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
TRUMPERNOMICS:
THE SUPER RICH APPLAUD TWITTER’S TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the super-rich, on top of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of the supposed recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1 percent income bracket."
Pence Rejects One-Time Coronavirus Wealth Tax — ‘The Way to Jump-Start This Economy Is Exactly the Opposite’
2:39
Wednesday during an interview with nationally syndicated radio host Hugh Hewitt, Vice President Mike Pence dismissed the suggestion of a one-time wealth tax to finance the federal government’s response to coronavirus.
Pence argued for the opposite and predicted 2021 would be a strong year for the American economy.
“President Trump has got our economic team working on a range of proposals, particularly as we look at what’s commonly referred to as a Phase 4 legislative package,” he said. “And we actually think the way to jump-start this economy is exactly the opposite, Hugh. We think now’s the time for us to look at eliminating the payroll tax, to look at other possible tax reforms. I mean, look, the President often says this, and it’s, you can’t say it too often, is that this is what you said. It’s a hundred-year event. No one saw this coming. The impact on our economy, the impact on businesses large and small, and hard-working American families is, was, is utterly unprecedented in our lifetimes. And so we need to think boldly about how once we’ve largely put the Coronavirus in the past, which may well be in the months ahead that we find ways to encourage investment and encourage growth and encourage the American people to safely and responsibly return to work and return to all of the activities that we all enjoy as parts of communities.”
“I really do believe that it’ll be, it’ll be one of the primary focus of this President going forward is how do we, not only how do we safely and responsibly open up America again, but what policies are we going to be able to enact that will create the kind of investment that’ll create jobs and growth in this economy,” Pence continued. “You know, one of the things the President’s often talked about is allowing for the expensing, once again, of business costs for dining out. It’s one of the ways that you can encourage businesses to have their employees start going back to restaurants and doing business at restaurants as once was the case before that tax deduction was eliminated. But rather than raising taxes, I promise you, President Trump, President Trump’s going to use the full strength of the American economy, because this is a president who knows that growth will solve all of our problems. We get the American economy growing again, starting to grow in the third quarter, rolling in the fourth quarter. And as the President said, we think 2021 could be one of the most prosperous years for economic growth in American history.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
Goldman Sachs Bankster “King of the Foreclosures” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin vows that the Goldman Sachs infested Trump Admin will hand no-strings massive socialist bailouts to Trump Hotels. Mnuchin says the welfare will exceed the Bankster-owned Democrat Party’s massive bailout of Obama crony Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan’s bailout in 2008
Goldman Sachs Bankster “King of the Foreclosures” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin vows that the Goldman Sachs infested Trump Admin will hand no-strings massive socialist bailouts to Trump Hotels. Mnuchin says the welfare will exceed the Bankster-owned Democrat Party’s massive bailout of Obama crony Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan’s bailout in 2008
International travel may not resume until 2021, warns Mnuchin as he encourages Americans to consider domestic travel after lockdown instead to help reboot the economy
- Mnuchin said it was 'too hard to tell' if international travel will reopen by 2020
- He encouraged Americans to consider domestic travel this year instead
- Discussions underway over whether more government relief funding is needed
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has warned that international travel may not resume until 2021 as he encouraged Americans to consider travelling within the US instead.
Speaking during an interview on Fox Business Network on Monday, Mnuchin said it was 'too hard to tell' at the moment whether international travel could open up by the end of the year.
But, he added: 'This is a great time for people to explore America. A lot of people haven't seen many parts of America.'
Speaking during an interview on Fox Business Network on Monday, Mnuchin said it was 'too hard to tell' at the moment whether international travel could open up by the end of the year
Mnuchin said his main priority was to 'open the domestic economy'.
'The president's also looking about ways to stimulate travel. We want people to travel safely, to be able to visit places safely.
'So as the economy opens up, I think you'll see demand coming back.'
The CEO of Southwest Airlines, one of the largest US air companies, has insisted that it is safe for travellers to fly again.
