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Forum Post: ''Debt Forgiveness & Nationalization are the Answers to the US (& Global) COVID19 Economic Crisis!'' by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Posted 4 years ago on March 28, 2020, 1:07 a.m. EST by ImNotMe (1488)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

''Debt Forgiveness & Nationalization Are the Answers to the Global Economic Crisis'' (mostly) by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts:

From which I excerpt & abridge, the following ...

''The US airline companies have bankrupted themselves by buying back their stock in an enrichment scheme for CEOs and board members. With the impact of the virus on their revenues, Congress is handing them a $50 billion bailout. Instead of being bailed out they should be nationalized.

''Nationalization is a four-letter word for many, but it actually offers a chance to correct for the decades of deregulation and concentration and thereby restore competition to the economy. Nationalized banks too-big-to-fail, for example, can later be broken up and the pieces sold back into private hands. Commercial banks can again be separated from investment banks, and concentrated financial power can be broken.

''Now that we know that markets are not self-regulating, we can restore sensible financial regulation and require banks to lend for productive purposes, not for financializing and leveraging existing assets. The US financial system has not served the productive side of the US economy for a long time.

''While ordinary heavily indebted Americans are losing their jobs right and left as businesses close, shopping center lobbyists are asking for a $1 trillion guarantee. The hotel industry wants $150 billion. The restaurant industry wants $145 billion. The National Association of Manufacturers wants $1.4 trillion

''Food service distributors are in trouble. Boeing wants $60 billion funded in part by loan guarantees. Local and state governments need support. The US conference of mayors wants $250 billion. The list is endless.

''And what is to be done for the 40% of Americans who, according to a Federal Reserve study, cannot raise $400 in cash without selling personal property? How are the large number of uninsured going to be cared for during this health crisis? Where will hospitals and medical practices get the money?

''The only solution is to nationalize health care so that the bills can be paid.

''The only solution for the economy is debt forgiveness for the ordinary people and nationalization for the companies. Trump indicated that aid might be given in the form of an equity stake, and later sell the government’s stake for a profit in a privatization when things return to normal. This would be a partial nationalization. Much better to go whole hog as it allows a cure for concentration and deregulation.

''The pandemic has made it clear that a society of self-seeking individuals is not a society. A society is a social system. A successful social system is one that can support its members. Once a self-sustaining social system exists, then there is a basis for people to branch out on their own. But without a sustainable social system, there can be nothing.

''To create a sustainable society in the United States requires the abandonment of dogmatic ways of thinking. Old ideologies are in the way. We and our leaders must think creatively if we are to successfully deal with the health and economic crisis.''

radix omnium malorum est cupiditas ergo, fiat justitia ruat caelum!

(love of money is the root of all evil therefore, let justice be done tho' the heavens fall!)<{cf. The Banks!!}>[Corporate & Dynastic!!!]


''Dr. Paul Craig Roberts .. was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy in the first Reagan administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service and, Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments & his internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are 'The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism' and 'Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost' and 'The Neoconservative Threat to World Order'.'' See his work here: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/

[Article copied under "Fair Use" from: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/54068.htm ]

129 Comments

129 Comments


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[-] 2 points by agkaiser (2554) from Fredericksburg, TX 3 years ago

Abstract v Real Economy. The former a parasitic disease. It's obvious to a 6 year old that the emperor has no clothes. The thralls of capitalism are educated with disinformation to the contrary!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

Re. "Abstract v Real Economy", consider this video:

And as true right now, as it was at the start of OWS!

respice; adspice; prospice!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

"Western Debt Is Driving Sri Lanka’s Crisis"! by Jerome Phelps:

"Behind the food and fuel shortages causing Sri Lanka's protests lie unmanageable debts to the West. The only answer to worsening humanitarian catastrophe is an immediate write-off." -- And which ends,

with "The Sri Lanka crisis, likely to be followed by a looming Ukrainian debt restructuring,should be the wake-up call. In the short-term, Sri Lanka needs resources now: the IMF should provide an immediate loan, on the condition that it not be used to pay off creditors.

"But systemic change is overdue. Replacing or strengthening the discredited Common Framework is one of the simplest single things that world leaders can do to address the multiple crises facing lower income countries.

"A system that allows countries to suspend debt repayments in the event of external shocks, and cancel debts when they go bankrupt, will be essential for addressing the climate emergency as well as the food and fuel crisis. The world cannot continue to stagger on with the delusion that all debts can and must be paid, no matter the scale of the emergency."

omnia causa fiunt!

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 2 years ago

Organization of Food Exporting Countries (OFEC) recommends talking to Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Federation's Foreign Minister. He knows Sri Lanka and Poo-tin who played ice hockey in Ukraine ( or was it actually iced-hoggy ? My Big Brother was probably looking for a Swiss watch in the hoggyswasch he fell into but didn't get it -- there were grunts and squeals from you-know-whom but no stern warning from Biden on Russian Federation attacking Ukraine despite massed Russian-Federation troops having only partly withdrawn with many still camping near Ukraine.) It's time for Russian oligarchs to loan out their gadzillions of rubles to Sri Lanka and the global South ( a billion or so euros { Euro got Ur-all-grabbled by its nutty little balls of fossil-fuel hernia } a day of fossil-fuel revenue flowing into Russia can keep the incendiary crisis in Ukraine going indefinitely until Russia runs out of oil and gas to sell.) It won't be Western debt but Eastern debt will still be satisfactory. Those Russian-speaking "Little Green Man" masked Martians in Donbass in 2014 should've learnt how to excrete greenbacks without getting diarrhea.

Nearby India and Red China ( which built big bitter for Sri Lanka, now that's probably good for a Red Chinese naval base ) got sanctions-discounted cheap oil and gas from Russia so they have fatter bulging pocketbooks right now. Who's benefiting from the present situation ?

Europeans are paying much more for fossil fuels so it's unlikely that they have much money to loan out to Sri Lanka. They have to keep their own place cooled or warmed and productive by continuing to fund Russia.

There are ways around the energy and food crisis for me here in the U.S. It's my advantage of having lived before with no running water, no heat, no air-conditioning, no electricity, no refrigerator, no toilet (of course, I had a small chamber pot for my kiddie-sized butt { sorry, adults had to run fast to the remote public toilet but it's really no worse than Yakut kids running to the outhouse for a core dump } but not named as Poo-tin !) etc. in a shantytown in my childhood. Experience and knowledge are good for dealing with adverse circumstances. Water for evaporative cooling doesn't need to be potable. The same water can be used multiple times if one understands the quality one is looking for.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

Ever desperate to kiss Uncle Sam's ass, as you churn his propaganda eh, gropes?! At least you kept it short & succinct, despite spewing your usual twaddle, lol & now - go get your Grey Matter around "The Grayzone"!

ad iudicium et e tenebris - lux?

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"Right-Wing Austerity Set New Orleans Up to Be a Coronavirus Disaster Zone" - by Mike Ludwig:

Alas multi-millionaire crooks in Congress, live in a world to which the "Real Economy" is an "Abstract"!

verum ex absurdo?

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"GOP Senator Worth $39 Million Was Biggest Opponent of the $600 Stimulus Checks" - by Sharon Zhang:

too infuriating for latin!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"New York attorney general's office 'actively reviewing' Robinhood activity" by Z.Budryk:

omnia causa fiunt!

[-] 2 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Let the Banks Go Under and Put Money Into the Real Economy!" Dr.Michael Hudson with Ellen Brown:

radix omnium malorum est cupiditas ...

[-] 2 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

"Ellen Brown: The Real Antidote to Inflation"

"The Fed has options for countering the record inflation the U.S. is facing that are far more productive and less risky .. Than Raising Interest Rates"! + Please try to connect to &, consider the following link:

multum in parvo!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

Consider: "Workers don’t set prices, bosses do! And they do so on the basis of maintaining the greatest possible profit margins!" - from ...

omnia causa fiunt!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

"As inflation chips away at our paychecks, the bosses are making more than ever" via:

nota bene!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

"The banks collapsed in 2008 and our food system is about to do the same"! - by George Monbiot:

Note that: "Massive food producers hold too much power – and the regulators scarcely understand what is happening. Sound familiar?"

Also note - "So what has been going on? Well, global food, like global finance, is a complex system, that develops spontaneously, from billions of interactions. Complex Systems have counterintuitive properties. They are resilient under certain conditions, as the self-organising properties stabilise them.But as stress escalates - these same properties start transmitting shocks through the network. Beyond a certain point, a small disturbance can tip the entire system over its critical threshold, whereupon it collapses, suddenly and unstoppably."

respice; adspice; prospice - et caveat!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

"Maintaining Class Inequality at Any Cost Is GOP’s Guiding Mission"! Noam Chomksy with CJ Polychroniou:

NOW - IF ONLY THE DEMOCRAP ESTABLISHMENT - COULD JUST STAND UP FOR THE 99%!!!

et spero meliora!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 2 years ago

Even loneliness is a creation of capitalism. See the discussion between Michael Hudson and Dr. Harriet Fraad on how the system treats workers so poorly that they lose self-esteem and feel shame and therefore, feel alone. Then the system tries to sell them things to make them feel better, overeating, mindfulness, healthcare they wouldn't need if they weren't depressed, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkVk9rgmxqs

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

"Dr Michael Hudson on Debt Relief, Inflation, Ukraine Disaster Capitalism, Petrodollar Crisis" with Benjamin Norton (Video and Transcript):

per aspera - ad iudicium!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 1 year ago

"Debt and the Collapse of Antiquity" - Prof. Dr. Michael Hudson:

And note --- "We get a first look at the new book by renowned political economist Dr Michael Hudson on the age-old battle between creditors and the real economy. Ancient Rome refused to adopt the practices of debt forgiveness and land redistribution previously understood to be essential. Instead, they instituted a rigid pro-creditor legal system, assassinating anyone who can remotely threatened it including Tiberius Gracchus, Julius Caesar, and Jesus. The empire devolved into a rentier economy .. ultimately collapsing from within. Today's Neoliberal Establishment, increasingly defends this failed state framework - even as the same disastrous dynamics intensify.

Also consider - "In part two, Dr Michael Hudson challenges the traditional beliefs about the fall of the Roman Empire, arguing that it was caused by a financial crisis brought on by excessive debt, wealth inequality, and the concentration of economic power.

"Hudson draws parallels to modern-day economies and highlights the dangers of financialization and wealth concentration."

respice; adspice; prospice et fiat justitia; ruat caelum!

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 1 year ago

Who started Biowar-2020 to sink the economies of so many Global South countries due to the collapse of global tourism and supply chains ? Wuhan, Red China.

Who approved Poo-tin's plan to invade Ukraine after the Beijing Winter Olympics with the commitment of "friendship with no limits" ? Xi Jinping, the triangular-eyed dear leader of Winnie the Pooh. Who caused Global South's food crisis ? Red China's support of Poo-tin's invasion of Ukraine.

The Global North coped with Biowar-2020's threatening to collapse its economies by massive deficit spending to support demand but the global supply chains were slow to recover (why ? "Red China's Zero-CoViD policy shutting down entire cities and regions encompassing tens of millions of people simply because Red China's CoViD-19 vaccines didn't work despite extremely high rates of vaccination). Resulting ignition of high inflation required the Global North to increase interest rates to curb inflation. This caused the distress of the Global South's highly indebted countries. Of course, this hit the Global North as well. High interest rates vaporized global glut of savings in the bond market. This caused some huge increases in the U.S.A.'s national debt and erratic Treasury instruments' auctions. It's well known that the destruction of savings by monetary authorities worldwide via persistent inflation eventually led to a dearth of global savings to buy the bonds desired to be sold. The supply of bonds is nearly infinite but the labor represented by the wealth for buying them is always finite, dear, and shrinking now due to population decline.

The 33 trillions USD national debt's interest rates also went up so the Global North suffers together with the Global South. The U.S.A. lost the most in increased interest-rate payment to (the auctioned-as-discounted) Treasury debt instruments' holders because of its huge national debt.

One red thread runs through these calamities: Red China's terrible decisions resulting from its dear leader's anger and incompetence.

Global Plutonium Association: Rudolf Peierls derived the equation determining how densely packed condensed enriched uranium powder must be to attain ignition of neutron density exceeding critical mass density of enriched uranium. One needs to know the neutron cross sections of uranium-235 and uranium-238 nuclei as a function of the speed of the neutron for making plutonium (Robert Oppenheimer was probably chosen to lead the Manhattan Project because of what he knew about Chemistry) in addition to Physics. Madame (and Columbia University Professor) Wu Chien-Shiung, nicknamed the Dragon Lady (who became the President of the American Physical Society and did the parity-non-conservation cryogenic emitted-electron-spins experiment enabling the winning of Nobel prizes for herself and two other Chinese heritage physicists of Stony Brook and Columbia University who were looking for a parking space near Columbia campus before going to eat Chinese foods -- Where do you think Nobel Prizes' idea came from ? Getting stuck in Manhattan's traffic talking about new experimental data from Brookhaven National Laboratory near Stony Brook University, and looking for Chinese foods ! 😂) worked on that problem behind a car dealership in upper Manhattan for the so-code-named Manhattan project which initial research was led by Enrico Fermi, a physics professor of Columbia University at the time. His research team achieved the world's first controlled self-sustained uranium-very-pure-imported-from-England-graphite-moderated nuclear fission chain reaction in a squash court of the University of Chicago. The venue was moved from Columbia to inland Chicago due to the discovery of German U-boat which could conceivably follow up the Hudson River to attack Columbia campus.

The Nazi Germans lost the race to build the first nuclear bomb due to their pursuing (the more ideal deuterium water obtainable from the residue of Norway fertilizer-making factory's seawater hydrolysis plant) heavy water moderation instead of graphite moderation of neutrons.

Look at FIG. 14.21 carefully. Due to the lanthanide contraction and possibly two low-energy bands being formed in the ground state, the lanthanide or chemically hard-to-separate lanthanides is/are promising for achieving near-STP superconductivity.

The presence of uranium in the extrasolar sample might have been necessary to inject electrons because uranium atoms have rather easily detachable electrons. As uranium is radioactive and thus undesirable (or its nuclear mass was simply near a massive lanthanide element's actually present in the sample thereby making mass aliasing possible), its replacement by other electron donors is probably possible because their detached electrons will have much higher energy than the ground state energy bands. Uranium's presence may also be explained by the necessity of using neutrons focused by neutron mirrors made from beryllium for releasing prolonged fission energy for propulsion.

The electron (or hole) transmitter can help fill these ground state energy bands as a water faucet can fill lower-placed jars.

The intersections of the atomic orbital energy v. atomic number Z curves in FIG. 14.21 are important for superconductivity because multiple elements can have atomic orbitals with nearly the same energy so if these orbitals' energies are widely separated from other orbitals' energies, a collision changing the momentum of a charge-carrier moeity requires another moeity to absorb the momentum due to the conservation of momentum.

The GROUP velocity of these moeities can thus remain unchanged to effect superconductivity. The hybridization of the similar-energy atomic orbitals of different elements means superconductors usually have either different elements with energy bands close to each other and widely separated from other orbitals' energy bands by large-compared-to-kT energy gaps, or the same element with multiple oxidation states exposing different orbitals.

We are now in a golden age of superconductivity research and superconductors' design & development: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superconductor-research-is-in-a-golden-age-despite-controversy/

Elastic collisions of very light charged moeities such as electrons, holes, or charged bosons with very massive ions helps reflect their momenta rather than dissipating momenta to the ions. "It's all done with smoke and mirrors." Using momentum mirrors flanking (" As above, so below") the collision sites to reflect the escaping ones like in a laser can restore their density conducive to superconductivity. At the same momentum value, high-mass ions tend to have lower kinetic energy than low-mass ones because kinetic energy K=(p×p)/(2M) with M being the mass of the ion. Within the lanthanides, ytterbium has the same outer electronic structure as calcium but has a much higher mass so the phonons consisting of ytterbium and oxygen within graphene ("smoke") have low kinetic energies less able to scatter the charged carrier moeities. Ytterbium-ed graphene may have even lower energy levels for its phonons than limed graphene thereby minimizing their abilities to scatter charged moeities.

Cuprates used as momentum mirrors may have many positively charged holes and graphene can accept them for conducting electricity. The graphene is used for imposing a periodic crystalline structure upon the oxygen and ytterbium ions to enhance propagation of charged moeities' matter waves.

Cerium is fairly abundant so it might work better for wider applications but is its ion too big to fit into graphene ? Other lanthanides can also be used for fine tuning if they can fit into graphene's hexagonal holes. Holes can exist at near-STP temperatures so they can be candidates for replacing the hydrogen in superconducting at high-pressure near-room-temperature hydrides.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"USPS Pilot Program Could Lead to Restart of Agency’s ... Nationwide Banking Services"!

ad iudicium?

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

By Drs. Michael Hudson & Paul Craig Roberts - this v. important article:

An essential read, imo in these crazy times of Fiat Money Debt Servitude!

respice; adspice; prospice ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 1 year ago

"High Finance and Investment Colonialism" by Prof. Dr. Michael Hudson:

which ends with this -- "The Industrial Capitalism today is a dinosaur. It is what was leading the late 19th century onwards to what seemed to be socialism. But instead - we’ve got Finance Capitalism.

"And if you have knowledge, if you explain what we’re going to be doing in the coming shows of how this mixed economy strategy, every economy that’s developed has been a mixed economy with the government to play a major role.

"If you let The Private Financial Interests take over this role of government, you’re going to have the kind of shrinkage that’s de-industrialized the U.S. economy.

"And that role of government, has now to be the core focus of how the BRICS economies are now going to develop. And that requires freeing themselves from the dynamics of Finance Capitalism and - Finance Imperialism"! Further consider ...

et veritas vos liberabit!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 1 year ago

"Justices Have Financial Interest In Major Tax Case"!!!

"John Roberts and Samuel Alito own shares of companies that could score billions in tax relief from the outcome of Moore v. United States."

And finally, just in relation to "Justice" Clarence Thomas, please try to closely consider these three links:

et fiat lux!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"Signaling shift on Student Debt, Biden picks Warren ally to oversee student aid"by C.Walker

ergo spero meliora?

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

NB: "Biden Removes Student Loan Forgiveness From Budget Proposal"! - by Sharon Zhang:

UH-OH!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 3 years ago

Forgive Student Debt Now!

Our young people cannot move forward with the burden of student debt.

The average student graduates with $33,000 of debt! This is insane. They graduate into extremely low paying jobs that offer no benefits or security and are expected to pay back these huge sums of money for simply getting an education! Ridiculous!

Biden can forgive this debt by Executive Order and as we now know from the pandemic economy, this is totally doable. The money is there! It's a matter of having the will! DO WE CARE ABOUT OUR KIDS?

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 1 year ago

Business owners CHOSE to run a business just like students chose to go to college, so just why should their PPP Loans be forgiven ... But Not Student Debt?!!!

Can someone take the PPP Loans (and, it is interesting that the # doesn't show up in Twitter!) that were forgiven, to the Supreme Court and charge back every wealthy employer that got Federal $ for nothing? A friend's millionaire boss in a small business with just 2 employees got $70k! Student Debt Relief Now!

Also "As the Supreme Court gears up for oral arguments on student debt cancellation here's a reminder of why this case even exists:"

"Alexander Taylor and Myra Brown are just political pawns for the billionaire funded groups, they are not actually harmed by people getting debt relief"!!! Also consider:

"While the US Supreme Court hears a case trying to kill student debt, Sen. Bernie Sanders joined a rally outside to say that we should make Public Colleges free & that you shouldn't "have to face financial ruin because you want a damn education!" - from:

Which ends with these wise words - "With things like this, it's better to try and fail than to not try at all. Americans (other than these two dopes) have made it resoundingly clear that they want student debt forgiveness to happen, which means that if it this program keeps getting blocked, pressure will be on Congress to come up with another one, and another one after that if that one doesn't work and so on, until we find something that does."

per ardua ad justitia!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 1 year ago

Never give up hope! Student loans are Biden's right to give forgiveness and what the press doesn't want anyone to hear is how well his attorney did at the Supreme Court.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/01/supreme-court-biden-loan-forgiveness-plan-chances.html

"The government’s top Supreme Court lawyer may have saved President Joe Biden’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan from what experts considered all but certain defeat."

Experts lobbed praise on Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the lawyer who represented the Biden administration in front of the nine justices Tuesday.

“The Biden administration now seems more likely than not to win the cases,” said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 1 year ago

NB: Thom Hartmann ... "If you can't afford to pay back your student loans - the Masters of the Financial Universe say: "Tough luck: learn some responsibility! You learn from hard times. If you are a billion-dollar bank & can't afford to cash out your depositors it's - "Please help us with a bailout!" - FROM:

"AFTER SUCCESSFULLY LOBBYING for the rollback of new rules applied to Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis, lobbyists for Silicon Valley Bank, immediately began pressing their case further to the federal authority that insures bank deposits in the US in the event of another crisis,according to lobbying disclosures reviewed by The Intercept. The lobbying effort, managed to exempt banks the size of Silicon Valley Bank from more stringent regulations, including the stress tests, aimed at uncovering the types of weaknesses that led to the bank’s implosion Friday. Two of the bank’s top lobbyists previously served as senior staffers for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy - who himself had pushed for the repeal of significant pieces of the landmark Wall Street reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank."

However glad for small mercies due to "Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar the lawyer who represented the Biden administration in front of the nine justices" but systemically the US' 0.01% - still call the shots!!

et spero meliora!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 1 year ago

Note - Parasitic Rentiers who use Revolving Doors to enable Regulatory Capture; motivated by self generated Perverse Incentives, Conflicts of Interest and Moral Hazard; are greedy evil psychopaths, who hate True Democracy .. and The Earth itself can not afford them! Their creed is Neoliberalism and so fyi, consider:

muttum in parvo!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 1 year ago

Bail out the bankers without batting an eyelash but students (who have the human right to an education) have to fight in the Supreme Court to get a measly amount forgiven.

I don't understand what it is about Americans that they stand by and allow the rich and corporations to continually suck everything out of the economy which is meant to work for all people.

Elizabeth Warren wrote an op-ed on the disgusting inequality and injustice:

https://www.businessinsider.com/svb-bailout-elizabeth-warren-student-loan-borrowers-limbo-banks-2023-3

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 1 year ago

Reinstating The Glass-Steagall Act was a major demand of Occupy Wall Street!!!

Guess they were right!! Why don't Americans ever learn or fight for their rights?!

From the link - "Republican lawmakers have blasted student-debt relief as a "bailout" with some calling for the relief to be blocked in a potential deal to raise the debt ceiling.

And - "It's unclear whether borrowers will end up getting the "bailout" GOP lawmakers oppose - but for now, Warren wants to ensure big banks won't be able to escape regulation.

And as - "These bank failures were entirely avoidable if Congress and the Fed had done their jobs and kept strong banking regulations in place since 2018," Warren wrote. "SVB and Signature are gone and now Washington must act quickly to prevent the next crisis." Also ...

respice et adspice; fiat lux et fiat justitia; nunc et semper!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 1 year ago

"Why the Banking System Is Breaking Up"! by Prof. Dr. Michael Hudson:

"There's an even larger elephant in the room: derivatives. Volatility increased last Thursday and Friday. The turmoil, has reached vast magnitudes beyond what characterized the 2008 crash of AIG and other speculators. Today JP Morgan Chase & other New York banks have tens of trillions of dollar valuations of derivatives – casino bets on which way interest rates, bond prices, stock prices and other measures will change.

"For every winning guess - there is a loser. When trillions of dollars are bet, some bank trader is bound to wind up with a loss that can easily wipe out the bank’s entire net equity.

"There's now a flight to 'cash', to safe havens; something even better than cash:US Treasury securities. Despite the talk of the Republicans refusing to raise the debt ceiling - the Treasury can always print the money to pay its bondholders. It looks like the US Treasury'll become the New Depository of choice for those who have the financial resources. Bank deposits will fall & with them - bank holdings of reserves at the Fed.

"So far, the stock market has resisted following the plunge in bond prices. My guess is that we will now see the Great Unwinding of the great Fictitious Capital boom of 2008-2015.So the chickens are coming hope to roost - with the “chicken” being, perhaps, the elephantine overhang of derivatives fueled by the post-2008 loosening of financial regulation and risk analysis."

MULTUM in parvo!!!

[-] 2 points by gsw (3420) from Woodbridge Township, NJ 1 year ago

A worthwhile read The expert who pioneered ‘quantitative easing’ has seen enough: Central banks are too powerful and they’re to blame for inflation

https://fortune.com/2023/03/20/is-federal-reserve-too-powerful-inflation-quantitative-easing-richard-werner/

[-] 2 points by gsw (3420) from Woodbridge Township, NJ 1 year ago

…..”A key difference with the CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability. And also, we will have the technology to enforce that. Critics of a central bank might suddenly find they are not allowed to pay for anything any longer – in a manner reminiscent of the way that protesting Canadian truckers were frozen out of their funds by the Canadian government in February 2022.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 1 year ago

"Three Banks Have Now Collapsed. A Progressive Economist Explains Why." [C.J.Polychroniou]

Note that - "There is a banking crisis underway and the problems are spreading, says Gerald Epstein."

FROM YOUR EXCELLENT LINK: "With the exception of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Great Inflation of the 1970s, is now generally viewed as the most dramatic failure of macroeconomic policy in the United States since the founding of the Federal Reserve - Judging from the dismal outcomes of the decade – especially the rising and volatile rates of inflation and unemployment ... it is hard to deny that policy was in some way flawed.

"In reality, central bank decision-makers led by the Fed - were largely responsible for the Great Inflation of the 1970s. They adopted “Easy Money” policies - in order to finance massive national budget deficits. Yet this inflationary behaviour just went unnoticed by most observers amid discussions of conflict, rising energy prices, unemployment and many other challenges.

"Most worryingly despite these failings, the world’s central banks were able to continue unchecked on a path toward the unprecedented powers they now hold. Indeed the painful 1970s & subsequent financial crises have been repeatedly used as arguments for even greater independence & less oversight, of the world’s central banking activities."

The only thing that I feel was missing^here, is any reference to the concomitant corollary of the primary socio-economic ideology of our times & as such - please consider this seminal article for added context:

respice, adspice, prospice ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 1 year ago

"Most US Banks are technically near insolvency - and hundreds are already fully insolvent'!"

NB "Nouriel Roubini is a professor emeritus of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, the chief economist at Atlas Capital Team, CEO of Roubini Macro Associates and - a co-founder of TheBoomBust.com."

multum in parvo?!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 1 year ago

"Regulation Won’t End Bank Crises. We Must Put Shadow Banks Under Public Control." by C.J. Polychroniou:

"Regulations designed by banks to shield their interests will never be enough to halt banking crises, an economist warns."

"Warren Says First Republic Collapse shows deregulation boosted 'Too Big to Fail' Banks & "Ultimately taxpayers will be on the hook," said the Democratic senator from Massachusetts."

radix omnium malorum - est cupiditas!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"Americans stress over ‘Unshakeable Burden’ of Student Loan Payments" ... by Michael Sainato:

which .. "Borrowers are awaiting relief from the Biden administration while the pause on federal student loan repayment is set to expire 30 September"

"Biden can forgive this debt by Executive Order and as we now know from the pandemic economy, this is totally doable. The money is there! It's a matter of having the will! DO WE CARE ABOUT OUR KIDS?"

No, not if they are from & of the 99%, just like everything else in U$A as Class War is waged by the 1%!

quod erat demonstrandum?

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 3 years ago

The psychological cost of debt is enormous, especially student debt.

“There is a psychological cost to this unshakable burden. We are facing having to put our own children through college, and eventually our own retirement, all with the burden of $1,500 to $2,000 payments every month, seemingly forever. We internalize a feeling of failure, even though we have accomplished a lot, personally and professionally,” added Kajikawa. “I am dreading the point at which we will start paying again.”

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"Biden Could Cancel Student Loan Debt Right Now ... By Signing an Executive Order"!

multon in parvo ...

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 3 years ago

Biden should keep promise and forgive student debt.

At least $10000, that was his promise!

From Teen Vogue, which has become a lefty magainze:

"With the stroke of a pen, Biden could grant tens of millions of Americans a semblance of financial freedom, keeping one of his major campaign promises along the way. Fortunately for debtors, this signature from Biden is not the only path to liberation. In the age of finance capitalism, we as debtors should see our debts as assets that we can collectively leverage against governments and financial institutions. We can demand full cancellation through campaigns of economic disobedience, growing debtors’ unions, and by continuing to challenge the myth of a debtor who made a bad choice as an individual. We have no other option but to fight for debt abolition and a society where everyone has the means to live. Now we must use that will to get this executive order on President Biden’s desk immediately, and by any means necessary.:

Hold him to this promise. Anything less is an utter disgrace! And, I just love that a beauty magazine is calling for the direct action of stopping payments. F-kn briiliant! We have come a long way since OWS in 2011!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"How Lockdowns Crushed the Working Class, While Leaving Elites Unscathed New Harvard Data (Accidentally) Reveals" ...

"The picture painted is one of working-class destruction" & usurious student or other debts do NOT help!

multum in parvo ...

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 3 years ago

Lockdowns also taught us that the money IS there. The gov't CAN provide the people with safety nets that we've been told for years are unaffordable.

The reality is that our gov'ts simply haven't prioritized the people. They've prioritized the military, corporations and rich creeps.

Here's a little gem of a piece.

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/opinion/lockdown-magic-money-trees-not-austerity-the-only-way-economy-can-survive-covid-pandemic-215475/

"Debt:

It is the huge amounts of money involved that shatter the illusion that all this money is borrowed from private investors. Much of the ‘debt’ the government has accrued is owed to the central bank which whistled up billions out of nowhere. The central bank as part of the state apparatus means that the state is borrowing from and repaying money to itself. There should be no question of this money being a burden on present or future generations.

Where is all this money going? Won’t it eventually pile up in an inflationary mountain? The answer is no because it is constantly being recycled as people meet their basic needs. The real inflationary danger is a collapse in the supply chain or profiteering not the creation and circulation of state-issued money."

"Fresh air:

The government should drop the pretence that it is borrowing the money it is dispersing. It should admit that it has, and always had, the power to create money out of fresh air. The pandemic shutdown means that people cannot get hold of money in the normal way. It is right therefore that the state should use its special power to replace that money until the normal economy can resume. It is akin to distributing a basic income.

What we must learn from this is that there is a public economy as well as a private market economy. For several decades now we have lived under an economic ideology that maintains that there is only a market economy. Where would we be today if that were the case? Let us nourish our magic money trees for they hold the key to our survival in these exceptional times."

So, while the working class has been decimated from the pandemic, they have also garnered the knowledge that they've been had for the past 4 decades. They're sick of working for slave wages and hopefully, apparently, they're not willing to do it anymore! Bravo!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"The Battle of Blair Mountain is one of the most stunning episodes in the United States’ violent history of class warfare. In 1921, twenty thousand armed miners in West Virginia marched on the coal bosses and were met with bombs and submachine guns." - from ...

respice; adspice; prospice ...

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 3 years ago

If only Americans learned history properly in school. The good, the bad and the ugly. That is the only way to know your country and to make it better.

I know I never learned about The Battle of Blair Mountain!

The most important outcome was how it broke the union. Always the goal of our "democratic" "free" nation. But, no you don't have the right to workers' rights or to organize or be safe or have retirement or decent pay. Sickening.

And, OSHA is like the most weak institution in this country. OSHA doesn't do anything to keep workers safe, you hardly ever hear of it doing anything at all anymore. Pathetic.

From: https://www.history.com/news/americas-largest-labor-uprising-the-battle-of-blair-mountain

"The Battle of Blair Mountain is now cited as a pivotal chapter in American labor history, but in the short term, it proved to be a crushing defeat for the miners. The state of West Virginia charged Keeney, Mooney and some 20 other union men with treason, and hundreds of others were indicted for murder. Nearly all were later acquitted, but the legal battles emptied the UMWA’s coffers and hindered its organizing efforts. By the end of the decade, only a few hundred miners in West Virginia were still members. The union wouldn’t reclaim the coalfields until the mid-1930s and the Great Depression, when workers’ rights to organize were enshrined in New Deal legislation such as the National Industrial Recovery Act."

Just think, the miners were charged with TREASON, for trying to be treated decently in their workplace!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

Consider "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" by Frederick Douglass (Dave Zirin)

"If only Americans learned history properly in school. The good, the bad and the ugly. That

is the only way to know your country and to make it better." So true, that it bears repeating!

respice; adspice; prospice ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"Remembering 1921: The Battle of Blair Mountain"! by David Rovics:

"The biggest multiracial uprising in the history of the U.S. took place in the hills of West Virginia in 1921. Ever heard of it?"

And -"There is another America. Remember it. Whether Jesus ever lived or died, I don't know but those miners died for you. You should at least know who they were. And then let us all follow in their footsteps. Long live the multiracial uprising in the hills of Appalachia in 1921.Long live the Battle of Blair Mountain."

et veritas vos liberabit!

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 3 years ago

All student debts should have the interest rate of the federal funds rate, which is the rate at which credit is created to be loaned out to banking institutional borrowers ( who are usually the richest people in the world, for creating global inflation.)

The new interest rate will thus allow a form of equality to emerge. A global inflation of students' knowledge ( like Germany does fund at college and university levels, more than most other countries, even for non-Germans or non-E.U. citizens; 'Kindergarten' was originally a German word and so is 'Universität' by now; many educated 《 often of a younger-generation; I call college or university levels people 'educated' because many German students learn English in the equivalent of U.S. grade schools》Germans know English very well so English speakers will probably do all right communicating in English over there { of course, speaking German is preferable in Germany even if one's not good at it; it's a form of respect towards the hosting culture; it's fine to switch to English once the Germans have found out how pitiful your German may be relative to how good their English is; intercultural interaction is often like building a bridge starting from both sides: whichever side builds better and faster has its bridge used by both; I, for example, speak my Dad's own dialect to him or in his presence because he couldn't speak or understand the few languages and dialects being in mixed usage among his family members; he wanted a "bridge built" when he was staying at home for a few months and I as a child could build it better and faster in his dialect than he could strive in the opposite direction to no avail to understand "what my children are talking about"; I believe that due to linguistic difference, Red China's leadership and foreign ministry might have overreacted in the ways based upon the millennium-old hegemony of China using the more U.S.S.R.-Stalinist/Chinese cultural understanding of what deterrence 《 威慑 = 威 prestige + 慑 deter 》 was: via terrorizing with intimidations; Western concept of deterrence doesn't include as much escalated disproportionate aggression and intimidation from Central; Pootin's usage of novichok in extraterritorial assassinations probably scared Kim Jong-un's sister that the U.S. might try to murder her brother under the global spotlight with a highly toxic poison smeared upon the pen to be used by Kim Jong-un to sign the denuclearization document; I laud her effort to protect her brother but it showed her paranoia; U.S. is highly unlikely to even try to do that at all because Kim Jong-un will definitely be needed to enforce and carry out what he had signed; as the U.S. is a secular Christian state 《 different from Israel's secular Jewish state, which has Judaism as its state religion 》 due to our First-Amendment Constitutional prohibition and thus the lack of any state religion, I doubt very much that there's such a thing as a half-virgin birth acceptable to the U.S. although Catholicism followed by Biden certainly promulgated the belief in the "virgin birth" of Jesus from Virgin Mary who was supposedly human; how did Jesus come out of Mary's body which had human anatomy and still leave her hymen intact ? Perhaps Jesus could move in an extraordinary higher dimension so as to get out of Mary and the eventual burial chamber as 'light' which might have reasonably caused the light-bearer Lucifer to become jealous; if Kim Jong-un is greater than Jesus in North Korea, has his throne in the people's temple been classified by DPRK as its greatest "state secret" in order to prevent the rebirth of freedom in a Red menstrual catharsis ? constipation kills as Mao had achieved in 1969 by "I don't give a shit" which had Red China's PLA on highest alert to push a button to nuclear-attack U.S.S.R. and a rogue U.S. Military commander just seconds from having his order to nuclear-attack Red China carried out; here's where Biden had his great delusion about Red China: that the sheer weight of the rural part of Red China will restrain its adolescent testosterone-surge-powered hegemonic wet dream; Red China has vast casualty tolerance; the DPRK has the same tolerance so Kim Jong-un will in due time fall into his white throne and be drowned in his own shit when he faints sitting atop it; ★ as the Sino-Soviet Border Conflict had already shown in 1969 that the U.S.S.R.'s having a numerically far superior nuclear weapon force than Red China's nascent small nuclear weapon force didn't deter Red China's ambush of Soviet soldiers, nuclear weapon possession didn't amount to the deterrence of conventional warfare; Russia's having nuclear weapons to defend against Red China's conquest of the Russian Far East will probably be insufficient to deter Red China; also recalling the aftermath of the 9-11-2001 attack on the U.S. by Al Qaeda, U.S. nuclear weapons couldn't and didn't help a bit; it's still the long slog in conventional warfare that largely stopped any additional large-scale terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland; there's no nuclear weapon substitute for conventional weapon force superiority when fighting against a "I don't give a shit about my people" country such as the DPRK, a.k.a. Red China's bulldog; my teammate and my vastly superior joint 21-to-0 score in soccer/football still didn't convince the opposing-team duo that they had indeed lost, so we all had to go for a shoot-out after negotiating to count the 21-to-0 score win as a 1-to-0 shoot-out win in order to settle the win-or-lose issue in the 2-wins-out-of-3 shoot-out; there is no substitute for decapitation credibility when dealing with the "I don't give a shit about my own people" countries; wet jobs such as in Tora Bora after 9-11-2001 attacks can be messy but necessary in a state of war ( no more Bushit outsourcing to so-called allies to allow Osama bin Laden to escape to Pakistan: Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, Muammer Gadhafi 《 who made the FATAL mistake of delegating power to his son Saif al-Islam as the de facto Defense Minister who, in his quest to massacre rebels, vowed to cut off water supply to Benghazi, the former capital city of at least hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen, thereby to commit genocide on innocent civilians triggering Libyan ambassador to U.N. to defect from Gadhafi family and his getting U.N. Sec. Council Resolution #1973 passed that was carried out succcessfully by N.A.T.O. which had been founded explicitly to fight an orders-of-magnitude more-nuclear war so I doubt very much whether Gadhafi's hypothetically having dozens of nuclear bombs could have achieved deterrence; Imperial Japan IGNORED U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima [ho-hum as Tokyo's great fire]; Japan's surrendering to the U.S. was likelier due to its not wanting to be occupied by its nemesis, the Russians of the U.S.S.R., as Japan and Russia had fought over Manchuria and more in China during Qing dynasty; U.S. played the role then as the peacemaker between Japan and Russia so Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize; Japan much preferred surrendering to a formerly peacemaking country, the U.S., rather than a former enemy, Russia; a visitor to Washington D.C. may enjoy the fragrance and beauty of Japan's national flower, the blossoms on the cherry trees, gifted by Japan to U.S.; a Mom's-MISDIRECTED@me-wrath-originated regret is: I didn't take my parents to visit D.C. while cherry trees were blossoming; their UNfulfilled wish was to visit D.C. but Dad had often visited Brooklyn Botanical Garden where there were also cherry trees in bloom; on our last trip, I drove and wheeled him in his wheelchair to view Manhattan's skyline from Brooklyn Heights Promenade and briefly visit what he had always called "日本花園 Japanese Garden" 》, ) if threats close-by should emerge against our homeland, it'll be no worse than a bullet speeding down the Fifth Avenue of New York as frontiers-towns had gunslinger law enforcers ★ I highly recommend for preventing constipation the Japanese habit of drinking 4 cups of [I prefer: tepid] water upon waking up and waiting 40 minutes before eating anything and using a bidét for [I prefer: soap and warm-]water cleaning after the shit has come out; glory to the Muslims and/or Hindus for this millennium-old hygienic breakthrough } as long as they can get used to accents which are really inevitable if one isn't speaking one's own native tongue -- accents are a sign of linguistic [and maybe also cultural] intelligence, in my opinion ) is mostly better than a global inflation of the peoples' costs of living.

I generally dislike the simple forgiveness of debts because it labels people as hopeless losers. However, if they do pay back albeit at easier-to-bear interest rates, they can say proudly that they did pay back their student loans.

The richest people in the world often say that their own efforts which made them their hoards of "money" ( actually mostly credit, i.e. hot thin air pumped into labor-produced 'assets', which renters pay money [often from labor] to occupy or live in ) so the student borrowers can also say that their own efforts allowed them to become free of student debts.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

Re. onerous US Student Debt & Usury - it is safe to say that U are full o'shit!

multum in parvo?

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 3 years ago

Are you mistaken ? I am neither Soso, 毛賊東, nor 김정은 !

김정은 decreed his people to achieve production quota of their shit output. It's literally a matter of life and death. Batshit harvesting by poor rural farmers for agriculture might well be the origin of this CoViD-19 pandemic which Red China tried hard to cover up, due to 'the program'. Shit is the source of great power, having achieved the millennium-long hegemony of China. More recently achieved in the past year, there was the global decrease in GDP except for the originating "I don't give a PPE fart to the foreign devils 「跟人屁, 食人屁, 我唔放屁, 餓死你。」 " cuntry.

Here's my advice to the new graduate: beans. Legumes, not plastics - this isn't 1967 with N.A.S.A. going for broke to the Moon anymore. Bean, corn, and squash planted together yield the synergy of high food production in the Americas.

Despite 'that [cuntry's] program', Biden-Harris vaccine is great for reopening the U.S.A. !

Having been fully two-dose vaccinated and having reached beyond the two-week efficacy kick-in interval, I normalized meeting with fully two-dose-vaccinated close relatives and eating in restaurants ( as this helps with the creation of jobs and the acceptance of a lunch paid for at the first time by a financially successful offspring who became not as possessive as before, probably due to a less sibling-stressed environment no longer competing for parental resources ) but I still strive to minimize the chances of catching a highly transmissible or more resistant-to-vaccine-conferred-immunity variant strain of SARS_CoV-2 by wearing masks ( thereby preventing the overstressing of our sickcare-medical-care-bill dodge-ball game ) etc.

My Mom was a vaccination fanatic ( H - for Health ) and an education zealot ( E for Education ) ( L for Livelihood and P for Passion were left to me to choose ) so she being a limitedly capable Socialist, not the Sosolists engaging in non-aggression cocktail daisy chaining pacts, would have approved.

If one hangs around that Rudy ( Red ) one long enough, one will end up in a prison. 「近朱者赤,近墨者黑。」( This wasn't a new advice but ancient and invariant in time - culture diffuses according to Schrödinger's Equation renormalized to the anthropological/sociocultural/sociological level; bridges, global air travel, importation of potentially cheap labor.. all change the definition of 近 so 近墨者黑, 近伐者紅。 Cultural affinity matters in disallowing cultural stresses to overcome cultural-bonding elasticity limit; all great jurisdictions are empires; some brittle regional hegemon strove for territorial-contiguous and tightly controlled expansion resulting in allergic heavy-handed reactions to any challenge while the other malleable global hegemon strove for ideologically contiguous and loosely coupled expansion; smaller states tend to be wealthier. )

History doesn't repeat itself but definitely rhymes. We may not have a Munich Pact yet again but... carbonated as dilute Chimurican Coke(R), acidic seawater surely dissolves limestone.

The village butcher who had correctly believed that our ancestral stone lion couldn't bleed was precisely the one who made it "bleed" from its eyes ( by smearing them with the blood of animals he had slaughtered in order to play a trick upon the village fool and "liberate him" from his obsession with absurd stone bleeding, ) thereby "bringing about" the events as foretold by the oracle which had been consulted after a terrible dream. The ones who believed and followed the village fool ( who did go to check the ancestral stone lion every morning day after day to decide whether to "run for the hills" ) survived the Deluge.

殺豬屠夫死掉了, 難道我们就吃帶毛豬 ? Ben, Ben, Ben Carson ( dark and highly educated enough with expensive enough taste to try to spend the taxes of the poorly educated on lavish furnishing ) for President 2024 !

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

Given all your gobbledegook, maybe I could well be "mistaken" but whoTF knows to be honest?

Because whoTF really knows WTF U are actually talking about?! So now maybe try to consider:

multum in parvo?

[-] 1 points by grapes (5232) 3 years ago

The healthcare workers who can borrow tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars aren't coming from any economically disadvantaged families. Money simply wasn't loaned to families with no money without a creditworthy cosigner ( it's why our connection to our adopted Grandma became so important in Hong Kong; Mom's decision to help her with getting potable water benefited our family in many unexpected ways, ) as I had learnt as a new-immigrant student attending college in the U.S. Here's why my connection to my Big Brother was very important to my having become college-educated. He helped me get jobs. He was the first rebel against his following in my Dad's footsteps ( with education zealot Mom's assistance ) and I was the second one [easier with continuing rebellion, for sure -- the American Revolution inspired the French Revolution]. It took willpower to say, "No !" to ten flavors of all-you-can-eat ice-cream in my possible future... I learnt from my experience with Dad's "chicken at every meal." I still eat chicken but not at every meal anymore. It's important to understand the crux of the matter -- usually exercising moderation and deferring-to-wait-for-the-complete-or-clear-evidence-to-emerge before making a decision is what a situation often calls for.

There's no valid reason whatsoever why the government should forgive debts to give a financial break to the richest families in our society whose children working in the sickcare industry earn the highest incomes. Not only does the World has a "global saving glut," the U.S. has a "college graduate glut" fueled by easy money till later. "Going to college" was the mantra of educators to fend off education reform in their grade-school dominion. Looking at it from an employer's perspective, it's better that one hires an all-college-graduate-or-even-more-educated workforce, one doesn't pay for it and who knows when it may come in handy. White workers have definitely gained an advantage in employment during this past year of pandemic. Biden was absolutely correct that paying more ( for White male workers ) worked well. White Lives Matter ! I understand because I was mugged by three Black teenagers, too. No, I didn't carry a gun as I pretty much gave up that idea in Hong Kong completely once my family had been relocated away from our shantytown to the space vacated by the British Military's fuel and munitions' depot because boundary and border peace came. ¿祖父?曰: 「四海之內,皆兄弟也。」

If I were to follow this line of reasoning, our government should forgive all real estate taxes owed by the landlords in this pandemic because their tenants haven't been paying their rents due to the governmental decrees. Landlords are in a class which could borrow hundreds of thousands and hundreds of millions of dollars to enable them to have an occupation which earns them the highest [unrealized for taxes but borrowable for spending via loans] incomes. Besides they have come from the richest families, even richer than those of the sickcare ( or more precisely deathdon'tcare but moneygrubbing dodge-ball-playing ) industry workers' parental families.

20% of U.S. annual GDP ( maybe roughly 2 to 3 Russias' annual GDP or 2 to 3 [Hong-Kong-and-Macau-Special-Administrative-Region-containing] Guangdong Provinces' annual GDP { this was why I had said before that Guangdong containing Hong Kong could be a viable country because the entire province would have a GDP higher than Russia's and Hong Kong's wealth alone was nearly the same as Russia's already so the entire province would surely have more wealth than Russia; Russia's being a sovereign state means that a Guangdong state would have both GDP and wealth greater than Russia's so it's likely viable without having Hong Kong's food and water dependency's making Hong Kong impossible to be an independent country in that neighborhood without its maybe becoming protected by the U.S. Military but that's not going to happen since the U.S. had long stopped being a colony-seeking power { recall Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan as the countries potentially colonized by the U.S. but weren't } -- U.S. military bases don't count as colonies so Hong Kong's leasing of its Lantau/Lantou Island to the U.S. as a military base might be accepted by the people of the U.S. but I was sure that Hong Kong's Chief Executive had no guts going against the controlling wish of Beijing ) goes towards this racketeering industry and filled coffins galore and sickened people are the result. We subsidized Trump's public landlording, didn't we ? By most measures, the U.S. has by far the worst health outcomes per unit money spent among the developed countries.

I understand why potholes are such great innovative American GDP-boosting devices. We have our cars being fixed by the automobile mechanics while those "silly Germans" were stuck on their "scenic routes" sitting in traffic jams during their 24 days of paid vacation in a year. Meanwhile, we've got to work more { stupid } days { flipping fried fat } in order to pay those auto-repair bills.

People of the World, listen: U.S. workers work a lot, probably more than most developed countries' workers. The world-leading U.S. annual GDP came from work ( this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.) We no longer track Gross National Product (GNP) which included incomes from our overseas investments. GNP is less indicative than GDP, of the actual conditions of our homeland.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

Maybe "There's no valid reason whatsoever why" - anyone should give any credence "whatsoever" to your reactionary RW brainfarts & your ever expanding forum replies?!!! I am NOT interested in your sui generis opinions gropes, only what U can show to be good for The 99%!! Stop kissing Ruling Class Ass, U dumb Stockholm Syndrome Suffering, insufferable Class Traitor! Read this and reply ... OR just fk off!

this "In recent years, many centrist economists have claimed that canceling student debt is economically regressive in that it would disproportionately favor higher-income households. Yet - study after study has revealed that this is not the case. In particular, a new study by the Roosevelt Institute .. explains that the “regressive myth rests on a series of misleading methodological foundations,” - demonstrating that quite contrary to these regressive claims ... student debt cancelation at each proposed level of cancelation — Biden’s $10,000 proposal, Warren and Schumer’s $50,000 proposal ... or the Institute’s own proposal of $75,000 — would see those most economically marginalized benefiting the most." Also look at this link ..

multum in parvo?!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Mortgages: Serious Delinquencies – rose by 376,000 and are now up more than 1.8 million from their pre-pandemic levels"

caveat emptor!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"The Plan Is to Save Capital and Let the People Die"! an important article .. by Hamilton Nolan:

radix omnium malorum est cupiditas ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

Note "Millions of Americans Expect To Lose Their Homes as COVID Rages"! - by Alexandre Tanzi:

caveat emptor ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Debt Collectors Have Made a Fortune This Year. Now They're Coming for More" by Paul Kiel & Jeff Ernsthausen:

"After a pause for the pandemic - debt buyers are back in the courts, suing debtors by the thousands."

Radix Omnium Malorum Est Cupiditas!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"Nineteen Tragic Facts About COVID-19" by Bill Quigley:

OMG!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

By Thom Hartmann - "Famous Medical Journal Calls Out the GOP Death Cult (&) while the world is shocked, Americans are not — here’s why…"

AN ESSENTIAL READ - imo.

e tenebris, lux!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"An Obscure Agency Is Threatening to Hand Medicare Over to Wall Street"! .... by Ana Malinow:

From which this .. "All evidence points against using the multibillion-dollar health insurance industry to improve outcomes and save money. But evidence is no match for profit. In 2019, the Medicare budget approached $800 billion and by 2026, it's projected to be $1.35 trillion.This amount of taxpayer money keeps capitalists up at night ... especially The Medical-Industrial Complex types, scheming up ways to grab some for themselves. Lucky for these capitalists - CMS continues its march towards privatization, or what is known in the parlance of health economists 'de-risking' all of Medicare, meaning eliminating the risk of providing health insurance to seniors by having someone else bear the risk. But the truth is the exact opposite: These overpayments are allowing the insurance industry to pretend they bear risk when in fact it’s the taxpayer who is bearing risk." Meanwhile ...

CAVEAT U$A!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 2 years ago

Biden must cancel all student debt!

100% of this predatory debt must be canceled.

Imagine having that kind of power and not using it?

And, it's not "forgiveness," it's CANCELLATION. Society can't function in the modern world without an educated populace so to punish those who sought an education is a travesty!

And, for those who didn't go to college or university and are against this due to jealousy or whatever, you should know it wasn't easy to go to college. College takes a lot of hard work and dedication and having to take on those loans to do so was a complete betrayal by the American government.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

"More than 3 million Parents took on Student-Loan Debt to give their kids a shot at higher education — and it can bury them in huge monthly bills they never anticipated"! Shocking!

radix omnium malorum - est cupiditas!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 2 years ago

Biden must forgive $10,000 per student as he PROMISED but he should do more and parents should not be forgotten! Great article and point!

The real threshold where real benefits will be felt is if he forgives $50,000 per student.

They forgave PPP loans like they were the Niagra falls overflowing, and those were loans to rich people who own businesses!

They can forgive the students who were just looking to better themselves. A society without an educated populace isn't going to function very well. Punishing people with debt is an atrocity!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

Note: "Officials Raise Concern Over Biden’s Plan to Limit Student Loan Cancellation"! by Sharon Zhang:

From 1st link "The majority of Americans support some form of student loan forgiveness and polls have found that student loan forgiveness could help drive people who are likely to vote Democrat to the polls in the fall. A means tested program, meanwhile, could make the idea less popular.

And -“The landmines on this are everywhere,” Bryce McKibben, former policy adviser to Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee member Senator Patty Murray (D-Washington), told Politico. “Their options are: an income cap and political train wreck — or no income cap and broader, automatic-based relief for everyone. There’s not a lot in between.”

et spero meliora!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"The 1 Percent's Quarter-Trillion Dollar Tax Cheat" by David Sirota:

Closely consider that "As the social safety net is shredded, new data shows that billionaires and corporations are refusing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars of owed taxes every single year."

fiat justitia ruat caelum!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Working people delivered Biden his victory. Now he needs to deliver for them." by Nina Turner:

"Too Many Young Voters are drowning in Student Debt"by N.Ravis:

quid pro quo!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

Consider: "How the Economy is Designed to Keep You Poor and Powerless"! by Umair Haque:

"Our Economies Have Become A Giant Underclass Pitted Against Each Other - Trapped By Lifelong Debt"!

radix omnium malorum est cupiditas!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

"Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and six other tech titans, made more than $360 billion

during the pandemic, which may finally shatter the myth of the benevolent billionaire." Shocking!

Note the "General Welfare" of "The People" is NOT advanced one iota by Oligarchic Crapitalism!

e tenebris - tenebris!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

We need COVID JUBILEE! More to follow but meanwhile this by Alison Krauss:

et veritas vos liberabit ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"$1,200 Only Goes So Far. It’s Time to Abolish Debt." ... by Nicholas Powers:

ad iudicium ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

''Wall Street Wins Again With Bailouts in the Time of Coronavirus'', by the excellent Nomi Prins:

From which - "In the first week of coronavirus economic shock, a record 3.3 million Americans filed claims for unemployment. That figure was nearly three times the peak of the 2008 recession and it doubled to 6.6 million a week later, with future numbers expected to rise staggeringly higher.

"As sobering as those numbers were, Treasury Secretary Steve “Foreclosure King” Mnuchin branded them “not relevant.” Tone-deafness aside, the reality is that it will take months, once the impact of the coronavirus subsides, for many people to return to work.There will now be jobs and possibly even sub-sectors of the economy that won’t rematerialize.

"This cataclysm prompted Congress to pass the largest ever fiscal relief package in its history. But as necessary as it was, that massive spending bill was also a reminder that the urge to offer corporations mega-welfare not available to ordinary citizens remains a distinctly all-American phenomenon.''

radix omnia malorum est cupiditas!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

''Currently The Federal Reserve is Socializing Debt without writing it down. This is nonsensical as it bails out debt by expanding it.

''In the US there is so much dogmatic prejudice against anything that has a tint of socialism, even as a temporary expedient measure, that thought and sensible action face very strong barriers.If we can not overcome these barriers, we are destined for far more difficult times.'' - from:

respice; adspice; prospice ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

''Capitalism Has Failed in Fighting Coronavirus'', by Prof. Richard D. Wolff:

''Workers are the majority in All capitalist societies; their interests are those of the majority. Employers are always a small minority; theirs are the ‘special interests’ of that minority but - Capitalism gives that minority the position, profits, and power to determine how the wider society as a whole lives or dies''!!!

multum in parvo ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

'''Heads we win, tails you lose': how America's rich have turned pandemic into profit'' by Dominic Rushe and Mona Chalabi:

radix omnium malorum est cupiditas ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Relief Is Funneled to the Wealthy. We Need a Financial Infrastructure Overhaul." ... by Alexis Goldstein:

ad iudicium?

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"The Red and the Black" - by Seth Ackerman:

Long. Deep. Exhausting. But Really Rewarding.

MULTUM in parvo!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

''Whistleblower - Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds.''

''Securities that contain loans for properties like hotels and office buildings have inflated profits, the whistleblower claims. As the pandemic hammers the economy - that could increase the chances of another mortgage collapse.''

FK ME! HERE WE GO AGAIN!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Among the toxic contributors to the financial crisis of 2008, few caused as much havoc as mortgages with dodgy numbers and inflated values. Huge quantities of them were assembled into securities, that crashed and burned, damaging homeowners and investors alike. Afterwards - reforms were promised. Never again, regulators vowed - would real estate financiers be able to fudge numbers & threaten the entire economy.

"Twelve years later, there’s evidence something similar is happening again.

"Some of the world’s biggest banks — including Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank — as well as other lenders have engaged in a systematic fraud that allowed them to award borrowers bigger loans than were supported by their true financials according to a previously unreported whistleblower complaint submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission last year.

''Whereas the fraud during the last crisis was in residential mortgages .. the complaint claims this time it is happening in commercial properties like office buildings, apartment complexes and retail centers. The complaint focuses on the loans that are gathered into pools whose worth can exceed $1 billion & turned into bonds sold to investors, known as CMBS (for Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities).

"Lenders and securities issuers have regularly altered financial data for commercial properties - “without justification,” the complaint asserts, in ways that make the properties appear more valuable & borrowers more creditworthy, than they actually are. As a result, it alleges, borrowers have qualified for commercial loans that they normally would not have ... with investors who bought securities birthed from those loans none the wiser." - from ...

SO YES ... "HERE WE GO AGAIN"!

respice; adspice; prospice!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

Using Covid to slash Social Security.

Unbelievable! How low can these mother f-kers go?

The Democrats want the documents released that show "...an internal State Department plan that reportedly proposes giving Americans direct cash payments in exchange for cuts to their Social Security benefits..."

From: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/18/house-democrats-demand-trump-state-department-turn-over-secret-plan-slash-social

"In this moment of crisis, when millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet and fear for their retirement, we should be enhancing Social Security, not developing policies to reduce benefits," the lawmakers wrote. "The idea that you would ask individual Americans to sell out their hard-earned retirement security as the price of desperately-needed help during a crisis is unacceptable."

Unacceptable? No, it's criminal.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

"Capitalism is preventing bold steps to curb COVID as cases skyrocket"! ... by William Rivers Pitt:

omnia causa fiunt!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

Note - "As COVID Surges .. Teachers in Chicago Are Up Against a Wall of Neoliberal Cruelty"!

"The struggle between the Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, over how the city’s public schools should be operating in the face of the current COVID-19 spike has been a case study in Neoliberal Governance."

caveat!

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 2 years ago

How about using "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" to thwart Capitalism ?

What's your home address ? We can weld you in there for free ( at public expense, of course; Jews are wise people who have a saying, "If it can be solved with money, it isn't really a problem." -- I didn't have money as most youth started out in life as such { because money is an artificial social construct } but the elderly people, not "entirely" Jewish but certainly having "culture," could and did pull me out of misery; trust was important and so was striving; situational awareness helped: why did these little oranges 《kumquat, probably shortly after Chinese New Year of 1964》 taste so terribly sour but my Big Brother who had peeled them for me to eat didn't grimace at all eating their rind ? I had better complain to him.)

"We can't breathe !" -- okay, this is 'apolitical': eat the ¿Cheatose(R)? citrus fruit's rind or wank to Omicron's rhythm to reach Omegan with ?*i?*a. Can a bullet flying down Fifth Avenue take out the Fengshui clock standing in front of Trump Tower ? Hotel California is car dependent so having mobility freedom frequenttimes ( in the several decades I've lived in the U.S., I have never heard of people here having been welded in their homes to have them be confined -- perhaps because the U.S. has built so many real prisons unlike those WWII days of Rheinwiesenlager; wealth is good for human comfort in our well-appointed U.S. prisons { some better ones have conjugal trailers though not up to the rooted stability of 李小龍 Bruce Lee's former residence converted to a love hotel i.e. in Chinese a「時鐘酒店」the subsidy of which by Hong Kong's Government might have alleviated the social pressure originating from the basic instincts of food and sex which had led to the 2019 unrests; in the youthful days of the Baby Boomers I 《of my Big Brother, but not me of Baby Boomers II; I got the post-Vietnam-War peace, Arab Oil Embargo, decade-long recession and stagflation i.e. a decade in musically fecund slow-economic-motion-refrigerated Hell》, Hong Kong's Government organized and probably subsidized dancing festivals 新潮舞會 } and war is good for destroying wealth and creating mass misery; are we all enjoying the fruit of the Wuhan Dispersion global biowar yet ? there's still a huge amount of biological fallout reverberating around the world after two years of CoViD-19; as my Dad would have said, "A hundred thousand cases in a month is only good enough for 小國度人, folk of the small chummy "countries" { 85% vaccination rate in Puerto Rico -- where's "herd immunity" ? } to worry about !" ) means driving one's own private car while living in a suburban neighborhood ( in "Whites'" style after the 1950/60s' "White Flight" via the U.S. Interstate Highway System away from cities leaving behind the then poorer darker-skintone folk, congestion, and crimes ) but Manhattan makes one's own driving undesirable: the degree of urbanization matters. So does the amount of money one has, to pay for [expensive in Manhattan] car parking.

Younger generations have got ride-hailing service such as Uber akin to the by-hour-rental love hotels, also of the new sharing economy. Neolibertarians probably support the by-hour-spouse-rental hotels of the countries { some Muslim ones with Shari'a definitely have got this innovation already in the form of hyper-short-term efficient-divorce marriages ( biological monostable multivibrators -- it's just too bad that the videoclip was narrated with Indian, not Islamic accent; no sacred cow had been slaughtered by the multivibration ) : I realize why ISIS which provides food and sex to extremists who have joined the rank says, "Allah is Great !" } in which a spouse cost too much to own long-term. Arranged marriages after consulting detailed genealogical history can frequenttimes avoid inbreeding ( with effects such as losing the North American British Colonies and having a hemophiliac Russian prince.) Apparently, Europeans didn't grasp the importance of diluting the offspring genomes, unlike many other continents' tribal peoples with long family and clan histories. European violence for conquests triumphed over tribal knowledge for avoiding inbreds. Let the inbreds rule... and we eventually got America the Beautiful. ( If one can use the N-word with the N-folk around without anyone raising an eyebrow, it's in contrarian terms a sign of great acceptance because generally only N-folk can do that as a privilege; I suspect that Hawaii may actually be in this rather distinctive category of having been well-influenced by the N-word rappers.) America! America! "Hypocrites with lofty ideals are strivers," explained one patriotic American to me ( all mountain climbers who live to tell others the story of climbing and reaching the highest summit { also the lowest earthly sky in complementarity } of the Himalaya know it's a "free"-open-air cemetery and garbage/rubbish dump/heap { recall Congo "Free" State } going up there and all ways back to civilization are DOWNwards as essence is points and a point is essence; does a point, pure location information, exist or doesn't exist ? it exists relative to other points 《as the origin is arbitrary》but not otherwise but "otherwise" doesn't exist as it's ruled out; all dimensional changes involve a dimension reaching a point or sprouting from a point; confinement is a reduction of dimension(s); all are finite & thus "confined" in [quantized] configuration space.) I recalled what Mom had said about Catholics going to church so highfrequencytimes when I asked why ( someone brought me and a few other gonadal [not mind] children, milk and cookies/biscuits, and asked us if we might come to listen and believe in a Man who had lived a long long time ago.) Königsberg is German as Siberia is Red Chinese. According to my trace of ancestral inheritance, I should by-right own every Eurasian land of mine between the Adriatic Sea and the Pacific Ocean 《from sea to shining sea!》as soon as my Big Brother dies. Socialism is a failed ideology in most of the world where it has been tried. Even in Russia, the place where it got absolute totalitarian power the earliest, it has failed -- not to mention the ne'er-do-well diehards 《the most hated being DPRK》holding dearly to life, on life support from far more prosperous "revisionist" states, relying upon spending down "old friendship" with the turncoats. I have heritage, both present and past, from the top two most-hated countries in 2021, so I am working on these two nose-thumbing and nose-picking superpower amokkers upon which the health of global economy, peace, and much else rest. Bull elephants in heat need to learn the grace of dancing amongst the tulips or get bee stings galore. Hopefully, Russian Federation, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and signer of the Budapest Agreement, doesn't violate the territorial integrity of Ukraine and foment chaos in Europe { there will likely be a renewed scramble by countries to join NATO and that'll certainly inflame Pootin and aggravate his psychosis even more -- I doubt that there is any European country contemplating taking on the Russian Federation in an offensive 《most national armed forces of Europe are no match and the U.S. is extremely unlikely to attack Russian Federation via its defensive NATO membership if Pootin truly understands NATO's charter 《can someone explain this and the U.N. charter aimed at ensuring member-states' territorial integrity to the psychotic Pootin ?》; NATO is for defense, not for offense. } while the bullfight is taking place in East Asia. Who will restrain Russia ? Mom's much-talked-about-for-a-year-already time-slowing machine, a General Electric(R) two-door refrigerator with the top freezer compartment reserved for Russia. I'll pitch in the aluminum/aluminium ice-cube-making tray filled with a liquefied then pressurized golden fluid once I get my tongue warmed up enough to become unstuck from it.

Having witnessed how durable reinforced concrete was, I feel bad that the decades old buildings are still there triggering peoples' unpleasant memories of those oppressive ¿bygone yet ever more? failed sordid socialism days. The small reinforced-concrete munitions bunker's tapered conic ventilation tower/chimney, entrance steps, and flanks-protecting-against-side-arm-shots structure in front of our home resisted the takedown attempts of the powerful backhoe bulldozer extremely well. Only with incessant manual hammering by sledge hammers and circular electric sawing with many sparks flying was it taken down after days and weeks of banging and screeching.

In these days, I take a philosophical { it's what philosophy is great for; subscribing to philosophy is highfrequencytimes why elderly people can effect happier affect despite gaining more and more undesirable properties such as slower reaction time, poorer eyesight, lousier hearing, less muscular strength, etc. } approach to this irksome matter. Just think of the greenhouse gas one has avoided emitting by continuing to use these very old buildings instead of tearing them down { with great difficulties } and building new ones. By reusing buildings, one's helping to save the World from Anthropogenic Climate Chaos.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

Are U drunk or high or something, grapes?!

When U are next sober - compare and contrast:

et fiat lux!

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 2 years ago

Golden Lives Matter ! Pootinium-laced Sputnik V and miraculous Biden-Harris breakthrough vaccine to the rescue.

Has Russia given its guarantees to the U.S. that it won't attack Alaska, California, and Kauai yet ? The U.S. doesn't want any Colored Revolution ( by [White=mixture of all colored lights in the rainbow's spectrum] Trumperian domestic terrorists' seizure of state's power in a putsch ) on any of the formerly Russia-controlled territory now under U.S. control. The U.S. needs strong and immediate security guarantees from Russia.

[-] 2 points by ImNotMe (1488) 2 years ago

GO WATCH "Prof. Richard D. Wolff: Opposition to Paying for Capitalism's Crisis"!

Or conversely, U can just choose to STFU; U rancid, reactionary, retarded Russophobe!

et temet nosce!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Never Waste A Good Crisis" is their dictum!!! Meanwhile, by Mara Dolan - this informative article ...

spero meliora!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

"New Zealand’s Prime Minister May Be the Most Effective Leader on the Planet"

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/jacinda-ardern-new-zealand-leadership-coronavirus/610237/

Speaking of feminist plans and perspectives, New Zealand's Ardern is re-structuring the economy there to focus on "well being."

https://treasury.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2019-05/b19-wellbeing-budget.pdf

While I think men can and do think this way, clearly women are at the forefront of showing empathy and compassion and Ardern is a clear communicator and heartfelt person who is not afraid to show those qualities out in the open. Lovely to see.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Jacinda Ardern’s leadership style, focused on empathy, isn’t just resonating with her people; it’s putting the country on track for success against the CoronaVirus.

"The CoronaVirus Pandemic may be the largest test of political leadership the world has ever witnessed. Every leader on the planet is facing the same potential threat. Every leader is reacting differently, in his or her own style. And every leader will be judged by the results.

"German Chancellor Angela Merkel embraces science. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro rejects it. U.S. President Donald Trump’s daily briefings are a circuslike spectacle, while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi holds no regular briefings at all, even as he locks down 1.3 billion people.

"Jacinda Ardern, the 39-year-old prime minister of New Zealand, is forging a path of her own. Her leadership style is one of empathy in a crisis that tempts people to fend for themselves. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing. And her approach isn’t just resonating with her people on an emotional level. It is also working remarkably well." (From your 'Atlantic' link above.)

With the above in mind & even in NZ - please consider ...

commune bonum est summum bonum ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

''From Trump to Johnson, Nationalists are on the rise – backed by Billionaire Oligarchs'' ... by George Monbiot:

''The Ultra-Rich are benefiting from Disaster Capitalism as institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode

"Today’s billionaires are the real citizens of nowhere. They fantasise - like the plutocrats in Ayn Rand’s terrible novel 'Atlas Shrugged', about further escape. Look at the new “seasteading” venture funded by PayPal’s founder, Peter Thiel ... that sought to build artificial islands in the middle of the ocean, whose citizens could enact a libertarian fantasy of escape from the state, its laws, regulations and taxes, and from organised labour. Scarcely a month goes by without a billionaire raising the prospect of - ''leaving the Earth altogether, and colonising space pods or other planets.

"Those whose identity is offshore seek only to travel farther offshore. To them - the nation state is both facilitator and encumbrance, source of wealth and imposer of tax, a pool of cheap labour and seething mass of ungrateful plebs, from whom they must flee, leaving all the wretched earthlings - to their well-deserved fate.

"Defending ourselves from oligarchy means taxing it to oblivion. It’s easy to get hooked up discussions about what tax level maximises the generation of revenue. There can be endless arguments about the Laffer Curve .. which purports to show where this level lies. But these discussions overlook something crucial: raising revenue is only one of the purposes of tax. Another is breaking the spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation.

''Breaking this spiral is now a democratic necessity: otherwise the oligarchs, as we have seen, come to dominate national and international life. The spiral does not stop by itself - only government action can do it. This is one of the reasons why, during the 1940s, the top rate of income tax in the US rose to 94%, and in the UK to 98%. A truly fair society requires periodic corrections on this scale. But these days the steepest taxes would be better aimed at accumulated unearned wealth.''

radix omnium malorum est cupiditas ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

''Gasping for Air, Gasping for Care ... so ... what does Global Health Justice look like?''

  • from ''Neoliberal Austerity and Private Health Care Has Worsened US Pandemic''-{excerpt} DemocracyNow!'s Amy Goodman - in conversation w/Gregg Gonsalves is assistant professor in epidemiology of microbial diseases at Yale School of Public Health;Amy Kapczynski is professor of law at Yale Law School and a co-founder of the Law and Political Economy blog. They are co-directors of the Global Health Justice Partnership.)

  • https://truthout.org/video/neoliberal-austerity-and-private-health-care-has-worsened-us-pandemic/ (Important Video & Transcript)

fiat justitia - ruat caelum!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Clean Water is a Human Right. In America it’s more a profit machine" .. by Bernie Sanders and Brenda Lawrence:

"When it comes to water infrastructure, America’s challenges resemble those of a developing country. It’s time for that to change."

ad iudicium ...

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

Millions can't afford water bills in Amerca.

https://www.consumerreports.org/personal-finance/millions-of-americans-cant-afford-water-as-bills-rise-80-percent-in-a-decade/.

This is really sickening. What the hell kind of country are we running here?

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"The Scandal of Millions of Americans Deprived of Running Water" (Podcast):

Where: "Guardian US environmental justice reporter Nina Lakhani reports on her landmark investigation into America’s Water Crisis - revealing that millions of Americans are facing unaffordable bills for running water and risk being disconnected or losing their homes."

Truly Shocking!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

Again, the hypocrisy and absolute blindness to problems in America due to hubris.

Always, you hear how much better off we are in America. Look at those third world countries, look how bad they have it. We're so superior to them. Be grateful you're in America. But, the truth is, there are third worlds right here in America and that is our SHAME. Our absolute SHAME. That any child should have to live in such poverty equal to that of any ghetto in any third world country on this planet. Pitiful.

And, that Americans themselves fight against their own interests to perpetuate such poverty on others just because they have a few bucks and a steady job that they think they may lose to those worse off than them is just sickening. Makes me ill.

Water is a human right. No one should have to pay for the water needed to live!

[-] 2 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Water Is A Human Right. No one should have to pay for the water needed to live!" ... Because it does bear repeating & fyi ...

fiat lux et fiat justitia ...

[-] 2 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

Water should be free. Especially right now during the pandemic as millions upon millions of people face unemployment and the inability to even pay their rent or mortgages and as thousands line up for food banks.

Humans die without water in just 3 short days. We simply cannot allow people to suffer the worries of how to pay a water bill right now. It's ridiculous. This should be part of the Covid stimulus plan.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Send in the Clowns for the Circus Is in Town", by Edward Curtin:

caveat - multum in parvo!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

"As C.S Lewis said in his preface to The Screwtape Letters: The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint...But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump received 129 million votes out of 157 million registered American voters eager to believe that this system is not built on imperial war-making by both parties.

Perhaps that’s a generous assessment. Maybe many of those voters believe in the U.S.A.’s “manifest destiny” to rule the world and wage war in God’s name. I hope not. But if so, you can expect a big turnout on November 3, 2020.

In any case, it’s quite a circus, but these clowns aren’t funny. They are dangerous." - Ed Curtin

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

A Dem/GOP ass clown choice does NOT amount to a democracy! + by Sasha Abramsky & also note:

caveat ...

[-] 1 points by grapes (5232) 4 years ago

The right of Greater Americans to free speech and water globally shall not be abridged or infringed upon by any nation, country, state, or potente, to be upheld by all the might and power of the U.S.A. Pax Americana.

Over this point was where Gadhafi's delegation of power to his son at the siege of Benghazi turned terribly wrong. His son threatened to cut off the water supply to Benghazi ( and vowed a massacre/bloodbath for it ! ) with millions of civilians in it to force out the rebels who had retreated to hide there. That threat eventually led to "up Gadhafi's." Yeah, beware of the central importance of water, even though it seems to be "only" for others. Others may well include oneself's own ( yeah, mine was illiterate and untrainable { well, not quite because drinking 32 fluid ounces of room-temperature water upon first awakening in the morning per Japanese [breakthrough] health habit trained it fairly well to be regular, though never literate even when offered soft and absorbent American standard } to understand my bidaily newspaper offerings in my young childhood when I didn't know which end's up--ends are important, whether high or low ) 屁眼 in due time.

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 4 years ago

It looks as if "Go[ing] to Red China for 'free' water" can work out very well. I wonder what exactly the Maniacal Artist has overheard this time around. Deluge? Who's missing all that water? Is India in severe drought again? Although Xi math has: "little people don't amount to a hill of beans," there's certainly enough water available there for free to sprout many beans.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

Note "'free' water" has been true for most of human history - much to your chagrin perhaps? What have China or India got to to do with this thread or forum-post? Now go try this article for relevance:

ad iudicium?

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 4 years ago

'Free' water is still widely available, just not quite what's needed. China nationalized too much water, probably including much of what was previously India's. We now have disasters in BOTH countries because of the great power of China to alter natural environment. How did that help China to get a Deluge while India got a severe drought?

We, the Americans again !, pretty much predicted back in 2009 that Global Anthropogenic Climate Change ( this is REAL and it's surely biting our asses nowadays but both of the world's most populous countries would rather continue or ignite economic growth fueled by coal rather than improving energy expenditure efficiencies ) would move the rainbands farther away from the Equator. Well, it seems that Tibet/CCP/China's side of the Himalayas and the Yangtze River Valley has got far more rain than the need ( the Wuhan CCP bioweapon of SARS_CoV-2 may have boomeranged { 卍 -- "what goes around comes around," as most long-enduring agricultural societies such as India, the ancient spiritual center of Asia, had discovered that truth eventually but the not-even-a-century-old CCP since 1921 has lost much of its ancient Chinese heritage under the spell of the Stalinist--steely, coal-based, crude, not quality- but quantity-oriented--industrialization heresy; coal usage created most of the industrialization-related, worldwide, extremely deadly, and atrocious conflicts of the Industrial Age; CCP was a byproduct reaction to the industrialized Europe's Colonialism so it had sprouted from a relative poverty and an inferiority complex } by diminishing the demand for electricity due to the sinking economy so less water needs to be run through the hydroelectric power plant near the Three-Gorges Dam and water is accumulated/pent up ) while India gets scorched. The CCP in its permanent greed created an artificial disaster on each of BOTH sides of the Himalayas.

India could have very graciously helped out with getting rid of all of that excess water whenever it's in severe droughts. At the very least, a well-coordinated flushing of water down the Ganga ( Ganges River ) could clean up the river or even provided whitewater rafting opportunity for sports enthusiasts as well as for crop irrigation. It's win, win, win!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

Water is a human right.

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 4 years ago

Only if we can protect potable water supplies to make it real. It doesn't help to put in a pigsty upstream of the drinking water wells so that its effluent feeds the well water. Of course, I didn't know the exact time order whether the pigsty was put in before or after our shantytown switched to municipal water supply for which every family had to pay. The consent of the community potentially affected by the pigsty's effluent should be consulted first before "deregulation."

Don't trust any man's nose, nor a man's mouth, if he's an exceptional gourmet, like Mikey. Three Americans were making dinner together. The woman dug up a carton of tofu from the back bottom of the White refrigerator. She opened it, sniffed at it, turned up her nose, and declared it spoiled. She was about to dump it into the garbage can when I said, "Let me see," so she brought it to me. I sniffed at it and said, "Tofu always smells like this. Cook it and let me taste it." She cooked it with other ingredients and brought the dish to me. After I had tasted a mouthful ( so it failed my "Buddha-finger" test,) I rushed straight to the garbage can to spit it all out. Then I declared the tofu dish "spoiled" and was about to toss the entire dish out when her brother said, "Let me see. Bring it to me." He sniffed at and tasted it. Then he declared righteously, "This tofu isn't spoiled. I eat in restaurants nearly every day so I have a lot of experience with tofu. Every piece of tofu tasted like this!" so with gusto, he ate the tofu dish all by himself while the two of us were staring at him with our jaws dropped, astonished.

One man's spoiled soybean/soyabean seediness ( 豆腐 ) is another man's gourmet "restaurant-quality" tofu. It's why God created the billionaires who would appreciate "animal-gourmet" seediness for recycling pigshit effluent, unlike the holy Quran, which mustn't be destroyed or recycled, as it's protected by heavy penalties imposed by religious fanatics. There are provisions for how to destroy the ragged and torn U.S. flags by burning them in honor. We never do this while it's serving as the rallying symbol of our not surrendering for our troops whose patriotic service and likely bodies as in times past during our wars for independence will uphold the rights of all "Americans"( in that word of the then British Empire to be earned via "perilous fight" which is armed conflict,) including the right to burn the flag itself in exercising the freedom of speech in a civilian setting "The right of Americans to free speech globally shall not be abridged or infringed upon by any nation, country, state, or potente, to be upheld by all the might and power of the U.S.A." On one level of consciousness, eating chicken is actually eating grass, as the Bible has implied. On another level of consciousness, eating chicken is definitely not eating vegetarian. What's the difference? The consciousness. One shouldn't lead the ones who are still training their consciousness astray. Eating vegetarian is indeed a valid way to achieve self-restraint although that's not the ultimate purpose but a stepping stone.

Rights must be exercised from time to time to stop people from forgetting about them since there's this notion of "the statue of limitation" of Whites that if one occupies something long enough, then it becomes mine with my claim to be backed up by the force of the government. It becomes quite scary when not only Whites but other races, nation states ( recall Shogunate Japan having been forced by the U.S. to spread her legs apart { the Portuguese and British were already trading with Japan, observing the restrictions imposed upon them by Japan } to trade with the U.S. using gunboat "diplomacy," giving rise to the Meiji Restoration and subsequently Imperial Japan's wanton "Yellow Aryan" conquest and atrocities to do the Whites one better in depravity at atrocities--here's where the seed for the attack on Pearl Harbor and the ensuing bloodbath was planted; brouhaha-to-be needs to be avoided early,) as well as heads of state manufacture fairy tales or impose de facto resource ( e.g. water, fish, minerals, trees { Redfuckgina was stealing them from Russia's Siberia,} purported oil and gas reserve on land and in the sea; advanced technologies such as diagonally slanted or curved drilling made stealing fluidic treasures from neighbors easy so combined with greed, they helped create instabilities as well as the actual causes for wars ) grabs on their neighbors.

Every morning as the sun rises, a randomly selected preferably innocent ( as the Ducktators often prefer so, such as in Russia or Redfuckgina, in order to rule by fear; actually DDR's Staatssicherheit was the best at this craft by turning everyone's family, friends, and relatives into so-called "informants" who may manufacture incriminating evidence "out of thin air" ) rooster is to be slaughtered to smear its blood around the corners of the gambling tables for the good of the Casino, called "Wall Street," in the U.S.A., in order to avoid the expirations due to "the statue of limitation."

[-] 1 points by elf3 (4203) 4 years ago

Well as PREDICTED Banks are already refusing to help people laid off due to covid. And they have only given people a three month deferment if they decide to (answer = no) stories on news already. So let the disgusting predatory buying bonanza and evictions begin. Are we going to take this America? We are the only industrialized nation that did not freeze loans. What is our government doing to us? Why are they doing this to this once great country? Selfish disgusting greed. Wall Street and our entire government is waging class war on every American. They want to see every American destitute so they can own moooar and mooooar and feel big and powerful. This land is their land.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

Time to ''Ignore The Bankers – the Trump economy is not worth more Corona Virus deaths'' ... by Robert Reich:

I excerpt this ''It may seem logical to weigh the threat to public health against the accumulating losses to the economy, and then at some point decide economic losses outweigh health risks. As Stephen Moore, who is advising the White House, warns, “You can not have a policy that says we’re going to save every human life at any cost, no matter how many trillions of dollars you’re talking about.”

''But this leaves out one big thing. The “trillions of dollars” of economic losses don’t exist on any balance sheet that can be tallied against human lives. An “economy” - is nothing but human beings. So it matters whose losses we’re talking about – whose losses of life, and whose losses of dollars.

“Look, you are going to lose a number of people to the flu,” - Trump said during a Fox News town hall on Tuesday. “But you’re going to lose more people by putting the country into a massive recession or depression.”

''Wrong. Recessions and depressions, do NOT themselves cause people to sicken or die. Their health is imperilled during such downturns .. if they don’t have enough money to eat, keep a roof over their heads and get needed medical care.''

ad iudicium?

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

Debt collection continues despite pandemic. Sheer cruelty.

"I have no money." but debt collection continues during one of the most impactful economic events in American history.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/mar/28/us-debt-collection-wage-garnishment-coronavirus

"One out of every six Americans has an unpaid medical bill on their credit report, amounting to $81bn in debt nationwide. Every year, about 530,000 Americans who file bankruptcy cite medical debt as a contributing factor."

“The garnishment came with no warning. You don’t know until your bank account is locked and your money is gone,”

“Unlike the rest of my bills that I can see, the debt collection agency doesn’t send you one. You can’t arrange to auto-pay and they don’t send anything showing what you paid. It’s like they are set up to make you fail. With the coronavirus they shouldn’t be allowed to harass and garnish bank accounts while Americans are in this crisis.”

How f-king sick is this? Collecting debt from people who have no money and no income during this pandemic, when people are more vulnerable than ever.

Better get the money back to the corporation! Who cares if an American citizen can feed his or her children! Sick!

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

The ''CEOs, billionaires and advisers have the president’s ear & want people back to work. They are callous – and wrong!'' - from:

who like a few other previously establishment figures like Dr.PCR ... is honest enough to support Bernie. The stone cold truth is: Banks & Bankers are NOT enablers, they're a monopolistic cartel of utter crooks. Trickle Down Economics turned out to be b-s - as the truth is the total fkn opposite: Hoover Up Larceny!

multum in parvo ...

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

Is Dr. Birx a twit? Or a sycophant?

Yesterday, during the Trump Press Briefing she refused to say that Georgia should not be opening up it's barber shops, nail salons, gyms and tattoo parlors.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/georgia-barbers-should-get-creative-to-safely-cut-hair-dr-birx/

"Small business workers in Georgia — including hair stylists — should get “creative” in order to safety operate when they are allowed to reopen on Friday, Dr. Deborah Birx said Tuesday.

Birx, a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, was asked by a reporter at the daily press briefing how to practice proper social distancing in businesses where people are usually close together, like hair and nail salons.

“I don’t know how, but people are very creative,” Birx said.

“So if there’s a way that people can social distance, and do those things, then they can do those things.”

IS SHE SERIOUS?! I mean, does she not understand that people will travel out of Georgia to other states bringing COVID 19 with them?!

Stupid people, selfish people will get other people sick and they WILL DIE.

Friggin' madness that this woman is too afraid of Trump to say the truth. Scary times, folks.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

PCR: "Michael Hudson and I believe that an economic system that enriches the rentier class by converting as much of personal income as possible to the service of debt is an economic system that is dead in the water. One possible way out is a debt writedown in order to create some discretionary income. Keep in mind that when the replacement of offshored manufacturing jobs with Walmart jobs stopped US GDP growth, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan subsituted growth in consumer debt for the missing income growth, and by this substitution created discretionary income by loading up the consumer with debt.

"That load is now full. We are in the unenviable position of having very high stock prices in an econony that has no growth potential. The high stock prices are the product of trillions of dollars injected into financial asset prices. If the reopening spreads the virus and produces a second wave that overwhelms the health care system on a broader basis, the economy could be shutdown again, or if kept open could be disrupted by widespread illness or reluctance to accept exposure to the virus. On the other hand, if the virus has run its course, or the threat was exaggerated, the existing stifling debt burden remains.

"The danger in the shouting and finger-pointing is that a sick economy will be blamed on the closedown, not on the debt burden. Reopening the economy does not make the debt burden disappear. Michael Hudson and I have tried to focus the public and policymakers on the real problem. So far we have been unsuccessful." - from:

As for Brix she's just another dumb puppet with degrees to prove it. Miller & Kushner are in charge now.

et veritas vos liberabit ...

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 4 years ago

She knows how to serve a flat-Earther ( here's a livestream view of Earth realizing Newton's dream of shooting around the Earth "like a cannonball" showing that the Earth's shaped more like an orb as the Bible had stated ) who knew how to block the viral assault coming after our Left Coast but wouldn't block it coming after Yankeedom from the opposite direction via Europe ( the shielded and less connected to the world "flyover country" will know soon what it means to be gloriously red as Seattle was doomed by Mao but saved by "a snake" of a Governor protecting that far-out { not the fart-out me-thane pounding-laundry } Washington.) Race might have something to do with the one-sided blindness. It's a lousy [¿Cyclop?] boxer who can only block a left hook but not a right hook unless it's playing against the one-armed bandit of a better casino owner ( every morning before the sunrise, a rooster which might crow is slaughtered and its blood is smeared onto the corners of the equipment to make it gloriously red in a purging ritual ).

Over-politicizing was what Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, and Maoist China all suffered from. All met their gloriously red demise. Some of our Red States itch to join them so we'll probably get more waves of this ( I estimated three months for the first wave; the second one should be a bit shorter due to some people having acquired immunity via infection and being survivors with fitter evolutionary behavior but the winter COVID-19 wave may synchronize with flu season causing an overrun of our healthcare system resulting in far more total casualties because the frontline workers won't even know what they will be dealing with due to the lack of testing and testing capacity { the U.S. has a vast population, only less than China and India, so testing its population en masse presents on a rather formidable scale but even the rather helpless starlings with "the herd mentality" can wisely retreat and at times fight back against the raptors if they know where and when to counterattack "Whereto, starlings, why? To the stars ( e.g. to visit a near-end-of-life red supergiant Betelgeuse, which is still cooking up the chemical-element ingredients such as C, N, and O, the star dust necessary for making new life possible as what had been done for us before in our ancient birthplace in the stars after the Big Bang )--for the universe has much hydrogen" and highly ionized oxygen, good for rocket propellents as well as drinking and life; when leaping over a big puddle in the schoolyard during recess, look to see whether one might splash the other kids around should one fall short; "look before you leap" to avoid "collateral damage" }; for each oscillation, we get a few more months of lockdown, essentially starting again near to but not at the beginning; from control theory, we want to achieve critical damping of the viral pandemic but not underdamp to allow many oscillations to develop ) if their borders are not largely impermeable.

I mentioned orange rind's pith as a possible decongestant because one may not have albuterol and a nebulizer on hand to improve the ease of breathing. One of COVID-19's symptoms is the shortness of breath which may thereby be alleviated. I hypothesize that the outer skin of the orange rind may have germicidal capability because that's the first defensive layer for the fruit to protect the seeds. "Be fruitful and multiply," so seediness must be protected by the "plants." The outer skin's potential effect of causing diarrhea may sometimes be useful for purging bad stuff ( SARS-CoV-2 viruses perhaps ) from the gastrointestinal tract which is in-body plumbing to be maintained in a similar way as other indoor plumbing: if it's clogged up by bad stuff, apply some cleaner, wait a while, flush with water, and coat with desired material. The pipes in the body are made of different material ( the gastrointestinal tract is a rather long winding tunnel with many bodily tissues surrounding it which may be harmed by the harsh cleaners--definitely no bleach, no Lysol(R), no hydrogen peroxide, no ¿alcohol?--despite having the U.S. Federal Reserve which may create virtually unbounded amount of credit out of thin air, some government revenue still depends upon the ethyl-alcohol excise taxes { ponder why New York, NY was nicknamed as the Big Apple--in the days before we had safe municipal drinking water, nearly everybody was drinking the old-time fermented apple juice called apple cider, not apple cider vinegar, due to apple cider's alcohol content killing many disease germs but alcohol interacts with medicines so beware of potential adverse side effects from drinking too much apple cider--it may still have too much fructose 《 fruct=fruit, ose=sugar 》 for diabetic people; upstate NY had many apple trees, sufficient to make much cider to supply "the [Big] City" } and won't I be profiled as a pre-muslim terrorist as Mom had already done with my nostrils pointing downwards if I should advise against drinking alcohol?, no lye, no ammonia, etc. should be ingested; I don't clean my skin { which is made of epithelial tissue, similar to the types of tissue lining the inner surface of the gastrointestinal tract } with these so I wouldn't use them to clean the linings of my gastrointestinal tract, either ) so the cleaner may be orange rind instead of lye. The body's fluid has salt in it so the flush water should be made isotonic by adding sufficient amount of table salt. After the flushing, coating the body's pipes with a good microbiome may be done by eating yogurt with live cultures ( such as Chobani(R) Greek yogurt { caution: it has higher calories but I like its thick smooth taste, a bit like sour cream, and I don't mind getting a bit more fat as I don't have an overly fat problem } or for the lactose-intolerant [non-mutant] people, a different variety of yogurt with low milk fat and no lactose《 lact=milk, ose=sugar 》). "Man is a machine," -- Leonardo da Vinci's breakthrough { albeit an extremely complex one with interlocked feedback loops [but a machine, nonetheless] }.

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

Student Loans forbearance until September 30th. So, 6 months that you don't have to make a payment and no interest will accrue during that period.

BUT, when September 30th rolls along and you've been having trouble paying all your other bills, rent, car payments and insurance, etc, your student loan payment will be due again and your balance will be the same lousy amount it was 6 months ago.

What we need right now is a Student debt jubilee. Forgive the debt. Forgive part of the debt. Do something meaningful. There is no way after the economic harm caused by COVID 19 that people will suddenly be able to go back to making their huge and unjust student loan payments!

Bailing out corporations to the tune of 2 trillion dollars and handing out measly checks of $1200 to Americans is unfair, unjust and unsustainable.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

Is there ''A 'Brady Bond' solution for America’s Economic Crisis & Unpayable Corporate Debt''?

e tenebris, lux?

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

On verge of a depression? I get that that is possible but how good is an economic system that can't pause for a month or two. Had we all just stayed home, and I mean, all of us, every single one, for 3 or 4 weeks we could be rid of this scourge.

That's what they did in New Zealand. But, if we have an economic system that is so friggin' fragile that it collapses after a few weeks of a shut down then perhaps we need a new way forward? We need an economic system that has some cushion n'est ce pas?

From Nouriel Roubini's COVID19 warnings http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/54069.htm

“So, right now, we are on the verge of something that could be worse than the great financial crisis, there are conditions under which we could get into another Greater Depression,” Roubini stated.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

''The economic fallout from the New Coronavirus Outbreak'' (4m video + Transcript)

More ''heads they win; tails U lose'' b-s .. from the greediest mthrfkrs in the history of greedy mthrfkrs!

Alors, "if we have an economic system that is so friggin' fragile that it collapses after a few weeks of a shut down then perhaps - we need a new way forward? We need an economic system that has some cushion n'est ce pas?" Oui!

e tenebris, lux?

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

45 million Americans are unemployed.

That is the entire population of England and probably more than every working person in the UK. So, imagine the whole of the UK out of work.

And, this article claims, if they're reporting 45 million, then it's probably 60 million. We are in the realm of the Great Depression era numbers.

https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-unemployment-rate-great-depression-af170c25-bf19-4f0d-9de8-c4dd515d6a91.html

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

Shocking! Furthermore, since U wrote that, a further 1m have registered! Meanwhile this:

multum in parvo ...

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

Delayed unemployment is intentional according to Salon.

Bad enough there are 46 plus million unemployed people but millions of those who have applied are still waiting to receive their unemployment payments!

According to this article in Salon, it is intentional! What ever happened to the General Welfare clause in the Constitution if we have governments that subvert our rights and justice?

https://www.salon.com/2020/06/06/havent-gotten-your-unemployment-check-thats-intentional/

"Haven't gotten your unemployment check? That's intentional "Designed to fail": Many states designed their UI systems to limit payouts, experts say"

"Nearly one-third of unemployment benefits owed to millions of Americans laid off amid the coronavirus pandemic still haven't been paid out, according to an analysis by Bloomberg."

"A system that mails out forgotten internet passwords is designed to fail," she said. "A system that can hold up benefit receipt for weeks or months because of a small error is designed to fail."

"Generally, unemployment insurance in many states is designed to be far more effective at limiting access to benefits for those ineligible than ensuring those eligible actually receive them," Herd told Salon.

Just sickening. And, this during a pandemic. How are people supposed to live?

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"How are people supposed to live? U ask and well U might ... especially when faced with the likes of:

multum in parvo ...

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

An Eviction Crisis is coming and we have no idea how bad it is going to be. Apparently our government thinks if we don't know about something then the something isn't happening. They are keeping the data murky on purpose to obfuscate the facts! Outrageous.

https://slate.com/business/2020/09/eviction-crisis-data-coronavirus.html

"Real-time data on which cities, counties, and neighborhoods are seeing the highest eviction rates could help municipal leaders direct rent assistance funds, lobby for additional federal and state funds for hard-hit cities and counties, and prioritize whose doors to knock on to get the word out about assistance programs. Local data on how much back rent tenants owe would allow Congress to determine with specificity the amount of assistance renters in each state would need. But nothing close to that level of data is available."

Without good data, we rely on anecdotal evidence and media narratives to understand housing loss. For example: in the uproar over the nation’s eviction crisis, we have lost sight of the fact that nearly 700,000 households lose their homes to mortgage foreclosure every year.

"And, when data is available but not publicly accessible, it tends to fall into the hands of the wealthy and powerful, often at the expense of the vulnerable."

"We need national eviction and foreclosure databases."

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"One Third of Americans Can’t Pay Their Bills as The Stimulus Talks Stall"! - by Mike Ludwig:

fiat lux et fiat justitia ...

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 4 years ago

"...people are going hungry across the country, including millions of families and children. In September, between 7 and 11 million households reported that their children did not get enough to eat in the last seven days, according to the Census estimates. More than 40 percent of children live in a household that doesn’t have enough to eat or is behind on rent. Black and Latinx renters are twice as likely to report having trouble paying rent than white renters."

From the truthout piece above. Sickening.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"Americans Are Dying In The Pandemic At Rates Far Higher Than In Other Countries" by NPR:

omnia causa fiunt!

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23824) 3 years ago

439,420 Covid deaths in USA as of January 30, 2021.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-us-maps-and-cases/

The CDC predicts 479,000 to 514,000 COVID-19 deaths by February 20, 2021.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/forecasting-us.html

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 3 years ago

The level of COVID19 planning in the USA has been beyond awful & here's what Biden has inherited...

e tenebris, lux?