Wednesday, April 8, 2020

ORANGE BABOON TRUMP VOW TO SERVE THE CRONY CLASS ON WALL STREET BY REMOVING INSPECTOR GENERAL AND REPLACING WITH A GOLDMAN SACHS APPROVED DUPE

“We’re in two crises: We have a pandemic 

crisis, and then we have a financial crisis, and

they’re not entirely lateral. The pandemic 

crisis is going to end before the financial 

crisis,” Stone said.

Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-fall-of-donald-trump-final-days.html

 “The legal ring surrounding him is collectively producing a historic indictment of his endemic corruption and criminality.” JONATHAN CHAIT




MSNBC’s Figliuzzi: Trump ‘Exploiting a Virus to Dismantle the Rule of Law and the Constitution’

2:54

Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” former FBI official and MSNBC national security contributor Frank Figliuzzi accused President Donald Trump of “exploiting” the coronavirus pandemic.
He claimed  Trump was working “to dismantle the rule of law and the Constitution.”
When asked about Trump removing the inspector general who was to oversee stimulus spending, Figliuzzi said, “Here we have a president who is exploiting a national crisis to move forward his own agenda, his own revenge, his own profit. It’s the very concept of what an inspector general stands for, Nicolle, that is anathema, it’s diametrically opposed to everything that this president stands for. What do I mean by that? IG’s stand for unvarnished truth, reporting the facts, crunching the numbers, the rule of law and compliance. That’s what they do for a living, and it just rubs Trump the wrong way that someone is going to get the truth out.”
He continued, “He doesn’t want to hear the truth. Not only do we have to fight this virus to save these lives, we have to fight it, we got to save this democracy. This president is exploiting a virus to dismantle the rule of law and the Constitution.”
He added, “He sees the truth as an adversary. Those who represent the truth and advocate for rule of law and compliance are simply not compatible with his administration. So he found a way to start doing it. I predict, I hope I’m wrong, but we might even see pardons come next. As the death toll mounts in a national healthcare crisis, we are seeing him slip in anything that advances his agenda. If he thinks the American people are not going to remember this, if he thinks that the military sailors on that ship with Captain Crozier are going to forget that their captain was removed for fighting for them, if he thinks the healthcare workers are going to forget that they don’t have PPE that they are put their lives on the line every day, if he thinks people are going to forget that they have to endanger their lives to go vote in a primary in Wisconsin, right, death or democracy, he’s sadly mistaken. I think this is going to be a strategic error on his part.”
Figliuzzi concluded, “I hate to draw the analogy between bracing this week for perhaps the deadliest time in American history, but I also think sadly we should be bracing for the person in the White House to exploit this time. You know back in my FBI days, Nicolle, some of the most heinous criminals that I saw were those who exploited crises, humanitarian crisis — 9/11, Hurricane Katrine — for their own benefit. I thought that was the most despicable thing that I had seen, and I have to tell you, I see the president’s conduct as akin to that kind of inhumane exploitation of a crisis.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN


Yellen’s views were seconded by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who, in his annual shareholder letter released on Monday, wrote that he expects a “bad recession.” According to Dimon, the gross domestic product could fall as much as 35 percent in the second quarter, and the downturn will probably last through the rest of the year.

