Debt Rattle April 25 2020
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Jack Delano “Untitled” near Durham, North Carolina 1940 • Wuhan Was The Fentanyl Capital Of The World. Then Coronavirus Hit (LAT) • ‘Wuhan Plag
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle April 25 2020]Jack Delano “Untitled” near Durham, North Carolina 1940
I like that picture. Everybody happy to pose for Jack.
Do they know, or even suspect, what’s coming…Celina Lin:
What a great way to explain futures contracts…
…and negative oil prices… 😉fluff
news
cut and paste
Trump.
I remember when I believed that the “reporters” job was to investigate and find news to report to the poor ignorant rif-raf
There is certainly a diversity of viewpoints here, but also some glue that holds us together. And our shared perspective is certainly at odds with the establishment narrative, which is nonstop mind- and soul-destroying propaganda. The more we can do to expedite the natural demise of this corrupt system, the better. This is our duty. Can we agree on a blueprint of 95 theses to nail to the door?
Just a nit, but Mountrail County is in northwestern North Dakota, not South Dakota. It’s 300 or so miles from the SD hotspot in Sioux Falls, SD.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2020/04/crowning-achievements.html
There has never been a successful vaccine for any coronavirus in all of human history, and now that scientists have discovered approximately 30 different strains of the virus that will just make the task of trying to develop a vaccine even more complicated.
Sadly, the reality of the matter is that this virus is going to be with us for a very long time to come. Eventually herd immunity will hopefully be achieved, but until then a lot of people are going to get sick and a lot of people are going to die.
And fear of this virus is going to be with us for a long time to come as well, and that is going to paralyze our economy whether there are lockdowns or not.
The bottom line is that this virus is not going to be stopped, and the economic collapse that has now begun is not going to be stopped either.The Facts That Prove That Almost Everyone Is Wrong About This Coronavirus Pandemic
Clif sends this article, which looks at the propaganda-narrative war between the US and China about the origin of this viral plague, and where the blame might be assigned. This is a battleground for global hearts and minds between an aging empire, and a much older, but rising empire. (Are there any other options I can have?)
The political and media class in the United States is doing all it can to inculcate the public with the idea that China is to blame for Covid-19. With over forty thousand Americans dead from the virus, this narrative has tremendous propaganda power. But the more information is revealed about the details surrounding the origins of the virus, the more vulnerable Washington’s narrative becomes.
https://medium.com/@rainershea612/uncomfortable-questions-are-going-to-keep-coming-up-about-americas-role-in-spreading-covid-19-5dc5466b508bReferenced in that article is this article, Last Man Standing, from a month ago, which makes the case that the current global pandemic, first apparent to us in Wuhan, in January, was seeded there by American military participants in the global military game in Wuhan. Some of the Americans got really sick with something, had to be hospitalized and couldn’t compete in their events. Could have been coronavirus, as we look back.
The soldiers stayed in a hotel near the wet-market, and trained near Ft Detrick, Maryland.
Enticing circumstantial evidence. There’s more.
https://www.unz.com/article/last-man-standing/David Stockman: (He’s 73 years old, and I’m not taking-his-side, but presenting it.)
I think for once, Donald Trump was right when he worried out loud the other day that the cure may be far worse than the disease.
Governors – mostly Democratic governors and mayors of major areas of the country – have imposed Lockdown Nation. It’s a complete economic disaster.
It’s a wrong policy from a public health point of view and an economic point of view.
It is hitting, like a ton of bricks, a highly fragile and vulnerable economy that was living hand to mouth anyway because of the kind of highly counterproductive monetary and fiscal policies and debt build-up we’ve had over the last 30 years.
If you look at the data for New York—which is the epicenter of the whole COVID-19 pandemic—it is abundantly clear that COVID is not some kind of latter-day Black Death plague that takes down the young, the old, the healthy, the sick, and everyone in between.
It is a kind of super winter flu that strikes fatally, almost entirely, the elderly population that is already afflicted with many life-threatening medical conditions—or what the technicians call comorbidities.
