Coop Scoop Dec 4: The Let' Em Eat Cake Edition
The Coop Scoop: The Let' Em Eat Cake Edition
Issue #49
December 3-4, 2020
The American political class, both Republicans and Democrats, are generally as blind or at least indifferent to the failures of our own economic and political system as the Soviet leadership was about the ground reality of communism.
On the other hand, from my own experience, I think the Russian people were much more realistic – in private—about those failures than most Americans are about their own. Capitalism remains our civic religion no matter what its costs.
It’s not an accident that every day, without fail, indeed evcry minute of the day on cable news, we are feted with the latest stock market numbers that really mean very little for most of the population outside the investor class. We NEVER see a perpetual broadcast ticker on the unemployment rate, the savings rate, housing and medical costs, or any other economic indicator that affects the other 90% of the population.
Our “economic news” is basically the daily S&P. Much like the Soviets who would publicly celebrate a massive wheat harvest while ignoring the penury that surrounded many Russians.
As we approach the worst of the pandemic, both medically and economically, the ossified US senate, symbolized by Chief Mummy McConnell, has finally decided to S_L_O_W_L_Y rouse itself and do something aimed at relieving a beleaguered population.
There’s only a few days to go before congress goes on vacation and after five long months of inaction, the Republican-led Senate has decided to get off its duff and begrudgingly throw a few crumbs out to the population before Christmas. And I do mean crumbs, crumbs that the Democrats are signing on to. In fairness, they may have little choice but to bend to a compromise that Mitch the Bitch will agree to. But I soundly and loudly criticize the Democrats for their failure to sufficiently mobilize ordinary Americans around this issue and for buckling too easily.
The situation the American people face can be categorized only as extremely grave, apart from the happy talk about a Dow 35,000 or “an ongoing recovery.”
Really? We are experiencing a recovery? We are economically recovering as the COVID-19 pandemic busts all constraints and kills 3200 people just yesterday (more than on 9/11 or on Pearl Harbor)? We are recovering as the biggest state in the union was forced today into a draconian shut down because there are still too many assholes running around without masks? We are recovering as joblessness begins to rise rather dramatically again to around 800,000 new claims a month? And all the projections for the virus over the next two months are apocalyptic? Can you really recover during Armageddon?
This is like saying, a day after the bombing of Hiroshima, that when the first resident crawled out from under the rubble and found some food, the Hiroshima Recovery was beginning! I don’t think so.
The covid death toll is currently two to three times higher than Hiroshima. And the most credible epidemiologists project as many as 750,000 COVID deaths by the end of summer – even with the vaccine.
More than a recovery, it feels like we are living in a months’ long sequel of that chilling 1959 anti-nuclear film On The Beach (if you have never seen it, watch it. But only after the pandemic dissipates).
We need some politicians, obviously Democrats, who speak the hard truths to the nation. We are NOT in a recovery. We are in a grave national emergency that requires extraordinary measures to save our people and our nation from further decline and degradation.
Consider:
Americans are not “food insecure” – an antiseptic and ultimately cruel phrase that should be banned. Nope. Americans are fucking HUNGRY.
Listen up, more than 1 in 4 families in America with children now report they are going hungry, they do not have enough food. That’s why you see those interminable lines at food banks. That’s why every Sunday night, my working class neighbors and I can hear other neighbors rummaging through our trash cans for whatever can be salvaged. And the level of American hunger is the highest in several decades.
An estimated 12 million Americans are slated to lose their unemployment insurance the day after Xmas (who wrote THAT into the original bill?). This dark reality is one that its recipients have been bracing for over the last few months. Just noting, that people who get dumped off unemployment at a time when unemployment is around 8% or more usually remain unemployed and with no income.
Sorry to bum you out but there’s more. Around seven million households, totaling 19 million people will either lose their homes or be evicted at the end of December as emergency protection sunsets. This equals the dislocation created by the sub prime housing crash of 2008.
