THE DOCTRINE OF THE N.A.F.T.A. GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS IS TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WITH ENDLESS WAVES OF INVADING 'CHEAP' LABOR SUBSIDIZED WITH WELFARE FUNDED BY TAXES ON MIDDLE AMERICA.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
The US Federal Reserve has kept its base interest rate at near zero and maintained its asset purchases at the rate of $120 billion a month. That decision, announced yesterday after a two-day meeting of its policy-making committee, was expected.
But in response to concerns by some members of the Fed’s governing body that the present sharp rise in inflation may prove to be permanent rather than a “transitory” effect of economic recovery from the pandemic, the official statement from the meeting hinted that “tapering” of its bond purchases may be closer than previously thought.
Last December, the Fed said its asset purchases would continue until “substantial further progress” had been made toward its goals—full employment and 2 percent inflation.
“Since then,” the statement said, “the economy has made progress towards these goals, and the committee will continue to assess progress in coming meetings.”
This was widely interpreted as a signal that it was at least moving to a closer consideration of a wind-back in asset purchases.
But Fed chair Jerome Powell, who has been characterised as occupying a centre position between the so-called doves and hawks within the governing body, made clear there were no immediate plans to withdraw the unprecedented levels of support the central bank has provided to financial markets and Wall Street.
With US employment levels still some 7 or 8 million below where they were before the pandemic, he said further gains in employment would be needed before any tapering of asset purchases.
“We have some ground to cover on the labour market side,” he said at his press conference following the meeting. He repeated his assertion that inflation was “transitory” while insisting the Fed would use its “tools” to counter any permanent rise.
In his prepared remarks he said conditions in the labour market had continued to improve and demand for labour was “very strong” but “nonetheless, the labour market has a ways to go.”
The focus on the state of the labour market as the reason for the maintenance of flow of money is essentially a cover for the real objective which is to ensure that the monetary props for Wall Street remain in place—a fact that is well known in financial circles.
As Thomas Hayes, chairman of Great Hill Capital, an investment management firm, commented to the Wall Street Journal on Powell’s remarks: “I don’t think he could have been more dovish. There’s nothing that the Fed could do that would be more accommodative to the stock market.”
Despite the Fed’s claim that the US economy is on the road to recovery there are significant contradictory signals. While inflation is rising, along with economic growth, the yields on Treasury bonds have been falling—an indication that financial markets consider growth could stall, if not develop into a recession.
Asked about the divergence between the economic growth outlook and the bond market at his press conference, Powell could offer no explanation apart from saying that it may be due to “technical” factors “where you put things you can’t quite explain.”
The fall in bond yields, a result of increased demand and rise in their price (the two move in opposite directions), has been significant.
At the end of March when there was an expectation of increased growth and inflation, the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond was at a 13-month high of 1.75 percent. By the middle of June it had fallen to 1.57 percent—a significant movement in this market—before dropping further to 1.26 percent on Wednesday. This could well be on the back of financial market expectations that what lies ahead is stagflation––higher prices combined with lower growth.
In an interview on CNN Financial Times columnist and editorial board member Rana Foroohar said in her 30 years in finance journalism she had never seen so many variables—from the effect of the Delta variant, inflation, to lower growth in China—impacting on the global economic outlook.
Apart from the continuing stimulus for Wall Street, another significant decision by the Fed was to establish a new facility to provide liquidity to big Wall Street banks as well as foreign central banks in times of financial turbulence.
Under the facility, the Fed would enter overnight repurchase (repo) agreements in which it would take in Treasury debt and mortgage-backed securities in return for cash at a rate of 0.25 percent. There would be a daily cap on the facility of $500 billion. A similar facility would be extended to foreign central banks with a daily limit of $60 billion. The facility may also be expanded in the future to include deposit-taking banks.
The new facility has been developed in response to the financial market crisis of March 2020 when the $21 trillion US Treasury market—the bedrock of US and global financial system—effectively froze in what was dubbed a “dash for cash” as buyers for Treasury debt disappeared.