Fiction, reality and the global crisis of capitalism

On Monday there seemed to be two different worlds: one based on reality and the other on fiction.
In the real world, the COVID-19 pandemic continued its deadly rampage within the United States and around the globe. The news was dominated by reports of overcrowded hospitals, exhausted doctors, nurses and support staff, and sick and dying patients.
But in the fictional world of global stock exchanges and finance, a mood of uncontrollable euphoria prevailed among investors, who, as if staging an orgy at a funeral, poured billions into equities and drove the Dow Jones Industrial Average up by nearly 7.5 percent. Substantial gains were also recorded by the German DAX (up 6 percent) and the British FTSE (up over 3 percent).
What motivated this shameful and shameless celebration?
On Monday, the US death toll surpassed the 10,000 mark. Despite a very slight decline in the daily total of new deaths in New York City on Sunday, there is no clear evidence that the virulence of the pandemic has peaked in this critical urban center.
Moreover, it is absolutely certain that other major urban centers and, more generally, large portions of the United States, are still to experience the full force of the pandemic. The level of testing remains so disorganized and primitive that there exists no objective data upon which reliable predictions can be made about when it will be possible for workers to return safely to their jobs.
The economic situation is dire and is deteriorating. Former Federal Reserve Chairperson Janet Yellen said in a CNBC interview on Monday that the US is in the midst of an “absolutely shocking” downturn. Unemployment is as high as 13 percent, Yellen estimated, and the overall contraction of the US economy is already at 30 percent.
Yellen’s views were seconded by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who, in his annual shareholder letter released on Monday, wrote that he expects a “bad recession.” According to Dimon, the gross domestic product could fall as much as 35 percent in the second quarter, and the downturn will probably last through the rest of the year.
Large sections of the global economy, beyond the US and Western Europe are in free fall. India, home to 17 percent of the world’s population, remains in lockdown, threatening global supply chains and food production. Former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan said yesterday that the country faces “perhaps its greatest emergency since independence.”
In Japan, a dramatic rise in coronavirus infections has finally compelled Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to declare a state of emergency, which will result in a shutdown of large portions of the country’s economic activity.
To the economic and health care crisis is added a deepening political crisis. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, having been infected by the coronavirus, was hospitalized and placed in intensive care on Sunday evening. Almost simultaneously, the 93-year-old Queen Elizabeth grimly addressed the entire country in a televised speech for only the fourth time (outside of the annual Christmas event) in her 68-year reign.
One might have expected that the hospitalization of an extremely sick prime minister in London, the financial center of Europe, would have sent the stock exchange into a tailspin when it opened for business on Monday morning.
But nothing of the sort happened. Investors plunged into the market with gusto and did not pause for even a minute to shed a tear for their ailing prime minister.
How can one explain the exuberance in global markets amidst such tragic and threatening conditions?
First, whatever anxiety Wall Street may have about the spread of the pandemic is offset by the expectation that the US government will continue to support its speculative activities with countless trillions. In fact, the direct transfer of resources into the markets, particularly by the Federal Reserve central bank in the US, is well underway. The Federal Reserve balance sheet increased last month by $1.6 trillion, approximately equal to the entire monthly gross domestic product of the United States. Every day, tens of billions are being digitally manufactured to buy up assets and debt from banks and corporations.
In other words, the policies that were implemented following the crash of 2008 are being taken to a new level. For more than a decade, the speculative mania on Wall Street has been financed through the infusion of cash from the US Federal Reserve in the form of “quantitative easing” (money printing) operations and low interest rates. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the Fed added $4 trillion to its balance sheet by buying up mortgage-backed securities and other assets held by the banks.
To this was added the unending stream of money plowed into the markets in the form of corporate stock buybacks. The Wall Street Journal writes in an article published over the weekend:
Corporate buybacks, in fact, have been the only net source of money entering the stock market since the financial crisis in 2008, according to Brian Reynolds, chief market strategist at research firm Reynolds Strategy. Buyback programs, through which companies repurchase their own shares on the open market, can help boost share prices by reducing the amount of stock outstanding and lifting a company’s per-share earnings, though not its overall profit.
Since the beginning of 2009, Mr. Reynolds estimates, buybacks have added a net $4 trillion to the stock market. Contributions from all other sources—including exchange-traded funds, foreign buyers, pensions, hedge funds and households—netted out to roughly zero, he concluded, based on the Federal Reserve’s quarterly flow funds reports. The S&P’s 500 market value is $20.9 trillion.
To sum up, through the mechanism of buybacks, the price of shares could be endlessly driven up even without an increase of profit levels. The new intervention of the Federal Reserve, following the bill passed by Congress, has reassured Wall Street that there will be endless liquidity available to support rising share values under conditions of severe economic contraction.
The Fed is already buying up corporate debt, and Yellen raised yesterday the possibility that it might begin direct purchases of stocks for the first time in history. Yellen also indicated that officials at the Federal Reserve, with whom she remains in contact, are thinking about purchasing very risky corporate “junk bonds.”
The second factor behind Wall Street’s rise is its enthusiastic reaction to the international campaign by the political establishment and the media for a speedy return to work.
In the final analysis, the edifice of fictitious capital—wealth created through the massive and inflationary expansion of credit and debt—cannot be entirely liberated from a real productive process involving and requiring the exploitation of the labor power of the working class. If that real process stops, for whatever reason, the structure of fictitious capital collapses.
This is why the calls for a return to work—regardless of the state of the pandemic—have been taken up internationally by the capitalist media. The prospect of an early return to work, under conditions of intensified exploitation, generated Monday’s euphoria.
Of course, the euphoria may not last long. Reality, not fiction, determines the course of events.
The class conflict and the logic of the opposing classes are starkly posed: For the ruling class, it is a question of securing its wealth, returning the workers to the job under unsafe conditions, and tearing up whatever remains of social programs. For the working class, it is a question of saving lives, stopping all nonessential production, and restructuring economic life on the basis of social need, not private profit.
The one path leads to authoritarianism, the other leads to socialist revolution. This is the irrepressible social and political logic of the fundamental reality of our epoch: the global crisis and death agony of world capitalism.




