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While the American far-right rants against alleged "Obama death panels" and other Freddy Krueger-like scarecrows to frighten--and divert--the kiddies, our capitalist masters, as they are wont to do, gaze at the spectacle, laugh, and then tighten the screws.

Health care for all derailed? Mission accomplished!

Meanwhile, despite alarm amongst civil liberties groups, public health researchers and other "reality-based" evil-doers who haven't slaked their thirst with "birther" kool-aid, the Obama administration "is quietly dusting off an effort to impose new federal quarantine regulations" to "contain" the H1N1 flu virus, Politico revealed.

"While any discussion of quarantine may stoke public fears of barbed wire camps filled with infected Americans or closures of international borders" Politico reports, "public health experts said that sort of approach to H1N1 flu would not be effective."

While White House officials aren't talking, Wendy Mariner, a professor of law and public health at Boston University told the publication, "it's not really going to help."

And if the H1N1 pandemic behaves in a manner similar to the 1957 outbreak of H2N2 influenza then "closing schools, stopping large gatherings and other such measures are unlikely to do much," a team of public health experts told Reuters.

"Efforts to mitigate it were futile," Brooke Courtney, a researcher with the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center told the wire service. "In 1957 it was decided pretty early on that efforts to quarantine or isolate people would not be effective," Courtney said.

Why? Because by the time the H2N2 strain was diagnosed it was already "too widespread" for a quarantine of affected individuals to serve a useful purpose.

Despite warnings from public health researchers, the Obama administration is moving full-speed ahead. And with a September target date for new federal regulations, CDC spokeswoman Christine Pearson told Politico, "It's important to public health to move forward with the regulations. We need to update our quarantine regulations, and this final rule is an important step."

Not everyone is convinced, however.

"It doesn't surprise me that when swine flu or any other epidemic is featured prominently in the news, we see a return to quarantine and other public health regulations," said Christopher Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union, which sharply criticized the Bush-era proposal as too heavy-handed. "The enemy here isn't the American people or sick people. It's an illness. ... Police officers with guns cannot make people obey a quarantine. In order for this to work, it has to be collaborative. They have to trust the government." (Josh Gerstein, "Obama Team Mulls New Quarantine Regs," Politico, August 5, 2009)

While Calabrese is certainly correct in a technical sense that "the enemy here isn't the American people or sick people," from the standpoint of a predatory national security state that views all disorder--including illness--as a dire threat to the heimat, what better means to keep the rabble in line than a state-imposed quarantine enforced by "police officers with guns"?

As Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky wrote in July, "it is in the interest of the political power brokers and the dominant financial actors to divert public attention from an understanding of the global crisis."

Despite clear signs that the economic crisis continues to deepen on a planetary scale and that state efforts to mitigate the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression have failed, as World Socialist Web Site analyst Barry Grey points out, the Federal Reserve Board's "upbeat assessment" fails to take into account that "new data on unemployment, home foreclosures, home prices and retail sales painted a picture of growing economic distress for tens of millions of Americans."

But "growing economic distress" for the majority of Americans have translated into rising corporate profits "on the basis of a deep and protracted decline in the wages, working conditions and wealth of the working class."

Under such dire conditions, combustible social fuel could lead to an unprecedented political explosion. Therefore, as Chossudovsky observes "an atmosphere of fear and intimidation which serves to weaken and disarm organized dissent" must be manufactured, one whose "objective is to undermine all forms of opposition and social resistance."

How will these goals be accomplished by the capitalist state? Chossudovsky avers: "In this framework, the occurrence of 'natural disasters,' 'pandemics,' 'environmental catastrophes' also plays a useful political role. It distorts the real causes of the crisis. It justifies a global public health emergency on humanitarian grounds."

And as with other "extraordinary circumstances" such as those which followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the declaration of a global war against terrorism, a militarized and repressive state will step in to fill the breech, this time as public health "savior."

In this context, Boston University's Wendy Mariner's statement that "proposals to limit liberty" through quarantine regulations by the federal government "represent a dangerous precedent to constitutional theory" must be viewed through the lens of capital's deepening economic, political and social crisis.

