Showing posts with label #Biden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #Biden. Show all posts

Thursday, October 8, 2020

Death Match: Trump vs. Biden and the Globalists’ One World Order

 



“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation.   The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”  ― George Orwell 

We have to “Keep America out of these endless, ridiculous, stupid foreign wars.” For many years, we have been “fighting foreign wars, defending foreign borders,” in countries we don’t even know where they are. ~ President Donald Trump

 

That's what this whole Covid-19 is, “a war waged by the ruling group against its own subjects.”   It is another attempted coup by the “ruling group against its subjects” for electing Donald J. Trump president.  The global, radical reaction to the pandemic and locking down of the world’s economy came at a time when the Central Banks of the world are on the verge of collapse. 

America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve has exerted control over America’s treasury and foreign policy since its inception in 1913.  Its fiat currency being held as the world’s reserve currency, is the only thing keeping the Fed solvent.  The Fed claims the American people owe them over $43 trillion dollars. How is that possible?  Where did the money go if the American people are homeless, jobless and hungry needing help from a bankrupt government that is collapsing due to nearly 20 years of endless war? 

Trump has been relentless in taking on the Federal Reserve Bank since the day he took hold of the reins of power.  The Federal Reserve Bank needs for America to be in a continuous state of war to justify America’s status as a debtor nation while billionaire globalists rape our treasury.  But the people were getting restless, down right angry taking to the streets of across Europe to demand financial justice and an end to austerity.  Something had to be done, voila a pandemic!

What better way to gag the protestors than to lock them in their homes, socially distance them from others, ban group gatherings and require masks be worn in public.  Now the important thing to do was to enlist the media to invoke hysteria in order to turn citizen against citizen.  This was a job for the CIA’s Mockingbird Media and the British Empire’s “FacebookWarriors: 

Excerpt:

 Is the UK heading toward medical martial law? 

We are hearing frequent calls for the UK’s coronavirus “pandemic” response to become a military operation

On the 28th September Tobias Ellwood, Tory MP for Bournemouth East, stood up in Parliament and suggested that the British Army and the Ministry of Defense be in charge of distributing and administering “millions of doses” of the Sars-Cov-2 vaccines, as well as issuing “vaccination certificates” which will “allow travel”.

And that’s just the highlights, there’s a lot more vaguely sinister language, camouflaged in his rather drab monotone voice…  This is a concerning development, one very much worth keeping an eye on. The BBC don’t think so, of course, because the call for what would easily amount to medical martial law didn’t even make it into their “Today in Parliament” programme.

This is not new behaviour for Ellwood. He has always been a consistent voice for use of the military in response to the “pandemic”. On the 18th of September he requested the Prime Minister make “greater use of our fine armed forces”.

He specifically mentions “managing the narrative”, which is no surprise considering his role as a former Army officer, a current reserves officer, and his known affiliation with the 77th Brigade. For those who don’t know: The 77th is the British army’s team of “facebook warriors”. An information warfare unit whose job is to “counter misinformation”, “manage the narrative” and generally corral and control the internet conversation.

That’s not a “conspiracy theory”, their existence is readily acknowledged by both the government and the mainstream media. Considering they’re currently employed “countering covid misinformation“, they will likely be in the comments of this post (Hi guys!). 

Other countries around the world have already moved on to this “war footing”, and the UK is likely not far behind.

The British Empire is “managing the narrative” so that the people of the UK will accept “a "military response” to the pandemic otherwise known as Marshall Law. The Covid-19 pandemic has provided the excuse for the UK and US to be on “war footing.”  Like the UK military’s “Facebook warriors” the CIA’s “Mockingbird media” in America is censoring Covid-19 information that refutes the official narrative.

For President Trump big media is the enemy.  President Trump knew he had to take action and expose the duplicitous media for what they are and to put an end to media censorship.  You can read Trump’s Executive Order here:

Excerpt: 

Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship 

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

 Section 1.  Policy.  Free speech is the bedrock of American democracy.  Our Founding Fathers protected this sacred right with the First Amendment to the Constitution.  The freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people.

In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet.  This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic.  When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power.  They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators…

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see.

As President, I have made clear my commitment to free and open debate on the internet. Such debate is just as important online as it is in our universities, our town halls, and our homes.  It is essential to sustaining our democracy.

Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse.  Tens of thousands of Americans have reported, among other troubling behaviors, online platforms “flagging” content as inappropriate, even though it does not violate any stated terms of service; making unannounced and unexplained changes to company policies that have the effect of disfavoring certain viewpoints; and deleting content and entire accounts with no warning, no rationale, and no recourse…

In particular, subparagraph (c)(2) expressly addresses protections from “civil liability” and specifies that an interactive computer service provider may not be made liable “on account of” its decision in “good faith” to restrict access to content that it considers to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.” 

It is the policy of the United States to ensure that, to the maximum extent permissible under the law, this provision is not distorted to provide liability protection for online platforms that — far from acting in “good faith” to remove objectionable content — instead engage in deceptive or pretextual actions (often contrary to their stated terms of service) to stifle viewpoints with which they disagree. 

Section 230 was not intended to allow a handful of companies to grow into titans controlling vital avenues for our national discourse under the guise of promoting open forums for debate, and then to provide those behemoths blanket immunity when they use their power to censor content and silence viewpoints that they dislike. 

When an interactive computer service provider removes or restricts access to content and its actions do not meet the criteria of subparagraph, it is engaged in editorial conduct.  It is the policy of the United States that such a provider should properly lose the limited liability shield of subparagraph and be exposed to liability like any traditional editor and publisher that is not an online provider…

I’ll bet Trump didn’t make any friends in Silicon Valley with his Executive Order revoking the immunity they have enjoyed for so long.  That immunity that awarded “a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet.  As Trump’s order states, “this practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic... 

Congress is the enemy of the people, they are not elected by the American people; they are selected by the billionaire Globalists and confirmed through an election system that is rigged by the politicos who are running for office.  They do not answer to the American people, they answer to their Globalist paymasters.  From the Unz Review:   

Excerpt:

 How an “Act of God” Pandemic Is Destroying the West

The U.S. is Saving the Financial Sector, not the Economy 

…We are seeing the consequences of Western societies painting themselves into a debt corner by their creditor-oriented philosophy of law. Neoliberal anti-government (or more accurately, anti-democratic) ideology has centralized social planning and state power in “the market,” meaning specifically the financial market on Wall Street and in other financial centers.

At issue is who will lose when employment and business activity are disrupted. Will it be creditors and landlords at the top of the economic scale, or debtors and renters at the bottom? This age-old confrontation over how to deal with the unpaid rents, mortgages and other debt service is at the heart of today’s virus pandemic as large and small businesses, farms, restaurants and neighborhood stores have fallen into arrears, leaving businesses and households – along with their employees who have no wage income to pay these carrying charges that accrue each month…

The U.S. corona virus lockdown is turning rent and debt arrears into an opportunity to impoverish the indebted economy and transfer mortgaged property and its income to creditors.  There is no inherent material need for this fate to occur. But it seems so natural and even inevitable that, as Margaret Thatcher would say, There Is No Alternative.

But of course there is, and always has been. However, resilience in the face of economic disruption always has required a central authority to override “market forces” to restore economic balance from “above...”

That is why every successful society since the Bronze Age has been a mixed economy. The determining factor in whether or not an economic disruption leaves a crippled economy in its wake turns out to be whether its financial sector is a public utility or is privatized from the debt-strapped public domain as a means to enrich bankers and money-lenders at the expense of debtors and overall economic balance…   

UNLESS PERSONAL DEBTS, RENTS AND TAXES THAT CANNOT BE PAID ARE ANNULLED, THE RESULT WILL BE WIDESPREAD BANKRUPTCY, IMPOVERISHMENT AND HOMELESSNESS. 

