Friday, May 29, 2020

ANALYSIS: George Floyd was deliberately murdered, right on schedule to unleash race riots across America to cause even more chaos

(Natural News) After reviewing the videos surrounding the arrest and killing of George Floyd, it’s clear to me that he was deliberately murdered. I understand there are different interpretations of what happened, and new evidence may emerge that will alter my view, but based on what I’ve seen so far, it seems abundantly clear that Mr. Floyd was deliberately murdered in broad daylight.
As I know very well due to my many years of training alongside law enforcement and military veterans, police officers are specifically trained to avoid pushing their body weight, through their knee, onto a suspect’s throat or neck for the simple reason that doing so causes severe injury or death. Any police officer that deliberately places their knee (and hence, their body weight) on the neck of a suspect who is pinned against the ground is doing so out of a premeditated desire to cause death.
The question isn’t whether George Floyd was murdered — he clearly was — the real question is why he was murdered.
Put another way, who benefits from the death of George Floyd?
The answer, of course, is that the forces of chaos and destruction (i.e. anti-American, anti-Trump) benefit from his murder. The more chaos and destruction is unleashed during this election year, the more the media hypes up the disaster and assigns blame to President Trump. Logically, it’s absurd, since President Trump had nothing to do with the murder of George Floyd. But emotionally, the media propaganda messaging whips up fear, anger and frustration — emotions that will largely be translated into anti-Trump sentiment in the coming elections.
This comes on the heels of Joe Biden telling a black interview host, “You ain’t black” if you don’t vote for me. The black community was rightfully outraged. Democrats experienced a wave of horror in old “crazy Joe’s” comments, realizing that if they didn’t do something to get the black vote to swing back to their side, many black Americans would vote for Trump, who isn’t someone who talks condescendingly to the black community (like Biden just did).
Right on time, almost as if scripted for the media in advance, comes the story the Left has been dreaming of: “White cop murders innocent black man in broad daylight.” Suddenly the narrative shifts. Joe Biden’s comment is quickly forgotten, and the media tries to redirect blame to Trump.
Left-wing provocateurs send in the militants to torch buildings and cause mayhem. Certain “race baiter” black leaders whip up the hatred and division for maximum effect, utterly avoiding what they should be doing which is calling for all humans to rise up against the real enemies of humanity: Globalists, Big Tech and the depopulation vaccine engineers who will soon be targeting black people all across the world with a “kill switch” coronavirus vaccine.
For the globalists to maintain control of humanity, they must maintain the hatred and division between the races, for if all humans banded together to rise up and defeat the globalists, the people would achieve an immediate victory. The only way the globalists maintain their criminal control and mass genocide operations is to convince certain groups of people to go to war with other groups. It’s all a distraction from the real threat to us all: Evil, demonic globalists who despise all human beings.
Look as this “white cop” carries out the engineered murder in broad daylight, almost as if he’s posing for the cameras, gleeful about the total destruction and hatred he’s about to unleash on the world:
Notice how his torso is leaning forward, placing the majority of his upper body weight on George Floyd’s neck, exactly where the carotid artery is located. Note also that Mr. Floyd is pinned to the concrete and thus has no “give” on the opposite side of his neck. This technique is widely known across law enforcement to be deadly. It is clearly deliberate. This cop could have easily controlled Mr. Floyd by placing his knee between Mr. Floyd’s shoulder blades, for example, but instead he chose to target the man’s neck.
To me, that looks like straight up murder, and based on the video evidence we’ve seen so far, we call for a criminal murder investigation into the police officers involved.
UPDATE: Derek Chauvin has now been arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter, according to multiple media sources.
Learn more about humanity rising up against oppression and government violence in this important podcast:
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ASMR - Why Is My Brain Tingling?

