JEFF J. BROWN—David is a progressive columnist writing on economic, political and social issues. His articles have been published by OpEdNews (where he is also an active editor), The Greanville Post (where he is senior contributing editor), The Real News Network, Truth Out, Consortium News, Global Research, and many other publications on the left. David is active in social issues relating to peace, race relations and religious freedom, homelessness and equal justice. David is a member of Veterans for Peace, Saint Pete for Peace, CodePink, and International Solidarity Movement. David is also a founding member of the Bioweapon Truth Commission and has contributed to its Global Online Library

PEPE ESCOBAR—Western corporate media, en masse, have virtually ignored the myriad, devastating economic consequences of Planet Lockdown. Wall to wall coverage barely mentions the astonishing economic human wreckage already in effect – especially for the masses barely surviving, so far, in the informal economy.

GEORGE ELIASON—I used to build decontamination chambers and work in hazardous environments, hence I’m familiar with hazmat protocols, including locked high radiation situations. People working in hazardous environments do so confidently because of the knowledge ensuring they can perceive their world without fear and the simple steps they take, to keep both them and their families safe. If you perceive the world the same way, you take the fear of the unknown out of the equation and are taking all the proactive steps that are possible.

JOHN BUELL—Governor Cuomo has been generally supportive of the neoliberal development model that includes tax cuts for business and fiscal austerity for the public sector to fund those cuts. He shares the centrist faith in markets as perfect information processing systems and strives to remove the public from active participation in such decisions. When the state budget mandated multi-billion-dollar cuts in spending for hospitals he attempted to deflect attention to his role by creating a commission comprised disproportionately of health industry insiders.

MoA—hen John Burn-Murdoch created that daily updated chart he did not anticipate that any country would have more than a 100,000 total cases. That was a reasonable assumption as China, with 1.4 billion inhabitants, stopped the epidemic with less than 85.000 total cases even when it was surprised by the outbreak. As of now the U.S. has 164.435 known cases. It will reach a total number of several dozens of millions and will have several hundreds of thousands of dead caused by the covid-19 disease.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Hollywood is a giant propaganda mill which when it isn’t cranking out movies which are literally funded and controlled by the US war machine is putting on spectacular ninety-minute “The imperialist world order is perfectly sane and capitalism is totally working” infomercial presentations. It is an arm of cultural control which is unrivaled by anything else in this world, so of course it has powerful forces at work within it ensuring status quo loyalism.

YASHA LEVINE—On the empire front: Using the chaos of the pandemic, we’ve been ramping up attacks on the usual list of official enemies — and Iran and Venezuela in particular. Trump’s bloodthirsty hairless walrus Mike Pompeo has been going around telling anyone who’ll listen that he and his people want to make sure COVID-19 kills as many people as possible over there. He wants to use the pandemic to finally push these countries over the edge — and so they’re squeezing them more than ever.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Obama is not the poor widdle victim here, the American public is. Remember that not even a year after the taxpayer took the brunt of the damage from the banks’ idiotic gamble on subprime loans, he was out there inspiring rallies of people with his talk of hope and change, but at the exact same time as he was promising the American people that he would take Wall Street to task, in private he was allowing Citigroup to handpick his cabinet.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—“China and Russia have seized on the coronavirus outbreak to wage disinformation campaigns that seek to undermine the U.S. and its handling of the crisis, rather than addressing public criticism of their own struggles with the pandemic,” warns The New York Times, who played a leading role in the disinformation campaign to build support for the Iraq invasion and who aggressively pushed crazy-making Russia hysteria (including famously retracting its bogus “17 intelligence agencies” claim).

WAYNE MADSEN—Another leader who did his very best to spread the coronavirus was Brazil’s Bolsonaro. After having spent time with Trump at the U.S. president’s Mar-a-Lago “billionaire’s compound” in Palm Beach, Florida, the close contact between the U.S. and Brazilian delegations resulted in positive coronavirus tests from members of Bolsonaro’s delegation, as well as Trump’s party, including the mayor of Miami, Francis X. Suarez.

After Bolsonaro and his virus-infected delegation returned to Brazil from Florida, Bolsonaro called the quarantine actions of Brazilian state governors and other officials to thwart the spread of the virus, which had already infected 200 people, “paranoia” and “extremism.”