The measure has been under discussion for some time as the Fed continues to try to assess what took place in the March crisis. New York Fed chief John Williams said earlier this month that a standing repo facility would not be used much in normal times but if there was an “unanticipated shock” it would keep short-term interest rates from spiking.
Its establishment indicates that another crisis on the scale of March 2020 could take place because none of the underlying problems and contradictions that gave rise to it have been resolved.
The decision of the Fed is in line with recommendations in a report from a group of 30 former central bankers and financial policymakers issued yesterday. The group, which includes former US Treasury secretaries Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers and former Bank of England governor Mervyn King, said reforms were needed to ensure that the most essential bond market was able to function smoothly in times of financial stress.
It said a “standing repo” repo facility was the “single most important near-term measure” that should be adopted.
But it pointed to deeper concerns. “This is a market that has outgrown its infrastructure and its regulatory framework, Oversight is fragmented and diffused. The capacity of existing market makers has not grown with the size of the Treasury market itself,” the group said.
According to Geithner, in remarks reported by the Financial Times, the pressure for reform could be “undermined by the belief that the Fed can always step in and fix things” and this was “not a particularly wise approach.”
The report underscores the findings of a report by the G20 Financial Stability Board last November. It said that while the intervention by the Fed in March 2020, when it pumped out trillions of dollars, may have stabilised the situation, the “financial system remains vulnerable to another liquidity strain, as the underlying structures and mechanisms that gave rise to the turmoil remain in place.”
Millions of people voted for Biden believing his pledge that he would “follow the science” in confronting the pandemic. As the WSWS warned, the Senator from DuPont and the credit card companies has not followed the science, but the interests of Wall Street.
On Thursday, the Washington Post published a leaked internal memorandum from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warning of mass community spread of COVID-19 among vaccinated people and calling on the Biden administration to stop discouraging mask wearing and social distancing.
The secret report contradicts nearly every public statement by the White House over the course of the past two months. Bringing together a broad range of public research—including some that was previously unpublished—the report warns that there are 35,000 symptomatic COVID-19 infections every week among vaccinated people.
The report states that vaccinated people who are infected with COVID-19 are just as infectious as those who are unvaccinated. It acknowledges that the so-called Delta variant of COVID-19 is more infectious than the common cold and, in fact, one of the most transmissible diseases known to man.
The document refutes President Joe Biden’s claim on July 22 that vaccinated people do not spread COVID-19—“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
For months, Biden has used the claim that vaccinated people are fully protected from COVID-19 to justify the abandonment of masking and social distancing requirements, despite the fact that the CDC had access to data definitively proving the opposite. “Take your mask off, you’ve earned the right,” Biden said in June.
On May 13, the CDC reversed its guidance on mask-wearing, urging vaccinated people to stop wearing masks and socially distancing in crowded areas.
“Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky declared in May.
The CDC’s statements prompted the near-total abandonment of mask-wearing in the United States. Within days, businesses stopped enforcing mask mandates, while the vaccinated public, misinformed by the CDC, went maskless in public and reduced social distancing.
The deliberate promotion of false advice by US health authorities helped drive a massive resurgence of the pandemic, with cases now surging 50 percent per week.
In the leaked report, CDC scientists call for an urgent reversal of this catastrophic guidance, declaring in bold, “universal masking is essential to reduce transmission of the Delta variant.”
The document further calls for “community mitigation strategies” and non-pharmaceutical interventions, which are “needed to reduce transmission of Delta variant”—such as the closure of non-essential businesses and schools.
In response to the leaked memo, the Biden administration made clear that it has ruled out serious measures to contain the disease. “We are not going to head towards a lockdown,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday.
It is unclear how the internal CDC document was leaked to the Washington Post. It remains the case, however, that it was not released by the CDC or Biden administration, and the CDC declined to comment on its publication to the Post—indicating that its leadership opposed its release to the public.
The media’s framing of the report was largely misleading. The report was presented by NBC Nightly News as “new findings from the CDC,” without mentioning that the document was leaked without the CDC or White House’s permission. Its findings were presented as unforeseen and surprising, completely ignoring the fact that most of the report’s conclusions were well-known beforehand.
Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, who has for months been raising the alarm about the Delta variant of COVID-19, including in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site in May, responded to the CDC report by detailing, point by point, how the main findings had been known for months.
Noting a study from Public Health England and Public Health Scotland that found the Delta variant was nearly three times as dangerous as the Alpha variant, Feigl-Ding asked, “What’s the date of the report? June 3rd 2021!!! That’s ~2 months ago!”
“We have long known vaccinated transmit,” Feigl-Ding wrote, pointing to a tweet from nearly a month ago in which he showed research from Singapore demonstrating community spread among vaccinated people. He wrote at the time, “This demonstrates why vaccinated people still need to mask up damnit!”
He continued, “Oh cmon, when should CDC have known? The data from Singapore Ministry of Health was all freely accessible online and updated **daily**… and you can see the above graph’s vaccine breakthrough #DeltaVariant cluster was already apparent by mid June!!”
Feigl-Ding continued, “why didn’t we know about breakthrough infections causing transmission earlier? Was the CDC lying or neglectful & derelict in their duty to monitor? Let’s rewind to May 2021— @CDCgov decided to stop collecting & investigating mild breakthroughs!”
Feigl-Ding also noted that on June 26, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant had explained that “the Delta variant is more transmissible than smallpox.”
In the article breaking the story, the Washington Post quoted an unnamed CDC official calling for the full publication of the data in the report, “Waiting even days to publish the data could result in needless suffering and as public health professionals we cannot accept that.”
In May 2020, the ousted US health official Rick Bright filed a whistleblower complaint making clear that “public health officials were fully aware of the emerging threat of COVID-19 by early January 2020,” despite the Trump administration’s efforts to downplay the dangers posed by the pandemic.
Future whistleblowers will show the CDC knew almost everything in the newly released report months ago, based on the publicly available data cited by Feigl-Ding and the World Socialist Web Site.
More than two months ago, on May 23, the WSWS published a perspective titled, “Abandonment of health measures threatens US COVID-19 resurgence.”
We wrote at the time:
The reduction of COVID-19 cases in the United States is the outcome of mass vaccination that came about as a result of an unprecedented effort by scientists and academic institutions to create a whole new class of vaccines in record time.
In a rational society, the reduction of COVID-19 cases would be used to strengthen protections ahead of what public health experts warn will be a new resurgence in the fall. But the Biden administration is squandering what health officials call a temporary reprieve to abandon measures to monitor and contain the disease.
We warned that the continued abandonment of public health measures will mean “the disease that has already killed nearly a million people in US will take the lives of countless others.”
The Biden administration had access to the fundamental conclusions of the CDC’s report when it called for the end of masking and social distancing in May, just like the World Socialist Web Site did when we warned these actions would lead to a surge of the pandemic. Biden administration officials knowingly and with criminal malice encouraged measures that they knew would lead to a resurgence of the pandemic, which now threatens to kill hundreds of thousands more people.
Millions of people voted for Biden believing his pledge that he would “follow the science” in confronting the pandemic. As the WSWS warned, the Senator from DuPont and the credit card companies has not followed the science, but the interests of Wall Street.
Millions of people voted for Biden believing his pledge that he would “follow the science” in confronting the pandemic. As the WSWS warned, the Senator from DuPont and the credit card companies has not followed the science, but the interests of Wall Street.
On Thursday, the Washington Post published a leaked internal memorandum from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warning of mass community spread of COVID-19 among vaccinated people and calling on the Biden administration to stop discouraging mask wearing and social distancing.
The secret report contradicts nearly every public statement by the White House over the course of the past two months. Bringing together a broad range of public research—including some that was previously unpublished—the report warns that there are 35,000 symptomatic COVID-19 infections every week among vaccinated people.
The report states that vaccinated people who are infected with COVID-19 are just as infectious as those who are unvaccinated. It acknowledges that the so-called Delta variant of COVID-19 is more infectious than the common cold and, in fact, one of the most transmissible diseases known to man.
