More Republicans back Joe Biden: Scores of George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney aides sign up to calls to defeat Donald Trump's 'toxic personality cult'
- Scores of Republicans who worked for the party's three pre-Trump nominees are now backing Democrat Joe Biden
- Alumni from Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush's campaign and government offices signed onto letter Thursday backing Biden
- Ex-aides of Romney wrote that they feared re-electing President Donald Trump would 'permanently transform the Republican Party into a toxic personality cult'
THEIR LOOTING ONLY GETS WORSE BY THE DAY!
The key question concerning financial elites around the world is how the Fed and other central banks intend to continue the stimulus to markets that has sent Wall Street to new record highs after it plunged in mid-March.
Last May, Forbes ’ global rich list reported that the world’s 25 richest individuals had increased their total wealth by $255 billion in the space of just two months.
Markets focus on Fed chair’s Jackson Hole speech
27 August 2020
The eyes of financial markets around the world will be focused today on the keynote address to be delivered by US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to the annual Jackson Hole conclave of central bankers.
Powell’s speech, to be given in a completely virtual format because of the COVID-19 pandemic, will focus on the two-year review by the Fed of its monetary policy. The key question concerning financial elites around the world is how the Fed and other central banks intend to continue the stimulus to markets that has sent Wall Street to new record highs after it plunged in mid-March.
The massive $3 trillion injection by the Fed since the plunge, backing every sector of the financial markets, has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the coffers of the financial elites, above all those holding technology-based stocks.
Last May, Forbes ’ global rich list reported that the world’s 25 richest individuals had increased their total wealth by $255 billion in the space of just two months. With the continued rise of Wall Street since then, that figure will have further increased.
Powell has previously stated there are no limits to the Fed’s action so far as injecting money is concerned, and if there is another crisis it will act. But there are questions about what form such action will take under conditions where the world economy is experiencing its worst downturn since the Great Depression.
Mark Sobel, a former US Treasury official and now the chairman of a central bank think tank, told the Financial Times: “The Fed and the European Central Bank have used up a lot of ammo. Even when advanced economies are significantly recovering, there will still be a legacy of sky-high unemployment, large output gaps and enormous dislocations to deal with.”
As far as the real economy is concerned, further monetary stimulus will do nothing to lift output or ease unemployment. The central bank is “pushing on a string,” according to Adam Posen, the president of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“You can alleviate liquidity problems, you can put a floor under some asset prices, you can stabilise credit markets, all of which is constructive, but none of which is sufficient to create recovery,” he said.
Investors in the financial markets, however, are eagerly anticipating that the Fed will signal action to further expand monetary intervention to keep the Wall Street surge going.
However, there are concerns in some quarters about where the unprecedented intervention is going to end. According to Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, “There’s a legitimate worry at this point that we are doing a bit of levitation. The massive increase in leverage and the low rates forever… all of these things are worrying from a financial stability point of view.”
In the past five months, corporations have taken on massive amounts of new debt in order to stave off bankruptcy. According to the rating agency S&P, corporations globally have raised $2 trillion in bonds alone so far this year, an increase of $600 billion over the same period last year.
In the US, companies have issued a record $1.25 trillion in debt, of which almost $1 trillion was raised following the March 23 decision by the Fed that it would intervene to buy corporate bonds as a backstop to the market.
The largest share of borrowing has been by investment-grade companies. But money has also been raised by junk-rated companies, which have issued $220 billion worth of bonds so far this year.
The debt issuance has been predicated on the assumption that the economy will “bounce back” and the debt will be able to be paid back. But these expectations will be thrown awry if there is a second wave of infections and consumer demand does not recover. There is no prospect for an increase in investment—the key driver of the economy—as it was already in decline before the pandemic struck.
Even under relatively favourable conditions, S&P estimates that the default rate for US junk-rated companies will rise to 15.5 percent by next March, higher than the peak experienced in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis. And if there is a deepening downturn in the global economy, investment-grade companies will also be hit.
There is another significant development in the stock market that underscores the unprecedented character of the present economic and financial crisis. While Wall Street indexes continue to surge, the so-called “recovery” has been far from broad-based. It is concentrated in the high-tech stocks such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which make up a large proportion of the S&P 500 index.
