Category Archives: Economy

By The Numbers: The Biggest Losers From Covid-19

COVID-19, Economy, Healthcare, Labor, Populism

The Economist on “The biggest losers from covid-19,” by the numbers:

… death rate from covid-19 in the neighbourhood with the most essential workers was more than twice as high as in the one with the fewest. A study in California found that people of working age saw a 22% increase in mortality from March to October 2020. But bakers saw mortality rise by 50%, and line cooks by 60%. One class of people stayed home in their pyjamas; others went into workplaces that probably killed them.

“DURING THE pandemic one part of the workforce did not get to wear pyjamas during the day or join in marathon sessions of ‘Tiger King’. The people known as ‘key’, ‘frontline’ or ‘essential’ workers had to be in public spaces and often in close proximity with their colleagues. Many died. …”

“…Describing a worker as ‘key’ is an arbitrary exercise (the label covers most journalists, for example). It usually includes occupations necessary to meet everyone’s basic needs—food, heating and transport, not to mention health care. Most such jobs cannot be done from home….”

“…The pandemic has reminded key workers that without them society would grind to a halt. …”

“…A study in Toronto found that the death rate from covid-19 in the neighbourhood with the most essential workers was more than twice as high as in the one with the fewest. A study in California found that people of working age saw a 22% increase in mortality from March to October 2020. But bakers saw mortality rise by 50%, and line cooks by 60%. One class of people stayed home in their pyjamas; others went into workplaces that probably killed them.”

MORE…

*Image courtesy The Economist

NEW ON YOUTUBE: Deep Tech As Pirates In Competition With The State

Business, Capitalism, Economy, Free Speech, Race, Technology

NEW ON YOUTUBE: Deep Tech As Pirates In Competition With The State:

… In which I share a few leftover thoughts about Deep Tech or Big Tech, as pirates in competition with the state, wishing their woke leaders could commandeer the ship of state. Certainly, when Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon were growing up, they wanted to be government. Now they are!

Cryptocurrency’s Max Keiser Vs. Gold’s Peter Schiff

Argument, Debt, Democrats, Donald Trump, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Russia

I’ve never known what to make of the financial expert RT has stuck by, Max Keiser of the eponymous Keiser Report.

I had been more of a Peter Schiff gold devotee. Thing is, the devotion was not returned. Most of Schiff’s clients, especially the small fry, fared poorly over time and seldom or never heard from the money maestro (who himself is very wealthy; broker fees and all).

Schiff is still calling “Bitcoin the latest iteration of fool’s gold and anybody buying it [the] ultimate fool.” Keiser, the choice on the business page of RT (Russia Today), is a Bitcoin guy. Bitcoin is holding the value of assets and then some. Gold? It has been fractionalized (spelling?)—fractional reserve banking has bad connotations!—and manipulated by the brokerages.

Speaking of RT (which once published this writer’s weekly column): Republicans, like the Democrats, speak of that TV station as an arm of the Kremlin (presumably nothing like CNN or MSNBC or WaPo which are never an arm of the Democratic Party).

In truth, Trump conservatives never defended President Trump’s conciliatory position toward Russia and Vladimir Putin. Rather, Republican defense of Trump’s correct stance toward Russia consisted of bolstering his alleged anti-Putin credentials, and boasting that he was ACTUALLY tougher on Russia than the Dems. So weak. So dumb.

It’s never about principled argument with Republicans. In their narrow little minds, the American Empire is supposed to war with Russia. That Trump came to power opposing that position was no reason to reexamine their asinine assumptions.

Since they invariably always fall in-line with neocon and neoliberal foreign-policy orthodoxy—Republicans and conservatives only ever tried to nudge Donald Trump toward America’s wrongheaded, Russia monomania.

*Image courtesy of RT.

NEW COLUMN: Still Addicted To That Rush: Revisiting The ‘09 CPAC Speech

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Donald Trump, Economy, Neoconservatism, Republicans, The Establishment, War, Welfare

NEW COLUMN, “Still Addicted To That Rush: Revisiting The ‘09 CPAC Speech,” is now WND.COM and The Unz Review.

Excerpt:

Rush Limbaugh died on February the 17th. In the encomiums to conservatism’s radio king, mention was made of his 2009 address at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

CPAC for short, or CPUKE before Trump.

At the time, I had surveyed the perennial, Republican Party dynamics surrounding the event. “Addicted to that Rush,” the March 6, 2009 column’s title, came not from Rush’s brief addiction to painkillers, following surgery, but from an eponymous hit by the band Mr. Big. (It, in turn, came from an earlier time when the American music scene produced not pornographers like Cardi B, but musicians like Paul Gilbert and Billy Sheehan.)

Nevertheless, that title alluded to one of Rush’s missed opportunities: Speaking against a war into which he was involuntarily drafted and by which he was almost destroyed: The War on Drugs.

Still, how petty does that war, in all its depredations, seem now?! How unimaginably remote do the issues Rush spoke to, in 2009, seem in light of a country that has come a cropper in the course of one year, due to an unprecedented consolidation of state power around COVID, compounded by an amped up, institutionalized campaign against white America. And, in particular, against white Trump voters.

Other than champion tax cuts and globalization, the Rovian cadre of the GOP had been doing what it has always done: Calling for a more upbeat, inclusive and diverse party. Michael Steele, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, today an “analyst” for MSNBC, had derided Rush as a mere entertainer, describing “The Rush Limbaugh Show” as incendiary and ugly.

Then as now, Steele’s main concerns were not those of main-street Americans. Rather, Steele’s cares were “conciliatory.” The Rovians, like the Never Trumpers and the Lincoln-Project perverts, believed in the urgent need to broaden the Republican Party’s base and “appeal” to traditionally hostile minorities, when in fact the GOP had been courting traditional Democratic constituents with every trick possible, with little success, all the while sticking it to the base.

The Steele-Limbaugh spat fell into Barack Obama’s lap. The former president was losing it—throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the thing he called “the economy,” but which is really no more than the trillions upon trillions of voluntary, capitalistic acts individuals perform in order to make a living.

Introduce government force and coercion into this synchronized spontaneous order, and it starts to splutter. The economy responds poorly to economic planning and planners. BHO had imagined that he could walk on water. America facilitated his fantasy. The former president was realizing that he was not the magic man he imagined he was. Desperate times called for desperate distractions.

In short succession, Democratic henchmen—Paul Begala, Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Robert Gibbs—began picking on Limbaugh. Strong-armed too by the Obama administration was CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, who led a revolt from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange against the bailout billions for mortgage delinquents. Little wonder, then, that the contents of Limbaugh’s speech at CPAC garnered less attention than the characters involved.

Rush spoke stirringly. He railed against the enormous expansion of government in the first few, frightening weeks of the Obama presidency.

But, as I noted at the time, not a word did one hear against the man who began what Barack was just completing. George Bush set the scene for Barack. Stimulus, bailouts, a house for every Hispanic—these were Bush’s babies. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights had been abandoned well before the fist-bumping Obamas moved into the White House. …

…  As rousing as his speech was, not a word did Limbaugh devote to the Warfare State, every bit as corrupt, corrupting, and bankrupting as the Welfare State. As I observed, at the time, over $1 trillion was being spent yearly on imperial expeditions that were awash in American blood, but offered few benefits to the sacrificed, stateside and abroad.

Besides, I asked, “what kind of a nation neglects its own borders while defending to the death borders not its own?” …

… READ ON. NEW COLUMN, “Still Addicted To That Rush: Revisiting The ‘09 CPAC Speech,” is now WND.COM and The Unz Review.