http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55145.htm
COVID-19 Exposed the Fraud of ‘American Exceptionalism’
Our leaders were so preoccupied with remaking the world they failed to see that our country was falling apart around them.
Has the time come to bury the conceit of American exceptionalism? In an article for the American edition of The Spectator, Quincy Institute President Andrew Bacevich concludes just that:
The coronavirus pandemic is a curse. It should also serve as an opportunity, Americans at long last realizing that they are not God’s agents. Out of suffering and loss, humility and self-awareness might emerge. We can only hope.
The heart of the American exceptionalism in question is American hubris. It is based on the assumption that we are better than the rest of the world, and that this superiority both entitles and obligates us to take on an outsized role in the world.
In our current foreign policy debates, the phrase “American exceptionalism” has served as a shorthand for justifying and celebrating U.S. dominance, and when necessary it has served as a blanket excuse for U.S. wrongdoing. Seongjong Song defined it in an 2015 article for The Korean Journal of International Studies this way: “American exceptionalism is the belief that the US is “qualitatively different” from all other nations.” In practice, that has meant that the U.S. does not consider itself to be bound by the same rules that apply to other states, and it reserves the right to interfere whenever and wherever it wishes.
American exceptionalism has been used in our political debates as an ideological purity test to determine whether certain political leaders are sufficiently supportive of an activist and interventionist foreign policy. The main purpose of invoking American exceptionalism in foreign policy debate has been to denigrate less hawkish policy views as unpatriotic and beyond the pale. The phrase was often used as a partisan cudgel in the previous decade as the Obama administration’s critics tried to cast doubt on the former president’s acceptance of this idea, but in the years since then it has become a rallying point for devotees of U.S. primacy regardless of party. There was an explosion in the use of the phrase in just the first few years of the 2010s compared with the previous decades. Song cited a study that showed this massive increase:
Exceptionalist discourse is on the rise in American politics. Terrence McCoy (2012) found that the term “American exceptionalism” appeared in US publications 457 times between 1980 and 2000, climbing to 2,558 times in the 2000s and 4,172 times in 2010-12.
The more that U.S. policies have proved “American exceptionalism” to be a pernicious myth at odds with reality, the more we have heard the phrase used to defend those policies. Republican hawks began the decade by accusing Obama of not believing in this “exceptionalism,” and some Democratic hawks closed it out by “reclaiming” the idea on behalf of their own discredited foreign policy vision. There may be differences in emphasis between the two camps, but there is a consensus that the U.S. has special rights and privileges that other nations cannot have. That has translated into waging unnecessary wars, assuming excessive overseas burdens, and trampling on the rights of other states, and all the while congratulating ourselves on how virtuous we are for doing all of it.
The contemporary version of American exceptionalism is tied up inextricably with the belief that the U.S. is the “indispensable nation.” According to this view, without U.S. “leadership” other countries will be unable or unwilling to respond to major international problems and threats. We have seen just how divorced from reality that belief is in just the last few months. There has been no meaningful U.S. leadership in response to the pandemic, but for the most part our allies have managed on their own fairly well. In the absence of U.S. “leadership,” many other countries have demonstrated that they haven’t really needed the U.S. Our “indispensability” is a story that we like to tell ourselves, but it isn’t true. Not only are we no longer indispensable, but as Micah Zenko pointed out many years ago, we never were.
It was 22 years ago when then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publicly declared the United States to be the “indispensable nation”: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Albright sounded much less sure of her old position: “There’s nothing in the definition of indispensable that says “alone.” It means that the United States needs to be engaged with its partners. And people’s backgrounds make a difference.” Albright’s original statement was an aggressive assertion that America was both extraordinarily powerful and unusually farsighted, and that legitimized the frequent U.S. recourse to using force.
After two decades of calamitous failures that have highlighted our weaknesses and foolishness, even she can’t muster up the old enthusiasm that she once had. No one could look back at the last 20 years of U.S. foreign policy and still honestly say that “we see further” into the future than others. Not only are we no better than other countries at anticipating and preparing for future dangers, but judging from the country’s lack of preparedness for a pandemic we are actually far behind many of the countries that we have presumed to “lead.” It is impossible to square our official self-congratulatory rhetoric with the reality of a government that is incapable of protecting its citizens from disaster.
The poor U.S. response to the pandemic has not only exposed many of the country’s serious faults, but it has also caused a crisis of faith in the prevailing mythology that American political leaders and pundits have been promoting for decades. This found expression most recently in a rather odd article in The New York Times last week. The framing of the story makes it into a lament for a collapsing ideology:
The pandemic sweeping the globe has done more than take lives and livelihoods from New Delhi to New York. It is shaking fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism — the special role the United States played for decades after World War II as the reach of its values and power made it a global leader and example to the world.
The curious thing about this description is that it takes for granted that “fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism” haven’t been thoroughly shaken long before now. The “special role” mentioned here was never going to last forever, and in some respects it was more imaginary than real. It was a period in our history that we should seek to understand and learn from, but we also need to recognize that it was transitory and already ended some time ago.
If American exceptionalism is now “on trial,” as another recent article put it, it is because it offered up a pleasing but false picture of how we relate to the rest of the world. Over the last two decades, we have seen that picture diverge more and more from real life. The false picture gives political leaders an excuse to take reckless and disastrous actions as long as they can spin them as being expressions of “who we are” as a country. At the same time, they remain blind to the country’s real vulnerabilities. It is a measure of how powerful the illusion of American exceptionalism is that it still has such a hold on so many people’s minds even now, but it has not been a harmless illusion.
While our leaders have been patting themselves on the back for the enlightened “leadership” that they imagine they are providing to the world, they have neglected the country’s urgent needs and allowed many parts of our system to fall into disrepair and ruin. They have also visited enormous destruction on many other countries in the name of “helping” them. The same hubris that has warped foreign policy decisions over the decades has encouraged a dangerous complacency about the problems in our own country. We can’t let that continue. Our leaders were so preoccupied with trying to remake other parts of the world that they failed to see that our country was falling apart all around them.
American exceptionalism has been the story that our leaders told us to excuse their neglect of America. It is a flattering story, but ultimately it is a vain one that distracts us from protecting our own country and people. We would do well if we put away this boastful fantasy and learned how to live like a normal nation.
Sunday, May 31, 2020
Saturday, May 30, 2020
SC213-7
https://www.peakprosperity.com/as-the-world-burns/
As The World Burns
Personal safety & security are quickly becoming more important in this era of growing social rage
Decades of unfairness are now boiling over in the United States in the form of protests, riots, burning buildings and violence.
Minneapolis is on fire – literally – and the unrest has spread to numerous other major cities.
Last year (2019) The Yellow Vest protesters in France dealt with enormous amount of police violence and intimidation as they put life and limb on the line to try and wrest better economic and living conditions for themselves.
The people of Hong Kong are back out in force again now that the Coronavirus threat has abated, seeking greater autonomy and control over their own lives. Last year (2019) Chileans also protested, seeking better wages and living conditions.
While the specific demands of each of these movements are unique, they all share common causes.
Our analysis at Peak Prosperity is this: the days of constant exponential growth on a finite planet are drawing to a close. All of the systems that govern the sharing of resources among humans – political, economic and especially financial – are designed to concentrate, not share, wealth.
Taken together, we have an economic pie that is no longer growing but is subject to a set of laws and financial predation that guarantee the wealthy get more than their fair share of what remains.
This leads to increasingly visible, palpable unfairness.
Primates hate that:
In today’s world, it’s grapes for the elites and cucumbers for the rest of us (if we’re even that lucky).
That’s been the model for a long time, but lately it’s been both accelerating and exposed for all to see.
Team Elite™ is busy gorging on grapes. It has granted itself $trillions of freshly printed dollars from the US Federal Reserve in order to prop up ‘their fair share of things’ like bonds, stocks, and derivatives.
That leads to these sorts of jarring headline juxtapositions:
Without any question whatsoever, the Federal Reserve has been printing up money like crazy and stuffing it into every crevice of the US financial markets in a bid to…well, drive up financial asset prices.
They’ve been extremely tone deaf the entire way while pretending that their aim isn’t to make the rich richer, or deliver fatter profits to banks. Of course, both of those things are indeed happening as a direct result of the Fed’s policies and anybody with eyes can see that — yet the media refuses to acknowledge this.
Really, it’s extremely easy to identify. Here’s what ‘grapes for the wealthy!’ looks like — see that $3 trillion spike since April?
All of that printing leads to some stocks now being at their priciest ratio to earnings ever:
That means that those holding them are being rewarded like never before. And don’t forget that the richest 10% of Americans own over 84% of all stocks
We also see the same price-goosing with bonds. Corporate bonds are now once again approaching historically low yields which means, in the see-saw language of bonds, they are almost as pricey as they’ve ever been. In history:
Who received the benefits of that gigantic cluster of grapes that the Fed has lavished upon the bond markets?
Well, the owners of all those bonds of course, and the major corporations now able to borrow at rock bottom costs even as small and medium sized enterprises are being wiped out.
As I often say, the Fed doesn’t actually create wealth, it redistributes wealth. While doing that it is both directly and indirectly picking winners and losers.
The above chart of corporate bond yields says the Fed is picking large corporations and the wealthy elite over small companies and Main Street folks.
Of course, there are no grapes quite as sweet as the ‘special interest’ varietals that are served to only the wealthiest of real estate investors:
The only thing that could make this worse would be for some White House official to condescendingly insult all us regular people by referring to us in non-human terms.
I have dozens more such examples. But I trust you get the point: the vast unfairness of the US system is now exposed for all to see. And that inequity has become even more predatory in our hour of need during the Covid-19 pandemic. Which is why social frustration and angst are now in the process of boiling over.
The reason why is as old as civilization itself, showing up ever since the first group of humans organized themselves into a cultural pyramid:
People often ask me why I shake my angry monkey-fist at the Federal Reserve so often. It’s because of the above quote. I’m the sort that prefers to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering. The Federal Reserve seems to be institutionally ignorant of the above fatal ailment.
What the Fed is doing is wholly unnecessary and manifestly unfair. It will lead to tears yet, regrettably, it is completely avoidable. Grapes for Wall Street, and cucumbers (or worse) for everyone else. It’s just how they’re wired. They literally cannot help themselves,. So things are certain to get worse before they get better.
It All Boils Over
The institutional failures of the Federal Reserve aside, there are also the obvious failures of management (I can’t bring myself to call them ‘leadership’ anymore) at our major health institutions, politicians who are far quicker to the rescue of major corporations than constituents, politicized and even falsified ‘science’ coming from formerly respected institutions, the list goes on and on.
Every one of these breaches of public trust undermines our collective safety and security. Beyond some incalculable level the foundation gives way.
The lowest level of management in this story are the police. For decades many police departments have been heavily militarized and trained often by Israelis who’ve done a remarkable job embedding the mindset of occupying forces into US policing.
Toss in some unresolved racial biases and animosity, civil asset forfeiture, no-knock raids for petty reasons that routinely result in innocent lives being violently taken, and you’ve got a tinder pile waiting for a spark.
George Floyd was that spark. A particularly callous officer with a long string of unpunished claims of excessive force and violence lodged against him, knelt on George’s neck until he was dead while 3 other officers stood by and casually watched. Against the backdrop outlined above, this was one flagrant abuse too many.
Editorially, the person now being vetted as a possible VP for the Biden campaign, Amy Klobuchar was the prosecutor in Minneapolis for many years who could have delivered justice to the lower classes. Let’s check her record:
Sadly, this is a record that can be found in hundreds of other cities. It’s neither an uncommon nor a defensible record. As a reminder, in the aftermath of the Michael Brown killing and riots in Ferguson MO (2014) the justice department came in and discovered that in a city of 20,000 mostly poor people there were 16,000 outstanding arrest warrants. Think about that for a second.
Many for infractions like ‘impeding pedestrian flow’ (a.k.a. standing on the sidewalk). The humans were little more that ATM livestock for the police and court machinery to exploit.
And so, with the killing of George Floyd, Minneapolis exploded.
There’s More Unrest On The Way. Get Prepared.
Welcome everyone to these turbulent times.
We all want to live in a just, fair, and safe world. Some people are born into peaceful times. Others aren’t so lucky. History goes through its turnings.
Well, here we are, smack in the middle of a whopper of a fourth turning. So let’s make the most of it.
I take the safety and security of myself and the people around me very seriously. Because it’s my responsibility I train, and I plan, and I think things through.
My home is in a town I judge to be very safe, and I’m not the fearful sort, so I really have to push myself to prioritize the other steps. Which I am doing because it has to be done.
The calm days are over. There’s a new future coming, one that promises to be a lot more interesting as the old Chinese saying goes.
I wish I believed that the worst of the social unrest was behind us. I don’t. Given the actions of the Fed and Plutarch’s quote, and the total lack of any pushback from the media on these matters, I am anticipating grapes for the elites and worse-than-cucumbers for everyone else for many years to come.
Which means it’s time for you to more seriously consider your approach to personal security, especially if you live in or near a city. I certainly am.
As a true mark of the turning, a growing number of my friends who would never have considered owning a gun before are now thinking about doing so. All sorts of formerly ‘hard’ decisions suddenly become up for grabs when folks start feeling more physically vulnerable.
But personal security is far more than ‘owning a gun.’ It’s a mindset as well as a behavior set. And above all, it’s about avoiding trouble in the first place.
It includes taking sensible steps to protect your home from being an easy target for crime. It means having a plan and well-practiced skills in place to keep yourself and your loved ones safe from violence. It means aligning with neighbors to watch each others’ backs. It means practicing with whatever tools or systems you adopt so that they are second nature to you if you ever have to use them.
For those without extensive experience and training (which I assume is just about everyone reading this), the best presentation I’ve ever seen covering the practical essentials you need to know to maximize your odds of staying safe is this video from Peak Prosperity member Tom C., a 19-year veteran inner city police sergeant, given at our most recent annual seminar:
Here’s a brief 3-minute clip from it in which Tom is fielding Q&A on the audience’s top concerns:
Tom’s full seminar presentation is 48 minutes long and addresses key safety & security issues including how to reduce your threat risk profile, situational awareness, what to do (both mindset and actions) if in danger, how to create “layers” of defenses, as well as good home security options. Peak Prosperity’s premium members can watch it in full here....
As The World Burns
Personal safety & security are quickly becoming more important in this era of growing social rage
Decades of unfairness are now boiling over in the United States in the form of protests, riots, burning buildings and violence.
Minneapolis is on fire – literally – and the unrest has spread to numerous other major cities.
Last year (2019) The Yellow Vest protesters in France dealt with enormous amount of police violence and intimidation as they put life and limb on the line to try and wrest better economic and living conditions for themselves.
The people of Hong Kong are back out in force again now that the Coronavirus threat has abated, seeking greater autonomy and control over their own lives. Last year (2019) Chileans also protested, seeking better wages and living conditions.
While the specific demands of each of these movements are unique, they all share common causes.
Our analysis at Peak Prosperity is this: the days of constant exponential growth on a finite planet are drawing to a close. All of the systems that govern the sharing of resources among humans – political, economic and especially financial – are designed to concentrate, not share, wealth.
Taken together, we have an economic pie that is no longer growing but is subject to a set of laws and financial predation that guarantee the wealthy get more than their fair share of what remains.
This leads to increasingly visible, palpable unfairness.
Primates hate that:
In today’s world, it’s grapes for the elites and cucumbers for the rest of us (if we’re even that lucky).
That’s been the model for a long time, but lately it’s been both accelerating and exposed for all to see.
Team Elite™ is busy gorging on grapes. It has granted itself $trillions of freshly printed dollars from the US Federal Reserve in order to prop up ‘their fair share of things’ like bonds, stocks, and derivatives.
That leads to these sorts of jarring headline juxtapositions:
Without any question whatsoever, the Federal Reserve has been printing up money like crazy and stuffing it into every crevice of the US financial markets in a bid to…well, drive up financial asset prices.
They’ve been extremely tone deaf the entire way while pretending that their aim isn’t to make the rich richer, or deliver fatter profits to banks. Of course, both of those things are indeed happening as a direct result of the Fed’s policies and anybody with eyes can see that — yet the media refuses to acknowledge this.
Really, it’s extremely easy to identify. Here’s what ‘grapes for the wealthy!’ looks like — see that $3 trillion spike since April?
All of that printing leads to some stocks now being at their priciest ratio to earnings ever:
That means that those holding them are being rewarded like never before. And don’t forget that the richest 10% of Americans own over 84% of all stocks
We also see the same price-goosing with bonds. Corporate bonds are now once again approaching historically low yields which means, in the see-saw language of bonds, they are almost as pricey as they’ve ever been. In history:
Who received the benefits of that gigantic cluster of grapes that the Fed has lavished upon the bond markets?
Well, the owners of all those bonds of course, and the major corporations now able to borrow at rock bottom costs even as small and medium sized enterprises are being wiped out.
As I often say, the Fed doesn’t actually create wealth, it redistributes wealth. While doing that it is both directly and indirectly picking winners and losers.
The above chart of corporate bond yields says the Fed is picking large corporations and the wealthy elite over small companies and Main Street folks.
Of course, there are no grapes quite as sweet as the ‘special interest’ varietals that are served to only the wealthiest of real estate investors:
The only thing that could make this worse would be for some White House official to condescendingly insult all us regular people by referring to us in non-human terms.
I have dozens more such examples. But I trust you get the point: the vast unfairness of the US system is now exposed for all to see. And that inequity has become even more predatory in our hour of need during the Covid-19 pandemic. Which is why social frustration and angst are now in the process of boiling over.
