I've never been much for New Years resolutions, let alone even celebrating the New Year. I did watch the ball drop on CNN in the faint hope it would shatter into a million harmless pieces before ever reaching the ground.
But I did plan on blogging this week, until whatever bug is going around hit me. Before taking sick, I'd actually broken my longstanding resolution to boycott the New York Times comment section.
Paul Krugman has essentially been writing the same column for months. . Over and over and over again he wonders why people are so damned pessimistic about the economy when everything is so great. You can't even call it gaslighting at this point. It's more like he's belching out massive overdoses of recycled laughing gas to his audience, since the bulk of the responses include such stock phrases as "Thank you, President Biden" or "You nailed it, Professor! " along with blaming the Republicans and only the Republicans for so nastily spreading false bad tidings and convincing happy people to be miserable.
Adding to the unintentional humor was the graphic photo appended to his "Is America on the Mend?" column:
Now, I think this is supposed to represent scaffolding. But to me it looks like Lady Liberty is trapped behind a maze of barbed wire, yearning to be free but not wanting to be impaled on material every bit as razor-sharp as the shattered Times Square disco ball of my imagination.
So I started out my published response with throwing one of Krugman's own lines right back at him.
"For if America’s resilience in the face of the pandemic shock has been remarkable, so has the pessimism of the public." Substitute "ruling class" for American resilience, and tens of millions of struggling, stressed-otd US residents for his "pessimistic public" and you've got yourself the class war in a nutshell. It's the entrenched, structural economic inequality wrought by a half-century of neoliberal capitalism. It's survival of the richest, or at least of the top 10 percent of what the late, great Barbara Ehrenreich dubbed the professional-managerial class. The well-off have never been better off. They're also living longer even as US life expectancy has plummeted to the lowest level in decades. The richest Americans added trillions to their composite wealth during the pandemic. Meanwhile, all the Covid-generated public assistance programs, which had actually cut the child poverty rate in half, have all ended. Tens of millions of people have been kicked off Medicaid, leading to record new rates of the uninsured. Emergency SNAP benefits, often to the tune of hundreds of extra dollars a month were suddenly yanked away from families even before Joe Biden prematurely declared an end to the public health emergency. Homelessness (surprise!) is way up. It is truly baffling to me why pundits are so baffled that people are not out there cheering in the streets for this wonderful economic recovery that's benefiting the precious few at the expense of the exploited many.
Surprisingly enough, the replies were highly positive, except for one guy lecutring me that Krugman's column was not about the class war. I was really expecting the reactions to be of the "Are you a Russian plant?" ripostes I was accustomed to, back when I was a more regular commenter./ So that's ecnouraging.
Meanwhile, my next resolution is to both watch and analyze Genocide Joe's campaign speech later today, in which he will unfavorably compare Donald Trump with George Washington. It was supposed to be given on January Sixth, the anniversary of the Capitol riot, which has supplanted September 11th as our most holy day of obligation. But since a snowstorm is forecast to interfere with the planned snowjob, he moved it up by one day/ This solemn anniversary is meant, I suppose, to take our minds off a genocide being perfromed right before our eyes.
I have a feeling I'm not the only one who believes that our so-called leaders and their apologists are completely, malevolently insane.
Keep all your excellent comments coming!
@ Karen: Yet another of my posts got "forbidden #403" - I'm assuming #403 is the category of infraction I violated. I do try to be careful what I write and often edit it to sound less belligerent but I seem to be failing lately.
ReplyDeleteThere are the upper 10-15% who think the economy is just dandy. And I reckon another 15% of the party faithful who believe whatever Democratic spokespeople like Kruggie, Friedie and whatever belches out of the Biden Whitehouse tells them to believe. I am amazed at how many of my friends fall into this category.
But the rest of the population . . . have a premonition - a sense - that our economy and with it, the world economy, is in BIG trouble. They may not be able to put their finger on it but they know, the party (that most of us weren't invited to) is coming to an end. I was reading somewhere (sorry, I can't give you a source) that while there is less and less money in circulation, it isn't circulating back to the government - meaning that people are hanging onto their cash. I also heard a podcast - and I'm pretty careful who I watch – again, no source (sorry!) - that it is getting harder and harder for people to lay their hands on silver eagles (99% silver coins used as collectibles) - which again means that more and more people don't trust the fiat currency. There is a lot of talk of CBDC’s which pretty much no one wants.