Bronze Age rulers could not afford to let such bondage concentration of property and wealth to become chronic. Labor was the scarcest resource, so a precondition for survival was to prevent creditors from using debt leverage to obtain the labor of debtors and appropriate their land. Rulers therefore acted to prevent creditors from becoming a wealthy class seeking gains by impoverishing debtors and taking crop yields and land for themselves.

By rejecting such alleviations of debts resulting from economic disruption, the U.S. economy is subjecting itself to depression, homelessness and economic polarization. It is saving stockholders and bondholders instead of the economy at large. That is because today’s rentier interests take the economic surplus in the form of debt service, holding labor and also corporate industry in bondage.

Mortgage debt is the price of obtaining a home of one’s own. Student debt is the price of getting an education to get a job. Automobile debt is needed to buy a car to drive to the job, and credit-card debt must be run up to pay for living costs beyond what one is able to earn. This deep indebtedness makes workers afraid to go on strike or even to protect working conditions, because being fired is to lose the ability to pay debts and rents.

So the rising debt overhead serves the business and financial sector by lowering wage levels while extracting more interest, financial fees, rent and insurance out of their take-home pay.

By injecting $10 trillion into the financial markets (when Federal Reserve credit is added to U.S. Treasury allocation), the CARES act enabled the stock market to recover all of its 34 percent drop (as measured by the S&P 500 stocks) by June 9, EVEN AS THE ECONOMY’S GDP WAS STILL PLUNGING.

The government’s new money creation was not spent to revive the real economy of production and consumption, but at least the financial One Percent was saved from loss. It was as if prosperity and living standards would somehow return to normal in a V-shaped recovery…

In times of a general economic disruption, giving priority to creditor claims leads to widespread bankruptcy. Yet it violates most peoples’ ideas of fairness and distributive justice to evict debtors from their homes and take whatever property they have if they cannot pay their rent arrears and other charges that have accrued through no fault of their own…

Yes, that is the Democratic Party today, just an extension of the GOP, it is a uni-Party dedicated to wealth extraction on massive privatization.  As the article says, “By injecting $10 trillion into the financial markets (when Federal Reserve credit is added to U.S. Treasury allocation), the CARES act enabled the stock market to recover all of its 34 percent drop (as measured by the S&P 500 stocks) by June 9, EVEN AS THE ECONOMY’S GDP WAS STILL PLUNGING.

The much ballyhooed bipartisan “CARES Act” that expired on July 31st was a prime example of Pelosi’s talent for passing legislation that is so half-assed as to do the absolute least amount possible to help the least amount of people possible.  

The CARES Act included a 120-day federal eviction MORATORIUM FOR RENTERS WHO PARTICIPATE IN FEDERAL HOUSING assistance programs or live in a property with A FEDERALLY BACKED MORTGAGE. ... This ban expired on July 24, allowing landlords to issue 30 days' notice for tenants to vacate properties.

So Pelosi and McConnell’s CARES Act moratorium on eviction only pertained to “renters who participate in Federal Housing or have federally backed mortgages”.  Really, isn’t that just one step above doing nothing?  But for Pelosi and McConnell even helping a small group of people out of the huge pool of millions who are facing eviction through no fault of their own, well that was just too generous. 

So they let the provisions of the CARES Act” expire on July 31st when they left for their month-long August vacation without a care in the world.  Trump and the American people are seeing just how useless, worthless and not needed congress is.  Fortunately for America, Trump side-stepped our bought and paid for congress to provide relief to Americans

An outraged Trump stepped in when congress left for their month-long vacay without acting.  Trump signed an Executive Order that extended the moratorium on evictions going further than congress in helping the American people directly (congressional action not needed).  From White House.gov:

Excerpt: 

Executive Order on Fighting the Spread of COVID-19 by Providing Assistance to Renters and Homeowners 

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows…

The CARES Act imposed a temporary moratorium on evictions of certain renters subject to certain conditions.  That moratorium has now expired, and THERE IS A SIGNIFICANT RISK THAT THIS WILL SET OFF AN ABNORMALLY LARGE WAVE OF EVICTIONS.  With the failure of the Congress to act, my Administration must do all that it can to help vulnerable populations stay in their homes in the midst of this pandemic. 

Those who are dislocated from their homes may be unable to shelter in place and may have more difficulty maintaining a routine of social distancing.  They will have to find alternative living arrangements, which may include a homeless shelter or a crowded family home and may also require traveling to other States.

In addition, evictions tend to disproportionately affect minorities, particularly African Americans and Latinos.  Unlike the Congress, I cannot sit idly and refuse to assist vulnerable Americans in need.

Accordingly, my Administration, to the extent reasonably necessary to prevent the further spread of COVID-19, will take all lawful measures to prevent RESIDENTIAL evictions and foreclosures resulting from financial hardships caused by COVID-19.

Sec. 2.  Policy.  It is the policy of the United States to minimize, to the greatest extent possible, residential evictions and foreclosures during the ongoing COVID-19 national emergency.

Sec. 3.  Response to Public Health Risks of Evictions and Foreclosures.  (a)  The Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Director of CDC shall consider whether any measures temporarily halting residential evictions of any tenants for failure to pay rent are reasonably necessary to prevent the further spread of COVID-19 from one State or possession into any other State or possession.

(b)  The Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development shall identify any and all available Federal funds to provide temporary financial assistance to renters and homeowners who, as a result of the financial hardships caused by COVID-19, are struggling to meet their monthly rental or mortgage obligations.

(cThe Secretary of Housing and Urban Development shall take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to promote the ability of renters and homeowners to avoid eviction or foreclosure resulting from financial hardships caused by COVID-19.  Such action may include encouraging and PROVIDING ASSISTANCE TO PUBLIC HOUSING AUTHORITIES, AFFORDABLE HOUSING OWNERS, LANDLORDS, and recipients of Federal grant funds in minimizing evictions and foreclosures.

(d)  In consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury, the Director of FHFA shall review all existing authorities and resources that may be used to prevent evictions and foreclosures for renters and homeowners resulting from hardships caused by COVID-19…

Now that’s some effing help to keep the American people in their homes.  Keeping people in their homes is integral to a healthy society.  When Pelosi and McConnell so callously left for their vacation allowing the CARES Act provision of an extra $600/week for masses of unemployed, they were just keeping “society on the brink of starvation” as the Globalists demand.  As with the Care’s Act provision on eviction moratoriums, the unemployment provision was also classic Pelosi, the least amount of assistance possible for the least amount of people for the shortest amount of time.

Under the FPUC provision of the Act, individuals who are eligible for unemployment benefits will receive an extra $600 weekly benefit for all weeks of unemployment between April 5, 2020 and July 31, 2020, in addition to the amount the individual otherwise would be entitled to receive under state law.

While the extra $600 per week may have allowed people to stay in their homes and pay car payments and phone bills, it was just too generous for Pelosi and McConnell. They let the provision expire on July 31st.  Once again President Trump side stepped congress.  Using his powers to declare an emergency, Trump enacted the emergency powers of FEMA to rescue the people. From White House.gov: 

Excerpt:

Memorandum on Authorizing the Other Needs Assistance Program for Major Disaster Declarations Related to Coronavirus Disease 2019

Because many of the relief programs created by the Congress have expired or will shortly expire, my Administration and the Republican leadership in the United States Senate have proposed multiple options to continue to provide needed relief to Americans…

I am hereby directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to assist in providing benefits from the DRF, and am calling upon the States to use their CRF allocation, to bring continued financial relief to Americans who are suffering from unemployment due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Sec. 2.  Providing Disaster Relief Funds.  On March 13, 2020, I declared a national emergency recognizing the threat posed by COVID-19.  I also determined that same day that the COVID-19 outbreak constituted an emergency, of nationwide scope, pursuant to section 501(b) of the Stafford Act (42 U.S.C. 5191(b))… 

As of April 18, 2020, I have declared that a major disaster exists in all States and territories as a result of the virus, and have authorized Emergency Protective Measures…

To provide financial assistance for the needs of those who have lost employment as a result of the pandemic, I am directing up to $44 billion from the DRF at the statutorily mandated 75 percent Federal cost share BE MADE AVAILABLE FOR LOST WAGES ASSISTANCE TO ELIGIBLE CLAIMANTS, to supplement State expenditures in providing these payments. 

