Day: August 3, 2020

Come August

Closing Thought–03Aug20

Kinda reminds of a tune by Earth, Wind and Fire…..but sadly this date is some dire predictions for the economy…..

There’s a chance that the worst of the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic hasn’t happened yet. According to a troubling BuzzFeed News op-ed, the real economic and societal collapse could arrive in August.

Part of the problem, according to BuzzFeed’s argument, is that many of the measures put in place by the U.S. government to mitigate the coronavirus’s impact will expire in August — while the actual pandemic will likely continue to rage. The result is that unemployed Americans could once more be vulnerable to evictions, right when federal employment payments helping keep them afloat stop coming.

Back in April, when the limited federal aid offered by the U.S. government started to arrive, American households began to save, on average, 33 percent of their income out of fears of an impending economic crash, according to the op-ed.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/economy-collapse-august

Of course the White House or maybe the Congress will offer up some stim money to head off this possibility….but will it work?

The problem is that a significant portion of the money is being funneled directly into capital buffers, leading to an increase in precautionary balances. The situation is akin to the “liquidity trap” that so worried John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression.

Today’s stimulus measures have understandably been rolled out in haste – almost in panic – to contain the economic fallout from the pandemic. And while this fire-hose approach was neither targeted nor precise, many commentators would argue that it was the only option at the time. Without a massive injection of emergency liquidity, there probably would have been widespread bankruptcies, losses of organizational capital, and an even steeper path to recovery.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stimulus-policies-must-benefit-real-economy-not-financial-speculation-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-and-hamid-rashid-2020-06

The problem is the oligarchs always want money thrown at them and they will fix the economy…..they have not done so in 200 years and yet their wealth keeps going up….and problems still exist.

Does that tell you want these stim plans are really doing?

But not to worry….the markets are up….and yet you are still trying to find the cash to buy food or pay the rent…..how did all that stim money help you?

That brings me to a question I have asking for a very long time…..

We’ve said it before: The stock market is not the economy.

Usually, this simply means that fluctuations in the markets may have little to no real bearing on the underlying realities we think of as making up the economy. Or that there are many important structural factors that make the markets’ outlook different from how ordinary citizens view the country’s overall economic health.

But now, those usual bromides risk wildly understating the disconnect. In the time of COVID-19, the stock market couldn’t be more divorced from the United States’ broader economic situation. Although the S&P 500 tumbled sharply in March, as the coronavirus shut down large swaths of the economy, it had made back almost all of its losses by the first week of June — before dipping again and then quickly rebounding yet again.

The Economy Is A Mess. So Why Isn’t The Stock Market?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

03 August 1807

History on this day……1882 the Immigration Act that banned Chinese immigrants for ten years (sounds familiar for some reason)

1908–Allan Allensworth filed for the first Afro-American city…..Allensworth, California

But the big situation was in the early years of the republic.

On this day in 1807, Aaron Burr,  the former VP of the United States and presidential candidate goes on trial for treason.

Burr was arrested in the Mississippi Territory in 1807……my post on this situation……https://lobotero.com/2019/02/19/the-arrest-of-aaron-burr-1807/

The synopsis…..

What was the nature of the plot that had seen Burr charged with treason? Even today, many details of the scheme remain hazy. “Too many people told too many different stories, and too many people had things to hide,” historian Buckner F. Melton has written. What is known is that Burr worked to raise a small army on the American frontier. He may have hoped to lead an independent campaign against Spanish-held territories in Texas and Mexico, but it’s also possible that he planned to wrest a portion of the newly acquired frontier from the United States. According to some contemporaries, Burr had designs on founding a new western nation with himself as its emperor.

https://www.history.com/news/aaron-burrs-notorious-treason-case

A very good account of the trial……

Click to access burrtrial.pdf

For those too lazy to read…..this video will help……

I have studied this incident….and I think that it was Jefferson being petty that caused the acquittal…..Jefferson had made promises that he did not keep and Burr wanted revenge on Tommie…..for his lies and manipulations.