He also said that air traffic, nearly paralyzed by the coronavirus pandemic, was gradually reviving.
The CEO of Southwest Airlines, one of the largest US air companies, has insisted that it is safe for travellers to fly again
Asked on CBS whether it was safe to fly again, Gary Kelly replied, 'It is. We're doing everything possible to encourage people to come back and fly.'
He said his airline was taking a number of safety precautions. Passengers and crew members will be required to wear masks, planes will receive deep cleaning between flights and some seats will be left empty to allow a degree of social distancing.
'I don't think the risk on an airplane is any greater risk than anywhere else,' Kelly said.
'You look at the layered approach that we use, it's as safe as any environment you're going to find.'
Kelly's remarks come after other major airlines, including Delta, United, American, and JetBlue, announced that passengers would be required to wear protective masks on flights.
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
Mnuchin said bipartisan discussions are underway over whether more U.S. government relief funding is needed amid the nation's novel coronavirus outbreak, but that President Donald Trump is focused on taxes and travel.
The Treasury Secretary said the Trump administration was prepared to back additional coronavirus stimulus money for American businesses if needed, but that right now it was carefully monitoring the economy as some states restart activity.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin pictured alongside President Trump. Mnuchin said bipartisan discussions are underway over whether more U.S. government relief funding is needed amid the nation's novel coronavirus outbreak, but that President Donald Trump is focused on taxes and travel
Congress has already passed several major coronavirus relief bills worth nearly $3 trillion during the pandemic, but Democratic lawmakers and both Republican and Democratic governors have called for billions more to help shore up local governments battered by the outbreak as they grapple with infections and historic waves of unemployment.
'We've put $3 trillion out, if we need to put more money out to support American business and American workers, the president's absolutely prepared to do that,' Mnuchin said. 'We're also going to take into account what the economic impact is as we open up the economy.'
'We're beginning to have conversations on a bipartisan basis, we're going through the issues, we're going to have very detailed discussions,' he added, when asked if June could be a target for the next wave of federal aid from Congress.
On Sunday, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said he would not rule out anything in a new relief bill, including more money for state and local governments and small businesses.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin embodies the plutocratic principle that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
Could Rise to 30%
Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-fall-of-donald-trump-final-days.html
Then Congress rushed through a record $2.2 trillion economic “rescue” bill, whose main purpose was to provide the Treasury and the Federal Reserve the necessary authority to bail out corporate America and Wall Street.
Coronavirus deaths in US nearing 4,000 as Trump washes his hands of responsibility
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin embodies the plutocratic principle that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
Illustration: Joe Darrow
Steve Mnuchin knows his way around a crisis. Twelve years ago, the Treasury secretary was still a middling multi-millionaire of little renown or historical import. But whenever God closes a door on an underwater home-owner, he opens a window to an unscrupulous speculator, and in 2008, the Big Man began closing a lot of doors. Mnuchin didn’t miss his opening. He may have been just a humble Goldman Sachs nepotism hire turned Hollywood financier back then, but he had a few million dollars to play with and a few friends with many millions more. Together, they bought up a failing mortgage lender, rapidly foreclosed on thousands of borrowers, and resold the homes at a nifty profit. By the end of his tenure as a bank CEO, Mnuchin had earned himself the title “Foreclosure King” — and a return of $200 million. That’s the kind of money that can buy you entrance into the good graces of a Republican nominee, especially if he’s already alienating a lot of the party’s biggest donors. And from there, it’s walking distance to the White House.
Thus far, the COVID-19 crash has been as kind to Mnuchin as the Great Recession once was. If the last global economic crisis made him rich enough to purchase a lofty perch in our government, this one is making the Treasury secretary powerful enough to claim a prominent place in U.S. history. Before the novel coronavirus made its presence felt, Mnuchin’s most memorable achievement as a public servant may have been commandeering a government plane for a solar-eclipse-themed day trip. Since the pandemic sickened global markets, he has brokered the largest stimulus legislation ever passed and won control of a multi-trillion-dollar bailout fund.