The shutdown, which I call the “plenary lockdown policy,” is wrong. Closing all the businesses except a tiny, arbitrary set of essential operations is courting disaster for no good reason...
For those under 50 years of age in the state of New York, the death rate is slightly under 5 per 100,000.
That isn’t a disaster. That isn’t a plague or a calamity.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/ripple-effects-government-lockdown-are-only-starting-take-shapeMICHAEL HUDSON:
Just think of when, in the debates with Bernie Sanders during the spring, you had Biden, and Klobuchar keep saying, ‘What we’re paying for Medicare-for-All will be $1 trillion over 10 years.’
Well here the Fed can create $1.5 trillion in one week just to buy stocks.
Why is it okay for the Fed to create $1.5 trillion to buy stocks to prevent rich people from losing on their stocks, when it’s not okay to print only $1 trillion to pay for free Medicare for the entire population? This is crazy!
The idea that only the rich should be allowed to print money for themselves, but the government should not be allowed to print money for any public purpose, any social purpose — not for medicine, not for schools, not for personal budgets, not for full employment — but only to give to the 1 percent. People hesitate to think that.
They think, ‘It can’t possibly be this bad.’ But those of us who have worked on Wall Street, for 50, 60 years in my case, that’s what the numbers show.
And that’s why you don’t have the media talking about actual numbers. They talk about, you know, just words, and they use euphemisms, and it’s the kind of Orwellian vocabulary, describing an inside-out world that they’re talking about.“In the US, the number of deaths passed 50k on Friday while the case total passed 900k early Saturday, leaving the country well on the way to the 1 million case mark. The US would be the first country to report 1 million confirmed cases. “
Don’t listen to Trump.
The country with the lowest numbers is number one.
vicod19 attacking all the care homes in the world by the workers
Show me the data, study, to prove that the care homes were infected by the workers working in multiple care homes.
In the USA Patient zero was a senior, in a care home on the west coast. Make the link to all the care homes across Canada and USA.
I don’t think that was even possible, probable or feasible for vicod-19 to have infected the weak people, in all the care homes in the world, in any pattern you could draw.“Randy George had never laid anyone off in his 20 years running his bakery and café in Middlesex, Vermont…He’s had to put 28 of the staff of Red Hen Baking Co. on furlough.”
That’s our favorite bread about 10 miles from here, and there is not as much of it available as pre-pandemic.For the sake of you all letting me get through this comment to it’s conclusion before dismissing me out of hand as a pontificating ivory tower philosopher, let’s just stipulate upfront that we ARE now in a situation that poses a significant threat to our lives and/or well being in one way or another.
In any disaster that’s serious enough to significantly threaten your life there are just TWO immediate objectives:
#1. Do whatever it takes to remain alive. If there is mortal danger, then don’t fall victim. Don’t get dead. If it’s a false alarm then make your call on whether it is or not and proceed accordingly. In either case, you HAVE TO BE ALIVE in order to move on to the next vitally important step.
#2. Do whatever it takes to prevent this sort of shit from ever happening to you again.
Now there is one additional major point to make, which is also painfully simple (although not at all obvious) and that is the plain fact that . . .
. . . those places (or systems) that come through the crisis with the least amount of damage are going to have a distinct advantage (at least temporarily) over those people that get the stuffings kicked out of them. ( example: New York and Washington had a much nicer 1946 than Berlin and Hiroshima.)
If you need or want to know what is going to happen next in this house of mirrors then look to those places (and systems) that are traversing and emerging from the crisis in relatively undamaged condition. These places are simply the ‘who/what/where’ that they are, and probably NOT AT ALL WHO YOU EXPECTED.
Senegal, Africa, for example. https://youtu.be/tqKBNQzEROc
And why are these TYPES of enclaves of reason the right places to look for role models and crystal ball into the future? Because they are the ones best applying objectives #1 and #2 (above.)