The reason why is as old as civilization itself, showing up ever since the first group of humans organized themselves into a cultural pyramid:
People often ask me why I shake my angry monkey-fist at the Federal Reserve so often. It’s because of the above quote. I’m the sort that prefers to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering. The Federal Reserve seems to be institutionally ignorant of the above fatal ailment.
What the Fed is doing is wholly unnecessary and manifestly unfair. It will lead to tears yet, regrettably, it is completely avoidable. Grapes for Wall Street, and cucumbers (or worse) for everyone else. It’s just how they’re wired. They literally cannot help themselves,. So things are certain to get worse before they get better.
It All Boils Over
The institutional failures of the Federal Reserve aside, there are also the obvious failures of management (I can’t bring myself to call them ‘leadership’ anymore) at our major health institutions, politicians who are far quicker to the rescue of major corporations than constituents, politicized and even falsified ‘science’ coming from formerly respected institutions, the list goes on and on.
Every one of these breaches of public trust undermines our collective safety and security. Beyond some incalculable level the foundation gives way.
The lowest level of management in this story are the police. For decades many police departments have been heavily militarized and trained often by Israelis who’ve done a remarkable job embedding the mindset of occupying forces into US policing.
Toss in some unresolved racial biases and animosity, civil asset forfeiture, no-knock raids for petty reasons that routinely result in innocent lives being violently taken, and you’ve got a tinder pile waiting for a spark.
George Floyd was that spark. A particularly callous officer with a long string of unpunished claims of excessive force and violence lodged against him, knelt on George’s neck until he was dead while 3 other officers stood by and casually watched. Against the backdrop outlined above, this was one flagrant abuse too many.
Editorially, the person now being vetted as a possible VP for the Biden campaign, Amy Klobuchar was the prosecutor in Minneapolis for many years who could have delivered justice to the lower classes. Let’s check her record:
Sadly, this is a record that can be found in hundreds of other cities. It’s neither an uncommon nor a defensible record. As a reminder, in the aftermath of the Michael Brown killing and riots in Ferguson MO (2014) the justice department came in and discovered that in a city of 20,000 mostly poor people there were 16,000 outstanding arrest warrants. Think about that for a second.
Many for infractions like ‘impeding pedestrian flow’ (a.k.a. standing on the sidewalk). The humans were little more that ATM livestock for the police and court machinery to exploit.
And so, with the killing of George Floyd, Minneapolis exploded.
There’s More Unrest On The Way. Get Prepared.
Welcome everyone to these turbulent times.
We all want to live in a just, fair, and safe world. Some people are born into peaceful times. Others aren’t so lucky. History goes through its turnings.
Well, here we are, smack in the middle of a whopper of a fourth turning. So let’s make the most of it.
I take the safety and security of myself and the people around me very seriously. Because it’s my responsibility I train, and I plan, and I think things through.
My home is in a town I judge to be very safe, and I’m not the fearful sort, so I really have to push myself to prioritize the other steps. Which I am doing because it has to be done.
The calm days are over. There’s a new future coming, one that promises to be a lot more interesting as the old Chinese saying goes.
I wish I believed that the worst of the social unrest was behind us. I don’t. Given the actions of the Fed and Plutarch’s quote, and the total lack of any pushback from the media on these matters, I am anticipating grapes for the elites and worse-than-cucumbers for everyone else for many years to come.
Which means it’s time for you to more seriously consider your approach to personal security, especially if you live in or near a city. I certainly am.
As a true mark of the turning, a growing number of my friends who would never have considered owning a gun before are now thinking about doing so. All sorts of formerly ‘hard’ decisions suddenly become up for grabs when folks start feeling more physically vulnerable.
But personal security is far more than ‘owning a gun.’ It’s a mindset as well as a behavior set. And above all, it’s about avoiding trouble in the first place.
It includes taking sensible steps to protect your home from being an easy target for crime. It means having a plan and well-practiced skills in place to keep yourself and your loved ones safe from violence. It means aligning with neighbors to watch each others’ backs. It means practicing with whatever tools or systems you adopt so that they are second nature to you if you ever have to use them.
For those without extensive experience and training (which I assume is just about everyone reading this), the best presentation I’ve ever seen covering the practical essentials you need to know to maximize your odds of staying safe is this video from Peak Prosperity member Tom C., a 19-year veteran inner city police sergeant, given at our most recent annual seminar:
Here’s a brief 3-minute clip from it in which Tom is fielding Q&A on the audience’s top concerns:
Tom’s full seminar presentation is 48 minutes long and addresses key safety & security issues including how to reduce your threat risk profile, situational awareness, what to do (both mindset and actions) if in danger, how to create “layers” of defenses, as well as good home security options. Peak Prosperity’s premium members can watch it in full here....
Friday, May 29, 2020
SC213-6
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-2020-wealth-transfer-heist/5714438
The Great US 2020 Wealth Transfer Heist. Deep Inequalities in US Society
In less than three-and-a-half years in office, Trump oversaw the Great GOP 2017 tax cut heist.
It handed corporate America and high-net-worth individuals a multi-billion dollar bonanza of enhanced wealth — followed this year by what I call 9/11 2.0, economic collapse triggered by COVID-19 lockdowns.
Along with letting dominant US corporate giants consolidate to greater size and market power, it includes an escalated great wealth transfer from ordinary Americans to privileged ones.
The scheme has been ongoing in the US (and West) for decades, notably since the neoliberal 90s — war on social justice, a plot to eliminate it altogether over time.
It aims to free up US wealth for escalated militarism, endless wars, corporate handouts, and greater enrichment of America’s super-rich.
The grand scheme is transforming the US (and other Western states) into ruler-serf societies — thirdworldized and controlled by police state power, unsafe and unfit to live in, privileged interests served exclusively at the expense of ordinary people.
Since US economic collapse began in February, millions of Americans applied for unemployment benefits — ongoing for 12 consecutive weeks in unprecedented numbers, greater than during the Great Depression, US unemployment today much higher than then.
Overall conditions today for ordinary Americans are far worse than in the 1930s.
Following Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 election, New Deal programs put millions of people back to work.
Virtually nothing is being done to create jobs today, Dems as culpable as Republicans.
Both right wings of the one-party state are indifferent toward public health and welfare, and it shows by their policies.
Official unemployment numbers way understate reality, the true number around 40% of working-age Americans.
Most US workers with jobs have part-time or temp employment for poverty-level wages with few or no benefits.
Countless numbers of US workers had their hours and pay cut. Growing millions have no health insurance.
Americans can have anything they want — depending on their ability to pay.
They’re increasingly on their own otherwise, notably at a time of unprecedented economic collapse that’s far more serious than COVID-19 outbreaks.
They’ll pass in time, even if increase substantially in the months ahead.
The wreckage from economic collapse will be long-lasting, millions of jobs permanently lost, the lives and welfare of countless numbers of Americans devastated — way too little help from Washington forthcoming.
A new Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) report discussed a bonanza for US billionaires at a time of unprecedented job losses — “pandemic profiteers” benefitting from human misery.
Super-wealth of America’s billionaire class increased by around “half a trillion” dollars this year, according to IPS, an unprecedented heist over a short period of time.
According to Forbes magazine, the US has 614 billionaires, along with nine others, foreign nationals living in America.
IPS reported that the super-wealth of America’s billionaire class increased by 16.5% from March 18 to May 28 — while countless millions in the country “face suffering, hardship and loss of life.”
The US billionaire class added 14 more to its total in the last 10 weeks, 628 up from 614, IPS explained.
Two super-billionaires — Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — increased their wealth by “over $63 billion since March 18.”
IPS called today’s state of America “a grotesque indicator of the deep inequalities in US society.”
Before economic collapse began in February, over 20% of working-age Americans were unemployed, based on the pre-1990 calculation model.
They’re omitted from official Labor Department numbers, nonpersons according to Republicans and Dems.
In the past three months, around 41 million more Americans sought unemployment benefits.
Millions more haven’t had their applications processed, along with millions of out-of-work self-employed Americans — many, maybe most, not getting unemployment benefits.
Because health insurance is linked to employment, tens of millions of Americans lost coverage.
IPS: “While millions risk their lives and livelihoods as first responders and front line workers, these billionaires benefit from an economy and tax system that is wired to funnel wealth to the top.”
“Low-wage workers, people of color, and women have suffered disproportionately in the combined medical and economic crises.”
“Billionaires are overwhelmingly white men.”
As of mid-May, the combined super-wealth of the US billionaire class exceeded $3.3 trillion.
Two Americas exist — one for the vast majority of its people, ordinary ones struggling to get by, including unprecedented numbers out-of-work.
The other is for the nation’s super-rich and privileged class overall. Its members never had things better — their gain at the expense of most others.
Looking ahead, things most likely will worsen for ordinary Americans, the trend for decades.
They’re exploited by the nation’s privileged class in cahoots with Republicans, Dems, and the Wall Street owned Fed.
Together they comprise a conspiracy against peace, equity, justice, the rule of law, and government serving all its people.
The American way is polar opposite, the privileged few benefitting hugely at the expense of most others in a nation where democracy is pure fantasy, not real.
The Great US 2020 Wealth Transfer Heist. Deep Inequalities in US Society
In less than three-and-a-half years in office, Trump oversaw the Great GOP 2017 tax cut heist.
It handed corporate America and high-net-worth individuals a multi-billion dollar bonanza of enhanced wealth — followed this year by what I call 9/11 2.0, economic collapse triggered by COVID-19 lockdowns.
Along with letting dominant US corporate giants consolidate to greater size and market power, it includes an escalated great wealth transfer from ordinary Americans to privileged ones.
The scheme has been ongoing in the US (and West) for decades, notably since the neoliberal 90s — war on social justice, a plot to eliminate it altogether over time.
It aims to free up US wealth for escalated militarism, endless wars, corporate handouts, and greater enrichment of America’s super-rich.
The grand scheme is transforming the US (and other Western states) into ruler-serf societies — thirdworldized and controlled by police state power, unsafe and unfit to live in, privileged interests served exclusively at the expense of ordinary people.
Since US economic collapse began in February, millions of Americans applied for unemployment benefits — ongoing for 12 consecutive weeks in unprecedented numbers, greater than during the Great Depression, US unemployment today much higher than then.
Overall conditions today for ordinary Americans are far worse than in the 1930s.
Following Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 election, New Deal programs put millions of people back to work.
Virtually nothing is being done to create jobs today, Dems as culpable as Republicans.
Both right wings of the one-party state are indifferent toward public health and welfare, and it shows by their policies.
Official unemployment numbers way understate reality, the true number around 40% of working-age Americans.
Most US workers with jobs have part-time or temp employment for poverty-level wages with few or no benefits.
Countless numbers of US workers had their hours and pay cut. Growing millions have no health insurance.
Americans can have anything they want — depending on their ability to pay.
They’re increasingly on their own otherwise, notably at a time of unprecedented economic collapse that’s far more serious than COVID-19 outbreaks.
They’ll pass in time, even if increase substantially in the months ahead.
The wreckage from economic collapse will be long-lasting, millions of jobs permanently lost, the lives and welfare of countless numbers of Americans devastated — way too little help from Washington forthcoming.
A new Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) report discussed a bonanza for US billionaires at a time of unprecedented job losses — “pandemic profiteers” benefitting from human misery.
Super-wealth of America’s billionaire class increased by around “half a trillion” dollars this year, according to IPS, an unprecedented heist over a short period of time.
According to Forbes magazine, the US has 614 billionaires, along with nine others, foreign nationals living in America.
IPS reported that the super-wealth of America’s billionaire class increased by 16.5% from March 18 to May 28 — while countless millions in the country “face suffering, hardship and loss of life.”
The US billionaire class added 14 more to its total in the last 10 weeks, 628 up from 614, IPS explained.
Two super-billionaires — Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — increased their wealth by “over $63 billion since March 18.”
IPS called today’s state of America “a grotesque indicator of the deep inequalities in US society.”
Before economic collapse began in February, over 20% of working-age Americans were unemployed, based on the pre-1990 calculation model.
They’re omitted from official Labor Department numbers, nonpersons according to Republicans and Dems.
In the past three months, around 41 million more Americans sought unemployment benefits.
Millions more haven’t had their applications processed, along with millions of out-of-work self-employed Americans — many, maybe most, not getting unemployment benefits.
Because health insurance is linked to employment, tens of millions of Americans lost coverage.
IPS: “While millions risk their lives and livelihoods as first responders and front line workers, these billionaires benefit from an economy and tax system that is wired to funnel wealth to the top.”
“Low-wage workers, people of color, and women have suffered disproportionately in the combined medical and economic crises.”
“Billionaires are overwhelmingly white men.”
As of mid-May, the combined super-wealth of the US billionaire class exceeded $3.3 trillion.
Two Americas exist — one for the vast majority of its people, ordinary ones struggling to get by, including unprecedented numbers out-of-work.
The other is for the nation’s super-rich and privileged class overall. Its members never had things better — their gain at the expense of most others.
Looking ahead, things most likely will worsen for ordinary Americans, the trend for decades.
They’re exploited by the nation’s privileged class in cahoots with Republicans, Dems, and the Wall Street owned Fed.
Together they comprise a conspiracy against peace, equity, justice, the rule of law, and government serving all its people.
The American way is polar opposite, the privileged few benefitting hugely at the expense of most others in a nation where democracy is pure fantasy, not real.
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
SC213-5
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay20/tinas-orgy5-20.html
TINA's Orgy: Anything Goes, Winners Take All
TINA--there is no alternative--is throwing an orgy of money-creation, and it's one for the ages: The Federal Reserve has created over $3 trillion out of thin air in a few months and invited all the usual parasites, predators and speculators to the orgy.
You and I, mere taxpayers? We get to watch as our "betters" feast on the Fed's limitless bounty of free money for financiers and other parasites and predators. Of course we don't get a clear view of the proceedings; the orgy is all behind closed doors.
What we see is the threadbare comedy of Fed Chair Jay Powell coming out of the orgy to assure us that the orgy is all for the good of the country--ha-ha-ha. Those gorging on the Fed feast inside are in danger of laughing so hard at Powell's comedy routine they might choke.
Your share of the orgy is a bowl of thin gruel: $1,200. That wasn't distributed out of kindness or generosity; like all federal giveaways, it's real purpose is to give you enough cash to make your loan payments so all the parasites and predators in the Fed's orgy won't experience the terrible suffering caused by debt-serfs defaulting.
The excuse for the orgy is always the same: there is no alternative. We have to bail out the greedy corporations that borrowed billions to buy back their own stocks, the corporations that sold junk debt to finance their bonuses and dividends, the financiers who bought the risky debt, the speculators who front-run the Fed's purchases of assets and on and on in an endless parade of fraud and corruption--because if we don't bail out the speculators and other parasites, the whole financial system will implode and that would be terrible.
Terrible for who? To answer the question, we need to ponder the fundamental nature of the Fed and our financial system, which can be summarized in one line: anything goes, and winners take all.
Anything goes, because money buys political influence and so what was once illegal--buying back your own stock, advertising medications directly to consumers, etc.-- are not just made legal but normalized by constant propaganda in the corporate media that these forms of legalized looting are good for the nation because... well, that doesn't matter, just take our word for it.
When anything goes, the winners take all. This is how we've ended up with a unstable, fragile economy dominated by a handful of corporations in each sector whose sole purpose is to maximize profits by any means available, and it just so happens the most profitable arrangements are monopoly and cartels, and so that's what we have: an economy of high costs, enormous profits, low-quality goods and services for the bottom 95% and an extreme concentration of wealth and income in the hands of the winners.
This dynamic also characterizes the public sector, where anything goes if you can get away with it has generated a few winners-- employees of small school districts getting salaries of $350,000 and pensions to match, and so on--and a multitude of losers as actual services for the public decay even as costs soar. Naturally, questions about this are dismissed with TINA: there is no alternative.
The fragility of such a system is so extreme that the winners' only hope to hold onto their booty is to persuade us that the simulations of open markets and democracy they conjure up are "real" in the sense that we can't really see the Emperor's fine clothing but we accept that this must be a flaw in our own sight, rather than what it really is: self-serving institutionalized delusion: believe us when we assure you that there is no alternative.
So as the greediest and most parasitic few gorge on TINA's orgy, try not to bust a gut laughing at Jay Powell's comedy act justifying the orgy because really, there is no alternative other than a collapse of what deserves to collapse and what will collapse despite (or as a result of) the Fed's manic money-printing.
What nobody dares whisper is there is no alternative to collapse because the system is now too fragile and brittle to survive. TINA may get the last laugh after all.
TINA's Orgy: Anything Goes, Winners Take All
TINA--there is no alternative--is throwing an orgy of money-creation, and it's one for the ages: The Federal Reserve has created over $3 trillion out of thin air in a few months and invited all the usual parasites, predators and speculators to the orgy.
You and I, mere taxpayers? We get to watch as our "betters" feast on the Fed's limitless bounty of free money for financiers and other parasites and predators. Of course we don't get a clear view of the proceedings; the orgy is all behind closed doors.
What we see is the threadbare comedy of Fed Chair Jay Powell coming out of the orgy to assure us that the orgy is all for the good of the country--ha-ha-ha. Those gorging on the Fed feast inside are in danger of laughing so hard at Powell's comedy routine they might choke.
