Trump’s government believes in free-market “capitalism”, as do the leaders from both political parties. It is a system that taxes the bottom to fund the top. They are dragging their ideological feet to protect and defend that system, their system, of “small” government, for the public.
Some corporations are stepping up, they say, in an attempt to prove they serve the public. They are working with desperate governors bidding against each other for scarce medical supplies. It’s a sad spectacle of free-market failure to adequately serve the public, during this emergency.
Most state governments have decreed a quarantine, shutting down businesses and telling people to stay home. They must now sacrifice their economies to minimize the exponentially increasing death from the virus. We must “flatten the curve”, they say “anyway we can”.
“Stay in your homes, and remember, we’re all in this together.”
Yet, the markets continue to hyperventilate money for Wall Street traders while the Main Street workers, the real taxpayers, go home and wait for public assistance. The result will be massive economic division.
Extreme Inequality is a military tactic intended to divide & conquer.
Intentional or not, the virus, and our reaction to it, is a battle between two economies, I will call it Wall Street versus Main Street.
Denial on Wall Street vs Devastation on Main Street
The local family businesses on Main Street who can’t afford to survive this shutdown will be replaced with shareholder franchises.
Main Street gets shutdown and withers away on welfare checks until Wall Street swoops in and replaces them with the money that they “made” from the taxpayer bailouts. Great plan!
Wall Street buys Main Street with taxpayer money.
The Coronavirus will be a death blow to Main Street, much like the digital revolution was and the rise of Amazon and Google. Wall Street and the electronic economy will continue to thrive as an untaxed lobby effort for themselves while Main Street dies.
Wall Street vs Main Street
The establishment is invested more in Wall Street than it is in Main Street. That’s the problem. The result is a government by corporate rule that rips off the taxpayers every chance they get.
Apparently, the Coronavirus will be no exception.
Bailing out investors in the same bill as Coronavirus relief is a cover story for the extraction scam. It’s business as usual on Wall Street, except now they get to work from the comforts of home.
Wall Street loses a few dollars on paper, temporarily.
Alternatively, mandating a Main Street shutdown could actually cause an economic catastrophe for workers and small businesses, who won’t recover, despite public assistance.
Destroying Main Street for Wall Street will allow global corporations to dictate public policy to desperate local governments who need money for their economies.
If the scam succeeds, and it already has, communities will be starved into compliance and extracted for investor profits, funneling local money to global pools of private capital.
The public needs that money to build a massive infrastructure for a better health industry. It should be funded as a priority to accommodate those who need it, now and into the future.
The ability of our government to handle this crisis, or not, will determine if their priorities have been correct, or not, and we already know they weren’t. So now we can see again that those who have been advocating smaller government, while extracting its wealth are, and have been, wrong.
The establishment continues to be wrong. They will borrow trillions of dollars more, or create it, in order to transact this crisis in a free-market, for-profit, manner while pretending taxes and socialism is what we should be afraid of, fear, and prevent.
And people believe them, apparently.
The government should temporarily but immediately nationalize every company necessary to combat this disaster as fast as possible. They should conscript all relevant talent and spend all the money necessary to provide disaster relief to everybody, and then send the invoice to Wall Street.
Market activities should be suspended for the duration of this crisis. Relief assistance should be given to healthcare workers, patients, hospitals, and states, and small business. It should not go to shareholders.
The markets should be recognized as the reason that governments were not prepared for this global pandemic in the first place. Markets deprive the public of money by corrupting elected officials to favor investors.
The predatory and extractive business model of Wall Street, and its influence over our government keeps the public broke and necessary political and economic reforms impossible.
Corporate government has no profit incentive to prepare for an emergency. That’s why we were not prepared. That’s why it’s important to have a government that serves the common good and not the money.
Now, we might have a depression and a deadly virus to to deal with at the same time, which would likely make both problems much worse for Main Street, but oddly enough, not for Wall Street.
Memo to The Street: We are not all in this together.
Despite a global pandemic, the taxpayer extraction scam will continue to profit Wall Street investors. It’s the golden goose that keeps on giving. The cycle of bailing out investor bubbles for fraudulent profits just keeps getting bigger and bigger. It must be protected at all costs, they believe.
The establishment will profit from $500 billion in “relief”, leveraged to $4.5 trillion, to secure their over-speculated investments. As a result, market indices are already rising faster than infection rates.
Comparatively, the $350 billion loan program for small business is stalled because, unlike the hi-tech Wall Street “system”, the underfunded Main Street “system” crashed. It can’t handle massive capital injections like the Wall Street system can. Surprise, surprise.
Our “system” was designed to prey on Main Street, not protect it. We are farming wealth from workers to profit investors. Our current economic division was caused by decades of reckless and irrational exuberance retroactively insured by the taxpayers, aka bailouts.
The Coronavirus was brought to you by globalism, under the banner of market capitalism, free trade, and corporate welfare. It is the corporate culture itself, and the religion of meritocracy and feudalistic royalty, that is to blame for this crisis.
Public vs Private
All of the industries of this system, that made the speed of this global pandemic possible, are to blame. And now they need more taxpayer money to survive, as usual. That’s how this “capitalist” system works.
For instance, despite facilitating this global pandemic, and causing climate change, the airlines industry now needs money to prevent their stocks from tanking. They need the taxpayers to insure their gains so they can afford to get back to vacation, which they will, just as soon as this quarantine is over.
And to condition corporate welfare bailouts on limiting stock buybacks and executive compensation is offensively benign. It’s like telling bank robbers the inspector will regulate how they spend the money that they keep stealing from the bank, aka the taxpayers.
Tell me how socializing investor losses helps combat a global pandemic and why it should be included in the coronavirus relief bill, if you can.
They call that pork, don’t they? The market rises on pork. Your capital gains come from taxpayer funded corporate welfare pork. aka socialism.
Everything is coming up socialism now. Because of the virus, everybody gets a bailout. The government can borrow an endless supply of money to pay interest on. What choice do they have?
The taxpayers can borrow as much money as they need to preserve capitalism, apparently, despite the debt services the uninvested taxpayers will have to pay to their investors, the lender class.
Just don’t raise their taxes, they say, and the public can borrow as much money as they want. There’s no debt ceiling and rates are so low.
Nobody can think of an alternative, apparently.
Bernie’s radical ideas of providing healthcare to everybody seem inescapably prudent at this point. We are quite likely to soon have a subculture of contagious dependents in constant need of assistance.
We need to train doctors and build hospitals for health’s sake, not for private profits but for public health. The time to transition to a health based economy has always been, right now.
It’s the lack of an adequate healthcare system that makes it necessary now for the military to provide emergency hospitals to defend the public from this invasion. That should be seen for what it is, a “system” failure.