Which is to say: We’ve put one of the primary beneficiaries of America’s inequitable response to the last economic crisis in charge of crafting our nation’s response to this one.
Of course, it wasn’t really God who opened the window to Mnuchin’s foreclosure profiteering or the profiteering of all the well-heeled investors who bought low during the financial crisis, then sold high amid the bailout-buoyed recovery (the Almighty contracts out those jobs to protect his brand integrity). Rather, it was an economic system that keeps a wide swath of Americans one bad break from financial ruin — and another tiny class draped in gold-plated armor.
From the first capital-gains-tax cut of the modern era in Jimmy Carter’s day to the supply-side bonanza of Donald Trump’s, this system’s essential rationale has remained the same: If capitalists cannot reap big rewards from their winning bets, they will have no incentive to take the great personal risks that fuel collective prosperity.
Mnuchin’s career and the pandemic response he has overseen belie most of that sentence’s premises. In truth, the Treasury secretary owes his success to a series of low-risk, high-reward bets of little-to-negative social value. Which makes sense. After all, if America’s brand of capitalism actually required the superrich to assume great personal risk in order to reap outsize returns, they wouldn’t be so invested in it.
Steve Mnuchin wasn’t born on third base so much as a few inches to the left of home plate. His grandfather co-founded a yacht club in the Hamptons. His father was a Yale-educated partner at Goldman Sachs. If his family’s name didn’t secure Steve’s own Yale admission, its wealth certainly covered his tuition, books, personal Porsche, and “dorm” at New Haven’s Taft Hotel. From this perch, it would have been harder for Mnuchin to tumble down America’s class ladder than to climb higher still. The former would have required prodigious acts of self-destruction; the latter mere fluency in ruling-class social mores and the art of strategic sycophancy — and the wallflower cipher Steve Mnuchin is a master of both.
At Goldman, Mnuchin’s colleagues did not consider him “especially book smart.” And some have suggested that his steady ascent at the firm was fueled less by merit than pedigree (Mnuchin’s elevation to partner in 1996 came at the expense of Kevin Ingram, an African-American trader who’d risen from a working-class childhood up through MIT’s engineering school, then Goldman’s ranks, where he struck one colleague as both “much smarter than Steven” and more “accomplished”).
After Mnuchin paid his dues at Goldman, he founded a hedge fund called Dune Capital and a motion-picture-financing company called Dune Entertainment (both named after a stretch of beach near his house in the Hamptons). He helped bankroll Avatar and the X-Men franchise, hobnobbed in Beverly Hills, and hoarded his investment profits in a tax haven. He had everything America’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” imagine a person could want. But Mnuchin longed for higher things. And when the housing market collapsed, he knew he was in luck.
Early in his career, Mnuchin had watched his superiors turn America’s savings-and-loan crisis into their own buying-and-selling bonanza. In the summer of 2008, Mnuchin was watching television in his New York office when an invitation to emulate his old mentors flashed across the screen: Out in California, frightened depositors were lined up outside IndyMac, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders, waiting to withdraw their cash. “This bank is going to end up failing, and we need to figure out how to buy it,” Mnuchin told a colleague. “I’ve seen this game before.”
He played it like a natural. Mnuchin reached out to George Soros, John Paulson, and other billionaires whose trust he’d cultivated. They marshaled a $1.6 billion bid. Eager to unload the bank — whose balance sheet was chock-full of toxic assets — the FDIC agreed to cover any losses that might accrue to the investors above a certain threshold. Which is to say, the government agreed to partially socialize Mnuchin & Co.’s downside risk. This public aid came with one major condition: The new bank, which Mnuchin dubbed OneWest, would need to make a good-faith effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. The FDIC would ultimately pay OneWest more than $1.2 billion.
This was not enough to buy Steve Mnuchin’s good faith.