I can tell you with extremely high probability (i.e. 100%) that having just been through a more or less existential threat to existence EVERYBODY is going to do their damnedest to make sure nothing like this ever happens to them again. If the Covid 19 debacle was any kind of serious then you can bet the farm that the people who emerge from are going to be even MORE serious. No more bullshit.
They are going to at least TRY do whatever it takes to never have a replay of this pandemic, or any similar threat to their physical and financial health. Those two objectives SHALL be the narrow focus of everybody’s actions going forward, and until further notice.
I strongly recommend RE-examining the information and projections and solutions in terms of the above facts. Is the WHO a dead monster walking (thus safely now ignored) or does it require a proactive coups de grace? Is electro-finance (as per usual) going to recover or is the smart money moving into local agriculture and cottage industry?
The answers to both questions is already out there, in usually overlooked places. Heads up.
D Benton Smith
Now there is one additional major point to make ….
the smart money moving ….I would think that “we” at TAE have the smart but our actions are limited by the amount of money that we have to set up our “safe zone”.
(oppps! Also limited by our age, and health)This will get down into the rocks of why we are ruled by a minority.
Okay, we print $1T, $10T for health care. What then? One, it goes passthrough to the exact same billionaires who hijacked and killed our former semi-capitalist system from the 80s. That’s why they wrote ACA, why prices rose 10%pa for 10 years before and after, and why their stocks spiked when it passed. So you wouldn’t be providing health care, you be providing free profits. Which is the same as now, but without a fake pizzeria out front for the organized crime money laundering all the policemen know about. Considering what health care has been doing since 1990, that may even be more efficient. I’ve never seen anyone waste resources like they do.
But more important, if they did print money, bail out, ACTUAL health care, or ACTUAL people, those small individual people would immediately trade for resources. That is, time, bandages, medicines, lawn mowers, roof shingles, and as those people get paid, everything else: steak dinners, nice dresses, Mexican vacations, heavy shoes… What does that mean? $10T in INFLATION. So?
So if you hand $10T, or most of it, to a few insiders like Zuck and Bezos and Gates, they DO NOT BUY anything. They hoard it and use the added leverage to tell people what to do. Like kill themselves by the thousands in Gates and Bezos’ case. NO inflation. = System goes on and does not die. = No one is mad, or at least not as mad as if you HAD destroyed the system like Argentina.
This is why you can only bail out the few and not the many. Because if you bailed out the many with the many, you’d have pulled yourself up by your own ankles. Bailouts, governments, billionaires, can ONLY ever TAKE money from the majority and give it to their own minority selves. With a slick con job over top. How could everyone take from everyone and everyone get rich? If we did that it would be free trade and a voluntary market, that is, capitalism. Least-bad, least-expensive, most efficient, and what they can’t stand, not controlled, chaotic and unorganized as the people it’s made of.
So of course the point is well-taken: it’s about priorities. We buy real military goods and suffer the real inflation and loss that creates. That’s literally what Eisenhower’s speech was about, and about the danger of this EXACT minority, a secret one according to Kennedy, that would do this, extract from the majority for their own power and to our own destruction, perhaps total. All I’m adding is the technical reason of why it can only happen in one direction, which is why you can never set up a system of government redistribution since it MUST and can ONLY be used this way. And that recommends therefore smaller governments that do NOT print money for health care because not only won’t they, they mathematically can’t. 2nd law of thermodynamics. No free lunch. Europe you say? Which only pays high services with very high taxes, and only because they use our multi-billion military force for free.
So as they print $10T (already) it will again double over every time period, so $20T by June, $40T by December and so on until that money finally reaches the people, which is the only place this black hole of compounding debt could actually ‘repair’ the economy. When it does, we will have all that backlog of inflation, and the system will stop because they broke the only rule: money can only be redistributed FROM the poor. Bailouts can only be for the few, the rich. But it needed to end and I’m not sorry to see it go. This lesson that everyone cannot live at everybody else’s expense and that we live and eat through work, are only the best possible reasons to turn.