Your share of the orgy is a bowl of thin gruel: $1,200. That wasn't distributed out of kindness or generosity; like all federal giveaways, it's real purpose is to give you enough cash to make your loan payments so all the parasites and predators in the Fed's orgy won't experience the terrible suffering caused by debt-serfs defaulting.
The excuse for the orgy is always the same: there is no alternative. We have to bail out the greedy corporations that borrowed billions to buy back their own stocks, the corporations that sold junk debt to finance their bonuses and dividends, the financiers who bought the risky debt, the speculators who front-run the Fed's purchases of assets and on and on in an endless parade of fraud and corruption--because if we don't bail out the speculators and other parasites, the whole financial system will implode and that would be terrible.
Terrible for who? To answer the question, we need to ponder the fundamental nature of the Fed and our financial system, which can be summarized in one line: anything goes, and winners take all.
Anything goes, because money buys political influence and so what was once illegal--buying back your own stock, advertising medications directly to consumers, etc.-- are not just made legal but normalized by constant propaganda in the corporate media that these forms of legalized looting are good for the nation because... well, that doesn't matter, just take our word for it.
When anything goes, the winners take all. This is how we've ended up with a unstable, fragile economy dominated by a handful of corporations in each sector whose sole purpose is to maximize profits by any means available, and it just so happens the most profitable arrangements are monopoly and cartels, and so that's what we have: an economy of high costs, enormous profits, low-quality goods and services for the bottom 95% and an extreme concentration of wealth and income in the hands of the winners.
This dynamic also characterizes the public sector, where anything goes if you can get away with it has generated a few winners-- employees of small school districts getting salaries of $350,000 and pensions to match, and so on--and a multitude of losers as actual services for the public decay even as costs soar. Naturally, questions about this are dismissed with TINA: there is no alternative.
The fragility of such a system is so extreme that the winners' only hope to hold onto their booty is to persuade us that the simulations of open markets and democracy they conjure up are "real" in the sense that we can't really see the Emperor's fine clothing but we accept that this must be a flaw in our own sight, rather than what it really is: self-serving institutionalized delusion: believe us when we assure you that there is no alternative.
So as the greediest and most parasitic few gorge on TINA's orgy, try not to bust a gut laughing at Jay Powell's comedy act justifying the orgy because really, there is no alternative other than a collapse of what deserves to collapse and what will collapse despite (or as a result of) the Fed's manic money-printing.
What nobody dares whisper is there is no alternative to collapse because the system is now too fragile and brittle to survive. TINA may get the last laugh after all.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
SC213-4
https://www.globalresearch.ca/lockdown-turned-america-despotic-cash-strapped-basket-case/5713970
The “Lockdown” Has Turned America Into a Despotic, Cash-Strapped Basket-Case
“… and when we look back on this in two years time, from the ruins of our economy and the ruins of our liberty, we will want to see some kind of justice, that the people who made this decision should pay a penalty for what they’ve done.” – Peter Hitchens
Economic activity across the country has collapsed, GDP is shrinking at the fastest pace on record, and the economic data is worse than anytime in history. Every sector of the economy is contracting and every economic indicator is pointing down. According to economist Nouriel Roubini, the country is headed towards a decade of “depression and debt”, and that is probably an understatement.
What prompted our leaders to follow the path of China? Were they bullied into it by Dr. Fauci and the Vaccine Gestapo or were they simply reacting to the sudden rise in Covid cases that skyrocketed overnight? Whatever the reason might be, the country is now headed for either a short-but-severe “U” shaped recession or an excruciating-and-protracted 1930s-type slump. Small and mid-sized businesses are folding by the thousands, the states are drowning in red ink, and more people are currently unemployed than anytime in the country’s 244 year history. The lockdown has effectively obliterated the economy and left the country in ruins. Here’s some background from an article at Yahoo Finance:
“Permanent job losses are likely to be a feature of the eventual U.S. recovery, according to University of Chicago research, which estimates that 42% of recently unemployed workers will not return to their jobs amid the “profound” shock stemming from coronavirus lockdowns.
The pandemic has taken a brutal toll on the world’s largest economy, with at least 36 million people thrown out of work over the last two months….The lockdowns have cratered activity in an economy that consists of 70% consumer spending, while undoing all of the jobs created since the great recession ended….
“It will likely take a number of years for the labor market to recover from its pandemic-induced meltdown.”…researchers extrapolated their findings that over 100,000 restaurants are expected to be permanently shuttered in the near-term…”
Some employers will shift resources to other roles, while many laid off workers may have to find new positions or careers.”
(“‘Major reallocation shock’ from coronavirus will see 42% of lost jobs evaporate: Study” Yahoo Finance)
The American people have yet to grasp the magnitude of the devastation caused by the lockdown but, soon, it will be the only topic of conversation. Most people left their jobs thinking they would return to them in a matter of weeks. They never imagined that a policy blunder would put the economy into a vicious death spiral that would terminate their livelihoods, dampen their prospects for the future, and reduce them to hopelessness and destitution. They never thought that such a nightmare was possible, especially since they were just following the orders of their governors and the affable Dr Fauci. They trusted these people. They put their lives in their hands and they were misled, duped into believing that these “experts” knew what they were doing when, all-along, they were making it up on the fly. Now we’re all going to pay for the mistakes for which they alone are responsible. This is from abc7news:
“Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus.…The head of the trauma in the department believes mental health is suffering so much, it is time to end the shelter-in-place order.
“We’ve never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time,” he said. “I mean we’ve seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.”
Kacey Hansen has worked as a trauma nurse at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek for almost 33 years. She is worried because not only are they seeing more suicide attempts, she says they are not able to save as many patients as usual.
“What I have seen recently, I have never seen before,” Hansen said. “I have never seen so much intentional injury.”The trauma team is speaking out because they want the community to be aware, for people to reach out and support each other and for those who are suffering to know they can get help.” (“Suicides on the rise amid stay-at-home order, Bay Area medical professionals say”, ABC News 7)
Here’s more from an article at the Washington Examiner:
“A study published in early May suggested that the coronavirus could lead to at least 75,000 deaths directly brought on by anxiety from the virus, job losses, and addiction to alcohol and drugs. Another study conducted by Just Facts around the same time computed a broad array of scientific data showing that stress is one of the deadliest health hazards in the world and estimated that the coronavirus lockdowns will destroy 7 times as many years of human life than strict lockdowns can save….
Earlier this week, more than 600 doctors signed their names on a letter to President Trump, referring to the continued lockdowns as a “mass casualty incident” and urging him to do what he can to ensure they come to an end….By late March, more people had died in just one Tennessee county from suicide than had died in the entire state directly from the virus.” (“California doctors say they’ve seen more deaths from suicide than coronavirus since lockdowns”, Washington Examiner)
So the lockdown is a “mass casualty incident”?
Of course it is. What else would you call it? People are locked in their homes indefinitely while the predatory media does everything in its power to terrorize them with one appalling horror story after the other. Did anyone consider this grim scenario before the lockdowns were imposed? Did anyone think that, perhaps, fragile people — that are cut off from the world, their friends and their families– might become so depressed that they’d take their own lives? Of course none of this matters to the media that measures its success in terms of its ratings not the number of people they’ve killed with their relentless fearmongering. For that, they accept no responsibility at all. Here’s more:
“Researchers warn that socially isolated people are over 40% more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or other major cardiovascular event. Moreover, the socially isolated are nearly 50% more likely to die from any cause….The study was conducted by Dr. Janine Gronewold and Professor Dirk M. Hermann from the University Hospital in Essen, Germany. They analyzed data on 4,316 people (average age: 59 years old) who had been recruited for research between 2000 and 2003…
“We have known for some time that feeling lonely or lacking contact with close friends and family can have an impact on your physical health”, Dr. Gronewold explains in a release. “What this study tells us is that having strong social relationships is of high importance for your heart health and similar to the role of classical protective factors such as having a healthy blood pressure, acceptable cholesterol levels, and a normal weight.”…
“We don’t understand yet why people who are socially isolated have such poor health outcomes, but this is obviously a worrying finding, particularly during these times of prolonged social distancing,” Dr. Gronewold says.” (“Social Isolation Increases Risk Of Heart Attack, Stroke, & Death From All Causes,” Study Finds)
Repeat– “We don’t understand why people who are socially isolated have such poor health outcomes??”
Yes, we do. It’s because they’re desperately lonely and cut-off from normal human-to-human contact. That, in turn, effects their overall health and well being. Of course if it was up to the malevolent Dr. Fauci we’d never even shake hands again. Fauci would like to repeal 5 thousand years of normal, social interaction and remake the world according to his own ghoulish specifications. Unfortunately, we are now seeing the blowback from that delusional world-view in the form of growing mental health problems, depression, anxiety and suicide. Should we tally the suicides alongside the Covid deaths to see whether Fauci’s strategy is working or not or should we simply ignore the horrible human costs of this twisted lockdown experiment? Some day, the American people will demand an accounting for the last 10 weeks, but we’re not there just yet. Here’s more from Bloomberg News:
“Retail landlords are sending out thousands of default notices to tenants, a situation that could tip already-ailing retailers into bankruptcy or total collapse….Department stores, restaurants, apparel merchants and specialty chains have been getting the notices as property owners who’ve gone unpaid for as long as three months lose patience, according to people with knowledge of the matter and court filings.
…“The default letters from landlords are flying out the door,” said Andy Graiser, co-president of A&G Real Estate Partners, whose firm works with retailers and other commercial tenants. “It’s creating a real fear in the marketplace,” Graiser said.” (“Default Notices Are Piling Up for Retailers Unable to Pay Rent”, Bloomberg)
More bad news. The lockdowns have triggered a tsunami of defaults and bankruptcies. With no source of revenue, merchants cannot pay the rent nor can landlords roll over their debts. The economy is an interlocking row of dominoes that tumble in sequence once the first block is set in motion. The American people were sold the idea that the economy could be turned “on and off” like a light switch. Now they can see that the theory has no basis in reality. As the bankruptcies pile up, the job losses will continue to increase pushing the country deeper into recession. Fauci’s directives have turned the country into a economic wastelands, that much is certain. Check out this excerpt from an article by is a clip from an article by Naomi Klein:
“…. former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that both set the new tone and made clear that Silicon Valley had every intention of leveraging the crisis for a permanent transformation….
” Schmidt called for “unprecedented partnerships between government and industry…
At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police, and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies….
If tech companies win their ferocious lobbying campaign for remote learning, telehealth, 5G, and driverless vehicles — their Screen New Deal — there simply won’t be any money left over for urgent public priorities, never mind the Green New Deal that our planet urgently needs…
For them, and many others in Silicon Valley, the pandemic is a golden opportunity to receive not just the gratitude, but t he deference and power that they feel has been unjustly denied.” (Screen New Deal, Naomi Klein, The Intercept)
Can you see what’s going on?
The fact that tens of thousands of people are dying and the nation’s economy has been reduced to rubble, doesn’t matter to the tech giants. For them the crisis is a “golden opportunity”, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to further subsume the government, to garner more government funding for their futuristic projects, to assert greater influence over public policy, and to wrap their tentacles more tightly around the levers of state power.
The tech giants are using the pandemic as a vehicle for imposing their own vision on the country and for promoting their own malign police state agenda. Just as Corporate America is using the crisis to restructure the labor market, and Wall Street is using the crisis to garner lavish multi-trillion dollar bailouts, and Fauci and Co are using the crisis to push for universal vaccines, so too, the tech giants are using the crisis to grab more power, more money and more integration with the state until the US government is nothing more than a trifling subsidiary of the ever-expanding Google octopus. That’s the ultimate goal, privatizing the state so the corporations rule the world. It is a Mission (that is nearly) Accomplished!
So how are the people going to respond to these developments? What will the reaction be when ordinary working people realize that their lives have fundamentally changed for the worse, that their living standards will continue to slide, that full-time work and job security have gone the way of the Dodo, that the middle class is going to be reduced to the size of an acorn, and that the social safety-net has been replaced by higher taxes, fewer public services, a weaker dollar and years of grinding, demoralizing austerity? Should we expect social unrest, rioting and street violence in the near future or should we assume that that those outbursts are inevitable now that personal liberty has been strangled while the economy was vaporized?
No country that willingly destroys its own economy should expect anything different. No people that abandon their liberty for the faux-security of state protection should expect anything different. Peter Hitchens sums it up perfectly in an article at the Daily Mail:
“I hate this word, (“lockdown”) because it does not seem to me to be fitting to describe free people in a free country. But we are no longer such people, or such a country. We have become muzzled, mouthless, voiceless, humiliated, regimented prisoners, shuffling about at the command of others, stopping when told to stop, moving when told to move, shouted at by jacks-in-office against whom we have no appeal. We are learning, during this induction period, to do what we are told and to become obedient, servile citizens of a new authoritarian State. We are unlearning the old rules of freedom.” (“Peter Hitchens: The New Authoritarian State’s Dream”, Daily Mail)
Well put. Bravo, Peter Hitchens!
The “Lockdown” Has Turned America Into a Despotic, Cash-Strapped Basket-Case
“… and when we look back on this in two years time, from the ruins of our economy and the ruins of our liberty, we will want to see some kind of justice, that the people who made this decision should pay a penalty for what they’ve done.” – Peter Hitchens
Economic activity across the country has collapsed, GDP is shrinking at the fastest pace on record, and the economic data is worse than anytime in history. Every sector of the economy is contracting and every economic indicator is pointing down. According to economist Nouriel Roubini, the country is headed towards a decade of “depression and debt”, and that is probably an understatement.
What prompted our leaders to follow the path of China? Were they bullied into it by Dr. Fauci and the Vaccine Gestapo or were they simply reacting to the sudden rise in Covid cases that skyrocketed overnight? Whatever the reason might be, the country is now headed for either a short-but-severe “U” shaped recession or an excruciating-and-protracted 1930s-type slump. Small and mid-sized businesses are folding by the thousands, the states are drowning in red ink, and more people are currently unemployed than anytime in the country’s 244 year history. The lockdown has effectively obliterated the economy and left the country in ruins. Here’s some background from an article at Yahoo Finance:
“Permanent job losses are likely to be a feature of the eventual U.S. recovery, according to University of Chicago research, which estimates that 42% of recently unemployed workers will not return to their jobs amid the “profound” shock stemming from coronavirus lockdowns.
The pandemic has taken a brutal toll on the world’s largest economy, with at least 36 million people thrown out of work over the last two months….The lockdowns have cratered activity in an economy that consists of 70% consumer spending, while undoing all of the jobs created since the great recession ended….
“It will likely take a number of years for the labor market to recover from its pandemic-induced meltdown.”…researchers extrapolated their findings that over 100,000 restaurants are expected to be permanently shuttered in the near-term…”
Some employers will shift resources to other roles, while many laid off workers may have to find new positions or careers.”
(“‘Major reallocation shock’ from coronavirus will see 42% of lost jobs evaporate: Study” Yahoo Finance)
The American people have yet to grasp the magnitude of the devastation caused by the lockdown but, soon, it will be the only topic of conversation. Most people left their jobs thinking they would return to them in a matter of weeks. They never imagined that a policy blunder would put the economy into a vicious death spiral that would terminate their livelihoods, dampen their prospects for the future, and reduce them to hopelessness and destitution. They never thought that such a nightmare was possible, especially since they were just following the orders of their governors and the affable Dr Fauci. They trusted these people. They put their lives in their hands and they were misled, duped into believing that these “experts” knew what they were doing when, all-along, they were making it up on the fly. Now we’re all going to pay for the mistakes for which they alone are responsible. This is from abc7news:
“Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus.…The head of the trauma in the department believes mental health is suffering so much, it is time to end the shelter-in-place order.
“We’ve never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time,” he said. “I mean we’ve seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.”
Kacey Hansen has worked as a trauma nurse at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek for almost 33 years. She is worried because not only are they seeing more suicide attempts, she says they are not able to save as many patients as usual.
“What I have seen recently, I have never seen before,” Hansen said. “I have never seen so much intentional injury.”The trauma team is speaking out because they want the community to be aware, for people to reach out and support each other and for those who are suffering to know they can get help.” (“Suicides on the rise amid stay-at-home order, Bay Area medical professionals say”, ABC News 7)
Here’s more from an article at the Washington Examiner:
“A study published in early May suggested that the coronavirus could lead to at least 75,000 deaths directly brought on by anxiety from the virus, job losses, and addiction to alcohol and drugs. Another study conducted by Just Facts around the same time computed a broad array of scientific data showing that stress is one of the deadliest health hazards in the world and estimated that the coronavirus lockdowns will destroy 7 times as many years of human life than strict lockdowns can save….
Earlier this week, more than 600 doctors signed their names on a letter to President Trump, referring to the continued lockdowns as a “mass casualty incident” and urging him to do what he can to ensure they come to an end….By late March, more people had died in just one Tennessee county from suicide than had died in the entire state directly from the virus.” (“California doctors say they’ve seen more deaths from suicide than coronavirus since lockdowns”, Washington Examiner)
So the lockdown is a “mass casualty incident”?