Purchasing IndyMac secured OneWest a claim on a lot of undervalued housing. The catch, of course, was that much of it was full of broke people. And California’s foreclosure laws make the process of separating low-net-worth humans from high-value housing stock long and arduous. But this was nothing a little entrepreneurship couldn’t solve: Mnuchin’s bank (ostensibly) bet it could get away with “robo signing” and backdating documents to expedite foreclosures. One-West got caught red-handed on the first count but emerged with a slap on the wrist. Investigators at the California attorney general’s office concluded the bank was guilty on the second and requested authorization to pursue an enforcement action. It’s unclear exactly why then–Attorney General Kamala Harris denied this request. But as the investigators themselves noted, to pursue legal action against an entity with OneWest’s resources would mean investing years of time — and large sums of the public’s money — in a deeply uncertain enterprise. The government could afford to take only so many risks, which meant the idea that the state could hold all its superrich residents accountable to its laws was a bluff. Mnuchin called it.
In the spring of 2016, another promising investment opportunity caught the eye of the now-former One-West CEO. Mnuchin had crossed paths with Trump several times over the years; his hedge fund had invested in (at least) two of the mogul’s projects. So when Donald invited Steve to swing by his tower on the night he won the New York primary, Mnuchin obliged. A dozenish hours (and a glass or two of Trump-branded wine) later, Mnuchin agreed to become the finance chairman of the future GOP nominee’s campaign.
This decision baffled some of Mnuchin’s Hollywood pals. The bankroller of The LEGO Batman Movie didn’t strike them as a political animal, let alone a Trumpist. But his motives weren’t mysterious. For someone in Mnuchin’s socioeconomic position, Trump’s presidential campaign was just another low-risk, high-reward bet. Or, as Mnuchin himself put it in an interview in August 2016, “Nobody’s going to be like, ‘Well, why did he do this?,’ if I end up in the administration.”
Mnuchin is the last of the “adults in the room” — that cabal of semi-credentialed advisers whose presence in the West Wing eased the troubled minds of Never Trump pundits circa 2017. None of the others — not Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, or John Kelly — could marshal the requisite combination of unscrupulous sycophancy and patient politicking to weather each turn in Trump’s tempestuous moods. Only the former Foreclosure King has what it takes to unequivocally defend the president’s kind words for alt-right marchers in Charlottesville or echo his attacks on NFL players who dared to protest police abuse. So when the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression hit, Mnuchin became — in The Wall Street Journal’s appellation — “Washington’s indispensable crisis manager.” Unburdened by ideological conviction or economic literacy, Mnuchin has proved to be the GOP’s most able dealmaker. Working out of a temporary office in the Capitol’s Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, Mnuchin spent the closing weeks of March running (and massaging) messages between the Senate’s Democratic and Republican camps as they sought consensus on a gargantuan coronavirus relief bill. “Mnuchin played the middleman, and he must have been in my office 20 times in three days,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Journal, going on to praise the reliability of the Treasury secretary’s word. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she and Mnuchin can communicate through a “shorthand” devoid of time-wasting “niceties or anything like that.”
The soft skills Mnuchin had once deployed to ink billion-dollar investment deals now eased the passage of a $2.2 trillion economic-relief package. And there was much to admire in the legislation’s headline provisions: an unprecedented expansion in federal unemployment benefits that would leave many laid-off workers with as much — if not more — income than they’d earned at their old jobs, forgivable loans for small businesses that agreed to forgo layoffs during the crisis, and onetime cash payments to all nonaffluent Americans.
But this is still a Republican stimulus, however much schmoozing Steve has done with Chuck and Nancy this spring. Congress’s persistent underfunding of the small-business aid has kept America’s most vulnerable mom-and-pops out in the cold. And our nation’s decrepit unemployment-insurance offices have struggled to administer benefits as the ranks of the jobless grow millions stronger every week. The Treasury Department has allowed debt collectors to garnish the relief checks of cash-strapped Americans, and Congress has essentially refused to bail out hospitals whose budgets have suddenly been destroyed by COVID-driven shortfalls, meaning that over the next few years, whole essential health systems and services could abruptly be suspended.
