Do You Trust Washington With Your Family's Well-Being?

Nabilah Islam, pictured above, is the most progressive candidate running for the open seat in the GA-07 seat in the suburbs and small towns north of Atlanta. This morning she shared an observation with us: "The House and Senate have had four opportunities to do what is right by the American people. At this point, I have faith in very few members in either chamber to put the American people first. We are on the brink of another great depression. We have 33 million Americans out of work. 90 million Americans uninsured or underinsured and those in the halls of Congress are debating on whether or not to expand COBRA. I've been saying for some time now that we need to be looking at policy proposals like FDR's New Deal. More immediately, we need emergency UBI, rent and mortgage cancellation, student debt cancellation, etc. Long term this is a great opportunity to implement a Green New Deal. It would create jobs with a federal jobs guarantee. Allow us to invest in ourselves and create an opportunity for working people to thrive not just survive. My biggest fear is ushering in the 117th Congress with people who would rather make austerity cuts that take on corporate special interests. That is why we need to fight to elect people like myself and other progressive candidates around the country who are committed to putting Americans first."

If he was a reader, I bet Catherine Rampell would trigger Trump every time the Washington Post published one of her columns. I'm sure that's already the case with Mitch McConnell. Yesterday's, Washington Shows Just Why The Country Shouldn’t Depend On It For Stimulus would have sent him into a screaming tirade. "Washington’s very Washingtonian behavior," she wrote, "has just underscored why a stimulus should not depend on Washington." Like many members of Congress, she thinks automatic economic triggers should determine aid to citizens, not DC finagling.

Last week, on the day the unemployment rate hot 14.7%, Don Beyer (D-VA), vice chair of Congress' Joint Economic Committee, issued a statement:

We have not seen horrible, history-making numbers like these since the Great Depression.

“In two months, almost a decade’s worth of job growth has been wiped out, the unemployment rate has more than quadrupled, and more than 75,000 Americans have died because President Trump did not take seriously multiple early warnings about the global threat of the coronavirus and failed to lead a competent fight against it. This is President Trump’s economic legacy-- cracks in the economy as a result of his trade wars and tax cuts have now split wide open as a result of his ignorance and incompetence.

It could be months before the tens of millions of Americans who have lost their jobs are able to return to work. If we expect them to stay home to stop the spread of the virus, then we need to make sure they can take care of themselves and their loved ones for as long as the public health and economic crises last.

A legislative proposal I introduced this week with Senators Reed and Bennet would extend unemployment benefits until states’ unemployment rates drop to acceptable levels. We should not penalize people for not having a job when there are no jobs to be had. I hope the legislation is included in the next coronavirus relief package.


In her column, Rampell went right to another statement on that same day, one from the White House-- "that those hoping for more help from the feds shouldn’t hold their breath. 'We're in no rush, we're in no rush,' President Trump said Friday. His economic advisers and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) echoed this message. In other words, don’t plan on more aid to states, which are already so strapped for cash that they’re cutting Medicaid during a pandemic. Don’t expect extensions of financial lifelines for jobless workers."



She's speculated that "this is a negotiating ploy to extract concessions from Democrats-- even though red states would suffer from delaying federal aid, too. Whatever the reason, GOP dawdling is the latest reminder that Congress should stop leaving the fate of the economy to the whims of callous, dithering, dilettantish, hostage-taking charlatans, who see every crisis as an opportunity for a shakedown. Instead, build a stimulus system that triggers on (and off) automatically-- based on whatever the economy actually needs, using metrics agreed to in advance."



Economists are generally fans of policies known as “automatic stabilizers,” or programs that ramp up automatically when the economy tanks. For example, as people lose jobs, they become eligible for food stamps or unemployment benefits.



These forms of stimulus kick in without politicians having to debate, and they have huge bang for their buck. Both are useful features in a dysfunctional political system, especially when the country is struck by an unusually bad shock in which a speedy fiscal response is critical.



Unfortunately, our automatic stabilizers were never robust enough. Worse, the Trump administration and state governments have made automatic stabilizers much less automatic and stabilizing by adding red tape and reducing programs’ generosity in recent years.