This has given rise to what is being referred to as a K-shaped development—a situation in which the share prices of market leaders diverge from others. In analysis of the market, Vincent Deluard, the director of global macro strategy at the brokerage firm Stone Group, told Bloomberg: “I would summarize 2020 as the bear market for humans. Like many things, COVID is just accelerating social transformation, concentration of wealth in a few hands, massive inequalities, competition issues and all that.”
He pointed out that firms that have relatively few employees have beaten the more labour-intensive ones by 37 percentage points in 2020.
One aspect of the divergence is the fact that high-tech companies employ relatively few workers and have been able to benefit from the pandemic, as reflected in the 33 percent rise in the tech-heavy NASDQ index so far this year. The one exception is Amazon, which has been able to increase its sales because of the increased turn to online purchases.
Bloomberg cited one extreme example of this process. MarketAxess Holdings, an automated bond trading firm, has seen its shares rise by 29 percent this year, five times the gain in the S&P 500, and now has a market capitalisation of $19 billion, while employing just 530 people.
According to Deluard’s calculations, the cluster of companies with the smallest number of employees relative to market value has risen by 18 percent this year, while the group with the highest labour intensity has recorded a 19 percent loss.
This situation has far-reaching implications the workers employed in these industries. Under conditions where all companies operate under the dictates of market value and returns to shareholders—the vast bulk of which are hedge funds and investment banks—these companies will be under increasing pressure to boost their share price through job cuts and ever-intensifying exploitation.
OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER
The Rise of Wall Street Thievery
How corporations and their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
by Ryan Cooper
America has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era. Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is, their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations. Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.
Berle exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and pensions.
Lemann then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning democratic political economy.
Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands.
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.
In his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
If concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out, especially African Americans.
Lemann writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings.
Conversely, for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families are below the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still, Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
KAMALA HARRIS, LIKE SENILE JOE, HAVE A DOCUMENTED HISTORY OF SERVING CRIMINAL BANKSTERS AND THE RICH.
All of this is, if we can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class. The Wall Street Journal wrote last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry professionals and their most trusted law firms.
The Democrats hope that the endless celebration of the trite, empty symbolism of Harris’ candidacy will serve as a repeat of Barack Obama’s run for president in 2008, deploying identity politics to cover over the right-wing content of her record and that of the Democratic Party. This is the logic of the reactionary politics of racial, ethnic and gender identity, promoted incessantly by the pseudo-left opponents of Marxism.
The nomination of Kamala Harris and the right-wing logic of identity politics
20 August 2020
The Democratic Party concluded the third night of its convention on Wednesday, culminating in the official nomination of California Senator Kamala Harris as the vice-presidential candidate of Joe Biden.
Wednesday’s proceedings were in line with the inane and insipid character of the event as a whole. Various reactionaries and multi-millionaires, from Hillary Clinton to Nancy Pelosi, declared the urgent need to elect Biden, the corrupt corporate shill from Delaware recast as a living saint, to right all wrongs and restore America to the path of prosperity and righteousness.
No actual program was advanced to deal with the massive social and economic catastrophe produced by the coronavirus pandemic and the bipartisan response of the ruling class to it. Everything was reduced to the fictionalized narrative of the life of Biden and his comrade in arms, Kamala Harris.
The selection of Harris was presented as a “historic” moment in American politics. This appraisal was based entirely on the fact that Harris is the first African American and Indian American woman selected by the world’s oldest political party to run for vice president. There were the inevitable proclamations that young girls throughout the country will conclude from this fact that they too can someday be vice president of the United States of America.
All of this is, if we can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class. The Wall Street Journal wrote last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry professionals and their most trusted law firms.
Just before she ended her bid for the presidency in December 2019, Harris’ campaign boasted the most billionaire backers, including oil fortune heir Gordon Getty and vulture capitalist Dean Metropoulos.
As San Francisco District Attorney from 2004 to 2011, Harris pursued an agenda that included the implementation of a law to fine and jail the parents of truant students for up to a year. As California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017, she warned parents across the state that they would face “the full force and consequences of the law” if their children missed out on too many days of school.