Most of all, the legislation’s largest appropriation — $454 billion to backstop a $4 trillion Federal Reserve lending program to large corporations — gives Mnuchin significant personal discretion over which firms will have access to low-cost credit and on what terms, thereby leaving a connoisseur in the art of subverting federal crisis management for personal profit in charge of preventing America’s corporate titans from subverting federal crisis management for personal profit.
The White House’s next big idea for promoting economic recovery is, reportedly, to formally suspend the enforcement of labor and environmental regulations on small businesses, a measure that would enable petit bourgeois tyrants to suspend all pretense of concern for their workers’ health and well-being in the midst of a pandemic.
Nevertheless, could we have reasonably expected anything better, all things considered? A GOP president and Senate majority were always going to comfort the comfortable and toss crumbs to the afflicted. And when Congress approved $2.2 trillion in coronavirus relief funds last month, nurses were intubating patients without proper PPE, grocery-store clerks were jeopardizing their health to keep others fed, and delivery drivers were forfeiting the security of social distancing so others could more comfortably enjoy it. The legislation included zero dollars in hazard-pay benefits for those workers. It did, however, provide $90 billion in tax cuts to the owners of pass-through businesses, such as, for instance, the Trump Organization. Such “relief” was necessary, the American Enterprise Institute later explained, to mitigate the “penalty” on economic risk-takers.
Bullard Says Unemployment
Could Rise to 30%
23 Mar 2020523
1:15
The unemployment rate in the U.S. could hit 30 percent, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said in Bloomberg News interview.
“This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S. economy in the second quarter. The overall goal is to keep everyone, households and businesses, whole,” Bullard said. “It is a huge shock and we are trying to cope with it and keep it under control.”
That would be the highest rate of unemployment since the Great Depression.
Bullard said he expects economic growth to plunge 50 percent in the second quarter but for the economy to bounce back later in the year, so long as the appropriate measures are taken by the fiscal and monetary authorities.
“I would see the third quarter as a transitional quarter,” Bullard said. The next six months, however, could be very strong. “Those quarters might be boom quarters,” he said.
Bullard also said the Fed was far from being “out of bullets,” as some Fed watchers have claimed.
“There is more that we can do if necessary,” he said. “There is probably much more in the months ahead depending on where Congress wants to go.”
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
TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE RICH…. and his parasitic family!
Report: Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit After He's Gone
"Trump's alleged comment is maddening and disheartening,
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
Global economic slump accelerating
As the coronavirus spreads, taking more lives at an escalating rate, its effects are penetrating ever deeper into the global economy.
GOLDMAN SACHS warned last week that US gross domestic product (GDP) would contract by 24 percent in the second quarter. There are forecasts that up to 5 million jobs will be lost in the American economy this year, with the fall in economic output to total as much as $1.5 trillion.
GOLDMAN expects, at this stage, that US output will contract 3.1 percent this year and the unemployment rate will rise to 9 percent from the current level of 3.5 percent. This is on a par with the jobless rate of 10 percent in October 2009, following the financial meltdown of 2008.
But just as the health impact of the virus was significantly underestimated, the same may apply to the current economic forecasts.
“Things look so gloomy right now that perhaps we should be grateful if we can get out of this health crisis with a brief recession,” Bernard Baumohl of the Economic Outlook Group told the Wall Street Journal.
“You just cannot rule out the prospect of a longer, more destructive depression,” he said.
In other words, a relatively short but deep recession is now the “best case” scenario.
The eurozone is expected to experience a fall of around 10 percent of GDP. But this forecast could well be exceeded. There is no end in sight to the spread of the virus and no clear assessment of the economic effect of the shutdowns being implemented to try to combat it.
