Covid19 & America’s War on the Poor

How the US Response to ‘Covid19’ is Affecting the Poor - Making the Poor Poorer and the Rich Richer

It’s interesting how the government response to this so-called pandemic has put over 30 million average (mostly poor) Americans out of work, while at the same time, in just four months, increasing the wealth of the ultra-rich by far more than any other time in history - by over $282 billion - more than the total combined wealth of the entire same billionaire class in 1990!

At least they were ‘kind’ enough to send those of us who qualify those $1200 stimulus checks, you might say. But little do most people realize, that check is far from a gift, but rather a petty loan, that as I understand each and every American will have no choice but to pay back when it is withdrawn from their tax return next year! You can bet your bottom dollar that the big corporations won’t have to pay back their massive multi-million dollar bailouts and stimulus packages though...

Before this “planned, organized” and “artificially induced” economic shutdown, nearly 80% of Americans were estimated to be living paycheck to paycheck, with the majority unable to even afford a $500 emergency!

Meanwhile the three richest men in the country own more wealth than the poorest 50% of the population combined. This reality does not paint the picture of the stereotypical middle class ‘American Dream’ we are all accustomed to seeing when envisioning the average American life in this country, but rather a picture of the poor class being the overwhelming majority of Americans, with the only other major economic classes in existence being the rich and the ultra rich.

Many people have pointed out how the government reaction to this so-called pandemic seems to be targeting the American middle class, but how can a class of people that no longer exists be targeted? I would argue rather that the existence of a middle class in this country is little more than an illusion, and that the government response to this covid19 scamdemic is simply an intensified continuation of its decades long war being waged on the poor and all of our freedoms at the same time.

For example, thrift stores in particular but also other used-good stores across the country have all been deemed ‘non-essential’ and have been shut down, while Walmarts and other corporate chains everywhere remain open, for they are deemed ‘essential’. The message is clear for all to see: Big corporate chains are ‘essential’, while small mom and pop shops are not; access to affordable clothes and other essential housewares for the poor are ‘nonessential’, while access to a host of nonessential toys and trinkets and all things treasured in this rampant materialistic society - often made by cheap Chinese child-labor of course - are deemed ‘essential’.

Thrift stores supply the poor and homeless with access to cheap used clothing and other essentials they cannot afford elsewhere, and yet these establishments are one of the most universally deemed ‘nonessential’ stores in America right now, at a time when more and more unemployed Americans are feeling poorer by the day! Not only do thrift stores function as a major service for the poor, they also serve as a useful alternative destination for all of the many still quite useful leftover goods from this wasteful consumerist, which would (and probably currently are) otherwise be hauled to the dump, filling the overflowing landfills even quicker.

If social distancing worked as the authorities claim, and was truly effective at stopping the spread of this so-called virus, then what difference does it make if people do their shopping at Walmart or at a local thrift store, so long as they are practicing social distancing? The answer is clearly none, it makes no difference, and thus the irrational government response cannot possibly have anything to do with actually stopping a pandemic and must have everything to do with rolling out pre-planned agendas, one of which is clearly a continuation of its war on the poor and complete eradication of any remnants of a so-called ‘middle class’, while funneling business and thus wealth into the corporate chains and thus the pockets of the rich corporate oligarchs.

Speeding up the process of making the rich richer and the poor poorer, is one of the major outcomes of this scamdemic.

Libraries have also been universally shut down across the country, while post offices and police departments and a host of other government departments have remained open. Libraries also function as a major resource for the poor, no longer available at a time when society likely needs them more than ever. Libraries serve as a means for those among society who are too poor to afford formal education to educate themselves in any number of subjects (or are unwilling to take out student loans for higher education), they offer access to books for those who cannot afford to buy their own, internet service for the homeless and others who have no internet access of their own, as well as public restrooms and a dry place for the homeless to get out of the weather.

Libraries also serve as meeting places for community gatherings and a number of other purposes, all of which have been deemed ‘nonessential’ by the same authorities who are busy bailing out corporate America while ensuring the death of your local small businesses and offering you a petty $1200 stimulus check loan as payment for your cooperation in the heist of the century, possibly the biggest heist (transfer of wealth) the world has ever seen!