BLOG EDITOR: KAMAL HARRIS IS AN ADVOCATE FOR BIDEN’S AMNESTY FOR MORE CHEAP LABOR. SHE APPEARS TO LIKE TO EXPLOIT SLAVE LABOR!
During her tenure, Harris also oversaw California’s resistance to a Supreme Court order that it release prisoners from the state’s overcrowded prisons. Her attorneys (“for the people,” as Harris put it last night) argued in court that releasing too many prisoners would deplete the cheap labor pool of inmates who fight the state’s notorious wildfires for less than $2 a day.
Serving as the junior senator from California since 2017, Harris sits on the committees overseeing the federal budget, the judiciary, homeland security and the intelligence agencies.
Through her position on the Intelligence Committee, Harris has been privy to the most sensitive information about American imperialism’s criminal operations all over the world. In this role, she has backed the Democrats’ anti-Russia campaign aimed at pressuring the Trump administration into taking a more hostile posture towards Moscow.
BLOG EDITOR: JULIAN ASSANGE IS UNPOPULAR WITH CORRUPT DEM POLS. ASSANGE EXPOSED THE OBAMA-BIDEN AGENDA OF SURRENDERING U.S. BORDERS TO NARCOMEX AND CHARACTERIZED HILLARY CLINTON AS A ‘SADISTIC SOCIOPATH’, NOT SOMETHING HILLARY HAS MUCH DEFENSE ON.
She also supports the persecution of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, who faces 175 years in a US prison for exposing American military war crimes, declaring that the organization had done “considerable harm” to the US.
BLOG EDITOR: KAMALA HARRIS SENATE COLLEAGUE DIANNE FEINSTEIN IS THE BIGGEST WAR PROFITEER IN U.S. HISTORY. HER HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM, HAS HANDED OUT GENEROUS ‘CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS’ TO VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE DEM POLS CLASS SO THEY KEEP THEIR MOUTHS SHUT ABOUT FEINSTEIN-BLUM’S STAGGERING SELF-SERVING CORRUPTION.
While feinting to the left as a proponent of cutting the Pentagon’s $750 billion-plus annual budget, in July Harris voted against a proposal by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that would have cut funding by a meager 10 percent, saying she supported the idea but that any cuts to the military should be done “strategically.”
Harris represents the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street billionaires, the intelligence agencies and the military. Her nomination Wednesday came just one day after the Democrats paraded a number of Republicans who endorsed Biden, including Colin Powell—the first African American chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and a chief architect of the 2003 war in Iraq—and the widow of the notorious warmonger, Senator John McCain.
Harris’ closing remarks at the convention last night were preceded by those of Obama, of which we will have more to say later. Suffice it to say that Obama, the first African American to be nominated by the Democrats and win the presidency, proceeded to bail out the banks, continue the wars of George W. Bush, implement a policy of drone murder, and deport more immigrants than any of his predecessors.
It was the right-wing policies of the Obama administration that paved the way for the ascension of Trump to the presidency.
The Democrats hope that the endless celebration of the trite, empty symbolism of Harris’ candidacy will serve as a repeat of Barack Obama’s run for president in 2008, deploying identity politics to cover over the right-wing content of her record and that of the Democratic Party. This is the logic of the reactionary politics of racial, ethnic and gender identity, promoted incessantly by the pseudo-left opponents of Marxism.
However, the elevation of an increasing number of women, African Americans and other ethnic minorities into positions of power, from city councils, to mayoral offices, police departments and the presidency itself, has done nothing to advance the interests of the working class. In fact, over the last four decades wealth inequality has grown most rapidly within racial groups, as a small layer of the population has been elevated into positions of power and privilege while conditions for those of all races and genders in the bottom 90 percent have deteriorated.
In addition to Obama, the likes of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, national security advisors Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and, one might add, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and German Chancellor Angela Merkel—have shown that women and racial minorities can pursue the interests of the financial oligarchy as ruthlessly as any other representative of the ruling class.
There is something fitting in the selection of Harris to co-lead the Democrats’ ticket. The response of the Democrats to the mass multi-racial and multi-ethnic protests against police violence that erupted earlier this year was to divert them into the politics of racial division, using the reactionary and false claim that what was involved was a conflict between “white America” and “black America,” rather than a conflict between the working class and capitalism. This effort now culminates in the selection of the former “top cop” of California as the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate.
