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We plan to be back in our apartment by next weekend, as soon as the decorators are finished.
The low-information, low-IQ ICPs (Intellectually Challenged Persons — I have been told I should come up with a more graceful way of referring to them than “idiots,” which is my preference) who are taking to the streets demanding that someone somewhere throw a switch and start the economy running like it used to, have not looked over their shoulders. The economy they walked out of just a few weeks ago isn’t there any more.
With nearly half of all American workers in serious trouble the first week of May — having severe difficulty paying rent, mortgages, credit-card and other debt, auto loans, health care and even food — the pain is only beginning. With the unemployment insurance systems overwhelmed, the first wave of a tsunami of state and local government layoffs is just now beginning.
A large number of the small private businesses closed by the coronavirus lockdown will never be able to reopen, and many of those that do will not be able to stay open because their customers have been impoverished and will be greatly reduced in number by “social distancing.” Can you imagine any restaurant surviving at 25% capacity, which some states are planning on mandating?
And it’s not just small businesses. The American oil industry has crashed, and is burning, and there is no way to put it back together. The automobile industry is just about finished. The American stock asylum, having overshot the cliff, has just about exhausted its Wile E. Coyote dance over thin air and will soon be a small grease spot on the canyon floor. The agriculture industry has gone from bad to unbelievable to “holy shit” in the past few years.
Nor will state and local government services, just now beginning to go down, be restored anytime soon. It is not well appreciated that state and local governments are legally prohibited from running deficits. The money they have spent to meet the crisis of the pandemic, unless replenished by the federal government’s magic money wand (which is itself running out of magic), will come out of the government’s budget, and the people’s hide. Services such as law enforcement, garbage collection, road maintenance, water and sewage treatment, firefighting and the like are going to deteriorate drastically this summer and are not likely to recover for years.
Nearly half of all Americans were living paycheck-to-paycheck before the coronavirus hit, and now many of them have missed two paychecks. The billionaire politicians and millionaire TV pundits have no clue about the level of misery that existed in the typical American home before the pandemic, and no clue that it has now gone from unbelievable to unbearable.
One-time $1200 checks are the equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s portions of cake. Or of sending firefighters out to meet a wildfire with tablespoons of water. Tax breaks are the equivalent of giving a stage-four lung-cancer patient a bandaid. Where’s he going to put it?
We are not going to bounce back. There may be a bounce, but it will be what students of stock market crashes call a “dead cat bounce” — a brief uptick before another plunge. Far from V-shaped, as the Trumpists and other ICPs insist, it will far more likely be staircase-shaped, and the bottom is a long way down.
Brace for impact.
Agree.
The federal government is beginning the process of nationalizing the oil industry — after all, we need to keep the trucks running. Ask Alice Friedemann (energyskeptic.com)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-briefed-on-emergency-aid-for-oil-industry/ar-BB13oaGR
If there is a recovery in the economy at all it may be in a sector that will not show up in metrics; the home economy. A run on flour, fabric, seeds and probably other raw materials shows that people are producing at home, baking, sewing and growing. It is the ultimate in re-localization and is a sign of existing and perhaps growing resilience. The vegetable starts my wife is selling at the end of our driveway are going quickly, people are even buying chives ferchrisake! Meanwhile a bunch of old fishnets I dragged off the foreshore as garbage removal are being grabbed up (free), once I recognized them as a resource, by those who plan to grow beans and peas. It gives me hope.
The economy they walked out of just a few weeks ago isn’t there any more.
You are the idiot here pal. They were THROWN out by the WHO drones and parasites advocating mass collective punishment by means of enforced bloody house arrest, to overcome another Corina Virus much like the other CV’s out there such as the common bloody cold and seasonal influenza.
Don’t be such a smug little smarty-pants self appointed internet intellectual, full of school yard Schadenfreude.
Goodbye, Davebee.
And don’t let the door hit you on the way out!
Our government had all the information it needed – China and Italy. Magic crystal ball into the future, but they ignored it. If they had shut down for two weeks a month earlier, we could probably have traced and contained the cases. The pain would have been far, far less.
Of course the economy had problems anyway, and we were already in a gradual slowdown, but it would have given state and local governments time to plan. And we could have avoided losing hundreds of health care professionals and tens of thousands of Grandmas and Grandpas.
The lack of federal leadership is just a given now. The only tool states really have is their National Guards. They can be mobilized without much additional cost. Why they are not out keeping the food system going is beyond me.
Most interesting use of a National Guard so far — Maryland is using theirs to protect a shipment of COVID-19 tests from seizure BT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. Hope they’re not holding it at Fort Sumter.
Perhaps Fort McHenry. But the Feds would have to fight their way thru southwest Baltimore to get at those supplies – a daunting challenge for even the best prepared force.
On a lighter note, CNBC carries the following headline, “Stocks close lower on Amazon outlook, trade worries”… They’re shitting me, right?
We get tribal very quickly. If, theoretically, NH officials tried to seize food from farms in our area, they would have a fight on their hands.