From Scientific American:

A few years ago, I watched a YouTube video called “Virtual Barbershop.” It was one of those viral videos that attempted to be somewhat educational. It featured (somewhat silly) barbershop sounds recorded with a special microphone that made the sounds appear as if in 3-D, to demonstrate how the brain localizes sounds.
Although it was meant to be funny and a bit of a gag video, I noticed that some of the 3-D sounds actually relaxed me. In fact, I realized it was the same calming feeling I got when watching, of all things, Bob Ross’ “Joy of Painting” videos. Curious, I watched some of Bob’s YouTube videos, and sure enough, his soothing voice, brushing and tapping sounds, and calm, deliberate actions had me nearly falling asleep.
By some happy little accident, I noticed a “recommended” video in the YouTube side bar called “Oh, such a good 3-D ASMR video.” I immediately felt relaxed upon hearing the sounds in the video, and even felt a small “tingle” in my head. That’s how I discovered that I had ASMR.
ASMR? It sounds like some horrible affliction—an acronym for a weird, one-in-100 million condition. “Hi, I’m Deirdre, and I have ASMR.” What is it—and why is my brain tingling?
What is ASMR?
ASMR, short for autonomous sensory meridian response, is a pleasant feeling caused by certain auditory or sensory stimuli. ASMR enthusiasts call these sensations “tingles,” or “brain bubbles,” since they are mostly felt in the head and down the spine, and produce a sense of deep relaxation. Common triggers for ASMR tingles include tapping sounds, hair brushing, massage, whispering and more.
ASMR has a large online presence, particularly on YouTube—a search of “ASMR” yields 5.1 million results. ASMR channels are curated by “ASMRtists,” who produce videos designed to induce tingles. Many focus on simple, relaxing sounds, or ramble in a soft whisper to the viewer. Others feature first-person views of elaborate role-plays, such as cranial nerve exams, applying makeup, or ear cleaning (a personal favorite). Still others focus on guided meditation, positive affirmations and anxiety relief, which are relaxing even for those who don’t experience ASMR. Of course, as with most things on the Internet, some ASMR videos can get very strange.
In spite of its admittedly weird nature, I appreciate how my ASMR helps me unwind from the stresses of graduate school. However, as a neuroscience graduate student, I was curious about what’s going on in my brain when I get ASMR. Why would listening to a whispering voice or watching someone fold towels cause a tingly feeling? Why do only some people feel relaxed when they hear or see triggers?
Craig Richard, a professor in the Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences at Virginia’s Shenandoah University, also asks these questions. He is the founder of the ASMR University website, and host of the ASMR University Podcast. Richard created ASMR University to “help gather and share what is known about ASMR, and also to inspire others to expand the understanding of ASMR through research and publications.”
Indeed, despite ASMR’s growing popularity, there have only been three peer-reviewed studies of the phenomenon, and the main focus has been on social studies. Research has barely begun into what goes on in the brain during ASMR. But here’s what might be happening.
A relaxed body map
Sometimes, you need to hear trigger sounds to get ASMR tingles. When sounds reach the brain, they are processed in the auditory cortex. But, this happens for all sounds we hear—what is it specifically about tapping or whispering that triggers the tingles?
The answer may lie in another brain area that helps with body awareness and sensation, called the somatosensory cortex. This strip of brain tissue is essentially a “body map.” Each area of the body is represented along the strip, from head to toe.
Richard explains, “The sensory experiences (tactile, audio, visual) happening inside any one person will be going to different parts of the sensory cortex. The surprising thing is how this wide array of sensations can all result in a similar perception of tingles and relaxation.”
Further, there is a lot of cross-talk between brain regions. Specifically, ASMR might involve a “conversation” between the auditory and somatosensory cortex. The information about the sounds may travel to the somatosensory cortex, and activate certain body-associated regions as if they’re actually being touched. For example, watching an ASMR video featuring ear cleaning, the sounds of “scratching” in your ear may be activating the “ear” portion of the somatosensory cortex, making it seem as though you’re actually experiencing the act.
That might explain why I got tingles during the “Virtual Barbershop” video—it created a 3-D space in which I “felt” the sounds affecting different parts of my body.
Mirror, mirror in my brain
Perhaps you can’t stand whispering, but instead get tingles from watching massage videos. Rest assured, there’s another possible explanation for your tingle trigger.
