War Wrings Ides of March, March, March, the Boyz 'R Tramping.

Although the US has invoked War as its simile for the fight against  a microbe, we have yet to ask ourselves precisely what that means.

Even as the virus was making its invisible deadly progression throughout the States, the US government's center of planning, The Pentagon, was still dutifully spending its Trump bonanza on Military World War-gaming US military prowess in the field. Unfortunately, that field was in Wuhan in October 2019. 

Likewise, even now, as China is still being blamed, it has occurred to no one that as recently as March 11, pundits and politicians alike, none more so than our illustrious President, were all downplaying the severity of this influenza: "It's just a cold", "Big deal it's only the flu", "2000 people were in car accidents in Florida this morning, and no one is saying we should stop driving" (well, actually LOTS of people are saying exactly that, we simply prefer to ignore them ... not to mention that we now have Safety Glass in automobiles specifically because precautions against a horribly painful and unnecessary death seemed to be indicated by the number of fatal crashes taking place. We have subsequently seen fit to provide autos with not only safety belts and airbags, but have a national campaign, one that is still ongoing thanks to MADD, to eliminate the perceived god-given right to drive while impaired by alcoholic intoxication. Every single one of these measures taken to combat a known threat to Americans' lives has been enormously successful in doing exactly that. And every single one of them was fought tooth and nail by the very industry it abetted as being too financially onerous, even for the spectacularly profitable Automotive industry, the most lucrative, outside of Defense contracting, on the planet).

Ergo the "It's all China's fault" is revealed for the absurdity it is, as exactly why China would take any action against a microbe that "is just a cold virus", or at most, "is no big deal; it's only the flu", is never explained.

You can't hold these two theories simultaneously: You can't blame China for not taking action against a virus going viral when the very people they would have been protecting, the West, held any action they themselves should take as being unnecessary for the simple fact that, despite the evidence to the contrary that was staring them in the face (Italy was by then a already a basket case), it was just the same virus that caused the common cold. Nothing to see here, even as the Chinese kept insisting that, "Yes, THERE IS!"

China had gone overboard to alert the world to what was going on, not just about the severity of the virulence, but the elevated number of bad outcomes and the collapse of a number of those taken ill ... they shut down the country, for god's sake. Yet the West maintained, right up until the first New Yorker took sick, its stony-faced denial of reality, clutching its tattered rag of implausible deniability to maintain its staunch stance of remaining as implacable and impenetrable to the truth as any totalitarian regime. 

That's what Disaster Capitalism does: waits until "INCOMING!" arrives and only then taking action, usually in the form of a power grab, justified by the fact that, "Nobody could have seen it coming".

So that now firms from Goldman Sachs to Boeing turn the phrase "I'm from the government and I'm here to help", that Reagan scoffed at so much, into "I'm from the private sector and I'm here to help myself to the tsunami of public monies that really belongs to me."

Thus the need to liken it to War, as War is the one enterprise in this anything-but-free enterprise system that you can depend on Americans to wholeheartedly, no questions asked as to who gets the cash or how it's to be spent, support and dutifully open their by-now-battered public purse for.

But like the argument  that China is to blame for not taking more strenuous action to contain a virus that the USA insisted even as its onset was upon it (who cares about old folks dying on the West coast? We're in NEW YORK CITY!) that "People die from the flu every year", so why would anyone take any precautions against its spread?, there is a major disconnect in following our usual paradigm of likening our response to it to War.

That disconnect being that the US mentality during the entirety of this century is that Wars are fought, not to win, but to keep the justification for the mind-boggling costs of maintaining our military industrial ... oh wait, we have now convinced ourselves that the economy is "Post-Industrial" ... so it's now basically just the burgeoning Military Complex (never figured that would happen, Ike, did you?) as we have rejiggered our economy to funnel its output into not only the endlessly rapacious construction of the armamentaria of nuclear Overkill, but into waging Forever Wars.

"We are not in the business of Nation building or reconstruction "

Yeah; no kidding.

The problem with all these Wars is that the USA has had bad outcomes in every one of them it has engaged in (OK, there was Reagan's Granada, Bush's Panama, Clinton's Kosovo, but I meant against a country that actually has the means to defend itself) since I was born in 1952. By then the Military Industrial Complex against which Ike warned us of at the end of his term (how convenient) was already firmly in place (a major part of which was the Interstate Highway System, a product of the DOD which came into being during Ike's tenure). To name a few, there was:

War on Poverty: abysmal failure. There are more homeless now than at any time in our country's history, while the economy is at "full employment", boasting a GDP in excess of $20 Trillion for a population of a mere 350 million in a world where the other 7 billion people on the planet must scrabble over the remaining $67 Trillion of global GDP (2019 total GDP was $87 Trillion); and then using a substantial part of that GDP to incarcerate more human beings than all the rest of the world's countries combined and spending trillions more on a coalition of the willing in the countries of our "enemies", while spending scant amount of attention or dollars on any planning or implementing of disaster relief/prevention in our own.

War on Drugs: Waged against the only drug affordable, even then, by the underclass, Marijuana. By classifying it, despite the fact that it never was nor ever will be, a narcotic, and spending an untold (literally) fortune on combating it, only to start funding farmers in the South to grow it, farmers who lost their tobacco subsidy (That's right, a deadly addictive drug that, all during the USA's War on Drugs, the US government was subsidizing; despite the fact that all those in the vicinity of smokers were being forced to inhale their toxic gases. The DEA has and continues in many states, been waging a War against a drug they have spent generations insisting is harmful, yet never proven such, all the while claiming, as it still does to this day, it has no medicinal effect, despite the tonnage of data documenting that such a stance is not only mean-spirited, but inaccurate). Then came the self-inflicted opioid epidemic that decimated communities across the country in far greater numbers than have been affected by the current pandemic, all while the DEA's funding to fight the use of marijuana increased steadily.

Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen  ...

None of these "engagements" have resulted in a good outcome. Contrarily, several bad outcomes have sometimes occurred in the same country. They have turned swaths of the planet into a living hell. It's as though the Gaza Strip were the USA's ideal of Democracy in Action, America has imposed conditions on one country after another that far more resemble life under Israeli occupation than anything remotely resembling the "Freedom" we insisted was the road to prosperity (they forgot to tell them Whose prosperity ... hint: Ours), but that has only paved the road to ruin for millions who never asked for it.

And now we're being expected to hail the likening of the fight against a microbe as being on par with a War footing as being a desirable thing?

First, one is left to wonder, "How can a Nation that has been waging serial wars for what amounts to this entire century not already be on a War footing?"

And secondly, perhaps if we as a country didn't believe it necessary to lard the military with trillions of dollars to prepare for the eventuality of waging military engagements on three fronts simultaneously, all for the arrogant goal of Full Spectrum Domination of every nation on the planet, and instead, oh so timidly, suggested that perhaps, Mister armchair General (Now I know why they're called "Officers", their entire career is spent in the office), that we spend a smidgen of that tidal wave of unaccounted-for trillions on planning for the far more likely eventuality of a pandemic (similar to what California did under Arnold Schwarzenegger, to provide for just such a crisis: amassing both ventilators and respirators in sufficient quantities, but which effort has since been squandered under successive Democratic administrations). 

Therefore, at least from a semantics point of view, by likening the struggle against the Corona virus to our Forever Wars, we are basically signing up to be waging it for the rest of our lives; we will never be free of it, and it will drain every last cent the economy can furnish to prolong it and its attendant death and despoliation. Because it's good for the economy, which by and by, everything else having been brought to its knees, it has become increasingly clear, it had damn well better be.

Democracy's a Foreign Policy.

Plump and Plumper.

In a hatchet job on China, Foreign Policy Magazine decided, via a list of bromides referring to what, I've no idea, that "Yes, Blame it on China and Xi Jinping, for the US outbreak of a pandemic for which the US had full knowledge was on its way, and a full three months to plan and take action against it. Many say instead we did nothing. That's not quite true.

The USA, that most modern of nations, went  out of its way to deny it was a problem.

Then the USA's pompous ass of a President re-assured the entire world, from his podium @ Davos, that it was under control, when it most certainly most obviously, wasn't.

THen,  even as it was spreading in his own country he rebuffed his own VP,  who he had "put in charge" (NO one else is ever in charge of ANYthing, no matter the depth of their scholarship, as long as the child-president is in the loop) of containing the virus, for bumping elbows; and the supine Pence, that most lapdog of Executive branch incompetents, panned for the camera shaking hands once again, because the big, as in BIG kahuna belly stands no dissent in his rank ranks. She who Must be Obeyed brooks no dissent.

The reasons the Foreign policy magazine gave, which reasons are obviously meant for an electorate still reading Highlights for Chlidren, as they drop a gelatinous dollop of pabulum for the masses: a squishy, cloudy clotting blancmange of cartilaginous junk plopped down on paper and sounding like it came right out of the pages of a 50's anti-commie comics, or out of the mouth of Marvel's Sgt. Fury.

They, as in Paul Miller, but since FP published this Fake News, it still deserves a "they", start by insisting that ,

"If China had a different government, the world could have been spared this terrible pandemic."

Somehow the fact that "if the USA had a different president, its citizens could have been spared this terrible pandemic", doesn't matter, since it's China's Government, that same government without which there would be no US, or perhaps European, economy. The Capitalist world devoured its own toxic paper and was choking on the garbage it had stuffed itself to the gills with. It relied on Communist China to extend the credit it needed to pull it chestnuts out of the self-inflicted conflagration of bad debt burning in the midst of a Bonfire of the Vanities, trillions of dollar of which is still sitting on the Fed's books (in this Free Market Economy ... dislike the commies as much as you like, but at least their level of hypocrisy is stories lower than that of the west) to this day, toxic debt that was marketed by the, now let's see, how did they put it in this propaganda sheet of lies and distortions? Oh, that's right, "open, established free-market democracies, which allow the free flow of information and markets", such that that "free flow"  of AAA-rated paper consisting of sub-prime debt foisted on to barely-solvent borrowers could be deliberately packaged as investment-grade "securities", all its Risk cleverly obfuscated by algo-enabled cons, blessed by Ratings agencies paid by the entities whose paper they were rating, and sold to the world as a haven as safe as US Treasuries.

Paul Miller claims that the Chinese government is most directly responsible for the governance failures that have now unleashed untold suffering and economic collapse on the world. Its mendacity and incompetence should cause politicians, policymakers, and business leaders across the world to reconsider their willingness to engage and do business with China until it proves itself a responsible actor on the world stage.

But, it is the US government that is most directly responsible for the governance failures that then, and continuing to now, has unleashed untold suffering and economic collapse on the world. Its (deliberate ... 2008 was no surprise pandemic that no one planned for, it was a carefully executed takedown and Shock Doctrine-maneuver to reallocate enormous swaths of capital "into", as GHW Bush put it, "the right hands") mendacity and incompetence:

 "should cause politicians, policymakers, and business leaders across the world to reconsider their willingness to engage and do business with China the Untied States until it proves itself a responsible actor on the world stage".

The geopolitical dimension an scope of the 2008 crisis means we should have sought criminal accountability to prevent its recurrence—and accountability begins with casting blame where it is due. That is, in China's case. In ours, of course, no such accountability took place. The exact same players are pulling the exact same schemes with the exact same results. Having a corona to hide behind is the biggest boon they could have wished for. And they lost no time in making the capital grab in the Capitol building the center of Disaster Capital Crimes for which there is never a Capital punishment. The pandemic will pass. The US Ponzi-schemes, embezzlements, defalcations and rehypothecations will not. It will continue its rot while writers such as Paul Miller pretend everything's just hunky-dory.