Maybe then we can all work, all get the fruits of our labors, and all understand that no one prospers by theft. Til we do it all over again.
zerosum
There is certainly a lot of smart in the TAE cohort , but I suspect a lot of years as well. I, for one, am definitely a geezer (72).
Advanced age changes both perspective and skin in the game, both of which then necessarily change the strategy. My strategy is unavoidably different than the strategy of a young couple with toddlers (and on top of that my own life has been so extremely unconventional that it’s utterly unusable as a model for anyone .) Some of the specific skills acquired, however, are very much applicable by anyone at any time.
Foremost among the implements in this modest tool bag is the certain knowledge that the present moment (and all of its conditions) are the absolutely inevitable consequence of previous actions by someone or other. In other words, you can’t change the past. But being totally honest about what the past really was can help direct the little bit of power we have to shape the present ( and the future consequence of the things we do in shaping the present with some goal in mind.)
If there is a present lack of resources like time, money, possessions or mobility to achieve an immediately desired objective then that is just a fact. And that fact is the consequence of earlier actions by self and others. It’s worth noting, too, that no matter where someone is on the scale of ‘have and have not’ there will still be the feeling of lacking resources needed to get some particular wanted thing’
All you can do then (in fact all any of us can do, at any time ) is to recalculate the problem into terms of “what must I achieve that is within the capacity of the resources which I either have now or can get my hands on in time to help.”
The bitter irony is that this problem is the SAME problem faced by both Bill Gates, and the Ethiopian herdsman who is one goat away from death by starvation.
Sure wish I could paint a kinder picture of the clockwork we live in, but to the absolute best of my knowledge the only bright spot is that we demonstrably do have awareness and free will. With them we not only will but shall do the best we can with what we’ve got.
An example of something along the line of DBS’s two objectives and smart responses….
Viet Nam
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/coronavirus-vietnam-quarantine-mobilization/
“The soldiers stayed in a hotel near the wet-market, and trained near Ft Detrick, Maryland.”
US to blame? What advantage does a military contingent offer in an intentional virus release, that an agent posing as obscure tourist can’t accomplish leaving little to trace/blame. And if carried there because of an accidental release by a US lab, I would have expected rest home wipe-out in the US far in advance of the January “discovery”.
Rather, the games offered a rather unique distribution opportunity to infect the military personnel of the world. Who had the most to gain? Should we expect a surprise military action in the next few weeks? They would be the guilty party.@ Dr.D
I get what you are saying about only being able to redistribute from the poor to the rich, but it’s just not so.
Marx explained that laborers must be included in the market as the market, by getting a significant amount of the excess production of their labor, not-merely-the-minimum-to-survive.
Michael Hudson really does know what the world looks like from the control-panel of the panopticon.
He repeats himself constantly, but it’s still ok to listen to what he says, even just once.
Caitlin Johnstone has a really good presentation today, about being born into humanity.
“We talk a lot about politics and revolution in this space, but in reality what we’re really waiting for is humanity’s birth from its second womb. For the human species to drastically shift from its second-womb relationship with mental narrative, wherein it can always be propagandized toward self-destructive behavior, into a relationship where thought is no longer a story to be compulsively believed but a tool to be used freely to create beautiful things.”Karl Marx was doing just fine until he got to the part about proposing solutions. His solutions are hog wash just on the face of it, and truly insane if you care to drill down.
So, I guess you could say with some fairness that he was HALF right. He was only thinking about HALF of the paradigm, so it’s no surprise that he only came up with HALF the answer.He was, in other words, not too much better or worse than the rest of us : a halfwit
Regarding Dr D’s warnings about inflation resulting if something like “Medicare for All” was set up in the USA, I’d like to point out…
“Today, the United States spends more than $3.2 trillion a year on health care… At $10,000 per person, the United States spends far more on health care per capita and as a percentage of GDP than any other country on earth in both the public and private sectors while still leaving 28 million Americans uninsured and millions more under-insured.” [according to Bernie Sanders]
So if these large amounts of money are already being spent, how can making the system more efficient (cutting out the insurance company middleman profits and negotiating drug prices down) be necessarily inflationary?
