Listening to Donald Trump and the morning news makes me think of a
real shocking headline.
"President Trump tells Wall Street, Capitalism is Survival of the
Fittest. So survive on your own!"
On 3/27/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, if you listened to the journalist on Democracy Now this morning who's
written an article in The Guardian, it wasn't a 2 trillion dollar bill. It
is a 6 trillion dollar bill with all kinds of financial bailouts for hedge
funds and financial firms, banks, and corporations, all hidden and
disguised, all agreed to by our progressive champions like Bernie Sanders
and Elizabeth Warren. In comparison, that 500 billion dollar bailout that
Bernie was complaining about Wednesday night, is nothing! And those
bastards, giving people one miserable check for twelve hundred dollars! But
you know, people are easily fooled and manipulated. Look, all those idiots
voted for Joe Biden because they believed all the lies that the party
leaders told about him, especially the Democratic Black leaders. And half
the time, when pieces of the truth dribble out, people don't believe them.
Both my daughter and my home health aide heard clips of the woman who had
been an aide to Joe Biden in the 90's, describe his treatment of her and
both immediately disbelieved her. My daughter thought she was a plant from
the Trump campaign. My aide thought she was making the allegation for self
serving reasons. There was enough information in what they both heard to
indicate that she was telling the truth and not being self serving, but they
didn't hear it. Then later, I heard the whole long interview that Katie
Halper did with her and it was obvious that she was telling the truth, not a
plant, and not self serving. But people are adrift in a sea of lies.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2020 12:40 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>; Trisha Hart
<trisha.angel.my.heart80@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Capitalism’s coronavirus response: Bail out the
rich!
https://socialistaction.org/2020/03/26/capitalisms-coronavirus-response-bail-out-the-rich/
Capitalism’s coronavirus response: Bail out the rich!
Socialist Action / 21 hours ago
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gives the thumbs up after speaking on
the bailout bill in the Senate on Wednesday. (Getty Images) By JOHN
POTTINGER
Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap
off tall buildings in a single bound! Superman? No, it’s the U.S.
and the world capitalist economies. Or is it?
As more states and more counties mandate stay-in-place orders more and more
people are out of jobs to the tune of perhaps 13 to 20 percent, compared to
ten percent unemployment at the nadir of the 2008 Great Recession.
Additional millions were rendered partially employed. As for the Gross
Domestic Product (GDP), an optimistic forecast (optimistic is a relative
term) by Warwick McKibbin, an economist at the Australian National
University who modeled the SARS pandemic, estimated that the coronavirus
might kill 236,000 people in the US while shrinking the GDP by 2 percent.
But if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers are correct
1,000,000 people could die and the GDP could fall by 8.4 percent.
Goldman Sachs, not to be outdone, said GDP could drop 24 percent for the
second quarter. (Goldman Sachs counts dollars not lives.) Donald Trump
suggests the same. “Restart the economy by Easter, he states (NYT, March
25.) Profits before people!
For now, millions of people staying home with no paychecks. It means
schools, libraries, restaurants, bars, all sporting events, concerts,
dentist offices, barbers, hairdressers and many more are closed. Better
this, of course, than Trump’s unthinkable back to work solutions – at the
peak of the curve, no doubt!
The pandemic also brought on a stock market crash which means among other
things that people who were going to buy a house or to a lesser extent a car
or SUV, won’t be able to do so because their down payment had been in the
stock market. On the up side the air is cleaner because no one is driving or
flying.
So what’s the response from the federal government? Well the Democrats and
Republicans knee-jerk response is to throw money at the big banks.
The New York Federal Reserve is offering $1 trillion for overnight loans and
$1 trillion more in 14-day loans. All for the corporate elite at near zero
percent interest rates. The Fed is also buying $500 billion in Treasury
bonds and snapping up mortgage-backed securities – all with printed paper
money, as usual.
Meanwhile on Capital Hill Congress plans a $2 trillion stimulus package;
$425 billion for “distressed companies,” $75 billion to airlines and hotels,
$100 billion for hospitals, $150 billion to state and local governments,
$350 billion in loans for small businesses, oh, and yes,
$1,200 to workers who make up to $75,000, plus $500 per child. Don’t spend
it all in one place.
So quite unlike Medicare for All, the bourgeois press and the bourgeois
politicians seem to think turning on the tap and printing money is now OK.
While $1,200 checks are a start and more money for the poor and unemployed
is good, where will the rest of the cash go?
Will the airlines spend it on wages or perhaps on buying a “distressed
competitor?” Will it prioritize jobs that produce real value or the further
concentration of finance capital to eliminate competition to drive up
declining profit rates?
Where’s the $500 billion the Fed spent on Treasury bonds going? Are they
going to tip the waiter or fund the big corporations’ line of credit?
Will printing more money lead to inflation or perhaps an asset bubble more
likely to burst? Ernest Mandel had the answer in his “Marxist Economic
Theory Vol. 2,” page 527, “The increase in the public debt has simply
replaced (concealed) direct currency inflation. Instead of appearing in the
form of an increased amount of fiduciary money* in circulation, it appears
in that of an increase in the fictitious
capital** constituted by public debt securities. But the total stock of
currency is swollen exactly as if there had been an issue of paper money.”
In other words, all this money being thrown at the bourgeoisie over the
course of time will end up in speculation – in capitalism’s ever increasing
casino-like economy of over priced shares, mortgage-backed securities,
assorted financial instruments, and who knows what. The capitalist could
invest in making widgets but with mass unemployment who will buy them?
What now? In the short term working people need a moratorium on all
evictions, foreclosures, rent, mortgages, utility payments, debt payments,
credit card payments and student loan payments. But we will never be really
safe until the banks and big corporations are nationalized under the control
of working people, where we can collectively and democratically construct a
planned economy that operates for human need not capitalist profit. We need
a workers’
government that plans for socialism and for that we need a revolutionary
party. Join us!
* Fiduciary money is money backed by trust between the payer and payee, like
the $20 bill that was in your pocket until you were lay off.
** Fictitious capital is value, in the form of shares, debt, speculative
instruments, etc., above and beyond what can be realized in the form of
commodities. With average profit rates derived from workers’ labor power
consistently in decline over the past several decades, capitalists
increasing invest their profits not in new production that creates real
value but rather in banks and related financial institutions that “invest”
in speculative instruments that have little or no correspondence to the
production of commodities.
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March 26, 2020 in Uncategorized.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson
