Washington simply has no clue how bad it is

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Granted, they don't care about working class people either.
And that's a big part of the reason why they don't have any idea what is actually going on with 50% of the nation.
But it's important to understand that they live in a completely seperate world from you and I.
Even Wall Street wants more money for Main Street, yet conservatives simply are unable to do what is right for the country.

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Weaker spending data could quickly evolve into industry-wide fallout if Congress doesn't prop up consumers, Jim Millstein, co-chairman of Guggenheim Securities, said Thursday.

"If those folks do not have continuing support, we're going to see a spike in delinquencies and defaults in consumer credit, and that will have some contagion effects across the banking system and across the variety of financial institutions who've supplied that credit," Millstein said on Bloomberg TV.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

So, if they won't do what WALL STREET is now telling them to do...who the fuck are they left serving?!?

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20 users have voted.

In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat
The Ghost of Ronald Reagan, I guess.

As society begins to fall apart we can finally see that the conservative neoliberalism was a religion.
Strike that.
Conservative neoliberalism was a death cult.

Above all else, the government could not be allowed to come in and save us from disaster. Because that would undermine the fundamental premise of neoliberalism - that the government is always the problem (even when it obviously isn't).
If the only other option is societal collapse, then that is the price that must be paid.

It's sort of like how "socialism always fails" because capitalism cannot allow it to succeed anywhere. And there is no limit on the number of innocents that must die in order to protect the myth of capitalism.

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mimi's picture

@gjohnsit
because people sleep on the beach, in the woods and couch surf all the time, when they can't pay the rent anymore. I am guessing here, but I think the number given doesn't reflect the real picture of how poor people survive there. They share. Something rare among the richer folks.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

@gjohnsit

...is to protect the People from experiencing the "Moral Hazard" of free rent, debt forgiveness, or subsidized income during a global financial crisis.

The receipt of such "Moral Hazards" would corrupt the middle class and working class, they say.

I presume they reached this conclusion by observing the blatant corruption among the corporate class and their financiers, who are the chief recipients of such notorious "Moral Hazards" as tax breaks, accounting loopholes, cheap borrowing, loan forgiveness, and exemption from criminal prosecution.

The yearly bloom of instant millionaires and billionaires in Congress are merely a subset of this unfortunate "Moral Hazard" suffered by the monied classes.

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20 users have voted.

____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
mimi's picture

@The Liberal Moonbat

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wendy davis's picture

Even Wall Street wants more money for Main Street, yet conservatives simply are unable to do what is right for the country.

shouldn't it read: 'extensive', not 'expensive'?

dunno about your conservatives framing, but dig it:

The Fed’s Emergency Loan Operations to Wall Street’s Trading Firms Began on September 17, 2019 – Months Before the Coronavirus COVID-19 Had Emerged in China or Anywhere Else in the World. That Strongly Suggests to Us that Wall Street Banks Had a Serious Problem Independent of the Virus Outbreak. Mainstream Media Refused to Cover this Story in any Depth, Leaving the Heavy Lifting to Wall Street On Parade, Which Has Since that Time Written More than Ten Dozen Articles Chronicling this Fed Bailout.

pam and russ martens, WS on parade

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19 users have voted.

@wendy davis Crap loans and overall debt got to the levels that gave us The Great Recession. The solution in 2008-9 was more Federal debt; the solution as of last year was more Federal debt; the solution as of March, 2020, was more Federal debt; and the Congress is now "debating" how much more Federal debt to accrue to keep the inevitable housing catastrophe from happening.

The best "conservative" argument in support of letting the $600 stipend expire (or be slashed to a lower level) is that all it would do is postpone, worsen and lengthen the housing crisis when it comes. I could respect that stoic attitude if they would apply it to the banks and corporations who own our Congress.

Of course they won't and I have no respect for these bags of scum in the Congress and on Wall Street.

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22 users have voted.

I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.

thanatokephaloides's picture

@fire with fire

The solution in 2008-9 was more Federal debt; the solution as of last year was more Federal debt; the solution as of March, 2020, was more Federal debt; and the Congress is now "debating" how much more Federal debt to accrue to keep the inevitable housing catastrophe from happening.

And not a dime of all that borrowed money going to the one group of Americans who could preclude the inevitable housing catastrophe and other such systemic failures: ordinary working-class people.

Bad

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

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9 users have voted.

I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

And are forced to ask for aid for the Wee People as they understand it is in their own interests. In a simple reading of the Russian and French revolutions, it appeared that both the Czar and King were willing to accept a British style constitutional monarchy as in England. However, conservative forces including their spouses refused any conditions on their absolute rule and won the day. We know the ending to that story.

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TheOtherMaven's picture

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14 users have voted.

There is no justice. There can be no peace.

They just want us to get more money so that they can take it all. No one can pay their mortgage any more? That's fine - if Uncle Sam will pay their mortgage for us. It's just admitting I was right on UBI - it's just pretending to be money for us, it's really money for them.

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9 users have voted.

On to Biden since 1973

Sonoma County dear leaders have made so much progress they are expert at evicting homeless people, forget renters and homeowners! sheesh The headlines around here read like constant Lucy yanking the football so Charlie Brown lands flat on his back. Every. Single. Time. This is what blue voting brought on after all these years. Stinking rich land owners and unsanitary obamavilles. just great

Santa Rosa plans to evict sprawling homeless encampment in Fremont Park

[...]
“I don’t want to be waking up to some garbage,” said the man, a 30-something, unemployed construction worker in a white tank top. “That’s why I pick up.”