This has left the country unusually reliant on Washington to devise a rescue program ad hoc during the worst economic crisis in nearly a century.



Congress has passed several rounds of relief, but more is undoubtedly necessary. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that without further stimulus, unemployment will be 9.5 percent at the end of 2021. Goldman Sachs estimates that even with another half-trillion dollars in yet-to-be-proposed fiscal stimulus, unemployment will average “only” 7.2 percent next year.



For now, most of Congress's existing measures are poised to sunset based on somewhat arbitrary deadlines unrelated to economic conditions. Enhanced unemployment benefits, for example, are set to expire July 31, even though the CBO expects the unemployment rate to average 16 percent that quarter.



Of course, nothing would stop Congress from renewing these emergency programs-- except, that is, Congress.

Each time measures come up for renewal, prolonged negotiation is more likely, with politicians exploiting “must-pass” legislation to make crazy, controversial demands. This already happens during debt-ceiling showdowns, the more common congressionally created opportunity for unnecessary crises.



If Trump’s “no rush” comments weren’t sufficient evidence of this risk now, recall that in the aftermath of the Great Recession, authorization for extended unemployment benefits lapsed five times. More recently, the small-business loan program ran out of funds for more than a week. And that was for a program virtually everyone supports, almost immediately after it began.



The next round of stimulus negotiations will be difficult and high-stakes. But it must include relief measures automatically linking stimulus to economic conditions, so that further rounds of negotiations can have lower stakes. Some Democratic lawmakers have proposed plans that would do this. Rep. Don Beyer (VA) and Senators Michael Bennet (CO) and Jack Reed (RI) recently offered a framework for linking enhanced jobless benefits to (duh) the joblessness rate. So did Sen. Ron Wyden (OR).

In these proposals, benefit extensions would automatically turn on while the economy is bad, and-- perhaps as important, at least to budget hawks-- automatically trigger “off” as the economy heals. Lawmakers, of course, can override their “autopilot” settings if they later change their minds.



Fair warning: Trigger-based programs are likely to have big up-front price tags. But they are no more expensive than the cumulative cost of multiple program extensions, such as those enacted after the Great Recession.


They could actually be less expensive, because they’d prevent costly program lapses and restarts. And they’d give states greater certainty around budgeting, and households greater confidence in their ability to pay bills. (Remember when Republicans used to complain about policy uncertainty?)



Most important, we need to minimize the number of desperate American families either party might take hostage. Especially when at least one party appears more than willing to actually destroy those hostages.

One senior Democratic congressman told me that he thinks Rampell's got it wrong. "If the GOP is going to act like callous jackasses," he said, "then you make them pay the price for it, just as Trump/McConnell tried to do with the Payroll Protection Program funding. Also, the trigger concept doesn’t really work here, because this may well be a once-in-a-century depression, not an unpleasant point in the business cycle. It also assumes that the Government has a limitless supply of funds, and in fact it doesn’t. Last month’s federal deficit is more than the annual GDP of Switzerland. Triggers make sense when you have only a demand problem; this is both a demand and a supply problem. Wendy’s is not running out of hamburgers because of a lack of demand, I assure you. At this point, even Keynes would not be a Keynesian. I’m not saying that I would vote against it, but I certainly don’t think that it’s a great idea."

