[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
When the Dodd Frank Act was passed in 2010, President Obama triumphantly declared, “No more bailouts!” But what the Act actually said was that the next time the banks failed, they would be subject to “bail ins” – the funds of their creditors, including their large depositors, would be tapped to cover their bad loans.
Many economists in the US and Europe argued that the next time the banks failed, they should be nationalized – taken over by the government as public utilities. But that opportunity was lost when, in September 2019 and again in March 2020, Wall Street banks were quietly bailed out from a liquidity crisis in the repo market that could otherwise have bankrupted them. There was no bail-in of private funds, no heated congressional debate, and no public vote. It was all done unilaterally by unelected bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve.
“The justification of private profit,” said President Franklin Roosevelt in a 1938 address, “is private risk.” Banking has now been made virtually risk-free, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States and its people. The American people are therefore entitled to share in the benefits and the profits. Banking needs to be made a public utility.
The Risky Business of Borrowing Short to Lend Long
Individual banks can go bankrupt from too many bad loans, but the crises that can trigger system-wide collapse are “liquidity crises.” Banks “borrow short to lend long.” They borrow from their depositors to make long-term loans or investments while promising the depositors that they can come for their money “on demand.” To pull off this sleight of hand, when the depositors and the borrowers want the money at the same time, the banks have to borrow from somewhere else. If they can’t find lenders on short notice, or if the price of borrowing suddenly becomes prohibitive, the result is a “liquidity crisis.”
The one thing the layman can trust is he can’t trust the experts. Because they don’t trust him.
Experts, if they aren’t fake or paid shills, come with a particular professional bias as well as the general contemporary bias by which Western elites are alienated from the common man.
There’s a pattern crises follow now: campaigns of misinformation, opportunistic looting by financial actors, the consolidation of power in the hands of the people who as often as not are responsible, and ending with society’s energies diverted to a cause with little or no relationship to the original crisis. A cause to which the people themselves may have no relationship or interest—the 2003 Iraq War is a stark model.
The first significant action taken in the current crisis (as opposed to significant inaction) was a campaign of misinformation. Faced with the very real prospect of a run on medical-quality face masks the experts lied to us about their effectiveness.
It’s not their fault, you might say; fault the outsourcing of the manufacture of basic medical equipment. But that misinformation campaign about masks was nestled like a Russian doll in a greater misinformation (or just mis-informed) campaign—that our hospitals would be overwhelmed with corona virus patients.
How many lives were lost to this? How much time was lost? Might we have avoided the shutdown and the coming economic depression if we had a system capable of honest action in the public interest?
Squint through the snowstorm of information and look into the heart, such as it is, of the elitist: aside from his objective appraisal of the current crisis (leaving aside his atrophied capacity for objectivity in the Current Year) what about the shutdown appeals to him, emotionally? He sees it as a crude device for a crude people—us. Faced with the prospect of formulating a set of rules for going about life and business or just telling the dumb bastards (us) to stay home, they opted, of course, for the latter.
They want you to “shelter in place” because they don’t trust you to carry out basic instructions.
Common to all crises now is the absence of accountability. Let’s not expect it. But it’s becoming increasingly suggestive the still-touted strategy of shutting down is misguided and may even be counter productive.
...numerous epidemiological studies have shown that infection rates for C19 are higher when people are exposed to it for prolonged periods in confined spaces. Locking people up in their homes is probably the worst thing you could do if you wanted to reduce the infections and the duration of the outbreak.
This is well known to the World Health Organisation. In their joint study with Chinese authorities, published in February, the WHO stated that airborne spread wasn’t reported for C19 and was not considered to be a method of transmission.
They found that most infections occurred within families where the chance of infection was as high as 20%. However, the chance of infection in the community was estimated to be between 1-5%
The elite’s reaction to the crisis was delayed and dishonest; so will be any reaction to the present strategy failing—recognition of which censorship will delay as long as it can. The media can be expected now to portray the inevitable waning of the pandemic as a vindication of the shutdown. This too will delay any abandonment of the strategy.
But for other reasons they are in no hurry. The shutdown hurts the little people, for whom it is crafted. It’s like a flood threatening to leave only the commanding heights above water.
The shutdown strategy retains the support of the experts, so the typical bugman can enjoy the disparate impact it has on the middle and working classes without feeling guilty. Indeed, he unthinkingly plugs it directly into his psychological matrix of understanding: it is a case of us dummies ignoring “science” and valuing “jobs” over “lives”.
That it accelerates the dis-empowering of certain people is inevitable, he might say (not that anyone is asking) like globalization and white decline.
Whatever the case, if wealth and cultural status are to remain wildly uneven in the favor of those in charge, the shutdown will have to be uniform across the country.