Despite the fact that "there's almost no evidence it will matter" in terms of mitigating an H1N1 pandemic outbreak, as Mariner averred "it wouldn't surprise me if they try to sneak this past in August, when people are away."

And with a bipartisan consensus in Washington to fork over billions of dollars to enterprising drug manufacturers, it's a sure bet that "liberal" Democrats and "conservative" Republicans will do what they do best: toe the corporatist line.

Project BioShield

While objections to new federal quarantine regulations may be widespread, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), particularly that agency's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) is pulling out all the stops.

Similar to the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a satrapy for arms manufacturers and other death merchants, HHS's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority freely doles out billions of dollars in taxpayer boodle to Big Pharma.

According to a blurb on their web site BARDA, a distinct entity within the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at HHS "provides an integrated, systematic approach to the development and purchase of the necessary vaccines, drugs, therapies, and diagnostic tools for public health medical emergencies."

Well and good as far as it goes (which isn't very far), BARDA does more, much more. Under the Bush regime, Congress passed the Project BioShield Act of 2004, a particularly grotesque piece of Bushist legislative flotsam "as part of a broader strategy to defend America against the threat of weapons of mass destruction."

You can bet however, they don't mean WMDs like the weaponized anthrax that came from Pentagon stockpiles and was used in the 2001 anthrax attacks. While "only" five people may have died, panic gripped the country as the capitol was shut-down and the national security state sunk its claws ever-deeper into civil institutions.

Never mind that a far-greater threat to the health and safety of the American people comes from the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex than from the H1N1 strain of the influenza virus. Or that this nexus of academic, corporate and militarist grifters operate with little in the way of effective oversight as a growing spate of accidents and unauthorized experiments at BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities readily attest. (For a round-up of incidents through 2007, see The Sunshine Project's essential web archive.)

Despite poor safety records and lax controls by federal authorities, America's bioweaponeers are devising ever-more devilish weapons in the form of genetically-modified pathogens such as antibiotic-resistant smallpox or a reassembled strain of the 1918 influenza virus that killed upwards of 40 million people. (For details see: Edward Hammond, Emerging Technologies: Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons, The Sunshine Project, Background Paper No. 12, November 2003)

Indeed as written, the BioShield legislation provides HHS and the National Institutes of Health "contracting flexibility, infrastructure improvements, and expediting the scientific peer review process, and streamlining the Food and Drug Administration approval process of countermeasures."

In other words, Project BioShield is little more than a generous public handout to unaccountable private corporations. Hence the law's emphasis on "contracting flexibility," the old public funding/private profit dodge that empowers FDA to "streamline" (cut-corners) the scientific peer review process in order to "expedite" (fast-track) "countermeasures" (new drugs) with little concern for public health and safety whilst immunizing corporate partners from liability.

In practice, this means that "in place of the peer review and advisory council review procedures" HHS will employ such "expedited peer review procedures (including consultation with appropriate scientific experts) as the Secretary, in consultation with the Director of NIH, deems appropriate to obtain assessment of scientific and technical merit and likely contribution to the field of qualified countermeasure research."

In plain English, these political appointees beholden to the whims of Executive Branch and congressional grifters in thrall to multinational drug corporations will empower "scientific experts" (e.g. scientists in the employ of Big Pharma) to rule on the efficacy of "countermeasures" for which said corporations reap a handsome profit. And should things go wrong and people begin dying from inadequately tested vaccines, well then, Congress has a neat solution: foot the American people with the bill!

This is spelled out quite clearly: "(2) FEDERAL TORT CLAIMS ACT COVERAGE.--(A) IN GENERAL.--A person carrying out a contract under paragraph (1), and an officer, employee, or governing board member of such person, shall, subject to a determination by the Secretary, be deemed to be an employee of the Department of Health and Human Services for purposes of claims under sections 1346(b) and 2672 of title 28, United States Code, for money damages for personal injury, including death, resulting from performance of functions under such contract."

Therefore, when Congress immunizes corporate entities from civil and criminal penalties by making them federal employees, you know the grift, and the fix, is literally in.

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