Tom Guild is running for the Oklahoma City district, currently held by GOP-lite Blue Dog Kendra Horn. "No rush is the operative phrase with too many members of the permanent political class in Washington, DC. It took a month for me to receive my stimulus check. If my rent or house payment or my need to buy food had been dependent on receipt of that money, I would have been a prime candidate for eviction or foreclosure and a casualty of nutrition deprivation syndrome. Many people I visit with on social media and otherwise are still waiting for their stimulus payment. They needed their money to survive and keep their financial heads above water. No rush. How asinine. Oklahoma’s unemployment compensation system has been fairly roasted for having an unduly complicated filing system and many intentional roadblocks to delay or deny claims for desperate Sooners. They may soon seek shelter with other homeless Okies or stand on the side of the road pleading for money to help themselves and their desperate loved ones. As Marie Antoinette coldly proclaimed before being beheaded by French revolutionaries, 'Let them (the hungry and desperate if bread was unavailable to them) eat cake!' No hurry. How barbaric. The national government has been an epic failure in addressing the desperation in America during these terrible dark days. The Reed/Bennet/Beyer proposal to extend unemployment benefits until states’ unemployment rates drop to acceptable levels is a sensible idea. As they indicate, 'We should not penalize people for not having a job when there are no jobs to be had.' This practical idea should be considered and included in the next coronavirus relief package. The Trump tax cuts for the wealthy, Wall Street, and big corporations moved through Congress and was signed into law in short order. Bailing out the wealthy and the big corporations among the political ruling class always takes priority over the lives of ordinary hard working and beautiful yet beleaguered Americans. The greed of some very BIG small businesses in snapping up forgivable loans authorized and funded by Congress, before the real small businesses, who lacked connections with the well-heeled and the big banks, had a chance to participate before the money set aside for them was gone, is despicable. When I taught a course called Contemporary Workplace Issues that I pioneered at the University of Central Oklahoma, I used a book to enhance discussion of white collar crime in the business world. The book is entitled The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. Graft, corporate welfare, and grifting has become a way of life for some privileged and entitled corporate citizens here in our country. Wealth and income inequality have reached critical mass and become one of the most serious systemic problems facing our country. The failure of the national government and many state governments to put the least among us first makes a tragic situation that much more horrific and intractable. No rush indeed. We better start addressing issues of poverty, privilege, inequality, and government incompetence now. The future viability and health of our republic hang in the balance."

Eva Putzova is the progressive running in AZ-01. The incumbent, a lifelong conservative Republican pretending to be an equally conservative Blue Dog, guarantees that voters have to real choice. Eva is ending that. "The failure of Congress and the White House to address the deteriorating conditions faced by American families," she told us this morning, "is disgraceful. I agree that there should be automatic triggers that guarantee increased unemployment benefits, food stamps and healthcoverage, until the economy recovers to full employment. However, that is not enough. With or without this current economic/public health crisis, we need universal healthcare, i.e, Medicare for All, a Green New Deal to completely retool the economy and invest in underserved areas, strong labor law reform and protections for workers rights to organize unions, a jobs guarantee, and much, much more. The Republican Party and its President are criminally negligent in failing to address the Covid-19 crisis as well the coming economic depression. But too many Democrats are willing to accept half-measures that don't address the social and economic problems that have gotten worse over the past 50 years-- well before Donald Trump became President."

Robin Wilt is a fully dedicated progressive running against a garden variety New Dem in Rochester, New York. She'll make a much better representative of Monroe County's working families, although not as much of a fighter to put corporate interests first, the way her opponent is! "Throughout March and April 2020, the U.S. government passed three main relief packages, and one supplemental one, totaling nearly $2.8 trillion. The overwhelming majority of that money-- over $2 trillion-- went directly to Wall Street. I want that to sink in. In the middle of a pandemic, the main spending priority of the Federal government was not to ramp up infectious disease testing, increase manufacturing of needed medical goods and PPE, or to provide health care coverage or a basic income for the tens of millions of people who would eventually be unemployed as a result of the health crisis. Once again, the first priority of those in Washington was to bail out Wall Street, not Main Street.

"The first COVID-19 relief bill passed on March 6, 2020, and rightfully went to response efforts to fund research for a vaccine and provide money to help with efforts to fight the spread of the virus. It totaled only $8.3 billion. On March 12, 2020, however, the Fed enormously expanded its repo operations to banks by a whopping $1.5 trillion dollars, then adding another $500 billion on March 16, 'to ensure there was enough liquidity in the money markets.' Yes, you read that correctly. That’s $2 trillion to banks within ten days of the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, while only some $8 billion went to fighting the health crisis.