TECHNO-TYRANNY: HOW THE US NATIONAL SECURITY STATE IS USING CORONAVIRUS TO FULFILL AN ORWELLIAN VISION
This is a Whitney Webb article from over at The Last American Vagabond. I consider her so good that I wonder why she’s still alive.
The Subsidy Effect: If widgets cost 10 and you have to have one and the government subsidizes them at 10, then widgets soon cost 20. Hyper-wealthy people benevolently petition the government to raise the subsidy to 20- hell, 30, 40, 100. Instant inflation.
A real economy is labor producing output- food, widgets, services, infrastructure, art, tech, science, entertainment, etc. Labor ought to be THE asset in a real economy. Labor makes something and sells it to someone who uses that capital (NOT necessary, but highly convenient- barter works, too) to buy something someone else made, etc.
I read that data is the new oil. Check out the government report Webb highlights. Be very afraid.Get rid of the [every expletive I can think of] “smart”phone.
“why she’s still alive”
An rotten choice of words on my part- may the gods of journalism keep her safe.“…. to raise the subsidy to 20- hell, 30, 40, 100. Instant inflation.”
IT’S TOO LATE!
If the wages are not raise to be greater than inflation, then too many people/customers cannot afford the product.
FORD had the right idea but the rich business men were afraid to do the same. Therefore, that possible social/economic structure died at birth.My Parents Said Know
That’s okay because we knew what you meant. Like my Dad used to say, “Take me by what I mean, not by what I misspell”.
Whitney is a world class world treasure investigator, and obviously ain’t skeered.
The more we can do to expedite the natural demise of this corrupt system, the better. This is our duty. Can we agree on a blueprint of 95 theses to nail to the door?
I’ve been in for 17 years; go for it… 😉
Come to think of it: they’ve been doing a splendid job of self destruction all by themselves…
I’d be at a loss on how to do it any better… or faster. 😉A Lesson on the value of Time and Money.
Working in Africa, I once naively asked an native African why he didn’t work harder?
In broken English, he replied, “Little money, little work”!
It hit me like a bolt of lightning, but I grasped instantly what he meant!
If he worked harder, he then needed to consume more food! The amount of money he received didn’t allow him to buy more food.
I soon realized from further experiences, nothing happened quickly in Africa.
If you wanted to make something happen quickly, you had to pay!
Thus time is money.
I had the money. They had the time!
I had a choice!
I could trade money for time or not!
I have never forgotten this lesson!
Today, for the first time up here in Toronto this spring, I broke quarantine and spent several hours raking dead leaves in my backyard, trapped last fall by the arrival of winter snow.
It was a nice sunny balmy 13 degrees Celsius or 55 degrees Fahrenheit outside!
Sad to say, the exercise proved what a couch potato I am!
Another unexpected surprise this weekend is my wife and I are finally free to talk to each other again!
Ever since my daughter came home, from her coronavirus closed university, we have had to be as quiet as mice, so as not to disturb my daughter studying for and writing her final exams online.
My wife has a quick temper, and so does my daughter! I wonder where she got that from! Not wanting to be the jam between two slices of bread, I naturally try not to get caught in the middle!
My wife is also rather forgetful, so she would start trying to talk to me in the kitchen where I hang out as the family’s short order cook! My daughter would then get mad at my wife for making too much noise!
(My daughter tolerates me better simply because I feed her!)
It also doesn’t help that my deaf wife likes to talk without her hearing aids on! That means she tends to shout rather than talk! Now you see why my hearing daughter gets upset so easily!
Oh, yes I almost forgot! The reason we can finally talk again, is my daughter wrote her final exam last night! Hurray!
Thank God for small mercies!
Again I am with DBS. I think it really is time to muster the will to action. Analysis is good but you can always judge what is going on not by what someone says but by what they do. If you aren’t doing anything then you are just talking. Put plans to work!