Of course it is. What else would you call it? People are locked in their homes indefinitely while the predatory media does everything in its power to terrorize them with one appalling horror story after the other. Did anyone consider this grim scenario before the lockdowns were imposed? Did anyone think that, perhaps, fragile people — that are cut off from the world, their friends and their families– might become so depressed that they’d take their own lives? Of course none of this matters to the media that measures its success in terms of its ratings not the number of people they’ve killed with their relentless fearmongering. For that, they accept no responsibility at all. Here’s more:
“Researchers warn that socially isolated people are over 40% more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or other major cardiovascular event. Moreover, the socially isolated are nearly 50% more likely to die from any cause….The study was conducted by Dr. Janine Gronewold and Professor Dirk M. Hermann from the University Hospital in Essen, Germany. They analyzed data on 4,316 people (average age: 59 years old) who had been recruited for research between 2000 and 2003…
“We have known for some time that feeling lonely or lacking contact with close friends and family can have an impact on your physical health”, Dr. Gronewold explains in a release. “What this study tells us is that having strong social relationships is of high importance for your heart health and similar to the role of classical protective factors such as having a healthy blood pressure, acceptable cholesterol levels, and a normal weight.”…
“We don’t understand yet why people who are socially isolated have such poor health outcomes, but this is obviously a worrying finding, particularly during these times of prolonged social distancing,” Dr. Gronewold says.” (“Social Isolation Increases Risk Of Heart Attack, Stroke, & Death From All Causes,” Study Finds)
Repeat– “We don’t understand why people who are socially isolated have such poor health outcomes??”
Yes, we do. It’s because they’re desperately lonely and cut-off from normal human-to-human contact. That, in turn, effects their overall health and well being. Of course if it was up to the malevolent Dr. Fauci we’d never even shake hands again. Fauci would like to repeal 5 thousand years of normal, social interaction and remake the world according to his own ghoulish specifications. Unfortunately, we are now seeing the blowback from that delusional world-view in the form of growing mental health problems, depression, anxiety and suicide. Should we tally the suicides alongside the Covid deaths to see whether Fauci’s strategy is working or not or should we simply ignore the horrible human costs of this twisted lockdown experiment? Some day, the American people will demand an accounting for the last 10 weeks, but we’re not there just yet. Here’s more from Bloomberg News:
“Retail landlords are sending out thousands of default notices to tenants, a situation that could tip already-ailing retailers into bankruptcy or total collapse….Department stores, restaurants, apparel merchants and specialty chains have been getting the notices as property owners who’ve gone unpaid for as long as three months lose patience, according to people with knowledge of the matter and court filings.
…“The default letters from landlords are flying out the door,” said Andy Graiser, co-president of A&G Real Estate Partners, whose firm works with retailers and other commercial tenants. “It’s creating a real fear in the marketplace,” Graiser said.” (“Default Notices Are Piling Up for Retailers Unable to Pay Rent”, Bloomberg)
More bad news. The lockdowns have triggered a tsunami of defaults and bankruptcies. With no source of revenue, merchants cannot pay the rent nor can landlords roll over their debts. The economy is an interlocking row of dominoes that tumble in sequence once the first block is set in motion. The American people were sold the idea that the economy could be turned “on and off” like a light switch. Now they can see that the theory has no basis in reality. As the bankruptcies pile up, the job losses will continue to increase pushing the country deeper into recession. Fauci’s directives have turned the country into a economic wastelands, that much is certain. Check out this excerpt from an article by is a clip from an article by Naomi Klein:
“…. former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that both set the new tone and made clear that Silicon Valley had every intention of leveraging the crisis for a permanent transformation….
” Schmidt called for “unprecedented partnerships between government and industry…
At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police, and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies….
If tech companies win their ferocious lobbying campaign for remote learning, telehealth, 5G, and driverless vehicles — their Screen New Deal — there simply won’t be any money left over for urgent public priorities, never mind the Green New Deal that our planet urgently needs…
For them, and many others in Silicon Valley, the pandemic is a golden opportunity to receive not just the gratitude, but t he deference and power that they feel has been unjustly denied.” (Screen New Deal, Naomi Klein, The Intercept)
Can you see what’s going on?
The fact that tens of thousands of people are dying and the nation’s economy has been reduced to rubble, doesn’t matter to the tech giants. For them the crisis is a “golden opportunity”, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to further subsume the government, to garner more government funding for their futuristic projects, to assert greater influence over public policy, and to wrap their tentacles more tightly around the levers of state power.
The tech giants are using the pandemic as a vehicle for imposing their own vision on the country and for promoting their own malign police state agenda. Just as Corporate America is using the crisis to restructure the labor market, and Wall Street is using the crisis to garner lavish multi-trillion dollar bailouts, and Fauci and Co are using the crisis to push for universal vaccines, so too, the tech giants are using the crisis to grab more power, more money and more integration with the state until the US government is nothing more than a trifling subsidiary of the ever-expanding Google octopus. That’s the ultimate goal, privatizing the state so the corporations rule the world. It is a Mission (that is nearly) Accomplished!
So how are the people going to respond to these developments? What will the reaction be when ordinary working people realize that their lives have fundamentally changed for the worse, that their living standards will continue to slide, that full-time work and job security have gone the way of the Dodo, that the middle class is going to be reduced to the size of an acorn, and that the social safety-net has been replaced by higher taxes, fewer public services, a weaker dollar and years of grinding, demoralizing austerity? Should we expect social unrest, rioting and street violence in the near future or should we assume that that those outbursts are inevitable now that personal liberty has been strangled while the economy was vaporized?
No country that willingly destroys its own economy should expect anything different. No people that abandon their liberty for the faux-security of state protection should expect anything different. Peter Hitchens sums it up perfectly in an article at the Daily Mail:
“I hate this word, (“lockdown”) because it does not seem to me to be fitting to describe free people in a free country. But we are no longer such people, or such a country. We have become muzzled, mouthless, voiceless, humiliated, regimented prisoners, shuffling about at the command of others, stopping when told to stop, moving when told to move, shouted at by jacks-in-office against whom we have no appeal. We are learning, during this induction period, to do what we are told and to become obedient, servile citizens of a new authoritarian State. We are unlearning the old rules of freedom.” (“Peter Hitchens: The New Authoritarian State’s Dream”, Daily Mail)
Well put. Bravo, Peter Hitchens!
Monday, May 25, 2020
SC213-3
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay20/stocks-fragility5-20.html
An Economy That Cannot Allow Stocks to Decline Is Too Fragile To Survive
Feast your eyes on the chart below of the Nasdaq 100 stock market Index, which is dominated by the six FAAMNG (rhymes with "famine") stocks: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Google which now account for over 20% of the entire U.S. stock market's capitalization.
Notice that despite the global economy sliding into a debt-bust depression, the NDX is within kissing distance of new all-time highs. You're joking, right? Sales and profits won't slide as the depression steps on the neck of hundreds of millions of households?
As you've probably heard by now, sales don't matter, profits don't matter, costs don't matter, and indeed, nothing matters but the Fed has our back so buy stocks, never mind the valuations. In other words, the U.S. stock market has reached the spiritual level where the corporeal tangible world no longer matters: in a word, Nirvana, or Heaven if you prefer.
If we set aside the satire and the absurd justifications of the financial punditry ( "we see a V-shaped recovery of profits in 2023, or was it in 2032? Never mind, doesn't matter..."), we discern a reality that should worry us: America's economy and financial system cannot allow the stock market to decline because any sustained drop will pop the debt-bubble and bring the entire rickety, rotten, corrupt structure down.
Erecting $100 trillion of phantom capital on speculative bets and disconnected-from-reality valuations was always doomed: piling one layer of debt and speculative excess on top of another while the actual collateral supporting the first layer of debt didn't actually change steadily increases the fragility of the entire pyramid.
Now the system is too fragile and brittle to survive even a modest drop in the stock market. Since the Federal Reserve and other tools of the financial-political elites can't increase the productivity of the underlying collateral of the economy, they're forced to manipulate the one signaling device they can control, which is the stock market.
And since they can't actually improve the productivity or prospects of several thousand companies, they've poured their conjured trillions in six mega-stocks to drag the entire market higher. The more money they pour into the Big Tech Six, the greater the market capitalization of these companies and therefore the greater their influence in the stock indices: the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq / Nasdaq 100.
It's a self-reinforcing set-up: dump another trillion in the six mega-cap stocks and this pushes the entire market higher. The influence of the real world has been reduced to zero. Nirvana indeed.
The problem is that any system this fragile and brittle cannot survive the slightest contact with reality. The system's stability is an elaborate illusion maintained by the Big Con of the Federal Reserve: we can create as many trillions as we need to prop up the stock market.
This is the hubris and arrogance of mortals claiming god-like powers. As the Fed and other central banks buy every over-valued financial asset in sight to prop up over-valued markets, eventually they will own the majority of the markets (as per the Japanese bond market). At some point there won't be any assets left for private capital to own that actually earn a return. With interest rates at zero or lower, private capital has no way to earn a return--an outcome that collapses the entire rickety, rotten, corrupt structure anyway.
Extreme concentrations of wealth and power, extreme speculative risk, extreme over-valuation, extreme central bank manipulation--all increase fragility and brittleness. America's financial system is the classic tightly bound system with all the lines of dominoes intersecting each other: any one domino will take down the entire system because it's all tightly connected and dependent on extremes of risk, speculation, debt and manipulation (stock buybacks being Exhibit #1).
The Gods of Finance are chuckling as the Fed's trillions push the system ever closer to collapse. No matter what the Fed does, no matter how many billions Apple borrows and throws into the putrid sewage of its endless stock buybacks, the market, the financial system and the economy that has become dependent on those speculative pyramids of debt are doomed to collapse for profoundly systemic reasons.
The fragile ice shelf of speculative bets and debt clinging to the mountainside is making strange creaking sounds-- will you listen or will you ignore it because the Fed has our back? The avalanche will catch everyone by surprise when it finally breaks, and the consequences will be non-linear and therefore disruptive in ways few anticipate.
But in the meantime, please enjoy the cosmic joke of the Nasdaq 100 and Jay Powell's deadpan comedy routine. But be careful that the joke doesn't end up on you: an economy that cannot allow stocks to decline is too fragile to survive.
An Economy That Cannot Allow Stocks to Decline Is Too Fragile To Survive
Feast your eyes on the chart below of the Nasdaq 100 stock market Index, which is dominated by the six FAAMNG (rhymes with "famine") stocks: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Google which now account for over 20% of the entire U.S. stock market's capitalization.
Notice that despite the global economy sliding into a debt-bust depression, the NDX is within kissing distance of new all-time highs. You're joking, right? Sales and profits won't slide as the depression steps on the neck of hundreds of millions of households?
As you've probably heard by now, sales don't matter, profits don't matter, costs don't matter, and indeed, nothing matters but the Fed has our back so buy stocks, never mind the valuations. In other words, the U.S. stock market has reached the spiritual level where the corporeal tangible world no longer matters: in a word, Nirvana, or Heaven if you prefer.
If we set aside the satire and the absurd justifications of the financial punditry ( "we see a V-shaped recovery of profits in 2023, or was it in 2032? Never mind, doesn't matter..."), we discern a reality that should worry us: America's economy and financial system cannot allow the stock market to decline because any sustained drop will pop the debt-bubble and bring the entire rickety, rotten, corrupt structure down.
Erecting $100 trillion of phantom capital on speculative bets and disconnected-from-reality valuations was always doomed: piling one layer of debt and speculative excess on top of another while the actual collateral supporting the first layer of debt didn't actually change steadily increases the fragility of the entire pyramid.
Now the system is too fragile and brittle to survive even a modest drop in the stock market. Since the Federal Reserve and other tools of the financial-political elites can't increase the productivity of the underlying collateral of the economy, they're forced to manipulate the one signaling device they can control, which is the stock market.
And since they can't actually improve the productivity or prospects of several thousand companies, they've poured their conjured trillions in six mega-stocks to drag the entire market higher. The more money they pour into the Big Tech Six, the greater the market capitalization of these companies and therefore the greater their influence in the stock indices: the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq / Nasdaq 100.
It's a self-reinforcing set-up: dump another trillion in the six mega-cap stocks and this pushes the entire market higher. The influence of the real world has been reduced to zero. Nirvana indeed.
The problem is that any system this fragile and brittle cannot survive the slightest contact with reality. The system's stability is an elaborate illusion maintained by the Big Con of the Federal Reserve: we can create as many trillions as we need to prop up the stock market.
This is the hubris and arrogance of mortals claiming god-like powers. As the Fed and other central banks buy every over-valued financial asset in sight to prop up over-valued markets, eventually they will own the majority of the markets (as per the Japanese bond market). At some point there won't be any assets left for private capital to own that actually earn a return. With interest rates at zero or lower, private capital has no way to earn a return--an outcome that collapses the entire rickety, rotten, corrupt structure anyway.
Extreme concentrations of wealth and power, extreme speculative risk, extreme over-valuation, extreme central bank manipulation--all increase fragility and brittleness. America's financial system is the classic tightly bound system with all the lines of dominoes intersecting each other: any one domino will take down the entire system because it's all tightly connected and dependent on extremes of risk, speculation, debt and manipulation (stock buybacks being Exhibit #1).
The Gods of Finance are chuckling as the Fed's trillions push the system ever closer to collapse. No matter what the Fed does, no matter how many billions Apple borrows and throws into the putrid sewage of its endless stock buybacks, the market, the financial system and the economy that has become dependent on those speculative pyramids of debt are doomed to collapse for profoundly systemic reasons.
The fragile ice shelf of speculative bets and debt clinging to the mountainside is making strange creaking sounds-- will you listen or will you ignore it because the Fed has our back? The avalanche will catch everyone by surprise when it finally breaks, and the consequences will be non-linear and therefore disruptive in ways few anticipate.
But in the meantime, please enjoy the cosmic joke of the Nasdaq 100 and Jay Powell's deadpan comedy routine. But be careful that the joke doesn't end up on you: an economy that cannot allow stocks to decline is too fragile to survive.
Sunday, May 24, 2020
SC213-2
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-war-humanity-honoring-fallen-military-service-members/5713873
US War on Humanity Rages While Honoring Its Fallen Military Service Members
Memorial Day weekend should be a time to reflect on why a day was established to commemorate lost lives of US military men and women who were sent to wage preemptive wars against other nations threatening no one.
From before the republic was established to the present day, US authorities proved time and again that America is a belligerent nation — perpetually at war against invented enemies.
All wars are based on Big Lies and deception. The US is like other belligerent nations in world history except that it’s far more powerful, destructive, and operates globally.
Its privileged class lets others do its fighting and dying, notably its underclass and jihadist proxies.
Its airmen terror-bomb from miles in the sky, never seeing the carnage they cause, including mangled corpses dismembered by munition.
Countless trillions of dollars are poured down a black hole of unprecedented waste, fraud, and abuse to enrich America’s merchants of death and others profiteering from mass slaughter and destruction — while vital homeland needs go begging.
Lessons from two world wars weren’t learned. Is a third one inevitable by accident or design?
Is US rage against China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other countries pushing the envelope toward confrontation that could explode into something much more serious?
If global war 3.0 occurs, will today’s super-weapons be used?
The father of America’s nuclear navy Admiral Hyman Rickover told Congress in 1982 that when nations go to war, they’ll use whatever weapons exist in their arsenal to win, including their most powerful ones if needed.
US confrontation with China and Russia could risk going nuclear, notably because of the bipartisan criminal class in Washington that’s indifferent toward human life and welfare.
Given US rage against China and Russia, the only nations standing in the way of its ability to achieve dominion over planet earth, its resources, and populations, Thucydides trap conditions exist.
Over 2,400 years ago, the Greek historian warned about the risk of war because of an established power’s fear about a rising one.
Because of its unmatched super-weapons and valuable oil, gas, and other resources, the US craves transforming Russia into a vassal state the way it was in the neoliberal 90s.
It’s mostly concerned about China’s political, economic, industrial, technological and military rise on the world stage — why US dark forces are going all-out to undermine its development, a futile effort doomed to fail.
Do militarists in Washington consider nuclear war a viable option to pursue their imperial agenda?
I was once asked on live television to comment on whether nuclear weapons are dearer than peace.
Because of their immense destructive power, are they unlikely to be used?
Is the US spending one or two trillion dollars on nuclear weapons upgrades over the next 30 years with no intention of using them? Or is it the other way around?
A nation that once used them could do it again. The risk of mass annihilation today is far greater than 75 years ago.
Egged on by militarists surrounding him, Trump once threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Does he feel the same way about China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, etc.?
Loose cannon Pompeo said the following:
“Any decision impinging on Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms as guaranteed under the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law would inevitably impact our assessment of One Country, Two Systems and the status of the territory.”
Separately, he threatened Beijing with other consequences in response to its work in progress national security law.
Does the Trump regime have more sanctions on Chinese enterprises and officials in mind, increased tariffs on Chinese imports, maybe visa restrictions and/or asset freezes, and/or perhaps tougher measures that could escalate to direct confrontation?
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) earlier warned that nuclear war may be just “a temper tantrum away.”
As long as these weapons exist, the threat of their use is terrifyingly real — notably by the US against China, Russia, and/or Iran.
If the US attacks the Islamic Republic with nuclear or conventional weapons, much of the Middle East could explode in conflict that would bring war on Israeli territory and the US regional presence.
Iran could also block oil transport through the Gulf of Hormuz with devastating consequences to the world economy if it continues long enough.
If the US attacks China or Russia with nukes, humanity’s survival would be threatened like never before.
Cold War “mutually assured destruction (MAD)” kept these weapons from being used.
In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuba missile crisis, Jack Kennedy said he never had any intention of using these weapons.
Geopolitical know-nothing Trump is no JFK. Nor were the Clintons, Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden.
For the first time in world history, the threat of possible nuclear war is ominously real.
Reportedly the Trump regime may conduct a nuclear test, the first by the US in 28 years if occurs — as a “message” to China and Russia.
According to an unnamed senior White House official quoted by the Washington Post, a possible US nuke test is “very much an ongoing conversation.”