"Meanwhile, the second relief package for people-- the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (which, ironically, came after the Wall Street bail out packages)-- passed on March 18, and again, in comparison to the spending on the financial sector, allocated a paltry $3.4 Billion to: 1) provide money for families who rely on free school lunches in light of widespread school closures; 2) mandate companies with fewer than 500 employees provide paid sick leave for these suffering from COVID-19, as well as providing a tax credit to help employers cover those costs; 3) nearly $1 billion in additional unemployment insurance money for states, as well as loans to states to fund unemployment insurance; 4) Funding and cost waivers to make COVID-19 testing free for all.

"It was not until almost a month later, on April 9, 2020, that the Federal government got around to passing any direct aid to families in the form of cash payments through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

"I am fond of the saying: Don’t tell me what your priorities are. Show me your budget. Our representatives who demonstrate that their priorities and loyalties are first and foremost to the financial sector-- as opposed to the people who are the engines of it-- should be voted out. We need new, bold, representatives who are not afraid to truly put people first in their spending priorities."

Poor People Are Most Likely To Be Infected And Most Likely To Die In The Pandemic. Who's To Blame?

Even if you're not as well-off as David Geffin and sailing your yacht around the Grenadines, wealthy Americans-- particularly wealthy white Americans-- seem less likely to be infected by COVID-19 and less likely to die of it if they are. Before we get to Eric Levitz' New York Magazine on why Americans don't vote their class, below, let's look at how that has impacted Americans during the pandemic. Multimillionaire Virginia Congressman Don Beyer (New Dem) is not letting the pandemic get in the way of his quest for party leadership. He's been using his position as the previously unheard of vice-chair of the Joint Economic Committee, to gain national name recognition. Last week, he announced the release of a compelling new report reporting why lower income workers and racial minorities are disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus.

With conservatives in both parties, standing firmly against Medicare-for-All, the report shows that Black, Latino and low-income Americans are more likely to have pre-existing conditions such as hypertension, chronic lung disease, diabetes and heart disease, conditions found in nine of 10 Americans hospitalized for coronavirus. In addition, they are more likely to do person-to-person work in the service industry-- often without benefits like paid sick leave, health insurance and the flexibility to work from home. Black, Latino and low-income Americans are also more likely to suffer economic impacts from the recession caused by coronavirus because they historically experience higher unemployment rates, lower income and much less wealth.

Beyer: "As a result of a corrosive cocktail of systemic inequalities, tens of thousands of people across the country are more likely to die from the coronavirus because of who they are, what they do and where they live. Not everyone has a job that will allow them to work from home and those that do not are disproportionately low-income and people of color. Public-sector jobs that have been pathways to the middle class for so many black families-- essential jobs to keep society running-- are now risky. I keep thinking about the black bus driver in Detroit who, like so many of those in the service industry, was torn between a paycheck and protecting his health-- a few weeks after complaining about the lack of health protections on his bus he died of coronavirus. As Congress thinks through how to help the nation respond and recover from the coronavirus, it is important that we remember that race neutral programs and policies do not always have race neutral impacts. We saw this play out with some of the small business programs that were included in previous legislative responses to the coronavirus-- even though they are eligible, small-business owners of color are having a harder time accessing federal loans through their local banks. I am pleased that in the bill passed yesterday we improved access by ensuring more funds are available to minority-owned businesses."

And best of luck to him. The report-- which makes it clear that "COVID-19 has focused attention on the high human cost of structural inequalities in American society" is very much worth reading. "Economic inequality in the United States strongly determines who will be most likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19 and who will be most harmed by its economic impact. As a result, the virus likely will increase inequality, disproportionately hurting the poor, working poor and communities of color. If these underlying conditions are not addressed, the next pandemic could have even more painful results."

Now, to Levitz' essay. "In the mid-20th century," he wrote, "a voter’s socioeconomic position strongly predicted his or her partisan allegiance: In Britain, France, and the United States, voters with low incomes and only a high-school education tended to support left-of-center parties, while high-income, highly educated voters aligned with those of the right. In all three nations, this is no longer the case. All else equal, lower-income voters are still more likely to “vote blue” in the U.S. But that tendency is much weaker than in the past. Meanwhile, the relationship between educational attainment and partisan preference has flipped: Now, college-educated voters are more likely to support putative workers’ parties, while non-college-educated ones tend to favor conservatives."