The USA has yet to "prove itself a responsible actor on the world stage".  The mendacity Miller refers to is on full display as, in the midst of a deadly pandemic in which the USA itself, thanks to its own view of itself as exceptional (No virus can come here, we  have a Wall), is now the center of, keeps sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, all for purportedly political reasons when the only reason is as always, energy resources, and the control of them. Not a Free Market, free flow of information, open government system, but instead more akin to how Miller characterizes China,

"... the most powerful institution on the planet that daily opposes human freedom, human flourishing, and human dignity."

Ummm, that's how the USA is seen by many billions who have suffered under the jackboot of Demockracy.

And does so not to try and assure a fair share of the world's resources for its 1.3 billion people, as China must, but to drain, within the time span of one generation, the earth's crust of an entire continent of its last drops of fuel, flaring in the process enough energy resources to lift entire countries out of poverty, in order to enable the lifestyle of effortless ease and Breaking Bad contempt for the very good governance the West provides its barely 350 million souls, a mere quarter of the number China must serve, yet the US is unable to provide that everlasting affluence and economic growth without sucking down more fossil fuels than the entire Chinese economy does to provide for 3 X's our population.

Miller goes on to opine that,

" ... the Chinese government’s record in the recent crisis is only the tip of an iceberg (no cliche will be left unturned). The same government is responsible for genocide against the Uighur people, violating international law in the South China Sea, wholesale intellectual property theft from and cyber-espionage against the United States and its allies, one of the worst records of environmental pollution in the world, the invention of a new type of technology-powered totalitarian surveillance state, and more."

He's kidding, right? Do you think he just didn't notice that,

the Trump government’s record in the recent crisis is only the tip of an iceberg. The same government is responsible for genocide against the Afghan, Irani and Venezuelan people, violating international law in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and ignoring the ICC so as to have no restraints place upon its illegal activities, and cyber-espionage against the Iran, murdering its nuclear scientists, and its allies, one of the worst records of environmental pollution in the world, having peopled Federal agencies with his own toadies and yes-men who do nothing without their Furor's Imprimatur scrawled across it, the deployment of killer drones for assassinations in the airspace of another (Oops, there ARE no other sovereign nations, the US policy of pre-emptive war and unilateral abrogation of treaties whose provisions the signatories have violated none of, makes sovereignty moot) sovereign Nation after said nation refused to grant it the invention of a new type of technology-powered totalitarian surveillance state, and more."

The real kicker regarding this entire hatchet job is that it is in response to the Trumpelstiltskin calling  COVID-19 (remember, the "19" stands for 2019 ... the virus was not something that sprang upon us without warning the way it did on China ... yet China's response, compared to our own, was far superior) a Chinese virus.

I saw the interview. The reporter was asking the President why, given the hate-mongering and anti-Chinese attacks that his referring to it as such were causing, does he insist on calling it the Chinese virus?

To which the puerile response was, "Because it's from "CHInuh", and the base dutifully rolled their eyes at the clueless libtard.

But the high-school level retort was more suitable to the sophomore gym class, or as a comedian's rebuttal, but it separated the last part of the reporter's question from the first, a bit of tried and true trumpery.

If he weren't cloaked in the awesome mantle of the presidency, and the reporter had a fair hearing, she would have answered him the same way a weary parent would have answered their teenage child. Yes dear, I know it's from China, but that's not what I was asking, and you know it's not. I was asking why you are insisting on referring to it as the Chinese virus WHEN YOU KNOW FULL WELL THAT YOUR BASE BASE WILL USE (has already used, as per your signalling) IT AS AN EXCUSE TO FOMENT VIOLENCE AND HATEFUL ATTACKS AGAINST CHINESE-AMERICANS.

... US citizens you have taken an oath of office to protect; not to put your base on notice that they're fair game. Which is exactly what you were deliberately doing.

But the answer to her actual question wasn't something you wanted known, it wouldn't  play well on the Reality TV show you still think you're the host of.