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“legho ergo scribo”

The Dems And Their Big Plans

I have always said that the Dems have marvelous ideas and plans….they just suck at politics and how to get those plans in motion.

Look at some of the more recent ideas…Green New Deal……a sweeping plan that could change everything in this country….and it will silently disappear after the next election……how about that Medicare For All….another excellent idea that would benefit all of American society…..and it will die an ignoble death……my point is as I have stated….great plans no umpf to get them done.

Now this brings me to the most recent situation in this country….the protests over the deaths of son many Blacks at the hands of the police….there have been many plans by many different activists…..but think about this….what is the “Big Plan” to fight this racism from the white Dems?

(Pause here for thought)

Here is the Dems promise for the future….Joe Biden…..https://lobotero.com/2020/06/18/biden-and-criminal-justice/

Fine words but I fear they are just that……WORDS.

Even before a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, leading to a renewed national conversation about racial inequality, white Democrats were already pretty “woke” on some issues. An overwhelming majority of white Democrats said that racial discrimination was a major barrier to Black people getting ahead in America, that the police and the broader criminal justice system in America treated Black people unfairly and that the legacy of slavery still affected Black Americans today. And on issues of criminal justice and policing in particular, white and Black Democrats held fairly similar views. Surveys since Floyd’s death1 have shown even greater wokeness among white Democrats (and Americans more broadly). White Democrats now view the police even less favorably and the Black Lives Matter movement more favorably, and they are also more likely to agree that Black people face “a great deal” or “a lot” of discrimination in America today.2

What we don’t know yet is whether white Democrats have moved significantly on racial issues beyond policing and discrimination in general — issues that deal with more material concerns, such as school integration and wealth redistribution. Most polling since Floyd’s death has focused on policing, Confederate monuments and other topics that have been in the news.

White Democrats Are Wary Of Big Ideas To Address Racial Inequality

If you think this election will be different…then I feel you will be sorely disappointed.

Most white Dems and even a few of the Black elected officials owe too much to the wealthy elite for any true program to fight racism to become anything but a fanciful thought.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Defund Afghanistan

These days there is lots about defunding this or that…from the police to the Pentagon……check what was written about this…….

https://lobotero.com/2020/06/09/de-fund-the-pd/

As long as we are calling for all this defunding….why not defund the US longest and costliest war…Afghanistan?

As the coronavirus pandemic overwhelmed the Afghan health system in June, doctors rallied in Kabul, calling upon the International Monetary Fund to rescind a recently granted $220 million emergency loan to the Afghan government to help with the COVID-19 crisis. In support, Sayed Ekram Afazali, head of Integrity Watch Afghanistan, a local group fighting corruption, said that such “monopolization in the spending of the aid . . . creates severe vulnerabilities and it removes the trust” in the government owing to embezzlement and mismanagement. The Kabul rally is just one of many protests against government corruption in Afghanistan. Doctors in Herat, for instance, protested against unpaid salaries. In remote Ghor Province, security forces killed six protesters angry at the distribution of food aid.

These and other similar actions acknowledge a counterintuitive but simple truth: Aid to Afghanistan is accelerating state collapse because it is channeled through a government that is dysfunctional and corrupt. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said the Taliban and other insurgents draw attention to government corruption and use it to “undermine public support for the government, garner recruits to their cause and weaken the government’s bargaining position during future peace negotiations.” We believe that the current system of centralized government is the cause of systemic injustices that drive this current conflict. After 20 years of this system, there are no technical fixes to corruption that could win public trust. Rather, the entire government must be defunded, dismantled, disbanded, and rebuilt anew by the Afghan people. The coming intra-Afghan dialogue will be an opportunity to do just that.

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/defund-afghanistan

This makes perfect sense….Trump is trying to end this costly war and the Congress and Hawks are fighting that tooth and nail…..

Time for the US to come home and save the cash spent on Afghanistan….this country needs the money to repair itself and yet those idiot warmongers are looking for other spots for their expansionism.

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”