The decline of class-based voting has long troubled the American left. And for good reason. Voters without four-year degrees are more numerous than those who have them, and America’s political institutions give the former disproportionate influence over election outcomes. For this reason, among others, the Republican Party has fared much better in the era of class depolarization than it did in the preceding one.

What’s more, the declining salience of class identity has exacerbated the challenge of enacting progressive reform, even when Democrats do manage to secure power. Corporate America and the typical worker do not meet each other on an even political playing field. Effective civic engagement requires resources. It takes money to finance campaigns, time to monitor legislative and regulatory developments, and organization to bend those developments in one’s favor. The Chamber of Commerce can shoulder these costs much more easily than isolated working people. Traditionally, the left’s formula for overcoming this fundamental disadvantage has been to (1) help workers collectivize the costs of political engagement by organizing into trade unions, and (2) exploit the working class’s numerical supremacy to overwhelm capitalist opposition. Or, as socialist sloganeers have summarized it: They’ve got money, but we’ve got people; we are many, they are few.

But once workers stop organizing into unions, and stop voting on the basis of class identity, they cease to be “many” in the operative sense. Both major parties become intra-class coalitions in which working people’s interests as workers are either balanced against those of corporate coalition partners (as in the Democratic Party) or ignored (as in the GOP). Meanwhile, absent the concentration of working people into one dominant partisan coalition, America’s veto-point-laden legislative institutions-- and the tendency of staggered presidential and midterm elections to produce divided government-- render large-scale reform of any kind a Herculean task.

Put all these considerations together, and it seems less than coincidental that the decline of class-based voting in the U.S. (and Britain and France) has corresponded with an upsurge in income and wealth inequality.

...The fact that Sanders boasts more support among suburban college graduates than whites with low levels of education shouldn’t be surprising. His agenda may have more to offer the latter in material terms. But in the contemporary U.S., college-educated whites tend to evince more progressive policy preferences than non-college-educated ones even on matters of redistribution. In a national survey fielded earlier this month, the progressive think tank Data for Progress asked voters, “Do you think it is the responsibility of the federal government to see to it that everyone has health-care coverage?” College-educated white voters said “yes” by a margin of 50 to 39 percent; among non-college-educated white voters, that margin was 43 to 39 percent.

The results of Maine’s 2017 referendum on Medicaid expansion lend credence to this finding. Given the opportunity to expand the availability of socialized health insurance, the most highly educated parts of the Pine Tree State voted in favor, while the least well-educated regions voted against. Material interests weren’t entirely irrelevant to voting patterns: Researchers found that, if one held education constant, then areas with higher incomes were more likely to oppose Medicaid expansion. But an area’s median income was still a less reliable predictor of its support for the policy than its average level of educational attainment; college trumped class.

This same dynamic is reflected in the ideological tendencies of the Democratic Party’s congressional caucus. Democratic House members who represent districts with above-median levels of college-educated white voters are more likely to belong to the Progressive Caucus-- and to co-sponsor Medicare for All-- than those who represent districts with above-median levels of non-college-educated white voters.

Democratic senator Joe Manchin represents a state whose median income is $45,000 a year. He is among the most conservative Democrats on Capitol Hill, and said in 2019 that he would not vote for Bernie Sanders in a race against Donald Trump. Manchin’s House colleague, Ro Khana, represents a constituency whose median income is $141,000. Khana is among the most left-wing members of Nancy Pelosi’s caucus and co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s campaign. This is difficult to explain if one posits a tight correspondence between an area’s class composition and its appetite for social democracy. But it’s much less mysterious if one presumes a correlation between high levels of education and support for progressive politics: 60 percent of the adults in Khana’s House district are college graduates, while just 20 percent of those in Manchin’s West Virginia boast bachelor’s degrees.

...The left has good reason to lament the decline of class politics. Class-based political organizations were the muscle behind virtually every major progressive reform in U.S. history. And a radicalized working class is a much more plausible agent for democratizing capital ownership than are affluent liberals (however comfortable the latter may be with western European–style social democracy). More mundanely, unless the Democratic Party staunches its bleeding with non-college-educated voters, it will struggle to assemble Senate majorities.

