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https://stephenlendman.org/2021/03/nyt-fake-news-calls-main-street-economic-collapse-the-biden-boom/

NYT Fake News Calls Main Street Economic Collapse the Biden Boom

What the Times calls “the Biden boom” ignores joblessness affecting over one-fourth of working-age Americans — a dismal state exceeding the worst of the 1930s Great Depression.

No US economic boom exists or is in prospect.

While America’s privileged 1% never had things better, ordinary Americans face protracted made-in-the-USA Main Street Depression conditions.

Days earlier, Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) reported the following:

Since early 2020, America’s billionaires became “$1.3 trillion richer.”

Their collective wealth increased to $4.2 trillion as of March 10 — based on ATF and Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) data.

Over the past year, “43 newly minted billionaires” joined the ranks of hundreds of others in the US — their numbers now at 657, America’s aristocracy.

According to ATF’s executive director Frank Clemente:

“It’s been a full year now of illness, unemployment, and insecurity for tens of millions of Americans—but 12 months of incredible wealth growth for the nation’s billionaires.”

IPS Program on Inequality director Chuck Collins added:

“(O)bscene gains of wealth (over the past year of the hardest of hard times on Main Street) prove that our economy is clearly designed for billionaires to profit, while millions suffer.”

Collins’ forthcoming book is titled: “The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions.”

ATF explained that “(u)nder  current tax law, none of the billionaires’ $4.2 trillion in wealth will be taxed during their lifetimes, unless the underlying assets are sold at a gain.”

By “aggressive tax dodging,” most of their wealth will be passed on to heirs. 

If “Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act” legislation proposed by a handful of House and Senate members is enacted, it would raise about $3 trillion in revenue over a 10-year period.

It would make the US super-rich pay their fair share.

Chances for what should become the law of the land — along with tax cuts for low-and-middle income Americans — most likely won’t because most congressional members support privileged interests exclusively over beneficial social change.

It’s been this way for the past half century with nothing in prospect to change things.

Yet NYT propagandist Tom Friedman absurdly called $1.9 trillion stimulus enacted into law a “rescue (plan for) the poor (sic)” and a boon for “the private sector to start new companies and create more good jobs (to) boost living standards (sic).”

It’s a short-term bandaid, not a boon for ordinary Americans. 

Nor will it “create more good jobs,” stimulate economic growth, or “supercharge” it.

A “Biden boom” applies to Wall Street, not Main Street.

America’s privileged class will keep benefitting at the expense of exploited ordinary Americans.

It’s notably been this way since the neoliberal 90s.

There’s nothing remotely democratic about empowered undemocratic Dems.

Diabolical Great Reset aims are all about greater exploitation of ordinary Americans and others abroad than already — along with elimination of free and open societies, tyranny replacing them.

On Tuesday, Michael Snyder’s Economic Collapse blog reported the following:

While super-wealthy individuals “are reveling in…giant mountains of money,” the US is “coming apart at the seams.”

For over a year, around a million jobless Americans applied for unemployment help weekly.

“(P)overty is absolutely exploding all around us, and crime rates are shooting higher at an unprecedented rate.”

Snyder cited a study that showed murder rates in 34 large US cities rose on “average 30% (year-over-year by) in 2020, adding:

“In some areas, carjackings, robberies, shootings, sexual assaults and violence have become so common that it seems like the crime literally never stops.”

In downtown Chicago where I live, it’s unsafe to be out at night alone — though police patrol main thoroughfares in the immediate vicinity of my residence round-the-clock, not side streets.

Three months into the new year, things are worse than in 2020.

Main Street crime, poverty, and unemployment booms exist, not what the Times called a “Biden boom,” according to its twisted perversion of reality.

Looking ahead, things are far more likely to worsen than improve.

The nation I recall as a boy, adolescent and youth no longer exists.

The land of opportunity I and my peers enjoyed is gone.

Worsening dystopian harshness replaced it.

Boom conditions apply only to the nation’s privileged class, especially its super-rich — while Main Street gets increasingly desolate.