It’s in this context where a responsible government would take unprecedented emergency measures far far outside the usual niggardly government solutions. This is where we could use – even on a temporary basis – a universal basic income for every American. This is where a universal housing subsidy would come into play. Along with emergency single payer health care. Instead, to our great national embarrassment, more than 7 million people have LOST their health insurance during the pandemic. I doubt they are “recovering.”
Have you noticed that, historically, government relief programs are always more than a dollar short?
Social Security needs to be defended but it’s impossible for most to live on.
Medicare is a relief, but it only pays 80% of medical bills that we know can be astronomic.
Bill Clinton’s ballyhooed American service program was supposed to be universal and wound up including, what? A 100,000 only.
Obamacare was a big step forward and several steps short of universal care (like 30 million short).
During this pandemic, the CARES Act, passed in May, bailed out as many big businesses as did small ones and its last fading effects are in play as I write.
Now, very very late, thanks again to McConnell & Co. not giving a shit, comes a $908b “bipartisan” COVID relief and stimulus measure that both parties have now agreed to negotiate to a bill sometime in the next few days. And, as could be predicted, it is the usual sort of routine “bailout” that falls short and kicks the can down a very diseased road.
Back in the summer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi started proposing a more robust $3.4 trillion package that went on to die in Mitch’s Senate graveyard. In August, when asked what number Pelosi would eventually settle for, she said. “Yeah. $3.4 trillion”). I guess she changed her mind.
All along and right up through today, Senate Republicans are using the good old standby of not wanting to run up deficits in order to defend their position.
How soon they forgot that their own president ran up a record deficit with their collaboration. Or more to the point, they ignore the central fact that God invented deficits precisely for this sort of existential national emergency.
That both parties this week are approving another ridiculously over-the-top military budget north of $700b is not even discussed or debated in polite company.
Earlier this week McConnell came up with his own counter-proposal, an insulting and bare bones $500b bill that omitted any additional economic aid for the unemployed. To say it was DOA is an understatement.
In its wake, the pending $908b proposal was cooked up a handful of days ago by Joe Manchin (D-WV), quite literally the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, along with a sprinkling of some of the less rabid Republican members.
As more Republicans began to drift toward this bill, so did the Democratic leadership. And the White House of Death also threw in a few words of encouragement.
“I think we are getting very close. I want it to happen,” Mad King Donald told reporters.
McConnell and Pelosi also met face to face for this first time since the election to discuss this bill and an overall government funding measure due by next Tuesday. “We had a good conversation,” Mitch said after his discussion with Pelosi. "I think we’re both interested in getting an outcome, both on the [spending bill] and on a coronavirus package.”
The bill as it stands, and it could change, provides another $300b in aid to small businesses, $160b for state and local governments, extends unemployment at a miserly level of $300 a week, and according to the Washington Post, devotes “tens of billions of dollars to other priorities, such as childcare, hunger, and vaccine distribution.”
Missing from this measure are any stimulus checks or relief for the working poor. The people are not worthy.
Those who are worthy are businesses and corporations. They would be bestowed a shield against any liability resulting from coronavirus lawsuits. After all, according to our civic religion, business owners are the most equal of all comrades.
All along, Pelosi has been saying Democrats would refuse this shield and refuse any package that did not include stimulus checks. We’ll see in the next few days if she meant it.
The most important takeaway we can get from this moment is that happy talk will get us nowhere. Yes, the vaccine is coming and I will have no problem getting one, ASAP.
That is no reason to discount, underplay, sugar-coat, or waffle about our current fix and its short and long term knock on effects. If the Democrats fill the tall order of winning both Georgia senate seats on January 5 then there is a possibility, I repeat, a possibility that more substantial relief can be enacted. That’s so long as Democrats like Manchin don’t balk.
As I’m writing this, I see a flash from CNN. Biden says he will ASK all Americans to wear masks during the first 100 days of his administration. This, of course, is the same advice we’ve heard from experts for the last 9 months and Biden saying it will make zero difference.
Hopefully, between now and January, Biden and his pals can think of something more creative and effective than “asking” as one American is dying every 30 seconds from COVID. +++
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