This afternoon, Jason Easley (3/19/20) at Politicsusa reported that Sen. Richard Burr, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was dumping $1.6 million in his own personal stock at the same time he was publicly reassuring the American people that their government had the coronavirus well in hand.

Burr was also warning his rich donors that this virus was likely to rival the 1918 flu virus that caused widespread devastation, thereby alerting them that they should scurry like rats leaving a sinking ship.  Burr, as head of the Intelligence Committee, was receiving daily updates (which included some of the nation’s most highly classified information) on the status of the virus and the extent of the threat to US security.

If the American people aren’t not furious about this, they should be.  They are losing their jobs, their financial security, and their retirement investments while a Republican member of Congress trades off his position to evade something like a 30% loss on his stocks.

As Miriame Kaba, an organizer recently interviewed on “The Intercept” stated, “capitalism is the crisis.”

This country has been thrown into social and economic turmoil by a group of people who have been telling the rest of us that the markets would take care of everything and that the individual pursuit of profit would make us free.  Meanwhile, they are busily trying to make money off the crisis.

If there is anything positive to be gleaned out of this crisis, it is the hope that people will finally realize that we are under the rule of  what Sarah Kenzior calls a crime syndicate posing as a government.  This includes not just Trump and his family.  This includes most of the members of the Congress as well.

I would be willing to bet that none of the corporate news media outlets will cover this story.  They will, instead, run video after video of reporters walking backward in grocery stores telling us that the shelves are empty as if this was edifying in any way.

Trump said today that the federal government was not a “shipping clerk.”  What he meant was that people were on their own, they couldn’t count of the federal government, their government, the government that they fund, to help them out.

We have no reason to be surprised.  Anyone could have seen this crisis coming.  It was never a question of whether, it was a question of when.  Experts in the field warned of the likelihood of a pandemic and people lived through an ebola crisis.

But for decades, the Republican party has been paving the way for just such a crisis.  They are the party that denigrates and ridicules science, reason, government, and expertise.  Why would anyone voting Republican expect anything different?

We are told we live in the richest, best country in the world, but we can’t afford testing kits to establish the severity of a pandemic.