The document refutes President Joe Biden’s claim on July 22 that vaccinated people do not spread COVID-19—“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
For months, Biden has used the claim that vaccinated people are fully protected from COVID-19 to justify the abandonment of masking and social distancing requirements, despite the fact that the CDC had access to data definitively proving the opposite. “Take your mask off, you’ve earned the right,” Biden said in June.
On May 13, the CDC reversed its guidance on mask-wearing, urging vaccinated people to stop wearing masks and socially distancing in crowded areas.
“Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky declared in May.
The CDC’s statements prompted the near-total abandonment of mask-wearing in the United States. Within days, businesses stopped enforcing mask mandates, while the vaccinated public, misinformed by the CDC, went maskless in public and reduced social distancing.
The deliberate promotion of false advice by US health authorities helped drive a massive resurgence of the pandemic, with cases now surging 50 percent per week.
In the leaked report, CDC scientists call for an urgent reversal of this catastrophic guidance, declaring in bold, “universal masking is essential to reduce transmission of the Delta variant.”
The document further calls for “community mitigation strategies” and non-pharmaceutical interventions, which are “needed to reduce transmission of Delta variant”—such as the closure of non-essential businesses and schools.
In response to the leaked memo, the Biden administration made clear that it has ruled out serious measures to contain the disease. “We are not going to head towards a lockdown,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday.
It is unclear how the internal CDC document was leaked to the Washington Post. It remains the case, however, that it was not released by the CDC or Biden administration, and the CDC declined to comment on its publication to the Post—indicating that its leadership opposed its release to the public.
The media’s framing of the report was largely misleading. The report was presented by NBC Nightly News as “new findings from the CDC,” without mentioning that the document was leaked without the CDC or White House’s permission. Its findings were presented as unforeseen and surprising, completely ignoring the fact that most of the report’s conclusions were well-known beforehand.
Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, who has for months been raising the alarm about the Delta variant of COVID-19, including in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site in May, responded to the CDC report by detailing, point by point, how the main findings had been known for months.
Noting a study from Public Health England and Public Health Scotland that found the Delta variant was nearly three times as dangerous as the Alpha variant, Feigl-Ding asked, “What’s the date of the report? June 3rd 2021!!! That’s ~2 months ago!”
“We have long known vaccinated transmit,” Feigl-Ding wrote, pointing to a tweet from nearly a month ago in which he showed research from Singapore demonstrating community spread among vaccinated people. He wrote at the time, “This demonstrates why vaccinated people still need to mask up damnit!”
He continued, “Oh cmon, when should CDC have known? The data from Singapore Ministry of Health was all freely accessible online and updated **daily**… and you can see the above graph’s vaccine breakthrough #DeltaVariant cluster was already apparent by mid June!!”
Feigl-Ding continued, “why didn’t we know about breakthrough infections causing transmission earlier? Was the CDC lying or neglectful & derelict in their duty to monitor? Let’s rewind to May 2021— @CDCgov decided to stop collecting & investigating mild breakthroughs!”
Feigl-Ding also noted that on June 26, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant had explained that “the Delta variant is more transmissible than smallpox.”
In the article breaking the story, the Washington Post quoted an unnamed CDC official calling for the full publication of the data in the report, “Waiting even days to publish the data could result in needless suffering and as public health professionals we cannot accept that.”
In May 2020, the ousted US health official Rick Bright filed a whistleblower complaint making clear that “public health officials were fully aware of the emerging threat of COVID-19 by early January 2020,” despite the Trump administration’s efforts to downplay the dangers posed by the pandemic.
Future whistleblowers will show the CDC knew almost everything in the newly released report months ago, based on the publicly available data cited by Feigl-Ding and the World Socialist Web Site.
More than two months ago, on May 23, the WSWS published a perspective titled, “Abandonment of health measures threatens US COVID-19 resurgence.”
We wrote at the time:
The reduction of COVID-19 cases in the United States is the outcome of mass vaccination that came about as a result of an unprecedented effort by scientists and academic institutions to create a whole new class of vaccines in record time.
In a rational society, the reduction of COVID-19 cases would be used to strengthen protections ahead of what public health experts warn will be a new resurgence in the fall. But the Biden administration is squandering what health officials call a temporary reprieve to abandon measures to monitor and contain the disease.