Why, you might ask, would Bakersfield, with its dearth of cases, have to observe the same drastic measures as Manhattan, and go down the drain of economic decline?
Because if New York, with its vast importance to the status quo we call Globo Homo, is to be shut down for months (because it’s acquired a nasty virus, as a result of being the center of Globo Homo) then by God so must the rest of the nation. We can’t have people and business, the very power, of New York migrating out to the hinterlands! Therefore a crude strategy must become cruder still.
Meanwhile some people are doing extremely well in the current atmosphere. The Daily Mail:
American billionaires are enjoying multi-million dollar increases to their net worth as the country’s unemployment levels rise to record highs amid the coronavirus lockdowns
Eight ‘pandemic profiteers’ have seen their net worth surge by over $1billion each since the start of the global pandemic.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, 56, has added $25billion to his own wealth since January 1, 2020, as the company’s staff protest their poor working conditions and he makes a return to the company’s day-to-day running.
According to a report from the Institute for Policy Studies, American billionaires added $282billion – nearly a ten percent increase – to their combined wealth between March 18 and April 10, as the U.S. unemployment rate approached 15 percent.
Plans for a new Baltic–Black Sea waterway, passing through Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, have the potential to revolutionize the geopolitics of Europe’s East as well as exacerbate East-West tensions (see EDM, February 18). The European Union has labeled the project “E40,” and the United States has signaled its support. And were the E40 waterway to be incorporated within the broader regional framework of the Three Seas Initiative (3SI), the transit project would not only help the economies of all three participating countries and their neighbors but also promote trilateral cooperation on other issues, including security, and make each one of them more attractive partners for the West. This development would thus transform the frequently dismissed “countries in between” Russia and Western Europe—the geopolitical equivalent of “flyover states”—into a unified, collective player in its own right. Not surprisingly, such prospects are gaining support in the US and part of the EU but generating ever more opposition in Moscow. Russia rightfully views E40 as a threat to its influence in the region and even, according to some analysts, as an existential threat to Russia itself. Nonetheless, Moscow faces increasing difficulty in blocking the project by using the means it has employed in the past (Ura.news, Sept 14, 2019; Deutsche Welle—Russian service, Sept 14, 2019).
For a century, Moscow has been leery of any efforts to promote East European unity, viewing them as an attempt to erect a cordon sanitaire against it and as a Polish plot against Russia. Indeed, Poland took the lead in such projects in the 1920s and 1930s with its Promethean League and regional confederal arrangements (Marek Chodakiewicz, Intermarium: The Land Between the Black and Baltic Seas, 2012). After World War II, however, the idea faded due to Soviet occupation and the division of Europe, which prompted all involved to think only in East-West terms rather than in the potential for North-South cooperation. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the notion again became realistic but gained relatively little traction at first because Central and Eastern Europeans saw their salvation in joining the West. In addition, many Westerners drew a new line between the former Eastern Bloc countries (including the three Baltic States and the former Yugoslavia) and the new republics that emerged from the disintegration of the Soviet Empire. Few in the West gave much consideration to the notion of there existing a larger region straddling both sides of this new dividing line.
Crushing the States, Saving the Banks: The Fed’s Generous New Rules
The new terms could be harnessed for local governments to own and operate their own banks.
by Ellen Brown, 3 May, for Common Dreams.Org:
the Fed’s relaxed liquidity rules have made it easier for state and local governments to set up their own publicly-owned banks. (Photo: Phillipp/cc/flickr)
Congress seems to be at war with the states. Only $150 billion of its nearly $3 trillion coronavirus relief package – a mere 5% – has been allocated to the 50 states; and they are not allowed to use it where they need it most, to plug the holes in their budgets caused by the mandatory shutdown. On April 22, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was opposed to additional federal aid to the states, and that his preference was to allow states to go bankrupt.
No such threat looms over the banks, which have made out extremely well in this crisis. The Federal Reserve has dropped interest rates to 0.25%, eliminated reserve requirements, and relaxed capital requirements. Banks can now borrow effectively for free, without restrictions on the money’s use. Following the playbook of the 2008-09 bailout, they can make the funds available to their Wall Street cronies to buy up distressed Main Street assets at fire sale prices, while continuing to lend to credit cardholders at 21%.
If there is a silver lining to all this, it is that the Fed’s relaxed liquidity rules have made it easier for state and local governments to set up their own publicly-owned banks, something they should do post haste to take advantage of the Fed’s very generous new accommodations for banks. These public banks can then lend to local businesses, municipal agencies, and local citizens at substantially reduced rates while replenishing the local government’s coffers, recharging the Main Street economy and the government’s revenue base.