In an interview with the Financial Times, the chief economist of the European Union, Paolo Gentiloni, indicated that officials were working on new measures.
“The consensus is growing day by day that we need to face an extraordinary crisis with extraordinary tools,” he said.
“This idea of a V-shape [recovery] that you can see in the first semester of 2020 is now completely impossible. We have no previous analysis of the impact of such a widespread lockdown in major economies.”
Gentolini conducted the interview as part of a political battle inside the EU over the economic and financial measures, bringing further into the open the widening rifts between leading member states.
Powerful forces in Germany and the Netherlands are opposed to all-European action, regarding this as a bailout for weaker economies such as Italy.
On the other side, the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire last week warned that failure to act in a unified manner meant the eurozone was in danger of disappearing.
European Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Münchau wrote yesterday that the situation facing the eurozone was “far worse” than the sovereign debt crisis of 2012.
“The coronavirus will prove to be an economic shock, a corporate solvency crisis and a political crisis all folded into one,” he said.
Münchau noted that European countries had fiscal stabilisers such as unemployment insurance, but these “shock absorbers” were designed to deal with “normal fluctuations.” They were not “big enough or strong enough for emergencies like this one.”
Pointing to the deepening divisions in Europe, Münchau wrote that not everyone would want to be in a monetary union with countries like the Netherlands where the prime minister was “ideologically opposed” to all-European measures. “This sort of unwilling partnership is not sustainable.”
In the absence of data on overall output, the Financial Times conducted a survey, particularly covering retail and services, to give some indication of what to expect.
It showed that vehicular traffic had halved in many of the world’s largest cities, while spending in restaurants and cinemas had collapsed.
Greg Daco, the chief US economist at Oxford Economics, said: “Looking at the data across various sectors of the US economy, it appears we could be heading for the most severe contraction in consumer spending on record.”
The rapid shrinkage in the real economy will further escalate the already severe crisis in the financial system, and extend from the stock and credit markets to the banks.
In a Financial Times comment, Sheila Bair, the former chief of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, wrote: “Big banks throughout the world are substantially exposed to the pandemic, particularly as it hurts corporate borrowers.”
Around the world, non-financial corporations covering every industry, including the hard-hit energy, transport, retail and hospitality sectors, had racked up debts to the tune of $70 trillion, she wrote.
“To survive, they are increasingly hoarding cash and tapping into their massive back-up lines of credit, placing additional strain on the banking system,” Bair wrote, noting that as bond markets “seize up,” bank credit may be their only source of cash.
But the ability to supply credit, she wrote, had been considerably weakened by the $325 billion paid out by the major global banks last year on dividends and share buybacks, some $155 billion of which was laid out by the eight largest banks in the US.
Meanwhile, fears are growing that the enormous pile of debt around the world could start to collapse as the economic effects of the coronavirus deepen and widen.
According to the Institute of International Finance, in a report published last November, total global corporate, government, finance sector and household debt had reached $253 trillion, equivalent to 322 percent of global GDP.
The unravelling could start in so-called emerging market economies where there is $72.5 trillion of debt, much of it denominated in US dollars. The growing dollar shortage in international markets, which has seen national currencies fall against the greenback, means obligations on interest and principal payments are rapidly rising.
This increase in the debt burden is occurring as all economies drop into recession, or something worse, and have less cash to meet their commitments.
It is not just emerging market economies that are affected. The Australian dollar, one of the most traded in the world, saw its rate against the US dollar drop to as low as 55 cents last week, compared to just under 70 cents a few months ago.
This means that the debt burden of a company or financial institution that had raised $100 million, when the Australian dollar traded at 70 cents to the US currency, would rise in Australian dollar terms from $A143 million to more than $A180 million when the Australian dollar fell to 55 cents, placing it under enormous strain as revenues drop.
The cash flow crisis is striking at the heart of the major economies as well.
In the UK, the Tory government is considering a plan to take out equity holdings in airlines and other companies because the economic stimulus packages announced so far are not sufficient to prevent collapses.
