Publsiher’s Note: This is an uncomfortable question for many. Thanks to US indy journalist Stephen Lendman for exploring possible answers here. Another vital question to ask of the COVID-19 phenomenon – cui bono? (Who beneifts?)

In all its preemptive wars on nations threatening no one, the US uses chemical, biological, radiological, and other banned weapons.

US genocide against Native Americans included infecting them with deadly diseases, the earliest form of US biological warfare against a targeted people, including use of smallpox infected blankets white supremacists erased from the public record.

During America’s Civil War, both sides used chemical weapons, including chlorine gas.

In WW I, German, British, French and US forces used artillery shells containing chemical toxins.

Substances included mustard gas, phosgene, dianisidine chlorosulfate, xylyl bromide, chorine and toxic tear gas.

A young Adolph Hitler was temporarily blinded during the war by a gas attack. From 1914 – 1918, around 1.3 million combatants were harmed by toxic gas. Around 100,000 died.

During WW II, the Nazis, imperial Japan, the US, and its allies used banned weapons.

US and UK warplanes terror-bombed Dresden with thousands of tons of high-explosive and illegal incendiary weapons, creating a firestorm, an act of barbarism against the defenseless city, massacring 100,000 or more Germans, mainly civilians.

US warplanes firebombed Tokyo when war in the Pacific was won, Japan at the time willing to surrender unconditionally provided its emperor was retained.

Mass slaughter by bombing  Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons were two of numerous US genocidal attacks — occurring when Japan was defeated, its surrender overture to the US denied by Franklin Roosevelt in early 1945, months later by Harry Truman.

Endless US wars of aggression from summer 1945 to this day killed countless millions from conflict, subsequent violence and chaos, starvation, untreated wounds and diseases, as well as overall deprivation.

During 1950-53 US aggression against North Korea, Pentagon forces used biological and other banned weapons.

According to Professor Stephen Endicott’s research on the war,

“American aircraft…dropped strange objects, including live spiders, flies, bees, snakes, fleas (with bubonic plague), ticks, dead rats, and mosquitos encased in US military tubes.”

US Southeast Asia war from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s included use of cluster, incendiary, and radiological munitions, deadly dioxin (Agent Orange), and other banned weapons.

In 1970, US forces conducted Operation Tailwind using sarin nerve gas in Laos, causing numerous casualties.

In 1975, the Senate Church Committee confirms from a CIA memorandum that US bioweapons were stockpiled at Fort Detrick, MD – including anthrax, encephalitis, tuberculosis, shellfish toxin, and food poisons.

Since the 1960s, the US used biological agents against Cuba.

In 1971, a US biological attack contaminated half a million pigs in Cuba with swine fever.

In 1981, dengue fever introduced in the country harmed over 340,000 people, killing at least 158 including 101 children. 

Since the 1991 Gulf War, illegal depleted uranium (DU) weapons were used. They’re radioactive, chemically toxic and poisonous.

International laws banned these substances, used by the US and its imperial allies extrajudicially, including Israel against defenseless Palestinians.

Was COVID-19 made in the USA? Last week, Pompeo falsely accused China, Russia, and Iran of conducting disinformation campaigns about the origin of the highly contagious/potentially deadly virus.

Trump turned truth on its head, calling it the “Wuhan virus.”

Researcher Larry Romanoff cited evidence reported by Japan’s Asahi news that COVID-19 originated in the US, not China, adding:

The news agency “presented scientific documentation for (its) claims…that the virus outbreak may first have occurred in the US.” 

“The Western Internet appears to have been scrubbed off this information, but the Chinese media still reference it.”

In late February, Taiwan television reported that analysis by a virologist suggested that COVID-19 originated in the US, said Romanoff.

Claims by the Trump regime and Western media blaming China are false.

According to a Taiwanese doctor, “Japanese (nationals visited) Hawaii (in September 2019) and returned home infected,” Romanoff explained.

China’s “Huanqiu…news website (reported that) a woman’s relative…in the US” was told the individual died of the flu.

“(T)he death certificate listed the coronavirus as the cause of death.”

Since 2018, China had significant outbreaks of two strains of bird flu, African swine flu, a “massive infestation of armyworms” that destroyed thousands of hectares of crops, since December COVID-19, and in January a ‘highly pathogenic’ strain of bird flu,” Romanoff explained.

