How Stupid Are the RepubliCons? It’s all about the economy stupid!

U.S. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell must be as stupid as U.S. Senator’s Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Paul and Cruz oppose the U.S. House of Representatives Heroes bill sponsored by the Democratic Party that will continue to provide $600 a week to the unemployed until January, as well as tens of billions of dollars to cities and states that are experiencing reduced tax dollars and will likely need to lay off tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or more, of public employees without further Federal aid.

Many Republican senators are opposed to the HEROES Act because it will not reward their billionaire owners to the same degree the CARES Act did, and which gave the superrich and their corporations $4.75 trillion in a $2.2 trillion bill. (Click here for that story.)

McConnell, appearing to be a dimwit, does not understand the issue that will decide the election in November. “It’s the economy stupid,” James Carville used to say. Carville was Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign manager in 1992. They won the election in 1992.

“We swears to serve the master of the precious.”

The U.S. economy is tanking big time. The only thing stopping the economy from further falling and moving into a Great Depression is the CARES Act, one of whose most important provisions for the 99 percent is about to expire. That provision is the $600 a week extra in unemployment benefits.

McConnell does not understand the economy needs people to spend money to keep it afloat. He opposes the $600 extra a week because some people are receiving more money than they were earning at their jobs, giving them an incentive to not look for work. Who cares? That $600 dollars is helping to keep the economy afloat, and there are not a whole bunch of available jobs out there right now anyway.

When cities, counties and states begin to lay off employees by the tens of thousands, along with those folks on unemployment who will stop receiving that $600 at the end of this month, the economy will likely move into a Great Depression, if we have not already done so.

The result will be a Democratic Party wave in November. Then it is likely the Republican Party will begin its fade into the history books as more and younger voters have become Bernie style Democratic Socialists, which is to say New Deal Democrats. McConnell and the rest of the Republican senators are about to send their political party into historical oblivion after voting to reward their billionaire backers $4.75 trillion while providing the vast majority of U.S. citizens crumbs with the CARES Act last March.

Meanwhile, U.S. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi decided to placate her Party’s base by sponsoring the Heroes Act, but not that saving the base and the economy from ruin was something she actually wanted to do. The Heroes Act is the fourth stimulus package since March and her attempts to save the billionaires who control her Party and neglect the financial needs of the 99 percent is most obvious by this fact alone. Something must have clicked in her brain to come up with the HEROES Act.

She likely came to understand saving the economy and the billionaires from ruin means having to save the rest of us. McConnell, Rand Paul and “tiny hands” Ted Cruz have not figured out this basic economic issue yet even as Texas, the state Cruz represents, is rapidly turning blue along with Virginia, North Carolina, and several other states the Republican Party reliably once controlled.

When these states turn blue, this will eliminate the Republican Party as a factor in national politics. This has already occurred on several state levels. The Republican Party used to control California. Now it is the super minority party in both of California’s legislative houses. McConnell, Cruz and Paul are hastening the Party’s decline by their economic stupidity. It’s the economy stupid!

Read Full Post »

Dictatorship of the Billionaires: Is this the United States Argentina Moment?

In the 1920s, Argentina was a nation with one of the great middle classes in the world, equal with most Europe nations. Then corruption sunk in and now Argentina is a nation filled with desperate people. We may be at such a tipping point in the United States.

The rich learned a valuable lesson from the Great Depression. Never let the stock market drop in value for too long. Otherwise, their economic and political clout will falter and open up the door for allowing democracy for the vast majority of citizens. Political corruption is so massive in the United States that members of both major political parties enacted the CARES Act in March 28, 2020. This was a $2.2 trillion economic rescue package that was actually a rescue package of over $6 trillion, most of which is making the top 0.01 percent of the U.S. population richer, while keeping political and judicial corruption at elevated levels.

The rich are receiving $4.95 trillion from the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill. You read that right. The $2.2 trillion includes more than $450 billion for large corporations, allegedly in loans. The bill includes a proviso that the Federal Reserve can print up to ten times that amount and lend that $4.5 trillion with a nod and a wink to large corporations. The combined profits of all US corporations in 2018 and 2019 were slightly over $4 trillion before taxes. The rich and their corporations, in other words, are getting more than two years’ worth of profits from the stimulus bill. This money will mainly go to the the 100 to 150 largest corporations, which will then funnel the money to the billionaires and multi-millionaires.

The Fed has been buying corporate bonds by the truckload every day. This money has been used in a large degree to providing dividend payments and keeping share prices up, which enriches the billionaires.

The primary purpose of this program has been to stifle democracy for the vast majority of citizens. If the stock markets had been allowed to continue falling in March 2000, the political, judicial and economic power of the rich would have evaporated and opened the door for democracy for the rest of us.