As the nation honors its fallen service members, reflect on why they were sent abroad to fight in the first place when no wars from the 19th to the 21st century needed to be fought.
Wars are waged for wealth and power, threats invented to unjustifiably justify them.
Merchants of mass slaughter and destruction profit hugely. The misnamed “good war” was worst of all.
If the US hadn’t goaded imperial Japan to attack America, Pearl Harbor wouldn’t have happened.
If the US, Britain and France challenged Nazi Germany early after Hitler came to power instead of letting things escalate toward war by doing nothing, peace on the continent could have been maintained instead of WW II.
Wars are all about belligerents wanting them waged. Throughout its history, the US has been and remains a warrior state, abhorring peace and stability.
It shows by forever wars on humanity in multiple theaters, no end of them in prospect — along with a militarized homeland.
Will humanity be consumed by mushroom-shaped denouement because militarists in Washington may go too far?
Memorial Day hypocrisy ignores a nation permanently at war for world peace it abhors and won’t tolerate.
Achieving it would defeat its imperial aims, why forever US wars won’t end in our lifetime — maybe never until they end us.
US War on Humanity Rages While Honoring Its Fallen Military Service Members
Memorial Day weekend should be a time to reflect on why a day was established to commemorate lost lives of US military men and women who were sent to wage preemptive wars against other nations threatening no one.
From before the republic was established to the present day, US authorities proved time and again that America is a belligerent nation — perpetually at war against invented enemies.
All wars are based on Big Lies and deception. The US is like other belligerent nations in world history except that it’s far more powerful, destructive, and operates globally.
Its privileged class lets others do its fighting and dying, notably its underclass and jihadist proxies.
Its airmen terror-bomb from miles in the sky, never seeing the carnage they cause, including mangled corpses dismembered by munition.
Countless trillions of dollars are poured down a black hole of unprecedented waste, fraud, and abuse to enrich America’s merchants of death and others profiteering from mass slaughter and destruction — while vital homeland needs go begging.
Lessons from two world wars weren’t learned. Is a third one inevitable by accident or design?
Is US rage against China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other countries pushing the envelope toward confrontation that could explode into something much more serious?
If global war 3.0 occurs, will today’s super-weapons be used?
The father of America’s nuclear navy Admiral Hyman Rickover told Congress in 1982 that when nations go to war, they’ll use whatever weapons exist in their arsenal to win, including their most powerful ones if needed.
US confrontation with China and Russia could risk going nuclear, notably because of the bipartisan criminal class in Washington that’s indifferent toward human life and welfare.
Given US rage against China and Russia, the only nations standing in the way of its ability to achieve dominion over planet earth, its resources, and populations, Thucydides trap conditions exist.
Over 2,400 years ago, the Greek historian warned about the risk of war because of an established power’s fear about a rising one.
Because of its unmatched super-weapons and valuable oil, gas, and other resources, the US craves transforming Russia into a vassal state the way it was in the neoliberal 90s.
It’s mostly concerned about China’s political, economic, industrial, technological and military rise on the world stage — why US dark forces are going all-out to undermine its development, a futile effort doomed to fail.
Do militarists in Washington consider nuclear war a viable option to pursue their imperial agenda?
I was once asked on live television to comment on whether nuclear weapons are dearer than peace.
Because of their immense destructive power, are they unlikely to be used?
Is the US spending one or two trillion dollars on nuclear weapons upgrades over the next 30 years with no intention of using them? Or is it the other way around?
A nation that once used them could do it again. The risk of mass annihilation today is far greater than 75 years ago.
Egged on by militarists surrounding him, Trump once threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Does he feel the same way about China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, etc.?
Loose cannon Pompeo said the following:
“Any decision impinging on Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms as guaranteed under the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law would inevitably impact our assessment of One Country, Two Systems and the status of the territory.”
Separately, he threatened Beijing with other consequences in response to its work in progress national security law.
Does the Trump regime have more sanctions on Chinese enterprises and officials in mind, increased tariffs on Chinese imports, maybe visa restrictions and/or asset freezes, and/or perhaps tougher measures that could escalate to direct confrontation?
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) earlier warned that nuclear war may be just “a temper tantrum away.”
As long as these weapons exist, the threat of their use is terrifyingly real — notably by the US against China, Russia, and/or Iran.
If the US attacks the Islamic Republic with nuclear or conventional weapons, much of the Middle East could explode in conflict that would bring war on Israeli territory and the US regional presence.
Iran could also block oil transport through the Gulf of Hormuz with devastating consequences to the world economy if it continues long enough.
If the US attacks China or Russia with nukes, humanity’s survival would be threatened like never before.
Cold War “mutually assured destruction (MAD)” kept these weapons from being used.
In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuba missile crisis, Jack Kennedy said he never had any intention of using these weapons.
Geopolitical know-nothing Trump is no JFK. Nor were the Clintons, Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden.
For the first time in world history, the threat of possible nuclear war is ominously real.
Reportedly the Trump regime may conduct a nuclear test, the first by the US in 28 years if occurs — as a “message” to China and Russia.
According to an unnamed senior White House official quoted by the Washington Post, a possible US nuke test is “very much an ongoing conversation.”
As the nation honors its fallen service members, reflect on why they were sent abroad to fight in the first place when no wars from the 19th to the 21st century needed to be fought.
Wars are waged for wealth and power, threats invented to unjustifiably justify them.
Merchants of mass slaughter and destruction profit hugely. The misnamed “good war” was worst of all.
If the US hadn’t goaded imperial Japan to attack America, Pearl Harbor wouldn’t have happened.
If the US, Britain and France challenged Nazi Germany early after Hitler came to power instead of letting things escalate toward war by doing nothing, peace on the continent could have been maintained instead of WW II.
Wars are all about belligerents wanting them waged. Throughout its history, the US has been and remains a warrior state, abhorring peace and stability.
It shows by forever wars on humanity in multiple theaters, no end of them in prospect — along with a militarized homeland.
Will humanity be consumed by mushroom-shaped denouement because militarists in Washington may go too far?
Memorial Day hypocrisy ignores a nation permanently at war for world peace it abhors and won’t tolerate.
Achieving it would defeat its imperial aims, why forever US wars won’t end in our lifetime — maybe never until they end us.
Saturday, May 23, 2020
SC213-1
https://srsroccoreport.com/big-trouble-for-the-big-three-u-s-oil-companies-financial-disaster-in-its-domestic-oil-gas-sector/
BIG TROUBLE FOR THE BIG THREE U.S. OIL COMPANIES: Financial Disaster In Its Domestic Oil & Gas Sector
There’s no better way to describe what is taking place in the U.S. Big three Oil Companies domestic oil and gas sector than a complete and utter financial disaster. Honestly, I am not exaggerating. The only place ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips are making decent money is in their non-U.S. or International oil and gas sector.
While it’s no secret that the U.S. shale oil industry continues to be a trainwreck, the damage is now spreading deep into the financial bowels of the Big Three Oil Majors. Unfortunately, the largest, ExxonMobil, has the worst-performing domestic oil and gas sector in the group. So, it’s no surprise that ExxonMobil was forced to borrow money just to pay dividends. I posted this chart in my last article on ExxonMobil:
As you can see, ExxonMobil’s long-term debt over the four-quarters (Q2-2019 to Q1 2020) increased nearly the same amount as the shortfall between the dividend payouts and the free cash flow.
However, if we look at the Big Three as a group, Q1 2020 wasn’t pretty at all. The next chart combines ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips Upstream Earnings and Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) from their U.S. sector versus their non-U.S. or International sector. The upstream sector refers to the company’s oil and gas wells.
The Big Three suffered a net $900 million earnings loss from their U.S. upstream sector while spending a whopping $5.6 billion ($5,591 million) in CAPEX. Now compare that to the combined non-U.S. or International upstream earnings of $4.3 billion based on investing $4.6 billion in CAPEX.
In a nutshell, the Big Three Oil Majors spent $5.6 billion in CAPEX in their U.S. oil and gas wells to lose a net $900 million. Now, if we were to combine the U.S. and International upstream earnings for Q1 2020 from this group, it would equal a net earnings gain of $3.4 billion ($4,311 million – $900 million = $3,411 million, or $3.4 billion).
So, if investors don’t look closely, they will see that these Big Three Oil Majors actually made money on their total upstream sector (oil & gas wells) during Q1 2020. However, it all came from their non-U.S. or International sector. It seems to me that ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips would be in much better financial shape if they CUT their entire U.S. oil and gas operations altogether.
BIG THREE OIL MAJORS: While Q1 2020 Was Bad, Q2 2020 Will Be Far Worse
In looking at the data, if we thought Q1 2020 was bad for the Big Three Oil Majors domestic upstream sector, wait until the next quarterly report comes out at the beginning of July. According to their financial statements, the Big Three Oil Majors received about $42 a barrel for oil during the first quarter of 2020. Both ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips received about $2-3 less than the average WTIC benchmark for the quarter.
With the current average WTIC (West Texas Crude Intermediate) oil price for the first six weeks of Q2 trading at $19.65 a barrel, what will the average be by the end of the quarter? Maybe $25-$30? If so, these companies would receive even less than that. And, to make matters worse, the price of North Dakota Light Sweet Crude has averaged so far about $10 a barrel in the second quarter.
Shaleprofile shows that ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil are producing about 166,000 barrels per day in the Bakken (Chevron doesn’t show any oil production in the Bakken):
So, these two companies received about $10 a barrel for their North Dakota Bakken oil for the first half of the second quarter. How bad will these losses add up to during Q2 2020?? GOOD GRIEF.
To give you an idea just how bad the situation is for ExxonMobil’s U.S. oil and gas sector, take a look at the company’s Supplementary Report:
Over the past five-quarters, ExxonMobil spent a stunning $14.4 billion on its U.S. oil and gas wells while posting a $168 million earnings loss. On the other hand, ExxonMobil’s non-U.S. upstream sector reported $15.1 billion in earnings. What a difference.
If ExxonMobil had to borrow money to pay dividends over the past year, what will the company’s management do in Q2 2020? Will they finally reduce or cut dividends? At some point, ExxonMobil’s management will have to cut dividends to stay alive. However, once the company starts to cut dividends, it will be the beginning of the end for the once-great Oil Major as there will be much less motivation to own the stock.
The financial data shows that the Big Three Oil Majors are struggling to make money in their U.S. domestic oil and gas sector. Now with the U.S. and global economy heading into a depression, the financial situation for ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips will only get worse.
The world is finally heading over the ENERGY CLIFF, but few realize the dreadful impact this will have on the U.S. Suburban Leech & Spend Economy.
BIG TROUBLE FOR THE BIG THREE U.S. OIL COMPANIES: Financial Disaster In Its Domestic Oil & Gas Sector
There’s no better way to describe what is taking place in the U.S. Big three Oil Companies domestic oil and gas sector than a complete and utter financial disaster. Honestly, I am not exaggerating. The only place ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips are making decent money is in their non-U.S. or International oil and gas sector.
While it’s no secret that the U.S. shale oil industry continues to be a trainwreck, the damage is now spreading deep into the financial bowels of the Big Three Oil Majors. Unfortunately, the largest, ExxonMobil, has the worst-performing domestic oil and gas sector in the group. So, it’s no surprise that ExxonMobil was forced to borrow money just to pay dividends. I posted this chart in my last article on ExxonMobil:
As you can see, ExxonMobil’s long-term debt over the four-quarters (Q2-2019 to Q1 2020) increased nearly the same amount as the shortfall between the dividend payouts and the free cash flow.
However, if we look at the Big Three as a group, Q1 2020 wasn’t pretty at all. The next chart combines ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips Upstream Earnings and Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) from their U.S. sector versus their non-U.S. or International sector. The upstream sector refers to the company’s oil and gas wells.
The Big Three suffered a net $900 million earnings loss from their U.S. upstream sector while spending a whopping $5.6 billion ($5,591 million) in CAPEX. Now compare that to the combined non-U.S. or International upstream earnings of $4.3 billion based on investing $4.6 billion in CAPEX.
In a nutshell, the Big Three Oil Majors spent $5.6 billion in CAPEX in their U.S. oil and gas wells to lose a net $900 million. Now, if we were to combine the U.S. and International upstream earnings for Q1 2020 from this group, it would equal a net earnings gain of $3.4 billion ($4,311 million – $900 million = $3,411 million, or $3.4 billion).
So, if investors don’t look closely, they will see that these Big Three Oil Majors actually made money on their total upstream sector (oil & gas wells) during Q1 2020. However, it all came from their non-U.S. or International sector. It seems to me that ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips would be in much better financial shape if they CUT their entire U.S. oil and gas operations altogether.
BIG THREE OIL MAJORS: While Q1 2020 Was Bad, Q2 2020 Will Be Far Worse
In looking at the data, if we thought Q1 2020 was bad for the Big Three Oil Majors domestic upstream sector, wait until the next quarterly report comes out at the beginning of July. According to their financial statements, the Big Three Oil Majors received about $42 a barrel for oil during the first quarter of 2020. Both ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips received about $2-3 less than the average WTIC benchmark for the quarter.
With the current average WTIC (West Texas Crude Intermediate) oil price for the first six weeks of Q2 trading at $19.65 a barrel, what will the average be by the end of the quarter? Maybe $25-$30? If so, these companies would receive even less than that. And, to make matters worse, the price of North Dakota Light Sweet Crude has averaged so far about $10 a barrel in the second quarter.
Shaleprofile shows that ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil are producing about 166,000 barrels per day in the Bakken (Chevron doesn’t show any oil production in the Bakken):
So, these two companies received about $10 a barrel for their North Dakota Bakken oil for the first half of the second quarter. How bad will these losses add up to during Q2 2020?? GOOD GRIEF.
To give you an idea just how bad the situation is for ExxonMobil’s U.S. oil and gas sector, take a look at the company’s Supplementary Report:
Over the past five-quarters, ExxonMobil spent a stunning $14.4 billion on its U.S. oil and gas wells while posting a $168 million earnings loss. On the other hand, ExxonMobil’s non-U.S. upstream sector reported $15.1 billion in earnings. What a difference.
If ExxonMobil had to borrow money to pay dividends over the past year, what will the company’s management do in Q2 2020? Will they finally reduce or cut dividends? At some point, ExxonMobil’s management will have to cut dividends to stay alive. However, once the company starts to cut dividends, it will be the beginning of the end for the once-great Oil Major as there will be much less motivation to own the stock.
The financial data shows that the Big Three Oil Majors are struggling to make money in their U.S. domestic oil and gas sector. Now with the U.S. and global economy heading into a depression, the financial situation for ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips will only get worse.
The world is finally heading over the ENERGY CLIFF, but few realize the dreadful impact this will have on the U.S. Suburban Leech & Spend Economy.
Friday, May 22, 2020
SC212-15
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/dance-macabre/
Dance Macabre
Western Civ’s most infamous encounter with pandemic disease, so far, was the big first wave of the Black Death that had a marathon run from 1346 to 1353. That bug was the real deal. It killed folks left and right, every age group, every social station, and it killed them ugly. Few who caught it survived. Up to half the population of Europe perished, along with a lot of their social and economic ways.
The cause of the Black Death was subject to every possible explanation except the actual one, Yersina pestis, a bacterium associated with rats and their insect parasites, fleas and lice, who also enjoyed an association with humans living in the generally squalid conditions of the day — the ancient Roman habit of bathing long forgotten. At the top of their list of causes was an angry God, and his wicked erstwhile subordinate, Satan. The “experts” of that time tended to cluster in the church hierarchy, with its drear obsessions and compulsions. The squishy boundary between the supernatural and reality loosed all manner of derangement. The Jews came in for much vilification, leading to massacres in Strasbourg, Mainz, and Cologne. On the whole, the episode represented a terrific humbling of humanity. The allegory of the Dance Macabre summed it up in mankind’s universal antic journey to the Palookaville of death.
On the plus side, as modern interpolators might say, the bubonic plague winnowed down Europe’s population to a scale more congenial with its resource base. After that big first wave of the disease, land was cheaper and human labor better rewarded. Eventually, more food got around. Incidentally, the plague provoked nostalgia for the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, especially among the scholars of Florence, launching the extravaganzas of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and eventually our own pageant of techno-supremacist Modernity.
Covid-19 seems rather a punk-ass illness compared to the Black Death. Its victims by far are people already on a fast track to the last roundup. We know exactly what causes it, if not so exactly its origin, and yet the response among our experts has been far more ambiguous than those long-ago bishops of Christendom to the Great Plague. The various scientists, physicians, public health officers, and politicians seem, to the casual observer, about equally divided between those who consider the corona virus a grave threat and those who insist it’s hardly worse than any annual flu. What is one to believe? Or do?
Which brings us to the verge of the Great Opening-up. The current nostalgia for pre-Covid-19 business-as-usual is understandably intense. Gone especially from daily life are all the ceremonies of human togetherness, from gatherings of friends to the casual shoulder-rubbings of urban life to the crowded venues of the lively arts to the great moiling orgies of pro sports. The life of the perpetual jigsaw puzzle, YouTube, and Netflix has proved inadequate to human aspiration. Gone, too, are livelihoods, revenue streams, and rewarding roles in everyday existence. The itch to get out and do, get out and make, get out and be, is overwhelming.
