Saturday, April 4, 2020

AMERICA: A NATION RULED BY AND FOR WALL STREET AND REIGNED OVER BY THEIR PET ORANGE BABOON TRUMPER

Three years and two months later, he is still fooling millions of Americans. His misleading, self-serving opinions interact with a credulous public to produce a toxin. “Don’t believe anything that the president says,” advised the Arizona woman whose husband died. In other words, we need to observe social distancing—from the president and his babbling.


Welcome to the Fourth World

How Trump has initiated America’s undoing—and how coronavirus is helping him speed it up.

Americans have a better chance of keeping themselves and others safe by ignoring what President Trump says. He has already contributed to the death of an Arizona man who, along with his wife, took chloroquine (used to clean fish tanks!) the day after Trump misinformed the country about its anti-viral effectiveness. Medical experts criticized the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency authorization for its use, because too much can kill you. In fact, its use against malaria is not necessarily applicable to COVID-19 without careful clinical trials to establish proper dosing. In the wife’s case, it sent her into critical condition. Even doctors who listened to Trump are writing prescriptions to hoard the drug for themselves, depleting supplies for those who really need it for lupus and other ailments.
This is what the United States has come to. You can’t believe your president, the one who is getting a 55 percent approval rating for his handling—or mishandling—of the pandemic. You shouldn’t have accepted his cavalier assessment that the supposed severity of the virus was just the Democrats’ “new hoax” that would soon disappear. You can’t trust his absurd assurances that sufficient tests and medical equipment are available, or that they’re not really needed in bulk.
You certainly shouldn’t act on his push to fill the churches on Easter and to go back to work—advice he’s now recanted by extending preventive guidelines until April 30. His contradictory and self-absorbed briefings have encouraged millions to take the disease less seriously than warranted, which could lead to the collapse of law enforcement, health care, fire departments, infrastructure maintenance, and food supplies as those essential workers drop into sickness.
Trump is a national security risk. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying attention. He refuses to talk to governors who don’t fawn over him. He claims to have inherited “a broken system.” Yet he has been in office for more than three very long years, during which he has watched TV compulsively, tweeted his grievances and insults, played lots of golf, come to work late in the morning, and governed the way Boris Yeltsin did in Russia as it descended: by simply firing people, as if the federal government were his TV show, The Apprentice.
The cost is now apparent. An excellent analysis by Jennifer Steinhauer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs in The New York Times documents the handicaps created by the widespread vacancies in key federal positions, the massive departures of top scientists and specialists in emergency management, and the colossal inexperience of political lackeys Trump has appointed. It’s a reminder of the Soviet Union in its final years, as political orthodoxy mattered more than expertise.
There is a reminder of another kind. Anyone who has been in a Third World country, whether in deep poverty or in wartime, knows the familiarity of harrowing accounts we are now receiving from American hospitals. In Cambodia, too, patients waited for hours or days in hallways. There, too, doctors and nurses were overwhelmed and often helpless in the face of insufficient methods of treatment. People died when decent medical care could have saved them.
We are now in a Fourth World—“a new category of nations: those once mighty and noble that are falling into frailty and disrepute.” Those words are from a piece I wrote the day before Trump was inaugurated. It was entitled, “America Enters a Fourth World.” My apologies for quoting myself, which puts me off when writers do it. But I’ll continue shamelessly, and you can read the whole essay here to see how obvious Trump’s defects were even before he took office as “the most childish, reckless, and truthless president in modern American history.”
The Fourth World “is a place of undoing. It is a place where moral values of the common good are picked apart, strand by strand, until only the shreds of caring and justice remain. It is where progress is dismantled: progress—albeit fitful and incomplete—in mobilizing the society through government to protect the impoverished from utter ruin, the innocent from false imprisonment, minorities from tyranny, children from hunger, families from dangerous foods and medicines and polluted air and water, and the earth from the end-stage of catastrophic global warming.
There is nothing divinely ordained about America’s greatness. Once Trump and the radicals who will populate most of his cabinet finish their efforts to destroy what has been painstakingly constructed over decades, it will take a generation to recover. That is the actual time when it will be appropriate to plead, “Make America Great Again!”
The term “Third World,” coined in 1952 by Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer, evolved into the optimistic label “developing countries.” In the meantime, it spawned the category “First World” to mean the industrialized capitalist countries, and the “Second World,” the industrialized communist countries. Only “Third World” survived for a while as common shorthand.
Welcome now to the Fourth World. “In Trump’s vicinity, truth dies,” I wrote the day before his inauguration. “He facilitates the erosion of shared reality in a polarized society more infatuated with opinion than fact—or, rather, that believes opinion is fact.”
Three years and two months later, he is still fooling millions of Americans. His misleading, self-serving opinions interact with a credulous public to produce a toxin. “Don’t believe anything that the president says,” advised the Arizona woman whose husband died. In other words, we need to observe social distancing—from the president and his babbling.