AT LEAST $25 BILLION OF TOTAL DRF BALANCES WILL BE SET ASIDE TO SUPPORT ONGOING DISASTER RESPONSE AND RECOVERY EFFORTS AND POTENTIAL 2020 MAJOR DISASTER COSTS…

These funds, including those currently used to support State unemployment insurance programs, may be applied as the State’s cost share with Federal DRF funds.  To ensure that those affected by a loss in wages due to COVID-19 continue to receive supplemental benefits for weeks of unemployment ending no later than December 27, 2020, States should also identify funds to be spent without a Federal match should the total DRF balance deplete to $25 billion.

So here we are again, Pelosi’s House has passed a half-assed lame stimulus package larded up with goodies and giveaways for themselves and their special interest groups that has no chance of seeing daylight, just before leaving for another extended, paid vacation that will last until after the November 3rd election. 

However this time the situation is even worse.  While Trump managed to keep people in their homes and pay them enough money to stay afloat, those emergency measures were a temporary fix.    Now we have a media manufactured new wave Covid-19 crisis is being used to keep the economy shut down in order to defeat President Trump.  From Lew Rockwell: 

Excerpt:

 The Absurdity of Covid "Cases" 

Today’s headlines announced Donald and Melania Trump “tested positive” for covid-19. Another claims nineteen thousand Amazon workers “got” covid-19 on the job. Both of these pseudostories are sure to ignite another absurd media frenzy.

As always, the story keeps changing: Remember ventilators, flatten the curve, the next two weeks are crucial, etc.? Remember Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown back in February, urging everyone to visit? Remember Fauci dismissing masks as useless? Why should we believe anything the political/media complex tells us now?

So what do these headlines really mean? What exactly is a covid “case”?

Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, most US media outlets have been exceedingly credulous and complicit in their reporting. Journalists almost uniformly promote what we can call the “prolockdown” narrative, which is to wildly exaggerate the risks from covid-19 to serve a political agenda

This explains why media outlets use the terms “case” and “infection” so loosely, to the point of actively misinforming the public. All of the endless talk about testing, testing, testing served to obscure two important facts. First, the tests themselves are almost laughably unreliable in producing both false positives and negatives.

And what is the point? Are we going to test people again and again, every time they go out to the grocery or bump into a neighbor? Second, detecting virus particles or droplets in a human’s respiratory tract tells us very little. It certainly does not tell us they are sick, or transmitting sickness to anyone…—A virus is not a disease. Only a very small percentage of those exposed to the virus itself—SARS-CoV-2—show any kind of acute respiratory symptoms, or what we can call “coronavirus disease.”

The only meaningful statistics show the incidence of serious illness, hospitalizations, and deaths. The single most important statistic among these is the infection fatality rate (IFR). Data collected through July shows that the IFR for those under age forty-five is actually lower than that of the common flu.

The covid-19 IFR rises for those over fifty, but it is hardly a death sentence. And the data does not segregate those with preexisting health issues caused by obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. If we could see data only for reasonably healthy people under fifty, the numbers would be even more reassuring.

MILD OR ASYMPTOMATIC COVID CASES ARE EFFECTIVELY MEANINGLESS. The world is full of bacteria and viruses, and sometimes they make us a bit sick for a few days. There are millions of them in the world all around us, on our skin, in our nose and respiratory tract, in our organs.

We are meant to live with them, which is why we all have immune systems designed to help us coexist and adapt to ever-changing organisms. We develop antibodies naturally, or we attempt to stimulate them through vaccines, but ultimately our own immune systems have to deal with covid-19. The virus will always be out there waiting, on the other side of any lockdown or mask—so we might as well get on with it.

From day one the focus should have been on boosting immunity through exercise, fresh air, sunlight, proper dietary supplementation, and the promotion of general well-being…

Lockdowns were never justified, either in terms of the covid-19 risk or the staggering economic tradeoffs, which will be felt for decades. THEY CERTAINLY ARE NOT JUSTIFIED NOW…

We still don’t know how many of the reported two hundred thousand US covid-19 deaths were actually caused by the SARS-CoV-2 respiratory disease, or simply reflect people who died of other causes after exposure to covid-19. We do know that the harms caused by the lockdowns far outweigh the harms posed by the covid-19 virus.

We have had nearly eight months of life and liberty stolen from us by politicians and their hysteria-promoting accomplices in media. How much more will we accept?

Yes, we’ve had “almost eight months of life and liberty stolen from us by politicians and their hysteria-promoting accomplices in media.  How much more will we accept?”  How much longer will we allow congress to enslave us in order to promote a One World Order?  This is not sustainable, the Federal Reserve Bank is on the mat.  The only thing that can save America is a new financial system that leaves worthless petro-greenback behind.  From Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge:  

Excerpt: 

In Unprecedented Monetary Overhaul, The Fed Is Preparing To Deposit "Digital Dollars" Directly To "Each American"

 Over the past decade, the one common theme despite the political upheaval and growing social and geopolitical instability, was that the market would keep marching higher and the Fed would continue injecting liquidity into the system.

The second common theme is that despite sparking unprecedented asset price inflation, prices as measured across the broader economy – using the flawed CPI metric and certainly stagnant worker wages – would remain subdued (as a reminder, the Fed is desperate to ignite broad inflation as that is the only way the countless trillions of excess debt can be eliminated and has so far failed to do so).

The Fed’s failure to reach its inflation target – which prompted the US central bank to radically overhaul its monetary dogma last month and unveil Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (or FAIT) whereby the Fed will allow inflation to run hot without hiking rateshas sparked broad criticism from the economic establishment, even though as we showed in June, deflation is now a direct function of the Fed’s unconventional monetary policies as the lower yields slide, the lower the propensity to spend…

In short, ever since the Fed launched QE and NIRP, it has BEEN MAKING THE SITUATION IT HAS BEEN TRYING TO “FIX” EVEN WORSE while blowing the biggest asset price bubble in history.

And having recently accepted that its preferred stimulus pathway has failed to boost the broader economy, the blame has fallen on how monetary policy is intermediated, specifically the way the Fed creates excess reserves which end up at commercial banks instead of “tricking down” all the way to the consumer level…

And yet, the lament is that even as the economy was desperately in need of a massive liquidity tsunami, the funds created by the Fed and Treasury (now that the US operates under a quasi-MMT regime) DID NOT MAKE THEIR WAY TO THOSE WHO NEED THEM THE MOST: END CONSUMERS.

Which is why we read with great interest a Bloomberg interview with two former Fed officials: Simon Potter, who led the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s markets group i.e., he was the head of the Fed’s Plunge Protection Team for years, and Julia Coronado, who spent eight years as an economist for the Fed’s Board of Governors, who are among the innovators brainstorming solutions to what has emerged as THE MOST CRUCIAL AND DIFFICULT PROBLEM FACING THE FED: GET MONEY SWIFTLY TO PEOPLE WHO NEED IT MOST IN A CRISIS.

The response was striking: the two propose creating a monetary tool that they call recession insurance bonds, which draw on some of the advances in digital payments, WHICH WILL BE WIRED INSTANTLY TO AMERICANS.

As Coronado explained the details, Congress would grant the Federal Reserve an additional tool for providing support—say, a percent of GDP [in a lump sum that would be divided equally and distributed] to households in a recession.

Recession insurance bonds would be zero-coupon securities, a contingent asset of households that would basically lie in wait… The Fed would then activate the securities and deposit the funds digitally in households’ apps.

As Potter added, it took Congress too long to get money to people, and it’s too clunky. We need a separate infrastructure. The Fed could buy the bonds quickly WITHOUT GOING TO THE PRIVATE MARKET.

On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero, we’re activating X amount of the bonds, and we’ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level, we’ll buy more. The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet; the digital dollars in people’s accounts will be on the liability side.”