With the coming of the Great Depression and the New Deal programs of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), Kim Phillips-Fein writes in her book Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, “Many of these programs were measures that American’s business class had resisted for a generation, and the government enacted them at a moment when the power and prestige of business was at its nadir. The employer’s paradise had been lost.” The rich wanted it back in a big way. So they organized over a few generations and brought us to the economic disaster that has been unleashed upon us now.

The 1 percent derive 2/3rds to 100 percent of their income and wealth from owning shares of corporations. During the Depression, they had lost their power and prestige because corporate profits and the stock market had dropped 90+ percent from 1929 to 1933. This opened the door for FDR’s innovative socialist programs, such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, controlling Wall Street’s depravity with the Securities and Exchange Commission, raising tax rates on the rich so they had less money with which to corrupt all three branches of the federal government and which also functioned to set maximum take-home wages, etc…. The rich appear to have learned a lesson the rest of us have plainly not learned.

The stock market must not be allowed to fall in value for the billionaires to continue their dictatorship of the United States. Both major political parties, the Federal Reserve, the United States Supreme Court, they’re all corrupted to the bone and the only thing allowing the 1 percent to continue corrupting government at all levels is the stock market, the fortunes of which have been disconnected from the real economy for at least a dozen years, and probably more. So long at the rich can use the Fed and the federal government to keep the value of the stock market disconnected from real world economic fundamentals, the door is open to enter that Argentine moment for the vast majority of United States citizens. We will become a nation of desperate people, if we have not already become so.

Read Full Post »

The Coronavirus Recession; The Dictatorship of the Billionaires is Getting Richer at Our Expense

I wonder how bad this economic downturn is going to be. This recession just began in February 2020. The economy is opening up for the first time since the coronavirus struck the United States and people are saying the economy is going to pop right out of its slump. I doubt that.

This week, I saw all kinds of people standing in the soup line three blocks long, which was three blocks longer than two weeks ago. Facebook just laid off my friend across the street a couple weeks ago. Just a week ago, a long-time friend was furloughed from her job for the summer. My domestic partner has seen her hours reduced at work. Middle class families are rummaging through my garbage and recycle bins. The rich are getting richer. Maybe that was the big boys plan.

No, I just do not see an economic recovery around the corner. I see a deep recession. One of my local bicycle stores is closed, along with two bakeries, the coffee shop, the chocolate shop, my chiropractor and others. Four blocks away two Vietnamese restaurants have closed permanently along with a pizza parlor. Seven blocks away the Roseway Theater is shuttered. Next to it the wedding store is closed forever, and next door to that the appliance repair store is gone. All have closed permanently since March 2020. All have been open since at least the 1980s. The Roseway Theater had been open since 1924.

The coronavirus pandemic ignited this recession, but its depth and misery for Americans have been caused by 40 years of relentless class warfare by the rich. The opening shots of the war began in 1971 when a little known Republican tobacco attorney named Lewis Powell wrote what is known as the Powell manifesto urging the rich to combine their resources, establish a variety of organizations to turn back the clock to the era of the robber barons, take over the courts, and generally fight back against the Constitutional and democratic rights of the vast majority of people. The rich took his advice. They organized. Out popped the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Federalist Society, and a lot more. Two months after he wrote his manifesto, Powell was sitting on the Supreme Court bench serving the rich as a legalized guerilla fighter in their war against the rest of us.

The Roseway Theater is closed and that financially helps streaming corporations like Amazon and Apple and their rich shareholders become richer. The local restaurants are gone but that financially helps Walmart, Domino’s Pizza and other major corporations and billionaire owned private equity companies by eliminating the local competition, and their rich shareholders are prospering at the expense of local business people, the real entrepreneurs, people who are our neighbors. The local coffee shops are gone, and that helps the affluent shareholders of Starbucks and other major coffee corporations get richer.

A recent poll shows 62 percent of Americans think the United States is in the toilet. Political corruption on a massive scale has done that, with the billionaires in control of both major political parties, as well as the Supreme Court. (Click here for that story)

The CARES Act of March 2020 was supposed to help the economy with loans to small businesses, but apparently, the authorized money is not enough and perhaps deliberately so. Thank you Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. The CARES Act authorized $4.75 trillion to save the 1 percent who derive the vast majority of their income and wealth from major corporations.

Bloomberg reports the Federal Reserve is printing and giving billions of dollars to major corporations, such as Walmart, AT&T, and United Health. Technically, those are loans but will likely be forgiven. Meanwhile, those billions find their way into the hands of the rich via higher dividends and capital gains. Click here for that story.

If you count capital gains, the rich have gone from stealing 7 percent of all income produced in the United States in 1971 when Lewis Powell wrote the Powell Manifesto to at least 37 percent by 2016. It is likely closer to 40 percent in 2020. You can thank the corporate wing of the Supreme Court for much of that gain.

Don’t you think it’s time to forget about our petty differences on the social issues the rich have used their news organizations to get us to focus on, and unite to save ourselves against the depredations of the rich? If not for yourselves, why don’t you do it for future generations?

Read Full Post »