But in the absence of a strong trade-union movement or laborite media, class position exerts a much weaker influence on voting behavior and policy preferences than some socialists have assumed-- while higher education exerts a much stronger one. Some of America’s most ardent dialectical materialists are themselves affluent college graduates whose politics grew more radical during their time at university. If academic socialization could teach such children of the upper-middle class to prioritize Marxist convictions above their 401(k)s, why couldn’t it also teach millions of “normie” college-educated Democrats to prize progressive principles above their marginal tax rates?

None of this is to say that leftists shouldn’t be fighting for the hearts and minds of white high-school graduates. Class position does not mechanically determine ideology. But neither does race or education. Tens of millions of white, non-college-educated voters cast their ballots for Democrats every election year, and the party could not survive without their support. There is no inherent reason why a larger percentage of this demographic group can’t be won over to progressive politics. But there’s little evidence that mere advocacy for social democratic reform will overwhelm the contingent reasons for the prevalence of white working-class conservatism and/or nonvoting. Only left-wing institutions with a footprint in non-college-educated voters’ workplaces and communities can plausibly overwhelm the hegemony that right-wing media exercises over the median white American’s political imagination. Whatever flaws the left’s account of class depolarization may have, its critique of the Democratic Party’s malign indifference to organized labor’s fate is unimpeachable. The failure of every unified Democratic government since the Second World War to prioritize labor-law reform doubtlessly exacerbated the rightward drift of the white working class.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of near-term electoral strategy, the left must presume that the class composition of the Democratic coalition cannot be drastically changed in the course of a single campaign-- and that college-educated Democrats are as “natural” a constituency for the party’s progressive wing as any other.

Today's Democrats can only win when "luck" defeats Republicans

Trump Has Utterly Failed His Test-- Guess Who Suffers (+ Bob Dylan's 17 Minute Song)

The GOP death cult is super-duper strong in Alabama, where the moron governor has challenged the coronavirus to come and kill all her citizens. Still, Nazis, fascists and assorted racists from all over the U.S. head up to their idea of an Aryan Nation-- Idaho's panhandle. The state voted or Trump in 2016 by a massive margin-- 59.25% to just 27.48% for Hillary (who won just two of the state's 44 counties.) The panhandle counties were even Trumpier than the rest of the state:

• Benewah- 74.0%
• Bonner- 60.8%
• Kootenai- 67.1% (the neo-Nazi capital of America)
• Shoshone- 64.4%

And even though Trump's net approval has decreased by 10 points since he first occupied the White House, 58% of Idaho voters still approved of the job he is doing, compared to just 39% who don't. None the less, Idaho's very conservative Republican governor, Brad Little, just issued a statewide 21-day stay at home order. Like most states, there is a long list of exceptions to the shutdown:

• Healthcare operations
• Grocery stores including liquor stores
• Food cultivation such as farming, fishing, and food processing
• Businesses that provide food, shelter and services for economically disadvantaged individuals
• News media services
• Gas stations, auto supply and repair facilities
• Banks, credit unions and financial institutions
• Plumbers, electricians and landscapers
• Hardware stores and firearm businesses
• Businesses providing mailing and shipping services
• Educational institutions to provide distance learning resources
• Childcare providing services that enable employees exempted in this order to work as permitted
• Laundromats and dry cleaners
• Restaurants can stay open but can only provide take out or drive-thru services
• Hotels, motels and shared rental units
• Businesses that supply people products to work from home
• Shipping businesses that deliver food, goods or groceries
• Airlines, taxis and private transportation needed for essential travel
• Home-based care for seniors, adults or children
• Essential tribal operations
• Legal or accounting services when necessary

Yes, even Idaho. And even Fox News. Their website carried a warning from the Surgeon General that the U.S. could be worse than Italy if 15-day guidelines are disregarded. Who's stupid enough to disregard them?

Jerome Adams explained his divergence with Trump by noting that the non-leader in the White House "is trying to be optimistic for Americans with his Easter timeline and also asked those not taking the coronavirus seriously to understand there is a possibility America could reach a worst-case scenario if residents do not follow the guidelines."