Are Trump’s Improv Skills His Secret to Survival?

Despite his gross mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, his approval ratings have gone up.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Donald Trump said on a “hunch” that the coronavirus was no more virulent than the flu. Then, against all Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautions, he claimed that the infected would be able to go to work. More recently,  he said the whole country should go back to normal by Easter Sunday, with jammed churches and a happy end to social distancing. He quickly had to reverse himself. Meantime, my hometown of New Orleans has some of the highest infection rates in the country. What explains these outbursts from the president?  “I’m a very instinctual person,” Trump once said, “but my instinct turns out to be right.” Except when it isn’t.
Still, Trump has seemingly benefitted from his antics, albeit in a perverse and cynical way. Despite the fact that he has consistently disseminated misinformation at his daily briefings, after failing to prepare for the outbreak itself, his approval ratings for his handling of COVID-19 have jumped to 60 percent, according to Gallup.
We tend to dismiss Trump’s characteristic improvising as unpresidential and maybe a bit comical. We had great fun with covfefe. But the persuasive power of Trump’s improvisations, for all their flaws—in fact, because of their flaws—carries tremendous power. It’s not just with his base. In the same Gallup poll, his approval rating among Democrats for his handling of COVID-19 rose from 7 percent March 2-13 to 13 percent March 13-22.
Americans have missed his improvising’s persuasive power at our peril. Throughout the ages, improvisation has held the power to change culture—think of jazz improvisation’s role in the civil rights movement—and even to change political history. Especially in times of crisis and disaster, we need improvisation and creative rule-breaking. But we also need a critical element in conjunction: empathy.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office set the standard for all administrations to follow because of his readiness to improvise amid the soul-shattering crisis of the Great Depression. His administration tried just about everything to turn around the economy. Not every attempt was a success, but some, like the Works Progress Administration, became legend, building the Hoover Dam and putting historians and composers alike back to work.
When New Orleans was shut down after Katrina, the “Cajun Navy” from west Louisiana—a flotilla of speedboats, airboats and pirogues—spontaneously showed up at the barricades. The National Guard had the good sense to let them through. The Cajun Navy saved many from drowning in attics and dying on rooftops.  That was a practical and heroic example of improvisation.
Both FDR and the Cajun Navy’s energy and willingness to improvise to address others’ needs were so successful because they were rooted in empathy, the core characteristic that Trump lacks. Their improvisation was based on love of others. Trump is so in love with himself that he cannot improvise based on anything beyond his own desire for praise and good PR. It is why, thus far, his actions have fallen so woefully short. His approval ratings may have gone up, but he keeps bringing the country lower and lower.
In ancient Greece, the great improvisor was Odysseus, whose great-grandfather (often his guide) was the winged-heeled god Hermes, who is also the Trickster known as the friendliest of the gods. Yet even as Odysseus improvises his way in and out of trouble throughout his year-long journey home, those who suffer the most are the men he leads. Odysseus lost sight of his men because of his determination to get home to Ithaca. Trump is similarly narrow-minded. He is focused solely on returning to the White House, which he once called a “real dump.”
The question we face today is whether Trump’s improvisation will save us collectively from a crisis unlike any we have ever seen—or whether he will fail miserably, and inflict the nation with all kinds of unnecessary suffering.  If Trump’s actions continue to be based more upon his self interests and less on the country’s, more on his hunches and less on science, then this crisis will indeed be prolonged.
There is a reason why the American public is riveted by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s leadership during this crisis. He improvises boldly. Look no further than his swift and successful action in creating a containment zone in Westchester County when infections soared. But he speaks with empathy. Dr. Anthony Fauci, too, has become universally admired. He communicates clearly, but with compassion.
It seems impossible that Trump will all of a sudden develop a sense of empathy in the next several months. I would settle for his taking his cues from, and ceding the podium to, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. They have compassion and open minds, and they live in the fact-based world of evidence and science. They are our way, if there is one, out of this folly.