“We’re in two crises: We have a pandemic 
crisis, and then we have a financial crisis, and
they’re not entirely lateral. The pandemic 
crisis is going to end before the financial 
crisis,” Stone said.

Small Business Optimism Suffers Sharpest Plunge Ever

Businesses closed (Scott Olson / Getty)
Scott Olson / Getty
2:44

Optimism has collapsed among America’s small business owners.
The National Federation of Independent Businesses index of small business optimism fell 8.1 points in March to 96.4, the largest monthly decline in the survey’s history.
Nine of the 10 Index components declined. The sharpest decline was in expected sales, which saw a 31 percentage point decline so that a seasonally adjusted net 12 percent of businesses now expect falling revenue. That is the largest decline for this metric in the survey’s history. Actual sales held strong in March, with a net 8 percent of all owners reporting higher nominal sales in the past three months.
“Small businesses are living through the coronavirus pandemic right now and it’s hard to say what the severity of the disruption will be, but we do know they’re feeling the urgency,” said NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg in a statement released with the report. “It is vital that these businesses have access to federal funds that are made available through the CARES Act to keep the doors open on Main Street.”
The NFIB survey collected the majority of responses in the first half of the month, so the 10 million job loss in the final two weeks of the month and the effects of widespread lockdown orders are not reflected in the March survey data.
Sixty percent of owners reported capital outlays, down just two points from February. Of those making expenditures, 43 percent reported spending on new equipment, 26 percent acquired vehicles, 16 percent improved or expanded facilities, 6 percent acquired new buildings or land for expansion, and 12 percent spend money for new fixtures and furniture. Twenty-one percent of owners said they are planning capital outlays in the next few months, a five-point decline.
Those figures will almost certainly decline in the next survey, as businesses pull closed the purse strings in April as the result of orders to shutter businesses and the widespread economic contraction that has gripped the nation and the world. That will hit manufacturers of equipment and vehicles as well as construction.
Reports of better business conditions in the next six months declined 17 points to a net 5%, which is the largest monthly decline since November 2012, indicating that business owners expect the drag from the pandemic will linger last into this year at least.
NFIB released separate surveys in March on how COVID-19 is impacting small businesses. The latest indicated that 92 percent of small employers are negatively impacted by the outbreak and about half of small employers said they can survive for no more than two months under the current business conditions.

“We’re in two crises: We have a pandemic crisis, 

and then we have a financial crisis, and they’re not
entirely lateral. The pandemic crisis is going to 
end before the financial crisis,” Stone said.



Coronavirus delivers first blow against Bay Area construction, economy could knock it out

 

Anticipated recession will be sharply exacerbated by COVID-19 crisis, officials say

 