The Illusion of an American Middle Class

As to my opinion that the American middle class is already long gone, and remains as not much more than a great big illusion, many people will surely label such a claim ludicrous. One might respond: “If there is no middle class, then where do all these supposedly poor Americans labeled ‘middle class’ - who appear to be fairly well off - where do they get all of the billions of dollars spent fueling the rampant materialistic, consumeristic society if the majority are too poor to even afford a small emergency? Certainly it is not only the rich minority fueling this economy with their purchases?” And I would respond: “They don’t have the money, all they have are plastic cards and mountains of debt!”

This is the illusion of the middle class that a society of debt slavery has created - the ability to purchase more than one can afford, the ability to live far beyond one’s means, and thus the ability to appear as a financially well off member of the middle class, when one is in reality just another peasant who was granted a bunch more debt than their poor ‘lower class’ neighbor.

A brief comparison between the American middle class and the poor will expose the illusion. What is the main difference in the minds of the people between the so-called poor people and the so-called middle class? Well, the poor have lower paying jobs, rent their homes because they can’t afford to buy one, and they can only afford to eat out at McDonalds or other cheaper fast food joints. The middle class have higher paying jobs, own their own homes instead of renting, and can afford to eat out at higher end restaurants. The poor typically own older used cars, while the middle class have much nicer and newer vehicles. The poor can’t afford much beyond the basic necessities, while the middle class seems to have an abundance of nice extra luxuries like campers, 4 wheelers, snowmobiles, expensive flat screen TVs, and so on and so forth.

At least that is the illusion, when looking at the surface. But in reality, the middle class people typically only have a higher paying job because of higher education and college degrees, college education that was only attained through numerous school loans that the average person will not be able to pay back for some twenty years or more - putting them on track for a life of perpetual debt slavery, lifelong debt that they may in fact never fully pay off. Their higher paying job allows them to qualify for a mortgage, another major debt they will spend the rest of their life paying off. Rest assured most ‘homeowners’ of the so-called middle class do not truly own their own home any more than renters own their own home, and are but a few paychecks away from being foreclosed upon and losing their home along with all the money they invested into it. They qualify for bigger auto loans, and so they have a nicer, newer car, but it isn’t theirs - the bank owns it, just as the bank owns their home. As they make timely payments on these loans, their credit score increases, and so they qualify for credit cards with bigger lines of credit, and so they can ‘afford’ to purchase nicer toys and luxuries the ‘poor’ people can’t. They might even run their own business, but even then, most small business ‘owners’ are only able to successfully start their businesses with the help of a hefty small business loan, and this is added to the already gigantic mountain of debt.

So they don’t actually own much if any of that which differentiates them from the peasant class; and just like their poor neighbors who are forced to rent a home and drive a cheap older car and can’t afford to go out to eat at the pricy steak house they frequent, they are but one to several paychecks away from losing everything - their house, their car(s), their line of credit, their business, their big boy toys, everything - and to top it off, they are also paying hefty interest rates on all that debt they’ve racked up to ensure their status as an average to well off ‘middle class’ American living the so-called American Dream. The only difference between most ‘poor’ Americans and those among the ‘middle class’ is two numbers - their credit score that determines how many and how big of a loan they ‘qualify’ for, and how much debt they’ve actually taken out.

In reality, most among the middle class don’t truly have more wealth than the poor, just the appearance of more wealth. Take away their income, and they would lose it all, because they don’t actually truly have ownership over any of it. Just like the poor, they are reliant on that paycheck, no matter how much bigger it may be, in order to maintain their class status and a roof over their heads - in order to make payments on their loans and stay financially afloat. Whereas the poor are one or two paychecks away from missing a rent payment and being evicted, the middle class are one or two paychecks away from missing a mortgage payment and being foreclosed upon.

In reality, they are both peasants - one renting from a wealthy landowner, and the other enslaved to a banker. We live in a land where the majority of Americans, whether deemed lower or middle class are in reality all among the peasant class, which is ruled by the rich aristocracy - the bankers, the wealthy landowners (true landowners, real estate moguls like Donald Trump and Jared Kushner), and the billionaire corporate oligarchs like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

America’s War on the Poor

This is the principle means by which the aristocracy (US government/media/bankers/corporate America) has waged war on the poor, and long ago succeeded in eradicating all but a few remnants of the American middle class: By encouraging and fostering a culture of perpetual debt slavery with materialistic consumerism as its foundation. They have for decades programmed the masses to live beyond our means, and this is the result: The poor have become poorer, by feeding the rich who have become richer, and the middle class has been all but totally eradicated. Through incessant consumerism which has fueled the the rise in corporate wealth, combined with interest on all the debt fueling the enrichment of the bankers, the middle class has been eradicated with only an illusion of such remaining to keep the masses from revolting. Where once the three American classes were the rich, a minority; the middle class, a majority; and the poor, another but larger minority; there now exists the ultra-rich, the most powerful and smallest minority; the rich, a larger minority than in previous times; and the poor, the masses of peasants, the overwhelming majority of Americans, ranging from the homeless to those living the illusion of the middle class American dream.