ESSENTIALLY, THE FED IS PROPOSING CREATING A HYBRID DIGITAL LEGAL TENDER unlike reserves which are stuck within the financial system, and which it can deposit directly into US consumer accounts. In short, as we summarized “THE FED IS PLANNING TO SEND MONEY DIRECTLY TO AMERICANS IN THE NEXT CRISIS“…

So this morning, as if to confirm our speculation of what comes next, Cleveland Fed president Loretta Mester delivered a speech to the Chicago Payment Symposium titled “Payments and the Pandemic“, in which after going through the big picture boilerplate, Mester goes straight to the matter at hand…

In the section titled “Central Bank Digital Currencies”, the Cleveland Fed president writes that “the experience with pandemic emergency payments has brought forward an idea that was already gaining increased attention at central banks around the world, that is, central bank digital currency (CBDC).”

And in the shocking punchline, then goes on to reveal that “legislation has proposed that each American have an account at the Fed in which digital dollars could be deposited, as liabilities of the Federal Reserve Banks, which could be used for emergency payments.”

But wait it gets better, because in launching digital cash, the Fed would then be able to scrap “anonymous” physical currency entirely, and track every single banknote from its “creation” all though the various transactions that take place during its lifetime. And, eventually, the Fed could remotely “destroy” said digital currency when it so decides.

Oh, and in the process the Fed would effectively disintermediate commercial banks, as it would both provide loans to US consumers and directly deposit funds into their accounts, EFFECTIVELY MAKING THE ENTIRE TRADITIONAL BANKING SYSTEM OBSOLETE…

To summarize, the wheels are already turning on a plan that sees the Fed depositing “digital dollars” to “each American”, a stunning development that essentially sees the Fed bypass Congress, endowing the Central Bank with targeted “fiscal stimulus” capabilities, and which could lead to a dramatic reflationary spike as IT IS THE LOWER INCOME QUARTILE SEGMENTS OF US SOCIETY THAT ARE THE MARGINAL PRICE SETTERS FOR ECONOMIC GOODS AND SERVICES.

In fact, even as inflation rages – which some alternative inflationary measures to CPI suggest it already is – the Fed will have a semantic loophole in explaining just why it needs to keep inflation scorching hot even as the standard of living in America collapses to the benefit of a handful of asset holders.

Why? The CBO showed the answer yesterday:

Absent a massive burst of inflation in the coming years which inflates away the hundreds of trillions in federal debt, the unprecedented debt tsunami that is coming would mean the end to the American way of life as we know it.

And to do that, the Fed is now finalizing the last steps of a process that revolutionizes the entire fiat monetary system, launching digital dollars which EFFECTIVELY REMOVE COMMERCIAL BANKS AS FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES, as they will allow the fed itself to make direct deposits into Americans’ “digital wallets”, in the process ALSO MAKING CONGRESS AND THE ENTIRE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH REDUNDANT, as a handful of technocrats quietly take over the United States.

Hmmm, sounds like Trump is nationalizing the Federal Reserve Bank, “effectively removing commercial banks and financial intermediaries who skim huge profits off the top” of any legislation to stimulate the economy by putting money in people’s pockets.  And the beauty of it is that in doing so, making the corrupt, self-dealing congress and the entire legislative branch redundant.”  How great is that? So what does Joe Biden and the Democrats have to offer? From Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report: 

Excerpt: 

Biden Offers Nothing But More War, Austerity and White Supremacy – Without Trump

 Biden is an unreconstructed racist and warmonger who has been in the forefront of austerity, and Harris is a party hack and mass Black incarcerator who became a prosecutor with police union endorsement.  “Biden’s acceptance speech put forward not one word that hinted at programmatic change on racial matters.”

The corporate Democrats are once again running as the Not-Trump Party, the second consecutive election in which they have succeeded in suppressing every issue except the fitness for office of one very wretched man.  The only way a party wholly-owned by oligarchs can deflect attention from its own culpability in dragooning its constituents into a Race to the Bottom amid never ending war, is to set up a straw man to be knocked down, leaving the machinery of racial capitalism and armed-to-the-teeth imperialism intact -- Hillary Clinton’s gambit in 2016.

She lost, but the oligarchy did just fine under the Orange Menace, as stocks and profits skyrocketed. In the interim, however, popular demands for relief from the duopoly’s bipartisan regime of austerity and war escalated, and a Black-led movement took to the streets in unprecedented numbers. 

China’s economy, which had already eclipsed the United States in purchasing power parity, continued to roar ahead, as Beijing countered U.S. military encirclement with the most ambitious multinational infrastructure project in world history: the Belt and Road initiative, formerly the New Silk Road.

With the bulk of the U.S. ruling class and their servants in the national security apparatus now aligned with Democrats, Trump was made the scapegoat for both Black anger at institutional racial oppression and for imperial decline. Black Democratic elected officials played their assigned role, waving American flags as they pretended that only Trump stood in the way of racial “healing” in a nation born of native genocide and Black enslavement.  

Recent history was quickly rewritten, positing the rise of Trump as the demon who taunted Blacks into resurrecting a grassroots movement that had been dormant for two generations, when in fact the Black Lives Matter phenomenon arose to demolish a bipartisan Mass Black Incarceration regime under his predecessor, the First Black President.

Having strangled the anti-austerity (but loyal imperialist) internal challenge from Bernie Sanders, the oligarch-aligned Democrats and their media chose Joe Biden as front man: a political hack with impeccable corporate credentials and an architect of the “New Jim Crow” and white northern massive resistance to Black urban intrusion. His Black female running mate is a pure product of the corporate Democratic machine, who launched her electoral career with the endorsement of police unions.

But neither of them is Trump, and that’s all that matters. “Trump was made the scapegoat for both Black anger at institutional racial oppression and for imperial decline.”

With Biden, the “white working class” champion carrying the corporate torch, there will be no talk of baskets of “deplorables” – because he is a certified denizen of the basket.  Rather, Biden promised in his acceptance speech to “choose a different path, and together, take this chance to heal, to be reborn, to unite. A path of hope and light.”

Trump is darkness, the Democrats are light – ad nauseum for 3,000-plus meaningless words.

Biden acknowledges that the U.S. responded to the Covid-19 epidemic with “the worst performance of any nation on Earth.” But it was all the fault of the unmasked man, Trump. The methodical privatization and shrinkage of the public health system, a thoroughly bipartisan policy, had nothing to do with mass death.

The austerity regime, of which Biden is a founding member, which apportions health care based on race and class, is blameless. There can be no true national health care system absent a single payer program, but Biden vowed to veto Medicare for all if it ever crosses his presidential desk...” Yet, he is the light.

Biden assures us that his “economic plan is all about jobs, dignity, respect, and community” -- a claim that flies in the face of his history as budget-slasher. As journalist Branko Marcetic writes, “Biden is uniquely susceptible to budget-cutting dogma.

He quickly became a fiscal hawk after entering the Senate in 1972, introducing  the Federal Spending Control Act five years later to potentially put all federal spending programs on the chopping block, and musing that Reagan’s 1980 victory was 'more consistent with the budgetary thrust that a guy like me ... has been going for.'”

In his speech, Biden called Social Security a “a sacred obligation, a sacred promise made.” But, again citing Marcetic,

Biden has proposed to means-test Social Security and, from the 1980s on “has called for and introduced legislation aimed at slashing federal spending, including by cutting Medicare and Social Security.”

Vice-President Biden was point man for Barack Obama’s partially consummated “Grand Bargain” with Republicans, during which the administration offered four trillion dollars in cuts, mostly to social programs, including Social Security – a program that Obama put on the cutting table, along with Medicaid and “all other entitlements” at the very beginning of his presidency.

BIDEN HAS ALWAYS BEEN A SOLDIER FOR AUSTERITY, A WAR AGAINST THE POOR. WHY SHOULD ANYONE BELIEVE HE HAS REVERSED COURSE IN HIS OLD AGE?