Behind those plain yearnings, though, looms the specter of a system that appeared to be already foundering before Covid-19 entered the scene. There is, at least, considerable agreement that the disease catalyzed the disorders of finance and economy and accelerated the damage — just not among the people most responsible for engineering the fragilities that actually crashed things
Jerome Powell, Pope of the Church of the Federal Reserve, went on the 60-Minutes show last night to reassure the nation that things will eventually get back to normal. “I think you’ll see the economy recover steadily through the second half of this year.”
Yessir, if you say so. Were his fingers crossed? You couldn’t tell because the camera had him framed in a head-shot. Personally, I think the Fed Chairman was blowing smoke up the nation’s wazoo. Spooky as it’s been, the Covid-19 virus has also been a great cover-story for the natural collapse of a severely unbalanced, ecologically unsound, and dishonestly represented set of arrangements that are now unspooling at horrifying speed. The car industry is dying. The airline industry is laying out its fleet of big birds in desert graveyards. The college racketeering operation went off a cliff, along with medical profiteering. Agribusiness no longer has a business model. Hundreds of kinds of services no longer have customers who can afford their offerings from acupuncture to zymurgy. None of that will be fixed by injections of miracle money borrowed from ourselves in quantities that would turn every US citizen into a millionaire — if it wasn’t just pounded down the rat-holes of the stock and bond markets.
The big question about the Great Opening-up is when the recognition of all that turns to raw emotion. Covid-19 may still be with us then, but it will be the least of our problems. The masks will come off. The dance will commence.
Dance Macabre
Western Civ’s most infamous encounter with pandemic disease, so far, was the big first wave of the Black Death that had a marathon run from 1346 to 1353. That bug was the real deal. It killed folks left and right, every age group, every social station, and it killed them ugly. Few who caught it survived. Up to half the population of Europe perished, along with a lot of their social and economic ways.
The cause of the Black Death was subject to every possible explanation except the actual one, Yersina pestis, a bacterium associated with rats and their insect parasites, fleas and lice, who also enjoyed an association with humans living in the generally squalid conditions of the day — the ancient Roman habit of bathing long forgotten. At the top of their list of causes was an angry God, and his wicked erstwhile subordinate, Satan. The “experts” of that time tended to cluster in the church hierarchy, with its drear obsessions and compulsions. The squishy boundary between the supernatural and reality loosed all manner of derangement. The Jews came in for much vilification, leading to massacres in Strasbourg, Mainz, and Cologne. On the whole, the episode represented a terrific humbling of humanity. The allegory of the Dance Macabre summed it up in mankind’s universal antic journey to the Palookaville of death.
On the plus side, as modern interpolators might say, the bubonic plague winnowed down Europe’s population to a scale more congenial with its resource base. After that big first wave of the disease, land was cheaper and human labor better rewarded. Eventually, more food got around. Incidentally, the plague provoked nostalgia for the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, especially among the scholars of Florence, launching the extravaganzas of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and eventually our own pageant of techno-supremacist Modernity.
Covid-19 seems rather a punk-ass illness compared to the Black Death. Its victims by far are people already on a fast track to the last roundup. We know exactly what causes it, if not so exactly its origin, and yet the response among our experts has been far more ambiguous than those long-ago bishops of Christendom to the Great Plague. The various scientists, physicians, public health officers, and politicians seem, to the casual observer, about equally divided between those who consider the corona virus a grave threat and those who insist it’s hardly worse than any annual flu. What is one to believe? Or do?
Which brings us to the verge of the Great Opening-up. The current nostalgia for pre-Covid-19 business-as-usual is understandably intense. Gone especially from daily life are all the ceremonies of human togetherness, from gatherings of friends to the casual shoulder-rubbings of urban life to the crowded venues of the lively arts to the great moiling orgies of pro sports. The life of the perpetual jigsaw puzzle, YouTube, and Netflix has proved inadequate to human aspiration. Gone, too, are livelihoods, revenue streams, and rewarding roles in everyday existence. The itch to get out and do, get out and make, get out and be, is overwhelming.
Behind those plain yearnings, though, looms the specter of a system that appeared to be already foundering before Covid-19 entered the scene. There is, at least, considerable agreement that the disease catalyzed the disorders of finance and economy and accelerated the damage — just not among the people most responsible for engineering the fragilities that actually crashed things
Jerome Powell, Pope of the Church of the Federal Reserve, went on the 60-Minutes show last night to reassure the nation that things will eventually get back to normal. “I think you’ll see the economy recover steadily through the second half of this year.”
Yessir, if you say so. Were his fingers crossed? You couldn’t tell because the camera had him framed in a head-shot. Personally, I think the Fed Chairman was blowing smoke up the nation’s wazoo. Spooky as it’s been, the Covid-19 virus has also been a great cover-story for the natural collapse of a severely unbalanced, ecologically unsound, and dishonestly represented set of arrangements that are now unspooling at horrifying speed. The car industry is dying. The airline industry is laying out its fleet of big birds in desert graveyards. The college racketeering operation went off a cliff, along with medical profiteering. Agribusiness no longer has a business model. Hundreds of kinds of services no longer have customers who can afford their offerings from acupuncture to zymurgy. None of that will be fixed by injections of miracle money borrowed from ourselves in quantities that would turn every US citizen into a millionaire — if it wasn’t just pounded down the rat-holes of the stock and bond markets.
The big question about the Great Opening-up is when the recognition of all that turns to raw emotion. Covid-19 may still be with us then, but it will be the least of our problems. The masks will come off. The dance will commence.
Thursday, May 21, 2020
SC212-14
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay20/demand5-20.html
This Sucker's Going Down: The Destruction of Demand
The first-order effect of the lockdown was demand destruction as shelter-in-place orders and business closures restricted consumers' ability to spend.
The second-order effect will be the permanent destruction of demand because people will realize they're better off reducing their consumption of high-cost, questionable-value goods and services. Let's start with the resurgence of savings, the most basic form of security you actually control and the most basic form of hedging against promises of a return to wonderfulness failing to arrive in the real world.
Comically, security you actually control, i.e. savings, are viewed by the status quo as a mortal threat to the economy: how dare you keep some of your own money rather than squander all of it! Notice how this bit of twisted CNN humor labels savings "hoarding," as if retaining a bit of your hard-earned wages is evil "hoarding" rather than prudent self-sufficiency.
New threat to the economy: Americans are saving like it's the 1980s
For those who weren't alive to experience the 1980s, it was a boom era of widespread prosperity. In a functional economy, savings are understood as one of the foundations of prosperity. In today's insanely dysfunctional neofeudal economy, savings are a despicable evil because they take the bread right out of the bankers' and corporate elites' mouths. How dare you rob poor Jamie Dimon and Jeff Bezos with your awful, horrible, cruel savings of money that you actually control, money that protects you and gives you some security!
In other words: how dare you serve your own needs and interests rather than our monomaniacal obsession with increasing our profits at your expense.
Another second-order source of demand destruction is people realizing they don't actually need as much XYZ as they once thought. This covers quite a range of services, from tourism to dining out to attending absurdly costly sporting events and concerts to all the video subscription services people pay for but rarely use.
Demand destruction won't be limited to the periphery. It will also shred big-ticket sectors such as healthcare and higher education. One of the key dynamics in demand for these crazy-expensive services is rarely addressed: the more higher education you "consume," the greater the pressure to get even more higher education. This also holds true for healthcare: the more you "consume," the greater the pressure to consume even more healthcare.
Correspondent AP (Anonymous Physician) delineates the sources of demand for healthcare:
An under appreciated challenge going forward is the destruction of healthcare demand.
The demand for healthcare was generated by three factors, in decreasing order of importance.
1. "Self-Generation" i.e. when healthcare was received, it led to more healthcare being demanded. Healthcare is pretty unusual as a good/service in that it generates its own demand.
2. Marketing. Except for a tiny sliver of high-margin procedures, healthcare is a loss-leader for health systems. The profitable revenues come from foot traffic, commercial real estate 'appreciation,' and the sales of personal information.
3. Actual, proven, demonstrably beneficial need. (By far the last).
The 'Casino' model of healthcare is driven by this dynamic: tight-margins/high cashflows lead to overbuilding, which leads to more of #s1 and 2 above, which leads to more cashflow, and so the cycle repeats.
People are discovering:
1. The delivery of healthcare entails real risk--even if they’ve mis-apportioned it to COVID-19.
2. They're doing alright without getting it.
3. Since they aren't getting it, they're getting less of it. (See #1 above).
We're already seeing healthcare corporations whining about a drop in income as "consumption" of "elective surgeries" is not bouncing back to pre-pandemic levels, and people are cancelling their "excuse to bill Medicare or Medicaid" "follow-up" appointments.
The people working in this broken, perverse-incentives system didn't choose it, they're trapped in it. The same can be said of every dysfunctional, sclerotic, ridiculously costly system in the U.S. Reform is impossible, given the incentives, regulations and vested interests whose sole purpose is to, in Clay Shirky's insightful phrase, "preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
Here's my summary of the sources of demand for higher education:
1. The higher your level of credentialed attainment, the greater the pressure to get another degree.
2. Marketing: the claim that a college diploma is the one essential passport to secure high-paying careers and therefore worth any price and any sacrifice.
3. Actual learning: near zero on the demand scale.
You know the multi-level marketing of higher education: gee, too bad your Bachelors Diploma turned out to be worthless. The solution is to spend another $100,000 on a Masters Degree.
Dang, too bad about the glut of other job seekers with Masters Degrees. The solution is to invest another 4 or 5 years and another $100,000 (in deferred income if nothing else) on a PhD or professional degree (MBA, etc.)
Shucks, there's a global glut of folks with PhDs and professional degrees? Well then you'll have to get a second professional degree.... and so on. There's no end to the number of credentials one can acquire, and the hope is just one more will do the trick and the over-credentialed student will escape the black hole of a global glut of over-credentialed job seekers.
Then there's the implosion of demand for commercial real estate and $1 million decaying bungalows. Why blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on design services and renovations if the asset is losing value no matter how much money you pour into it?
Once people were forced out of their manic rut of buy, buy, buy in search of deranging distraction, they've realized they're better off without the expense, the mania and the derangement. The media is cheerleading the crowds jamming into bars, but I suspect a consequential number of those "consumers" will find the things they so longed to resume doing aren't as fulfilling as they'd expected.
A consequential number of consumers may be questioning the viability and benefits of blowing hundreds of dollars to attend a sporting event. Maybe the $12 cup of beer and the $12 hot dog at the ballpark are no longer worth it.
A consequential number of consumers may be realizing they can no longer afford the splurges they indulged in so regularly, of if they can afford it, they no longer want to trade away savings for mindless indulgences.
There are competing models for healthcare and higher education that cost mere fractions of the systems now imploding due to demand destruction. I outlined a campus-free apprenticeship model of higher education in my 2012 book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy, that lays out an alternative way to credential actual learning: accredit the student, not the institution. (This goes hand-in-hand with my other principle, accredit yourself.)
Demand based on debt, unfulfilled promises, over-regulation and unaffordable habits is burning down. Scapegoating savings is the last desperate propaganda ploy of an exploitive system that was never sustainable.
This Sucker's Going Down: The Destruction of Demand
The first-order effect of the lockdown was demand destruction as shelter-in-place orders and business closures restricted consumers' ability to spend.
The second-order effect will be the permanent destruction of demand because people will realize they're better off reducing their consumption of high-cost, questionable-value goods and services. Let's start with the resurgence of savings, the most basic form of security you actually control and the most basic form of hedging against promises of a return to wonderfulness failing to arrive in the real world.
Comically, security you actually control, i.e. savings, are viewed by the status quo as a mortal threat to the economy: how dare you keep some of your own money rather than squander all of it! Notice how this bit of twisted CNN humor labels savings "hoarding," as if retaining a bit of your hard-earned wages is evil "hoarding" rather than prudent self-sufficiency.
New threat to the economy: Americans are saving like it's the 1980s
For those who weren't alive to experience the 1980s, it was a boom era of widespread prosperity. In a functional economy, savings are understood as one of the foundations of prosperity. In today's insanely dysfunctional neofeudal economy, savings are a despicable evil because they take the bread right out of the bankers' and corporate elites' mouths. How dare you rob poor Jamie Dimon and Jeff Bezos with your awful, horrible, cruel savings of money that you actually control, money that protects you and gives you some security!
In other words: how dare you serve your own needs and interests rather than our monomaniacal obsession with increasing our profits at your expense.
Another second-order source of demand destruction is people realizing they don't actually need as much XYZ as they once thought. This covers quite a range of services, from tourism to dining out to attending absurdly costly sporting events and concerts to all the video subscription services people pay for but rarely use.
Demand destruction won't be limited to the periphery. It will also shred big-ticket sectors such as healthcare and higher education. One of the key dynamics in demand for these crazy-expensive services is rarely addressed: the more higher education you "consume," the greater the pressure to get even more higher education. This also holds true for healthcare: the more you "consume," the greater the pressure to consume even more healthcare.
Correspondent AP (Anonymous Physician) delineates the sources of demand for healthcare:
An under appreciated challenge going forward is the destruction of healthcare demand.
The demand for healthcare was generated by three factors, in decreasing order of importance.
1. "Self-Generation" i.e. when healthcare was received, it led to more healthcare being demanded. Healthcare is pretty unusual as a good/service in that it generates its own demand.
2. Marketing. Except for a tiny sliver of high-margin procedures, healthcare is a loss-leader for health systems. The profitable revenues come from foot traffic, commercial real estate 'appreciation,' and the sales of personal information.
3. Actual, proven, demonstrably beneficial need. (By far the last).
The 'Casino' model of healthcare is driven by this dynamic: tight-margins/high cashflows lead to overbuilding, which leads to more of #s1 and 2 above, which leads to more cashflow, and so the cycle repeats.
People are discovering:
1. The delivery of healthcare entails real risk--even if they’ve mis-apportioned it to COVID-19.
2. They're doing alright without getting it.
3. Since they aren't getting it, they're getting less of it. (See #1 above).
We're already seeing healthcare corporations whining about a drop in income as "consumption" of "elective surgeries" is not bouncing back to pre-pandemic levels, and people are cancelling their "excuse to bill Medicare or Medicaid" "follow-up" appointments.
The people working in this broken, perverse-incentives system didn't choose it, they're trapped in it. The same can be said of every dysfunctional, sclerotic, ridiculously costly system in the U.S. Reform is impossible, given the incentives, regulations and vested interests whose sole purpose is to, in Clay Shirky's insightful phrase, "preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
Here's my summary of the sources of demand for higher education:
1. The higher your level of credentialed attainment, the greater the pressure to get another degree.
2. Marketing: the claim that a college diploma is the one essential passport to secure high-paying careers and therefore worth any price and any sacrifice.
3. Actual learning: near zero on the demand scale.
You know the multi-level marketing of higher education: gee, too bad your Bachelors Diploma turned out to be worthless. The solution is to spend another $100,000 on a Masters Degree.
Dang, too bad about the glut of other job seekers with Masters Degrees. The solution is to invest another 4 or 5 years and another $100,000 (in deferred income if nothing else) on a PhD or professional degree (MBA, etc.)
Shucks, there's a global glut of folks with PhDs and professional degrees? Well then you'll have to get a second professional degree.... and so on. There's no end to the number of credentials one can acquire, and the hope is just one more will do the trick and the over-credentialed student will escape the black hole of a global glut of over-credentialed job seekers.
Then there's the implosion of demand for commercial real estate and $1 million decaying bungalows. Why blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on design services and renovations if the asset is losing value no matter how much money you pour into it?
Once people were forced out of their manic rut of buy, buy, buy in search of deranging distraction, they've realized they're better off without the expense, the mania and the derangement. The media is cheerleading the crowds jamming into bars, but I suspect a consequential number of those "consumers" will find the things they so longed to resume doing aren't as fulfilling as they'd expected.
A consequential number of consumers may be questioning the viability and benefits of blowing hundreds of dollars to attend a sporting event. Maybe the $12 cup of beer and the $12 hot dog at the ballpark are no longer worth it.
A consequential number of consumers may be realizing they can no longer afford the splurges they indulged in so regularly, of if they can afford it, they no longer want to trade away savings for mindless indulgences.
There are competing models for healthcare and higher education that cost mere fractions of the systems now imploding due to demand destruction. I outlined a campus-free apprenticeship model of higher education in my 2012 book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy, that lays out an alternative way to credential actual learning: accredit the student, not the institution. (This goes hand-in-hand with my other principle, accredit yourself.)
Demand based on debt, unfulfilled promises, over-regulation and unaffordable habits is burning down. Scapegoating savings is the last desperate propaganda ploy of an exploitive system that was never sustainable.
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
SC212-13
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/05/21/how-to-understand-all-this-china-stuff/
How To Understand All This China Stuff
China is in the news every day now. Today here in Australia we’re pretending to be offended because a Chinese tabloid published the accusation that our nation is a “giant kangaroo that serves as a dog of the US”, even though we all know that’s completely true and we should be flattered that at least they said “giant”. Before that we were getting indignant over a hefty barley tariff in response to our facilitation of America’s global anti-China spin campaign, which it turns out Washington screwed us on.
Anti-China sentiment has been thriving in Australia, aided by our Murdoch-dominated news media, State Department-funded think tanks explicitly geared toward manipulating the China narrative, and of course our own deep-seated racism and xenophobia. Because of its geographical location, the US military/intelligence asset conventionally known as Australia has been a major focal point for the US-centralized empire’s propaganda campaign against the most powerful unabsorbed nation in the world.