But although programming the masses into this culture of rampant materialism and debt slavery is a principle means of America waging war on the poor and keeping them in poverty, it is by no means the only method by which this war on the poor is waged.

Ever since 1950, when the American economy officially became a war economy and the Military Industrial Complex as we know it was born, the US foreign policy has been one of perpetual imperialistic expansionism and domination; and the US war machine has been waging a never-ending war on the Third World, a war on the world’s poorest nations and peoples. From its open military interventions and invasions, to its economic sanction campaigns responsible for starving millions of the world’s poorest populations, to the numerous CIA-instigated regime change efforts and funding of radical right-wing revolutionary movements in Central and South America responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent peasants, the US war machine has done nothing but wreak havoc and destruction on the world in the name of national security and spreading freedom and democracy.

From the carnage of Vietnam where US bombs destroyed entire villages, to the invasion of Panama where US troops indiscriminately torched the peasant homes throughout the villages in the vicinity of their invasion, to the CIA’s secret wars which killed over an estimated 6 million people in the 20th Century alone, to the present day crippling Iranian sanction campaign targeting and now beginning starve the Iranian civilian population, the entire might and power of the US war machine has for seven whole decades been aimed exclusively at the Third World.

Colonialism never died, only the way in which the colonizers plundered the colonies changed, and the face of the colonizer. When the British empire finally breathed its last breath, the American empire was already born and immediately rose to take its place on the world stage; and as soon as the last of the British colonies declared independence from the Crown, the US was already busy and in the process of colonizing the Third World, with a large focus on the South and Central Americas along with the Middle East. In every place touched by this new US imperial interventionism, the goal and results were the same: Ensuring a western monopoly on the goods and natural resources of the ‘colony’ at a cheap price, at the expense of the impoverished locals. Often this cost was far more than the engineered perpetual poverty the western corporate monopolization created for the people of these colonies, and also included the slaughter of countless local peasants.

In almost every single case, when a popular revolutionary leader arose in any Third World country who stood up for the rights and well being of his own people, particularly the peasant masses, the US targeted both the leader and the peasants who supported him, because a policy that was good for the local peasants and true national interests of that poor nation was always bad for the economic interests of the rapidly growing US empire.

And that US empire doesn’t skimp on funding for its war machine either. The US government spends so much on war and empire-building that that the annual US military budget is over three times the estimated cost of ending all hunger across the entire world!

That’s right, the US spends triple the estimated cost to end world hunger on its annual military budget alone, year after year, while 1/3 of the world’s population is starving and America’s own homeless population is growing, even while some of its own citizens go to bed hungry as they find a place to sleep on the streets. Meanwhile, as a Congressional investigation reported, not one dime of the American’s income taxes go to pay for a single service expected by the American taxpayer, but rather goes solely to pay off the interest on the federal debt - debt taken out to fund the empire’s war machine and its never-ending 19-years-and-counting war in the Middle East and elsewhere being waged under the guise of the so-called ‘War on Terror’, while America’s homeless population and rate of poverty growth are on the rise.

Of course this misuse of American tax dollars and funding of the war machine to the insane tune of over $700 billion per year doesn’t just leave the American citizenry out to dry while filling the pockets of the war profiteers, it also has very real and lasting negative effects on the impoverished populations of the countries towards which this highly funded war machine is directed.

Vietnam is probably the most obvious and well known example. The extent of the less well known devastation in Iraq alone is astounding, and is but one example of many dozens. US-backed UN sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s caused the death of an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis, over half a million of which were children. Another million Iraqis were killed during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation, along with over 5,000 American soldiers.