This is aimed at blocking the emergence of a powerful, united movement of the working class. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the criminal indifference of the entire ruling elite to the lives of the working class. As was shown with the near unanimous passage of the trillion-dollar CARES Act bailout, their concern is for their stock portfolios and corporate profits at the expense of more than 175,000 people who have now died and the more than 5.5 million who have been infected by coronavirus.
The fight to advance the interests of the working class will have to be waged through the methods of class struggle, in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans and the capitalist system which they defend.
Kamala’s Lies
Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to tell the truth about virtually anything.
By David Keltz
Last week when Joe Biden officially announced Kamala Harris as his running mate on August 12th, 2020, Harris made what amounted to one of the most dishonest speeches by a vice-presidential candidate in recent memory. “This is a moment of real consequence for America. Everything we care about, our economy, our health, our children, the kind of country we live in, it’s all on the line,” she said. Harris, who appears to have been honing her acting skills during the pandemic, unleashed a bevy of emotions during her remarks, as she went from “cheerful,” to “empathetic,” to “nostalgic,” to “indignant,” and finally back to “cheerful,” all in a matter of seconds. In a desperate attempt to portray herself as humanizing, relatable, and down to earth, she instead reminded us all why the robotic Hillary Clinton was seen as untrustworthy and was immensely unpopular. Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to tell the truth about virtually anything.
Harris heavily criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, blaming him for the death toll, the economic contraction, the high unemployment rate, the closure of schools, homelessness, hunger, and poverty. “The case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open and shut. Just look where they’ve gotten us, more than 16 million out of work, millions of kids who cannot go back to school, a crisis of poverty, of homelessness afflicting black, brown, and indigenous people the most, a crisis of hunger afflicting one in five mothers who have children that are hungry and tragically, more than 165,000 lives that have been cut short, many with loved ones who never got the chance to say goodbye.”
Aside from the fact that Trump has been a huge advocate for the reopening of schools, Harris did not mention that seven of the top ten states with the most COVID deaths are run by Democrats, including New York, which has more deaths than Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona combined. Not only was NY the hardest hit state in the U.S., but it has far more deaths per million, when compared to any other country, at 1,692. By comparison, the country with the next highest death toll per million residents is Peru, at only 796. Harris also did not bother to explain how Trump was responsible for the 32,920 deaths in New York state, considering that it was Governor Andrew Cuomo who chose to allow seniors who tested positive for the virus to return to nursing homes, resulting in thousands of avoidable deaths. The state’s death toll for nursing home residents is listed as 6,600, but the official number is likely significantly higher. The AP reported that the real number may be as high as 11,000, with some estimates indicating that it could be closer to 14,000, considering that 21,000 nursing beds are currently vacant, compared to just 13,000 from one year ago.
In addition to ramping up testing, and sending thousands of ventilators to the state of NY, Trump allocated 350 million dollars to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for construction of alternate care facilities in NY, including sending the USNS Comfort ship, and turning the Javits Center into a military field hospital. For what it’s worth, Cuomo praised Trump back in April at the time when his state was in desperate need of the president’s help saying, “He has delivered for New York. He has." Harris did not bother to ask Cuomo or Mayor Bill De Blasio why they chose not to efficiently use the resources that the federal government provided them with. None of those facts fit into Harris’s narrative, so instead she moved ahead and blamed Trump for an economy that is recovering quicker than many economists predicted.
Harris also bizarrely compared COVID-19 to Ebola. “It didn’t have to be this way. Six years ago, in fact, we had a different health crisis, it was called Ebola. We all remember that pandemic, but you know what happened then? Barack Obama and Joe Biden did their job.” As of this writing the coronavirus has killed 775,000 people worldwide, and 21,927,114 people have tested positive for the virus. Ebola, by comparison, killed 11,310 people worldwide, while only 28,616 people tested positive for it. To put in perspective, nearly as many people have tested positive for the coronavirus as the total number of people residing in Sri Lanka, a country that has the world's 58th largest population at just over 21 million. Meanwhile, roughly the same number of people that can attend a football game at Princeton Stadium (27,800), tested positive for Ebola.