The brain has cells called “mirror neurons,” which are located in higher-order areas of the brain. Mirror neurons activate when watching someone doing a motion or task, and are thought to mimic the movements that are seen. It’s as if you’re performing the movement in your mind, but not physically. Unsurprisingly, mirror neurons also connect to the “body map” and motor areas of the brain.
“This network of neurons subtly recreates an experience in your brain as you watch it,” said Richard. “In other words, you are activating a similar set of neurons as the person [who] is actually experiencing the action. Your brain is ‘mirroring’ the action it is seeing.”
Richard explained that mirror neurons might also be a component to learning and empathy. “Just like when you wince when you see someone cut their finger, viewers of ASMR videos may be mirroring the relaxation being simulated in the video.”
So, in the case of a massage ASMR video, it’s possible that watching massage movements activates mirror neurons, making it seem as if you were receiving a massage. Or, if you watched someone performing precise, meditative hand gestures, mirror neurons would make it seem like you were performing the calming gesture. That, combined with the connection to the body map, could possibly explain how watching such actions triggers tingles and relaxation.
Why do tingles feel good?
Whether they’re caused by an auditory-sensory conversation, or mirror neurons, or something else entirely unknown, tingles share one common factor—they feel really good, and produce a feeling of relaxation. This is caused by release of chemicals in the brain.
“It is likely that neurochemicals like dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and/or serotonin are involved in the sensation of ASMR,” Richard says.
For instance, dopamine is one chemical that is associated with reward. Specifically, it’s associated with food, sex, and drugs. However, it’s also associated with “frisson,” or chills that happen when listening to music. Taken together, dopamine might be released when listening to relaxing sounds, creating ASMR tingles. Another chemical, oxytocin, is associated with social bonding. In ASMR role plays, the ASMRtist often creates a sense of personal intimacy with the viewer, often with close contact and detailed attention to the viewer. This personal attention may trigger an oxytocin release in the brain, which again might be related to tingles.
“If someone has a biological change which alters the production of these chemicals or alters the sensitivities of the receptors for these chemicals, then that could explain some aspects of the biology of ASMR and the varied responses to ASMR triggers,” explained Richard.
Similarities to other sensations
ASMR shares similar characteristics with other body sensations. For instance, gently running fingers down someone’s arm or back can cause similar sensations to tingles. Tingles can also feel like the sensations you get from scalp massagers. For the curious, these are great ways to mimic tingles if you can’t experience ASMR from videos.
In a recent studyby UK researchers Emma Barratt and Nick Davis, around 6 percent of participants who had ASMR also had synesthesia, the ability to “hear” numbers or “see the color” of a sound. However, there was no significant association between ASMR and synesthesia. Paradoxically, ASMR may be linked to misophonia, or the inability to tolerate certain sounds. For example, chewing sounds cause ASMR in some people, but others can’t stand it. Anecdotally, those with ASMR experience tingles with certain peoples’ sounds, but when others make the same sounds, it disgusts them. It could be that the same neural mechanism that causes tingles could also operate in reverse, so to say, and cause discomfort when hearing certain sounds.
Like many uncommon brain conditions, “ASMR is starting off as a poorly understood phenomenon which will require neurobiological studies to give it wider validity and deeper understanding,” Richard says.
Future use of ASMR
Despite the current lack of studies on ASMR, many researchers are just now getting involved in understanding this phenomenon. For instance, Richard’s ASMR University is dedicated to helping solve the puzzle of what chemicals are involved, and to recruiting people with and without ASMR to help study its effects.
But, why should we care about some weird tingling sensation? What difference does it make if certain people’s brains are wired that way? Many believe that ASMR has the potential to be used as part of therapies for mental health or stress management. Indeed, in the Barratt and Davis study, 98 percent of participants watched ASMR videos to relax, 82 percent to help them sleep, and 70 percent to reduce stress. The same study found an increase in “flow,” or concentration during a task.
Richard agrees. “[The Barratt and Davis study] helps to support the hope that ASMR could someday be approved as a medical treatment to help people with insomnia, anxiety, depression, and/or chronic pain—but there is still a lot of research and clinical testing that needs to be done,” he says.
For now, though, I’ll take pleasure in the fact that I don’t know why my brain tingles.
Richard encourages readers to take an ASMR survey at this link.