In the US, the Wall Street Journal has reported that “scores of US companies,” from the aircraft maker Boeing to the telecommunications Verizon, are “furiously lobbying” to be included in the bailout packages being prepared by the Trump administration that could run as high as $2 trillion.
For more than a century, the semi-official religion in the US has been the denunciation of socialism, which Trump had planned to make the centre of his re-election campaign.
Now the universal cry is: the state must intervene; once again billions must be handed to the corporations on an even larger scale than in the crisis of 2008.
The calls will only get louder. According to a Wall Street Journal report yesterday, investors and analysts say the more than 30 percent drop in the share market over the past month is not over, despite extraordinary actions by the Fed involving trillions of dollars.
Summing up the voracious outlook in corporate and financial circles, a representative of the global investment and banking firm State Street, told the Journal: “Market participants need to feel they are backstopped without question.”
Then Congress rushed through a record $2.2 trillion economic “rescue” bill, whose main purpose was to provide the Treasury and the Federal Reserve the necessary authority to bail out corporate America and Wall Street.
Coronavirus deaths in US nearing 4,000 as Trump washes his hands of responsibility
The coronavirus killed at least 812 people in the United States Tuesday, the highest death toll since the pandemic began, while nearly 25,000 new cases were reported, bringing the total number infected to more than 188,000, the largest number in the world by far.
Along with the unprecedented scale of the infection, its sheer speed is staggering. On March 10, there were only 1,000 reported coronavirus infections in the United States. Three weeks later, it is nearing 200 times that level. Another such three weeks would see 40 million people infected in the United States.
The US death toll has not yet reached the level of Italy (12,428) or Spain (8,464), but that is only a matter of days. And White House officials continue to escalate their projections of the total number of deaths in a “best-case” scenario, setting the figure at a staggering 240,000, with Trump himself hinting that the total could be double that.
Four countries—Italy, Spain, the US and France—have now seen more deaths than China, where the epidemic first broke out in the city of Wuhan last December. After 3,305 deaths, China claims to have largely suppressed the outbreak through systematic testing, contact tracing and quarantining of those exposed to the coronavirus.
The American media and the Trump administration continually describe efforts to counteract the coronavirus as a war, where the frontlines are being drawn in emergency rooms and ICUs throughout the United States, and especially in the New York metropolitan area, where half of all COVID-19 cases are located. On Tuesday the death toll in New York City itself hit 1,096, and 10,000 people were hospitalized, with 2,700 of them requiring ventilators.
But in this war, under the incompetent “commander-in-chief” Trump and his hapless lieutenants among the state governors, the troops are being sent into battle haphazardly, without weapons, and largely without regard for their own safety. Healthcare workers lack sufficient personal protection equipment, and they are being infected and incapacitated at an alarming rate, with many deaths.
In Spain, the healthcare workers accounted for 14 percent of the country’s cases, while in Italy, they accounted for 10 percent. The same process is under way in the United States. NPR reported that 345 employees of Boston’s four largest hospitals have tested positive for COVID-19. In New York City, hundreds of workers have fallen ill. At Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan, 50 percent of the intensive-care staff have been infected.
The result is that in addition to the shortages of hospital rooms, ICU beds, masks, and ventilators, there is a growing shortage of medical staff who can cope with the increasing volume of patients seeking medical attention.
Meanwhile, hospitals and healthcare systems are threatening doctors and nurses who make their concerns over working conditions public. An emergency room physician, Dr. Ming Lin, in Washington state, was fired because he gave an interview to a newspaper complaining about inadequate protective equipment. Ruth Schubert, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Nurses Association, told Bloomberg, “Hospitals are muzzling nurses and other healthcare workers in an attempt to preserve their image.” Nurses who have spoken under conditions of anonymity with WSW S reporters said that they have been told they would be fired if they talked to the media.