Biden is an unreconstructed racist, as is proven every time he makes a remark even remotely related to race. His acceptance speech put forward not one word that hinted at programmatic change on racial matters. However, he did mention the name of George Floyd’s daughter, and seemed to think that John Lewis’ ghost will cause us all to “see the light.”

But Russia shall be consigned to darkness, along with Trump. Biden repeated the wholly unsubstantiated and historically bizarre charge that Moscow put “bounties on the heads of American soldiers” in Afghanistan, despite Russia’s longtime and invaluable assistance to maintain the U.S. presence in that country.

War. Austerity and White Supremacy are all that Biden/Harris offer – but without Trump. If that’s enough for you, then say “Hallelujah” -- and then tighten your belts and pass the ammunition.

Ahh, yes the entire global response to Covid-19 is, “a war waged by the ruling group against its own subjects.”   It is another attempted coup by the “ruling group against its subjects” for electing Donald J. Trump president.  The shutdown of the economy, the fake death totals, the huge amount of false positives to feed the hysteria, all of it is a great big Globalist last gasp effort to save itself.

Yeah, Trump isn’t the most effective speaker, he’s not the most qualified individual, but he is what America and the World needs now.  The biggest question now is whether there is enough time before the end of the year to completely drain the swamp and will Trump survive?  Let’s hope so.  Good luck to us all.



Sunday, July 19, 2020

Keep the Electoral College and abolish the corrupt billionaire financed two-party system




Since the election of President Donald Trump there has been an unprecedented not only bi-party effort to remove America’s elected president from office but that of a foreign country, Britain.  With the assistance of a corrupt media owned by the billionaires who fund the campaigns for public office, Donald Trump’s presidency has been attacked as “illegitimate” from the beginning.

Donald Trump came to office by way of winning the Electoral College votes, in spite of the massive disinformation and outright lies spread by the billionaire-funded duopoly.  Unlike George W. Bush who the duopoly claims won the 2000 presidency by winning the Electoral College, which he did not, Trump actually did win the electoral College.  George W. Bush lost the election in 2000 and lost the Electoral College votes. 

In the 2000 election George W. Bush’s brother Jeb was governor of Florida.  As governor of Florida, along with Jeb’s paramour and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the groundwork was laid for a Bush victory.  In spite of caging lists that eliminated thousands of black voters from the voting rolls, designating thousands more as felons, setting up road blocks to stop black voters from reaching polling places, a butterfly ballot that placed the hole to punch for Patrick Buchanan where it should have been for Al Gore, to closing polling stations in black precincts, Bush still lost.

When Katherine Harris tallied the votes, she declared the election for George W. Bush, but thousands of complaints were called in to the election officials complaining of fraud.  Al Gore’s running mate, the much hated Zionist Joe Lieberman who the Democratic Party forced on Al Gore, immediately conceded losing to Bush, even though he had no authority to do so.  Ignoring Lieberman’s attempt to sabotage the Gore campaign, Al Gore called for a recount of the votes and was backed by the Florida Supreme Court.

Once the recount started, the massive amount of fraud in Florida began to unfold.  Republican operatives were bused into Florida to interrupt and stop the recount from taking place.  In what was called the Brooks Brothers rebellion, the recount station was bombarded and the people who were counting the votes were violently attacked shutting down the operation.  From Gregory Palast:


Excerpt:

Roger Stone is not just an impotent trickster
He's a violent, evil man who had a lot to do with fixing the vote in Florida in 2000

Roger Stone is not just an impotent trickster. He's a violent, evil man who had a lot to do with fixing the vote in Florida in 2000. George Bush supposedly officially won the presidency by 537 votes in Florida — just 537 votes! But 178,000 ballots were disqualified, considered unreadable. A hundred and seventy-eight thousand!!! These were concentrated in Democratic and Black areas: Jacksonville, Gadsden County, Miami-Dade and Broward.

Miami was “recounting” those ballots (remember the hanging chads?). We use the term “recount” but what we really mean is counting ballots that were never counted in the first place. Al Gore had those ballots. Those were overwhelmingly Gore ballots. Bush would have lost. So they stopped the count.

And one way to stop the count in Miami was Roger Stone literally led a riot. He was the instigator of what they called the White Collar Riot (aka Brooks Brothers riot). They were trying to break windows and smash doors, but it was white guys in suits led by Roger Stone.

That type of violence elected a president. The Republican operatives loved it. They figured this guy will do anything we need. And he does. It's not cute, it’s not little dirty tricks. It is deeply evil vote manipulation. It's violent and it's racist — and it's Roger Stone.

The Bush campaign brought in outside counsel to sue the Gore campaign on behalf of Bush claiming recounting the votes was a violation of Bush’s civil rights.  The case was brought before the U.S. Supreme court, who had no jurisdiction over the Florida voting system as voting laws fall under the jurisdiction of the state and the Florida Supreme Court had already ordered the recount.

Nevertheless, five corrupt Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “if the votes were to be counted it would have a devastating effect on a Bush presidency” therefore they declared Bush the winner.  The court further stated that their decision only pertained to Bush v. Gore and could not be used as a precedent in any other similar case.

This judgement gave Bush enough electoral votes to win the election.  In other words Bush lost both the nationwide election and the Electoral College until the Supreme Court intervened and awarded Bush the presidency.  

In the 2016 campaign Trump actually understood the Electoral College system and fine-tuned his campaign in order to win the Electoral College votes.   Trump stumped across all of the states directly appealing to the people’s disgust toward the corrupt two party monopoly that ignores the wishes of the people and serves the interests of the billionaire class.  Trump capitalized on the corruption of the two party system and ran on a populist agenda.  He went to every state and made his case.

On the contrary Hillary Clinton’s highly paid campaign staff concentrated only on states with the largest populations with large Electoral College votes believing if they could win these few states they would have enough Electoral Votes to win the day.  The media provided bogus poll data showing Clinton overwhelmingly leading Trump in order to create a sense of futility on the part of Trump voters.  Their gamble failed.

By ignoring states like that of Wisconsin, where Trump campaigned more than once, even though the Republican Party of Wisconsin did not support him, the Clinton campaign lost support.  In the end, Hillary got about two million more votes than Donald Trump but Trump carried more counties across the nation than Clinton did.    From Governing.com:

Excerpt:

Looking Back at Trump's Win in Raw Numbers

The president's victory has been extensively explored. But a state- and county-level look at the data offers stunning evidence of just how large the shifts were in certain places.  For the first half of the year, I was writing the state and gubernatorial chapters of the Almanac of American Politics 2018, the once-every-two-years, 2,000-page-plus "Bible of politics" that is being released in early August.

As part of that effort, I gave special attention to state- and county-level data on last year's presidential voting patterns, focusing on locations where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton did well or poorly compared to their party's performance in 2012.  I found some interesting results. Let's start by looking at Trump.

 Trump's Areas of Strength

In a number of states, Trump's candidacy resonated so strongly with voters that these places became even redder across the board than they were in 2012. These states included Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and West Virginia.  In others, Trump didn't do well enough to win, but he did do well enough to cut into the Democrats' winning margins.

In Rhode Island, for instance, the winning Democratic margin shrank by 13 percentage points between 2012 and 2016. Similarly, Delaware saw its margin shrink by eight points; Minnesota, by about seven points; New Hampshire, by six points; and Nevada, about four points.

Older Voters

Two demographic groups, in particular, produced notable results for Trump's candidacy. The first is senior citizens, whose influence was most noticeable in Florida.  Trump ran strong in the Interstate 4 corridor that stretches from Tampa past Orlando. He flipped from blue to red such counties as St. Lucie and Pinellas, which includes St. Petersburg. He also saw six-digit raw-vote increases in the counties of Lee, home to Fort Myers; Pasco; Volusia (Daytona Beach); Polk; Manatee (Bradenton); Hernando; Sarasota; and Charlotte.