SHUT THEM DOWN: It’s time to end the tyranny of Big Tech censorship in America

(Natural News) The tyranny of Big Tech is now on full display in America as Twitter has unleashed an army of so-called “fact-checkers” (i.e. left-wing propagandists) to place fact-check labels on the tweets of President Trump.
“Fact-checking” is just the excuse for tech giants like Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube or Facebook to interrupt the communications of conservative or pro-Trump users with radical left-wing propaganda messages. The very idea that a tech company led by communists and radical left-wing socialists could claim a monopoly on “facts” is absurd. No one has a monopoly on facts, and the entire fact-checking fiasco of the Big Tech ecosystem has boiled down to politically targeted censorship run by radical left-wing propagandists who are truly mentally ill in the fact that they actually believe their delusions are an accurate map of reality.
But it’s more than mere propaganda. It’s election rigging. It’s a violation of the civil rights of millions of Americans. And it’s almost certainly a type of criminal racketeering and fraud that should be aggressively prosecuted by the DOJ as well as Attorneys General across the 50 states.
Now, for the first time, after years of censorship of Trump supporters, the President himself is finally vowing to do something decisive about Big Tech tyranny. He tweets, “Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct. Big action to follow!”
What “big action” could that be?
If Trump wanted to resolve this problem literally overnight, his best option is to seize the domain names of the tech giants and force them to respect the First Amendment or be shut down.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1265601611310739456

Why President Trump must SEIZE the domain names Google.com, Twitter.com, Wikipedia.com, Facebook.com, YouTube.com, Vimeo.com and many more

The politically-targeted censorship of the tech giants mentioned above is, of course, criminal and fraudulent. It is election rigging, for starters, and Robert Mueller’s prosecution of so-called “Russian” content farms has already proved that the DOJ can charge tech companies with “attempt to defraud the United States of America” by interfering with elections.
All the left-wing tech giants are guilty of election rigging, which means they’re guilty of criminal fraud. The CEOs of the tech giants are not merely criminals but enemies against humanity:
But that’s only the beginning. In many cases, their politically targeted censorship is coordinated with the left-wing media. CNN broadcasts a segment demanding Facebook ban a certain channel, and Facebook complies. YouTube and Twitter usually follow in concert. This is coordinated, malicious de-platforming that’s almost always conducted for a political purpose: To silence a pro-Trump voice and thereby alter the landscape of public debate in order to eliminate Trump in the next election.

Without the freedom to speak, there can be no “fair and free” elections… all elections are null and void

Democracy, of course, cannot survive without the freedom to think, and the freedom to think cannot exist without the freedom to speak. The very idea of “fair and free” elections depends entirely on people being able to debate and consider a variety of ideas circulating in public forums such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
Without the freedom to speak, there can be no fair and free elections.
This means that until the First Amendment is respected by the tech giants, all elections should be postponed until at least one year has passed after free speech is restored.
Put another way, if the tech giants reverse their censorship today and reinstate all the pro-Trump channels and voices that they insidiously banned over the last three years, then we could perhaps hold elections in May of 2021.
But we cannot hold fair and free elections in November of this year, as those elections have already been rigged or stolen by Big Tech censorship.
All the debates have been rigged. Only one side of every debate is allowed to exist on the Big Tech platforms. Whether you’re talking about climate change, the coronavirus, border security or abortion, there is only one side of every debate that’s called “facts,” and those so-called “facts” are determined entirely by delusional, sociopathic Leftists who run the tech giants and believe they alone have the right to decide the “truthiness” of every statement under the sun.
The very existence of these Big Tech authoritarian enforcers is irreconcilable with basic human dignity and freedom. No corporation has the right to unilaterally decide what is true, and the very invocation of “facts” is an insult to all those who understand logic and reason. Facts may be stubborn things, but they are also incredibly difficult to nail down, and when so-called “facts” are claimed to be perfectly formed by the very people whose own rage-filled emotional filters practically nullify any rational circuitry in their own brains, those “facts” turn out to be nothing more than consensus delusions.
Consensus does not determine fact, and this is especially true when the consensus is cherry picked to support a particular slant on “facts” while silencing all those with opposing views.