The US regularly used internationally-banned depleted uranium munitions in Iraq in both the first gulf war and during the 2003 invasion. Not only did this war crime cause irreparable damage to countless American servicemen and women and their families who would later be exposed to the deadly toxin, but permanently ravished the Iraqi land. In fact the radiation poisoning from this depleted uranium has become so widespread in Iraq now that birth defects, disfiguration and deformation have become so common in newborns that most Iraqi families giving birth no longer wonder if their child will be a boy or a girl, but whether they will be normal or permanently damaged from radiation poisoning. Many of these affected newborns are so deformed that they don’t make it out of childhood before death takes them; others live their entire lives suffering from the effects of this senseless crime; the radiation spreading throughout the environment and soil will be with the Iraqis until the end of time.

But they are poor, and brown, so this doesn’t bother those rich elitists calling the shots. Their viewpoint was well summarized by Henry Kissinger during the Iraq-Iran war, when he remarked: “Let them kill themselves.” At that time we supported the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein which we supplied with weapons, including internationally-banned chemical weapons. Iraq used these same US-supplied chemical weapons against US soldiers during the short Gulf War when we invaded Kuwait to counter Iraq’s invasion of the small country, which along with depleted uranium radiation and forced untested vaccinations caused irreparable damage to countless US soldiers.

This same Henry Kissinger is later reported to have said in reference to the American troops, that: “Soldiers on the front line are dumb animals.”

After all, it is overwhelmingly America’s poor who join the service, being sent off to kill and to die fighting rich men’s wars; the rich rarely send their own sons to fight in any of the wars. As General Smedley Butler accurately pointed out after the First World War - {“war is a racket”](https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html) - and it is a racket in which the rich get richer at the expense of the poor, the American peasants pitted against the peasants of the Third World. “Let them kill each other” - and as the poor fight and kill each other off, the rich make off as bandits - the bankers who finance the wars, the weapons manufacturers who supply the weapons (often to both sides of the conflict), the Private Military Contractors like Halliburton, typically Big Oil or other corporate natural resource beneficiaries, and also in almost every case the CIA.

The CIA doesn’t just help run US guns and manufacture its proxy-wars, it also vies for the title of largest drug cartel on the planet. Guns and drugs are two the most profitable rackets on the face of the earth, both wreak havoc on the poor, and the CIA has its hands deep in the pockets of both. The CIA has run drugs from all around the world, from South America, Vietnam, and even the Middle East.

In Afghanistan, we didn’t just plunder the nation’s lithium, US soldiers and mercenaries alike were paid to protect the poppy fields, the harvest of which is the key ingredient in the production of heroin, which then turns a mighty profit on the international black market.

The CIA floods American streets with drugs, especially the inner city ghettos, which is just another aspect of America’s war on the poor. Then under the guise of the so-called War on Drugs, the DEA/police-state dragnet catches and supplies the Prison Industrial Complex with a steady supply of mostly nonviolent ‘offenders’ - the modern American slave labor - a disproportionate number of which are blacks or other racial minorities, and almost all of which came from America’s poorest communities. You see, slavery was never abolished in this country, it simply changed names and appearances, much like modern day imperialism and the colonization of the Third World.

At precisely the same time that slavery was officially abolished in America at the end of the Civil War, the private prison industry conveniently began to arise to take its place; where instead of picking cotton for the rich plantation owners, the slaves instead began manufacturing a number of items for their white and Jewish slave owners who run this Prison Industrial Complex, while the slaves are no longer exclusively black anymore. Instead of plantation slavery, it’s called prison labor, but the prisoners are literally paid slave wages (pennies a day) and have truly been physically enslaved by those who imprisoned them and keep them behind bars. Different name, same game, and the target is America’s poor, particularly black Americans. Once again, the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor, and as is so often the case, racial minorities are still a major target.

We live in a society in which the criminal [In]Justice System is rigged against both justice and the poor, where the accused is in effect presumed guilty until proven innocent, and only the rich can afford to hire an attorney able or willing to either prove their innocence in court, or pay off the judge to drop the case or render a desirable verdict.

And then on an entirely different level, the whole web of traffic courts throughout this country is an elaborate revenue-collection system built upon fleecing the poor to enrich the state using the state’s monopoly on force, and it too directly targets the poor. This mockery of justice is a fraudulent scam that has nothing to do with protecting the peace or public safety and everything to do with revenue collection through force and the threat of force; and every single day it is waging a war on America’s poor - from the badged enforcers handing out citations and making arrests, to the public defenders paid by the very same state profiting from this road piracy scam, to the black robed tyrants and government attorneys meant to give the charade a semblance of justice.