These are the things I hear people around me quietly talking about:
Housing is so unaffordable. Those who have jumped into the market have had to take on obscene debt that won't be easy to pay back.
Inflation of unavoidable expenses in people’s budgets keeps going up. Most people accept that they should be buying fewer clothes and taking fewer vacations, but food, electricity, car insurance, medical copays, etc seem to be hit hardest by inflation.
Wars are expensive and our government isn't even trying to hide the cost anymore and the Middle East is heating up. These Forever Wars must stop – yet they don’t.
There is never enough money to pay for government programs that benefit ordinary citizens and the few programs that do exist are always on the chopping block. They get nibbled away – little by little.
Our infrastructure is crumbling and not being maintained.
There is little job security.
More and more people around us seem to be struggling financially.
And our national debt, 34 trillion (34,000,000,000,000 ), is costing the taxpayers 2 billion (2,000,000,000 ) in interest A DAY.
. . . and the biggie - if we have another financial crash, China won't be there to bail us out.
While Australia, which pretty much dodged the Financial Crisis in 2008/2009, is more oblivious – people in the U.S. remember the lay-offs and the financial uncertainty of the Great Recession. I know people who lost their homes after valiantly fighting to keep paying their mortgages. I know people in their 40’s and 50’s who were laid off – never to find meaningful and secure employment with health benefits again. People know it can happen – and anyone with half a brain can see that the conditions are right for a shitstorm.
Hi Valerie,
ReplyDeleteU suspect that the Forbidden message is a browser issue and not a censorship issue. When Google "disappears" a comment they just do it quietly. If you continue having problems posting, just send me the comment in an email and I can paste it up from my end.
@Valerie
ReplyDeleteI recommend using the Firefox browser, a product of Mozilla, a nonprofit dedicated to internet privacy. It's the offspring of my favorite operating system and browser back in the day, Netscape/Netscape Navigator. That was before Microsoft came on the scene and stole the whole show - literally - and ruined everything for awhile.
After discovering Firefox existed and how it protects privacy, I've been using it ever since and have never had a problem. I downloaded it to my smartphone too. Just find the Firefox website online and download it for free. Easy peasy.
There's no need to disable or delete the default browser that comes with your operating system. After downloading you'll be asked if you want to make Firefox your default browser and just click yes. You can still manually open and use your old browser (Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc.) from the icon on your desktop.
Alternately, you can keep your old browser as the default and manually open Firefox by clicking on the icon. You can even go back and forth in separate tabs/windows at the same time. That's what I did the first time to transfer my bookmarks from Internet Explorer (or whatever it was called then) to Firefox.
Since then the first thing I do when I get a new device is download Firefox. I'm a true believer!
BTW, I try to never use Google for searches or anything else. No Chrome for me!
@Annanegma
ReplyDeleteI do use Firefox. Not because I know anything but because my husband downloaded it on my computer and recommended it. Honestly, I am not an unintelligent person but I really struggle with technology! I think the problem might be that I often leave a comment open and then come back to it to reread, refine or to add to it. I think I will do this in future on a word document and then cut and paste it into the comment box.
A tour de force from Valerie, thank you. I illegitimately give myself credit for helping to retrieve Valerie from the brink of quitting on us way back when. She seems to understand now that quitting isn't an option.
ReplyDeleteI'm old enough the remember the NYC financial emergency of the 70's (where I'm now) when buildings sold for a pittance. The wealth of many current New Yorkers was enhanced then. The wealthy, as a class with a ton of cash on hand, anticipate the collapse of the economy when the lower classes are forced to liquidate their assets for cash in order to survive. This is when the wealthy get to buy up what they don't already own, and at bargain prices. We're hearing about this already. I get a sleazy call a week offering cash for our apartment, divulging, from "investors". The proles that are spared the hardships are the enforcement of property services. I'd be surprised to see Kruggie bring this up.