Was all of the above bad luck or US biowarfare to harm China’s economy and increase US exports of agricultural and other foodstuffs to the country?

COVID-19: A US Scheme for Greater Consolidation of Wealth and Power?

Earlier global crises were manufactured to enhance the power of US ruling authorities, serve corporate favorites, and transfer wealth from ordinary people to privileged ones.

Since the neoliberal 1990s alone, that’s what the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, 2000 dot.com bust, and 2008-09 financial crisis were all about.

Is that what’s behind COVID-19 fear-mongering, lockdowns, and market turmoil? Are things not what they seem?

If past is prologue, what was manufactured before appears to be happening again — establishment media playing a key roll as before by scaring the public to death.

While great care needs to be taken to prevent a highly infectious disease like COVID-19 from spreading, public angst generated by fear-mongering suggests motives other than protecting public health are in play.

Notably since the neoliberal 90s, US-led Western governments, in cahoots with corporate favorites, consolidated greater power and transferred enormous wealth from ordinary people to privileged interests.

For decades, monied interests never had things better, profiting hugely from market manipulated casino capitalism — at the expense of the public welfare.

Since the 2008-09 Wall Street orchestrated financial crisis, protracted Depression conditions adversely affected ordinary people in the US and elsewhere.

Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, homelessness, food insecurity, hunger, overall deprivation and human suffering are growth industries in the US and West.

While Washington spends unlimited trillions of dollars for militarism, forever wars, and homeland security to protect privileged interests from nonbelievers, vital popular needs to health and welfare increasingly go begging.

The world’s richest country doesn’t give a hoot about the vast majority of its people, just its privileged class.

Class warfare pits private wealth against public health and welfare. For decades in the US, wages haven’t kept pace with inflation. Benefits steadily eroded. 

High-paying jobs with good benefits disappeared by offshoring to low-wage countries. 

Improved technology forced wage earners to work harder for less. So-called free markets work only for elements that control them. See below.

Powerful interests benefit from class struggle by exploiting ordinary people with bipartisan support from Washington.

Instead of governance of, by, and for everyone equitably, only the privileged few are served.

Until the late 1970s in America, new generations were better off financially than previous ones — no longer by institutionalized inequality.

The notion that markets move randomly is pure fiction. They’re manipulated up and down to serve monied interests.

Schemes include pumping and dumping, naked short-selling, precious metals price suppression, illegally profiting from inside information unavailable to the public, and government/Fed intervention to serve privileged interests at the expense of the public welfare.

Banks and other corporate favorites get bailouts, ordinary people sold out by their ruling authorities.

In cahoots with government, powerful private interests create financial shocks to eliminate competition and consolidate to greater size and power by buying damaged assets cheap.

Financial history in the US and elsewhere has numerous examples of preying on the weak, crushing competition, socializing risks, privatizing profits, and redistributing wealth upward to a financial oligarchy, creating tollbooth economies in debt bondage, getting what Michael Hudson calls a “free lunch” for privileged interests at the public’s expense.

When foxes guard the henhouse, new ways are invented to get a “free lunch” by creating crises for greater consolidation of wealth and power.

Orwell might have put it this way. At times like now, instability is stability, creating systemic risk is containing it, sloping playing fields are level ones, extracting maximum profit is sharing it, and what benefits the few helps everyone.

Market collapses can be hugely profitable for powerful insiders.

Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulators created an environment that serves speculation through futures, options, index funds, derivative securities, and short-selling, etc. 

At times like now, greater concentration of wealth and power can be achieved at the expense of savers, seniors,  other ordinary people, and personal freedoms.

The road to tyranny is paved with ill-intentions. It’s happening in the US, West, and elsewhere in plain sight.

A Final Comment

Michael Hudson explained that lockdowns, social distancing, mass layoffs, crashing markets, and corporate bailouts “theat(en) a (global) depression,” adding:

History shows “it doesn’t have to be this way.” Hudson’s solution is “a debt jubilee…(R)estore…balance (by) slate-cleaning…”

“(W)hen debts grow too large to be paid without reducing debtors to poverty, the way to hold society together and restore balance is simply to cancel the bad debts.”

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary actions. Ones taken by America’s oligarchy benefit privileged interests exclusively at the expense of most others.

This time is highly likely to be no different than earlier in the US. 

Hard times are likely to get much harder for ordinary Americans while favored interests benefit greatly from what’s going on.