By JOSEPH GEHA | jgeha@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
Neighbors sheltering in place inside their new homes along Centre Point Drive in Milpitas sent angry emails to city officials early last week, complaining about the cacophony of construction noise across the street where a large mixed-use development was going up.
“Please drive by and hear it for yourself,” one resident wrote. “The constant, simultaneous sounds of hammering, drilling, rapid stapling, and heavy pounding!”
On Wednesday morning, the neighbors’ wishes seemingly were granted. The job site — where SummerHill Apartment Communities had started building hundreds of planned apartments and more than 10,000 square feet of retail across multiple five-story buildings — was silent, other than the occasional sound of a few shooting nail guns and swinging hammers.
But it wasn’t because city officials heeded the neighbors’ requests.
Several hours earlier at the stroke of midnight, the Bay Area’s latest shelter-in-place order kicked in, halting most construction in its tracks and sending thousands of workers home until at least May 3 in an effort to contain the rapid spread of coronavirus.
In the tech-driven economy of Silicon Valley, where over the last decade record job growth has spurred billions of dollars’ worth of new housing and commercial construction, officials say the COVID-19 pandemic could wreak a huge economic toll on the development scene.
“I believe that the development, the construction and the leasing activity will be delayed, and in some cases canceled, due to the heightened sense of uncertainty over the economic and business outlooks,” Larry Stone, Santa Clara County’s longtime assessor, said Thursday.
While the shelter order is in effect until May 3, the work stoppages could be extended well beyond that date and the ripple effects may alter the area’s landscape, he suggested.
Half-finished buildings may languish indefinitely if the financial constraints become too much for builders to bear. In other cases, parcels may remain vacant as the demand for homes and offices vanishes in an economy that’s tanking.
“At the height of the Great Recession, we had between 10 to 12 percent unemployment, we’re going to be over 15 percent if this thing lasts another three months,” Stone said.
“Some developers may very well conclude that they’re not going to proceed even when the pandemic goes away because the market has been impacted so much by unemployment and those kinds of things,” he said.
Developers say they understand the importance of social distancing, which is driving the shelter-in-place order, but argue that construction could be safely done.
“I certainly believe in the shelter-in-place and the necessary steps we’re trying to take as a community to flatten the curve, but construction of this type, I thought was a place that we could control the risks and minimize the risks,” said Robert Freed,  CEO of major Bay Area developer SummerHill Homes.
“We’ve also heard from the hundreds of people we employ on these jobs that they want to keep working, and they want to be safe,” Freed said.
SummerHill isn’t the only big developer in the Bay Area left in the lurch.
In San Jose, for example, Bayview Development Group’s Miro project — two 28-story towers with more than 600 housing units and 18,000 square feet of commercial space at 167 E. Santa Clara St. — has ground to a halt.
So has the Serif Condominiums project in San Francisco by L37 Partners, a 242-unit complex at 950 Market St. that was expected to be completed in February 2021.
And back in Milpitas, The Fields project by Lyon Living is another victim — 1,185 market-rate apartments off McCandless Drive planned to include almost 150,000 square feet of retail and a hotel across from The Great Mall. The 370 apartments in the first phases of the four-phase project are up, but only a little more than half of the 200 planned for the second phase are done.
With few other exceptions, about the only kind of construction that health officials said Tuesday would be allowed to continue involves housing projects with “at least 10% income-restricted units.”
Although the public risks in building all homes are the same, they reasoned that affordable housing would be in even more dire need long after the pandemic has passed, according to spokespersons for Alameda and Santa Clara counties.
Exceptions aside, Freed said the shelter order will hurt developers as deeply as did the Great Recession.
“I think developers and individual projects that are overleveraged, or have debt structures that are onerous, are going to fail if this goes on for any significant length of time,” he said.
“Time is never a friend of a construction project. There will be a financial hit all the way around. The clock is still ticking on the debt, the clock is still ticking on a return on equity, and the longer it goes without producing the housing, the revenue is being pushed out further into the future,” he said.
“None of that bodes well for us,” he added.
A few miles north in Fremont, SiliconSage Builders CEO Sanjeev Acharya also is wary, though hopeful, of the future.
The development company had to halt work at the Osgood Residences, a 93-unit condominium complex near a planned future BART stop.
The structure, already coated in white paint with copper, California Poppy orange and deep-red accents around the windows, is more than three-quarters finished, Acharya said.
Crews were about to install some wooden siding and other portions of the building’s facades.
“We’re hoping it’ll open up on May 3rd and we’ll be back to business to push the production through,” Acharya said.
“People want to see things built and done, they don’t want to see vacant properties, especially when there’s also a possibility of more vandalism and theft,” he added.
“We are hoping that we get past this soon and we are able to at least open up construction in a prudent manner where we keep people safe, but at the same time, get things going,” he added.
Stone, the assessor, said some financially stable developers will manage to weather the storm, but as unemployment spikes and major industries are hamstrung, there may no longer be a demand for new homes, and mortgage companies are not going to be as willing to provide loans.
“People were building and financing … because the market indicated that they could do that,” Stone said.
The value of new commercial and residential construction totaled an unprecedented nearly $6 billion of Santa Clara County’s assessment roll last year, he said.
“Go or no-go in real estate development is always based upon the market, whether it’s residential or commercial. And if the market is changing because of this accelerated crisis, then the decision making on real estate development could be altered as well,” he said.
“We’re in two crises: We have a pandemic 

crisis, and then we have a financial crisis, and

they’re not entirely lateral. The pandemic 

crisis is going to end before the financial 

crisis,” Stone said.
“And the question is, how do you get out of that?”

Joseph Geha | Reporter 

Joseph Geha is a multimedia journalist covering Fremont, Milpitas, Union City, and Newark for the Bay Area News Group. His prior work has been seen in multiple Bay Area outlets, including SF Weekly, as well as on KQED and KLIV radio. He is a graduate of California State University, East Bay (Hayward), a Fremont native and a lifelong Oakland Athletics fan.


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