We warned that the continued abandonment of public health measures will mean “the disease that has already killed nearly a million people in US will take the lives of countless others.”
The Biden administration had access to the fundamental conclusions of the CDC’s report when it called for the end of masking and social distancing in May, just like the World Socialist Web Site did when we warned these actions would lead to a surge of the pandemic. Biden administration officials knowingly and with criminal malice encouraged measures that they knew would lead to a resurgence of the pandemic, which now threatens to kill hundreds of thousands more people.
Millions of people voted for Biden believing his pledge that he would “follow the science” in confronting the pandemic. As the WSWS warned, the Senator from DuPont and the credit card companies has not followed the science, but the interests of Wall Street.
Florida sees explosive growth of Delta variant infections, hospitalizations
Florida is experiencing an alarming spike in COVID-19 infections and hospital patients, fueled by the deadly Delta variant of the coronavirus, the latest mutation of the disease which is accelerating a tremendous resurgence of the pandemic worldwide.
The state has emerged as a significant epicenter for the new surge in cases engendered by the more lethal variant, with health authorities around the nation warning that the latest wave of sickness will lead to record-breaking case numbers and death rates like those reached during earlier peaks in the pandemic.
This is already being witnessed in Florida, where the number of confirmed cases and hospitalizations are increasingly rivaling the historic highs seen in the summer of 2020.
Although Florida comprises just 6.5 percent of the U.S. population, it accounts for 20.4 percent of the country’s new cases, based on the data the state is reporting to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On Wednesday Florida recorded its fourth-highest single-day spike in COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began, with 17,589 new cases. This was the eighth consecutive day Florida reported to the CDC more than 12,000 new daily infections, with cases skyrocketing in a single month. Just one month earlier, on June 28, the state reported only 1,312 new COVID-19 cases, so Wednesday’s number represents a month-to-month increase of 1,241 percent. The daily spike in cases was the largest since January 15.
The three-highest days of new COVID-19 cases for Florida all occurred during Florida’s peak in January, with 17,783 cases on January 6, 19,816 cases on January 7, and 19,530 cases on January 8.
CDC officials also reported 92 new COVID-19 deaths in Florida on Wednesday, which brings the total during the pandemic to 38,340. Moreover, a new CDC guidance demanded that fully vaccinated Floridians should wear masks in indoor spaces, as the entire state of Florida is considered a high transmission area. The new guidelines on mask wearing included other states seeing “substantial and high transmission” rates.
Of Florida’s 67 counties, 64 are considered areas of high transmission by the CDC. The rampant spread of the pandemic is also finding expression in an uptick in positivity rates, with Florida’s seven-day average positivity rate climbing to 17.2 percent on Monday, up from 16.8 percent on Sunday.
According to public health experts, the highest caseloads and severe infections are being driven by unvaccinated individuals who are still vulnerable to the virus. The level of vaccinations still remains far below what’s needed to slow down spread of the deadly variant. More than 12 million Floridians have received at least one dose of the vaccine, about 57.2 percent of the state’s total population. An estimated 49 percent of Florida’s total population is fully vaccinated, in line with the US average.
Although the media and sections of the Democratic party have sought to scapegoat the population for not taking vaccines, the low vaccination rates are primarily due to the propaganda emanating from layers of the far-right political establishment that have promoted anti-scientific conspiracy theories to discredit mass vaccinations.
The Biden administration has made as its top priority the reopening of in-person schooling and opposition to lockdowns no matter the costs to human life, in an effort to normalize living with COVID-19. Following Biden’s suggestions that the pandemic was virtually done away with, the CDC moved in May to end its regulations on mask mandates and social distancing, only to have such policies reversed this month because of the explosive growth of the Delta variant.
As a result of the new CDC guidelines, major businesses, local governments and schools throughout Florida have been forced to revive mask mandates to counter the spike in cases. On Wednesday, Walt Disney World announced that starting Friday all guests, unvaccinated or not, would have to wear masks while in indoor spaces and on Disney transportation. This came after Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings reinstated a state of emergency in the county due to high rates of COVID-19 transmission.
