" Department of Energy is even considering paying domestic oil producers to keep crude in the g

https://www.rt.com/business/486278-us-oil-price-falls/

Iran is paying for their own oil shipping and insurance as well as providing discounts to countries to compensate them for risking sanctions. Venezuela is in a much worse situation, a much smaller country and having no other functioning economic sector. Putin created a network of dummy corporations to avoid the sanctions placed on Venezuela. I doubt this is any kind of permanent solution.

What's ironic is that the trillions of dollars spent by all the major American banks and their foreign allies invested in poisonous oil shale and its related industries making the US by far the largest producer of energy on the planet is at risk. Even the most efficient of these fields need at least $40 a barrel, some over $60. None of the costs of cleaning up the massive environmental and health costs have been factored into this price. After all the costs are in, one can speculate that it will take over $100 a barrel for the honor of destroying the planet and slow genociding of the species, albeit every other species but bacteria, archaea and extremophiles who can survive practically any disaster.

The bailout/looting is focused on this existential economic disaster. It is highly likely that either this is an opportunistic overrated accidental threat, flus do kill the weak, morbidly obese, etc... thousands die every day this is a planet way overpopulated with over 7 billion of people with which capitalists have little use for. Or this virus has been specifically created, along side of a vaccine to be used by elites, (note that nobody important to the ruling class has died as of yet), which is finely tuned to psychologically terrorize the population into allowing the complete looting of generations worth of wealth. To be frank most of this money has been stolen from other far more vulnerable sectors of the Human family, i.r. slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, etc...), so I have relatively little pity for the upper middle classes being destroyed. For the proletariat to be completed, the educated sector of the middle class must be turn into workers, before a Revolution can become a possibility. There are exceptions to every rule, some people have honestly and progressively accumulated these assets. There is unfortunately no way to separate the vast corruption and the puny progressive exceptions.

Its not a coincidence that Bezos, Musk, Paul Allen, etc.. all have invested in Space corporations. These people have gone from building elaborate panic rooms, to underground bunkers, (the Walton Mafia of WalMart infamy has a vast facility in Arkansas, Gates has a hundreds of millions bunker) to building a Space life raft. These gangsters know what they are doing. Maybe they even feel that its evil, even horrible. However the JFK disciplining has taught all of them the dangers of going against the wishes of the majority in their psychopathic class. It is not for nothing that Epstein, who has turn the pedophilia business into a multibillion dollar concern, has worked hard to control newly super rich like Bill Gates. Evidence is arising that Gates has fallen into a honey trap all the way back into the 1990s. Assembling vast databases of sexualy compromising pictures and videos has become a major industry, a backbone of police agencies everywhere. It has become the glue that holds together an increasingly morally degenerate ruling class. This moral rot has penetrated all classes in Imperial America and throughout the World.

Richard

PS: Ralph Nader has written a fictional book called, "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!', inspired by Nader admiration for Warren Buffett. John Locke the father of modern day bourgeois Democracy invested in slave trading corporation. Practically all progressive liberals are millionaires these days, Amy Goodman, Micheal Moore, Bernie, Chomsky, Nader etc.... We must look more closely how economics affects an individual's ideology. Unfortunately Stalinists have pervert and damaged this very important tool of the class analysis. Marx has spoken often of the creative dimension of Capitalist destruction. It has been misinterpreted as a racist endorsement, such as examples where he stated regarding England genocidal behavior in India. However the past has to be cleanse from the present before we move on to our desired utopia. All prejudices must be purged. Culture must be destroyed and continuously recreated. This is the only way for true individuality to arise from the ashes of class society.