And optimistic for himself? I mean, Pope Francis asked the faithful to stay out of churches on Easter Sunday; Trump wants them filled with people celebrating his own resurrection. That's some step from "Hoax!"

Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported that a record-breaking 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits. The Washington Post put it like this: "Last week saw the biggest jump in new jobless claims in history, surpassing the record of 695,000 set in 1982. Many economists say this is the beginning of a massive spike in unemployment that could result in over 40 million Americans losing their jobs by April. Laid off workers say they waited hours on the phone to apply for help. Websites in several states, including New York and Oregon, crashed because so many people were trying to apply at once."

“The most terrifying part about this is this is likely just the beginning of the layoffs,” said Martha Gimbel, a labor economist at Schmidt Futures.

The nation’s unemployment rate was 3.5 percent in February, a half-century low, but that has likely risen already to 5.5 percent, according to calculations by Gimbel. The nation hasn’t seen that level of unemployment since 2015.

...“We may well be in a recession,” said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in his first appearance on morning television on NBC’s Today show. “The first order of business is to get the virus under control and then resume economic activity.”

...Both the scale of the layoffs and the speed at which they are happening are unprecedented. During the Great Recession, for example, the worst week for jobless claims was 665,000. Last week the nation saw five times that amount.

The Trump recession has begun and now what we have to hope for is that it doesn't become the Trump Depression. With him at the helm, we could be looking at 40 million unemployed by Easter. Read any independent economist and the words "it’s going to get worse" are always in their analysis. Writing for HuffPo, Zach Carter and Amanda Terkel reported that Mnuchin is basically in his own delusional world and that everything will be fine after he gets his hands on the half trillion dollar slush fund. After the unemployment spike was announced yesterday, he told CNBC's audience that "I just think these numbers right now are not relevant, and you know, whether they’re bigger or smaller in the short term. I mean, obviously, there are people who have jobless claims. And again, the good thing about this bill is the president is protecting those people. So you know, now with these plans, small businesses hopefully will be able to hire back a lot of those people. Last week, they didn’t know if they had protections. They didn’t have any cash. They had no choice. Now with this bill passed by Congress, there are protections."

This is wishful thinking, to put it mildly. Despite its big price tag, economists believe the legislation passed by the Senate on Wednesday is far too modest to meet the scope of the coming economic crash.

The $349 billion the legislation sets aside for small businesses will be exhausted quickly, but experts also believe that it will take months for the aid to reach most small firms. During that time, many of them will simply fail, and you can’t rehire workers if you don’t have a company.

The key provision of the bailout bill is a $454 billion program overseen by Mnuchin that can be leveraged 10 times over by the Federal Reserve to do essentially anything Mnuchin and the Fed want to do with it. But firms that receive this money will still be allowed to lay off up to 10% of their workforces over the next six months-- and that figure would be calculated based on this week’s employment. The 3.3 million people who were laid off last week wouldn’t count.

The coronavirus crash isn’t a simple shortage of cash. It’s a crisis on several different economic fronts that will require months, if not years, of aggressive government action to combat.

Global supply chains are breaking down as companies that manufacture goods in other countries find themselves unable to access factories and materials that they have relied upon for years. The collapse in U.S. consumer spending won’t simply return to normal.

The legislation’s protections for people who are laid off or struggling to pay the bills are simply too paltry to restore the plunge in purchasing power from unprecedented layoffs, not to mention the fear that most families are now experiencing. Every household in America will be pinching their pennies for the foreseeable future, and that loss of spending translates into a loss of revenue for businesses, and lower payrolls. The loss of American purchasing power will resonate both at home and abroad. This may well culminate in a shock to the financial system akin to the meltdown of 2008.

Thursday’s unemployment number is likely undercounting how many people are without work as well. Some people who have tried to apply for unemployment benefits have reported phone lines and websites frozen and jammed up by the crush of applicants. And people who are self-employed, undocumented, students or gig workers are ineligible to apply and therefore not counted.