The Democratic vice-presidential candidate also professed her supposed patriotism and love for the country by calling the U.S. a country that is rooted in institutional racism. She praised the “Black Lives Matter Movement,” while failing to condemn violent protests, the rioting, the looting, the burning of businesses, churches, and courthouses, and the destruction of property that has swept across major cities including: Portland, Seattle, Minnesota, Chicago, New York City, Washington, D.C. and many other places. “We’re experiencing a moral reckoning with racism and systemic injustice that has brought a new coalition of conscience to the streets of our country, demanding change,” she said. The beneficiaries from this “moral reckoning,” or non-social distancing exercise that has made our streets much less safe was not something Harris was willing to explore.
Harris also claimed that she, along with Joe Biden, would bring the jobs back, “We’ll create millions of jobs and fight climate change through a clean energy revolution, bring back critical supply chains so the future is made in America, build on the affordable care act.” Harris and Biden somehow plan on increasing employment while raising taxes by more than three trillion dollars, including increasing the marginal, federal, and payroll tax rates, and eliminating thousands of jobs in the energy sector if the “Green New Deal,” is implemented. Harris spoke of implementing many of the things that Trump not only talked about, but already succeeded in accomplishing before the Chinese virus struck the world. All of these outright lies might explain why Harris was forced to drop out of the presidential race last December, after running her campaign into insolvency coupled with her anemic poll numbers. Not to worry, the mainstream media continues to tell us Harris is not only a moderate, but much more exciting, and invigorating the second time around. She is none of those things, but one constant remains: she is as dishonest as ever.
Pope Francis: Unequal Wealth Means ‘the Economy Is Sick’
ROME — Pope Francis said Wednesday unequal wealth among nations and individuals reveals a sick economy, “an injustice that cries out to heaven.”
The coronavirus pandemic “has exposed and aggravated social problems, above all that of inequality,” the pontiff told those following his live-streamed remarks delivered from Library of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.
“Some people can work from home, while this is impossible for many others,” he said. “Certain children, notwithstanding the difficulties involved, can continue to receive an academic education, while this has been abruptly interrupted for many, many others.”
“Some powerful nations can issue money to deal with the crisis, while this would mean mortgaging the future for others,” he added.
These economic differences are pathological, the pope suggested, signs of a “sick economy.”
“These symptoms of inequality reveal a social illness; it is a virus that comes from a sick economy,” Francis said. “And we must say it simply: the economy is sick. It has become ill. It is sick.”
This sickness “is the fruit of unequal economic growth – this is the illness: the fruit of unequal economic growth – that disregards fundamental human values,” he said.
“In today’s world, a few rich people possess more than all the rest of humanity. I will repeat this so that it makes us think: a few rich people, a small group, possess more than all the rest of humanity. This is pure statistics. This is an injustice that cries out to heaven!” he said.
The pope went on to suggest that such unequal economic growth is the fruit of greed and demands rectification.
“When the obsession to possess and dominate excludes millions of persons from having primary goods,” he said, “when economic and technological inequality are such that the social fabric is torn; and when dependence on unlimited material progress threatens our common home, then we cannot stand by and watch.”
It is unclear from the pope’s words how he believes equal economic growth among nations and individuals should be achieved, or whether it is merely a question of redistribution of all the world’s wealth equally among individuals.
Catholic social teaching has, however, consistently recognized the natural differences among persons and nations and insisted that economic homogeneity is an unworkable utopia.
In the first “social encyclical,” Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 text Rerum Novarum, the pontiff called for a healthy realism, bearing with “the condition of things inherent in human affairs” for “it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level,” as opposed to the Socialists’ utopian efforts toward perfect economic equality, since “all striving against nature is in vain.”
Leo called to mind that manifold differences naturally exist among persons: “people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition.”
At the same time, Leo insisted that these natural inequalities are not necessarily evil, either for individuals or for the larger community. In fact, he wrote, social and public life “can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition.”
While the Catholic Church teaches that there are, indeed, “sinful inequalities that affect millions of men and women,” which stand “in open contradiction of the Gospel,” it also recognizes that not all inequalities are evil and the campaign to impose perfect economic equality would cause more harm than it would alleviate.
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