The school board for Broward County Public Schools, the second largest in the state, voted unanimously on Wednesday to institute a mask mandate for all students, teachers and staff when school begins on August 18. In Miami-Dade County, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava mandated masks at all county facilities on Wednesday, including libraries and recreational centers. Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach has also moved to reverse policies starting Friday, saying it will not allow visitors at its medical center or physician locations, while having limited visitation at its emergency centers in Miami Beach, Aventura and Hialeah.
The enormous surge in cases is propelling a tsunami of hospitalizations. Hospital admissions of coronavirus patients are now surpassing previous peaks reached during last summer’s surge. The state’s Health and Human Services department released data on Monday confirming that hospitals in Jacksonville were at maximum capacity.
Ascension St. Vincent’s on the city’s Southside has dropped to negative for ICU beds available to patients. Jacksonville’s Orange Park Medical Center reportedly has a zero percent availability for ICU beds. Florida hospitals as a whole reported more than 8,900 patients with COVID-19 on Thursday. The Florida Hospital Association said the state peaked at 10,179 patients last July. The number of patients on Thursday was five times higher than a month ago, and it climbed from about 5,500 in just one week.
As Jacksonville emerges as the epicenter for the pandemic’s resurgence in Florida, local health experts are sounding the alarm bells for the impact the much more contagious new variant is having on children as the school year approaches. Dr. Mobeen Rathore, the chief of pediatric infectious disease and immunology for Wolfson Children’s Hospital, called the vaccination rates among children “pathetically low.” The Florida Department of Health’s most recent COVID-19 data shows only 35 percent of young people ages 12 to 19 are vaccinated in the state, the lowest of any age group.
Despite the extraordinary danger facing the population because of the rise of the Delta variant, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has redoubled his opposition to any scientifically guided health measures aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19. At an event in Salt Lake City, Utah, the right-wing governor condemned the mask requirements being issued in various counties and vowed to introduce a legislative order allowing parents and guardians to choose whether their children should wear masks in classrooms.
DeSantis’ declaration came as a response to Broward’s school board announcing its new mask mandate for schools this fall and in defiance of the CDC’s recently released guidelines on masking. The governor said that forcing children to wear masks in schools “would be a huge mistake.” He said that an emergency action curtailing mask mandates would be signed into law “very soon” in order to counter the “push from the CDC and others to make every single person, kids and staff have to wear masks all day.”
The governor’s decision to implement an executive order prohibiting masking in schools has received some backlash from Democrats and the teacher’s unions. Florida Education Association President Andrew Spar denounced the Governor for the draconian measures because he “continues to think that Tallahassee knows best what all Floridians need.” Likewise, Miami-Dade County Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said Friday the school district would seek COVID-19 recommendations from local health experts “regardless” of any executive order issued from DeSantis.
No confidence should be placed in either the Democratic Party nor the trade union bureaucracies, both of whom carried out the reckless reopening of non-essential businesses and schools that was demanded by DeSantis earlier in the pandemic, which has prepared the groundwork for the current wave of infections. The Democrats as well as the teachers unions subordinated all health policies regarding school closures throughout the past year to profit interests, which demanded that children be placed in unsafe classrooms so that parents could return to work and pump out wealth for big business.
Spar’s comments reflected this, as he limited himself to a feckless plea asking DeSantis to listen to elected officials in the cities and school districts and allowing them to make “health and safety decisions locally,” a request that will surely go ignored as the Republicans push to overrule all public health restrictions aimed at COVID-19.
THERE IS NO BANKSTER TUCKING MORE STOLEN MONEY INTO THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY JOB BIDEN’S POCKETS THAN BLACKROCK’S LARRY FINK.
IF YOU’VE WONDERED IF JOE BIDEN, THE CLOWN WHO STAGES HIMSELF AS A BLUE COLLAR POPULIST, IS ANYTHING BUT BOUGHT AND OWNED BY WALL STREET’S BIGGEST CRIMINAL BANKSTERS, LOOK AGAIN! JOE WILL BE BAILING THEM OUT FIRST!!!
