Just saying things promised soon sometimes take awhile, after POTUS and dutiful (R)s pretend we already got em because a law was signed.
Mass testing plus social tracing is the best way to deal with this. South Korea has had ~11,000 cases and ~1,600 deaths.
South Korea had its first diagnosed case the same day as the USA.
US intelligence started briefing folks about the outbreak in November last year. That info was incorporated into a Presidential Daily Briefing in early January.
oligarchy extracting wealth, in total secrecy, and the law
Secret provision sets up mysterious $450 billion coronavirus bailout fund — with almost no oversight
A last-minute provision tucked into the coronavirus recovery bill allows the Federal Reserve to set up a $450 billion bailout plan with almost no oversight.
The previously unreported provision — which makes the bailout funds exempt from the federal open meetings law
The central bank won’t be required to announce its meetings or
keep most records about discussions about which firms might benefit from the bailout,
although the board would have to record its votes — which could remain out of public view until after the crisis is over.
“We may never know what terms are being given to banks,
what collateral is being offered,
what repayment methods and duties banks and other financial ins utions may have,
“This is written too broadly and allows the Federal Reserve to
avoid its responsibilities of public disclosure as the courts have described them.”
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/bombs -secret-provision-sets-up-mysterious-450-billion-coronavirus-bailout-fund-with-almost-no-oversight/
Not previously unreported as claimed, but yeah. The no strings corporate bailout boggles as to the scope of money handed out to remake the economy.
The Real Economy is not the objective.
The objective is to bail out, enrich, empower more than ever the wealth-extracting, wealth-hoarding Financial Economy, just as it was in the Banksters Great Depression.
You missed the [oligarchs,] Bouts!
i have to admit, the PPP loans are a pretty sweet deal for the banks. On loans under $350,000 they get paid 5% to process them with zero liability. thats $15,000 to do the paperwork on a $300,000 loan. As an example, by Tuesday morning Bank of America had received 32 billion of loan applications. Assuming they are all approved thats a quick 1.6 Billion of profit.
New survey reveals devastating number of domestic workers have lost work due to pandemic
While unemployment claims have reached record-breaking numbers as families everywhere are losing work due to the pandemic,
those numbers don’t include domestic workers,
like Melissa, who are being let go by their clients, sometimes after years of service.
“My job just stopped like that,” the organization of 16,000 Spanish-speaking housekeepers, nannies, and home aides
“80% of respondents with a high volume of work (more than 10 jobs per week)
either had no work for the following week, or
had lost at least half of their jobs for the following week,”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/202...tail=emaildkre
$450B to BigFinance, no strings attached, in total secrecy
Boutons, your math is all ed up there. Fake news
Macho Man, show "your" numbers, or S T F U
Bouton's can't do simple math? 320,000,000 X 18,000 = Five Trillion Seven Hundred Sixty Billion.
The Plan Is to Save Capital and Let the People Die
Whether Americans know it or not, their government is not working for them. Their government is working on behalf of capital.
Humans are now a mere second-order, instrumental factor to be considered based on how it affects capital.
if you had an entirely different goal: protecting capital.
What would you do then?
you would prioritize the health of corporate balance sheets, rather than human bodies.
You would keep the healthcare industry, now booming, in private hands;
you would stimulate consumer demand via unemployment benefits,
rather than by keeping workers on existing payrolls,
in order to create an enormous pool of cheap and desperate labor;
you would pursue tax cuts for the investor class;
you would welcome the opportunity to allow debt to pile up on individuals;
and you wouldn’t be too sad about small businesses going bankrupt—they are, after all, just ceding market share to bigger, richer businesses.
You would use this crisis to create a greater, not lesser, concentration of wealth.
You would emerge on the other side with more, not less, inequality.
The truth is, it would be easy.
the U.S. federal government is doing?
It is allowing the unemployment rate to skyrocket, as tens of millions of workers are fired;
it is allowing countless small businesses to go bankrupt, from incompetence and neglect;
it has not even considered a national suspension of rent,
nor a strong national policy of paid sick leave,
much less a national system of free public healthcare;
as millions of needy people struggle with decrepit and broken state unemployment systems and
wait weeks or months for their emergency checks to come, and
essential workers are forced to agitate or walk out to gain hazard pay,
the administration plots a new bill featuring a capital gains tax cut and
“a waiver that would clear businesses of liability from employees who contract the coronavirus on the job.”
In real wars, we have higher taxes on the rich.
This time, we are giving investors a tax cut.
Their government is working on behalf of capital.
Humans are now a mere second-order, instrumental factor
to be considered based on how it affects capital.
capital must be protected and nurtured, and
we must draw resources from our entire society in order to help capital survive,
People can be sacrificed—capital is irreplaceable.
We are navigating our way through this so that capital comes out okay on the other side.
we are choosing this approach, rather than an approach that prioritizes human life.
They will die because we did not dedicate resources before this pandemic to building an adequate system of public health care, and
they will die because we made the decision during this pandemic to put the needs of capital first.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/09/plan-save-capital-and-let-people-die
Kushner Cos. Gets $800 Million Federally Backed Apartment Loan
has received about $800 million in federally backed debt to buy apartments in Maryland and Virginia --
the company’s biggest purchase in a decade.
The loan was issued by Berkadia, a lender co-owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Jefferies Financial Group Inc., in a deal that’s backed by government-owned Freddie Mac,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...af8vNE5BmsUj3o
So? They are in the real estate business. It's a legitimate mortgage loan just like when your momma bought the singlewide.
I'm old enough to remember when avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest was a political scruple. Normatively observed, you might say.
The conservative talking point for apparent conflicts now seems to be "so what? It isn't illegal or anything."
Yanis Varoufakis glosses the EU bailout of Italy as an austerity squeeze
Sound off: why should we bail out cruise lines but not the USPS?
What's the good civics rationale for 86ing the USPS?
I don't see the founding fathers Cons utional scholars here defending the USPS either, tbh... kinda weird.
It's a two fer: if the USPS.is allowed.to "go out of business", vote by mail becomes impracticable, suppressing turnout in November.
Might also be a great opportunity for politically well connected companies.
The USPS is an anachronism. The Cons ution is a living do ent and needs to change with the times.
Interesting article about Andrew Jackson, the USPS and the war against the Bank of the US.
http://werehistory.org/a-vast-politi...-the-bank-war/The founding generation of politicians who authored the legislation of 1792 that created the Post Office firmly believed that a healthy republic depended on an informed citizenry, so they subsidized the circulation of newspapers through the mail below cost. Editors and members of Congress, through the franking privilege, could send newspapers through the mail for free. Individuals could mail newspapers for less than two cents.
Funny this turned into a USPS thread. They could eliminate the junk mail and deliver to everyone once a week with 1/5th the overhead and still be fine. Get the out of package delivery. UPS and FedEx can do just fine on packages. All they are doing is subsidizing amazon to justify their existence.
just charge Amazon and everyone else more.
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