China is in the news constantly now, and it’s not because of any virus. It’s not because of Hong Kong, it’s not because of Uighurs, it’s not because of intellectual property violations or any of the other scattershot, unrelated hodgepodge of excuses you’re being fed as to why the Chinese government must be regarded as the latest Actual Hitler all of a sudden.
China is in the news all the time because of imperialism.
To understand what’s going on with China and why the “news” media keep punching you in the face with stories about how awful it is, you really only need to grasp two basic points:
Point 1: We are in the middle of a slow-motion third world war between the US-centralized power alliance and the nations which have resisted being absorbed into it.
A loose alliance of nationless oligarchs who use governments as weapons have secured control over a large empire-like cluster of nations with economic and military might loosely centralized around the United States. In order to gain more power and ensure its ongoing hegemony, this oligarchic empire must keep expanding by absorbing more nations and brutalizing them if they resist. China is by far the most powerful of the unabsorbed nations, followed by Russia at a distant second and Iran at a distant third.
Nuclear weapons make another hot world war undesirable, so this one takes the form of resource control, economic warfare, staging coups, arming oppositional militias to use as proxy armies, expanding military presence in key geostrategic regions under the pretense of fighting terrorism, and “humanitarian interventionism”, with old-school full-scale ground invasions used only as a last resort, and only after manufacturing sufficient international approval to ensure the continued cohesion of the empire-like power alliance.
But the end goal is the same as that of a conventional world war: to beat the other side into submission and compliance. And, in this case, absorption into the imperial blob. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the prevailing orthodoxy in US power structures became that the US must maintain unipolar hegemony at all cost to maintain a “liberal world order” (even if it means abandoning “liberal” values whenever it’s convenient). From that point on the agenda has been global domination and the slow, suffocating subversion of anyone who gets in the way.
Point 2: Propaganda is used to move this world war along.
In a conventional war each side has clear military objectives that everyone understands, and the weapons are naturally moved around in accordance with these objectives. In this weird slow-motion world war, nobody understands what’s going on besides the major power players and those who are paying very close attention. The various agendas against the governments of Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, China etc appear different and unrelated when looked at individually, and indeed you will see different political factions supporting some of these agendas but not others. The only thing unifying this slow-motion movement toward the destruction and absorption of all unabsorbed nations is carefully constructed propaganda narratives.
The way these unifying propaganda narratives operate is simple. It would never occur to rank-and-file citizens that a nation on the other side of the planet that’s pretty much just doing its own thing needs to be sanctioned, subverted and brought to heel, so the imperialist oligarchs who own the political/media class make sure everyone is fed custom-made narratives according to their own ideological echo chamber to prevent any domestic inertia from being thrown on these agendas. Once there’s sufficient agreement that Saddam/Gaddafi/Morales/Assad/Maduro/whomever must go, the campaign to subvert, sabotage and absorb that government can safely be escalated.
If you can understand points one and two, you can understand everything that’s happening with China, and everything that will continue to happen. Propaganda narratives will be rolled out with increasing aggression which have the long-term goal of alienating China from its allies, hurting its economic interests, and preventing its rise to true superpower status and creating a multipolar world.
And the funny thing is, none of this is necessary. Westerners have been deliberately propagandized into believing that China wants to take over the world and will do so unless kept in line by the United States, who has surrounded China with military bases in an act of extreme aggression that the US itself would never tolerate from any unabsorbed government. But if you really grill people on how they know that China wants to take over the world, you’ll find they don’t have any substantial evidence for it.
They’ll tell you that China has an authoritarian government which persecutes ethnic and religious minorities, wrongly claiming that this means they want to take over the world and inflict the same on everyone else. They’ll tell you China has sought to expand control over some directly adjacent territories, wrongly claiming that this means they want to dominate the planet militarily like the US currently does. They’ll cite evidence which shows China is seeking to become a superpower and create a multipolar world (something China openly admits) and wrongly claim that this is proof that they are seeking to dominate the world with unipolar hegemony. They won’t be able to produce any actual, hard evidence that China is trying to take over the world and censor your internet and take away your rights, because no such evidence exists. It’s a completely empty belief arising from aggressive narrative manipulation.
“One myth I think really that needs to be dispelled is that somehow China is aiming to replace America and going to run the world, and it’s not,” said Chinese venture capitalist and social scientist Eric Li on the John Pilger documentary The Coming War on China. “First of all, the Chinese are not that stupid. The west, with its Christian roots, are about converting other people into their beliefs. The Chinese are not about that. It’s just that–again, I’m not degrading the western culture, I’m just pointing out the inherent nature, the DNA of two different cultures–the Chinese two thousand years ago built the Great Wall to keep the barbarians out, not to invade them.”
I’d say this is a reasonable summary. After European nations tried to conquer the planet just a few generations ago in the name of spreading Christianity and “civilization”, we’re projecting our sick vestigial colonialist values on a nation whose culture never drove it to such madness.
Violently dominating the entire planet for all eternity on the vague suspicion that another country wants to do the same to you is not sane, and is not an option. Unabsorbed nations should be allowed to remain unabsorbed, absorbed nations should have their sovereignty restored (or in Australia’s case granted to it for the first time since its existence as a nation), and America should begin acting like a normal country. The notion of “pre-crime” is the purview of dystopian horror fiction when applied to individual people, and there’s no reason we should find the prospect of attacking and destroying for hypothetical future offenses any less insane on an international scale.
There was never any reason for the coronavirus to be made into an issue of international conflict when it could just as easily be an issue of international collaboration, and indeed collaborating is what we should all be doing, with this virus and with everything else. Let’s end this weird slow-motion world war and move toward sanity.
How To Understand All This China Stuff
China is in the news every day now. Today here in Australia we’re pretending to be offended because a Chinese tabloid published the accusation that our nation is a “giant kangaroo that serves as a dog of the US”, even though we all know that’s completely true and we should be flattered that at least they said “giant”. Before that we were getting indignant over a hefty barley tariff in response to our facilitation of America’s global anti-China spin campaign, which it turns out Washington screwed us on.
Anti-China sentiment has been thriving in Australia, aided by our Murdoch-dominated news media, State Department-funded think tanks explicitly geared toward manipulating the China narrative, and of course our own deep-seated racism and xenophobia. Because of its geographical location, the US military/intelligence asset conventionally known as Australia has been a major focal point for the US-centralized empire’s propaganda campaign against the most powerful unabsorbed nation in the world.
China is in the news constantly now, and it’s not because of any virus. It’s not because of Hong Kong, it’s not because of Uighurs, it’s not because of intellectual property violations or any of the other scattershot, unrelated hodgepodge of excuses you’re being fed as to why the Chinese government must be regarded as the latest Actual Hitler all of a sudden.
China is in the news all the time because of imperialism.
To understand what’s going on with China and why the “news” media keep punching you in the face with stories about how awful it is, you really only need to grasp two basic points:
Point 1: We are in the middle of a slow-motion third world war between the US-centralized power alliance and the nations which have resisted being absorbed into it.
A loose alliance of nationless oligarchs who use governments as weapons have secured control over a large empire-like cluster of nations with economic and military might loosely centralized around the United States. In order to gain more power and ensure its ongoing hegemony, this oligarchic empire must keep expanding by absorbing more nations and brutalizing them if they resist. China is by far the most powerful of the unabsorbed nations, followed by Russia at a distant second and Iran at a distant third.
Nuclear weapons make another hot world war undesirable, so this one takes the form of resource control, economic warfare, staging coups, arming oppositional militias to use as proxy armies, expanding military presence in key geostrategic regions under the pretense of fighting terrorism, and “humanitarian interventionism”, with old-school full-scale ground invasions used only as a last resort, and only after manufacturing sufficient international approval to ensure the continued cohesion of the empire-like power alliance.
But the end goal is the same as that of a conventional world war: to beat the other side into submission and compliance. And, in this case, absorption into the imperial blob. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the prevailing orthodoxy in US power structures became that the US must maintain unipolar hegemony at all cost to maintain a “liberal world order” (even if it means abandoning “liberal” values whenever it’s convenient). From that point on the agenda has been global domination and the slow, suffocating subversion of anyone who gets in the way.
Point 2: Propaganda is used to move this world war along.
In a conventional war each side has clear military objectives that everyone understands, and the weapons are naturally moved around in accordance with these objectives. In this weird slow-motion world war, nobody understands what’s going on besides the major power players and those who are paying very close attention. The various agendas against the governments of Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, China etc appear different and unrelated when looked at individually, and indeed you will see different political factions supporting some of these agendas but not others. The only thing unifying this slow-motion movement toward the destruction and absorption of all unabsorbed nations is carefully constructed propaganda narratives.
The way these unifying propaganda narratives operate is simple. It would never occur to rank-and-file citizens that a nation on the other side of the planet that’s pretty much just doing its own thing needs to be sanctioned, subverted and brought to heel, so the imperialist oligarchs who own the political/media class make sure everyone is fed custom-made narratives according to their own ideological echo chamber to prevent any domestic inertia from being thrown on these agendas. Once there’s sufficient agreement that Saddam/Gaddafi/Morales/Assad/Maduro/whomever must go, the campaign to subvert, sabotage and absorb that government can safely be escalated.
If you can understand points one and two, you can understand everything that’s happening with China, and everything that will continue to happen. Propaganda narratives will be rolled out with increasing aggression which have the long-term goal of alienating China from its allies, hurting its economic interests, and preventing its rise to true superpower status and creating a multipolar world.
And the funny thing is, none of this is necessary. Westerners have been deliberately propagandized into believing that China wants to take over the world and will do so unless kept in line by the United States, who has surrounded China with military bases in an act of extreme aggression that the US itself would never tolerate from any unabsorbed government. But if you really grill people on how they know that China wants to take over the world, you’ll find they don’t have any substantial evidence for it.
They’ll tell you that China has an authoritarian government which persecutes ethnic and religious minorities, wrongly claiming that this means they want to take over the world and inflict the same on everyone else. They’ll tell you China has sought to expand control over some directly adjacent territories, wrongly claiming that this means they want to dominate the planet militarily like the US currently does. They’ll cite evidence which shows China is seeking to become a superpower and create a multipolar world (something China openly admits) and wrongly claim that this is proof that they are seeking to dominate the world with unipolar hegemony. They won’t be able to produce any actual, hard evidence that China is trying to take over the world and censor your internet and take away your rights, because no such evidence exists. It’s a completely empty belief arising from aggressive narrative manipulation.
“One myth I think really that needs to be dispelled is that somehow China is aiming to replace America and going to run the world, and it’s not,” said Chinese venture capitalist and social scientist Eric Li on the John Pilger documentary The Coming War on China. “First of all, the Chinese are not that stupid. The west, with its Christian roots, are about converting other people into their beliefs. The Chinese are not about that. It’s just that–again, I’m not degrading the western culture, I’m just pointing out the inherent nature, the DNA of two different cultures–the Chinese two thousand years ago built the Great Wall to keep the barbarians out, not to invade them.”
I’d say this is a reasonable summary. After European nations tried to conquer the planet just a few generations ago in the name of spreading Christianity and “civilization”, we’re projecting our sick vestigial colonialist values on a nation whose culture never drove it to such madness.
Violently dominating the entire planet for all eternity on the vague suspicion that another country wants to do the same to you is not sane, and is not an option. Unabsorbed nations should be allowed to remain unabsorbed, absorbed nations should have their sovereignty restored (or in Australia’s case granted to it for the first time since its existence as a nation), and America should begin acting like a normal country. The notion of “pre-crime” is the purview of dystopian horror fiction when applied to individual people, and there’s no reason we should find the prospect of attacking and destroying for hypothetical future offenses any less insane on an international scale.
There was never any reason for the coronavirus to be made into an issue of international conflict when it could just as easily be an issue of international collaboration, and indeed collaborating is what we should all be doing, with this virus and with everything else. Let’s end this weird slow-motion world war and move toward sanity.
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
SC212-12
http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/here-is-why-the-u-s-economy-would-continue-to-crash-even-if-all-the-lockdowns-were-lifted-immediately
Here Is Why The U.S. Economy Would Continue To Crash Even If All The Lockdowns Were Lifted Immediately…
COVID-19 has created an enormous amount of fear, and that fear is doing far more damage to the economy than the actual virus is. In an environment of fear, financial institutions become a lot tighter with their money, and that inevitably causes economic activity to slow down. For example, just consider what happened in 2008. Mortgage lending standards suddenly became much more strict, and that greatly contributed to the horrific housing price crash which left millions upon millions of Americans underwater on their mortgages. Unfortunately, this coronavirus pandemic has created a wave of fear that is far greater than what we experienced during the last recession, and that has enormous implications for the months ahead.
Extremely loose lending standards helped create debt-fueled “booms” throughout our economy in recent years, but now lending standards are going in the complete opposite direction very rapidly.
For instance, Chase is now requiring a credit score of at least 700 for all new home loans, and they are one of the financial institutions that is now requiring a down payment of at least 20 percent…
A Chase spokesperson confirmed that starting April 14, new mortgage applicants will need a minimum credit score of 700 and a down payment of 20%. Refinancing applications for non-Chase mortgages will also need the same score. Chase didn’t disclose its previous lending standards but the average downpayment for first-time home buyers is around 6%, according to a 2018 survey from the National Association of Realtors.
If you own your home, would you have been approved for a mortgage under the new Chase standards?
And Chase is far from alone. In fact, most major mortgage lenders have now tightened up, and Redfin is estimating that about a quarter of all home buyers last year would not have qualified under the new standards.
So if you remove about a quarter of all buyers from the marketplace moving forward, what happens to the housing market?
Yes, there will be an implosion, and it will happen no matter whether coronavirus lockdowns are in effect or not.
And home equity loans are going to be hit even harder. As I discussed last week, Wells Fargo is no longer taking HELOC applications at all.
So no matter how good your credit is, you simply cannot get a home equity line of credit from Wells Fargo at this point.
This is what fear does.
We see similar things happening in the credit card industry. Standards have been greatly tightened for new customers, and in some instances existing customers are having their limits slashed or their cards suddenly canceled. The following comes from Newsweek…
Analysts warn that credit card companies are lowering credit limits and canceling cards—often without warning—amid the pandemic-induced economic crisis, just as they did during the Great Recession.
If you think that this won’t have a dramatic impact on the U.S. economy, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.
Our economy is a consumer driven economy, and if consumers don’t have access to easy credit there is no way in the world that economic activity will return to previous levels.
Of course even if they did have access to easy credit, many Americans are so afraid of this virus that they have no intention of resuming normal economic patterns any time soon…
Here’s hoping you enjoyed the last movie or concert you attended, because if the results of a new survey are accurate, it may be a long, long time before such events are ever popular again. According to the research, 40% of Americans plan to avoid public spaces unless “absolutely necessary” long after the coronavirus pandemic has subsided.
The survey, commissioned by Vital Vio, asked 1,000 U.S. adults about how they envision every day life in the wake of the coronavirus. All in all, it looks like there are suddenly a whole lot more germaphobes in the land of the free. Over four in five (82%) said they are now more aware of, and concerned about, cleaning protocols in public areas. Additionally, 58% are more suspicious about their friends’ and family’s hygiene habits.
And a lot of companies are also going to be extremely hesitant to “return to normal” because of the threat of lawsuits.
Earlier today, I was stunned to learn that 771 coronavirus-related lawsuits have already been filed…
Hundreds of lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus pandemic are rapidly amassing in state and federal courts, the first wave of litigation challenging decisions made early during the crisis by corporations, insurance companies and governments.
Claims have been filed against hospitals and senior-living facilities, airlines and cruise lines, fitness chains and the entertainment industry – 771 as of Friday, according to a database compiled by Hunton Andrews Kurth, an international law firm tracking cases that emerge from the pandemic.
Isn’t that insane?
I have repeatedly warned my readers that it will be exceedingly difficult to “return to normal” in our overly litigious society, but even I didn’t expect so many lawsuits so soon.
And this is just the beginning. Eventually there will be thousands upon thousands of coronavirus lawsuits, and they will tie up our courts for the foreseeable future.
This pandemic just seems to be magnifying everything that is wrong with our society, and at this point the future looks so bleak that even perpetually optimistic Warren Buffett is throwing in the cards…
A 95% plunge in passengers. Billions in losses. A rush for new debt. A recovery that executives expect to take years. Coronavirus is roiling the airline industry and the Oracle of Omaha has seen enough.
Warren Buffett told investors Saturday that Berkshire Hathaway has sold its entire stakes in the four largest U.S. airlines — American, Delta, Southwest, United — as the pandemic upends another bet on the sector that the famed investor had shunned for years before a surprise return in 2016.
Buffett understands that fear of this virus is going to paralyze air travel for a very long time to come, and he is getting out while he still can.
But if our society cannot even handle COVID-19, what will things look like once much worse things start happening?
It has been sobering to watch how rapidly our “snowflake society” has melted during this pandemic.
Now virtually the entire nation is paralyzed by fear, and the once great U.S. economy is crashing all around us.
And the really bad news is that this is just the beginning…
Here Is Why The U.S. Economy Would Continue To Crash Even If All The Lockdowns Were Lifted Immediately…
COVID-19 has created an enormous amount of fear, and that fear is doing far more damage to the economy than the actual virus is. In an environment of fear, financial institutions become a lot tighter with their money, and that inevitably causes economic activity to slow down. For example, just consider what happened in 2008. Mortgage lending standards suddenly became much more strict, and that greatly contributed to the horrific housing price crash which left millions upon millions of Americans underwater on their mortgages. Unfortunately, this coronavirus pandemic has created a wave of fear that is far greater than what we experienced during the last recession, and that has enormous implications for the months ahead.