Don Beyer (New Dem-VA), vice chair of the Joint Economic Committee: "These numbers are far worse than anything we saw during the Great Recession. We need to move quickly to help those that are getting hurt. It not only protects those families but it protects the economy-- so everyone benefits. That is why the bill passed by the Senate to increase unemployment insurance by an extra $600 a week for four months and make billions available for small business grants and loan payments is so important-- only Congress can make sure that those who are out of work right now, and the small businesses that employ them, do not go broke. It is vital that the federal government continue to follow the directives of medical professionals and public health experts, and not yield to the urge to 'reopen' the economy too soon. Doing so could cost lives and drastically deepen and prolong the damage to the economy. Stopping this pandemic and protecting human life is the most important thing we can do, and it is also the best thing we can do for the economy. I continue to urge all who can to please stay home."

As Chris Martenson says every single day in his podcast-- not to mention Erasure-- it didn't have to be this way. Obama made it look so easy that even a brainless blowhard-- who assured us he only hires "the best people"-- could be president. Turns out, he only hires the worst people. In yesterday's NY Times Jennifer Steinhauer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs noted that "Of the 75 senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security, 20 are either vacant or filled by acting officials, including Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary who recently was unable to tell a Senate committee how many respirators and protective face masks were available in the United States. The National Park Service, which like many federal agencies is full of vacancies in key posts, tried this week to fill the job of a director for the national capital region after hordes of visitors flocked to see the cherry blossoms near the National Mall, creating a potential public health hazard as the coronavirus continues to spread. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, workers are scrambling to order medical supplies on Amazon after its leaders, lacking experience in disaster responses, failed to prepare for the onslaught of patients at its medical centers. Empty slots and high turnover have left parts of the federal government unprepared and ill equipped for what may be the largest public health crisis in a century, said numerous former and current federal officials and disaster experts. Some 80 percent of the senior positions in the White House below the cabinet level have turned over during President Trump’s administration, with about 500 people having departed since the inauguration. Mr. Trump is on his fourth chief of staff, his fourth national security adviser and his fifth secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Between Mr. Trump’s history of firing people and the choice by many career officials and political appointees to leave, he now finds himself with a government riddled with vacancies, acting department chiefs and, in some cases, leaders whose professional backgrounds do not easily match up to the task of managing a pandemic."

Trump rules by chaos, fear, personal loyalty and whim. No American president was ever less prepared for something as catastrophic as this pandemic as Trump was. There is no part of the federal government functioning adequately.





Last night, Bob Dylan alerted his fans, via tweet, that this previously unreleased 17 minute song, "Murder Most Foul," is now available. Alexis Petridis for The Guardian: "People have mooted that it’s a standalone release, appearing now because Dylan understandably thinks it’s timely, March 2020 being a pretty apropos moment to release an epic song filled with death and horror and apocalyptic dread ('The age of the antichrist has just begun... it’s 36 hours past judgment day'), or perhaps to give his diehard fans further incentive to stay indoors. You rather get the feeling some of them will still be self-isolating months after the coronavirus all-clear has sounded, delicately unpicking its manifold knotty allusions-- the line about playing it for Carl Wilson down Gower Avenue requires the listener to know that the late Beach Boy sang backing vocals on Desperados Under the Eaves, the concluding track from Warren Zevon’s eponymous 1976 album, which ended with the line 'look away down Gower Avenue'-- and arguing on message boards as to whether the Susie mentioned midway through is just a reference to the Everly Brothers, or to Suze Rotolo, the girlfriend with whom Dylan watched the aftermath of Kennedy assassination unfolding, holed up in their New York apartment... The point is clearly the lyrics, which are dense and intriguing enough to hold your interest, and give the listener plenty to digest. Quite aside from all the cultural references, there’s a narrator that keeps switching from Kennedy himself to Dylan, who in turn seems to keep switching from firebrand mode to the grimly resigned old grouch of Things Have Changed and It’s All Good ('I hate to tell you Mister but only dead men are free') and a plethora of details about the assassination itself: 'Don’t say Dallas don’t love you, Mr President' is a mangling of the last words spoken to Kennedy by Nellie Connally, the first lady of Texas."