In some cases, state governors have made statements that amount to a confession of bankruptcy. On CNN Live, Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland said, “We are all trying to get more testing, but this is a pinch point on testing, on supplies, and materials, and PPE and ventilators. Everybody in America knows we don’t have enough of these things … and without the tests we are really flying blind. We are guessing about where the outbreaks are, what the infection rates in the hospitals are, and the mortality rates.”
However, the Trump White House manages to combine moronic expressions of optimism (largely in the form of testimonials to Trump’s personal genius) with ever more ominous declarations that the death toll in the United States will reach six or even seven figures.
On Sunday, White House adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said that 100,000 to 200,000 deaths was a midrange figure that could be substantially lowered if proper measures were taken. On Monday, White House coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that 100,000 to 200,000 was now the floor, the best-case scenario if everything went perfectly, while Trump himself declared that a death toll in that range would represent “a good job” by his administration.
On Tuesday, Fauci and Birx presented a slide show to a press briefing indicating projections that without severe mitigation, total deaths due to COVID-19 could reach 1.2 million to 2.2 million. Birx admitted that even with strict mitigation efforts throughout the month of April, the number of deaths could range as high as 240,000. At the peak of such a “best-case” outcome, 4,000 to 5,000 people would be dying every day.
Shocking as such figures are, even more outrageous is the blithe indifference displayed by Trump personally and his closest aides to the likely results of their own policy of refusing to conduct a serious struggle to contain the pandemic, not merely mitigate it.
Trump himself, towards the end of the press “briefing” that lasted more than two hours—a clear indication, in and of itself, that the White House antivirus campaign is an exercise in political propaganda and media manipulation—made comments that amounted to a self-indictment for criminal negligence on a monumental scale.
“We’re going through the worst thing this country has probably ever seen,” he said. “Look, we had the Civil War. We lost 600,000 people, right? Had we not done anything, we would have lost many times that, but we did something, so it’s going to be hopefully way under that. But you know, we lose more here potentially than you lose in world wars as a country.”
Given that the US death toll in the Second World War was 405,000, Trump is saying, in his semiliterate and meandering way, that the US death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic could well be between 400,000 and 600,000.
There was remarkably little push-back from the journalists of the corporate media who appeared to be in a daze. While several media outlets had taken note that on Tuesday morning, more Americans had died from coronavirus than were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, not even this comparison, inadequate as it is, was made.
The US government’s response is best characterized as malign neglect to a pandemic that was both foreseen and preventable. With complete indifference to the fate of the people, the Trump administration’s primary focus was on ensuring the financial markets were protected. Only when the markets began to implode did the government’s machinery begin to churn to prevent its complete collapse. Everything else was deemed an afterthought.
First, on March 3, the Federal Reserve slashed rates by 0.5
percent, the most significant cut since the 2008 financial crisis.
On March 12, the Federal Reserve added $1.5 trillion of liquidity
into the banking systems by massively expanding short-term
loans to the banks to keep money markets stable and provide
banks with cash in hand. When the markets continued to
plummet on March 15, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a
full percentage point down to almost 0.00 percent. They also
resumed quantitative easing by purchasing $500 billion in
treasuries and $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities.
Then Congress rushed through a record
$2.2 trillion economic “rescue” bill, whose
main purpose was to provide the Treasury
and the Federal Reserve the necessary
authority to bail out corporate America
and Wall Street.
Comparing the gargantuan and energetic efforts to save the markets with the slapdash, indifferent and grossly incompetent actions in relation to public health, it is easy to see what are the priorities of the American financial aristocracy.
But there is another force to be heard from in this crisis—the working class. Instacart, Amazon, and Whole Foods workers have initiated strike actions against forced work under unsafe conditions. Workers at General Electric have protested, demanding their company begin producing ventilators. Many other workers are rebelling against being forced to remain on the job without protective gear.
As the crisis escalates, the decisive question is for the working class to develop a conscious political response, recognizing that it must fight the capitalist system as a whole, based on a socialist program.
No comments:
Post a Comment