Bullard Says Unemployment Could Rise to 30%

Photo by John Vachon/Library Of Congress/Getty Images
23 Mar 2020523
1:15
The unemployment rate in the U.S. could hit 30 percent, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said in Bloomberg News interview.
“This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S. economy in the second quarter. The overall goal is to keep everyone, households and businesses, whole,” Bullard said. “It is a huge shock and we are trying to cope with it and keep it under control.”
That would be the highest rate of unemployment since the Great Depression.
Bullard said he expects economic growth to plunge 50 percent in the second quarter but for the economy to bounce back later in the year, so long as the appropriate measures are taken by the fiscal and monetary authorities.
“I would see the third quarter as a transitional quarter,” Bullard said. The next six months, however, could be very strong. “Those quarters might be boom quarters,” he said.
Bullard also said the Fed was far from being “out of bullets,” as some Fed watchers have claimed.
“There is more that we can do if necessary,” he said. “There is probably much more in the months ahead depending on where Congress wants to go.”


Donald Trump’s Economic Record Isn’t What He Says It Is

He claims the economy is “the best it has ever been.” A closer look at the data tells a different story.
February 5, 2020
U.S. Department of Agriculture/Flickr
Donald Trump has been on a mission this week to distract from his impeachment by touting his administration’s economic record. First, he launched a 30-second ad after the Super Bowl promising that “the best is yet to come.” Then, in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Trump highlighted the “American Comeback.” The speech was full of audacious—and characteristically inaccurate—claims: “our economy is the best it has ever been”; the “average unemployment rate … is lower than any administration in the history of our country”; and “wages are rising fast.”
The reality, however, doesn’t match Trump’s 
rhetoric. In fact, it would take much longer than a 
30-second commercial to highlight the many 
ways that the U.S. economy isn’t working for all
Still, the moment provides an opening for Democratic presidential candidates to challenge the president’s record.
In 2019, for instance, the gap between the richest and poorest households in the United States reached its highest point in more than 50 years. The number of Americans without health insurance continues to climb following years of declines since the passage and implementation of Obamacare. And household debt is now in excess of $14 trillion, exceeding the pre-recession high.
Even with low unemployment, wage growth is lagging. The most recent employment report reported wages increasing by just 2.9 percent over the last year. With inflation at 2.1 percent, that’s not much of a pay raise. To the extent that wage growth has picked up in recent months, a major contributor has been increases in state and local minimum wages that Republicans and the president opposed.
Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment, the 2017 tax cut, has produced none of its promised benefits, including the $4,000 pay raise that he and his allies promised to American workers. 
In fact, as a result of the tax cut, 91 companies in the Fortune 500 paid no federal taxes last year. The country’s six biggest banks saved $32 billion at the same time that they laid off more than 1,000 employees.
The tax cut has also failed to produce the “four, five and even six percent” economic growth that Trump promised. In the fourth quarter of 2019, the GDP growth of 2.1 percent was lower than both the growth rate before the tax cut was passed in 2017 and the average of Obama’s second term (2.4 percent). Instead, the tax cuts have produced annual budget deficits of $1 trillion, which Trump has signaled may lead to cuts in Social Security and Medicare, in addition to his ongoing efforts to erode the social safety net.
Ironically, despite the president’s pledge to help the “forgotten men and women,” blue-collar job growth—which includes construction, manufacturing, and mining—remains anemic, only growing at 0.8 percent in 2019 compared to 2 percent in Obama’s final term.
What’s more, the ongoing trade war plunged the manufacturing sector into recession last year, which has stunted economic growth in states like Wisconsin and Michigan. Tensions with China produced a 24 percent increase in farm bankruptcies last year, with the most coming from Wisconsin. The Congressional Budget Office estimated recently that Trump’s trade policies will cost American households an average of $1,277 this year.
Worse yet, employers reported the highest number
of layoffs in four years. For workers who are able 
to find new jobs, data shows they earn about 10 
percent less than before. That gap is even greater 
for workers who were at the same job for three 
years or more.
But while the economic reality under Trump is troubling for most Americans overall, it’s even more daunting for African-American workers, who have an unemployment rate almost twice as high as white workers. Displaced African Americans earn 13 percent less in their new jobs. Those who were employed for three or more years earned 31 percent less in their new jobs.
Despite the headlines, too many workers are not feeling the economic boom Trump describes. Instead of making investments to provide Americans with the world-class education and training needed for 21st-century jobs, the president and the Republican Congress chose stock buybacks to benefit the wealthy and a temporary sugar high for the economy that has now worn off.
Democrats can and should challenge Trump on the economy in 2020. Millions of workers are looking for good jobs and a pay raise. Policies to build an economy for all should be central to any campaign’s message. But it’s more than just good politics. Building an economy that works for the 90 percent instead of just the top 10 percent is sound economic policy.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”

