[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
I went shopping at the local Costco yesterday and got immensely discouraged, all the cleaning products, paper towels and toilet paper had been stripped. Oh my god it’s happening again, the covid-19 panic is on, cases are surging everywhere, businesses are closing down, Thanksgiving ruined with stay-at-home orders.
A long slow dread crept upon me and surely among many others that the Spring ordeal of shutdown had been simply wasted, that funhouse was merely a slight introduction to the real horror show that’s about to engulf us: a restaurant industry smashed and giving up, hospitals overrun and stuffed with dying patients that’s killing and crushing our health care corps, rampant unemployment everywhere.
As we all know the President is totally absent in any effort whatsoever to ameliorate this, the country is careening and smashing toward a total healthcare nightmare and right this second a headline at the Washington Post is Trump uses power of presidency to try to overturn the election.
That absolute screamer of a civic horror show is just a background, amazingly, to another roaring crisis, our American economy, another headline is Mnuchin cuts off Fed’s emergency aid programs, sparking rare rebuke.
Not only are the childish petulant whiners in the White House letting the CARES act expire, they’re letting the Fed’s stimulus tools go too. This is beyond lunacy with a covid-19 crisis revving up to an unimaginable pitch of misery, any outsider looking on would have to conclude it’s possible Trump and Mnuchin are deliberately sabotaging the economy, it’s that stupid and destructive.
One of the most painful and exasperating elements of Election 2020 for liberal writers was that our lying felon President always polled better than President-elect Biden on handling the economy. Put aside the absolute present economic stupidity and just look at the incredible mess Obama and Biden inherited from Bush and Trump, Republicans are terrible at managing the economy.
One supposes a general naïve public view that what’s good for American business must be good for America, and since Republicans are the slavish lapdog darlings to American business they must know what they’re doing. Also, too, many Americans hate labor and their demands for real wages, it’s good to keep the Republicans in charge to keep labor down.
Whatever the cause this beyond-ridiculous reputation that Republicans are good for business and the economy really needs to end, they’re clueless and keep smashing the economy to crisis for Democratic presidents to clean up.
That is a complete, total obvious truth that leaves Democrats miserable as a corporate journalism corps ignores it and reports on the markets every day, not the unemployment rate. Of course liberals make the argument the macro numbers for alleged economy health lead to the yawning, awful inequality and terrible wages we have today, even in the alleged good Republican times it still left scraps and crumbs for the little people.
Be that as it may on this fine day, November 20th 2020 the American economy is teetering on the brink of an abyss of catastrophic consequences if no Federal stimulus arrives for unemployment, States and small business, as with covid-19 if nothing is done the Spring was just a puny intro to the smashing devastation awaiting us.
Amazingly the Federal Reserve has done its part in furiously ringing the bell of unholy alarm that this lunacy cannot continue, consumer confidence and spending will be smashed in a matter of weeks with no covid-19 leadership.
Within an hour’s drive of my little house are the titans of the new information economy—Apple, Cisco, Symantec, Oracle, Juniper Networks. I implore will all my humility and earnestness to the CEO’s of Silicon Valley to start making calls for the Feds to pass stimulus, I know you’ve tried in the past, please try again.
United States Chamber of Commerce, I know too you’ve done what you can to exert stimulus legislation, please try again and beg with those clueless Republicans that are somehow supposed to be good for business another freaking Depression 2021 is on the line if nothing is done.
There are hundreds of amazing economic professors in the California education system. If there’s anything you can do, please try, thank you.
I’d implore the journalism corps to help, but no little person alive trusts them to be anything but infatuated with the markets and their corporate masters.
[opens hands helplessly] I’m sorry, we appear to be in the first days of a roaring economic cyclone of destruction, ruin and misery, Washington cannot respond.