Blue-Collar Voters

The strong affinity between Trump and non-college educated voters has been extensively explored since the campaign. But a state-by-state look offers stunning evidence of just how large the shifts were in certain counties. 

One of the best examples of this is Colorado's Pueblo County, a historically Democratic stronghold that is home to many blue-collar, religious, gun-friendly voters. Barack Obama won the county by 14 points. This time, though, Trump won it, albeit narrowly, and even as incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet won re-election in the county by about 7,000 votes.

There were similar shifts in solidly blue states.

In Connecticut, the town of Plainfield, near the border with Rhode Island, went for Obama by 10 points but backed Trump by 22. Naugatuck, south of Waterbury, backed Trump by 16. In New York, Trump won 19 counties that had voted for Obama in 2012. Franklin County and Oswego County both saw their margins shift by more than 30 points toward the GOP. Five other counties saw margins shift by between 20 and 29 points, while another nine shifted by between 10 and 19 points.

But the more important shifts for Trump -- for his victory in the Electoral College, anyway -- came in competitive states.

In Maine, Trump won nine counties in the state, which was eight more than Romney did in 2012. It was enough to secure an electoral vote (Maine allocates a portion of its electoral votes by congressional district). The margin in Oxford County shifted 28 points toward Trump; it shifted 25 points in Aroostook County, 24 in Franklin County, 17 in Kennebec County (Augusta), and 14 in Penobscot County. And it wasn't just the margins that gave him a victory: In these five counties alone, the overall level of voter turnout rose by 6 percent over 2012.

In Ohio -- which went from blue to red in 2016 -- Trump's gains were especially strong in the state's blue-collar northern tier. In seven of the Obama counties that Trump was able to flip, the margins shifted toward the GOP by between 12 and 32 points. Even in some of the counties that remained blue, the Democratic margins narrowed significantly, shrinking by 25 points in Mahoning County (Youngstown), by 16 points in Lorain County (west of Cleveland), by 14 points in Lucas County (Toledo) and by seven points in Summit County (Akron).

In many places, Trump outperformed Romney robustly, such as Stark County (Canton), where a virtual tie in 2012 became a 17-point Trump romp in 2016.

In Pennsylvania, the cumulative Republican improvement over 2012 in just five blue-collar counties in western Pennsylvania -- Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland -- was almost enough by itself to supply Trump's statewide winning margin in this previously blue state. Trump's margin was also in the ballpark of his improvement in Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre) and Lackawanna (Scranton).

In Wisconsin, another blue-to-red state, Clinton won only about one-third of the counties Obama had won four years earlier. The swing in Trump's direction reached 31 points in Forest County, which is located between Green Bay and Lake Superior.

A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel analysis found that in Wisconsin communities of less than 2,000 people, Trump won by 24 points, a margin six times bigger than Romney's. And while Trump lost the state's metro areas by five points, the newspaper calculated, he won non-metro areas by 19 points…

Yes, Hillary Clinton couldn’t be bothered to campaign in States like Wisconsin.  Now there are hews and cries to end the Electoral College.  The Electoral College was a brilliant idea of the founding fathers to protect the rights of the average Joes to have a say in who governs them.  The duopoly is irate that they lost control of the electoral process in 2017.  The only lessons learned by the governing elite is to eliminate the Electoral College and restore power to the powerfully connected.

The devastation left behind the Covid-19 pandemic should have been a wakeup call to the Democratic Party that the American people desperately need universal healthcare, good paying jobs and affordable housing.  But alas, the Democratic Party is too deeply wedded to big Pharma, big banks and the insurance industry that they don’t give a flying fig about the American people.  Their pandemic relief package is just another big taxpayer giveaway to the DNC and RNC’s well-heeled constituents, their campaign donors.

 CARES Act and HEROS Act anything but caring or heroic:

Wall Street based for profit health insurance vs. health care:

From Jacobin:

Excerpt:

Why Does Nancy Pelosi Want to Subsidize a Brutal For-Profit Health Insurance Industry?

We desperately need a Medicare expansion to provide health care to millions. But instead, Nancy Pelosi’s office is backing a health policy reform that is actually more expensive and will cover less people — all to placate centrist Democrats and insurance executives.

“It’ll be big” is how speaker Nancy Pelosi described the next coronavirus bill being discussed in the House of Representatives. Yet on Tuesday, when House Democrats unveiled the HEROES Act, their primary proposal to provide health care was to subsidize COBRA payments for the unemployed.

This is yet another example of the Democratic Party thinking small, subsidizing a horrific industry, and condemning people to suffer at the hands of a morally unjustifiable health care system…

COBRA is more expensive than even ACA plans. Premiums for the average family are currently more than $20,000 per year, making them unaffordable for most people with jobs, much less the unemployed.

Pelosi deals with this issue by simply having the government cover the cost while not dealing with the other weaknesses of COBRA: it is a limited program that will not cover you if your employer closes shop; it still forces people to find thousands of dollars to pay for deductibles and co-pays to actually get care; and it still makes us deal with the cruelty of private insurers who profit by denying Americans care.

Why claim to go big, yet play the smallest of ball when it comes to the most fundamental issue during a pandemic — health care? Especially when other, better options that specifically focus on health care exist. Progressive Caucus cochair Pramila Jayapal and more than thirty of her House colleagues introduced the Medicare Crisis Program Act. Bernie Sanders is introducing a similar bill in the Senate — legislation that would cover those recently unemployed, and those who are already uninsured, by expanding Medicare.

Here is the rub — it’s actually cheaper than subsidizing COBRA. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group of conservative deficit scolds, the cost of this program would be “$150 billion over four months and $400 billion over the course of a year.” 

The driver of this cost is that instead of directly paying for health care, COBRA is a subsidy to insurance companies. They’re receiving money to cover people at a time when, ironically, health care demand has fallen off a cliff.

Representative Ro Khanna noted, “The decision to extend Cobra benefits instead of providing the unemployed with Medicare or even ACA subsidies is economic nonsense. Cobra won’t cover those who work for businesses that go under. Cobra is 25% more expensive than Gold plans on the ACA and much more than Medicare.” 

Furthermore, under COBRA health insurance, companies charge consumers an extra 2-percent administrative fee on top of their premiums. With the government picking up the tab, the fee is a bonus worth billions of dollars.  As Representative Ilhan Omar pointed out, “Expanding COBRA would be a massive giveaway to for-profit insurance companies and leave millions of Americans uninsured during this pandemic.”

This handout would be grotesque under normal circumstances but becomes even more obscene when considering the health care industry is actively gloating about their financial position during this crisis.  Anthem’s CFO claims the company will save money because of people canceling voluntary procedures while Cigna executives say they are “not expecting a material financial impact.”

Considering these facts, I asked a member of Congress why they believed Pelosi took this approach. They responded, “it makes no sense.”  They went on to explain that Pelosi’s office believes Medicare is “bad politics with the moderates” and, furthermore, expanding the Affordable Care Act in any significant way is “something Blue Dogs don’t want to litigate.”

Even in a crisis, the first group standing in the way of universal health care is centrist Democrats. In this case, they cannot even use cost as an excuse, since the plan they are proposing is more expensive than a Medicare expansion.

Their stance here hearkens back to the strategy that Never-Trump Republican Bill Kristol proposed in 1993 to defeat the Clinton health care plan. “Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy — and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security,” he wrote. “Its success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas.”

Centrists recognize that expanding Medicare now and normalizing its adoption across age brackets would inevitably lead to growing support for Medicare for All. In addition, it would begin to put in place mechanisms that would inevitably make the program’s implementation far easier.

Overt hostility to Medicare for All is widespread in Washington. Pelosi’s top health care aide, Wendell Primus, gave a presentation to Blue Cross Blue Shield executives, just after Democrats retook the House in 2016, to make it known that Democratic leadership had no intention of pursuing Medicare for All or other policies that would cut into their bottom line.