We are calling on President Trump to suspend the 2020 elections until free speech is restored in America

Today we call on President Trump to suspend the 2020 elections, seize the domain names of the tech giants to temporarily shut them down, and force Big Tech to respect the universal right to free speech among not just Americans but citizens around the world who use Big Tech’s platforms.
The freedom to speak is a universal right, and Big Tech’s insidious, repeated efforts to suppress free speech are a crime against humanity. Any corporation that engages in this large-scale, malicious oppression of basic human rights should either be forced to change its ways or be permanently abolished and prevented from functioning ever again.
Unless Twitter respects free speech for all its users, in other words, Twitter should be abolished and eliminated, and Jack Dorsey should face trial for his crimes against humanity.
Fair and free elections can only take place after the public has been able to experience at least a full year of a level playing field when it comes to public discussions and debates on all topics, including politics, vaccines, transgenderism, abortions, GMOs, pandemics and so on.

We the People refuse to accept the outcome of the 2020 elections unless free speech is restored

Finally, We the People — all of us whom are being illegally silenced and censored by Big Tech — now assert that we will not accept the outcome of the 2020 elections unless free speech is restored long before the elections take place. (Ideally, we need a full year of a level playing field before any honest elections can be held.)
The elections are being rigged every day via a coordinated criminal conspiracy among the tech giants to deprive the American people of their civil rights to engage in the very process of democracy: Debate, speech and voting.
It’s also abundantly clear that every censorship effort by the tech giants has been formulated specifically to defeat President Trump and all Republicans in the US Congress. Christians are also being systematically targeted and silenced by the radical left-leaning tech giants. Because these malicious censorship efforts are clearly so one-sided and engineered to rig all future elections, they qualify as criminal racketeering under the RICO Act.
Big Tech is, in reality, a criminal cartel of techno-fascists who routinely violate U.S. law with increasing aggressiveness. It is now abundantly clear they will never stop their crimes against America unless they are forced to stop. This means that unless humanity wants to wake up and find itself utterly enslaved, living in an Orwellian authoritarian nightmare run by lunatic Leftists who celebrate the murder of babies and the chemical neutering of children under the label of “transgenderism,” we must all rise up and abolish Big Tech with a sense of urgency.
The tech giants must be dismantled and permanently abolished. They must never be allowed to rise up again and concentrate the power of speech in the hands of the few. The CEOs and top managers of all the tech giants who have engaged in this criminal behavior must be arrested and prosecuted, then punished accordingly.
In summary:
– Big Tech platforms, including Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are engaged in a criminal conspiracy against the United States of America to selectively censor conservative, Christian and pro-Trump voices in an effort to rig all future elections and control the allowable arguments in every debate.
– The U.S. government must seize the domain names of all the tech giants to halt their crimes against the American people. The domain names may be returned once those corporations sign a consent decree in which they agree to reverse all their free speech censorship and allow speech freedom on their platforms.
– The 2020 elections must be postponed until mid-2021 in order to allow free speech to be restored in America so that open debates can be allowed to take place, contributing to “fair and free” elections.
– Knowing that Big Tech is actively working to rig the 2020 elections with politically targeted censorship, if the 2020 elections are allowed to take place, We the People withdraw our consent from recognizing the “winners” of that rigged election.
– Unless free speech is restored, the 2020 elections are already null and void, and the American people should universally withhold any recognition of the outcome of the 2020 election while demanding the restoration of free speech, public debate and the freedom to think as the necessary pillars for any resumption of democratic elections.
NOTE: Facebook will prohibit you from sharing this story from the NaturalNews.com domain. That’s part of their criminal conspiracy: Censor those who are pointing out their crimes against humanity. To share this story, first go to Banned.news:
Find more news about censorship and free speech at Banned.news.

-51.2%! Atlanta Fed Now Expects Staggering Collapse In Q2 GDP

From ZeroHedge

Two months ago, St Louis Fed president James Bullard triggered a market plunge when he predicted that unemployment may soar to 30% and GDP plunge by an unprecedented 50%, vastly eclipsing the collapse observed during the Great Depression.
Sure enough, moments ago the Atlanta Fed's closely followed GDPNow tracker confirmed this worst case scenario, when the latest model estimate for real GDP growth in the second quarter of 2020 crashed to -51.2% on May 29, down from -40.4% on May 28, which would be the biggest drop on record.
How did the US just lose 10% (annualized) in GDP growth in 1 day? Here is the explanation:
After this morning's Advance Economic Indicators report from the U.S. Census Bureau and personal income and outlays release from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the nowcast of second-quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth decreased from -43.3 percent to -56.5 percent and the nowcast of the contribution of change in real net exports to second-quarter real GDP growth decreased from 2.07 percentage points to 0.73 percentage points.
And this is what the AtlantaFed's real-time GDP estimate for the current quarter looks like:

