Living in Clover in District Corona By James Reed

     I imagine if an Earth-shattering asteroid, about 1,000 kilometres in diameter, was heading to the Earth in an inescapable path, so that short of a divine miracle we were doomed, then the 1 percenters would be out making money until the end, dying happy looking at the latest meaningless strings of 1s and 0s on their computers. Yes, that is what the human race has come to.
   https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/05/27/tech-companies-coronavirus.aspx?cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20200527Z1&et_cid=DM547425&et_rid=880885396

“Bill Gates has built a global empire around his technologies and “philanthropic” endeavors. His sheer wealth has allowed him to become a veritable superpower in his own right, rising to become the unelected global health tsar on COVID-19. Indeed, the World Health Organization and the White House pandemic response team even kowtows to his nonexistent medical expertise. Life cannot and will not go back to normal until we can vaccinate the entire global population, Gates says, and that same sentiment is being echoed from government leaders and health authorities around the world. Never mind the fact that actual scientists and medical researchers are finding all sorts of simple, inexpensive and safe strategies to address this illness. But vaccinating the global population isn’t enough, in Gates’ eyes. We must also implement surveillance of infection and vaccination status. Not surprisingly, Gates’ recommendations benefit himself most of all. As discussed in “Bill Gates — Most Dangerous Philanthropist in Modern History?” the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donates billions to the very same companies and industries that the Foundation owns stocks and bonds in. Using nonprofit money to advance research for companies you're invested in is illegal, yet he’s been getting away with this for many years. At the same time, his Foundation gets tax breaks for the charitable donations it makes money from. Remember, he has “donated” tens of billions, yet his net worth has doubled. This is largely because his “donations” are tax deductible investments.

Pandemic Fear-Mongering Pays Off for Tech Companies
While unemployment has reached a historical high during this pandemic, the financial crush is not felt by some. In fact, Gates and other tech billionaires are cashing in big, in a variety of different ways. In a May 8, 2020, article in The Intercept, Naomi Klein reports on how New York is tasking Gates with reinventing the state’s “post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.” May 6, 2020, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the state is partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop “a smarter education system” focused on online learning. This, despite the fact that the Common Core curriculum — the Gates Foundation’s previous attempt at remaking American education — has been an abysmal failure. The state is also partnering with Google, and Cuomo has asked former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to head a new panel to plan the state’s technological infrastructure. Schmidt joined Cuomo during a briefing, saying “The first priorities … are focused on telehealth, remote learning and broadband …” As noted by Klein: “It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent pandemic shock doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the Screen New Deal. Far more hi-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future … It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces, but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails … It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because, pre-Covid, this precise app-driven, gig-fueled future was being sold to us in the name of friction-free convenience and personalization. But many of us had concerns … Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this warmed-over dystopia is going through a rush-job rebranding. Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe … At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies.” In her article — which is well worth reading in its entirety — Klein reviews how Schmidt and Gates have been working and pushing toward the future that is now staring us square in the face, and how the surveillance apparatus that consumers have been railing against is now being rebranded as the answer to everyone’s health concerns. In a May 6, 2020, article, Vox’s Theodore Schleifer weighed in on Cuomo’s decision to hand over the proverbial keys to the state to tech billionaires whose philanthropy always ends up benefiting themselves the most:“Details are scarce about exactly how much power these groups will have beyond issuing recommendations or whether their work will be public. But Gates could suddenly have the ability to recommend what types of things are taught to the state’s students in a ‘reimagined’ system. Schmidt could encourage the state to significantly embrace remote health care services that could be controversial. While both have been successful business leaders, the concern would mirror the broader criticism of billionaire philanthropy: that this ‘help’ offers a few wealthy people some undemocratic influence over American public policy.”

     Dear Reader, you must be of very strong stuff to have got to the end of this tale of woe and misery. It is a pity that the bugs do not discriminate a bit more, and turn their molecular pathological attention to more worthy opponents than the aged, sick, the poor, minorities, men  and the vulnerable.
  https://www.newsbreak.com/news/0OoRyhcB/bill-gates-most-dangerous-philanthropist-in-modern-history
  https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/