I remember hearing about the BILLIONS of money that would be lost, when all these government employees would not get paid, and would not contribute their share to the local economy. And how were they going to SURVIVE, these poor people, many of whom made less than $100,000 a year, some of them even AFTER benefits? The horror. The horror.
Well, look at what our State governments are doing. Look at California in particular. If “shelter in place” (as you would do following a nuclear detonation in the fallout period) means what I think it does, not even the pizza delivery people are working.
Now, this affects the Information Workers, broadly speaking, much less than the service industry. Most InfoWo’s (not a great shortening, but I like it for that reason, InWo’s would work too) of them do whatever they do on a computer, and in principle they could do it from a beach in Bora Bora, if the internet were reliable and fast enough.
But if you get tips, if you manage people who get tips, if you handle customer service, then you are well and truly fucked. You may or may not get a check eventually, paid for with borrowed money which itself will create problems at some point, but you are fucked right now.
And it would, I think, be productive and useful to compare the hysteria over a one week government shut down, with the hysteria which is leading to the cessation of all public activity in spaces the size of California.
Both are driven by cynical, abusive, amoral, and frankly disgusting media outlets, pushing a political agenda which has nothing at all to do with the well being of ordinary Americans, which is not REALLY seeking to rectify any wrongs, fix any problems, or palliate and soothe any tears. They don’t give a flying fuck about the “people”. We are dogs to them. Ignorant morons. Rabble. Something to be used, like a whore or condom, then cast aside practically, if not rhetorically. Rhetorically, the story stays the same, and has across decades of failure and abuse.
Shutting down the government appeals to many of us. I argued for it at the time, I think, although I can’t claim fully recollection.
But shutting down the world outside of home computers: that is ridiculous.
I’ve been posting this elsewhere, and thought I had posted it here, but apparently not.
I thought about the comment Brad Pitt, as Ben Rickert, made in “The Big Short”, that every 1% increase in unemployment leads to another 40,000 deaths. I looked it up, and this actually seems to be in the range of the numbers most economists think most plausible, something between 30-40,000 deaths. Most of them from heart attacks brought on by unbearable misery and stress, some strokes from the same cause, some suicides, some homicides, and some drug and alcohol overdoses.
Here is a BBC bit where they discuss these numbers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03kpvk2?fbclid=IwAR3Rp_qIS7rew55ULcvF4yxvr5-5gZtjUfCwtvoFWFxGe8RPha5YCH2cTWo
Unemployment, according to substantially ALL studies, has terrible effects psychologically. It damages self esteem, breeds depression and substance abuse, and acts as a corrosive on families and communities.
So why are we doing this fucking experiment, in the face of something which only killed 10,000 people (maybe: I’m roughly doubling the official number) in China, a country of 1.5 BILLION? Normal demographic prediction would say they will lose 250,000 dead to the flu this year. If you figure 80% of the death happens between Dec. 1st and March 30th–which is a SWAG, but probably not too far off, since on all accounts flu is mainly a winter disease–then over those four months about 60,000 people are dying a month, or 15,000 a WEEK, or about 2,000 a DAY.
If you don’t think we are being played–by whom, how, and to what extent it is impossible of course to say–you are a fucking idiot.
But it has been obvious for some time that key power elites want Trump OUT, by any means necessary. If they didn’t invent or start the virus, they damn well intend to USE it to crash our economy. Self evidently, if it has a financial effect on them, it will mainly be to create opportunities. They would have been early sellers of stocks.
For that reason I have argued that this media blitz in favor of hysterical and extraordinarily unprecedented and completely unnecessary measures, should be seen as an extension of the same mindset, and the same methods, which were used to impeach Trump on the basis of a telephone call he released the transcript to, and with regard to a crime the presumptive Democrat nominee CLEARLY committed.
For anyone with half a brain, all you need to do is look at how many powerful and well placed people hate Trump, to understand that 1) he is not one of them; and 2) he represents an existential threat to them. This doesn’t tell you, exactly, who they are, but it does clearly tell you THAT they are, that they exist, that this guy is the one in a million shot we were blessed with to halt the descent of our nation into soft authoritarianism.