshore production over the past 20 years especially, hollowing out U.S. industry along with the “financialization” of the economy where Wall Street paper pushing has become the dominant economic activity.
Of particular note right now is Senator Bernie Sanders’ victories, so far, in the U.S. Democratic primary elections for the nomination to run against Trump in November. These victories, which make him the front runner for the nomination, have appalled the Democratic Party establishment and the entrenched main street U.S. media, who have been banking for their continued provenance and power on the status quo in all its ugly ramifications through rival candidates such as, for example, billionaire former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was slaughtered in a recent “debate” by another rival for the nomination, Elizabeth Warren.
Bloomberg, a Jew and a Zionist, has already spent the obscene sum of half a billion dollars on his campaign, but this is a piddling amount given his fortune of an estimated $60 billion. Bloomberg is everything Bernie Sanders abhors given Sanders’ posture as an alleged “socialist” who wants to raise taxes on people like Bloomberg and reform the health care system to make Medicare available to all Americans. Sanders, another Jew, also wants to make Israel more accountable for its crimes and give the Palestinians a fair shake, and many Democrats obviously agree with this notion and other various reforms that Sanders advocates, especially for the forgotten middle class and workers.
Probably with some accuracy if Sanders were to be elected President, a possible miracle, the economy and markets would suffer, but it’s likely they are going to suffer anyway even if Trump is reelected. The money printing and more does have diminishing economic returns, not to mention the debasement of the dollar towards oblivion. America is just on the verge of a huge crisis that may be delayed but cannot be stopped. The coronavirus just quickens the pace of a lambent social, medical and economic disaster this year or next.
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