Wednesday, April 15, 2020

WALL STREET GORGES ON AMERICA

Wall Street feasts on death

15 April 2020
Yesterday, April 14, the total worldwide deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic passed 126,000. In the United States, more than 2,400 people died on Tuesday, bringing the total nationwide number of victims to 26,000. These official numbers are undoubtedly substantially lower than the actual number of people who have died as a result of being infected by the coronavirus.
Not since the 1930s has the United States experienced a crisis on its soil that has had such a devastating impact on the social well-being of the American people. Images showing mass graves being dug in New York City, body bags piling up in Detroit hospitals, and endless lines of cars with drivers waiting to collect food to feed their families will be remembered like the Depression-era photos of Dorothea Lange. Tens of millions of Americans are without an income and lack sufficient savings to cover their mortgages and rent, insurance premiums, interest on outstanding loans, and other inescapable daily, weekly and monthly expenses. More than 16 million people have filed unemployment claims. It will take weeks, if not months, before their jobless checks arrive. The promised payment of $1,200 that was supposedly part of the CARES bill passed last month by Congress has shown up in very few bank accounts.
A social disaster is unfolding, and the media’s joyful invocation of “glimmers of hope” bears no relation to reality as it is being experienced by the vast majority of the population. The references to “peaks” and “plateaus” are of a largely hypothetical character. The pandemic is raging throughout the country. For millions who are still on the job, showing up for work means running the serious risk of being exposed to the coronavirus.
And yet, in the midst of this immense crisis, there is one small segment of society that has richly prospered during this time of troubles.
Just over three weeks ago, on March 23, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 18,591. During the previous five weeks, as the seriousness of the pandemic was being gradually and reluctantly acknowledged, the Dow had fallen nearly 35 percent from its February 13 high of 29,551.
Since March 23, two numbers have risen in tandem: COVID-19 deaths and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (along with other major markets' averages such as the S&P and NASDAQ).
On March 23, the number of pandemic victims in the US had reached 556. Over the next four days, Congress hastily enacted its multi-trillion-dollar bailout of financial and corporate institutions and investors. The “CARES Act” was signed into law on March 27. On that day, the DJIA closed at 21,636. Expectation of the imminent passage of the bailout had lifted the market nearly 3,000 points in just four days. But between March 23 and March 27, the number of pandemic deaths in the United States nearly tripled, rising to 1,697.
During the week of March 30, there was a further explosive rise in pandemic victims. By Friday, April 3, the number of victims reached 7,139. Throughout the weekend, the media sought to prepare the public for a further rapid rise in the death toll. But there was also a distinct change in the tone of the media narrative. Phrases such as “hopeful signs,” “turning the corner,” and, inevitably, “glimmers of hope” became part of the media’s propaganda repertoire. This was combined with an increasingly aggressive campaign for a more or less rapid return to work.
Throughout the week, the rapid rise in the death toll revealed the expanding dimensions of the social tragedy. The rise in the stock market averages reflected the financial elite’s expectation, having been gifted trillions of dollars by the government, that it will profit from this crisis and emerge wealthier and more powerful than ever.
By Monday, April 6, the number of COVID-19 deaths reached 10,895. The Dow closed at 22,679. By April 9, the death toll had climbed to 16,712. The Dow closed at 23,319. And yesterday, as the number of dead went beyond the staggering 26,000 mark, the investors and speculators joyfully watched the Dow gain another 569 points and close at 23,935.
Let the reader pause over these numbers. Since March 23, the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed, according to official statistics, more than 25,000 lives in the United States. During the same period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen more than 30 percent.
On the surface, there is nothing in the economic news that justifies the extraordinarily rapid rise in the markets. In fact, all available information indicates that the global impact of the pandemic may prove to be as serious and long-lasting as the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Yesterday morning, the International Monetary Fund issued a report titled, “The Great Lockdown: Worst Economic Depression Since the Great Depression.” Written by chief IMF economist Gita Gopinath, the report describes the prevailing situation as “a crisis like no other,” and forecasts a prolonged decline in global economic growth. “This makes the Great Lockdown the worst recession since the Great Depression, and far worse than the Global Financial Crisis [of 2008–2009].” The report continues:
The cumulative loss to global GDP over 2020 and 2021 from the pandemic crisis could be around 9 trillion dollars, greater than the economies of Japan and Germany, combined.
Clearly, it is not current economic projections that have fueled the euphoria on Wall Street; and it is highly unlikely, as the global contraction grows ever more severe, that the current rally can be sustained. But for the time being, the euphoria is being driven by the trillions of dollars of free and unsupervised money that is being provided by the Federal Reserve; and by the expectation that the crisis will provide the corporate-financial oligarchy within the United States as well as in Europe with an opportunity to restructure the capitalist economy and class relationships in a manner that facilitates the accelerated transfer of wealth into the coffers of the capitalist class.
But there is another factor that will counteract the euphoria; and that is the growing social resistance of the working class, which is developing its own ideas about how the American and global economy should be restructured and wealth redistributed.