We live in a society in which the state governments have taken it upon themselves to run a number of various lotteries, which inevitably prey almost exclusively on the poor, giving the most impoverished among us a false sense of hope that they might just be the next winner and could actually get rich quick...if they just buy enough tickets. Just another plot to enrich the state at the expense of the poor, the hopeless, and the ignorant.

We live in a society where government bodies across the country have passed legislation or enacted ordinances that literally ban private landowners from camping on their own land for any extended period of time - just another tactic in America’s war on the poor, not to mention a major infringement on private property rights. If you think you can rise above the poverty and avoid getting sucked into a lifetime of debt by diligently saving up to purchase a cheap piece of property and then avoid the cost of building a home (and higher property taxes) by living in a tent or a camper, this has actually become illegal in many (if not most) locales.

We live in a country in which it has actually become illegal to feed the homeless without a government permit in some places, and where a 90 year old man was actually arrested and taken to jail for doing just that - feeding the homeless just as he had been doing every week for years - because he refused to beg the government for permission!

The cheapest food in this country is also typically the least healthy. The poorer the family, the less likely they are to eat a healthy diet, and many an educated and health-conscious person refrains from buying organic produce not because they are unaware of the enormous health benefits of ‘going organic’, but because they feel they cannot afford to pay the higher cost of organic, pesticide-free foods. The fast food joints frequented by poor, working class Americans are literally poisoning the masses, making America sick.

There can be no doubt that for these reasons and more, the poorer people among us are more likely to have a shorter lifespan and to develop chronic disease such as a cancer or heart problems, which they will in turn struggle to be able to afford any treatment for. Obama’s “Affordable Care” did nothing but raise the cost of health insurance for the average American, which is now so expensive that a large number of Americans simply cannot afford it, while others refuse to pay such outrageous sums, opting instead to bank on a healthy diet.

The price of property and especially housing across the country continues to skyrocket, while wages do not keep up with this ever rising cost of living - seen both in higher rent costs and rising price of real estate. The raising of minimum wages over the past decade has done little to nothing to solve this problem, as the gap between wages and cost of living continues to grow larger despite these so-called government ‘solutions’.

At least America’s poor have access to ‘free’ education, you might say; but the public school system’s ‘education’ is one of the worst in the western world, and on top of that this ‘education’ is in fact nothing more than totalitarian government indoctrination - 12 years of programming the next generation to be good, obedient, mindless, merciless, corporate debt slave consumers - ensuring that the cycle of poverty-inducing debt slavery continues, nicely cloaked in the facade of the middle class American Dream that fewer and fewer people are able to envision for their future, let alone achieve. And so the vicious cycle continues - Work. Buy. Consume. Die. - while all of us but the elite few at the top continue to get poorer every day, for this is the new American way.

As the mask continues to be ripped off, the illusion of an American middle class becomes more and more apparent by the day. The American economy is in shambles; society is crumbling; and still the government insists on spending hundreds upon hundreds of billions on war, corporate bailouts of the rich, and useless government programs that do nothing to help the average American - like the current proposed $100 billion ‘contact tracing’ bill which will fund a program aimed at tracing the spread of covid19, or more accurately spreading the tentacles of a 1984-style totalitarian police state. The country is finally reaping the harvest of a decades-long war on the poor, the seeds of which were being sown as far back as 1913 with the creation of the private, internationally-owned Federal Reserve Bank, and all but the rich are beginning to see and feel the effects all around them.

A quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but apparently in reality first appearing on the Texas Morning News in 1933, warns us that this was the inevitable eventual outcome of allowing a private central bank to control the nation’s currency. Whoever is the true source of this wisdom, their predictions were spot on.

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

The US claims to be fighting a war on terror, a war on drugs, and a war on covid19. In reality, as should by now be quite obvious, they are in fact waging a war on freedom, a war on truth, and above all a war on the poor.

The war on terror has only been a war of terror. The war on drugs has done nothing to stop drug trafficking, use or abuse. It should not be surprising, then, if the war on covid19 becomes just another never-ending war - in effect a war to perpetuate covid19, and of course America’s war on the poor. Welcome to America, the new and improved Third World. Welcome to the new normal. Welcome to Covid-1984...