We must recognize that this is not a fight on the merits of policy. Nancy Pelosi’s office is backing a more expensive policy that will cover less people, in order to placate moderates and health insurance CEOs.  Of course, no one expects the HEROES Act to become law as written. Instead, its purpose is to set the parameters for the next round of negotiations with the Senate and the White House.

What establishment Democrats are doing is setting the Overton window, boxing out the most sensible and cost-effective policy option that would deliver health care to the most Americans, effectively demonstrating that their arguments against Medicare for All were never made in good faith.

Yes, Pelosi and the Democrats CARES and HEROS Acts is anything but caring or heroic, it’s a big giveaway to the insurance industry and to their donors and themselves.  They are hogs at the trough.  Also part of their big giveaway is the Payroll Protection Program sold as a program to help small businesses retain their staff and survive the loss of income due to the pandemic.

The payroll protection act:


Excerpt:

BANKS STAND TO MAKE $18 BILLION IN PPP PROCESSING FEES FROM CARES ACT

BANKS WILL MAKE out with $18 billion in fees for processing small business Paycheck Protection Program relief loans during the pandemic, according to calculations by Amanda Fischer, policy director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive economic think tank.

That’s money taken directly out of the overall $640 billion pot of funding Congress allocated to the program it created as part of the CARES Act. “If we did it through a public institution, there would be [more than] $140 billion left,” Fischer noted, as opposed to the $130 billion still up for grabs. The Washington Center for Equitable Growth is releasing an analysis of the government response to the pandemic as soon as this week.

The fees compensate the banks for some of the costs that come with processing loans — call center time to handle business owners’ questions, employee hours spent on processing paperwork for both loan and forgiveness applications — and some of the risk they shoulder if any of the loans they extend end up being fraudulent. But there is no credit risk; if business owners who qualified for PPP loans later default, the Small Business Association takes the hit, not the banks. “Basically it’s free money,” Fischer said.

For some banks, this money represents a hefty windfall. New Jersey-based Cross River Bank’s estimated $163 million haul would be more than double its net revenue last year. JPMorgan Chase could make $864 million.

The fact that banks are siphoning money off of the relief program is thanks to the fact that the United States had no existing public infrastructure ready to quickly get money out to struggling businesses when the pandemic hit. Fischer characterized it as “a failure of preparedness,” adding, “We should have invested in better systems…”

But on top of the fact that the program leaked money to banks, relying on these firms meant an uneven distribution of funds. One study found that areas served by the country’s four largest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and Bank of America — underperformed in terms of how many businesses got PPP funding.

On the flip side, another found that places with large numbers of mid-sized and community banks saw more businesses get PPP loans.

That meant that whether a small business received the money it needed to stay afloat depended in large part on the composition of financial institutions in its area. “That’s a really perverse outcome,” Fischer said.

The other major business relief program, the Federal Reserve’s Main Street Lending Program, is also being run through private Wall Street firms. The Fed contracted with asset management firms BlackRock and Pimco to help it purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth of commercial bonds and short-term borrowings to shore up mid-sized companies, doing so without soliciting bids from any other firms.

“This is another example where, theoretically, it could have been done in-house,” Fischer said. She notes that the Fed has 23,000 employees, some of whom could have been deployed to purchase investments for the Fed themselves. Instead, advocates are warning of vast conflicts of interest in having BlackRock and Pimco do it, as both firms are also shareholders or bondholders in many of the companies from which they may buy investments at the behest of the Federal Reserve.

BlackRock can even purchase its own exchange-traded funds. Financial reform advocates have also warned that BlackRock could use inside information from the Federal Reserve to make its own proprietary trades.

BlackRock stands to make as much as $40 million a year from the program through the fees it will charge for setting up the program and on each bond or loan it purchases. Still, that’s not a huge windfall for a firm that manages trillions of dollars in assets. What Fischer sees it accruing is, instead, power. “I imagine [BlackRock CEO] Larry Fink has [Federal Reserve Chair] Jay Powell on speed dial,” she said. “If the Fed needs to rely on you to stabilize the entire economy, then there’s not a lot of room for them to push back and regulate you rein in your conduct in other circumstances.”

Instead of using such a privatized system, governments of other European countries have just directly paid companies for their payroll costs to keep them from firing employees. The approach dampened skyrocketing unemployment numbers in the beginning of the crisis.

In Denmark, businesses simply applied for money directly from the government’s Danish Business Authority. “They had the capacity to just, in-house, accept all the applications … and get money to small businesses in a time-effective way…”  Fischer noted that there has been little public outrage over the fact that banks skimmed PPP money in the form of fees, whether or not it was authorized.

Instead, outrage has been directed at companies and people that received PPP loans but don’t appear deserving, or the IRS sending stimulus checks to dead people. The $18 billion captured by banks “is technically above board,” she noted. “But it’s a much bigger grift than some elderly person getting a check because their spouse died three months ago.”

Yes indeed, the two parties rose to the occasion after shutting down the entire economy by shoveling borrowed cash into the coffers of banks, campaign donors and their own families and friends while leaving the people to twist in the wind.  They did, in their “generosity” give a portion of the population one-time $1,200 dollar checks which did little to nothing to help the people, while Wall Street soared on “false” profits propped up by the Federal Reserve Bank.  From Reason.com:

Excerpt:

The Paycheck Protection Program Is a Mess. Here's Who Is Benefitting From the Dysfunction.

A program designed to keep workers on payrolls showered benefits on lobbyists, advocacy groups, and even members of Congress.

The list of companies and organizations that received loans through the federal government's flagship coronavirus relief program includes firms linked to powerful politicians, celebrities, lobbyists, and government spending hawks.  On Monday, the Small Business Administration (SBA) released a list of organizations that each received more than $150,000 through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

That program, first approved as part of the $2.3 trillion CARES Act in late March, allocated $670 billion to purchase loans made by banks to businesses and non-profits with fewer than 500 employees. The government would forgive those loans so long as the recipients spent a certain portion of the money on retaining or hiring back employees.

Politico reports that PPP borrowers included companies owned or founded by members of Congress, as well as the educational arms of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Several lobbying firms, technically barred from receiving loans if over half their revenue comes from lobbying, also benefited from PPP.

On the executive side of things, the Daily Beast reports that several companies linked to the family of White House Special Adviser (and President Donald Trump's son-in-law) Jared Kushner received PPP loans.  That list includes Observer Holdings LLC, a media company once owned by Kushner himself and currently held by an investment firm run by his brother-in-law. The Beast reports that hotels owned by Kushner Companies, a real estate investment firm owned by members of Kushner's family, also received PPP loans.

Aspiring presidents have had their turn at the trough too. Clothing brand Yeezy, which is owned by rapper and recently announced presidential candidate Kanye West, received a loan of between $2 million and $5 million. (The SBA did not release exact loan amounts.) 

Even advocacy groups have been cashing in, including some noted critics of profligate government, spending such as Americans for Tax Reform and the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI).  The latter's acceptance of government aid provoked a lot of jeering on Twitter about the alleged hypocrisy at play, although ARI has said since late May that it would gladly accept PPP loans as an effective return of stolen goods…

The list of PPP beneficiaries also includes progressive watchdogs like Public Citizen Foundation, the research and litigation wing of Public Citizen Inc., which received between $350,000 and $1 million from the program…

NBC News reports that 43 Planned Parenthood affiliate organizations received between $65 million and $150 million in PPP loans. Congressional Republicans have argued that these affiliates are too closely tied to the national Planned Parenthood organization to qualify for the small business program. The SBA has demanded that these affiliates return the PPP money they received.  NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, an advocacy group, and the National Abortion Federation, which represents abortion providers, also both received PPP loans.

Critical headlines about connected businesses and lobbyists receiving PPP money has sparked a backlash of sorts against "PPP shaming."  The basic argument here is that so long as these funds kept employees on an organization's payroll—whatever type of organization it is—then PPP was a success on its own terms. By accepting aid, these organizations fulfilled the public purpose of the program…

But there are always trade-offs when the government spends money, "money printer goes brrr" memes notwithstanding.  Any PPP loan that went to a politically connected lobbying firm or a billionaire-owned shoe company is a loan that did not go to the government-shuttered restaurant or similar small business down the street. All those PPP dollars could have gone towards relief programs better targeted at the least well off. The money could have also gone straight back into the hands of taxpayers.