Faced with a disaster when the markets re-opened, Mnuchin, Powell and Fink were engaged in a series of discussions over the weekend of March 21–22 to devise a rescue package. According to the Times report, Mnuchin spoke to Fink five times over the two days, more than anyone else, other than Powell with whom he spoke nine times.
According to the article, Larry Fink, the
CEO of Blackrock, the world’s biggest
asset management firm, was “in frequent
touch” with US Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin and Fed chair Jerome
Powell “in the days before and after many
of the Fed’s emergency programs were
announced in late March.”
World’s largest asset management firm
BlackRock was “front and center” of Fed’s
Wall Street bailout
“In his new post, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation, Mr. Deese of BlackRoack will play a lead role in implementing Mr. Biden’s economic agenda,” the Wall Street Journal wrote Monday.
The closeness of the relationship between
Blackrock and the financial and economic
arms of the state, the US Treasury and the
Fed, were highlighted in a comment by
William Birdthistle, of the Chicago-Kent
College of Law and the author of a book
on funds, cited in the article.
He said Blackrock was “about as close to
a government arm as you can be, without
being the Federal Reserve.”
Democrats let US eviction moratorium expire, pushing millions of families to the brink
Alongside the latest surge in COVID-19 infections and deaths, another social crisis is set to erupt as the federal moratorium on evictions issued in September will come to an end over the weekend. Millions are threatened with losing their homes, adding to the already dire situation Americans face as the pandemic enters a new deadly stage.
The Biden administration announced Thursday that it would allow the nationwide ban on evictions to expire on Saturday declaring that it was up to Congress, with just two days to go, to extend the measure. The White House claimed that the President’s hands are tied, and there was nothing Biden could do for the more than six million families that have fallen behind on rent, citing the Supreme Court’s decision last month to only allow a moratorium extension until the end of July.
According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, approximately 6.4 million households were behind on their rent by the end of March. As of July, roughly 3.6 million people in the US reported they faced eviction in the next two months, according to the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.
A New York Times analysis of the survey data found 250 counties where at least 20 percent of renters are behind on their payments, threatening a severe spike in homelessness across the country. Some counties in the rural South present a more worrying trend, with more than one in four renters being behind. Nationwide, rent debt stands at an estimated $23 billion, with the average household being $3,800 in arrears.
In the 84 most populous urban counties, renters owe a collective bill of $13 billion. Almost 300,000 renters in Los Angeles County owe an average of $5,300 in back rent. More than 400,000 renters in New York City owe a collective $2 billion. Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, Phoenix and San Diego all have at least 55,000 families at risk of being put out on the streets.
Congress has allocated nearly $47 billion in federal Emergency Rental Assistance funds through the CARES Act, but only a minute fraction has been distributed to renters in need. According to state and federal data from June, only about $3 billion of the first $25 billion in relief has been distributed by states and localities. Some states like New York have distributed almost nothing, while several have only approved a few million dollars.
For example, only $158 million has reached renters in California, while residents applied for over $1 billion in rental aid. South Carolina is faring far worse: under $1 million has been disbursed, out of $39 million requested, accounting for less than one percent of funds being spent. By mid-July, the state’s emergency rental assistance program had only processed 226 applications for rental assistance. Meanwhile, 29 percent of renters in South Carolina reported being behind on rent, the highest percentage in the country.
An NBC News survey found that 26 out of 41 US states surveyed had distributed less than 10 percent of their first round of Emergency Rental Assistance, with many states only beginning to hand out money in June. Experts point to numerous reasons aid has yet to reach tenants, including a lack of federal guidelines for distribution, application processes that are too complicated and excessive documentation requirements to prove one’s need.
Exacerbating the issue is a large eligibility gap, with half of the families facing eviction falling outside of eligibility for federal assistance due to their income. As a result, funds are reaching only a small fraction of those who need them most.