The man lived with his wife in a lean-to in the middle of the park. He’d been there since the beginning of July, when he was evicted from his lodgings in Guerneville.

“We don’t want publicity,” said the man, when asked for his name. “We don’t want our pictures taken. We just want to be left alone. We don’t come around taking pictures of you in your brick houses,” he said, employing a metaphor from a children’s story, “so don’t come around trying to blow down our straw houses, you know?”

Can you hear me now, Buttegeig? lol I just realized the other fake choice can't say Vote Red can they? try it

There have been plenty of building permits issued to dig wine caves, but next to none for affordable housing it seems. duh No landlord is ever going to take less income when the bankers hold all the nuts, so it is cheaper on paper for 3 bedroom houses and luxury apartments to sit around empty then it is to house the human detritus these industries produce. Cloverdale is still building luxury apartments while the working poor go hungry and homeless, and empty houses sit for sale. I welcome any change at this point. Not Biden.

peace and love

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@eyo 40,000, 50,000, who knows how many thousands of Empty luxury condos sit in the middle of the City that has 50,000+ homeless people.

From my window I can see cranes adding more New soon-to-be-unsold condos to the skyline.

Apparently the money to be made on these new structures is on the front end. Construction loans from the bank, where a portion of the money is used to erect the new building and the rest goes into the developers pocket.

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9 users have voted.

NYCVG

Their raps are interesting as they pretty well define the edge of the Main Stream. Both are bright rather than glib and they are bold enough to deal with contradictions and ambiguity in a straightforward way. You won't hear anything from them about how the votes aren't counted accurately or that the Red and Blue Players on TV are not really trying to put each other in jail. But within the confines of The Game of Politics, their program is often very interesting and they come up with significant insights.

I have a slightly different take on their idea that the Republican politicians who are now publicly trying to block the extension of the $600 stipend out of ideology. But I cannot dismiss their point out of hand at all. I have seen the calcification of Neoliberalism into dogma over the course of my lifetime, and I am sure that most GOP office holders in their youth were campus ideologues stereotypically in love with Ayn Rand. That factor might be the biggest one at work now.

My quibble is with the term "ideology" which implies a kind of idealism. The business and political figures that I have encountered over the four decades of my professional life do not tend to be ideologues. They consider themselves "realists." And realism to them encompasses both fidelity to free market theory and a cold blooded assessment of what it takes to Get Ahead. That is what is so much fun for them to read Rand's shitty books -- Getting Ahead is not just selfishness, it is Virtue Itself. What a happy foolosophy.

I found Sagaar's account of how to Get Ahead in the political journalism and advocacy game to be spot on.

Sitting where they sit, these two rather simpatico Talking Heads cannot suggest ideas like neither party cares about their side winning. You saw the Democrats lying down and dying for the GOP from the Inauguration of Barack Obama to today. Just as the villains in wrestling have to win some of the time, the Parties now take turns being the National Punching Bag.

Trump is now on track to lose -- and he will take 1000% of the blame for everything fucked up in this country along with him into exile. The Dems will sweep the "election" and get to work on dealing with the crises that Goldstein, I mean Trump, left them.

All the money will be gone. Digging out from the Goldstein Hole will require national sacrifice and impose individual hardship. We will be told that any structural change is impossible and insane.

And then, the GOP will find a new leader who will rev up Trump's supporters. And the fraud of American Democracy will continue on its merry way, a beacon of Freedom to the world, restored to its grandeur -- except for the temporary setback caused by Goldstein.

If you work for The Hill, you can push the envelope, but you cannot say that the votes aren't counted accurately. It takes most of us another election cycle or two for the significance of "hacked" elections to sink in.

But the parties are not really fighting each other. Together they are keeping us under control.

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7 users have voted.

I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.

Cassiodorus's picture

From Naomi Klein's book:

That is how the shock doctrine works: the original disaster – the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane – puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies much as the blaring music and blows in the torture cells soften up prisoners. Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect. (17)

They've pulled this sort of thing in all sorts of places, and Klein's book is full of examples. As for Wall Street right now, Wall Street is "objecting" to protect itself. They actually like this situation -- Congress gives them everything they want under cover of crisis, and they can keep the working class nice and subservient while they continue to demand money from everyone and everything, money which doesn't exist (at least not just yet) but which they can eventually collect when the imagined "recovery" comes through.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

@Cassiodorus describes what happens after a tremendous, but temporary event.

We are in the Shock Part, or if not now, soon will be if massive evictions take place and the Unemployment Insurance is cut and jobs and businesses remain closed.

If this homelessness and joblessness transition from a temporary state to a permanent state.....

My imagination fails me.

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5 users have voted.

NYCVG

OzoneTom's picture

@NYCVG
The incipient collapse of the larger portion of our unequal economy could easily trigger widespread unrest -- with so many illusions being shattered at once.

It could get pretty ugly. Will even the oligarchs be safe? If they flee, where to? All of the autocrats they have been propping up are either too puny and/or are prone to being toppled soon as well.

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