The Covert War on the States
Payments going to state and local governments from the Coronavirus Relief Fund under the CARES Act may be used only for coronavirus-related expenses. They may not be used to cover expenses that were accounted for in their most recently approved budgets as of March 2020. The problem is that nearly everything local governments do is funded through their most recently approved budgets, and that funding will come up painfully short for all of the states due to increased costs and lost revenues forced by the coronavirus shutdown. Unlike the federal government, which can add a trillion dollars to the federal debt every year without fear of retribution, states and cities are required to balance their budgets. The Fed has opened a Municipal Liquidity Facility that may buy their municipal bonds, but this is still short-term debt, which must be repaid when due. Selling bonds will not fend off bankruptcy for states and cities that must balance their books.
States are not legally allowed to declare bankruptcy, but Sen. McConnell contended that “there’s no good reason for it not to be available.” He said, “we’ll certainly insist that anything we borrow to send down to the states is not spent on solving problems that they created for themselves over the years with their pension programs.” And that is evidently the real motive behind the bankruptcy push. McConnell wants states put through a bankruptcy reorganization to get rid of all those pesky pension agreements and the unions that negotiated them. But these are the safety nets against old age for which teachers, nurses, police and firefighters have worked for 30 or 40 years. It’s their money.
It has long been a goal of conservatives to privatize public pensions, forcing seniors into the riskier stock market. Lured in by market booms, their savings can then be raided by the periodic busts of the “business cycle,” while the more savvy insiders collect the spoils. Today political opportunists are using a crushing emergency that is devastating local economies to downsize the public sector and privatize everything.
Free Money for Banks: The Fed’s Very Liberal New Rules
Unlike the states, the banks were not facing bankruptcy from the economic shutdown; but their stocks were sinking fast. The Fed’s accommodations were said to be to encourage banks to “help meet demand for credit from households and businesses.” But while the banks’ own borrowing rates were dropped on March 15 from an already-low 1.5% to 0.25%, average credit card rates dropped in the following month only by 0.5% to 20.71%, still unconscionably high for out-of-work wage earners.
Smalls was having trouble following social distancing requirements. The powers that be want to promote blacks as the left unionizing heroes. But it’s not ok for you to unionize in your interests, Whitey. In fact, they are watching for where there is too large a majority of Whites, and thus susceptibility of your unionization, collective bargaining power.
Whole Foods, an Amazon subsidiary, tracking “lack of diversity” to head-off susceptibility to unionization
The heat map apparently uses more than two dozen different metrics to track which Whole Foods stores may unionize. The heat map focuses on monitoring three main areas: “external risks,” “store risks,” and “team member sentiment,” Business Insider.
Here are some examples of “external risks,” reports Business Insider:
Some of the factors that contribute to external risk scores include local union membership size; distance in miles between the store and the closest union; number of charges filed with the National Labor Relations Board alleging labor-law violations; and a “labor incident tracker,” which logs incidents related to organizing and union activity.
Other external factors include the percentage of families within the store’s zip code that fall below the poverty line and the local unemployment rate.
Here are some examples of “store risks”:
Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a “diversity index” that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers’ compensation claims, according to the documents.
And here are some examples of how “team member sentiment” is tracked:
Amazon has resisted Whole Foods unionization efforts before — in 2018, the company sent a 45-minute anti-union training video to Whole Foods team leaders that was obtained by Gizmodo. “Throughout, the video claims Amazon prefers a ‘direct management’ structure where employees can bring grievances to their bosses individually, rather than union representation,” according to Gizmodo.
Whole Foods used similar language about direct management in a statement to Business Insider, which it also shared with The Verge. “Whole Foods Market recognizes the rights of our Team Members to decide whether union representation is right for them,” Whole Foods said in the statement. “We agree with the overwhelming majority of our Team Members that a direct relationship with Whole Foods Market and its leadership, where Team Members have open lines of communication and every individual is empowered to share feedback directly with their team leaders, is best.”
Amazon has not replied to a request for comment from The Verge.
Amazon has a history of aggressively combating unionization efforts, and its anti-labor stance has also come to light due to recent organizing efforts by warehouse employees to protest Amazon’s handling of worker safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. In late March, Amazon fired a warehouse worker named Chris Smalls who organized a walkout in New York City, claiming he violated COVID-19 safety instructions after coming into contact with a co-worker who tested positive for the virus.
However, Amazon executives later attacked Smalls on Twitter after Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) criticized the company. Shortly after, notes from an Amazon executive meeting obtained by Vice News revealed a plan to publicly smear the worker in an effort to discredit broader labor movements within Amazon.
Update April 20th, 6:31PM ET: Whole Foods provided the same statement to The Verge that it provided to Business Insider.
It should be noted that left-leaning organizations have made use of the same technology in their organizing efforts, although some predictably differentiate their use of heat maps from what Bezos and Amazon are doing by calling the latter, “surveillance.”
The Black Socialists in America (BSA), for example, have created a “Dual Power Map”, a digital tool originally created to help organisers find and connect with other groups or initiatives building alternative, democratic and anti-capitalist structures or institutions.
Now, at the request of organisers throughout the US, BSA is also using the map to plot where strikes and Covid-related mutual aid efforts have happened, so that people can tap into a wider network of support and coordinate further actions together.
As a small organisation with limited resources and capacity, BSA has been using open, publicly available data collected and aggregated by a range of journalists and grassroots groups to feed into the backend of the Dual Power Map.
“In this particular situation, you’re talking about one thing that’s designed by Leftists for public use and covering efforts that are already out in the open, led by poor and working-class people who want their efforts signal boosted and supported, and another thing that was a secret, private surveillance tool designed by members of the ruling class to stop working-class efforts before they can even begin,” said Z, one of the founders of BSA and its current national coordinator, who has adopted the name to protect their identity.
In the age of COVID-19, where discussion about drone use and public cameras employed to help identify outbreaks has revolved around making sure civil liberties are also being protected, Bezos’ heat map strategy to prevent unionization at Whole Foods could come under scrutiny.
Of course, Smalls being a Negro and his wanting to unionize, either for Negroes or being encouraged to do so in order to have a more diversified working class, now that’s ok and newsworthy. Unionizing for your interests, Whitey, that’s not ok, that’s “racist.”
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 25 April 2020 05:00.
The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation
‘The Data Is In — Stop The Panic And End The Total Isolation’: Fmr. Stanford Chief Of Neuroradiology, Dr. Scott Atlas, discusses his viral column in The Hill
BY DR. SCOTT W. ATLAS, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 04/22/20 12:30 PM
EDT THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.
Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.
It took only a few days for Congress to unanimously pass the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which will be doling out $2.2 trillion in crisis relief, most of it going to Corporate America with few strings attached. (Photo: Public domain)
Was the Fed Just Nationalized?
Did Congress just nationalize the Fed? No. But the door to that result has been cracked open.
It took only a few days for Congress to unanimously pass the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which will be doling out $2.2 trillion in crisis relief, most of it going to Corporate America with few strings attached.
Mainstream politicians have long insisted that Medicare for all, a universal basic income, student debt relief and a slew of other much-needed public programs are off the table because the federal government cannot afford them. But that was before Wall Street and the stock market were driven onto life-support by a virus. Congress has now suddenly discovered the magic money tree. It took only a few days for Congress to unanimously pass the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which will be doling out $2.2 trillion in crisis relief, most of it going to Corporate America with few strings attached. Beyond that, the Federal Reserve is making over $4 trillion available to banks, hedge funds and other financial entities of all stripes; it has dropped the fed funds rate (the rate at which banks borrow from each other) effectively to zero; and it has made $1.5 trillion available to the repo market.
It is also the Federal Reserve that will be picking up the tab for this bonanza, at least to start. The US central bank has opened the sluice gates to unlimited quantitative easing, buying Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities “in the amounts needed to support smooth market functions.” Last month, the Fed bought $650 billion worth of federal securities. At that rate, notes Wall Street on Parade, it will own the entire Treasury market in about 22 months. As Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari acknowledged on 60 Minutes, “There is an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve.”
In theory, quantitative easing is just a temporary measure, reversible by selling bonds back into the market when the economy gets back on its feet. But in practice, we have seen that QE is a one-way street. When central banks have tried to reverse it with “quantitative tightening,” economies have shrunk and stock markets have plunged. So the Fed is likely to just keep rolling over the bonds, which is what normally happens anyway with the federal debt. The debt is never actually paid off but is just rolled over from year to year. Only the interest must be paid, to the tune of $575 billion in 2019. The benefit of having the Fed rather than private bondholders hold the bonds is that the Fed rebates its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs, making the loans virtually interest-free. Interest-free loans rolled over indefinitely are in effect free money. The Fed is “monetizing” the debt.
Smalls was having trouble following social distancing requirements. The powers that be want to promote blacks as the left unionizing heroes. But it’s not ok for you to unionize in your interests, Whitey. In fact, they are watching for where there is too large a majority of Whites, and thus susceptibility of your unionization, collective bargaining power.
Photo: Nathaniel St. Clair
Dennis Dale “Unteathered”
‘The Data Is In — Stop The Panic And End The Total Isolation’: Fmr. Stanford Chief Of Neuroradiology, 
It took only a few days for Congress to unanimously pass the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which will be doling out $2.2 trillion in crisis relief, most of it going to Corporate America with few strings attached. (Photo: Public domain)