 

Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz


President Donald Trump told business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s characterization is “just wrong.” 
“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”
In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a “blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle class.”
Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans over each of the past three years.
“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”
The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.
“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”
As the presidential race inches closer to the general election in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.
BLOG: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH OCCURRED DURING THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME
“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business investment.
“To every business looking for a place where they are free to invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth than the United States,” he said in Davos.
Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America and China.
“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.
Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find hi



More Americans Are Going on Strike

For decades, the decline of the American labor movement corresponded to a decline in major strike activity. But new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, indicates a recent and significant increase in the number of Americans who are participating in strikes or work stoppages. As a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute explained on Tuesday, strike activity “surged” in 2018 and 2019, “marking a 35-year high for the number of workers involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period.” 2019 alone marked “the greatest number of work stoppages involving 20,000 or more workers since at least 1993, when the BLS started providing data that made it possible to track work stoppages by size.” Union membership is declining, but workers themselves are in fighting shape.
EPI credits the strike surge to several factors. Unemployment is low, which bestows some flexibility on workers depending on their industry. If a work environment becomes intolerable or an employer penalizes workers for striking or organizing, a worker could find better employment elsewhere. (Though federal labor law does prohibit employers from retaliating against workers for participating in protected organizing activity, employers often do so anyway, and under Trump, the conservative makeup of the National Labor Relations Board disadvantages unions when they try to seek legal remedies for the behavior.)
The other reason undermines one of Donald Trump’s central economic claims. Though the president points to low unemployment as proof that his policies are successful, the economy isn’t booming for everyone. Wage growth continues to underperform. People can find jobs, in other words, but those jobs often don’t pay well. As the costs of private health insurance rise, adding another strain on household budgets, Americans are finding that employment and prosperity are two separate concepts.
Without a union, exploited workers have few options at their disposal. They can take their concerns to management, and hope someone in power feels pity. They can stage some kind of protest, and risk the consequences. Or they can find another job, and hope their new workplace is more equitable than the last. Lackluster wage growth suggests that this last option is not as viable as some right-to-work advocates claim. Unions afford workers more protection. Not only do they bargain for better wages and benefits, union contracts typically include just-cause provisions, which make it more difficult for managers to arbitrarily fire people for staging any sort of protest at work. Discipline follows a set process, which gives a worker chances to improve. Retaliation still happens, but would likely happen more often were it not for union contracts, which are designed to act as a layer of insulation between workers and managers with ill intent.
The new BLS data reveals that despite their relatively small numbers, unionized workers are exercising the power afforded them by their contracts. Elected officials ought to listen to what this activity tells them. A strike wave is a symptom that the economy is actually not as healthy as it superficially looks. Nobody withholds their labor unless they’ve exhausted all other options. Strikes and stoppages stem from exasperation, sometimes even desperation. Workers know they’re playing a rigged game, and they’re running out of patience.

“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”

 

Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz


President Donald Trump told business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s characterization is “just wrong.” 
“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”
In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a “blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle class.”
Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans over each of the past three years.
“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”
The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.
“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”
As the presidential race inches closer to the general election in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.
BLOG: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH OCCURRED DURING THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME
“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business investment.
“To every business looking for a place where they are free to invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth than the United States,” he said in Davos.
Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America and China.
“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.
Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find hi


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