"Unsurprisingly, authoritarian rulers, such as China’s, Trump, do not like sharing news about their ignorance and do not like cooperating with other governments. As Danielle Pletka recently argued, Xi’s Trump's “prime concern was not lives at risk, or containment of the virus, but rather the nation’s and his reputation, place in the global supply chain and his grip on power re-election prospects.”

(Easy change that one)

If, as Miller apparently believes, it is authoritarian rule that is so suspect, why is the thrust of every Western country, ever since the permanent damage the US inflicted on the global economy for its own nefarious purposes, intent on turning every one of the Democracies, but none more than the US, into authoritarian States? Here the Leader owns the Justice Department as his own: pardoning willie-nilly, using his little bevy of lawyers and the AG like it's a steno pool paid for by the  taxpayers to do his bidding.

You don't get more authoritarian than castigating a member of Congress because he took his sworn oath seriously. Surrounded by religious "Leaders", he openly mocked Romney for "bringing religion" into the impeachment process, because Romney had, like every other Senator, placed his hand on a bible to swear that oath.That was not Romney's idea; that was the Senate's rtual. The fact that they swore an oath that they then disregarded as though it were as meaningless as a Trump marriage vow, demonstrates the blasphemous disdain for the deity these dilettantes actually feel.

Miller goes on to claim that "Simply put, the Chinese government does not give a damn about the Chinese people." Well many Chinese people are US citizens, but "the US government does not give a damn about those Chinese people", nor does its President. They are not part of his base, so that oath he swore to protect them, he relegates to the realm of meaningless mumbo-jumbo, as he then insisted Romney, who actually has integrity, should have done. An oath to god, sworn an the bible of a religion I profess to believe in? Meaningless ... completely non-binding nonsense.

For all the truth in many of Miller's observations, it is the lack of any sense of proportion that his piece screams for being torn to pieces. Communism may indeed be godless, but to pretend that you are, to put on a sham religion to sway an ignorant base to vote for you and then blaspheme in front of the world, scoffing at an oath to tell the truth as so much falderal, makes our own system uniquely our own. Whatever. It is what it is, right? However, what it doesn't do, is what we have been doing for generations now. It doesn't bestow on the us any right to steam aircraft carriers across the oceans and bomb the bejeesus out of one country after the other, all the while insisting they, "be more like us", which is what Miller so arrogantly insists China do. Yeah, right.

In that case, when they start arming every country in South America with sting missiles, drones, laser-guided missiles, and other Weapons of Mass Destruction we delight in marketing, selling, deploying and dropping on unarmed civilians heads, like those we have been hawking to the world in our role as the globe's premiere Merchants of Death, remember, it was you who insisted they mimic the country hosting that "most thoroughly diseased and decaying institution in the world", one whose only raison d'etre is to enable the Sole Super Power in its soulless quest for Omnipotence: The Pentagon

Wreckonomics: The Big American Bust is Set to Lower the Boom.

 Double Trouble Helix: Just-in-Time means Too-Little Too-Late.

It is human to have compassion for the afflicted, yet howsoever much it behooves everyone to not only feel, but show that other people matter to them, it is more particularly compelling in people who have once had need of comfort and have found it, so know that in some measure it helped save them from one of the many of life's travails they'd had visited upon them.

In this our current affliction, the pleasant discourse of friends and their admirable consolations can afford us such refreshment such that I firmly believe that without it many who needn't have will die.
Despite the immutable law that states that all things mundane must at some point come to an end, it remained firmly within my hope for humanity that that point was nowhere in sight no matter how far out we peer along mankind's event horizon.

Those with some compassion who within their tender bosoms, fearful and shamefast, hold hidden the fires of love, now must be content to bide most of the time confined to the narrow compass of their dwellings and, sitting there in idleness, willing and unwilling in the one and the same moment, turn over in their minds various thoughts and dreams which they are finding it is not possible to always keep exactly merry.

By that reason alone, if it raises in their minds any melancholy, bred of ardent desire, it must now, with growing annoyance, be left to but abide within, unless it can be dispelled by some new discourse to allay the loneliness and fear and find the inner strength necessary to endure during these days of deadly pestilence.