I have, for a long time thought to myself – don’t take life too seriously and pay attention to what Jesus and Buddha are saying regarding illusion and peace of mind – but act as if no one will save your wretched body and life but yourself. Like Dr D is always bangin’ on about – war lords and rich bastards are always looking at a dynamic model of accumulation – and what we have and are is what they are trying always, and with insane determination, to accumulate. Fuck em. I don’t want everything but I want time to laugh, healthy children, clean water and food and the right to access land.
This is why the crossroads of Permaculture and TAE have been where I stop and take stock. Also why the chinese art of war strategy works best for me (I don’t have Assange’s courage or brain) “Stoop to Conquer”. Keep a low profile my good friends – don’t ruffle too many feathers but don’t give anymore away than you have to in work, time, assets and labour.
They want your money and stuff – so earn as little as you can. They are not yet costing to come in with bulldozers to rip out your nut trees or soil. They want you to always need them too. Turds. So build your house with mud and straw or sticks or rocks. What ever is on site. I’m preaching to the converted so maybe I sound like a talker but this week I planted about 70 trees for customers and then came home to dig trenches by hand through rocky hard soil with a mattock to install irrigation main line for our 22,500 litre water tank. Infrastructure I own. No fluctuating prices. Pay as you go where ever possible and regard debt as last resort very carefully managed.
Rambling but pumped. For this 48 year old to have had to good fortune to read and interpret the combined intelligence and analysis of this crowd is humbling. Also V Arnold and DBS – kiss and make up (please). They are just opinions/thoughts and none of us are that special.Karl Marx in person.
In 1983, I got to see, first hand, how the Russians pulled themselves up by their bootstraps!
Well, first of all their boots didn’t have any straps. At least not in Siberia!
Maybe if they had tried pulling up on their ankles, it might have worked better?
Carl Marx’s solutions did not take into account basic human nature.
You see in Russia, everyone was waiting for the other guy to do the heavy lifting to get to worker’s utopia!
The problem was the other guy was waiting for them to do the heavy lifting!
So nobody was doing any lifting, heavy or not!
Since they all worked for the government, nobody could be held responsible!
If from drinking the Kool-Aid, you foolishly insisted upon working, the rest of your co-workers would soon make you stop, one way or another, because you would make them look bad!
Doesn’t that sound pretty much like how our government doesn’t works?
Oxymoron:
I think what you are trying to say is called a state of confusion!
If you listen to what a person says and then watch what they do, this creates a state of confusion because they don’t match!
Naturally, to undo this state of confusion, you just watch what they do, and ignore what they say!
Trudope says don’t go to the cottage! Trudope goes to his cottage.
I am going to my cottage!
See, I am not confused at all!
I’ve learned that I can’t oppose the system- I must go skew.
My fear, it doth envelop me
‘Til what I fear is all I see.
I turn my eyes to what is real-
Then none can manage how I feel.V Arnold:
Glad to see you have kept your sense of humor!
I left the rat race 19 years ago, so 2 years ahead of you!
Mind you, I probably got a head start at the ripe old age of 47!
The usual cycle of life goes something like this: You are born, you grow up, you go to school, you get a job, as you gain work experience supposedly you move up the ladder until you reach your level of incompetence, then your grow old, then you retire, then in your golden years you lose your marbles before regressing to your childhood, then you end up in a nursing home, then you die. These days of the coronavirus, of course!
So, you start life being a dependent child and end your life being a dependent child.
Because I never reached my peak, I got an early start, regressing toward my second childhood!
I have certainly lost all of my marbles! However, I still have a few lose screws!
So now you know how I got an earlier start, regressing to my childhood, than most folks!
My parent said know:
You just need to pretend to go along!
Russian saying about communism: We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us!
After 70 years, it worked!
WES
Watch what they do – ignore what they say.Now I know why I am slow at picking up the threads of truth – I still hope that what bubbles out the mouth means something….
Oxymoron:
For 70 years the Russians watched their leaders and ignored what they said!
Nothing got done!
The rest is history!
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