Don’t expect the NYT or other establishment media to ever set the record straight.

They feature mind-manipulating mass deception rubbish — truth and full disclosure banned in their reports.

....

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar21/detours3-21.html

The Hazardous Detour in the Road to "Recovery" Few Foresee

You know the plot point in the horror film where the highway is blocked and a detour sign directs the car full of naive teens off onto a rutted track into the wilderness? We're right there in the narrative of "the road to recovery": the highway that everyone expected would be smooth and wide open is about to be detoured into a rutted track that peters out in a wilderness without any lights or signage.

Oops--no cell coverage out here either. Is that the road over there? Guess not--we just careened into a canyon alive with the roar of a raging river. Our vehicle keeps sliding downhill, even with the brakes locked... this trip to "recovery" was supposed to be so quick and easy, and now there's no way out... what's that noise?

You know the rest: the naive, trusting teens are picked off one by one in the most horrific fashion. Substitute naive punters in the stock market and you have the script for what lies ahead.

The "recovery" has an unfortunate but all-too accurate connotation: recovery from addiction. The "recovery" we've been told is already accelerating at a wondrous pace does not include any treatment of the market's addiction to Federal Reserve free money for financiers; rather, the "recovery" is entirely dependent on a never-ending speedball of Fed smack and crack and a booster of Fed financial meth.

The addiction to Fed speedballs had already turned the entire financial sector into a casino of lunatic junkies who delusionally believe they're all geniuses. Beneath the illusory stability of the god-like Fed has our back, the addiction to free money has completely destabilized America's social, political and economic orders by boosting wealth and income inequality to unprecedented extremes.

While it's convenient to blame the carnage on the response to the Covid pandemic, the damage to the speedball-addicted financial system had already reached extremes before the pandemic: the addiction began decades ago, but like all addictions, the amount of stimulus needed to maintain the high keeps expanding, and eventually the need can't be met without toxic doses: then the junkie / addicted system collapses.

The ever-greater doses of Fed speedballs have unleashed both deflation (smack) and inflation (crack): real returns on ordinary savings have been crushed to zero (deflation of ordinary income), and as the cost of capital/credit have been dropped to near-zero, then the purchasing power of wages has deflated while the speculative gains of those who own assets have soared (asset inflation).

By lowering the cost of capital to zero, the Fed has generated fatally perverse incentives. With the cost of capital at zero, it makes sense to buy labor-saving technologies to replace costly labor-- labor that is costly to employers because of America's perverse sickcare system, which burdens employers with ever-higher costs.

Not only have the Fed's free-money speedballs made it essentially free for financiers to speculate in the stock market casino, the Fed has rigged the game and bailed out its cronies whenever their bets soured. This has fueled infinite moral hazard: Go ahead and gamble with free money from the Fed, and go ahead and leverage it up 10-to-1 because the Fed will bail you out if you lose, but if you win, the stupendous gains are yours to keep.

The problem with addiction is you're dependent on the high, no matter what the eventual consequences may be. Long-term consequences are ignored because all that matters to the addict is to get the next Fed speedball and throw it on the gambling table to keep the high going.

Our entire economy is now dependent on ever-expanding speculative gains. Should the casino winnings falter, our economy will crash, and given the primacy of money and consumption in our society and political system, the financial collapse of the Fed's casino lunacy will sweep those systems over the falls.

As the level of Fed smack and crack needed to maintain the high increases, system fragility increases geometrically. The irony of addiction is that when the crack/meth kicks in, the addict feels god-like, in control, invulnerable. This artificial confidence is entirely illusory, a deadly combination of delusion and hubris.

In this delusional state of supreme confidence, the addict loses touch with reality, i.e. the fatal consequences of the addiction. That's the detour we've taken in becoming addicted to the Fed's free-money speedballs. Now the rutted road has ended in a trackless wilderness. There is no way back and no way forward. The addict's addled confidence will push them into the ice-cold river, and as they're swept over the falls, the realization that it was all a drug-induced delusion will come too late to make a difference.