Agree in principle. The stresses and strains (which I don’t mean to diminish by invoking euphemisms) we’re all currently experiencing represent a fundamental transformation into a new regime. There will be no going back. However, I would make two points. First, the viral pandemic was a trigger for a major reset that was already coming. It’s the equivalent of saying Trump is a symptom, not a cause. The speed with which everything changed is astounding, but that is also part of an historical pattern, usually associated with acts of god and wars fought in the streets at home. Second, the view from the top of the metaphorical stairs seems clear, but it is only a wide survey and lacks the grainy details. Further, that view right now is more like an initial damage assessment, but the bombardment is not yet over. Better yet, since the crisis is ongoing, maybe it’s more like triage where systems are overwhelmed and losses must be accepted. What comes next is not at all clear. But again, there is no going back.
How well we manage the transition to whatever comes next is largely unknown. Americans have demonstrated a canny ability to pull together in crisis, but our belligerent character may well turn all those defensive weapons in the hands of the populace into offensive ones as conditions deteriorate. The two certainties I sense are that (1) our elected leadership is fundamentally unable to lead effectively through the crisis and (2) whatever objectives those leaders (or the corporate state) have are not the way things will turn out.
Very well put. The “Through The Looking Glass” nature of our politics over the last five years should put paid to any idea that our senile elite will do anything other than exacerbate the cascading crises we are now starting to face.
I tell my friends “your friend can kill you”. A lady getting on a NY city bus coughed onto the drivers face. The driver DIED! Enough said.
Arnie A.
“ Enough said.”
Amen to that, Arnie.
You nailed it, Tom. It should be self evident, but somehow isn’t for a majority of folks. The advent of technical gadgetry seems to have lowered IQ across the board. Each succeeding generation is less capable of analytical thought; a nation of TV and smartphone morons.
Larry Hogan’s defiance of the federalles interests me. The adage ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ might better be applied to Maryland. The British found this out in 1814. After trashing Washington DC, they had their asses handed to them at the battles of North Point and Fort McHenry. Half a century later, Lee’s army was given a similar welcome at Antietam Creek – the real turning point of the civil war…Hogan displays a like defiance of the administration, and he’s a Republican!
To the north, Gov. Cuomo issued what I consider to be a veiled threat to the boys in DC. After McConnell’s ‘let the states eat bankruptcy’ comment, Cuomo angrily retorted words to the effect that, New York pays far more in federal taxes than it receives back in goods and services, while Kentucky remains a receiver state. “The stock market will crash!” Cuomo bellowed. Could the Governor be hinting that New York would reroute ALL federal taxes (including withholding taxes) to state coffers should the Feds decide to ignore the funding needs of the states… particularly the ‘blue’ states? And what about New York’s financial centers, ports and aircraft hubs, internet and communications centers, corporate headquarters, cultural and educational institutions; not to mention vast tracts of arable land, water, timber and mineral resources. And, at least by American standards, a large, educated and hardworking population…Will these massive assets be held over the head of the nation should Washington not blink? Might Cuomo and his nascent coalition of Northeastern governors have such machinations in mind? And at what point does federalism become rebellion?
Truly the implications of the nation’s current array of predicaments beggar the imagination
“Truly the implications of the nation’s current array of predicaments beggar the imagination.”
Agree.
The Battle of Anietam was … “the real turning point in the civil war …”
Disagree.
Of course, there’s plenty of room for disagreement. But consider the political equation: Until the Maryland Campaign, the Confederate Army had wisely avoided incursions into Union territory. However, Lee believed that, as a slave state, Maryland would lend popular support to the Southern cause. But the sight of thousands of ragtag Confederate soldiers trampling through the bucolic Maryland countryside produced the opposite effect on the populous. In Maryland, as throughout the Union, Lee’s invasion only reignited what had been a flagging support for the North’s war effort. Lee’s failure became Lincoln’s success; the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, and support for the President soared. For the South, the writing was on the wall: tentative British support for the Confederacy melted and the myth of the invincibility of Lee – shattered.
One can only assume that Lee’s deja vu invasion of Pennsylvania only a year latter gave evidence of his deteriorating mental and emotional health. As they say, insanity is making the same mistake twice.
Hey, guys? Relevance?
Simply this: not since the Civil War has America been so divided, it’s economic, social and political order so threatened, and the rights and responsibilities of the States visa-vie the Federal Government so poorly defined. I won’t speak for Max, but I’m not the first to notice the parallels.
Many thanks for your patience.
I have predicted disaster since 2005 and been wrong so long that I am not confident in what I know to be true. Things have been so nice and quiet as I have been out of work for the last 7 weeks. I start back tomorrow, but I can imagine a sudden fear as the meat section empties and then “poof” next week nothing being available–no cans of beans or soup, no flour, no chicken and then suddenly like the USSR or Venezuela-lines for everything and nothing available…. The mayor will announce where the bread lines are. I have provisions for 3-4 months and don’t need a job but feel we are skating close to the edge…
Tom Lewis- I am in the middle of Dave Gibbs’s “Planet of the Humans”.
I thought I’d come over and see if you have seen it. It’s captivating, and pretty grim.
There’s some thought that Moore’s documentary is not based on a rational reconnoitering of the facts: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/michael-moores-green-energy-takedown-worse-than-netflixs-goop-series/
That review was useless. But maybe the different parties are focusing on different things.
The review says the solar panels produce much more energy over its lifetime than used to create the panels. OK, but if you need fossil fuels to produce the panels (not disputed in the review), it’s not an important fact.
For solar panels to work as a long term solution, they have to be produced with no (maybe a tiny bit of) fossil fuels. The same goes for nuclear and wind. The review admits that the solar array in the documentary went kaput within 30 years. It’s about surplus energy available to society–not mentioned here.