Royal Fuckup Perpetuated
In today’s New York Times opinion “page”, Paul krugman says:
This pandemic response is guided by a corrupt federal government whose only loyalty is to the corporatist oligarchy. If you aren’t somebody with money to buy influence by bribing the Trumpistas, your input to the government is nonexistent. This federal government is by the rich, of the rich, for the rich, in all three branches of government. The judiciary and executive branches are the most aligned with the corporatist oligarchy, helped by the traitor Moscow Mitch McConnell, emperor of the Senate. Virtually everyone in Congress has been bought and paid for by the American elites. They’re the ones running the country.
This country has been coopted by an un-American cabal of opportunists who are intent on destroying America, and instituting a right-wing theocracy in cahoots with the AntiAmerican collection of Devils advocates, the evangelicals. Talk about anti-democratic. They aren’t anything close to a majority, so the only way they can “win” is to engage in voter suppression and vote fraud. Is it surprising that almost every instance of vote fraud is perpetuated by right-wing voters? And that they’re never prosecuted by the “authorities”.
The coronavirus led to a plunge in output and employment. This plunge, however, was a feature, not a bug. As I’ve been saying for a while, we deliberately put the economy into the equivalent of a medically induced coma, suppressing activity to give ourselves a chance to get the pandemic under control.
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If we had stayed the course, this period of pain could have set the stage for a rapid recovery. But it was obvious early on that mishandling the situation — failing to stay the course on social distancing, failing to use the time to develop enough testing and contact tracing to gradually resume normal life while keeping a lid on new outbreaks — could extend the pain, turning a short, sharp recession into a prolonged depression, a long period of very high unemployment.
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Here’s how I described the nightmare scenario more than six weeks ago: “Over the next few weeks, many red states abandon social-distancing policies, while many individuals, taking their cues from Trump and Fox News, begin behaving irresponsibly. This leads, briefly, to some rise in employment.
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This pandemic response is guided by a corrupt federal government whose only loyalty is to the corporatist oligarchy. If you aren’t somebody with money to buy influence by bribing the Trumpistas, your input to the government is nonexistent. This federal government is by the rich, of the rich, for the rich, in all three branches of government. The judiciary and executive branches are the most aligned with the corporatist oligarchy, helped by the traitor Moscow Mitch McConnell, emperor of the Senate. Virtually everyone in Congress has been bought and paid for by the American elites. They’re the ones running the country.
This country has been coopted by an un-American cabal of opportunists who are intent on destroying America, and instituting a right-wing theocracy in cahoots with the AntiAmerican collection of Devils advocates, the evangelicals. Talk about anti-democratic. They aren’t anything close to a majority, so the only way they can “win” is to engage in voter suppression and vote fraud. Is it surprising that almost every instance of vote fraud is perpetuated by right-wing voters? And that they’re never prosecuted by the “authorities”.
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