Extremely loose lending standards helped create debt-fueled “booms” throughout our economy in recent years, but now lending standards are going in the complete opposite direction very rapidly.
For instance, Chase is now requiring a credit score of at least 700 for all new home loans, and they are one of the financial institutions that is now requiring a down payment of at least 20 percent…
A Chase spokesperson confirmed that starting April 14, new mortgage applicants will need a minimum credit score of 700 and a down payment of 20%. Refinancing applications for non-Chase mortgages will also need the same score. Chase didn’t disclose its previous lending standards but the average downpayment for first-time home buyers is around 6%, according to a 2018 survey from the National Association of Realtors.
If you own your home, would you have been approved for a mortgage under the new Chase standards?
And Chase is far from alone. In fact, most major mortgage lenders have now tightened up, and Redfin is estimating that about a quarter of all home buyers last year would not have qualified under the new standards.
So if you remove about a quarter of all buyers from the marketplace moving forward, what happens to the housing market?
Yes, there will be an implosion, and it will happen no matter whether coronavirus lockdowns are in effect or not.
And home equity loans are going to be hit even harder. As I discussed last week, Wells Fargo is no longer taking HELOC applications at all.
So no matter how good your credit is, you simply cannot get a home equity line of credit from Wells Fargo at this point.
This is what fear does.
We see similar things happening in the credit card industry. Standards have been greatly tightened for new customers, and in some instances existing customers are having their limits slashed or their cards suddenly canceled. The following comes from Newsweek…
Analysts warn that credit card companies are lowering credit limits and canceling cards—often without warning—amid the pandemic-induced economic crisis, just as they did during the Great Recession.
If you think that this won’t have a dramatic impact on the U.S. economy, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.
Our economy is a consumer driven economy, and if consumers don’t have access to easy credit there is no way in the world that economic activity will return to previous levels.
Of course even if they did have access to easy credit, many Americans are so afraid of this virus that they have no intention of resuming normal economic patterns any time soon…
Here’s hoping you enjoyed the last movie or concert you attended, because if the results of a new survey are accurate, it may be a long, long time before such events are ever popular again. According to the research, 40% of Americans plan to avoid public spaces unless “absolutely necessary” long after the coronavirus pandemic has subsided.
The survey, commissioned by Vital Vio, asked 1,000 U.S. adults about how they envision every day life in the wake of the coronavirus. All in all, it looks like there are suddenly a whole lot more germaphobes in the land of the free. Over four in five (82%) said they are now more aware of, and concerned about, cleaning protocols in public areas. Additionally, 58% are more suspicious about their friends’ and family’s hygiene habits.
And a lot of companies are also going to be extremely hesitant to “return to normal” because of the threat of lawsuits.
Earlier today, I was stunned to learn that 771 coronavirus-related lawsuits have already been filed…
Hundreds of lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus pandemic are rapidly amassing in state and federal courts, the first wave of litigation challenging decisions made early during the crisis by corporations, insurance companies and governments.
Claims have been filed against hospitals and senior-living facilities, airlines and cruise lines, fitness chains and the entertainment industry – 771 as of Friday, according to a database compiled by Hunton Andrews Kurth, an international law firm tracking cases that emerge from the pandemic.
Isn’t that insane?
I have repeatedly warned my readers that it will be exceedingly difficult to “return to normal” in our overly litigious society, but even I didn’t expect so many lawsuits so soon.
And this is just the beginning. Eventually there will be thousands upon thousands of coronavirus lawsuits, and they will tie up our courts for the foreseeable future.
This pandemic just seems to be magnifying everything that is wrong with our society, and at this point the future looks so bleak that even perpetually optimistic Warren Buffett is throwing in the cards…
A 95% plunge in passengers. Billions in losses. A rush for new debt. A recovery that executives expect to take years. Coronavirus is roiling the airline industry and the Oracle of Omaha has seen enough.
Warren Buffett told investors Saturday that Berkshire Hathaway has sold its entire stakes in the four largest U.S. airlines — American, Delta, Southwest, United — as the pandemic upends another bet on the sector that the famed investor had shunned for years before a surprise return in 2016.
Buffett understands that fear of this virus is going to paralyze air travel for a very long time to come, and he is getting out while he still can.
But if our society cannot even handle COVID-19, what will things look like once much worse things start happening?
It has been sobering to watch how rapidly our “snowflake society” has melted during this pandemic.
Now virtually the entire nation is paralyzed by fear, and the once great U.S. economy is crashing all around us.
And the really bad news is that this is just the beginning…
Monday, May 18, 2020
SC212-11
https://www.globalresearch.ca/federal-reserve-financial-mismanagement/5713281
Federal Reserve Financial Mismanagement
The misnamed Federal Reserve isn’t federal. It’s owned and controlled by major Wall Street banks.
It serves their interests at the expense of sound economic policy, ignoring its congressional mandate to “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, (low inflation), and moderate long term interest rates.”
The Fed transformed monetary policy into a tool for elevating stock prices to more greatly enrich America’s privileged class at the expense of protracted Depression conditions, high unemployment, and far greater underemployment throughout most of the new millennium.
Its mismanagement is greatly exacerbated by the current economic collapse, a likely protracted economic death cycle for most Americans.
Tens of millions are unemployed. Millions with jobs are working reduced hours for poverty-level pay and few or no benefits.
Countless millions lost healthcare coverage at a time when it’s most needed.
GDP, retail sales, industrial production, unemployment, and other economic data plunged to record low levels while food prices are surging — risking a 2nd epidemic of hunger and malnutrition.
Real unemployment isn’t the phony Labor Department’s 14.7%.
When calculated according to its pre-1990 model, it’s 39.6% and rising, according to economist John Williams.
By comparison, unemployment during the depths of the Great Depression was around 25%.
Noted Wall Street analyst Jeremy Grantham earlier slammed what he called “ruinous” Fed policymaking, saying:
“If I were a benevolent dictator, I would strip the Fed of its” wrongheaded policymaking, “limit(ing) its meddling to attempting to manage inflation,” adding:
“I would limit (Fed) activities to making sure that the economy had a suitable amount of liquidity to function normally – a Goldilocks formula, not too hot, not too cold, just right.”
“I would force it to swear off manipulating asset prices through artificially low rates and asymmetric promises of help in tough times” — the so-called Fed put, believing its policymaking will reverse stock prices if fall too far.
The so-called Reagan era-established Plunge Protection Team operates by manipulating stock, bond, commodity, and currency markets.
There’s nothing random about market movements, one of many Wall Street myths.
Grantham also explained that abnormally low interest rates for protracted periods encourage destabilizing speculation, adding:
Fed governors know that “low rates and moral hazard encourage higher asset prices and increased speculation, heading, when unchecked, to bad endings,” small investors and ordinary people hurt most.
Policies of Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and now Powell elevated markets to unsustainable bubble levels.
Artificially low interest rates like now also transfer wealth from savers and retirees to corporate America and high-net-worth individuals.
Quantitative easing has nothing to do with reviving economic growth — everything to do with providing investors with low-cost or near-free money for speculation.
It lets corporations buy back shares to artificially elevate their valuations.
Despite decades of Fed policy errors, it failed to learn from its mistakes and correct them.
It’s more off-the-rails under Powell than his predecessors, handing trillions of dollars of virtual free money to Wall Street banks and other corporate favorites at a time when policymaking should focus like a laser on helping ordinary Americans by creating jobs and reviving economic growth.
Instead, neoliberal slow-motion train wreck Fed, White House, and congressional policies keep worsening conditions at a time when vital aid is needed for most Americans.
Instead of contributing to the solution, the Fed is a key part of the problem.
Even the late free market economist Milton Friedman called for abolishing the Fed, saying:
It has a “very poor record, and it’s done more harm than good” by creating financial crises.
“We don’t need the Fed,” he said, adding:
“I have for many years been in favor of replacing the Fed with a computer (that) would print out a specified number of paper dollars” to augment the money supply — the “same number, month after month, week after week, year after year.”
“The Fed has had very few periods of relatively good performance. For most of its history, it’s been a loose cannon on the deck, and not a source of stability.”
“I do not believe the Fed ought to let its monetary policy be determined by the stock market.”
“The Fed ought to devote its attention solely to keeping a relatively stable price level of goods and services” and working for full employment.
Since established in 1913 by federal law at the behest of monied interests, time and again the Fed failed to achieve its mandated obligations.
Sunday on CBS News 60 Minutes, Fed chairman Jerome Powell was interviewed.
Instead of apologizing for failed policies and vowing to change his ways for the betterment of the economy and ordinary Americans, he falsely blamed dire economic conditions on COVID-19.
He ignored the longtime house of cards US economy. If coronavirus didn’t trigger collapse, it would have been something else — notably because of Fed mismanagement.
He maintained the myth that “the the economy…can start getting better fairly soon,” ignoring its rotting underbelly because of wrongheaded Fed, congressional, and executive branch policymaking.
Rome burns while he, Trump, and congressional leaders pretend otherwise.
At the same time, Powell admitted that recovery “could stretch through the end of next year. We really don’t know.”
He failed to explain that since economic collapse began this year, over 100,000 US small and medium-sized business shut down permanently, millions of jobs gone, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study.
He largely ignored record high plunges of key economic data, notably unemployment that way exceeds the worst of the Great Depression with no near-term prospect for turning things around.
If a second coronavirus outbreak occurs, all bets are off. It could be worse than what’s ongoing, perhaps lasting well into next year or longer — exacerbating a collapsed economy and human misery more greatly than already.
Throughout the 60 Minutes interview, Fed mismanagement was ignored, Powell’s feet not held to the fire.
Nor were the economically harmful policies of his most recent predecessors.
Instead of challenging Powell’s false claim that millions of Americans were only laid off “temporarily,” the deception wasn’t corrected.
Nor was his projected max 20 – 25% unemployment challenged when it’s already near-40%.
Powell also deceptively claimed that “we had a very healthy economy two months ago” — ignoring its house of cards status, a bubble economy burst by a public health crisis.
A litany of misinformation and disinformation was offered viewers throughout the interview.
At no time was Powell’s feet held to the fire.
Nor was anything said about how Wall Street manipulators transformed America into an unprecedented money making racket, facilitated by government collusion at the highest federal, state and local levels — at the expense of the general welfare.
Notably since the neoliberal 90s, ordinary Americans have been scammed of their savings, jobs, homes, and futures to let privileged elites get richer and more powerful.
Money power runs America and the world. The Wall Street owned Fed does it by controlling money, credit and debt, along with manipulating markets for corporate and private enrichment without oversight or supervision.
Fed money printing madness defrauds the public, instead of constructively sustaining prosperous, inflation-free, growth that colonial America enjoyed for a generation — long before the Fed existed.
Markets today work by manipulating them for special interests to profit hugely at the expense of an economy that works for all Americans.
None of the above was discussed during the CBS interview with Powell.
Like most everything aired and published by establishment media on major issues, Sunday’s broadcast was a exercise in mass deception.
Viewers were left uninformed about the economy’s dismal state that’s likely to sustain harder than ever times for the vast majority of Americans, long term.
Federal Reserve Financial Mismanagement
The misnamed Federal Reserve isn’t federal. It’s owned and controlled by major Wall Street banks.
It serves their interests at the expense of sound economic policy, ignoring its congressional mandate to “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, (low inflation), and moderate long term interest rates.”
The Fed transformed monetary policy into a tool for elevating stock prices to more greatly enrich America’s privileged class at the expense of protracted Depression conditions, high unemployment, and far greater underemployment throughout most of the new millennium.
Its mismanagement is greatly exacerbated by the current economic collapse, a likely protracted economic death cycle for most Americans.
Tens of millions are unemployed. Millions with jobs are working reduced hours for poverty-level pay and few or no benefits.
Countless millions lost healthcare coverage at a time when it’s most needed.
GDP, retail sales, industrial production, unemployment, and other economic data plunged to record low levels while food prices are surging — risking a 2nd epidemic of hunger and malnutrition.
Real unemployment isn’t the phony Labor Department’s 14.7%.
When calculated according to its pre-1990 model, it’s 39.6% and rising, according to economist John Williams.
By comparison, unemployment during the depths of the Great Depression was around 25%.
Noted Wall Street analyst Jeremy Grantham earlier slammed what he called “ruinous” Fed policymaking, saying:
“If I were a benevolent dictator, I would strip the Fed of its” wrongheaded policymaking, “limit(ing) its meddling to attempting to manage inflation,” adding:
“I would limit (Fed) activities to making sure that the economy had a suitable amount of liquidity to function normally – a Goldilocks formula, not too hot, not too cold, just right.”
“I would force it to swear off manipulating asset prices through artificially low rates and asymmetric promises of help in tough times” — the so-called Fed put, believing its policymaking will reverse stock prices if fall too far.
The so-called Reagan era-established Plunge Protection Team operates by manipulating stock, bond, commodity, and currency markets.
There’s nothing random about market movements, one of many Wall Street myths.
Grantham also explained that abnormally low interest rates for protracted periods encourage destabilizing speculation, adding:
Fed governors know that “low rates and moral hazard encourage higher asset prices and increased speculation, heading, when unchecked, to bad endings,” small investors and ordinary people hurt most.
Policies of Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and now Powell elevated markets to unsustainable bubble levels.
Artificially low interest rates like now also transfer wealth from savers and retirees to corporate America and high-net-worth individuals.
Quantitative easing has nothing to do with reviving economic growth — everything to do with providing investors with low-cost or near-free money for speculation.
It lets corporations buy back shares to artificially elevate their valuations.
Despite decades of Fed policy errors, it failed to learn from its mistakes and correct them.
It’s more off-the-rails under Powell than his predecessors, handing trillions of dollars of virtual free money to Wall Street banks and other corporate favorites at a time when policymaking should focus like a laser on helping ordinary Americans by creating jobs and reviving economic growth.
Instead, neoliberal slow-motion train wreck Fed, White House, and congressional policies keep worsening conditions at a time when vital aid is needed for most Americans.
Instead of contributing to the solution, the Fed is a key part of the problem.
Even the late free market economist Milton Friedman called for abolishing the Fed, saying:
It has a “very poor record, and it’s done more harm than good” by creating financial crises.
“We don’t need the Fed,” he said, adding:
“I have for many years been in favor of replacing the Fed with a computer (that) would print out a specified number of paper dollars” to augment the money supply — the “same number, month after month, week after week, year after year.”
“The Fed has had very few periods of relatively good performance. For most of its history, it’s been a loose cannon on the deck, and not a source of stability.”
“I do not believe the Fed ought to let its monetary policy be determined by the stock market.”
“The Fed ought to devote its attention solely to keeping a relatively stable price level of goods and services” and working for full employment.
Since established in 1913 by federal law at the behest of monied interests, time and again the Fed failed to achieve its mandated obligations.
Sunday on CBS News 60 Minutes, Fed chairman Jerome Powell was interviewed.
Instead of apologizing for failed policies and vowing to change his ways for the betterment of the economy and ordinary Americans, he falsely blamed dire economic conditions on COVID-19.
He ignored the longtime house of cards US economy. If coronavirus didn’t trigger collapse, it would have been something else — notably because of Fed mismanagement.
He maintained the myth that “the the economy…can start getting better fairly soon,” ignoring its rotting underbelly because of wrongheaded Fed, congressional, and executive branch policymaking.
Rome burns while he, Trump, and congressional leaders pretend otherwise.
At the same time, Powell admitted that recovery “could stretch through the end of next year. We really don’t know.”
He failed to explain that since economic collapse began this year, over 100,000 US small and medium-sized business shut down permanently, millions of jobs gone, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study.
He largely ignored record high plunges of key economic data, notably unemployment that way exceeds the worst of the Great Depression with no near-term prospect for turning things around.
If a second coronavirus outbreak occurs, all bets are off. It could be worse than what’s ongoing, perhaps lasting well into next year or longer — exacerbating a collapsed economy and human misery more greatly than already.
Throughout the 60 Minutes interview, Fed mismanagement was ignored, Powell’s feet not held to the fire.
Nor were the economically harmful policies of his most recent predecessors.
Instead of challenging Powell’s false claim that millions of Americans were only laid off “temporarily,” the deception wasn’t corrected.
Nor was his projected max 20 – 25% unemployment challenged when it’s already near-40%.
Powell also deceptively claimed that “we had a very healthy economy two months ago” — ignoring its house of cards status, a bubble economy burst by a public health crisis.
A litany of misinformation and disinformation was offered viewers throughout the interview.
At no time was Powell’s feet held to the fire.
Nor was anything said about how Wall Street manipulators transformed America into an unprecedented money making racket, facilitated by government collusion at the highest federal, state and local levels — at the expense of the general welfare.
Notably since the neoliberal 90s, ordinary Americans have been scammed of their savings, jobs, homes, and futures to let privileged elites get richer and more powerful.
Money power runs America and the world. The Wall Street owned Fed does it by controlling money, credit and debt, along with manipulating markets for corporate and private enrichment without oversight or supervision.
Fed money printing madness defrauds the public, instead of constructively sustaining prosperous, inflation-free, growth that colonial America enjoyed for a generation — long before the Fed existed.
Markets today work by manipulating them for special interests to profit hugely at the expense of an economy that works for all Americans.
None of the above was discussed during the CBS interview with Powell.
Like most everything aired and published by establishment media on major issues, Sunday’s broadcast was a exercise in mass deception.
Viewers were left uninformed about the economy’s dismal state that’s likely to sustain harder than ever times for the vast majority of Americans, long term.
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