A 2020 report from the Aspen Institute found that nearly a quarter of all US households spent more than half of their monthly income on rent. Tenants in this category were far more likely to be at or below the federal poverty line. These households represent millions of workers struggling to live paycheck to paycheck, or one accident or unfortunate event away from financial ruin. Already ravaged by the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic, these workers and their families, anywhere from 30 to 40 million people, face eviction, putting them at heightened risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19.
On an individual level, evicted families will not be able to easily recover from being thrown out. An eviction is a stain that can haunt a person for years. Landlords often discriminate against individuals with an eviction on their credit history and deny them lodging.
At the same time, the confluence of the rapid spread of the Delta variant with tens of millions possibly being evicted in the coming weeks bodes a social catastrophe.
The Biden administration’s patchwork vaccination campaign has left people in many parts of the country still vulnerable to the virus and its various mutations. The Public Health Informatics, Computational, and Operation Research (PHICOR) organization estimates that more than 40 percent of Americans may not be sufficiently protected against the fast-spreading Delta variant.
The organization also estimates that more than 98 percent of US residents live in counties where less than 70 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated. Additionally, 82 percent of residents live in localities with less than 60 percent of the population fully vaccinated.
Even those who are vaccinated remain vulnerable, as the Delta variant has demonstrated the ability to evade vaccine-granted immunity. And across the US, children under the age of 12 are ineligible for vaccination, further ensuring the spread of the disease as the Biden administration pushes for the full reopening of schools.
The White House issued a limp statement claiming Biden’s sympathy for renters facing a moment of “heightened vulnerability,” with Biden meekly calling on “Congress to extend the eviction moratorium to protect such vulnerable renters and their families without delay.”
“Given the recent spread of the Delta variant, including among those Americans both most likely to face evictions and lacking vaccinations, President Biden would have strongly supported a decision by the CDC to further extend this eviction moratorium to protect renters at this moment of heightened vulnerability,” the White House said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has made clear that this option is no longer available.”
The Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 majority last month to allow the eviction ban to continue through the end of July. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the court’s “liberal” wing in the decision, made clear he would block any additional extensions unless there was “clear and specific congressional authorization.”
Democrats in the House introduced a last-minute bill Thursday to extend the moratorium to the end of the year, but this has only been to save face. The Democrats are fully aware that the bill would immediately die once it reached the Senate, where Democrats intended to pass a one-month extension through a voice vote. However, a single Republican objection would instantly kill the legislation. Considering the vast majority of Republicans and many “moderate” Democrats oppose an extension, there is no question about the fate of the bill.
The impending eruption of evictions is not merely the result of the ongoing pandemic, but rather stems from the conscious policy of the financial elite. Every decision made regarding pandemic policy has been predicated on the interests of Wall Street and American imperialism. Determined to ensure the continued extraction of profit from the working class, the ruling class has eviscerated and abandoned any serious measures to contain COVID-19.
In response to the abandonment of social distancing measures and the forced reopening of schools and businesses, the stock markets have surged, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P hitting record highs this week. Over the course of the pandemic, the world’s billionaires have seen their fortunes skyrocket in conjunction with the growing number of deaths which have now surpassed four million globally.
The unfolding social crisis in the United States stands as an indictment of the capitalist system, its inability to deal with social crisis, and the ultimate need for building a working-class movement seeking to reorganize society based on human need and not the drive for profit.
10 Million Face Evictions And Foreclosures In 2021 As Federal Moratorium Ends
A key measure of inflation reached a 30-year high last month, data released Friday by the Commerce Department showed.
Excluding food and energy, consumer prices were 3.5 percent higher last month than they were in June 2020, the briskest pace of inflation since the summer of 1991 and an acceleration from a month ago.
The data comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ personal consumption expenditure price index, which is the index used by the Fed in its inflation targeting and projections.
The better-known Consumer Price Index, which is produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, came in at 4.5 percent in June. That was also nearly a 30 year high.
The two indexes tend to follow the same path over time, although they are composed using different data sets on divergent bundles of goods and services. The Fed switched from CPI to the PCE two decades ago after deciding that it was a better gauge of prices in the economy. CPI tends to show more inflation than the PCE index.
The overall PCE index rose 4 percent from a year ago, matching the rise in May at the highest since 2008.