George Floyd Worked Security At The Same Nightclub As The Officer Who Killed Him

From ZeroHedge

bizarre twist in the murder of George Floyd was reported on Thursday night, as a former club owner in south Minneapolis revealed that Floyd worked at her club as a security guard, alongside recently fired police officer Derek Chauvin, the man who killed him.
Club owner Maya Santamaria says that the two both worked the same security shift at El Nuevo Rodeo club on Lake Street, before the business was sold a few months ago.
“Chauvin was our off-duty police for almost the entirety of the 17 years that we were open. They were working together at the same time, it’s just that Chauvin worked outside and the security guards were inside,” Santamaria told KSTP.
However, Santamaria said that she can’t be certain that Chauvin and Floyd knew each other, because often over a dozen security guards working at the club on any given night.
Still, they did work overlapping shifts, and the fact that one man ended up killing the other should justify further investigation into whether or not the two had a prior relationship.
If Chauvin and Floyd were not meeting for the first time in the moments before Floyd’s death, that could potentially mean that there was a deeper motive behind the murder.
If true, this could make the difference between a manslaughter charge or a murder charge.
As of right now, no other evidence of a prior relationship has been revealed, but this is an extremely strange coincidence, which would be cause for serious suspicion in any other circumstance.
Santamaria says that she did not realize that the men in the video were her former employees until a friend told her.
“My friend sent me (the video) and said this is your guy who used to work for you and I said, ‘It’s not him.’ And then they did the closeup and that’s when I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s him.’ I didn’t recognize George as one of our security guys because he looked really different lying there like that,” Santamaria said.
People around the country are calling for Chauvin to be charged with murder, but thus far no formal charges have been filed against any of the officers involved in Floyd’s death.
All four of the officers who were on the scene at the time of the incident were fired from the police force, but Floyd’s family says that is not enough, and the city’s mayor agrees.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has called for criminal charges against the police officer who killed George Floyd.
“I’ve wrestled with, more than anything else over the last 36 hours, one fundamental question: Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail. If you had done it, or I had done it, we would be behind bars right now,” Frey said.
When asked about which specific charge he would want to see for the officer, Mayor Frey declined to comment, but many legal experts have speculated that Chauvin could face manslaughter charges considering the video evidence against him.

    Nearly Half Of Small Business Owners Expect To Close Down Permanently

    from ZeroHedge

    The economy was booming. The stock market was setting records. Then coronavirus came along and governments shut things down to minimize the pandemic. That led to massive layoffs and a nasty recession. But once states open up, things will spring back to life and the economy will go back to being great again.
    That’s the mainstream narrative. But it’s not based on reality.
    In truth, the economy was a Fed-induced bubble before the pandemic. The central bank has managed to reinflate the stock market bubble despite the economic destruction, but it is nothing but a Fed-induced sugar high. And the economy won’t likely rebound quickly, even after things open up.
    There are all kinds of reasons to doubt the quick economic recovery narrative. We’ve reported on the number of over-leveraged zombie companiesskyrocketing household debtthe battered labor market, and a potential cash-flow crisis even after the economy gets moving.
    Now we have another sign of long-term economic trouble. A survey conducted by financial services company Azlo found that nearly half of small business owners think they will eventually have to close their businesses for good.
    Forty-seven percent of the small business owners surveyed said they anticipate shutting down, and 41% said they are looking for full-time work elsewhere.
    This is on top of the small businesses that have already shut down and will never reopen.
    The survey also asked questions about the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) instituted through the CARES Act. The results were less than stellar, as Newsweek reports.
    Less than half of participants—38 percent—involved in Azlo’s recent survey applied for PPP loans. Of those who did apply, 37% said the program was slow to distribute funds and 20% described the process as ‘painful,’ the company reported.”
    It’s absurd to think the economy is going to come roaring back when nearly half of small business owners expect to shut down. Small businesses employ 58.9 million Americans, making up 47.5% of the country’s total employee workforce.
    The economy would struggle to recover from the shutdown even if it was healthy before the pandemic. And it wasn’t.