Congress has tried to reform PPP by passing a law that gives recipients more time and flexibility when it comes to spending the money received from the program. But Congress has devoted very little time to winnowing down who is actually eligible for the program in the first place…

Yes, while the American people suffer from lack of healthcare, lack of nutrition, no jobs and now are being evicted from their homes because the measly $1,200 checks did little to help them, congress has been languishing on yet another vacation.  They are due to come back July 20 to possibly pass another emergency aid package before they leave for their month-long vacation in August.  Already they are bickering about being too generous to the American people.    

However there is another constituency that congress has ensured is engorged with American tax dollars, that is the military industrial complex.  No belt tightening there, no sir we always have money for spreading war, death and destruction.  From Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept:

Excerpt:

How the House Armed Services Committee, in the Middle of a Pandemic, Approved a Huge Military Budget and More War in Afghanistan

WHILE THE COUNTRY IS SUBSUMED by both public health and an unemployment crisis, and is separately focused on a sustained protest movement against police abuses, a massive $740.5 billion military spending package was approved last week by the Democratic-controlled House Armed Services Committee. The GOP-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee will almost certainly send the package with little to no changes to the White House for signing.

As we reported last week, pro-war and militaristic Democrats on the Committee joined with GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and the pro-war faction she leads to form majorities which approved one hawkish amendment after the next. Among those amendments was one co-sponsored by Cheney with Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado that impeded attempts by the Trump administration to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and another amendment led by Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., and Cheney which blocked the White House’s plan to remove 10,000 troop stationed in Germany.

While those two amendments were designed to block the Trump administration’s efforts to bring troops home, this same bipartisan pro-war faction defeated two other amendments that would have imposed limits on the Trump administration’s aggression and militarism: one sponsored by Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to require the Trump administration to provide a national security rationale before withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF, signed with the Soviet Union in 1987, and another to impose limits on the ability of the U.S. to arm and otherwise assist Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemen.

Perhaps most remarkable is the amount of the military budget itself. It is three times more than the planet’s second-highest military spender, China; it is ten times more than the third-highest spender, Saudi Arabia; it is 15 times more than the military budget of the country most frequently invoked by Committee members as a threat to justify militarism: Russia; and it is more than the next 15 countries combined spend on their military. They authorized this kind of a budget in the midst of a global pandemic as tens of millions of newly unemployed Americans struggle even to pay their rent.

How does this happen? How do Democrats succeed in presenting an image of themselves based on devotion to progressive causes and the welfare of the ordinary citizen while working with Liz Cheney to ensure that vast resources are funneled to the weapons manufacturers, defense sector and lobbyists who fund their campaigns?...

This media dynamic is exacerbated by the journalistic practice of obsessing on the areas where the two parties squabble, while steadfastly ignoring the very consequential and numerous areas where they find full agreement — such as approving close to a trillion dollars in military spending and ensuring the oldest war in U.S. history continues without end.

When the two parties are in agreement, as they so often are, this is boring from a media perspective, so it is typically ignored. This has the dual-propagandistic effect of creating the appearance that the two parties never agree when they in fact agree constantly, while also suppressing those vital policies which receive overwhelming bipartisan consensus…

It was remarkably revealing about how the U.S. government really functions, who the culprits are, what their motives are in pursuing policies that so blatantly have no benefit for the people they pretend to represent, and the vast gap between the image they create for themselves and the reality of what they really do in Washington.

It is, of course, impossible to understand how the Congress works without understanding those who wield power in it. The chair of the House Armed Services Committee selected by Nancy Pelosi and her caucus is the obscure but powerful Rep. Adam Smith of Washington. He has a long record of supporting pro-war policies, from the invasion of Iraq to numerous Bush/Cheney war on terror transgressions to blocking reform of the NSA after the Snowden reporting to denouncing the Obama administration’s efforts to reduce the troop presence in Afghanistan.

When Smith had a progressive challenger in 2018, who criticized him for this militarism, the defense industry, as my colleague Lee Fang reported, poured money into his coffers to ensure their loyal pro-war servant kept his perch as chair of this crucial committee.

A similar episode occurred the same year when a progressive challenger emerged to run against the former Marine and Iraq War veteran Jason Crow. House Majority Leader Steney Hoyer, as Fang also revealed by publishing a secret recording, tried to bully his opponent out of the race. Crow now joins with Liz Cheney to continue the war in Afghanistan. PRO-WAR DEMOCRATS WIELD ALL THE POWER FOR MILITARY AND FOREIGN POLICY BECAUSE THAT IS WHO HOUSE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP SELECTS…

There is a pocket of anti-war and anti-imperialism resistance on the committee and in the broader Congress, particularly on the left and to some extent on the isolationist right. But, as the House Armed Services Committee hearing of last week proves, they are outnumbered by the Adam Smiths, Jason Crows, and Liz Cheneys who work in bipartisan tandem to ensure their defeat and maintain a path of endless war for the United States.

And it is impossible to overstate the central role which the concocted, wildly exaggerated “Russia threat” plays in all of this. Over and over, the pro-war committee members from both parties invoked the scary threat of Moscow and the Kremlin to justify this bloated budget of imperialism and aggression…

So who supports these military budgets and the forever wars?  Is it the members of America’s military?  Do members of the military feel their sacrifice is worthwhile?  All recent polls say NO!  According to Consortium News:

Excerpt:

More significant and unique is the recent wave of defiance from normally conservative low- to mid-level combat veterans, most, though not all, a generation junior to the attention-grabbing ex-Pentagon brass and suits. There were early signs of a shift among those post-9/11 boots-on-the-ground types. In the last year, credible polls showed that two-thirds of veterans believed the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria “were not worth fighting,” and 73 percent supported full withdrawal from the Afghan War in particular. Notably, such rates of antiwar sentiment exceed those of civilians, something for which there may be no precedent….

Should the sudden wave of military and veteran dissent keep rising, it will invariably crash against the pageantry patriots of Chickenhawk America who attended that Tulsa rally and we’ll all face a new and critical theater in this nation’s culture wars. I don’t pretend to know whether such protests will last or military dissent will augur real change of any sort. What I do know is what my favorite rock star, Bruce Springsteen, used to repeat before live renditions of his song “Born to Run”: Remember, in the end nobody wins, unless everybody wins.

They say your budget reveals your values and your priorities and no budget shows the values and priorities of the American government better than the budget for fiscal year 2020.  According to Thomas Schatz, President of Citizens Against Government Waste the horrendous boondoggle known as the F35 Joint Strike Fighter which after 20 years of congress shoveling money into the production on a time and materials basis still doesn’t work.

F35 Joint Strike Fighter give $2.1 billion for Fiscal Year 2020.

Thomas Schatz, President of Citizens against Government Waste

Congress has appropriated another $2.1 billion for the F35 Joint Strike Fighter in the 2020 budget.  The appropriation for the 22 aircraft goes beyond that requested by the Department of Defense.  This earmark represents 13% of all earmark spending bills for fiscal year 2020.  

The program is 19 years in development, is 9 years behind schedule, the acquisition costs are almost double the initial estimate, the lifetime operation and maintenance is almost $1.2 trillion making it the most expensive weapon system  in history.  This was the project of the late Senator John McCain who was Chairman of the Armed Services committee who said “the program is both a scandal and a tragedy with respect to cost, schedule and performance.” 

When is the last time that congress appropriated more than asked for, for education, housing, jobs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or any program that actual provides some relief for the American people?  When?  

Now not the Democratic Party has coalesced around removing Trump from office for his great sin of wanting to end the endless wars, but they have been joined  by Never Trump Chicken Hawks.  The media has joined forces to put their clout behind the Zionist warmongering crook, Joe Biden.  From Ted Rall: