California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

The Code Breaker

by John Lawrence, March26, 2021

The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson is an exciting new book which details the efforts and the knowledge to edit genes known as CRISPR. That means cutting into the DNA genome and removing "sick" genes and/or replacing them with the correct genes. The book details the quest to discover the mechanism by which this is possible. The book focuses on Jennifer Doudna but many researchers, many of them recent immigrants or workers at foreign universities, are involved. The fundamental insights can be explained in a few sentences. They noticed that bacteria have been fighting off viruses successfully for billions of years, and they were doing this by incorporating the virus DNA into the data base of their own genome. Upon encountering a new virus the bacteria knew how to encode that virus's DNA so that they could identify it in an attack in the future. Secondly, the bacteria knew how to dispatch a portion of RNA that would travel to the site of the virus and encode an enzyme that would then destroy the virus. The messenger RNA knew precisely where to point the enzyme which then cut the virus DNA thereby destroying it. So the e. coli bacterium has known how to edit genes for billions of years. The trick is to figure out exactly how the bacterium does this.

So Jennifer Doudna and cohorts did just that: They figured out how a bacterium cuts a virus's DNA precisely in a certain location. That's what the book is about. That's what gene editing is about. Gene editing is in its infancy, but it has already been used to correct the genetic mutation which causes sickle cell anemia which is caused by the mutation in one gene. Experimentally, it has been shown that if this gene can be cut out and replaced by one that contains the correct genetic information, the disease can be cured. If this can be done early in the development of an embryo, the correct gene can even be transmitted to succeeding generations. An estimated 8 million children are born each year with severe genetic disorders or birth defects. Gene editing can possibly correct some or all of these defects. In order to do this the enzyme which cuts the gene out of the DNA must be told precisely where to cut, and the correct gene must somehow be implanted precisely at this location and the DNA reconnected. In theory the whole idea is very simple. Figuring out how to do this either in the laboratory or in actual animals, much less in humans, is the hard part.

Whether or not this research will lead to an understanding of the origins of life is an open question. Perhaps there is a sub-atomic entity sort of like a neutrino which is massless and ubiquitous in the universe which is the progenitor of life wherever conditions are propitious. Perhaps it is able to generate an organism with the minimal genome, something which has never been discovered in nature. Even a virus which has the simplest known genomic structure has three thousand base pairs, compared to the three billion base pairs in human genomes. A base pair consists of the 4 nucleotides called A, C, G, T   which comprise one rung of the DNA ladder. So a successful gene edit would have to identify the precise rung of the DNA ladder where the mutation had occurred which means at least one of the 4 letters of the base pair was incorrect and correct it.

So I theorize that a life progenitor would have to be something that is ubiquitous in the universe and capable of starting life with a minimal genome which consists of only a few base pairs. This is a mystery but certainly not the only one. Gravity is an every day phenomenon but no one has detected a graviton which is thought to be the physical entity that distorts space time according to Einstein's theory of relativity. No one understands the "dark energy" which is thought to be responsible for the fact that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating. No one understands what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" which has been demonstrated to be a reality in quantum theory. Just as the line is blurred between what is material and what is massless energy, the line is blurred between what is spiritual and what is material. Is the creation of life in the universe a physical, material phenomenon or a spiritual one?

Off the Top of My Head

Inflation Probably Not a Problem If Biden Programs Are Carefully Targeted

by John Lawrence, March 14, 2021

Critics have said, "Oh, My your children and grandchildren are going to have to pay back all these trillions of dollars that have been spent by both the Trump and Biden administrations on COVID relief and to get the economy going again." Not True! Modern Monetary Theory has shown that the Federal Reserve can just create the money and the Treasury Department can just spend it without ever worrying about paying it back. Finance is not the problem. The problem is potentially inflation which economist Larry Summers has sounded the alarm about. Most of Biden's relief bill is targeted at the poor which means that that money will be sucked up to pay past due rent and mortgage bills as well as providing a decent lifestyle which should not be inflationary except if you believe the nonsense of the neoliberal Phillips curve which supposedly proves that a certain segment of the population has to live in poverty and penury in order to fight inflation. That has also been debunked by Modern Monetary Theory although most politicians are still on the wavelength of neoliberal economics which has been shown to be fallacious in this and many other regards.

State and local governments likewise will just suck up the money in the relief bill to bail themselves out of debt and provide an adequate level of social services. This also is not inflationary because the money will not be just sloshing around in the economy with nowhere to go. What is inflationary is tax breaks for the rich, but this money can be sucked out of the economy by taxing the rich. What Larry Summers fails to take into account is that the US and much of the rest of the world has a two tier economy. The rich and upper middle class are doing very well, thank you, while the lower middle class and the poor are suffering. The COVID pandemic illustrated this in even starker terms with the so-called K-shaped recovery. The upper classes made money; the lower classes are on the verge of losing whatever financial gains they had made during the Trump economy. Inflation is caused by too much money sloshing around in the economic system. Most of that inflationary money is held by the rich in assets like stocks and real estate. Money injected into the economic system targeted at the poor is immediately sucked out of the system to pay debts and to provide basic necessities. There is enough physical and material capacity in the system to provide basic necessities so this money is not inflationary.

Inflation is caused when there is too much money chasing too few goods. As long as there is the material and human capacity, money directed at those sectors of the economy will not cause inflation. The real problem in future Biden administration bills involving infrastructure and the Green New Deal is that the materials to build out infrastructure, namely, steel, cement and plastics, require fossil fuels to manufacture and the manufacturing processes themselves are inherently carbon dioxide emitting. This comes about from basic chemistry which involves the carbon and oxygen atoms every step of the way. Most basic materials are composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, and the chemistry involved in manufacturing releases large amounts of carbon dioxide. The manufacture of solar panels requires mining high quality quartz and combining it with coal. It's hard to get away from fossil fuels as the Michael Moore movie, Planet of the Humans, pointed out. For this reason spending large amounts of money on infrastructure involving cement, steel, plastics and other materials could actually produce more global warming rather than preventing it. The finances are available; the proper materials are not. The manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels require the release of large amounts of greenhouse gasses.

Because of these fundamental limitations regarding materials, it doesn't make sense to throw trillions of dollars at either infrastructure or global warming mitigation. That would be either inflationary or misguided in the sense that large projects in these areas could produce even more global warming. As Bill Gates has pointed out, money should be invested in promising startups and research that can solve these basic problems and into digital nuclear which is the only renewable energy source that won't result in a lot of greenhouse gasses being created in the first place. Advanced nuclear is the most promising source of clean energy. Gates has invested in a company TerraPower which does research on advanced nuclear reactors. Their mission statement reads:

"TerraPower was founded by Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries that decided the private sector needed to take action in developing advanced nuclear energy to meet growing electricity needs, mitigate climate change and lift billions out of poverty. Advanced reactors and other isotopic applications are now possible with technology and enhanced computing capabilities that were unimaginable a few decades ago. At TerraPower, we are innovating in nuclear to improve the lives of people everywhere and to build the clean energy of tomorrow – today."

So when the Biden administration gets around to their initiatives on infrastructure and global warming, they need to heed Bill Gates' warning about traditional manufacturing methods involving cement, steel and plastic. Energy from solar and wind are inadequate to solve the problem for many reasons. Large scale demonstration and build out of nuclear energy reactors should be the order of the day, They are the only clean energy source that has the potential for diminishing the world's reliance on fossil fuels.

Off the Top of My Head

If Two Democratic Senators Were Not Elected in Georgia Run-offs, There Would Be No COVID Relief Package Under Biden

by John Lawrence, March13, 2021

It was crucial that the two Georgia Democratic Senators were elected. Not one Republican voted for Biden's $1.9 trillion bill. If there were one less Democrat in the Senate, nothing like it would ever have been passed. Republicans are the Party of No. Not one Republican Senator will ever vote Yes on any legislation put forward by a Democrat so that Georgia election was crucial. That's why Republican legislatures not only in Georgia but around the country are scrambling to put restrictive Jim Crow voting regulations in place on the belief that Republican operative Paul Weyrich was right. He said, "So many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

So now economist Larry Summers is worried about inflation due to the fact that trillions have been added to the deficit. So far, lawmakers have enacted six major bills, costing about $5.3 trillion, to help manage the pandemic and mitigate the economic burden on families and businesses. Even those economists know that the Federal government doesn't need taxes  in order to spend money. The Federal Reserve can create it with a few keystrokes on a computer just the way they did to bail out Wall Street banks during the Great Financial Recession (GFR) of 2008. Of course the public wasn't suppose to know about this "secret" bailout by the Fed. Authorities wanted you to believe that the $700 billion bill passed by Congress provided the bailout. In reality it was much more. Rolling Stone reported: "Washington Post “Fact-checker” columnist Glenn Kessler disputes the numerous studies showing the real bailout outlay was through the Fed, which the Sanders campaign had said was anywhere from $7.7 trillion (the number Bloomberg used in its coverage of secret Fed lending) to $29 trillion (the number the Levy Institute at Bard College calculated, including guarantees and other forms of aid).

So how is it that  Larry Summers was not so worried about inflation due to the Fed's trillions of dollars created and given to Wall Street? The answer is that that money was given to rich people which has caused no inflation because rich people are not going to spend money in ways that drive up the Consumer Price Index (CPI). They are mainly going to invest their money in ways that aren't included in the CPI. They are going to purchase assets like stocks and real estate. Consequence: no inflation at least as measured by the CPI. Instead the Wall Street bailout during the GFR as well as the $2 trillion tax breaks of the Trump administration produced asset inflation. It's the reason that home prices and rents are becoming increasingly unaffordable. But Summers is worried about inflation as measured by the CPI which is what happens when poor and middle class people get a trillion dollar bailout. They will spend that money at least partly on consumer goods that are included in the CPI and potentially drive up prices. However, much of the bailout money will go to pay off debts like past due rent and mortgage payments. This is not inflationary. So the real moral of the story is that, according to economists like Summers, bailing out rich people is good, bailing out poor people is bad.

So two lessons are to be learned here. 1) The Fed doesn't need taxes to create money and spend it into the economy whether that money is to bail out banks or to bail out the poor and middles class. 2) Democrats need to enact at the Federal level voting laws which encourage as many people to vote as possible and roll back Republican enacted restrictions on voting at the state level. In order to do the latter, Democrats will have to eliminate the filibuster at least for particular types of legislation. The only reason Biden's $1.9 trillion relief bill passed is that it was done by a process known as "budget reconciliation" which only requires a majority vote in the Senate. A national voting rights bill cannot be passed by that process and is subject to the filibuster which requires 60 votes. The Party of No wouldn't hesitate to use the filibuster to doom any voting rights legislation at the Federal level which means essentially that Jim Crow voting rights would again be put in place to discourage black people from voting. And don't worry about your children and grandchildren having to pay off the national debt. The Federal Reserve doesn't need their money.

Off the Top of My Head

Bill Gates Needs to Get Up To Speed on Modern Monetary Theory

by John Lawrence, February, 28, 2021

Bill Gates is a smart guy. He has singlehandedly been the most influential person on pandemics and now on climate change with his book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. In this book the most important thing he points out in my opinion is that it is not enough to put electric cars on the road and to use renewables to power electricity generating plants. There is also much carbon dioxide emission coming from manufacturing and agriculture. In particular the manufacture of cement, steel and plastic produce as much or more carbon dioxide ton for ton as those products themselves. In addition beef and dairy cows produce a lot of methane due to the fact that they are ruminants with a certain kind of digestive system. Gates believes that much innovation, research and development is needed to come up with substitute products in all these areas as well as electrifying everything and running it all with renewables including a new digitized nuclear system.

The one thing that this polymath doesn't seem up to speed on is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) which is important because all this innovation, research and development requires vast amounts of money. He personally can't provide it all although he has used his fortune in very constructive ways in terms of health care around the world and also seeding promising startups. The Gates Foundation is concerned with all these problems on a world wide basis and not only in the US. He is a globalist and not an America First type of guy which is altogether appropriate because pandemics and particularly global warming are universal problems affecting every country and all people on earth, and their solutions require a world wide approach.

Bill Gates like some economists is somewhat concerned about inflation after all these trillions of dollars are spent by the US government first on COVID relief and then on infrastructure and a Green New Deal. If they study MMT they would know that MMT shares that concern, but addresses it in terms of the amount of idle resources there are in the economy. For instance, if there is 5% unemployment (what is considered full employment by conventional economists), there are still over 15 million people available for work. If there are material resources available such as cement, steel and glass, the price of these items is not likely to be bid up causing inflation. However, while some material resources are readily available, their substitutes which don't cause carbon dioxide emissions in the manufacturing process are not. A large infrastructure project which requires huge amounts of concrete with rebar such as is necessary in constructing a bridge, for example, will also cause large amounts of carbon dioxide to be emitted into the atmosphere. As Gates points out, making things which require cement, steel and plastic adds about 31% of the total of greenhouse gasses which are emitted annually. For every ton of steel produced we emit 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide. For every ton of plastic, the figure is 1.3 tons of carbon dioxide, and for every ton of cement, we emit a ton of carbon dioxide.

With figures like that how is the US going to do a $4 trillion (which is the amount our infrastructure is in deficit) infrastructure project without producing even more billions of tons of greenhouse gasses (GHGs)? We need huge R&D projects funded by the government first before we can scale up the production of carbon free products which replace these traditional construction materials. Financing the R&D is not a problem as these human resources are widely considered to be available. This would cause no inflation. Getting the material resources when little or none of them is available would cause inflation. Nevertheless, the US ramped up production of ships and airplanes for World War II without causing much inflation. To deal with global warming or climate change is a thornier problem. If money is just poured into the economy on a non-targeted basis, it will cause inflation so it makes sense at least initially to pour the money into R&D as Bill Gates suggests. Doing a large infrastructure project without using the proper materials could make global warming even worse.

Off the Top of My Head

Why Should Blue Collar Workers Have to Pay Taxes to Bail Out White Collar Student Loan Debt?

by John Lawrence

Short answer: There is no need for the Federal government to tax in order to spend. That has been demonstrated by Modern Monetary Theory. However, taxation, if imposed in order to fight inflation, needs to be imposed primarily on the rich and upper middle class, not on the poor or lower middle class. The smart thing for the Biden administration to do would be to decrease taxes on the lower middle class ^i.e. blue collar workers before 2022 thus drawing them away from the Trump camp. In general the American people need to be educated that deficits don't matter except just as accounting entries on the Fed's balance sheet. Biden's COVID relief initiative of $1.9 billion will not raise taxes nor will his follow-on trillion dollar initiative for the build-out of green infrastructure.

The question, "Can We Afford to Pay for the Green New Deal?" is equivalent to the question "Can We Afford to Pay the Costs of Avoiding Annihilation?". In the past we have been able to afford a massive build-up to pay for the Second World War. The climate challenge is the moral equivalent of war. If we lose this war we lose not just our freedom. We lose the habitability of the entire planet. Various attempts have been made to cost out the components of a Green New Deal. Green power generation and transportation are not sufficient in themselves to get to net zero carbon emission, but they are a start. As Bill Gates has pointed out in his recent book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, major industrial processes also generate much greenhouse gas emission. For instance, every ton of cement that is produced contributes one ton of carbon dioxide which goes into the atmosphere. Every ton of steel produced results in 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, and every ton of plastics produced emits 1.3 tons of carbon dioxide. So it's not enough just to deal with green transportation (electric vehicles) and green power generation (solar and wind).

The cost of "greening" these industrial processes is pretty steep. Capturing carbon dioxide at the site of the manufacturing process is possible, but there is no cheap way to do it. Bill Gates is investing in promising start-ups and is counting on innovation to come up with new processes and materials which will not result in so much carbon dioxide being released into the air. Gates points out that we need to electrify every possible manufacturing process and make sure that all that electricity is generated cleanly. He advocates a new generation of nuclear power sources as wind and solar can not possible fill every energy need mainly because they are intermittent. Nuclear can fill the gap for consistent power generation when solar and/or wind are offline. Smart nuclear power which Bill Gates has been instrumental in developing would solve the problems encountered so far of explosion and what to do with nuclear waste. As a last resort Direct Air Capture of carbon dioxide from the air is possible but also costly.

What it all boils down to is this: we will need on the order of a trillion dollars a year for 10 years commitment to address climate change if we have a prayer for avoiding the worst consequences. What's more a lot of this commitment must be made in cooperation with China which is one of the worst polluters. Rivalry and even a Cold War must be set aside if the world is to avoid the worst outcome from global warming. India and China are building coal fired power generation plants at a rapid pace because coal fired power plants are so cheap comparatively and those countries are developing so quickly. It's not enough just to "green" the US. It has to be cooperation on a world wide basis. Competition has to be set aside and replaced by cooperation. The ownership of intellectual property is irrelevant when it comes to saving the planet.

A national budget for a Green New Deal shouldn't contribute to inflation since there are currently so many unemployed people available for work, and particularly because so many of the small businesses that were lost during the pandemic are not coming back. Also further robotizing of manufacturing processes will eliminate whatever blue collar workers are left working in those fields. In World War II there was some postponement of consumption in order to fight inflation. That may be necessary for the moral equivalent of war which the Green New Deal represents. If so, workers in certain nonessential industries may have to be repurposed and retrained for industries involved in combating climate change.

Off the Top of My Head

Despite All the Talk, Practically Nothing Has Been Done About Global Warming

by John Lawrence

Every year 51 billion tons of Greenhouse Gasses (GHGs) go into the atmosphere. There has been no decrease in that number despite the Paris Accords, despite more hybrid cars, despite the build up of solar and wind renewables. 197 countries adopted the Paris Agreement at the COP21 in Paris on 12 December 2015, over 5 years ago and yet there has been no improvement in the number of tons of GHGs dumped into the atmosphere per year. Well, a couple of tons less this year due to the pandemic. In general it is slightly increasing according to Bill Gates in his new book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster." At the rate we are going, there is no way that the earth can escape the dire consequences of global warming. Should we just give up and enjoy the few remaining years of a habitable earth? I don't think so. What will it take to forestall catastrophe? Basically, it will take a Green New Deal or should we call it the Green Equivalent of World War II?

During World War II there was a huge amount of government deficit spending. Modern Monetary Theory has shown that this is no problem because a government such as the US which issues its own sovereign currency can never run out of money whether or not there are tax receipts to cover the spending. The problem is inflation which occurred in WW I despite more modest outlays. In the WW II years there were wage and price controls which effectively controlled inflation. There was also rationing. These measures made sure that all resources both human and material were devoted to the war effort. Everyone was on the same page. Is that possible for a Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW) today? Would people be willing to give up anything so that resources could be devoted to a MEOW as far as Global Warming is concerned? Many Americans are not even willing to wear a mask during a pandemic, and many also believe that global warming is a hoax. Would they sacrifice for a MEOW?

Bill Gates has invested his money in a variety of start-ups which have some promise of addressing the global warming issue. One of them is Direct Air Capture (DAC) in which carbon dioxide is removed directly out of the air. This is a feasible alternative which is already in use on a small scale. The problem is that it's the most expensive alternative out there. A combination of other methods to ameliorate GHGs in the atmosphere would not only be more feasible but cheaper. He estimates that removing 51 billion tons of GHGs per year would cost $5.1 trillion per year. This would be an upper bound on the cost of getting to zero GHG emissions. Actually this does not seem too unreasonable given the fact that between 2008 and 2015, the Fed’s balance sheet, its total assets, ballooned from $900 billion to $4.5 trillion. That means that the Fed "printed" $3.4 trillion with its Quantitative Easing (QE) program. The Fed has "printed" $3.5 trillion just in the year 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic to keep the economy from falling apart. This is the amount of money authorized by Congress in several spending bills. Add to that Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill and you get a total of $5.4 trillion. And yet there has been no inflation.

So there is a little hocus pocus going on in the relationship between the Fed and the Treasury. The Fed by law is not allowed to buy US debt directly from the Treasury department. How it works is Congress authorizes a spending bill. The Treasury issues a Treasury bond if there aren't enough taxes to cover it. That bond is sold to the "primary dealers" which are mainly big Wall Street banks, and then the Fed buys the bond on the "open market" which means it buys them from the primary dealers. So by a roundabout method, the Fed buys up US debt by means of "printing" money although it's actually by means of a few keystrokes on a computer crediting the Treasury's account at the Fed and the Fed takes the bonds onto its balance sheet from which theoretically it could sell them some day. One little distinction: this is not QE. QE was a term coined when the Fed "printed" money to bail out the big banks aka providing liquidity. The Fed took all the toxic junk of mortgage backed securities and other assets onto its balance sheet and gave the banks all the money they needed to cover bets on credit default obligations and interest rate swaps and other casino garbage. So while it amounts to the same thing - the Fed "printing" money and adding it into the economy - the money injected now is going into the real economy whereas the QE went into the Wall Street economy.

But I digress. So Bill Gates says it would require at most $5.1 trillion to get our GHGs down to zero on an annual basis. In other words keep the goddam fossil fuels, cow farts and Keystone pipeline and just get those DAC machines humming. Seems reasonable to me. The Fed can just print up that $5.1 trillion and we're home clear. J.D. Alt estimates that solving the global warming crisis will cost $60 trillion over 10 years which is about the same amount per year that Bill Gates estimates although supposedly we will reach some point at which renewables and other technologies will result in zero emissions so we will not have to go on spending that amount in perpetuity. So why don't we just go ahead and do it? The Fed could just print the money. No inflation is in sight. Modern Monetary Theory has shown that any country with a sovereign currency (such as the US dollar) can never run out of money and as long as the resources are available (both human and material) the financial resources will always be available. The only problem is the stupidity of most of the US Congress (mainly Republicans) whose only response to any Democratic initiative is just to Just Say No as well as their economic ignorance. So it is of paramount importance that next year after the pandemic is over and before Republicans take over (hope not) one of the branches of Congress in 2022, that Congress passes a $5 trillion per year Green New Deal or a $50 trillion GND spread over 10 years.

Off the Top of My Head

The Two Strands of Modern Economic Theory

by John Lawrence, February 12, 2021

Ellen Brown with her book Web of Debt pointed out that public banks could save states and municipalities millions in interest compared to Wall Street banks. She also pointed out that money is created by banks when they make loans with fractional reserve banking. They just create the money with keystrokes; it doesn't come out of deposits. Ergo, all money comes from debt, but that's only half the story. The other strand explains how the Federal Reserve just creates money by keystrokes. In The Deficit Myth, Stephanie Kelton explains how countries with sovereign currencies can create money that really is not debt, despite the fact that conventional thinking says it is. When households or states or countries in the Euro zone take on debt, they do have to pay it back. When countries with sovereign currencies create money, they don't have to pay it back. It's as simple as that.

When European countries gave up their sovereign currencies and adopted the Euro, they gave up the right to create the money they needed to pay bills so they need to borrow on capital markets which can charge them whatever interest they want. This is how Greece and Italy and other European countries got into problems. On the other hand the U.K. which never gave up its sovereign currency can just create the money it needs without going to the debt markets. In the same way Orange County and other US municipalities got into trouble with spiraling debt which had to be paid back. This can get out of hand because the more indebted a debtor gets, the higher interest rate they get charged so that in the worst case they are just borrowing money to pay interest. The US can never get in this debt trap because it never has to borrow money on the open market and the Fed can set interest rates however it wants. Once authorized by Congress and required by law Treasury bonds are issued and can always be paid because the Fed can just create the money to pay them.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has established that deficit spending, whether that comes from tax breaks or government programs or currently for coronavirus relief, is just an accounting entry on the Fed's balance sheet. The national debt never needs to be paid off. Also any country that owns Treasuries - for instance, China - could have them paid off tomorrow if they chose to cash them all in by the Fed just debiting money from the savings account of the People's Bank of China at the Fed and crediting their cash account also at the Fed. Countries with sovereign currencies, ^i.e. the US dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen etc, can all create money in this way by having their central banks do it with keystrokes on a computer. Greece, Italy, California and New York can't do this because they don't have sovereign currencies.

So there is a difference between debt acquired by households, firms and countries which don't issue their own sovereign currency and countries which have central banks that do. The US Federal Reserve can buy up Treasury bonds as necessary to provide as much money as is authorized by Congress to the US Treasury. By law they can't buy them directly from the Treasury but must buy them on the open market. However, US primary dealers - mainly Wall Street banks - are required to buy them and the Fed can buy them from the primary dealers by providing "liquidity" - dollars which the Fed creates with keystrokes - to the Wall Street banks. The Fed also controls interest rates which at this time are 0.25% or almost zero. So the $1.9 trillion relief package proposed by Biden is no problem either for the US Treasury or the Fed. That money could just end up on the Fed's balance sheet the way the trillions of dollars it created to bail out the Big Banks in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 did. The fact is that, when the US government deficit spends, that adds money to the private economy, and right now the private economy is hurting because so many are out of work and not able to pay rent or mortgages or car payments. Money added to the economy by deficit spending (deficit being really a misnomer) can be readily absorbed by unemployed workers to pay their bills. The point is that taxes are not necessary for government spending.

So Web of Debt applies to the private economy and The Deficit Myth applies to the national economy. The first book advocates public banking which can save states and municipalities money on interest because they do have to pay their debts. The second book describes how governments with sovereign currencies can just create money which need never be paid off. However, this money creation facility should, like alcohol, be used responsibly; otherwise, inflation can occur. But when huge numbers of people are unemployed and states are having a hard time paying their bills, it is incumbent on the central government to help them. The same applies to European countries in the Euro zone. US lawmakers need to get up to date on how the real economy actually works. In truth Republicans have lost all legitimacy when it comes to their harping on deficit spending.

Off the Top of My Head

China Has Been Taking Over the World ... Peacefully

by John Lawrence, February 11, 2021

As Trump was retreating from multilateralism with his America First approach, China was winning friends and influencing people by building infrastruture in countries around the world with its Belt and Road initiative. This model put excess Chinese labor to work pulling their families out of poverty and set up the groundwork for increased trade and friendly relations with with other countries. Latest example: Latin America. Meanwhile, the US has not even been able to build infrastructure in its own country. Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) publishes The Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, which grades the current state of national infrastructure categories on a scale of A through F. In 2017, the U.S. infrastructure earned a D+ average. Stay tuned for a new report later this year. Infrastructure looms large because now it must be built out as green infrastructure replacing fossil fuel infrastructure.

In Latin America, America's so-called back yard, 19 countries have signed up for China's Belt and Road Initiative. The value of trade between China and Brazil, Latin America's largest country is $100 billion. China is South America's largest trading partner. Only Paraguay is not on board because they're the only South American country that recognizes Taiwan and not Beijing as the legitimate Chinese government. In 2019 Chinese companies invested $12.8 billion in Latin America concentrating on regional infrastructure such as ports, roads, dams and railways. Meanwhile, America was focused on its entertainment and consumerist economy, now partially defunct due to COVID. Chinese purchases of minerals and agricultural commodities helped South America get through the worst effects of the 2008 financial crisis. While the US had an orgy of financial speculation that created the 2008 financial crisis, China was powering on keeping its shoulder to the wheel, ear to the ground and nose to the grindstone building infrastructure and providing full employment for the Chinese people. As the US was relying on its military power to maintain its influence in the world, China was employing peaceful means to expand its influence. In 2020 the US spent $738 billion on defense, an additional $35 billion on nuclear weapons and and additional $80 billion on intelligence programs, none of which by the way provided intelligence on the assault on the Capitol although it had been discussed widely and openly on the web in prior weeks. Meanwhile, China's 2020 defense budget was $178 billion.

China's Cosco Shipping is building a new $3 billion port in Peru, and there are plans for a transcontinental railroad linking South America's Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Diplomatic opportunities for China have also been opened up due to COVID since China produces most of the world's PPE. The US was caught flat footed because it had to go hat in hand to China for PPE not much of which is manufactured domestically. Mask diplomacy has caused Washington to worry that China is gaining influence during the pandemic as China has provided PPE to 150 countries and 7 international organizations around the globe. While the US struggles to get vaccine into the arms of Americans, China has agreed to provide Pakistan with half a million doses of its Sinopharm vaccine free of charge. Time magazine reported:

"Yet China has won influence not by wielding sticks but by deftly distributing carrots. In Brazil, the region’s largest economy, bilateral trade with China rose from $2 billion in 2000 to $100 billion last year. Today, Brazil sends 30% of all exports to China, including 80% of its soybean crop and 60% of its iron ore. These entanglements are typically tightest with nations with goods to sell; China has supplied over $17 billion in financing to Argentina since 2007, according to Inter-American Dialogue, and is the world’s top importer of Argentine soybeans and beef.

"China is also now a preferred lender across the region. It hosts two international development banks–the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank (NDB) in Shanghai–that are both expanding their remit across the region. “Infrastructure development has shrunk the distance between Asia and Latin America,” AIIB president Jin Liqun tells TIME in his Beijing headquarters."

While China was deftly distributing carrots, the US was wielding sticks with Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo bullying the rest of the world to get them to fall in line behind the US. The US needs to cooperate with China to stave off the next big crisis - global warming - not start a new Cold War in an effort to overtake or compete with China. For the most part China has already won any competition to speak of by gaining cooperation and friendship with the rest of the world and achieving the world's largest economy while the US still struggles with COVID, its economy in shambles. "No country has put itself in a better position to become the world's renewable energy superpower than China,"says a recent report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation. In Brazil China's State Grid Corp. is the largest power generation and distribution company, while China's Three Gorges, the world's largest hydropower provider, controls 17 out of 48 hydro plants and 11 wind farms.

Joe Biden is doing his best to backtrack from Trump's disastrous America First policy, but American foreign policy is still on the track that it views China as a competitor rather than a nation that should be cooperated with in order to meet the challenge of global warming. Rather than gearing up for a military confrontation or quibbling and squabbling over human rights, the US must adopt a less belligerent foreign policy and learn to get along with the other nations of the world even those who have not been historic allies. The US should cut back on its bloated military and military-complex spending and devote the savings to virus research and green infrastructure implementation at home and around the world in cooperation with China and other nations.

Off the Top of My Head

When Will the Pandemic Be Over? Maybe Never

by John Lawrence, February 10, 2021

We may just have to live with it, the same way we live with most other viruses. To eradicate COVID-19, it would have to be eliminated everywhere in the world. Not likely. To add insult to injury, COVID-19 is mutating - everywhere in the world and not only in humans. These viruses are also present in animals and are mutating there as well. What this means is that all the billions spent on vaccines so far may not have resulted in vaccines effective against the mutants. So billions more need to be spent for new vaccines that might not be effective against even newer mutants. It's a race against time, and humans may need to be vaccinated multiple times each one not effective against the newest mutant.

So we may have to learn to live with COVID. After all we have learned to live with a number of other viruses including flu, which also keeps mutating, HIV, poliomyelitis, yaws, dracunculiasis, malaria, measles, mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis and cysticercosis. In some cases symptoms are treatable in an individual even though the virus may still be present as is the case with HIV. The only viruses that has been eradicated from the planet are smallpox and rinderpest. The fact that humans are the only reservoir for smallpox infection and that carriers did not exist, played a significant role in the eradication of smallpox. Most viruses are present in animals as well as humans and can harbor there for years before breaking out again in humans.

The modus operandi for a virus is that the more transmissable ones win out over the less transmissable ones. So the longer the virus exists in the population, the more the virus mutates and the more transmissable the virus gets. It does not necessarily get more deadly because if it killed its host right away, it wouldn't have as much time to infect others. So an ideal virus is one that hangs around in its host for a long length of time and then kills it. Being asymptomatic but transmissable for a long length of time also contributes to the success of the virus at least from the virus' viewpoint. Time magazine reports:

"That underscores wealthy countries’ responsibility to help developing nations get access to vaccines, Mazet says–for the benefit of the people who live there, of course, but also for the rest of the world. Even if one country achieves herd immunity, that status could be threatened by new viral mutations emerging from areas without broad vaccine coverage.

"The good news is we already know how to live with viruses, like seasonal influenza and the coronaviruses that cause the common cold. These diseases aren’t harmless–the flu infects millions of people in the U.S. each year and kills tens of thousands–but we have learned to minimize their damage."

So it becomes apparent that, if we don't help poorer countries, our own lives will never be out of danger. This is true for pandemics but it is also true in many other respects which should be perfectly obvious. Global poverty contributes to global disease. Going it alone or America First or ignoring the plight of our neighbors puts our own lives in peril. This is especially true for global warming. It is also true for the refugee crisis, childhood poverty all around the world and many other things. Climate refugees are already being created thanks to the effects of global warming. All these problems can only be addressed if not solved by global cooperation. In order to do this we must overlook things about other countries that we quibble with especially on the order of human rights. From their perspective we are human rights violators. What is important is not to bully or sanction other countries but to get along with them. Diplomacy and cooperation should be the order of the day. We must deemphasize military threats and solutions to world problems, defund the military and fund programs designed to counteract the real threats to ourselves and others.

Time put it this way:

"A better solution, many experts believe, is investing in the public-health infrastructure that went neglected before the COVID-19 pandemic, thus improving our ability to contain, respond to and monitor coronaviruses and other pathogens. “We need to invest in creating a healthier country [and world!], so when there is another virus, we will not be as unprepared as we were for this one,” Galea says.

...

"Recovering from the pandemic must also involve better science communication, to improve understanding of what must be done to curtail disease spread–and to persuade Americans to actually do it.

"Part of coexisting with COVID-19 may mean recognizing the need for cooperation [emphasis mine], whether it’s getting vaccinated to contribute to herd immunity; wearing a mask to prevent spreading the virus; consenting to regular testing or contact tracing to help with monitoring; or adhering to the guidelines set out by local health authorities if an outbreak emerges. Steven Taylor, author of The Psychology of Pandemics, says it’s possible for humans to adjust to such a scenario. Wearing masks felt bizarre to many in the Western world less than a year ago; now it’s second nature for most. “The virus will adapt to its host,” he says, “and we will adapt to the virus.”"

Yes, cooperation to provide herd immunity, to provide a herd response to global warming which also affects the whole herd and elimination of war and military responses to every nonexistent but imagined threat. We are all interconnected so that the more we cooperate, the more likely it will be that we will solve these global problems. If we don't the human race could be wiped out by ongoing pandemics, global warming and warfare. Let's spend our money on the real threats to mankind and not on a bloated military-industrial complex which is proving on a daily basis that it is ineffective in confronting the real problems of mankind.

Off the Top of My Head

Even With Unlimited Spending Some Problems Can't Be Solved

by John Lawrence

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shown that unlimited Federal spending is no problem. The money is there, but it's a question if the productive capacity is there. For instance, since most products are manufactured in China, unlimited spending on products needed to counter the pandemic might only produce inflation. That's a problem of letting crucial industries be relocated to a foreign country and not manufactured here. If you can't ramp up production in a meaningful time frame, even though the finance is not a problem, the ability to produce needed products may be. In this situation MMT predicts inflation. Existing facilities to produce vaccines can only produce so many vials.You could go to 24 hour a day production, but beyond that you would have to build more factories and that takes time. Would the money spent to build more factories be well spent if the production facilities came online only after the crisis was over? No. MMT stands for spending money wisely to solve social problems like the pandemic and global warming, but the time frame within which the problems need to be solved is important. There's no sense in spending money to ramp up production if that production only is available after the problem has already been solved.

Yeva Nersisyan and L Randall Wray write:

"But what happens when ventilators and masks are not available for sale even as companies are operating 24/7? More money may not solve the problem, but the government still has a role to play. During the second world war, the US quickly became “the arsenal of democracy” by repurposing its productive capacity to meet the needs of the war. Through diligent planning “[l]ipstick cases became bomb cases, beer cans went to hand grenades, adding machines to automatic pistols, and vacuum cleaners to gas mask parts”. We were able to cut “production time for Liberty Ships down from 365 days to 92, 62, and, finally, to one day”. We can mobilize our resources once again to build temporary hospitals, and to ensure a sufficient supply of medical equipment and whatever else is necessary to overcome the crisis."

So it may be necessary to shift production from pre-COVID endeavors to provide the necessary human and material resources to deal with the problem. For instance, the restaurant industry which filled the gap from lack of time for home preparation of meals due to both spouses working has suffered the most during the pandemic because more people have the time for meal preparation at home. Those workers are now available for deployment in other more crucial industries such as the renewable energy industry. Other hospitality and entertainment sector workers can also be shifted to more crucial endeavors just as they were during World War II. The economy as it existed pre-COVID was composed mainly of profitable private sector activities, many of which were not designed to deal with the most crucial social problems.

The solution of the pandemic at least in the US has an expected solution within the next year. Global warming has a somewhat longer time frame, but requires much more money to be spent because, from a finance point of view, it's a much larger problem. Changing the infrastructure of the whole world will require much more money but over a longer time span. The time span for solving global warming is approximately 10 years so we have ten times as long to solve global warming as we do to solve the pandemic. The pandemic may never be completely resolved because wiping out the virus everywhere in the world completely may not be possible just as it has not been possible to wipe out a number of other viruses. Over time, however, the problem can become treatable and manageable. The same can be said of the global warming problem. It may be impossible to eliminate every source of greenhouse gas emission in 10 years, but if most of them are eliminated, the remaining problems may be manageable in the sense that the earth may ultimately be salvageable.

What we have learned from the pandemic is that much more money needs to be spent on research and development in virology so that we are better prepared to deal with pandemics and epidemics. Two infectious diseases have successfully been eradicated: smallpox and rinderpest. The rest still exist somewhere in the world. There are also four ongoing programs, targeting poliomyelitis, yaws, dracunculiasis, and malaria. Five more infectious diseases have been identified as of April 2008 as potentially eradicable with current technology by the Carter Center International Task Force for Disease Eradication—measles, mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis and cysticercosis. What we have also learned is that there is more of a threat to Americans and human beings in general from viruses than there is from foreign nations, both state actors and terrorists. Therefore, the money spent on the defense department should be drastically reduced while the money spent on human health should be vastly increased. Let's deal with the real threats not the imagined ones.

Coronavirus Has Destroyed the Myth of the Deficit

by Yeva Nersisyan and L Randall Wray

from the Guardian, April 17, 2020

No, federal government spending doesn’t have to be ‘paid for’. The crisis shows providing for our society is not a financial issue

‘Buying into the deficit myth, for generations we have been living below our means – paralyzed by the belief that finance is the constraint.’ Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Only a month ago, a stimulus bill of $2tn would have been unthinkable. Indignant deficit scolds would have asked how one planned to pay for it, and complained about burdening our grandchildren with debt and bankrupting our country. Bernie Sanders bent over backwards to explain how he was going to pay for a Green New Deal or Medicare for All. These programs don’t seem as expensive any more. Suddenly the government is planning “helicopter drops” of cash. Larry Kudlow, who relentlessly attacked the Obama stimulus during the global financial crisis, is touting the current stimulus as “the single largest Main Street assistance program in the history of the United States”.

Nobody is seriously asking how we are going to pay for this stimulus – and they shouldn’t. It took a global pandemic to explode the myth that federal government spending has to be “paid for”. The Covid-19 crisis has clearly demonstrated what should have been obvious already: provisioning society – whether with food, disinfecting wipes, toilet paper or medical supplies – is not a financial issue. If we can’t produce enough masks, ventilators or food, finance will not help. Society’s capacity to produce real output is what limits its ability to provision itself. And this is precisely what the virus threatens, as workers stay home, supply chains break down and businesses shut their doors.

On the financial side, a sovereign government can always afford to buy what is for sale in its currency, as Modern Money Theorists have long explained. It cannot run out of money because it simply credits bank accounts when it spends. This is not a prescription, but merely a description of what actually happens. In the United States, Congress passes the budget, while the Treasury, in cooperation with its fiscal agent, the Federal Reserve, makes the necessary payments. This happens through the thick and thin of the business cycle, crisis or not. If the US government wants to buy more ventilators or masks, finance cannot be an impediment.

But what happens when ventilators and masks are not available for sale even as companies are operating 24/7? More money may not solve the problem, but the government still has a role to play. During the second world war, the US quickly became “the arsenal of democracy” by repurposing its productive capacity to meet the needs of the war. Through diligent planning “[l]ipstick cases became bomb cases, beer cans went to hand grenades, adding machines to automatic pistols, and vacuum cleaners to gas mask parts”. We were able to cut “production time for Liberty Ships down from 365 days to 92, 62, and, finally, to one day”. We can mobilize our resources once again to build temporary hospitals, and to ensure a sufficient supply of medical equipment and whatever else is necessary to overcome the crisis.

Buying into the deficit myth, for generations we have been living below our means – paralyzed by the belief that finance is the constraint. Prolonged periods of slack and jobless recoveries have disincentivized investment and hurt our productive capacity and labor productivity. Even in good times our economy leaves millions unemployed or underemployed and a significant amount of our capacity idle (before the epidemic, our factories were only operating at three-quarters of capacity). We have underinvested in public healthcare, education and infrastructure and imposed extreme limitations on social assistance programs. As of this writing, the administration still plans to go through with its plan to kick 700,000 Americans off the food stamps program to save a measly $4.2bn over five years. We have been living in “poverty in the midst of plenty”, as John Maynard Keynes aptly noted in the Great Depression.

Once this crisis passes, the deficit scolds will be back at it again, trying to put roadblocks in front of progressive policies. We will be told we can’t afford Medicare for All, Jobs for All, College for All or halting climate change. The centrists will try to get us back to “normal” – ie an economy that leaves so many behind.

It is imperative that we resist. What progressives need to push for is creating a different kind of economy through a Green New Deal. To do so, we need to distinguish between the myths and real constraints, understanding “that what is technically feasible is financially possible” for a sovereign government. Affording the Green New Deal is about real resources and technology, not about finance.

The original New Deal was also dogged by concerns about excessive government spending. The second world war eliminated that obstacle, unleashing extraordinary economic mobilization and decades of prosperity. Hopefully the coronavirus crisis will not be as destructive as the Great Depression, but if there is one thing it should destroy, it’s the myth of the deficit.

• Yeva Nersisyan is associate professor of economics at Franklin and Marshall College

• L Randall Wray, author of Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems; Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist; and Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability, is senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute and professor of economics at Bard College

 

Off the Top of My Head

Contrary to Larry Summers Biden's Relief Bill Will Not Cause Increased Inflation

by John Lawrence, February 8, 2021

Joe Biden's almost $2 trillion pandemic relief deal will not be inflationary despite Larry Summers' opinion. Inflation occurs when there is too much money sloshing around in the economy chasing too few goods, services and human resources. That is not the case here. First of all it will reemploy the unemployed. This is a presently unused resource. Secondly, it will suck up unused or unsold goods and services funding things that are currently unfunded like child care, and thirdly, it will serve to pay off debt and replenish savings. Any money going into savings or paying off debt is not inflationary. It's deflationary in the sense that the banks will lose money due to interest they won't collect if loans are paid off. The middle class that did have savings or credit in many cases has had to use those to survive the pandemic. That's why giving money to higher earning, but not wealthy, families is a good thing. To hear some people talk only money should be given to those who are desperate and living from paycheck to paycheck. Yes, those are the families most in need who should be given money first, but higher earning families who have depleted their savings or gone into debt need to be resuscitated also.

So here is what Larry Summers says about inflation:

"First, while there are enormous uncertainties, there is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability. This will be manageable if monetary and fiscal policy can be rapidly adjusted to address the problem. But given the commitments the Fed has made, administration officials’ dismissal of even the possibility of inflation, and the difficulties in mobilizing congressional support for tax increases or spending cuts, there is the risk of inflation expectations rising sharply."

Summers fails to take into account the deflationary effects of the relief bill. Money going to states and municipalities will actually be deflationary because much of it will be used to pay down debts and loans. Many state budgets are in horrible shape and employees such as police, librarians and firemen have been laid off. People paying back rents and mortgages will have a deflationary effect on the economy. People on the lower end of the economic spectrum who are living paycheck to paycheck will be able to get a little ahead and also save. This will not add a lot to inflation. Also money can always be withdrawn from the economy by taxing the rich, those who actually added to their wealth and income during the pandemic. This is the only reason that taxes might need to be raised because the US government has the ability to spend without raising taxes. The only reason to tax would be to fight inflation and those taxes can be targeted towards wealthier families and individuals. The Federal Reserve has not been able to achieve its target rate of 2% inflation recently despite maintaining almost zero percent interest rates. It wants more money sloshing around in the economy.

There are other ways to suck money out of the economy to offset inflation. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) recommends Medicare for All which would result in much less money spent on health care while providing better health outcomes. This would be deflationary which would counteract any inflationary propensities of government deficit spending. Conventional economic thinking is that there is a tradeoff between unemployment and inflation. The more people unemployed there are, the more inflation is diminished. Therefore, full employment as defined by economists is not really employment where everyone is employed. It is that level of unemployment which just keeps inflation in check. However, according to "The Trade-off between Inflation and Unemployment in an MMT World: An Open Economy Perspective" by Emilio Carnevali and Matteo Deleidi, MMT it is contended that inflation "occurs when the system reaches the point of full utilization of its productive capacity, both in terms of capital utilization and in terms of availability of workers. At this point, the government should curb inflation forces cooling down the effective demand. This is another fundamental task of taxes." As long as there is unused capacity in human or production terms, increased employment will not be inflationary. So Larry summers need not worry that putting all those unemployed people back to work will lead to inflation.

Biden's putting a $15.00 an hour minimum wage in the relief bill is also what MMT advocates in relation to a Federal job guarantee. Real full employment at a minimum wage of $15.00 an hour does not need to be inflationary especially if it is in areas that don't compete with already employed workers. Biden's relief bill will have the effect of putting almost everyone to work with at least an hourly pay of $15.00 an hour. People who are living paycheck to paycheck and employed at $15.00 an hour are not going to contribute to inflation since their demands on the economy are those that can be easily accommodated by existing production and easily increased production. Deficit spending is not a problem. Former Chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan said, "The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default." So the real limit on government spending is inflation which can be controlled by taxes on those sectors of the economy which are not easily upscaled to provide more supply.

There is much unused capacity in the current US economy both in human and material or physical terms. People should be put back to work with a minimum wage of $15.00 per hour. A follow-on bill that would address infrastructure rebuilding and a Green New Deal also needs to be done. Resources may have to be managed by government to control inflation, but the important thing is that work needs to be done in these areas and people need to be put back to work. Inflation can also be offset by the deflationary effect of withdrawing funds form a bloated defense sector.

Off the Top of My Head

The Left/Right Political Spectrum Is Irrelevant at This Point

by John Lawrence

The Extreme Right position on the pandemic is just to let it rip. This would mean ongoing disaster for the whole world into the indefinite future. The Extreme Left would advocate government spending as much money as necessary to defeat the pandemic and get the economy back to normal. The middle of the road would advocate doing half as much as necessary to sort of but not really get the pandemic under control. Result: the coronavirus would be mutating and popping back up for years just as SARS COVID-9 is a mutation of the original SARS virus and is related to the MERS virus. Whether the mutations occur in animals or in humans, it doesn't matter. Viruses mutate and doing a half ass job in getting rid of this pandemic which is the political "middle" insures that there will be more pandemics in the future. Not allocating increased funding for the study and research of viruses insures that there will be more threats to human lives and economies.

The Extreme Right position on global warming is to do nothing about it. That includes encouraging consumption of fossil fuels and not caring how many greenhouse gasses are emitted into the atmosphere. This virtually guarantees that the earth will become uninhabitable in 50 years or less. The Extreme Left position would be to do as much government spending as necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero in about 10 years. This would prevent global temperatures from rising more than the amount that would destroy the habitability of the earth. The middle position would be to spend a piddling amount to combat global warming. The result would be that the earth would become uninhabitable in a slightly longer time frame.

Republicans want to limit Federal government expenditures to solve problems while maximizing the private sector in the economy. Problem is that dealing with the pandemic and climate change are problems private enterprise is not capable of solving or even leading the way. Is there a role for private enterprise? Certainly, but government must play the leading role or these major problems as well as a number of others will not be solved. Private enterprise won't engage in any activity for which there are no profits to be made. Some problems like the pandemic and global warming are not likely to yield much in the way of profits. Ergo, private enterprise will not be interested in dealing with them.

The COVID relief package that Biden has put forward is totally dependent on Democrats controlling both Houses of Congress. That in turn was totally dependent on the Georgia runoff elections for two Senators which produced two Democrats. Otherwise, there would be no COVID relief package or follow on projects to deal with global warming because not enough Republicans will be voting for any of Biden's projected spending to solve these problems. So the Extreme Left position of these issues which are totally necessary if they are to be dealt with successfully would not have been possible. Even successfully dealing with these two existential problems was hanging by a thread because the election of two Democratic Senators from the state of Georgia was heretofore unheard of. But now there is a chance.

What really needs to happen with regard to government spending is that the public, and that includes Senators and Representatives, need to be educated on how the economy really works. Deficit spending is not really a problem. Read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton. Republicans rely on the ignorance of the public while suggesting that adequately dealing with global warming or the pandemic will raise their taxes. It does not have to increase taxes which is the conventional understanding about it. The Federal government does not need to pay back Federal deficits because the US dollar is a sovereign currency. The Federal Reserve can just "print" the money - although it doesn't actually print it - it creates it by a few keystrokes on a computer. A household or private firm must pay back its loans. Even US states must pay back loans usually by raising taxes. Th Federal government does not have to raise taxes nor does it have to pay back loans. Treasury bonds can just end up on the Fed's balance sheet where in fact most of them do end up. So a government, any government, which has a sovereign currency can create as much money as necessary to solve any problem. The only caveat is that money creation under certain conditions can induce inflation.

Too much money sloshing around in any sector can produce inflation in that sector. What the US economy has created recently is asset inflation but not inflation in the real economy. Tax breaks for the rich has resulted in the bidding up of assets. Take the stock market, for example. Major corporations have used their tax breaks not to build production facilities but to buy back their own stock. This raises the stock price: ergo, asset inflation. The same holds for the real estate market. People, with more money than they are willing to put to productive use, use it to bid up the value of real estate. Ergo, inflation. This makes housing less affordable. The real economy has under utilized capacity in terms of all the unemployed and underemployed labor. Government spending which soaks up this capacity and puts it to productive use in converting to a reusable energy economy and upgrading to green infrastructure should not produce inflation. Neither will more government money spent on research on viruses produce inflation. What else produces asset inflation is money spent on the military-industrial complex. Think $600 toilet seats.

The US public needs to be enlightened on how the economy really works at the macro level. That being understood would take all the wind out of the sails of Republican objections to government spending. It does not have to raise your taxes because the US government can never run out of money. An understanding of Modern Monetary Theory leads to that understanding.

Off the Top of My Head

Fareed Zakaria: The Pandemic Will Not End Unless Every Country Gets the Vaccine

by John Lawrence, February 4, 2021

Does this finally mean that we have to cooperate with all other countries in the world whether we like it or not or face the dire consequence that the pandemic will never end? War no more? Or will we so much not want to give up war, Hot or Cold, that we are willing to continue competitive rivalries with other nations? Will we have to settle or at least live with our differences in order for most of us to survive? Must petty grievances and bullying sanctions end? The US spends a trillion dollars a year on its war machine, while the real enemies are global warming, domestic terrorists and viruses. Will human beings ever learn or do we love competition and fighting so much that we will not cooperate on any terms and for any reason.

The longer the pandemic goes on anywhere in the world, the more time the virus has to mutate to deadlier and more transmissible forms. Yet some people even refuse to wear a mask. It seems that freedom is not having to do anything I don't want to do even if it protects others - especially if it protects others.Freedom is all about me - my rights, my prerogatives. Freedom is not what Kris Kristofferson thought: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose". No freedom means that I don't have to love my neighbor as myself as the Bible says. Freedom means that I can do what I damn well please despite the consequences to anyone else.

Fareed Zakaria wrote in the Washington Post:

"Despite the amazing progress we’ve made with vaccines, the truth is that our current trajectory virtually guarantees that we will never really defeat the coronavirus. It will stay alive and keep mutating and surging across the globe. Years from now, countries could be facing new outbreaks that will force hard choices between new lockdowns or new waves of disease and death.

"The basic problem is in how the vaccine is being distributed around the world — not based on where there is the most need, but the most money. The richest countries have paid for hundreds of millions of doses, often far in excess of what they need. Canada, for example, has preordered enough to cover its 38 million residents five times over.

"Meanwhile, Nigeria’s 200 million people have not received a single dose of the vaccine. Rich countries make up 16 percent of the world’s population, yet they have locked up 60 percent of the world’s vaccine supply. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Thomas Bollyky and Chad Bown pointed out that Australia, Canada and Japan account for less than 1 percent of the world’s coronavirus cases but have secured more doses than all of Latin America and the Caribbean, which account for more than 17 percent of cases."

Both the pandemic and global warming put the human race in an interesting dilemma. We must help each other if any of us are to survive, and we must sacrifice if future generations are to survive. People that are all about "me" are in actuality a threat to lasting human civilization on planet earth, probably on any other planet as well. Yet as is well known many, if not all, humans elevate selfishness above communal values. Their enjoyment of what life has to offer in the present is more important than someone else's survival in the future. This isn't true of most mothers though who want their children to survive even if they have to die. So maybe men are the problem here. They value the present and their "toys" much more than they do the future. They want what they want and they want it now.

Billie holiday wrote the song, "God Bless the Child Who's Got His Own." "Rich relations give crusts of bread and such. You can help yourself but don't take too much." Billie Holiday died in a hospital with 74 cents in her bank account and $750 strapped to her leg. You might think that the fact that she died without a will would not have mattered yet her estate was valued at $14 million in 2014 and revenues from her reissued records are bringing in more money on an annual basis. By a quirk of fate most of that money, and the continuing revenue from royalties, is going to people she never even knew in life. Is people getting their just desserts really the issue here? Maybe perhaps other people getting just a little dessert is what's important.

Off the Top of My Head

Republicans' New Definition of Socialism: Any Government Program That Would Help Black People

by John Lawrence, February 2, 2021

Republicans are worried that the US will become a socialist country. The public sector will come to dominate the private sector. Well, the private sector has been helpless at solving the big outstanding problems: global warming and the pandemic. If the private sector could solve these problems, well, that would be great, but they're not capable of doing it. Therefore, government is left by default to deal with global warming and the pandemic as well as a host of other systemic problems like health care, poverty, economic inequality and racism. So what does capitalism stand for at this point: fossil fuel dependency and business as usual which means more and more income and wealth inequality. With capitalism there is no "we" there, only an accumulation of "I"s.

What Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shown is that the Republican accusation of Democrats - "tax and spend" - is a discredited misnomer because US government spending does not depend on taxation. In fact a Green New Deal and Medicare for All could all be accomplished without increasing taxes on anyone. That's because the US central bank aka the Federal Reserve can just create money with a few keystrokes on a computer the way it did to save the banking industry during the Great Recession when it gave the Big Banks several trillion dollars without any consequences whatsoever for deficit spending or increased taxes to pay for it. This facility should be used responsibly, however, just like the use of alcohol. Used irresponsibly this money creation facility could increase inflation.

So what is the responsible use of government spending? Obviously, during a pandemic and incipient global warming, it would be responsible for the government to spend money to solve these huge worldwide problems which not only affect the US, but affect the whole world. One of the lessons of this situation is that, if we want to contribute to the solution of global warming, we must become friends with the world's biggest GHG emitter which is China. China and the US are the world's first and second largest GHG emitters and the first and second largest economies. We can't afford not to be partners in the solution of this problem. China and US continued rivalry even amounting to a Cold War will guarantee that the earth is destroyed as a habitable living place for humans. So we have no other choice. Either we can continue our petty squabbles with China or we can cooperate with them to solve problems. We are truly all in this together. Either we hang together or we hang as nations separately.

The second lesson of MMT is that Medicare for All (M4A) could be part of the solution for global warming. If M4A were to be implemented, the US could have a much better health care system with better outcomes health wise at a far cheaper price. This has been shown in study after study. What's more M4A would be deflationary in financial terms. Deflation as well as inflation is bad for the economy. The fight against global warming would be inflationary because of the huge expenditures that must be made so it could offset the deflation caused by M4A. In fact we find in How to Pay for the Green New Deal, working paper 931 by Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray:

"To be clear, we do recognize that implementation of the GND will shift spending from the private sector to the government sector. However, unless there is an a priori reason to believe this would—by itself—be inflationary, we take the position that in the general case it makes no difference in terms of inflation whether the dollar spent to hire resources comes from the government or from the private sector, which is also the method used by Keynes. As Stephanie Kelton says, cash registers do not discriminate. Indeed, as we report below, there is strong evidence that at least in the healthcare sector a dollar of government spending buys more care than a dollar of private spending—so shifting toward government as the single payer would produce disinflationary pressure."

So while the US government can create as much money as it needs for a GND by means of the Federal Reserve's money creation powers without increasing taxes, the need to forestall inflation could be offset by M4A which would in addition provide a health care system with better outcomes for Americans at a lower price. The only reason then to raise taxes would be to diminish economic inequality which could be ameliorated by only taxing the rich.

Off the Top of My Head

Taxing the Rich Will Lessen the Need for Deficit Spending

by John Lawrence, January 29, 2021

Billionaires are upset because their hedge fund ploys in the Wall Street casino went awry when a group of average Joes countered their short sales of GameStop. Oh the tears that were shed. Billionaires losing millions gambling? Outrageous! Bernie Sanders tweeted: "Oh look, another billionaire is mad that he might have to pay more taxes while children in America go hungry and veterans sleep on the street. Cry me a river," Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill will mean a lot of deficit spending which can be offset, however, by taxing these billionaires. A financial transaction tax would raise $2.4 trillion over the next decade—"enough to make public colleges tuition free and cancel student debt."

Casino Capitalism Lesson 1: Selling short. Here's how billionaire hedge fund managers planned to make a killing. They knew that GameStop was losing money and probably going out of business. GameStop closed 321 stores in 2019 alone and planned on closing even more stores by the end of 2020. So knowing that GameStop's stock was going down (it didn't take a big brain to figure that out), they sold its stock short. What that means is that they "borrowed" the stock from people that already owned it. Then they sold the stock at its value at that time. Some time later when they would have to "return" the stock to those they borrowed it from, they planned to buy it back at a lower price (it having gone down in the meantime) and pocket the difference. One might ask why the original owners of the stock would loan it in the first place since they must have known that the stock would be worth less when it was returned to them.

However, a group of "amateur" investors foiled the plans of the billionaires by buying GameStop stock thereby bidding up the price making it worth more when the short sellers had to return it, not less. That would mean that the short sellers would lose money instead of making money. That's when the billionaires cried, "Ouch!" Then the "amateurs" who bid up the stock could sell it at the higher price and make money. Woo Haa! Leon Cooperman, whose net worth is estimated to be around $3 billion, sniffed that "the reason the market is doing what it's doing is, people are sitting at home, getting their checks from the government, basically trading for no commissions and no interest rates." In other words average people trading stocks are making the money that billionaires like him should have made. Boo Hoo!

Modern Monetary Theory maintains that all the money for the COVID relief bill could be raised from deficit spending because deficits don't matter without any need for increased taxation. Yet it would be prudent to raise taxes on the mega rich in order to decrease economic inequality which represents an enormous chasm between the billionaire class and everyone else. A new report found that the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, underscoring the degree of global inequality. This would also offset any decrease in the value of the dollar that large deficit spending might bring about. In The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, she points out that the Federal Reserve which creates US dollars can never run out of money since the US dollar is a sovereign currency, but there is a concern about inflation if too much money is created which doesn't have a productive purpose in the economy. Since so many are unemployed and since there is a huge infrastructure deficit, this is not in danger of happening any time soon. There is no lack of money for government programs since they don't depend on tax flows, and money created by the Federal Reserve that ends up on the Fed's balance sheet never has to be paid back.

While the Fed can create as much money as it likes to bail out the banks without Congressional approval, which it did during the 2008 banking crisis, money created for government spending, such as the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill, must have Congressional authorization. Fortunately, there is a process known as budget reconciliation which only requires a majority vote and the Democrats have the majority in the Senate. Therefore, the COVID relief bill cannot be filibustered by Republicans which they surely would do if they were in the majority. So it's clear that Republicans only represent the interests of the rich who will contribute to their campaigns and enrich them in return as long as they vote to nullify everything that might help the average person or raise taxes on them.

Off the Top of My Head

The Republican Game Plan is No Mystery: Obstruct Democratic Attempts to Help the Poor and Middle Class

by John Lawrence, January 24, 2021

The Washington Post article said it best: Right on schedule, Republicans pretend to care about deficits again. When they are in power, they run up the deficit by giving tax breaks to the rich. When Democrats are in power, they use the filibuster if necessary to deny Democrats any success in helping the American people who need help the most. They are deficit hawks, supposedly, but only when Democrats are in power. Knowing how this game operates by now, Democrats are prepared to do whatever is necessary to thwart it. The main tool at their disposal to get the COVID relief package passed is budget reconciliation which escapes the filibuster and only requires a majority vote in the Senate, exactly what Republicans have used to get their tax cuts passed. It seems clear that what the Republican party really stands for is aiding and abetting the rich while denying financial help and opportunities to the poor.

Even conventional economists like Larry Summers advocate for more Federal spending since interest rates are low. "We note that in a world of unused capacity and very low interest rates and costs of capital, concerns about crowding out of desirable private investment that were warranted a generation ago have much less force today. We argue that debt-to-GDP ratios are a misleading metric of fiscal sustainability that do not reflect the fact that both the present value of GDP has risen and debt service costs have fallen as interest rates have fallen." His point is, since interest rates are near zero, the US debt is not going to increase much as a result of paying interest on Treasury bonds. Furthermore, pump priming to get the economy up to full capacity as quickly as possible results in more taxes being collected by the Federal government which lowers deficit spending. Also, since the Fed sets interest rates, it can keep them at zero.

Furthermore, the piece de resistance is that in the final analysis deficits don't matter. The US Federal government can never run out of money since the US dollar is a sovereign currency. It can just be created by a few keystrokes on a computer by the Federal Reserve as it was when trillions of dollars were created to bail out the big banks. It is the same process that is used when the Federal government needs money. Instead of the Fed creating the money and moving it into the accounts of the big banks at the Fed, the money is created and moved into the account of the US Treasury which also exists at the Fed. This is the process that takes place when the amount of Federal government spending exceeds the amount the Federal government takes in from taxes. Republicans know this because of the $2 trillion that was created this way due to the Trump tax cuts.

So Republicans basically are lying to the American people as they have done so many times before when they pretend that money is not available to accelerate the COVID response or to provide relief to the American people or to rebuild infrastructure or to combat climate change. They are deluding the public. Democrats need to reeducate the American people about how the economy really works. Government debt just ends up on the Fed's balance sheet the same way that the trillions to bail out the big banks ended up on the Fed's balance sheet. Since the US dollar is a sovereign currency, there is never a need to pay it off. The US can never be in a situation of dependency on China or Japan or be constrained to pay off the Treasury bonds that they own since they could be paid off tomorrow again by a few keystrokes if necessary by moving money to their accounts at the Federal Reserve. Modern Monetary Theory has unmasked the way that the US economy really works in terms of how the US currency is created or destroyed by the US central bank - the Federal Reserve. In her book The Deficit Myth, Stephanie Kelton details this process.

So are there limitations on the creation of money by the Fed. Of course, but, as long as there is unused productive capacity in human or material terms, deficit spending can benefit not only the economy in general in terms of increasing GDP, but it can benefit the actual lives of people who are suffering because of food insecurity, rent and mortgage insecurity, health care insecurity, crumbling infrastructure and a desire to save the planet as a habitable place to live for their grandchildren. As the article points out, "the greater risk now, as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell and others have warned in recent months, is that policymakers will do too little, rather than too much, to prevent permanent damage to the country’s productive capacity."  Janet Yellen, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee to run the Treasury Department and former Fed Chairman, has also said that the government must “act big” with its next coronavirus relief package. So do Fed Chairmen and current and former Treasury Secretaries know more than Republican hacks who are spewing deficit hawk propaganda? You bet they do. They know how the relationship between the Fed and the US Treasury actually works. And it works how Stephanie Kelton outlines in her book.

Off the Top of My Head

Which is better: A Universal Basic Income (UBI) or a Government Job Guarantee (JG)?

by John Lawrence, January 22, 2021

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) favors a JG where the government is the employer of last resort employing people that the private economy cannot accommodate. Now Larry Summers, Secretary of Treasury for Clinton, is coming around to the MMT view. Especially now when there is so much work that needs to be done (infrastructure, renewable energy) and so many idle workers, a JG makes much sense. One might ask where will the money for this come from? Answer: from the same place it came from for Reagan's $100 billion tax cuts, Bush 1's $125 billion tax cuts, Bush 2's $1.2 trillion tax cuts and Trump's $1.5 trillion tax cuts, all of which benefited the rich a lot more than they benefited the poor. Surprisingly, MMT maintains that government spending whether in the form of tax cuts or government programs benefit the private sector economy whether or not they are "paid for" out of tax receipts. Since the US dollar is a sovereign currency, the Federal Reserve can just create the money by a few keystrokes on a computer and move it into the US Treasury's account at the Federal Reserve. This process does not depend on tax receipts or money generated from the sale of Treasury bonds.

Either way - tax cuts or government programs - benefits the private economy. It's just that tax cuts benefit the rich more and government programs benefit the poor more. The fact that both entail deficit spending is irrelevant because the Fed can never run out of money. Don't believe me? Read: The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton. She explains it better. Larry Summers says:

"The impulse behind the latest “big” progressive idea of creating a federal job guarantee is entirely valid. Studies show that those without jobs are much more likely to be dissatisfied with their lives, to become addicted to alcohol or drugs and to be abusive within their families than even those working at low wages they find inadequate.

"On this point, the U.S. economy is falling short of its potential. The fraction of the adult population between ages 25 and 54 that is working or seeking work has declined over the past 20 years. Despite America’s vaunted labor-market flexibility, the chance that a 25- to 54-year-old man will be out of work is much greater than it is in France and not very different than what it is in Spain . And in sharp contrast to the rest of the world, the fraction of adult women working in the United States has been declining since 1999 .

"These trends are important causes of the increasingly bitter nature of U.S. politics and of resistance to technological change and overseas trade. President Trump received disproportionate support in parts of the country where joblessness increased most.

"If the United States could guarantee jobs in even a modestly efficient manner and in a way that significantly increased employment, it would be a very good thing. I want to be enthusiastic about job-guarantee proposals. But at a time when cynicism about government runs strong, it is important for progressives to avoid making promises that they cannot keep. We must rigorously examine the practicality of a job guarantee."

Here's how the Fed's money creation process works. Tax receipts are deposited into the US Treasury's account at the Fed. The US Congress authorizes either spending programs or tax cuts. The US government spends money. When the Treasury's account at the Fed gets down to zero (spending equals tax receipts), the Fed injects money into the Treasury's account. It is impossible for the US government to ever run out of money. Then Treasury bonds are sold by the Treasury Department which are bought by "primary dealers" (mainly big Wall Street banks) which are obligated to buy them. Some are sold to investors whether they be private individuals or governments like China and Japan.

When the point is reached that the banks don't have enough liquidity (cash - because they've been buying up Treasury bonds)), the Fed creates liquidity by buying up the Treasury bonds from the Wall Street banks in return for cash. Where did it get the money to do this? It created it by a few keystrokes on a computer. So by a roundabout process the Federal Reserve makes sure that the US government has all the money it needs as authorized by Congress regardless of any considerations for deficit spending or the total amount of the US national debt. Those are just accounting entries on the Fed's balance sheet. The Fed buys and sells Treasuries every day as a means of setting the interest rate or of providing liquidity as it did in the Great Recession of 2008. The Fed is the loaner of last resort to the US banking system, and it stands ready to create as much money as is necessary to keep it running smoothly. It also stands ready to provide the same guarantees for the US government, but the money has to be authorized first by Congress.

The takeaway is that Deficits Don't Matter. The private sector benefits from government deficit spending whether those deficits are created by tax breaks or government programs. Government spending programs primarily help the poor while tax cuts primarily help the rich. A government Job Guarantee in which the government becomes the employer of last resort is better than a Universal Basic Income because a job provides one with more dignity than a handout and there is much work to be done. Congress - not taxes - is the limitation to government spending. Republican obstructionism is the only thing that can limit economic benefits to the American people because, while the Fed can directly benefit the Big Banks without Congressional approval, it cannot benefit the American people without Congressional approval. Democrats want to benefit the American people, convert to renewable energy, provide jobs and income for the American people and prevent the earth from burning up due to climate change. Republicans want simply to hold on to political power by preventing Democrats from being successful.

Off the Top of My Head

Was the Insurrection a Blessing in Disguise?

by John Lawrence, January 21, 2021

What could have been a horrible tragedy ended up being just a horrible spectacle. But what if, instead of showing up January 6, the mob showed up January 20 catching security off guard the way they did at the Capitol?  As it turned out, Congress persons, in a show of defiance, went ahead with their business on the same day, and the inauguration went off without a hitch restoring hope and confidence in government. Result: insurrection defeated with very little loss of blood. The second thing is that now domestic terrorists and white supremacists are on the FBI's radar the way they never were before.Those who broke into the Capitol will be rooted out and sent to jail. Others will be closely watched. I never thought I'd be singing the praises of the FBI, but I'm so happy that they, the Intelligence agencies and the American people are finally aware of the real threats to America and not just imagined ones.

The one possible shred of a rationale that the election was stolen from Trump is that election laws were changed—legally—by the states to allow more mail-in balloting. This was motivated by a need to save people from congregating due to the coronavirus. The net effect was that more people, especially poor working people, got to vote than ever before. This probably made the difference in who won, but in a democratic society ideally every legally qualified voter should be able to vote. Republicans have always used voter suppression techniques to prevent this from happening. Republican operative Paul Weyrich famously said, "I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Well, in this election, unfortunately for Trump, pretty close to a majority of people actually voted. Now Republicans will be doing everything in their power to roll back those election laws so that mail-in voting will not be available in the next election. Democrats need to work very hard to make sure that mail-in voting stays in place permanently and even is expanded. This will insure that the demographic change that favors Democrats will be reflected in the electorate.

I thought that, since the Democrats had majorities in both Houses of Congress, getting legislation passed and signed into law would be a breeze. The only hang-up would be the filibuster, but the filibuster can be nullified by a simple majority vote. Easy peasy. Well, not so fast. There are a couple of conservative Democrats, the most notorious of which is Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia. He has already said he won't vote to suspend the filibuster rule. This leaves budget reconciliation as the only way to get a bill passed by majority rule in the Senate. This will probably be used for the COVID relief bill which will probably pass. It's unclear if it can be used a second time, and, if it were, would Manchin vote with the Democrats? Even then budget reconciliation cannot be used for non budgetary issues.  What it boils down to is that this one man, Joe Manchin, has extraordinary control over the legislative process. Republicans will probably be united in the Senate and be as obstructionist to Democratic initiatives as they were during the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, the FBI is rounding up the mob that violated the Capitol. I want every one of them that went beyond the police barrier, even if they didn't go into the Capitol, rounded up and brought to justice. Some of them are so stupid like one real estate agent from Dallas who even advertised her business live on social media as she was entering the Capitol! Shaman Qanon begged Trump for a pardon. Trump could have blanket pardoned all of them if he had wanted to. After all they attacked the Capitol in Trump's name and at his urging. But when all was said and done, Trump abandoned them to their own fates, something they can ponder while spending 20 years in jail. Something else - I want the FBI to track down everyone who calls or emails someone with a death threat. It seems that a lot of this is happening, and I want the FBI to track down and prosecute all these bozos too. If it takes a Federal law to make this legally all encompassing, then one should be enacted.

Off the Top of My Head

Bernie Sanders, Budget Reconciliation and Modern Monetary Theory

by John Lawrence, January 18, 2021

Joe Biden will have no trouble from Congress in passing his $1.9 trillion relief bill. That's because Democrats control all 3 branches, and the filibuster is neutered due to "budget reconciliation." This allows a spending bill to be fast tracked through Congress without the possibility of a filibuster. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "The Senate can consider and pass reconciliation bills relatively quickly and with only a simple majority, rather than the three-fifths majority often needed for controversial legislation. That’s because reconciliation legislation isn’t subject to filibuster. Under general Senate rules, legislation can be stalled by virtually unlimited debate and the offering of numerous amendments, with a three-fifths majority vote required to invoke “cloture,” thereby limiting debate and blocking non-germane amendments. For a reconciliation bill, however, the Congressional Budget Act limits Senate debate on the bill to 20 hours and limits debate on the subsequent compromise between the two houses to ten hours."

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shown that deficits don't matter. At least George W Bush didn't think so when he used the budget reconciliation process to give huge tax breaks to the rich which significantly increased the deficit and reduced income to the Federal government from taxes. The use of budget reconciliation did an end run around PAYGO which requires the Federal government to balance its budget and the debt limit which also constrains Federal spending. Both conservatives and liberals will be enthused over the fact that MMT proclaims that either tax reduction or government spending is good for American society (up to a point) even though the debt limit or PAYGO may be violated. This is because government is effectively adding money to the private sector which drives economic activity.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are very familiar with not only budget reconciliation but also MMT because one of its chief adherents, Stephanie Kelton who wrote the book, The Deficit Myth, previously was a Senate advisor to Bernie on the Senate Budget Committee. On December 26, 2014, Kelton was designated as Chief Economist for the Democratic Minority Staff of the Senate Budget Committee, a post that she held in 2015 and early 2016, when she left that position to become an economic advisor to the Bernie Sanders campaign. So the American economy is about to get a shot in the arm that will mostly benefit poor and middle class people (whereas the Bush tax cuts primarily benefited the rich) much to the chagrin of conservatives that hold to the idea that government deficit spending should only benefit the rich through tax cuts.

MMT contends that, since the Federal Reserve creates money by keystokes on a computer and the US dollar is a sovereign currency, the US government can never run out of money. Treasury bonds can always be sold to cover deficits, and, if they can't be sold to the general public, they will end up on the Fed's balance sheet where they may remain forever as an accounting entry. Even the interest paid on Treasury bonds, which is now approximately zero, is not a consideration. Interest on Treasuries owned by the Fed is remitted to the Federal government anyway. So now is the time for massive spending by the US Federal government to 1) expedite recovery from COVID; 2) jump start the economy; and 3) expedite a global response to global warming by converting to renewable energy on all levels including:

"replacing fossil-fuel engines with electric in all public and private transport, super-insulating buildings and replacing inefficient HVAC systems, establishing regional photo-voltaic micro-grid electric networks, replacing gas cooking ranges with electric induction units, buying regenerative-produced farm products and 'meatless meats', replacing all small engine appliances and tools with battery electric power"

And this is not to mention that solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy need to replace fossil fuel electric generating plants.

There is no time to lose. The incoming administration has a lot on its plate. In addition to that they have to run an impeachment trial in the Senate. Let's hope it doesn't slow down any of Joe Biden's initiatives. With Bernie as the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, armed with a knowledge of MMT, we can look forward to restoring the US' standing in the world community as well as restoring an economy that works for the poor and not just the well heeled, getting the pandemic under control and mitigating climate change. Thank you Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Off the Top of My Head

Pence Will Likely Not Pardon Trump Even If He Resigns

by John Lawrence, January 11, 2021

When Richard Nixon resigned his Presidency in 1974, his successor, Gerald Ford pardoned him for any and all crimes connected with the Watergate break-in. But this will not happen in Trump's case because he threw Pence under the bus in the January 6 insurrection. Trump has immense criminal and legal liability for his actions on that day. As Pence presided over the Senate, domestic terrorists were breaking in and chanting "Hang Mike Pence." Pence's life as well as those of Congress persons, staff and others were in danger. Pence's wife, daughter and other family members were in the Capitol that day. Yet Trump never called Pence to warn him, check on him, see how he was doing, make sure he and his family were safe. Reportedly, he hasn't spoken to Pence since.

So it remains to be seen how many people Trump will pardon on his way out the door. Probably family members and Rudy Giuliani but not any of the rioters. Even though they were doing his bidding, he cares nothing for them. He used them; they were just tools as far as he was concerned. The people who spoke at Trump's "Save America" rally, including Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama who declared: “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass", are certainly culpable. But I don't think Trump will pardon him. He'll just be thrown under the bus like many of Trump's other friends and associates.

The people marching through the halls of Congress carrying flags and chanting "USA. USA." are not patriots. To be a patriot it is not enough to carry a flag and shout USA. The true patriots were the Congress persons themselves who didn't let a little insurrection that put their lives in danger prevent or deter them from carrying out the nation's business certifying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the next President and Vice President of the United States. I wrote previously, "What is patriotism? Is it just saluting the flag, singing the national anthem, getting choked up when the US wins a gold medal at the Olympics, stuff like that? All these expressions of patriotism are merely lip service. They are insubstantial. Or is it patriotic, as George W Bush said, to go shopping?"  I have suggested that what we need is a planetary patriotism. We must care about the whole planet and its peoples especially in view of the threats which affect the whole planet: pandemics and global warming. We need also to be concerned about people living in poverty planet wide, and about the 70 million people who are refugees largely due to US started wars in the Middle East and their continuations.

The US has lost the moral high ground and shouldn't be lecturing the rest of the world about human rights. The US has many human rights problems itself including the disenfranchisement of African American and Native Americans both politically and economically. I expect that the Biden administration will do much more to create peace in the world and use diplomacy than the Trump administration, which attempted to bully other countries. Sanctions also should be taken off the table. If we can have treaties with Russia over nuclear weapons, why can't we have a treaty over internet hacking? The  trillion dollars a year we spend on the military-industrial complex did nothing to stop the pandemic or domestic terrorism. The enemy is not so much out there as it is in here. The US needs to get on the right track and associate peacefully with other countries in order to combat our mutual enemy - global warming. We need to create peace in the world, not fuel petty animosities and cold wars. The true threat is domestic terrorism not terrorism from abroad. Money needs to be spent on the former rather than the latter.

I wrote previously:

Patriotism as now defined is based on militarism. Patriotic displays are expressions of militarism. Love of country is expressed in jingoistic terms: "We're number one!" Instead, war and militarism should be thought of as necessary evils instead of exalting them. The goal should be to eliminate them while at the same time building the foundations for peace and prosperity in the world. There should be opportunities for those who want to serve their country by eliminating poverty, building infrastructure, saving the environment, curing the sick and extending helping hands to the underserved and downtrodden."

"God bless America."

COVID-19 VIRUS CONTINUES ITS DEADLY EXPANSION IN U.S.

by Frank Thomas

The World Health Organization ( and Statista) report following pandemic data for Holland on Dec. 29, 2020 and U.S. on Dec. 30, 2020.

 

	HOLLAND	U.S.	EU + UK (20 countries)
ConfirmedCases	778,293	19,674,000	27,172,025
Deaths	11,218	338,000	420,000
New Cases last 24 hours	7,561	163,000
Population	17.3 Mil.	328.0 Mil.	493.0 Mil.

Holland's 162,000 deaths you cite includes ALL deaths of any sort, and the 13,000 more than usual total deaths is 15% higher than actual pandemic deaths.

Holland's Covid-19 pandemic deaths total 11,218. This equals 0.065% of population (17.3 million) or 648 deaths per 1 million population. The U.S. Covid-19 pandemic deaths total 338,000.This equals 1.030% of total population (328.0 million) or 1,030 deaths per 1 million population. 

Holland's pandemic deaths soared from 7,195 deaths Oct. 30 to 11,218 as of Dec. 29. 

That is a 56% increase from 416 deaths per 1 million population Oct. 30 to  648 deaths per 1 million population Dec. 29. 

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The U.S. pandemic deaths soared from 227,753 deaths Oct. 30 to 338,000 Dec. 30.  That is a 48% increase from 694 deaths per 1 million population Oct. 30 to 1,030 deaths per 1 million population Dec. 30.  EU & UK pandemic deaths soared from 214,216 deaths Oct. 30 to 420,000 Dec. 30. That's a 96% increase from 434 deaths per 1 million population Oct. 30 to 852 deaths per 1 million population Dec. 30.  

Note: Data for EU countries above relates to 19 EU countries plus the UK as shown in my Oct. 30 Data Report (link below)

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SUMMARY

After the ferocious rise in U.S. and EU pandemic deaths particularly in December, it's tragic to see how the U.S. is doing far, far worse in controlling absolute pandemic case and death levels than Holland and most EU countries - with notable exceptions of UK, Italy, Spain, France where death results per 1 million population reached U.S.'s level of +1,000 deaths per 1 million population Dec. 29. Unlike U.S., the EU/UK got their 1st wave peak deaths down fast in June to 445 deaths per 1 million population and kept that level low at 434 deaths per 1 million vs. U.S. doubling its death level to 694 deaths per 1 million Oct. 30. The EU/UK and U.S. must go much lower now from much HIGHER 1,000 death levels.

Accordingly, EU lockdowns, wearing of masks, distancing, avoiding large groups, and limiting family size gatherings now in operation are tougher and more universally in force in Europe than in the U.S. It is expected that European protection discipline will bring the fall-winter peak wave death levels - that hit the U.S. and EU countries so hard in November and December - sharply down much more quickly (as achieved in 1st wave) than will likely take place in the U.S. Europe also appears to be much better organized and hence on a faster path of getting at least 50%-70% of its people vaccinated by early spring. 

The much faster spreading and absorption strength of the new virus variant in the current epidemic is encouraging all EU countries with +-500 million people, to get rapidly vaccinated. The new vaccines that can be easily refrigerated-cooled, and the higher density of Europe's people on a relatively small land territory compared to the U.S will also make transportation and storing logistics simpler, quicker and less costly, further facilitating a speedy distribution and vaccination process that requires two injections per person. It’s a huge problem enough to reach herd immunity by late fall 2021 without making that achievement more difficult as we continue effectively to do. Vaccinations must reach 50-60 million a month by March to reach herd immunity by Sept. 2021.

The U.S. is failing in this critical stage to get its timing, coordination and logistical act together in 50 states. This has sadly been an undisciplined, chaotic management problem we've had throughout the coronavirus pandemic period. As I write this, deaths are exploding above 350,000 just 3 days (Jan.3) after the 338,000 deaths reported Dec. 30.

Three Major Threats to Life on Earth That We Must Address in 2021

January 6, 2021

by Noam Chomsky – Vijay Prashad

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Pulp Mills on a December night, Wauna, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Large parts of the world—outside of China and a few other countries—face a runaway virus, which has not been stopped because of criminal incompetence by governments. That these governments in wealthy countries cynically set aside the basic scientific protocols released by the World Health Organization and by scientific organizations reveals their malicious practice. Anything less than focused attention to managing the virus by testing, contact tracing, and isolation—and if this does not suffice, then imposing a temporary lockdown—is foolhardy. It is equally distressing that these richer countries have pursued a policy of “vaccine nationalism” by stockpiling vaccine candidates rather than a policy for the creation of a “people’s vaccine.” For the sake of humanity, it would be prudent to suspend intellectual property rules and develop a procedure to create universal vaccines for all people.

Although the pandemic is the principal issue on all of our minds, other major issues threaten the longevity of our species and of our planet. These include:

Nuclear Annihilation

In January 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, too close for comfort. The clock, created two years after the first atomic weapons were developed in 1945, is evaluated annually by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, who decide whether to move the minute hand or keep it in place. By the time they set the clock again, it may well be closer to annihilation. Already limited arms control treaties are being shredded as the major powers sit on close to 13,500 nuclear weapons (more than 90 percent of which are held by Russia and the United States alone). The yield of these weapons could easily make this planet even more uninhabitable. The United States Navy has already deployed low-yield tactical W76-2 nuclear warheads. Immediate moves toward nuclear disarmament must be forced onto the world’s agenda. Hiroshima Day, commemorated each year on August 6, must become a more robust day of contemplation and protest.

Climate Catastrophe

A scientific paper published in 2018 came with a startling headline: “Most atolls will be uninhabitable by the mid-21st century because of sea-level rise exacerbating wave-driven flooding.” The authors found that atolls from the Seychelles to the Marshall Islands are liable to vanish. A 2019 United Nations (UN) report estimated that 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. Add to this the catastrophic wildfires and the severe bleaching of the coral reefs and it is clear that we no longer need to linger over clichés about one thing or another being a canary in the coal mine of climate catastrophe; the danger is not in the future, but in the present. It is essential for major powers—who utterly fail to shift from fossil fuels—to commit to the “common but differentiated responsibilities” approach established at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. It is telling that countries such as Jamaica and Mongolia updated their climate plans to the UN before the end of 2020—as mandated by the Paris Agreement—even though these countries produce a tiny fraction of global carbon emissions. The funds that were committed to developing countries for their participation in the process have virtually dried up while external debt has ballooned. This shows a lack of basic seriousness from the “international community.”

Neoliberal Destruction of the Social Contract

Countries in North America and Europe have eviscerated their public function as the state has been turned over to the profiteers and civil society has been commodified by private foundations. This means that the avenues for social transformation in these parts of the world have been grotesquely hampered. Terrible social inequality is the result of the relative political weakness of the working class. It is this weakness that enables the billionaires to set policies that cause hunger rates to rise. Countries should not be judged by the words written in their constitutions but by their annual budgets; the U.S., for example, spends almost $1 trillion (if you add the estimated intelligence budget) on its war machine, while it spends a fraction of this on the public good (such as on health care, something evident during the pandemic). The foreign policies of Western countries seem to be well lubricated by arms deals: the United Arab Emirates and Morocco agreed to recognize Israel on the condition that they could purchase $23 billion and $1 billion worth of U.S.-made weapons, respectively. The rights of the Palestinians, the Sahrawi, and the Yemeni people did not factor into these deals. The use of illegal sanctions by the United States against 30 countries including Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela has become a normal part of life, even during the COVID-19 public health crisis. It is a failure of the political system when the populations in the capitalist bloc are unable to force their governments—which are in many ways democratic in name only—to take a global perspective regarding this emergency. Rising rates of hunger reveal that the struggle for survival is the horizon for billions of people on the planet (all this while China is able to eradicate absolute poverty and largely eliminate hunger).

Nuclear annihilation and extinction by climate catastrophe are twin threats to the planet. Meanwhile, for victims of the neoliberal assault that has plagued the past generation, the short-term problems of sustaining their mere existence displace fundamental questions about the fate of our children and grandchildren.

Global problems of this scale require global cooperation. Pressured by the Third World states in the 1960s, the major powers agreed to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968, although they rejected the deeply important Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order of 1974. The balance of forces available to drive such a class agenda on the international stage is no longer there; political dynamics in the countries of the West, in particular, but also in the larger states of the developing world (such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa) are necessary to change the character of the governments. A robust internationalism is necessary to pay adequate and immediate attention to the perils of extinction: extinction by nuclear war, by climate catastrophe, and by social collapse. The tasks ahead are daunting, and they cannot be deferred.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Noam Chomsky is a legendary linguist, philosopher, and political activist. He is the laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. His most recent book is Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.  

7 Ways 2020 Exposed America

by Robert Reich
Monday, January 4, 2021

If America learns nothing else from these dark times, here are 7 lessons it should take away from 2020:

1. Workers keep America going, not billionaires.

American workers have been forced to put their lives on the line to provide essential services even as their employers failed to provide them with adequate protective gear, hazard pay, or notice of when COVID had infected their workplaces. Meanwhile, America’s 651 billionaires – whose net worth has grown by over $1 trillion since the start of the pandemic – retreated to their mansions, yachts and estates.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sheltered in his 165,000-acre West Texas ranch while Amazon’s warehouse workers toiled in close proximity to each other, often without adequate masks, gloves, or sanitizers. The company offered but then soon scrapped a $2 an hour hazard pay increase for warehouse workers, even as Bezos’ wealth jumped by a staggering $70 billion since March, putting his estimated net worth at roughly $186 billion as the year came to an end.

2. Systemic racism is literally killing Black and Latino Americans.

Black and Latino Americans account for almost 40 percent of coronavirus deaths so far, despite comprising less than a quarter of the population. As they’ve borne the brunt of this pandemic, they’ve been forced to fight for their humanity in another regard — taking to the streets across the country to protest decades of unjust police killings of their community members, only to be met with more police violence.

Among Native American communities, the coronavirus figures are even more horrifying. The Navajo Nation has had a higher per-capita infection rate than any state but can’t adequately care for the sick, thanks to years of federal underfunding and neglect of its healthcare system.

Decades of segregated housing, pollution, lack of access to medical care, and poverty have left communities of color vulnerable to the worst of this virus, and the worst of America.

3. If we can afford to bail out corporations and Wall Street, we sure as hell can afford to help people.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to insist we can’t “afford” $2,000 COVID survival checks for Americans. But the latest coronavirus relief legislation doled out over $220 billion to powerful business interests that could instead have been used to help struggling working families.

Another way of looking at it: The total cost of providing those $2,000 checks ($465 billion) is less than half the amount America’s 651 billionaires added to their wealth during the pandemic ($1 trillion).

4. Health care must be made a right in America.

Even before the pandemic, an estimated 28 million Americans lacked health insurance. After it struck, an additional 15 million lost employer-provided coverage because they lost their jobs. Without insurance, a hospital stay to treat COVID-19 cost as much as $73,000. Remember this the next time you hear pundits saying Medicare for All is too radical.

5. Our social safety nets are woefully broken.

No other advanced nation was as unprepared for the pandemic as was the United States. Our unemployment insurance system is over 80 years old, designed for a different America. We’re one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t provide all workers some form of paid sick leave.

Other industrialized nations kept their unemployment rates low by guaranteeing paychecks during the pandemic. But Americans who filed for unemployment benefits often got nothing or received them weeks or months late. Under new legislation they get just $300 a week of extra benefits to tide them over.

6. The Electoral College must be abolished

Biden won 7 million more popular votes than Trump. But Biden’s margin in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin totaled just 45,000. Had Trump won these three states instead, he would have gained 37 more electoral votes, tying Biden in the electoral college. Under the Constitution, this would have pushed the election to the House of Representatives, with each state delegation getting just one vote. Even though Democrats have a majority in the House, more state delegations have Republican majorities. Trump would have been reelected.

The gap between the popular and electoral college vote continues to widen. The Electoral College is an increasingly dangerous anachronism.

7. Government matters.

For decades, conservatives have told us that government is the problem and that we should let the free market run its course. Rubbish. If nothing else, 2020 has shown that the unfettered free market won’t save us. After 40 years of Reaganism, it’s never been clearer: Government is in fact necessary to protect the public.  

It’s tragic that it took a pandemic, near-record unemployment, millions of people taking to the streets, and a near-calamitous election for many to grasp how broken, racist, and backwards our system really is. Biggest lesson of all: It must be fixed.   

Off the Top of My Head

K Shaped Recovery Calls For K Shaped Tax Structure

by John Lawrence, January 4, 2021

It has been well documented that the rich have gotten richer during the pandemic while the poor have gotten poorer. Over a roughly seven-month period starting in mid-March – a week after President Donald Trump declared a national emergency – America’s 614 billionaires grew their net worth by a collective $931 billion. Although the CARES Act led to a diminution of poverty in the early stages of the pandemic, poverty rates have risen since then to around 17% of the population. Among blacks and Hispanics the poverty rate is closer to 25%. The one thing that has benefited minority groups is the fact that for the first time many of them were able to vote by mail because of the pandemic. Before the pandemic many poor voters were not likely to stand in line on a week day to vote thus losing a day's pay. While the many techniques of voter suppression used by the Republican party kept the votes of blacks and Hispanics to a minimum, the last election proved that voting by mail allowed many more poor and especially black voters to cast a ballot

After Joe Biden is finally in office, we will see an increase in programs that will benefit poor and minority communities many of whom are essential workers who sacrificed in many ways to keep the economy going. While the rich got richer during the pandemic, it became clear that poor essential workers should be making more money while rich inessential workers deserve less. However, the results were the opposite of that. People invested in financial assets and people who could work from home by and large did well economically during the pandemic while those workers, without whom the economy would have come to a grinding halt, were working for minimum wage in many cases. Signs went up at nursing homes "Heroes work here", but what they forgot to add was the phrase "at minimum wage." Nursing homes are staffed with CNAs, Certified Nursing Assistants, who make little more than the minimum wage.

The K shaped recovery refers to the fact that the rich got richer while the middle class working from home did well while the bottom half of the economy, the lower half of the K, did worse financially. In any event the tax structure should reflect that fact in order to diminish economic inequality. The rich should be taxed more while the poor and lower middle class should be taxed less and actually subsidized. This is the enlightened purpose of taxation - to reduce economic inequality. According to Modern Monetary Theory, taxes are not important for raising money for government expenditures because the Federal Reserve can make any amount of money available to the government by means of a few keystrokes on a computer. Stephanie Kelton writes:

"But taxes are important in other ways. As the World Inequality Report notes,'the income-inequality trajectory observed in the United States' is partially explained by 'a tax system that grew less progressive.' Taxes can be used to curb astronomical accumulations of wealth. That's important precisely because the wealthy use their money to amass power and influence over the political process: they've rigged the tax code in their favor; they've rewritten labor laws, trade agreements, rules governing patents and protections, and much more. They've made public policy serve their economic interests."

This accumulation of economic and political power by the wealthy has been somewhat redressed recently by mail voting which tends to serve the interests of the poor and lower middle class. If it remains in effect, the voter suppression techniques of the past, used mainly by Republicans to suppress the African American vote, will have been counteracted with the result that the interests of the poor and lower middle class will have been elevated at the expense of the rich.This is what Donald Trump is so mad about - that the pandemic caused a revolution in mail in balloting at his expense. This is largely why he lost, and he's mad as hell about it. So what. The Republicans had it coming. Maybe the pandemic was a blessing in disguise at least in this respect.

Off the Top of My Head

"We're Only going To Be Secure If Everyone Is Secure"

by John Lawrence, December 13, 2020

These words spoken by Fareed Zakaria regarding the pandemic could as well apply to war as well. What a novel idea! If everyone is secure with access to a vaccine, the pandemic will be gone. Perhaps if every nation is secure in their relations with other nations, war will be gone. Of course there will a colossal drop in GDP if the war industry goes away and an increase in unemployment if everyone in the military is civilianized. War and the threat of war is caused by mistrust and insecurity with regards to the intentions and good (or bad) will of other nations towards us. That's why it's important to build friendship and trust between and among nations instead of threatening other nations by economic means such as sanctions or in terms of direct military threats.

Nations who have solved the pandemic problem within their borders are surging back economically. This year the US will decline in GDP relative to last year while China will have positive growth in its economy. While Trump backed out of the Trans-Pacific partnership which would have brought about free trade among 12 countries, China has recently signed the world's largest free trade agreement - the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement - among 15 countries. The signatory states account for 30% of global GDP, larger than NAFTA or the EU. In addition China's massive Belt and Road initiative is an agreement with 70 countries for China to build infrastructure which will enable greater trade relationships among those countries benefiting China the most. Also China owns about $1.1 trillion in US debt. It seems that the only advantage the US has is the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency. But that situation is subject to change especially as nations find ways to outmaneuver US sanctions. It seems that China is becoming the world's preeminent nation not by virtue of its military prowess but by virtue of its aggressive trade and infrastructure building policies. Washington has not been able to respond except by threats and sanctions. Sanctioning Tik Tok and Huawei is a pathetic response to China's bid for world leadership.

Vaccine development for COVID-19 is a massive cooperative effort among scientists and companies throughout the world. Most of the PPE used in America was manufactured abroad. Global supply chains have been absolutely crucial in supplying the US with needed products which aren't manufactured here. One of the hallmarks of capitalism is free trade. It represents the idea of free markets applied to international trade. So while China has exemplified leadership in increasing free trade, the US under Trump has backed off from free trade, invoked protectionism, and hence negated its free market capitalist principles. However, that's about to change under a Biden administration. We can expect a lot more global cooperation and diplomacy rather than the bullying policies represented by Pompeo and Trump. It's especially important now that global warming is a looming global threat. Biden wants a $1.7 trillion deal to combat global warming.

China, the world's largest emitter of carbon, has vowed to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Joe Biden has vowed to achieve carbon neutrality in the US, the world's second largest emitter, by 2050. The EU has agreed to spend a half a trillion dollars on global warming projects. If all these massive commitments are actually followed through on, the world might limit the increase in global warming to 2.1 degrees Celsius which is about what they had agreed on in the Paris Accords was necessary to prevent disaster. A lot will depend on whether Biden can get his programs through Congress. If the Senate is controlled by Republicans, all bets are off. That is why the run-offs in Georgia for two Senate seats are so important.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/fareed-zakaria/

 

Off the Top of My Head

Has the Approach to Dealing with the Virus Been All Wrong?

by John Lawrence, December 11, 2020

I don't want to start a conspiracy theory here. My questions are purely speculative, but inquiring minds want to know. How comes it that President Trump, Rudy Giuliani and presumably any number of other Republican VIPs get admitted to hospital at the first symptoms of COVID where they are administered remdesivir, monoclonal antibodies, steroids, corticosteroids and a cocktail of God knows what else, and in a couple of days, they are cured, test negative and are not contagious to others while the average person goes to hospital at first signs only to be told they are not sick enough to be admitted, are sent home where the virus gets a good grip on them, come back to hospital where they are admitted to ICU where they die after heroic efforts to save them by overworked doctors and nurses?

Meanwhile, President Trump, Rudy Giuliani, presumably the President's family and other White House staff and Republican VIPs get the same treatment the President got and are COVID free in a couple of days. Am I missing something here? Has all the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the development of various vaccines been misspent while a treatment which knocks the virus out in a few days has been overlooked except for privileged VIPs. Why hasn't the Defense Production Act been used to ramp up the production of remdesivir and other components of "the cocktail"? A clinical study of remdesivir showed the following:

"Treatment with remdesivir was associated with fewer days of subsequent oxygen use for patients receiving oxygen at enrollment and shorter subsequent duration of mechanical ventilation or ECMO for those receiving these interventions at enrollment. Cumulatively, these findings suggest that treatment with remdesivir may not only reduce the disease burden but may also decrease the use of scarce health care resources during this pandemic. The benefit in recovery persisted when adjustment was made for glucocorticoid use, which suggests that the benefit of dexamethasone as shown in the Randomized Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy (RECOVERY) trial⁴ may be additive to that of remdesivir."

Most patients in the study had severe symptoms before they were enrolled. On the other hand the President was administered the cocktail before symptoms were severe as presumably was Rudy Giuliani as well. Perhaps the lesson here is that the virus can be knocked out quickly if remdesivir and other elements of the cocktail are administered before the virus gets a good grip on a person. In other words as soon as or shortly after someone tests positive. This evidently worked well for the President and a few others who got exceptional treatment as soon as there were any symptoms at all while most others are only admitted to hospital after the virus has gotten a good grip on them and their symptoms are severe. The study went on to say: "Given the preliminary results about remdesivir, the Food and Drug Administration issued an Emergency Use Authorization on May 1, 2020 (modified on August 28, 2020), to permit the use of remdesivir for treatment in adults and children hospitalized with suspected or laboratory-confirmed Covid-19. Remdesivir has also received full or conditional approval in several other countries since that time."

So the benefits of remdesivir were approved with an EUA 7 months ago. Why hasn't its production been ramped up under the Defense production Act? Perhaps the fact that the doctors involved in the study received fees from the pharmaceutical companies involved in vaccine development had something to do with it. Perhaps not. The study was done on already sick hospitalized patients who probably had developed an already heavy viral load. If done on patients with a lighter viral load as presumably the President and Rudy Giuiani had, the results might have been even more promising. It makes sense that the virus could be defeated more successively with aggressive treatment before it has gotten well established in the human body. Of all the many Republican VIPs that have contracted the virus, very few if any have died. Is this because they have gotten treatments not available to the general public?

Another consideration is that remdesivir is expensive. Eric Topol, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Center in La Jolla, California wrote "Remdesivir is an expensive drug, costing around $3000 per treatment, in short supply, and even its approval for severe covid-19 was based on time to recovery in a relatively small trial of just over 1000 patients.” Of course expense is not a problem for the President or other wealthy VIPs. The study also found the following: "The well known, cheap, and widely available corticosteroid dexamethasone, for example, has been proved to reduce mortality among severely ill covid-19 patients who were either on ventilators or receiving oxygen. Given the apparent benefit to reducing mortality in some cases at a cost of less than $1 per day, many experts want to see studies testing remdesivir’s effectiveness when given in conjunction with corticosteroids." Yes, why haven't more studies been conducted on the cocktail of pharmaceuticals that the President and Rudy Giuliani and probably other non-mask wearing Republican VIPs been performed? All the money was placed on vaccine development. This might not have been the best course especially in light of the fact that vaccinated individuals can still be infected with the virus and can transmit it to others while the President was virus free in a couple of days and not contagious to others.

Off the Top of My Head

Is the Pope a Communist?

by John Lawrence, December 8, 2020

Did Karl Marx write this:

"May we not sink to such depths! Let us look to the example of the Good Samaritan. Jesus’ parable summons us to rediscover our vocation as citizens of our respective nations and of the entire world, builders of a new social bond. This summons is ever new, yet it is grounded in a fundamental law of our being: we are called to direct society to the pursuit of the common good and, with this purpose in mind, to persevere in consolidating its political and social order, its fabric of relations, its human goals. By his actions, the Good Samaritan showed that “the existence of each and every individual is deeply tied to that of others: life is not simply time that passes; life is a time for interactions”.

"The parable eloquently presents the basic decision we need to make in order to rebuild our wounded world. In the face of so much pain and suffering, our only course is to imitate the Good Samaritan. Any other decision would make us either one of the robbers or one of those who walked by without showing compassion for the sufferings of the man on the roadside. The parable shows us how a community can be rebuilt by men and women who identify with the vulnerability of others, who reject the creation of a society of exclusion, and act instead as neighbours, lifting up and rehabilitating the fallen for the sake of the common good. At the same time, it warns us about the attitude of those who think only of themselves and fail to shoulder the inevitable responsibilities of life as it is."

Directing society to the pursuit of the common good? Building a new social bond? Showing compassion for the sufferings of others? Rehabilitating the fallen for the sake of the common good? Decrying those who think only of themselves? These are not the words of Karl Marx. These are the words of Pope Francis in his third encyclical Fratelli Tutti (All Brothers)  subtitled "on fraternity and social friendship". In the document, Francis states that the COVID-19 pandemic has proven the failure of the world to work together during this crisis. The encyclical calls for more human fraternity and solidarity, and is a plea to reject wars.

But to hear some Republicans talk, the Pope is a Communist. He doesn't espouse the primary doctrine of freedom like freedom is the most important thing or the American Dream is the most important thing. According to the Pope, bearing responsibility for our fellow man and woman is the most important thing. Social bonds are the most important thing. This is worlds apart from Kelly Loeffler who can put down a minister of the Gospel like Raphael Warnock who had to almost apologize for espousing Matthew 25:

"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you? And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'"

In the recent debate Kelly Loeffler called Warnock "radical liberal Raphael Warnock" 13 times! To hear her talk the highest value is freedom, but Jesus never elevated freedom to the highest value. He never said, 'Blessed are the free, for they shall inherit the earth" Instead he said "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." It's clear that Warnock is more in touch with bedrock Christian values than Loeffler is. And he is more in solidarity with the Pope in decrying consumerist and militarist values. Kelly Loeffler stood there at the debate like a frozen Barbi doll with some combination of a sneer and a smile on her face while she robotically repeated the same bullshit over and over trying to justify that Trump had a right to exploit every legal means to salvage his Presidency when he is actually trying to use extra legal means to do so.

Besides that, I don't remember that Jesus ever elevated the value of freedom above the value of helping one's neighbors especially the weak and vulnerable. Freedom has become a watchword for those who refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic inasmuch as saying 'I don't give a damn about infecting my neighbor. My own freedom is more important.'

Off the Top of My Head

How to Prevent More Deaths From COVID

by John Lawrence

When people show mild symptoms like coughing or headache, even though they test positive, hospitals won't admit them. Then they go home where the virus can gain ground, and they become really sick. Then they are admitted but in many cases it's too late. Look at what happened in the most famous case: Donald Trump. As soon as he showed symptoms, he went to the hospital where he was treated with mononclonal antibodies among other treatments. This knocked out the COVID before it had a chance to take hold on his body. Hardly anyone else is getting this kind of treatment . If they were, there would be a lot less serious sickness and a lot less death. The point is that the disease is treated early before it has had a chance to gain a hold. That is the treatment the President got, but nobody else is getting that kind of treatment. Hospitals should be admitting and treating mild cases as soon as they show any symptoms at all and then treating them with monoclonal antibodies.

Off the Top of My Head

Why is the Stock Market Surging in the Midst of Huge Unemployment

by John Lawrence

Simple answer is that the stock market has nothing to do any more with the Main Street economy. There are two economies: Main Street and Wall Street. There's the economy of rich investors, and the economy of the 90% who aren't investors. The stock market is dominated by large multinational corporations like Apple and Google, and is invested in by rich people from all over the world. As COVID has shown, we have a bifurcated economy. Secondly, interest rates for Treasury bonds are zero so why would an investor buy them when investing in stocks amounts to a self fulfilling prophecy? The more money going in, the greater the rate of return, and rich people are continuing to make huge amounts of money. Business Insider reported that billionaires saw their net worth increase by half a trillion dollars during the pandemic. All that money has to go somewhere. Meanwhile, middle class people with 401(k)s are draining them to meet expenses. Thirdly, the Federal Reserve has all but gifted rich investors trillions of dollars.

More than 1 in 4 Americans are raiding their retirement accounts after a coronavirus-related job loss. The unexpected loss in income is causing many Americans to tap their retirement savings just to make ends meet. And many people who lost a job — or have a spouse or partner whose income has declined — didn’t have much money saved in the first place. Half of Americans who were recently furloughed or let go have saved less than $500 for retirement in the past year — and 70% have saved less than $1,000, according to a report by fintech firm SimplyWise. Of those who have an individual retirement account, 401(k) plan or retirement savings account, 1 in 5 now plan to tap those funds. Of course rich investors don't suffer job losses because they don't have jobs other than managing their money. That they can do from home.

Some has been written about a K-shaped recovery from the pandemic. In a K-shaped recovery, the economic bounce-back is bifurcated like a "K": The wealthiest Americans are quickly rebounding, even thriving, while the middle- and lower-income set are not. As of the first quarter of 2020, the wealthiest 10% of American households owned 87% of all stocks and mutual funds, according to the Federal Reserve. So where does that leave the other 90%? Struggling. Waiting in line at food banks. Getting evicted and foreclosed on. Losing their small businesses in droves. The fact that a second relief package has not been implemented and in all probability won't be for another 2 months till after Biden takes office will hinder those people in the lower part of the K even more.

So what does this say about essential workers? Are rich investors essential workers? I don't think so. Are doctors and nurses? You bet. But they are being shafted by the American people who won't obey simple guidelines in the midst of a surge upon a surge in COVID. Many of them are committing suicide. Others will soon throw up their hands and quit their jobs rationalizing that their own families are more important than taking care of sick patients which puts them at risk. Multitudes of Americans traveled during the Thanksgiving holidays ignoring pleas to stay home. Now doctors and nurses will pay the price for those who exercised their "freedom" as Americans to ignore the pleas of others and only think of themselves. Even family members of these will pay the ultimate price. Another ghastly statistic: the US with 4% of the world's population has 19% of the world's COVID cases. An in November there were an average of a million new cases per week.

Having a President for the past four years who has dumbed down the American people has not been a big help in contributing to a better society for Americans or those in the rest of the world who had looked up to America. Now the question is to what degree the Biden administration can recover some semblance of American democracy and respectability among other world leaders and also economic equity for all Americans. A lot of it will hinge on whether or not Democrats will control the Senate after the two runoff elections in Georgia. If Republicans continue to control the Senate, we can expect four more years of gridlock and straitjacketing of Biden's ambitious agenda. This will be devastating for America and the world. The US will continue to diminish in importance in the world community. Economic inequality will be exacerbated, and global warming will get even worse as hurricane and fire seasons become normal year round events.

'Hunger Like They've Never Seen It Before': US Food Banks Struggle as 1 in 6 Families With Children Don't Have Enough to Eat

Published on Friday, November 27, 2020

by Common Dreams

"We're now seeing families who had an emergency fund but it's gone and they're at the end of their rope," said one Texas food bank director. 

by Brett Wilkins, staff writer

 

74 Comments

People queue on November 21, 2020 at a food distribution site at Lake-Sumter State College in Clermont, Florida sponsored by the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida. (Photo: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Light Rocket/Getty Images)

One in six U.S. families with children don't have enough to eat this holiday season, a national emergency exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and the unemployment crisis it has generated. Over the past several days, remarkable reporting in the Washington Post and National Geographic, among other outlets, has explored this alarming trend. 

"It's been hard to survive. Money is low. No jobs. Hard to find work."
—Randy Young, Houston 

According to Feeding America, the largest hunger relief organization in the U.S., more than 50 million people will experience food insecurity by the end of the year. Among U.S. children, the figure rises to one in four. The group, which runs a network of some 200 food banks across the nation, says it distributed over half a billion meals last month alone, a 52% increase from an average pre-pandemic month. 

The latest U.S. Census Bureau pandemic survey, published earlier this month, found that fewer than half of U.S. households with children were "very confident" they could afford to provide enough food for their families in the next month. 

As is so often the case when it comes to matters of economic inequality, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by the hunger crisis. Among the 25 U.S. counties experiencing the worst food insecurity, only four have majority white populations, all of them in rural Kentucky. Census Bureau data reveals that fully 27% of Black and 23% of Latinx households with children reported not having enough to eat over the past week—compared with just 12% of white families. 

"This is a story about racial and ethnic disparities—both food insecurity and the story of coronavirus," Emily Engelhard, managing director of Feeding America's research unit, told National Geographic. "The populations and geographies that started in the most disadvantageous state of food insecurity are the ones that are getting hit the hardest" during the pandemic. 

"People are seeing hunger like they've never seen it before," Trisha Cunningham, president of the North Texas Food Bank—where cars lined up for miles and people slept in their vehicles waiting for Thanksgiving food boxes—told National Geographic. On November 14, its busiest day on record, North Texas Food Bank provided groceries—including 7,000 whole turkeys—to more than 25,000 people.

In northeastern Ohio, the Greater Cleveland Food Bank planned to distribute 12,000 meals, a 5,000-meal increase from a year ago. 

"We're now seeing families who had an emergency fund but it's gone and they're at the end of their rope," Kristin Warzocha, president of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, told the Guardian. "We're going to be doing this for a really long time, and that's frankly terrifying given the impact hunger has on physical health, learning and development for children, and parents' stress."

In Texas' second-largest city, the San Antonio Food Bank distributes eight semi-trucks full of food every day, but still was forced to resort to rationing due to soaring need. 

"Covid-19 has taken so much, people's jobs, their loved ones, and now we're just trying to stop it from taking Thanksgiving," San Antonio Food Bank CEO Eric Cooper told CNBC. "Pre-pandemic we were feeding around 60,000 people a week, and now we're seeing around 120,000... and most of those are new to the food bank. They've never had to ask for help before." 

 

Indeed, among the thousands of cars that lined up starting in the pre-dawn hours for free Thanksgiving meals at Houston's NRG Stadium last weekend, there were more than a few luxury makes. 

"I was just telling my mom, 'You look at people pulling up in Mercedes and stuff, come on,'" Randy Young, a recently laid-off cook at the stadium who was waiting in line with his elderly mother, told the Post. "If a person driving a Mercedes is in need of food, you know it's bad."

"It's been hard to survive," Young said. "Money is low. No jobs. Hard to find work." 

Loudoun County, Virginia is per capita the wealthiest county in the nation, with a median household income of just under $140,000. Yet the Post reports Loudoun Hunger Relief recently handed out meals to 887 households in one recent week, a 300% increase from pre-pandemic activity.  

"We are continuing to see people who have never used our services before," Jennifer Montgomery, Loudoun Hunger Relief's executive director, told the Post. 

In the nation's largest city, Food Bank for NYC president Leslie Gordon told France 24 that "even before the pandemic, there were 1.5 million residents here across the five boroughs who didn't always know where their next meal was coming from or what it would be, and that's escalated considerably to nearly two million of our neighbors." 

"Across the country demand has not let up, and food banks do everything they can to make sure families have food on the table for Thanksgiving," Zuani Villareal, a spokesperson for Feeding America told the Guardian. "There's no end in sight, but we can't be the only solution." 

Celia Call, CEO of Feeding Texas, stressed to the Post that "without sustained aid at the federal level, we'll be hard-pressed to keep up" with demand. "We're just bracing for the worst," she added. 

Several progressive lawmakers tweeted the Post article over the past two days. One of them, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), said that "Congress has the power to address this crisis," and asked, "Why aren't we doing it?" 

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

How Mitch McConnell’s Do Nothing Republicans are Killing You

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

The Senate adjourned and left town without even trying to pass a COVID disaster relief bill. By the time they return on November 30, based on current trends, an additional estimated 16,000 Americans will have died from COVID-19.

We pay these elected officials to keep us safe, and they’ve failed us. To them I ask: How much death and suffering must the American people endure before you act?

Remember: House Democrats passed a comprehensive relief bill all the way back in May. 

You, Mitch McConnell, have refused to lift a finger for months, and Senate Republicans have been happy to follow your lead.

Countless Americans are now paying the price for your malicious inaction.
You should have learned lessons about COVID during its first horrific wave last spring.

First, there’s no tradeoff between COVID and the economy, and no way to get the economy back until COVID is under control. As the virus surges and more shutdowns loom, the millions of jobs we’ve added since April are about to disappear again. I’ve said this since March and I’ll say it again: The only way to get our economy back to full strength is to control the virus.

Second, more shutdowns are necessary. Businesses like Tesla in Alameda County, California, and Tyson meat packing plants in Iowa remained open during previous shutdowns, and both companies suffered COVID outbreaks. No exceptions this time around.

Third, and most importantly, shutdowns are only viable if accompanied by disaster relief so Americans can survive financially.  So pass disaster relief.

Re-up expanded unemployment benefits. The extra $600/week provisioned in the CARES Act expired on July 31st, and all federal relief will expire on December 31st. Expanded unemployment benefits were a financial lifeline for millions during the first and second waves, and must be instituted again to keep millions out of poverty this winter. Don’t listen to people who claim that we have to get people back to work, or keep them working. The best way to stop the spread is to pay people to stay home.

Stop evictions and foreclosures. It would be the height of cruelty to force even more people out onto the streets in the middle of winter as the virus surges. And with more job losses around the corner, we must ensure that a missed rent or mortgage payment isn’t a death sentence.

Distribute another round of Paycheck Protection Program loans to businesses, with strict oversight to ensure the funds actually go to businesses that need them, not massive, publicly-traded companies that have plenty of other options. 

Shore up state and local budgets. State and local governments are facing huge budget shortfalls. Without federal aid, vital public services are on the chopping block – schools, childcare, supplemental nutrition, mental health services, low-income housing, healthcare – when the public needs them more than ever. And local governments need funds to shelter unhoused residents, especially as temperatures drop and COVID intensifies.

Protect essential workers. Tens of thousands of workers on the frontlines have contracted COVID over the past 10 months – including nearly 20,000 Amazon warehouse workers. At a minimum, they need generous hazard pay and paid sick leave.

When the last COVID relief package was passed on March 27th, there were 18,093 new cases that day. Now, there are over 100,000 new cases every day. With hospitalizations lagging behind cases, and deaths lagging behind hospitalizations, it’s clear that this is going to get much, much worse unless people shelter in place. But most Americans can’t do this without relief.

The writing is on the wall. Do your job, Mitch McConnell. Our lives depend on it. 

Off the Top of My Head

Will We Be Able to Gather Safely by Next Thanksgiving?

by John Lawrence, November 26, 2020

A vaccine is on the way, but what about the time frame? Will we be able to celebrate Thanksgiving with large family multigenerational gatherings next year? Probably not safely. It won't be until spring when most Americans can start to get vaccinated. So what if half the family has been vaccinated by next Thanksgiving and half hasn't? Will it be safe to gather? Perhaps not. A person who has been vaccinated can still be contagious even if they are asymptomatic. So they can give COVID to the half of family members who haven't been vaccinated yet. It will take everyone at the Thanksgiving table to be vaccinated before we can gather safely for Thanksgiving dinner in 2021. To make matters worse, the vaccines will undoubtedly be released without the normal approval protocol. The vaccine makers will apply for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and probably get it. This means that the normal follow-up study which typically takes 6 months will not be undertaken. Instead the EUA lets pharmaceutical companies monitor trial participants for only 2 months. The follow-up is to make sure that the vaccines are safe and don't lead to serious side effects. We already know that there are "long haulers" that experience severe symptoms months after they have tested negative for COVID.

The mRNA technology used by Moderna and Pfizer allows fast development, but it hasn't ever been used before in the development of a vaccine. The vaccines are said to be 95% effective. What that means is that 5 people out of 100 actually came down with COVID even after they were vaccinated. If you are older or have underlying conditions, you need to bear in mind that being vaccinated will not guarantee that you will not get COVID or even die from it although the chances are that the vaccine will protect you. However, because the COVID virus will still be out there floating around, safety precautions should still be undertaken long after everyone has been vaccinated. Until everyone has been vaccinated and the number of new positive cases is down to zero, people shouldn't let down their guards.

Another thing about the Pfizer and Moderna studies is that not everyone that either got the vaccine or the placebo was tested. Only those were tested that displayed symptoms. That means that there could have been far more positive cases both in those who got the vaccine and those that got the placebo. The studies did not test everyone to see how many people in the vaccinated group got infected compared to the placebo group. The bottom line is that the vaccine will likely prevent you from getting seriously sick. However, it won't prevent you from getting infected and passing it along to others. That's why it is important that public health measures like mask wearing and social distancing stay in effect until not only when everyone is vaccinated but until the hospitalization rate comes down to zero. Depending on how much testing will be in effect next year it is also a consideration that the number of positive cases come down to almost zero. Especially if you're older or have underlying conditions, don't jump the gun and let down your guard prematurely. Another thing we don't know is what happened to the ones that did get sick both in the vaccinated group and in the unvaccinated group. Did any of them die or were intubated? What kind of treatment did they get and how effective was the treatment? Did they get monoclonal antibody therapy/ If so and it prevented them from becoming seriously ill, why isn't that treatment (similar to what President Trump got) more readily available to the average person?

Because there is so little testing in the US, there are a lot of asymptomatic cases out there who have never been tested. That means that there is a lot more COVID that can be transmitted to those who are vulnerable. The problem right now is that the testing of vaccines so far has not shown whether the vaccine protects you from the disease or does it also protect you from being infected? That is unknown at this time. So public health measures must stay in place long after everyone has been vaccinated. The only reliable measure is the number of hospitalizations. When that number comes down to zero, then it will be safe to return to normal. Until then, we are all guinea pigs. The vaccine is no panacea.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Off the Top of My Head

Are We Really All in This Together?

by John Lawrence, October 21, 2020

The pandemic in terms of dying has affected mainly old people and minorities, but also there have been many at the highest level White House related cases including 87 year old Senator Chuck Grassley. I assume that these high level cases have been and will be treated with monoclonal antibodies like Remdesivir which "cured" President Trump. These treatments it should be noted are not available to everyone. Why not if they are so efficacious. Those who have the best treatments available can subscribe to the thesis that the coronavirus is no big deal. Mainly others are doing the dying.

Pope Francis' words of wisdom, Fratelli Tutti, his encyclical letter on Fraternity and Social Friendship represents a plea that we all should be in this together even though it's clear that in many parts of the world we're not. His words of wisdom follow:

"All too quickly, however, we forget the lessons of history, “the teacher of life”. Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation. God willing, after all this, we will think no longer in terms of “them” and “those”, but only “us”. If only this may prove not to be just another tragedy of history from which we learned nothing. If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators, partly as a result of the dismantling, year after year, of healthcare systems. If only this immense sorrow may not prove useless, but enable us to take a step forward towards a new style of life. If only we might rediscover once for all that we need one another, and that in this way our human family can experience a rebirth, with all its faces, all its hands and all its voices, beyond the walls that we have erected.

"Unless we recover the shared passion to create a community of belonging and solidarity worthy of our time, our energy and our resources, the global illusion that misled us will collapse and leave many in the grip of anguish and emptiness. Nor should we naively refuse to recognize that “obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction”. The notion of “every man for himself” will rapidly degenerate into a free-for-all that would prove worse than any pandemic."

Yet in the US we are divide into two nations fundamentally at war with each other. Even religious institutions fan the flames of political divides. Masc wearing has become something that freedom loving Americans feel free to not do on Constitutional grounds. Caring about the welfare of others is unAmerican when it takes away from some Americans' freedoms. That's the American way: freedom trumps "Fraternity and Social Friendship" as the Pope would say. Is freedom the only value worth supporting? Must it dominate all other values? Must saving the earth from global warming be politicized into a Left-Right issue? Those who want to convert to renewable energy are characterized as "too far Left?" It isn;t a matter of Left Right. It's a matter of what is the right thing to do.

When it comes time to give the American people a tax break, there's no hue and cry about deficit spending. When the big banks were bailed out costing trillions of dollars, there was no hue and cry about deficit spending. Even though many of the bankers had committed fraud, none of them went to jail and the fines were just a slap on the wrist. But when a government program that forgives student loan debt or funds a massive green infrastructure program is mentioned, all of a sudden Republicans are concerned about deficit spending. It's "too far Left." Providing affordable housing, feeding the hungry, creating jobs for the unemployed - all those ideas are "too far Left." It's more important to preserve American values than it is to solve social problems. In other words despite the Pope's pleas, we are not all in this together. Freedom is more important than social cohesion.

Who Wins from Trump’s Final Travesty?

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Leave it to Trump and his Republican allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud than containing a virus that has killed 244,000 Americans and counting.

The cost of this misplaced attention is incalculable. While Covid-19 surges to record levels, there’s still no national strategy for equipment, stay at home orders, mask mandates or disaster relief.

The other cost is found in the millions of Trump voters who are being led to believe the election was stolen and who will be a hostile force for years to come – making it harder to do much of anything the nation needs, including actions to contain the virus.

Trump is continuing this charade because it pulls money into his newly formed political action committee and allows him to assume the mantle of presumed presidential candidate for 2024, whether he intends to run or merely keep himself the center of attention.

Leading Republicans like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell are going along with it because donors are refilling GOP coffers.

The biggest beneficiaries are the party’s biggest patrons – the billionaire class, including the heads of the nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions, private-equity partnerships and hedge funds – whom a deeply divided nation serves by giving them unfettered access to the economy’s gains.

Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent Rand study, if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following the second world war, the bottom 90% would now be $47 trillion richer.

A low-income American earning $35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in inequality that began 40 years ago is costing the median American worker $42,000 per year.

The upward redistribution of $47 trillion wasn’t due to natural forces. It was contrived. As wealth accumulated at the top, so did political power to siphon off even more wealth and shaft everyone else.

Monopolies expanded because antitrust laws were neutered. Labor unions shriveled because corporations were allowed to bust unions. Wall Street was permitted to gamble with other peoples’ money and was bailed out when its bets soured even as millions lost their homes and savings. Taxes on the top were cut, tax loopholes widened.

When Covid-19 hit, Big Tech cornered the market, the rich traded on inside information, and the Treasury and the Fed bailed out big corporations but let small businesses go under. Since March, billionaire wealth has soared while most Americans have become poorer.

How could the oligarchy get away with this in a democracy where the bottom 90% have the votes? Because the bottom 90% are bitterly divided.

Long before Trump, the GOP suggested to white working-class voters that their real enemies were Black people, Latinos, immigrants, “coastal elites,” bureaucrats and “socialists.” Trump rode their anger and frustration into the White House with more explicit and incendiary messages. He’s still at it with his bonkers claim of a stolen election.

The oligarchy surely appreciates the Trump-GOP tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks and the most business-friendly Supreme Court since the early 1930s. But the Trump-GOP’s biggest gift has been an electorate more fiercely split than ever.

Into this melee comes Joe Biden, who speaks of being “president of all Americans” and collaborating with the Republican party. But the GOP doesn’t want to collaborate. When Biden holds out an olive branch, McConnell and other Republican leaders will respond just as they did to Barack Obama – with more warfare, because that maintains their power and keeps the big money rolling in.

The president-elect aspires to find a moderate middle ground. This will be difficult because there’s no middle. The real divide is no longer left versus right but the bottom 90% versus the oligarchy.

Biden and the Democrats will better serve the nation by becoming the party of the bottom 90% – of the poor and the working middle class, of black and white and brown, and of all those who would be $47 trillion richer today had the oligarchy not taken over America.

This would require that Democrats abandon the fiction of political centrism and establish a countervailing force to the oligarchy – and, not incidentally, sever their own links to it.

They’d have to show white working-class voters how badly racism and xenophobia have hurt them as well as people of color. And change the Democratic narrative from kumbaya to economic and social justice.

Easy to say, hugely difficult to accomplish. But if today’s bizarre standoff in Washington is seen for what it really is, there’s no alternative.

'It's Even Worse on Video': Trump Adviser Welcomes Killing Loved Ones With Covid-19 as This May Be 'Their Final Thanksgiving' Anyway

Published on Tuesday, November 17, 2020

by Common Dreams

"Eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow my policies may kill you."

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

8 Comments

Dr. Scott Atlas, a top White House coronavirus adviser, said Monday that Americans should flout public health guidance and gather as normal for the holidays as this may be "the final Thanksgiving" for many. (Photo: screenshot)

In his latest anti-science appeal to Americans, White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas on Monday night called on families to ignore the guidance of public health experts who say the holiday season should not include indoor gatherings—suggesting to Fox News that families should take the risk even for elderly or sick relatives this Thanksgiving because they will no longer be alive next year.

"This kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly who are now being told don’t see your family at Thanksgiving," Atlas, who has no public health expertise, told Fox host Martha MacCallum. "For many people this is their final Thanksgiving, believe it or not. What are we doing here?"

Stanford University, where Atlas was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution before joining President Donald Trump's coronavirus team, promptly distanced itself from the doctor's comments, while political observers expressed shock on social media.

 

Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall wrote that for many Americans it will be their last Thanksgiving "because they're attending Thanksgiving."

Protecting the elderly from Covid-19 is one of the main reasons infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and other officials have called on Americans to skip indoor family gatherings and traveling this year. Last week he advised Americans to wear face coverings at any gatherings they do have if they don't know the Covid-19 status of all attendees. 

Meanwhile, Atlas has falsely stated that face masks don't reduce transmission of Covid-19 and is a proponent of the U.S. government taking a "herd immunity" approach to the pandemic—encouraging people who are relatively young and healthy to go about their daily lives with no regard for mask-wearing, social distancing, or the existence of a virus that's killed more than 246,000 people in the U.S. this year, while using unspecified methods to separate them from people who are elderly or at high risk for severe Covid-19 infections.  

The "herd immunity" approach, euphemistically rebranded as "focused protection" by some proponents, has been denounced as "fringe" by seasoned public health officials. 

On Sunday, Atlas also called on Michigan residents to "rise up" against public health guidance after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced that in-person learning, indoor dining, organized sports, and other activities would be shut down for three weeks to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.

"This guy is a public health menace and it needs to stop now," tweeted one emergency room physician on Monday evening following Atlas's comments about Thanksgiving.

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Off the Top of My Head

Why Isn't Monoclonal Antibody Therapy Widely Available?

by John Lawrence, November 17, 2020

Monoclonal antibody therapy similar to what knocked out COVID for Donald Trump has been shown to knock out the virus if administered within the first couple days of showing symptoms. Trump is a living example that it works, but now as of November 9 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued an emergency use authorization for the monoclonal antibody therapy bamlanivimab for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) showed that Eli Lilly's COVID-19 convalescent plasma–derived virus-neutralizing monoclonal antibody treatment reduced viral loads, lowered the severity of symptoms, and had no serious adverse effects in outpatients. So it knocks out the virus and also may give short term immunity. "It is important to treat people with COVID-19 as soon as possible after diagnosis in order to forestall development of more severe disease," said Peter Chen, MD, of Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles and first author of the NEJM study. "Our findings indicate that neutralizing antibodies may have the potential to be useful in this early-stage intervention," he added.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that starting November 13, Medicare beneficiaries can receive coverage of monoclonal antibodies to treat COVID-19 with no cost-sharing during the public health emergency. CMS’ coverage of monoclonal antibody infusions applies to bamlanivimab, which received an emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“Today, CMS is announcing a historic, first-of-its kind policy that drastically expands access to COVID-19 monoclonal antibodies to beneficiaries without cost sharing,” said CMS Administrator Seema Verma. “Our timely approach means beneficiaries can receive these potentially life-saving therapies in a range of settings – such as in a doctor’s office, nursing home, infusion centers, as long as safety precautions can be met. This aggressive action and innovative approach will undoubtedly save lives.”

The only problem is that this life saving treatment is not widely available. The President got it in the form of Remdesivir, and it worked for him. Why are so many people dying who could have been treated with this therapy? The question remains as to why this therapy was not factory produced in the millions of doses just in case it worked like several of the potential vaccines have been.So many Americans are dying just because they have not had access to the same therapy that the President of the US had access to.

Off the Top of My Head

Trump's 'Cull the Herd' Philosophy wrt COVID

by John Lawrence, November 2, 220

Trump's philosophy is that people who succumb to COVID are 'suckers and losers' which is what he said about those who die in war. He himself exemplifies this survival of the fittest philosophy. Take him as an example. He got COVID and bounced back within a couple of days. He's out there doing four or five campaign rallies a day, quite remarkable for a 74 year old man. So he must have some superior constitution to overcome the virus and be bouncing back big time. His example is that people with superior constitutions will hardly be affected with COVID, and that the US should cull the herd of suckers and losers that are so affected. Especially since most of the suckers and losers that succumb to COVID are blacks Latinos and old people who were going to die anyway.

Hitler had a somewhat similar philosophy. In addition to Jews, he was culling the herd of mentally defectives, homosexuals and non-Aryans, in other words people he considered to be weaklings or inferiors. Trump has the same philosophy: why let the American economy go down the tubes in order to try and save the lives of suckers and losers especially since a preponderance of them are minorities ^i.e. non-Americans. Beyond that Trump and his followers are only interested in short term profits for themselves. They adhere to the Ayn Randist philosophy of extreme selfishness. Nobody counts for anything except themselves. It's the extreme opposite of the philosophy of caring which the Biden campaign represents. Trump and his cultlike following don't care about anyone but themselves.They don't want to diminish their own prospects in order to do anything (example: mask wearing) to help anyone else, especially those whom they consider inferior to themselves. Hitler would smile on this philosophy.

The Trumpistas worship power whether that power is political, financial or athletic. They relish powerful pickup trucks flying Trump flags, sports bars, football and anything else that represents power and winning. They could care less about what happens to the earth 10 years or 100 years from now. They want their selfish interests to be realized now. They're not interested in doing anything about gloabal warming because it's not in their immediate interests. Wall Street seconds this emotion by only promoting those who can demonstrate short term profits. As in football winning is the only thing that matters, winning by any means necessary. The values of Trumpistas are that people who care for those who are poor or sick or vulnerable are suckers and losers. People who succumb to COVID are weaklings. People like Trump who get over it in a few days are the winners. They want to cull the herd of the losers who get COVID and die.

There are those like Joe Biden and mostly other Democrats who want to take care of those like the elderly and the sick and the weak rather than letting them die and have the herd culled from their prescence. After all they are someone's loved ones too. Nixon had a philosophy of "benign neglect." In other words just let them die. And let the earth die as well if it gets in the way of corporate profits which it does if respect and caring for the environment is taken into consideration. So let's just have another maskless motorcycle rally or campaign event and see who is superior and who is a loser that gets COVID and dies. After Trump's Tulsa rally Herman Cain, former black Presidential candidate and Trump supporter, got COVID and died. In Trump's view probably he was just another loser. Since mostly minorities are doing the dying, this just proves the superiority of the white race. Hitler would seem to be vindicated.

So the opposite philosophy from the philosophy of power and selfishness and winning is the philosophy of caring. It is exemplified by the Hippocratic Oath which all doctors take. It requires doctors and health care professionals to save every life if at all possible. If it were not for this attitude and philosophy, in a Trumpian value system, doctors might make the decision to let people die who couldn't pay for their services or to let people die who weren't of the same race or to let old people die who were going to die shortly anyway or to let people die who they considered to be suckers and losers. Joe Biden and the Democrats generally have the opposite philosophy, the philosophy which the Pope has called a  'preferential option for the poor,' a philosophy of caring for the weakest among us. In a few days we shall see which philosophy will hold sway in America and quite possibly in the rest of the world as America sets the example.

Off the Top of My Head

Conservatives Argue That Phasing Out Fossil Fuels is Socialism. They Argue That Saving the Planet from Global Warming is Socialism. They Argue That Universal Health Coverage is Socialism. I Say Bring It On!

by John Lawrence, October 27, 2020

So anything that would benefit the people as a whole or the planet is socialism. Creating jobs by a government sponsored infrastructure program is socialism. Yet private enterprise has not built any infrastructure. It won't do so unless the money is provided by the government. Rebuilding roads and bridges is not something private enterprise is equipped to do. If it was, they'd build roads and bridges and then charge tolls to recoup their investment. Private enterprise is good at inventing things and starting entrepreneurial enterprises, but not large picture enterprises which are properly the domain of government or require government cooperation with the private sector. A government that makes sure that everyone has health care complements private enterprise. They want healthy workers after all. Private enterprise benefits from safe roads, tunnels and bridges more so than does the average citizen. They use infrastructure in the conduct of their business.

President Reagan declared that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Yeah, it's the problem when it doesn't do its proper job. It's the problem when President Trump doesn't take any responsibility for the pandemic or attempts to do anything about it. Reagan also said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Really? We could use a little help from the government in the midst of a pandemic. The private enterprise system is doing its part inventing a vaccine, but they're doing it with the help of government money. Pfizer got $1.95 Billion to produce a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year. Johnson & Johnson got a billion dollars. Without government being "here to help" there would be no vaccine on the horizon. Private enterprise would not take that money out of its own research budget especially if it didn't figure to make a profit selling the vaccine.

So socialism will be responsible for developing a coronavirus vaccine and eventually ending the pandemic. It will be done with the "government help" that Ronald Reagan thought was so terrifying. The problem is that we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The rich spend tons of money lobbying Congress to pass legislation in their favor. In a truly free market they wouldn't be spending money making sure government was doing their bidding in their interests. They would be spending money on research, development and promoting their products. Rich people don't want government so small that they can "drown it in the bathtub" as Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist said. No, they are manipulating government everyday to get government just the right size to suit their financial interests. Defense contractors lobby to get the government to spend more money on the military-industrial complex. Pharmaceutical corporations lobby to get government not to allow Medicare to negotiate with them for lower drug prices. This is something Joe Biden said he would do: allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma.

Most civilized nations have universal health care. The US is the only outlier. Most civilized countries want to do something about global warming. The US under Trump is the outlier. Most civilized countries have a social safety net so that people don't suffer needlessly. At the same time most countries facilitate a partnership between government and private enterprise that works for entrepreneurs and business people and the citizenry as a whole, in partnership and cooperation. There is a balance between capitalism and socialism that works for the benefit of all the people. That's what makes for a successful nation. Right now this is very out of whack in the US. A bloated military has wasted trillions of dollars on disastrous wars that have made the nation less safe. And yet the military was absolutely impotent to do anything about COVID-19. The money would have been better spent strengthening our knowledge and preparations for a pandemic and for better health among Americans so that they don't have so many underlying conditions that have led to more deaths from the coronavirus.

As jobs are being destroyed by automation, robotization and AI, it's imperative that jobs be created addressing the needs of infrastructure and the need for renewable energy. This endeavor can be in part a joint mission for both government and private enterprise, but without government's input the nation will keep on spewing fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere because that's what's in the interests of existing corporations. That dynamic needs to change and government has to be instrumental in bringing about that change. That's why it's important to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Many vested interests will continue making money by polluting and emitting greenhouse gasses unless government changes the dynamics of energy production. This means countering the demand of lobbyists and putting government in a direction that benefits the people as a whole and not just special interests.

VOTE!

 

 

'We're Rounding the Corner Beautifully,' Trump Lies Just Before US Hits Another Record: 85,000+ New Covid-19 Cases

Published on Saturday, October 24, 2020 by Common Dreams

"Trump's lies and his rejection of science have cost us tens of thousands of lives. We need a new president," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

17 Comments

President Donald Trump speaks during his campaign event on October 23, 2020 in The Villages, Florida. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump late Friday repeated his lie that the United States is on its way to defeating the coronavirus pandemic just before the country reported a single-day record of more than 85,000 new Covid-19 infections, nearly 10,000 more cases than were tallied at the height of the devastating surge in mid-July.

But the president's remarks during a campaign rally Friday at The Villages, a Florida retirement community, conveyed zero indication that the U.S. is entering what could be the worst phase of the pandemic yet.

"It's true that country is rounding the turn of the pandemic. We are spiraling out of control."
—Dr. Zoë McLaren,School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County

"I mean, you look at what's going on and we're rounding the turn. We're rounding the corner. We're rounding the corner beautifully," Trump said, recycling an egregious falsehood that has become a staple of his stump speech even as infections and hospitalizations surge nationwide.

The New York Times reported late Friday that "since the start of October, the rise in cases has been steady and inexorable, with no plateau in sight... By that measure, Friday was the worst day of the pandemic, and health experts warned of a further surge as cold weather sets in. The number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 has already risen 40 percent in the past month."

Consistent with his reckless downplaying of the pandemic from the very start, Trump once again peddled the lie that the U.S. is "rounding the turn" during a late Friday rally in Pensacola, one of many largely maskless and closely packed in-person campaign events the president has held in recent days against the warnings of public health officials.

Watch:

"It's true that country is rounding the turn of the pandemic," responded Dr. Zoë McLaren, associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "We are spiraling out of control."

In addition to the record number of cases, the U.S. also reported more than 940 coronavirus deaths on Friday, bringing the nation's death toll to nearly 224,000—the highest in the world.

"This is only getting worse," tweeted epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, warning that the U.S. could soon reach 100,000 new cases per day as the winter months approach.

With the November 3 election less than two weeks away, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted Friday that "Trump's lies and his rejection of science have cost us tens of thousands of lives."

"We need a new president," Sanders said.

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Off the Top of My Head

Trump Holds Super Spreader Events with Old People as COVID Sets Record in US

by John Lawrence

Yesterday a record was set: 83,000 COVID infections, the highest ever. Meanwhile, Trump was holding a mainly maskless event in the Villages, a retirement community in Florida.The New England Journal of Medicine reported on October 8, 2020:

Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.

The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly.

Is this Vietnam's revenge? Vietnam is the country we ravaged burning women and children alive with Agent Orange while affecting our own soldiers as well. The number of Vietnam veterans affected by the chemical Agent Orange is astonishing. Roughly 300-thousand veterans have died from Agent Orange exposure -- that's almost five times as many as the 58-thousand who died in combat. Be that as it may, the fact that the death rate from COVID in the US is 3000 times greater than the death rate in Vietnam is astonishing. Could it have to do with the fact that Vietnam is the least obese country in the world while the US is among the most obese? Out of 191 countries Vietnam has an obesity rate of 2.1% while in the US the obesity rate is 36.2%. As we know obesity is an underlying condition for COVID morbidity. The American diet may be the main underlying condition. Burgers, pizza and fast food may have been a contributing factor to the COVID death rate.

We also know that countries that have got the pandemic under control have been able to reopen their economies successfully. China is on track to expand by roughly 5% in the third quarter roughly at the same rate as in 2019 before the pandemic hit. On the other hand countries that haven't gotten the pandemic under control such as the US have not been able to reopen successfully see sawing back and forth between reopening and reshuting as the COVUD infection rate see saws back and forth. Consumers are wary to come out in public as long as the infection rate is high. Since consumption is 70% of the US economy, much larger than the European consumption rate of 50%, it is more important in the US that consumption remains high in order for the economy to sustain itself. After the election, providing Biden wins, there will probably be another installment of the CARES Act putting money directly in consumers' hands thus preventing the US economy from free fall.

Expert opinion holds that US leadership, namely Trump and his cronies, has abjectly failed in its response to the COVID pandemic. Elections have consequences. Electing clowns like George W Bush, who lied us into a tragic war in Iraq, and Trump who was Missing in Action with respect to the COVID pandemic shows the ignorant mistakes the American electorate has made. Gore and Hillary Clinton would have been infinitely more competent in dealing with the crises that America has had to face. Let's not make the same mistake again! This time we must elect Joe Biden or the US is finished as a world leader. A democracy is only as good as the competence and intelligence of the citizens comprising it. So far the American people - some of them - have displayed their ignorance and incompetence by not wearing masks and complaining that they have a right not to do so. Freedom may just be another name for nothing left to lose as the Kris Kristofferson song says.

Off the Top of My Head

If You Thought American Inequality Was Bad Before COVID, You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

by John Lawrence, October 19, 2020

Pandemics should be the great equalizer, but COVID has exacerbated inequality. The rich have gotten richer. The poor have not only gotten poorer, they've slipped into poverty and homelessness. Around the world the Economist estimates that about 100 million people are falling back into extreme poverty, that is they are living on less than $2 a day. In the US between 6 and 8 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty within the last few months. CNBC reported that nearly 40% of cash-strapped Americans can't last a month on their savings. But there are success stories if you want to call them that. Amazon has seen its market cap increase by $750 billion to around $1.7 trillion. Jeff Bezos' net worth is now around $200 billion. Clearly the COVID economic depression has not been bad for everyone.

Americans are not encouraged to save for a rainy day, and 2020 has seen a series of the all time rainiest of days. We are encouraged to consume, consume, consume. Consumption is 70% of GDP in the US, much higher than the 51% share in Europe and 57% in China. The problem now is that Americans can't consume if they don't have the money to do it. That is why the CARES Act  was so important and why a further relief package is as important. If people don't spend to consume, the US will go into a depression. Consumer spending is important for the US economy much more so than elsewhere in the world.

China's economy will be the only one to grow this year while the US economy shrinks. China got COVID under control months ago, and its economy now is in full swing. It goes to show the wisdom of getting COVID under control first no matter how severe the measures that have to be taken to do so. Then the economy can open with no problem. The US, under the leadership of President Trump, did a half ass job of getting COVID under control with the result that opening the economy was done in a half ass way also. Now COVID is on the upswing in the US, and Trump is holding super spreader event rallies as he seemingly wants to take his supporters down with him if he fails to win on election day. The economy is on a roller coaster of half openings and half closings.

Clearly, there has been a K shaped recovery with the rich doing very well and the poor slipping into poverty. Poor essential workers such as meat packers and agricultural workers presumably still have their jobs. Nonessential poor workers such as maids in the hospitality industry and restaurant and bar workers have lost their jobs as those industries have either shut down or are struggling. The worst thing for these struggling industries would be to have to shut down completely again although that may be necessary if COVID cases continue to spike. Although the situation is bad for poor people in the US, it's worse in the rest of the world. The World Bank has revised its analysis of the effects of COVID, and they now estimate that the COVID pandemic is likely to push between 88 and 115 million people into extreme poverty in 2020, setting back poverty reduction by around three years. Meanwhile, billionaires saw their wealth climb 27.5% to $10.2 trillion from April to July this year, according to a report from Swiss bank UBS.

The US' response to COVID has been among the poorest in the world with the result that America's influence in the world, already on the downswing, is further eroding. Inevitably China will take over as the world's largest economy just based on its superior response to the COVID pandemic alone. That makes this year's elections crucial to resuming some semblance of American influence and respect in the world community. Not to mention that if Trump is reelected there is no hope for a remediated response to global warming and climate change. Either the US will get on the right track in several different dimensions with Joe Biden as President or Trump, if he serves another 4 years, will take America and the world down with him.

Off the Top of My Head

Has China Won?

by John Lawrence, October 16, 2020

Ian Bremmer wrote in Time magazine: "You might think 2020 had been a pretty good year for China, at least when compared with the West. Though COVID-19 began its global march there, China’s recovery has been remarkable. The government’s unprecedented capacity for surveillance, large-scale testing, contact tracing and quarantine helped contain the outbreak inside China within two months. That success allowed for the restart of supply chains and enabled a state investment-led rebound. China could be the world’s only large economy to grow this year. And as second waves of COVID-19 appear in Europe and the U.S., China hasn’t had any serious outbreaks over the past month. Life there is nearly back to normal."

The Chinese and the US economies were neck and neck prior to COVID. The fact that China has handled its response much better than has the US means that China will emerge as the world's largest economy by 2021. In his book, "Has China Won?", author Kishore Mahbubani sums up the strengths and weaknesses of both societies. He contends that the "Chinese Communist Party" is a misnomer. It should be called the Chinese Civilization Party as it owes more to China's 3000 year civilization than it does to communism. China values stability over chaos. It has pulled 800,000 Chinese citizens out of poverty in the last 40 years, largely because it has privatized large swaths of its society. Chinese citizens are well satisfied with their lot in life because among other things they have access to as wide a variety consumer goods as do the developed western societies.

So what has been the US response to China's rapid economic growth and expansion particularly with regard to its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which is building infrastructure all over the world with the intention of recreating the ancient Silk Road trade route? Obama initiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which would have been a trade alliance rivaling the BRI. Trump immediately withdrew from the TPP as well as withdrawing from other global initiatives and alliances under his America First go-it-alone philosophy with the result that even US allies are giving Xi Jinping and China more credibility than the US. Under the Trump administration the response to China's rise has been to try and put roadblocks in the way of Chinese corporations. They had Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei, China's largest privately held company, arrested on December 1, 2018 in Canada under the pretext that Huawei had sold equipment to Iran violating US sanctions. Subsequently, she was extradited to the US. On February 13, 2020 Meng was personally indicted by the DOJ on charges of trade secrets theft which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years' imprisonment.

Similarly, the Trump administration sought to prohibit the popular Chinese app Tik Tok from being downloaded by American consumers. Tik Tok, however, received a reprieve in September 2020 from an American federal court when a judge put a temporary stop to the Trump administration's ban. The government had argued that Tik Tok may have a "back door" through which it could share American data with the Chinese government. A ban would “be no different from the government locking the doors to a public forum,” said John Hall, a lawyer for TikTok. “We’re pleased that the court agreed with our legal arguments and issued an injunction preventing the implementation of the TikTok app ban,” a spokesman for TikTok said after the judge’s decision.

The American response to the success of Chinese private corporations might have been to cheer the at least partial privatization of the Chinese economy, a laudable development in accordance with US free enterprise, capitalistic principles. Instead, the US under Trump has sought to hinder Chinese corporations every step of the way even when they have won competitions fair and square. It is what I would call the Tonya Harding response. In January 1994, skater Tonya Harding became embroiled in controversy when her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, orchestrated an attack on her fellow U.S. skating rival Nancy Kerrigan. Both women then competed in the February 1994 Winter Olympics, where Kerrigan won the silver medal and Harding finished eighth. Harding was later banned from the sport. The US response to China over China's pulling ahead of it is reminiscent of Tonya's response to Kerrigan. If you can't beat your opponent with your natural talent, try to injure them (in this case sanction or ban them) instead.

This leaves aside the legitimacy of the US use of sanctions to demand that another country (in this case China) must not do business with some other country if the US says it can't. A Biden administration would reenter the Iran nuclear agreement which reduced sanctions against Iran, and, supposedly, Meng would be released. Tik Tok also would be allowed to continue its ability to sell its app all over the world. The US should engage constructively and diplomatically with China to allay any fears about "back doors." Diplomatic treaties and agreements are the way to go, not retaliation over imagined and ill defined fears. It's important that the US and China cooperate especially when it comes to global warming. They are the 2 largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters, and their cooperation is necessary in working with the rest of the world (in particular India) in bringing GHG emissions to net zero in the shortest time. The destructive effects of global warming are manifesting themselves now all over the world in addition to the wildfires on the US west coast and hurricanes in the Gulf states.

Off the Top of My Head

China Back to Normal. US COVID Surging.

by John Lawrence,, October 14, 2020

According to The Lancet: "As of Oct 4, 2020, China had confirmed 90,604 cases of COVID-19 and 4739 deaths, while the USA had registered 7,382,194 cases and 209,382 deaths." Clearly, China has had a much better response to the pandemic than has the US. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, offered “deepest congratulations...to the front-line health workers in China and the population who worked together tirelessly to bring the disease to this very low level”. Fareed Zakaria in his excellent book, "Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World," writes:

The pandemic has accelerated America's selfish turn - its abandonment of its role as leader of the free world and provider of public goods within the multilateral system. Perhaps the most striking example came with its vaccine strategy. Far from coordinating a global effort, or even encouraging its allies to pool resources, the Trump administration was simply looking to "win," edging out other countries in a race to get the vaccine first. The German press reported that the American government offered "large sums of money" to secure a German company's vaccine "for the US only." Meanwhile, partners like France, Brazil and Canada accused the US of swooping in on deals to acquire critical medical equipment and outbidding them, or even blocking shipments.

But it has been to no avail. The Trump administration's botched handling of its response to the pandemic has landed the US up in the situation that COVID is on the upsurge 9 months after Trump first knew about it. The denouement is that China is surging ahead with its economy while the US is surging ahead with the virus. What's more is that people are dying at a rate of some 700 a day  while the President himself, having caught the virus, was given Regeneron's monoclonal antibodies cocktail which seems to have killed off the virus in short order. Unfortunately, that treatment isn't available to everybody.

Zakaria opines on the US relationship with China. Trump can't condemn China too much as a huge amount of American products from American corporations are manufactured in and imported from China. The two countries are intertwined despite Trump's "Made in America" push. American corporations will not make their products in America as long as they can get cheaper labor elsewhere. After all their imperative is the bottom line and maximizing profits. Wall Street has told them this is what they must do, patriotism be damned.

Zakaria details the US response to the rise of China, its growing influence in the world even among US traditional allies, who seem to have more respect for Xi Jinping than for Trump. Trump is considered a loose cannon in the world today. The US can degenerate into Cold War II with China or America can play a more constructive role with its chief rival, which rivalry has come about rather suddenly. For example, the US can quibble with China about the situation in the Xinjiang region with the Uighurs, an Islamic minority, while ignoring its own history of forcing the Indians off their lands and onto reservations. In the long run, more is at stake in the US-China relationship them petty rivalries. As the two largest emitters of greenhouse gasses (GHGs), the US and China must cooperate to achieve net zero carbon emissions in short order or the earth will become uninhabitable. Scientists think Venus was inhabitable for billions of years before runaway GHGs made it uninhabitable. The same thing could happen to earth unless we take the situation seriously. For this reason the US and China must cooperate, not compete. We must avoid Cold War II or else the winner of this rivalry will win nothing more than a scorched earth.

Off the Top of My Head

It's Not the Quantity of Government. It's the Quality.

by John Lawrence, October 13, 2020

Fareed Zakaria has written a brilliant book: "Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World." In it he says that the old debates between the Left and the Right are invalid. He notes that most major countries are a part of the world economic system. That system was set up after WWII by the US. China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. The WTO deals with regulation of trade in goods, services and intellectual property between participating countries by providing a framework for negotiating trade agreements and a dispute resolution process aimed at enforcing participants' adherence to WTO agreements. So China which is arguably the world's largest economy is playing on the same field and under the same rules as the US, the EU and 123 other nations. It's fair to say that all countries party to the WTO are hybrids of capitalism and socialism, some leaning more one way and some leaning more the other way.

Zakaria writes: "... the old ideologies are obsolete. The divide that has organized politics for centuries has been between left and right. The Left has advocated a larger role for the state in the economy. The Right has staunchly defended free markets. For the twentieth century, the great political debate was about the size and role of government in the economy - the quantity of government. But what seems to have mattered most in this [pandemic] crisis was the quality of government." Zakaria argues that the US' response to the pandemic was hindered by the fact of US federalism. The creation of a national strategy for dealing with the pandemic was "complicated by the existence of 2,684 state, local and tribal health departments each jealously guarding its independence. To make matters even messier, the US has 90,126 units of state and local government, many of which were tasked with devising their own rules on mask-wearing and public gatherings."

Zakaria continues: "But this patchwork of authority is a nightmare when tackling a disease that knows no borders. The fragmentation of standards is especially acute when handling Covid-19 tests. ... (It is a far cry from Taiwan's system of 'health cards', which link up with a single data base for all relevant medical information.)" Imagine if every US citizen was covered by a health card that linked up with a national data base. It will never happen as long as the US remains a fragmented national state with so many conflicting jurisdictions. This fragmentation contrasts with a country like Canada which has one health card which any citizen can use anywhere, and the doctor can access all that patient's records. The medical visit costs the Canadian citizen nothing. This streamlining of medical records saves a lot of money and effort compared to the hodge podge of American medical record keeping.

This hodge podge and fragmentation of the US extends to many other areas. It has made police reform almost impossible as there are 18,000 police departments across the country. The fact of the matter is that this Federalism precludes any coherent national strategy when it comes to the COVID pandemic or much of anything else. It's the reason that the medical system in the US is so expensive while returning mediocre results. China and some other countries have handled the pandemic in an intelligent and coherent way with the result that they have controlled COVID. Therefore, their economies have gotten more or less back to normal while the US is still struggling to get a handle on the pandemic with the result that the US economy is still a shambles.

Off the Top of My Head

Quantitative Easing = Printing Money

by John Lawrence

In her book, "Deficits Don't Matter," author Stephanie Kelton makes the case that we don't have to worry about deficit spending. That's when the US government spends more than it takes in in taxes. So in a sense taxes don't matter either at least as far as balanced budgets go. The US dollar is a sovereign currency. This means we don't have to ask anyone's permission to print money. The US dollar was taken off the gold standard in 1971 under President Nixon. It is a fiat currency meaning that it is not backed by anything other than the word of the US government. The US has experienced the phenomenon of printing money to bail out the banks in the Great Recession of 2008. As of September of this year, the Fed's balance sheet was $7.1 trillion. As of January 2008, the Fed's balance sheet was less than $1 trillion. That means that the Fed has printed money to the tune of over $6 trillion since 2008. Yet there has been no inflation in the US economy which is the danger a lot of economists had predicted from printing so much money.

The Federal Reserve bank can print US dollars just by a few keystrokes on a computer. Approximately $3.5 trillion was printed to bail out the banks during the Great Recession. Another $2.5 trillion has been printed so far to deal with the COVID pandemic. The question arises that, if the Fed can print money any time it wants, why can't there be Quantitative Easing (QE) for the people? In other words, if the Fed can bail out the banks, why can't it bail out the homeless, why can't it bail out the $4 trillion deficit in infrastructure spending, why can't it bail out the hungry and the poor? The answer is that it can do all those things, but this tool, QE, for that is what it is - a tool - should be used judiciously. It should be used to accomplish useful and necessary goals. It should not be used frivolously. It should be used in conjunction with other tools like tax policy. It should be used to promote a full employment economy and achieve socially useful goals.

Tax policy should be used to raise most of the money needed for government spending, and it should be used to redress the balance of the high amount of inequality in the American economy. Taxing the wealthy both in terms of income and wealth while giving tax breaks to the middle class and poor while implementing policies to help them build wealth is one of the major things US Federal tax policy should do. Additional money can be obtained by reducing the bloated military and military-industrial complex budget. If, however, there are additional goals that should be met like hastening the switch to renewable energy or a fuller safety net for the American people, then QE for the people should be implemented. The goal is to have a balanced and useful economy, one that promotes net zero carbon emissions, one that promotes sustainable development on other parts of the world, one that hastens the day when no child goes hungry or uneducated, one that reduces financial inequality.

It has already been demonstrated that deficits don't matter because the Great Recession of 2008 was quelled by the Fed's policy of printing money with no adverse effects on the economy. We have seen again the salubrious effects pf printing money or QE, if you want to call it that, during the COVID pandemic during which another $2.5 trillion has been printed so far. There is no reason why any country that has a sovereign currency like the US does cannot print money. Since the US dollar is the world's reserve currency, other countries and individuals are willing to buy up most if not all of US debt. But if they didn't buy up any of it, the Fed could still take it - or as much as necessary - on its balance sheet. In other words the fact that other countries are buying US debt means that the Fed doesn't have to print as much money. Any country with a sovereign currency can do the same even if their currency is not much in demand on world markets. Since the US dollar is used a lot in world trade, other countries need a supply of US dollars and are willing to buy US debt to get them.

There is no reason why any American should go hungry or be homeless or lack health care. Speaking of health care, Medicare for All would not eliminate private health care as some have suggested. Even with Medicare some doctors refuse to see patients because they don't like the reimbursement Medicare provides. There would be a private market for the wealthy who would just pay out of pocket to doctors who refused to accept Medicare patients. The wealthy don't even need health insurance. It could not be made illegal for such a market to exist. So even though everyone would have health care under a Medicare for All plan, the wealthy would still hire private and presumably better doctors at their own expense.

The policy of the Fed's buying US debt, which is equivalent to printing money, should be used wisely and the money not wasted.  QE for the people combined with the fact that deficits don't matter should lead to a more productive society providing that those additional tools and resources are used in a constructive way and not used to further militarize the society and the world. Any tool can be used for good or for ill. QE for the people could be used for a more healthy, beneficial and well balanced society for all people, could eliminate poverty in the US and the world, bring US infrastructure into the modern era and combat global warming and future pandemics.

Health Experts 'Stunned' as Trump Says He Will Resume In-Person Rallies While Infected With Covid-19

Published on Friday, October 09, 2020

by Common Dreams

Trump and White House officials have repeatedly refused to say whether the president has tested negative for the coronavirus since his diagnosis last week.

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

16 Comments

President Donald Trump greets a crowd during a campaign rally at Smith Reynolds Airport on September 8, 2020 in Winston Salem, North Carolina. The president also made a campaign stop in South Florida on Tuesday. (Photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

After refusing to say whether he has tested negative for Covid-19 since his diagnosis late last week, President Donald Trump told Sean Hannity of Fox News Thursday night that he is hoping to hold a pair of in-person rallies this coming weekend in the key battleground states of Florida and Pennsylvania despite the potential risk of spreading a virus that has now killed more than 212,000 Americans on his watch.

"I'll tell you, I took this Regeneron, it's phenomenal," Trump said, blowing past Hannity's question about whether he has recently tested negative for Covid-19. "Eli Lilly has something very comparable, it's phenomenal. It's a whole new day."

When asked later in the interview if he's had a coronavirus test since his diagnosis, Trump said, "Well, what we're doing is probably the test will be tomorrow, the actual test, because there's no reason to test all the time. But they found very little infection or virus, if any. I don't know that they found any—I didn't go into it greatly with the doctors."

Watch:

Amid ongoing questions about the president's condition following his release from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Monday, White House doctors and administration officials have repeatedly declined to say when Trump's last negative coronavirus test was, prompting concerns that the president is still contagious and poses a risk to others.

"I don't want to go backwards," White House physician Dr. Sean Conley said Monday when asked about the president's last negative test result. White House Deputy Press Secretary Brian Morgenstern told reporters that he doesn't know when the president last tested negative for the coronavirus and is not interested in finding out.

"We're not asking to go back through a bunch of records and look backwards," Morgenstern said, parroting Conley's line.

In a brief memo on Thursday, Conley—who has come under fire for evading reporters' questions and omitting crucial information during his briefings on the president's condition—wrote that "based on the trajectory of advanced diagnostics the team has been conducting," he believes Trump will be able to safely "return to public engagements" as early as Saturday.

 

But public health experts immediately voiced skepticism in response to Conley's proposed timeline. Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and visiting professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University's Milken School of Public Health, said she was "stunned" by Conley's claim that the president is nearly ready to return to public activities.

Saturday is "day 10, according to White House's own time course," Wen noted. "Patients with severe Covid-19 can be infectious for 20 days."

Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious-disease physician based in South Carolina, told the New York Times Thursday that while "everyone is going to have a different point of view," he would "err on the safe side, and keep [Trump] isolated for 20 days."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that "for most persons with Covid-19 illness, isolation and precautions can generally be discontinued 10 days after symptom onset and resolution of fever for at least 24 hours, without the use of fever-reducing medications, and with improvement of other symptoms." Based on the White House's public statements, it's unclear when Trump began showing coronavirus symptoms.

"This is bigger than him," Kuppalli said, alluding to the public health risks associated with the president resuming public events.

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Off the Top of My Head

There is No Such Thing as a National Solution to a Global Crisis

by John Lawrence, October 9, 2020

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation announced its 2020 Goalkeepers report with the above words. COVID-19 has killed more than 850,000 people worldwide. Every year until this one the world has made progress towards reducing poverty and disease. Notice the Gates foundation emphasis on the world as one coherent unified organism rather than just on US national boundaries. The pandemic knows no national boundaries. Until it's stamped out worldwide, the US is vulnerable. The foolishness of spending a trillion dollars a year on the US military which was powerless to do anything about the pandemic has been demonstrated. International cooperation is crucial to ending this pandemic, as well as others which are likely to follow, and reducing the conditions of poverty and disease in the world which breed war and terrorism. When will the US get its priorities straight?

The Goalkeepers report tracked 18 indicators included in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In recent years, the world has improved on every single one. This year, on the vast majority, we’ve regressed.There is also a worldwide recession that the military and military-industrial complex is powerless to do anything about. The US is not an island. Pandemics, global warming - these are problems affecting the whole world not just the US. Nations that have the resources need to assist other nations that don't have the resources. That means that the developed world has to help the developing world to combat these problems: disease, poverty, weaponization, global warming.

In 2015, 193 world leaders agreed to a series of 17 ambitious goals to end poverty, fight inequality, and stop climate change by 2030. The Global Goals are within our reach, but we must remain committed—embracing what works and addressing what doesn’t, while holding ourselves and others accountable. In 2016 President Trump dropped out of global cooperation with his America First policy. That has gotten the US nowhere. Whichever countries handle the pandemic intelligently are going to come out of the recession as world leaders. That won't be the US unless Joe Biden gets elected and is able to turn the shambles of Trump's response to the pandemic around.

The first and most important goal is ending poverty. Eradicating poverty is not a task of charity, it's an act of justice and the key to unlocking an enormous human potential. Still, nearly half of the world’s population lives in poverty, and lack of food and clean water is killing thousands every single day of the year. Together, we can feed the hungry, wipe out disease and give everyone in the world a chance to prosper and live a productive and rich life. The second goal is zero hunger. Hunger is the leading cause of death in the world. Our planet has provided us with tremendous resources, but unequal access and inefficient handling leaves millions of people malnourished. If we promote sustainable agriculture with modern technologies and fair distribution systems, we can sustain the whole world’s population and make sure that nobody will ever suffer from hunger again.

The third goal is good health and well-being. Over the last 15 years, the number of childhood deaths has been cut in half. This proves that it is possible to win the fight against almost every disease. Still, we are spending an astonishing amount of money and resources on treating illnesses that are surprisingly easy to prevent. The new goal for worldwide Good Health promotes healthy lifestyles, preventive measures and modern, efficient healthcare for everyone. The fourth goal is quality education. Education liberates the intellect, unlocks the imagination and is fundamental for self-respect. It is the key to prosperity and opens a world of opportunities, making it possible for each of us to contribute to a progressive, healthy society. Learning benefits every human being and should be available to all.

The fifth goal is gender equality. Gender bias is undermining our social fabric and devalues all of us. It is not just a human rights issue; it is a tremendous waste of the world’s human potential. By denying women equal rights, we deny half the population a chance to live life at its fullest. Political, economic and social equality for women will benefit all the world’s citizens. Together we can eradicate prejudice and work for equal rights and respect for all. The sixth goal is clean water and sanitation. This will require major infrastructure development. It's not rocket science. The techniques involved are well known in the developed world. One in three people live without sanitation. This is causing unnecessary disease and death. Although huge strides have been made with access to clean drinking water, lack of sanitation is undermining these advances. If we provide affordable equipment and education in hygiene practices, we can stop this senseless suffering and loss of life.

Actually I would put clean water and sanitation right up there with ending poverty. It would put an end to many of the diseases that occur in the underdeveloped world. The emphasis on healthy living and basic creature comforts needs to spearhead the use of resources worldwide. That means that developed nations have to give back to the underdeveloped ones instead of putting their further enjoyment and well being first which is the gist of America First. Global cooperation to combat global problems needs to take precedence over preparations for war and bullying other nations by the most powerful ones. The negligence and incompetence with which Trump has treated the COVID pandemic, the withdrawal of the US from universal institutions, almost assures that the US will assume a secondary status in the world unless the next administration can make up for the damage Trump has done and set us on a new and more constructive course.

'Telling All Working People...to Drop Dead': Trump Ended Covid Relief Talks After McConnell Said Republicans Wouldn't Vote for Deal

Published on Wednesday, October 07, 2020

by Common Dreams

"Trump is turning his back on you," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. "He doesn't care about workers and families. He only cares about himself."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

64 Comments

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) walks from the Senate floor to his office on Thursday, July 30, 2020. (Photo: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump's abrupt decision Tuesday to order a halt to coronavirus relief negotiations despite widespread and growing economic suffering, hunger, and a looming mass eviction crisis came after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly told the president that any compromise deal would likely be doomed to fail in the Republican-controlled chamber.

On a call with Trump shortly before he fired off a series of tweets announcing the end of stimulus talks, McConnell "suggested to Trump that [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi was stringing him along and no deal she cut with [Treasury Secretary Steve] Mnuchin would command broad GOP support to pass in the Senate," the Washington Post reported, citing two unnamed sources with knowledge of the conversation.

"We are looking at the potential of hunger in the United States exploding on a level that we have never seen since the Great Depression. And all of it is preventable. All of it."
—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

McConnell publicly voiced agreement with the president's instructions to push off stimulus negotiations until after next month's election and focus fully on confirming right-wing Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, despite polling showing that even a majority of Republican voters want the Senate to prioritize another aid package.

"I think his view was that they were not going to produce a result and we needed to concentrate on what's achievable," the Kentucky Republican told reporters Tuesday, just 24 hours after Trump departed Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after a brief stay for coronavirus treatment.

For months, in the face of increasingly dire economic circumstances and nationwide desperation, McConnell and his GOP allies in Congress have obstructed progress on an additional aid package, allowing relief programs approved by previous stimulus legislation to expire and abandoning tens of millions of jobless Americans to drastically reduced incomes.

Last week, as Common Dreams reported, not a single Republican representative voted for a $2.2 trillion compromise version of House Democrats' HEROES Act. McConnell has dismissed the House-passed legislation as a "political stunt" and refused to allow the bill to reach the Senate floor for a vote.

"They are telling all working people, no matter who we vote for or what state we live in, to drop dead," tweeted the Working Families Party.

In an interview on MSNBC Tuesday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) warned that "if the president and the GOP follow through with walking away from Covid relief, we are staring down the barrel at one of the largest mass eviction crises in this country since the Great Depression."

"We're looking at a potential second wave [of the coronavirus] that could be catastrophic," said Ocasio-Cortez. "We are looking at the potential of hunger in the United States exploding on a level that we have never seen since the Great Depression. And all of it is preventable. All of it."

Just hours after killing negotiations over a broad relief package that likely would have included aid to state and local governments, stimulus checks, and an extension of the lapsed federal unemployment insurance boost, Trump took to Twitter once more to advocate stand-alone bills to assist the airline industry and provide another round of direct $1,200 payments.

"If I am sent a Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200), they will go out to our great people IMMEDIATELY," the president tweeted. "I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?"

Following the president's earlier call for an end to relief negotiations, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—tweeted that "by walking away from the Covid package we just passed, Trump is turning his back on you—and on economic relief, expanded unemployment assistance, stimulus checks, eviction moratoriums, help for businesses."

"He doesn't care about workers and families," Jayapal added. "He only cares about himself."

Kyle Herrig, president of watchdog group Accountable.US, echoed Jayapal in a statement late Tuesday. "Economic experts and working Americans agree: the time for Congress to secure a new aid deal is now," said Herrig. "Unfortunately, President Trump and his Senate allies don't feel the same."

"While Trump and his friends in Congress prioritize Barrett's nomination over new coronavirus relief," Herrig continued, "American families and small businesses—and by extension, the nation's economy—continue to suffer."

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Off the Top of My Head

What's Wrong With This Picture: Essential Workers Depending on Food Handouts While Non-essential workers Paid Millions of Dollars

by John Lawrence

Are professional football players essential workers? I don't think so. Yet they are paid millions of dollars. Are agricultural workers essential workers? I think so. Yet they are standing in food lines. What's wrong with this picture? Essential workers are becoming homeless while non-essential workers are perusing their stock portfolios. 80,000 refugees in other parts of the world are homeless due to US wars in the Middle East. Yet the US spends a trillion dollars a year on its military and military-industrial complex. All this money did absolutely nothing to defend the American people from the coronavirus. Our priorities are absolutely distorted. Wildfires and hurricanes devastate parts of the US. Yet the President denies global warming. Trump holds a COVID super spreader event that has infected at least 18 people at this writing. Yet all he can think about is demonstrating his machoism in conquering the virus. But he's still not out of the woods, and the average American does not have the benefit of the "compassionate usage" of the drugs Trump had access to.

Trump's supporters, the WPP, (White Peoples Party) are a bunch of good ol' boys who drive around in pickup trucks with a gun rack, drinking beer, listening to WPM (White Peoples Music - Country & Western), and throwing the empty cans out the window. Some of the more environmentally conscious like those in liberal Austen, TX, throw their empty beer cans in a litter bag. Trump appeals to his base by trying to appear to be strong and macho. His party is the party of machoism. He is so strong that a little virus cannot defeat him. Yet 210,000 people have died from COVID. Were they all weak? Is it better then that they are no longer with us. Will the virus cull the herd of weak people leaving only the master race? Maybe they should change the name "compassionate use" to "strong stuff for strong people." Compassion has nothing to do with it.

Are we reevaluating what is important in American life? Some people are. They are thinking essential workers should be paid more than inessential workers. Otherwise, we are living in a semi-slave state. Here's what's essential: food, housing, medical care, transportation, education, the internet. Here are the essential workers: agricultural workers, house builders, doctors and nurses, caregivers, drivers and teachers. Here's what's inessential: professional and college sports, amusement parks, movie theaters, bars, cruises, music festivals. Entertainment including movies is available over the internet and is piped into all homes that have a TV and internet service. Beer is available in stores and can be drunk at home. Food can be eaten at home. Restaurants are inessential. It comes down to values. Living more simply and less luxuriously means that resources are freed up to provide homes for the homeless, food for those who are food insecure, good infrastructure replacing fossil fuel energy with renewable energy, proper sanitation for the 2.5 billion in the world that don't have it, repatriotizing refugees.

It's no longer commendable to think narrowly just in terms of what is good for America or Americans. COVID is a pandemic that affects the whole world. It does not recognize national borders. Global warming is a phenomenon that affects the whole world. It doesn't just go on a country by country basis. It becomes of paramount importance that the nations of the world cooperate and not dwell on the petty grievances they have with each other. They are quiveling over trivial matters when the fate of the world and human civilization is at stake. A change of heart, a change of lifestyle, a change of values is necessary so that people can eventually live in peace and harmony with a reasonable amount of creature comforts wherever they live in the world. Think globally, not nationally.