As pandemic deaths continue to rise

Trump calls on states to move quickly to reopen their economies

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump seemed to back off from his plan to establish a new White House “Opening Our Country” task force and instead announced that he would be teleconferencing with corporate leaders, politicians and all 50 state governors this week to initiate a back-to-work plan that would be implemented on a state-by-state basis.
Trump announced his stepped-up drive to force workers back to work, under conditions of rising infection and death tolls and an abysmal lack of testing and on-the-job health safeguards, at his daily coronavirus task force press conference. As he made his announcement, governors in the Northeast and the West Coast were joining together to plan out their own return-to-work programs.
The governors of seven eastern states—New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Massachusetts—announced on Monday that they would work together to gradually loosen social distancing rules and reopen non-essential industries that had been closed due to the pandemic.
President Donald Trump departs after speaking about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House, Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The governors of three West Coast states—California, Washington and Oregon—also announced a similar pact on Monday. All but one of the 10 governors, Charles Baker of Massachusetts, are Democrats.
The bipartisan character of the drive to reopen business without having brought the disease under control was underscored by presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s op-ed piece in Monday’s New York Times, headlined “My Plan to Safely Reopen America.”
The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday congratulated both Trump and the Democratic governors for moving to lift the restrictions on profit-making. In an editorial headlined “Reopening the Economy, at Last,” it said:
“At long last our political leaders are considering how they can reopen the American economy they put into a destructive coma. Let’s hope this overdue process doesn’t devolve into another fight between governors and President Trump that will confuse Americans and slow the return to normal economic life.”
The editorial went on to complain that “The focus for weeks has been on the course of virus infections, the danger of overrun hospitals, and the death toll.”
In a similar vein, the Washington Post published an editorial with the headline, “The next phase: Can we find a way to begin reopening even as we live with the virus?” The newspaper’s owner, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, has made billions off of the pandemic, with Amazon stock hitting a new record high on Tuesday.
At his Tuesday press conference, Trump barely sought to conceal in whose behalf he was pushing for a rapid return to work. He hailed the record surge in the stock market since the passage last month of the bipartisan multi-trillion-dollar corporate bailout bill, and predicted that the markets would not only recoup their losses from the near-shutdown of the economy and the explosive growth of unemployment, but would soon hit new highs.
He then listed dozens of S&P 500 corporations with which he would be consulting on Wednesday, including the top firms in agribusiness, banking, defense, energy, the hedge fund and private equity sector, the restaurant and food industry, transportation, telecommunications, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, health insurance, high tech and the professional sports leagues.
The total wealth of the CEOs with whom he will be plotting the back-to-work drive is in the tens of billions, enough to provide a significant number of the masks and personal protective gowns that are desperately needed by health care workers, grocery workers, logistics workers, transit workers and others for whom the lack of such equipment is fueling disease and death.
He said he would be consulting with “thinkers” from such right-wing institutions as the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution, and named individuals including right-wing economist Arthur Laffer and the Iraq War conspirator Condoleezza Rice. On Friday he plans to meet remotely with religious leaders. On Thursday he is to meet with the governors in all 50 states to lay down the guidelines for the reopening of their states.
He did not mention a single doctor, public health expert or scientist in the long list of consultants.
Trump said different states would reopen on different dates, but he was convinced some would begin lifting restrictions even before May 1.
It is one thing, however, to announce a premature return to work. It is another thing to carry it out. The ruling class is well aware of the seething anger in the working class over the catastrophe that has been inflicted on it as a result of the incompetence and indifference of the entire political and economic system.
Workers have rebelled against being forced to work under unsafe conditions, with wildcat strikes and protests being organized by autoworkers, nurses, Amazon workers, grocery and Instacart workers and food processing workers.
The entire political system is being discredited, as trillions are funneled to bail out the financial oligarchy while nothing serious is being done to organize mass testing and provide needed hospital beds and ventilators. Nearly 17 million workers have filed for unemployment benefits over the past three weeks, and millions more have had their pay cut. The bailout bill has done next to nothing to provide income for workers who live paycheck to paycheck, resulting in the appearance of massive food lines across the country for the first time since the Great Depression.
The crisis has fueled tensions and conflicts within the ruling class and the state. The Northeast and West Coast governors have called for a gradual reopening of the economy and promised expanded testing to head off a new surge in infections and deaths. On Monday, Trump reacted angrily to their actions, declaring that governors had no authority to determine how the restrictions would be lifted, and that as president, he had “total authority.”
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo responded to Trump’s assertion of unconstitutional and authoritarian powers by declaring that Trump was not a king and the states had powers within the constitutional framework of the United States. However, far from mounting a defense of democratic rights, by the time of his daily press conference Tuesday morning, Cuomo was calling for a partnership with the fascistic occupant of the White House.
He said: “The president will have no fight with me… This is no time for politics, and it is no time to fight. I put my hand out in total partnership and cooperation with the president. If he wants a fight he’s not going to get it from me.”
Trump seemed as well to have had second thoughts about provoking an immediate constitutional confrontation with the states. At his Tuesday press conference he did a 180-degree turn and said each state would decide for itself how and when to reopen.
The Democratic governors in no way represent a progressive or democratic opposition to Trump. Workers in their states will face brutal and deadly conditions if they are forced back to work without a massive deployment of resources to ensure their safety. At the same time, millions of workers who have been laid off will never get their jobs back, and many will he hit with wage cuts and speedup.
States and cities across the country are preparing massive cuts in schools, social services, pensions and public employee jobs to impose huge deficits from lost revenues on the backs of the working class. New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio has already announced a hiring freeze and budget cuts, and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has threatened a return to bankruptcy and the imposition of a new emergency financial manager. Both are Democrats.
For all the Democrats’ talk of a “safe” reopening of their state economies and the need for sharply expanded testing, isolation, contact tracing and care of those infected, they have done nothing to put these conditions in place, and have no intention of doing so in the future. This is because the corporate oligarchy is implacably opposed to the diversion of the required resources from their money-mad pursuit of personal enrichment.

Talking out of both sides of his mouth, Cuomo said on Tuesday that his group of governors in the Northeast would begin to reopen businesses only under conditions of mass testing. He then said: “How do you start to do the massive testing that we’re going to have to do here? And that we don’t have the capacity to do today? The capacity does not exist.”

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