Even though some may still insist that this is but a more deadly version of the common cold, since we are asked by them to believe, despite all our instincts suggesting otherwise, that it is a media-frenzy coverage of yet another hoax, perhaps it is its effects on the economy that will coax at least a modicum of compassion to soften their hearts of stone.

A closer scrutiny of such people reveals them to be largely comprised of those same individuals who insist that another invisible, even deadlier, peril occasions the same non-reaction, but it might afford the rest of us some vision of a different future than the one our present momentum has determined we should continue.

The fires in Australia have now been all-but-forgotten by the rest of the world, (and for all I know in the rest of Australia), but the heat-seeking missile of molecular geo-engineering wrought by fossil fuel combustion has changed the attitude of many Australians in much the same way the Pestilence has stimulated many confronting it to change theirs. The outpouring of clouds of toxin-bearing plumes bellowing into the atmosphere has been slowed down, despite all the brouhaha raised by calling for even the most timid of curtailments, by only one phenomenon: Corona Virus. Not all the bloviating or jetting from one country to another making pledges no one intends to keep and promising outcomes no one believes will come to pass, what this virus has shown us, or could show us, is that the major part of the CO2 burden we are asking the atmosphere to bear has nothing whatsoever to do with real human needs, and everything to do with the needs of "the economy".

Developing countries may fare far better than the developed countries' economies, because they do actual work of providing, however poorly, for their citizens' needs, whereas we in the OECD nations cater to the most selfish part of the population that demands enormous inputs of fossil-fueled recreational diversions. The worship of Bling, the yen for a fling, drives this world where the Dollar is King.

That is what they are trying to save, not lives.

When Trump towers over Fauci as though Fauci were Hillary Clinton, a debate contender he's determined to crush, rather than a member of his own administration, it becomes apparent that the freedom of enterprise includes the freedom to sit back and watch as if it were death-porn the glowing statistics that ensure the continuation of Social Security and Medicare, as the largest coterie of the population dependent on them gets wiped out.

The President has insisted he knows a lot, a lot, about viruses. That most basic of facts, however, that a virus is virulent, he has pretended to have overlooked.

Knowledge he had at Davos when he assured the world there was no problem.

But, of course, knowing even a little about viruses would mean he knew even then, as most of us who actually were paying attention to the news out of Wuhan, knew, that that was a lie. He already knew, being the expert on viral epidemiology he has boasted he is, that borders weren't going to contain a microbe.

But, like China, the US has a problem: old people. More specifically, the US economy has a problem:

The promises and commitments made to retired people as to the payment of pension benefits and health care that their government and US Corponations would provide them after they left the work force could not, given the pillaging of Corporate America by the CEO's enabled by their sponsors in Congress, be honored.

The current administration like the Republican administration that preceded it, the one that attempted to slough off the onerous burden of the Social Security system to Wall St., has determined that the US economy cannot provide the excess earnings in anything close to the amount needed to honor those liabilities.

By downplaying the virus, the President, knowing all there is to know about viruses, is fully aware that the longer the virus is allowed to spread and gain traction among the general population , the larger toll it will take on the most elderly population as well as anyone over 60 (The Italians have already opted to not bother to even extend treatment to anyone over 60 years of age).

Along with the rest of his colleagues, he considers this a boon.

From California to Illinois, and all other states facing bankruptcy in the face of retiring municipal workers and State nursing home capacity, the virus is secretly considered a god-send.

As they watch their elder population disappear they watch all those liabilities melt away like morning dew in the sunlight of a New Day.

Trump support among the young people of America grows the longer he gives nothing but lip service to the virus and billions to the billionaire class to work on a vaccine that will do absolutely nothing for the next 18 months.

Bring it on and Bring em down, is the Trumpelstiltskin's new campaign promise: to weed out the weak, bring down the vast majority of the population bedeviled with "previous conditions", and solve both the Social Security's and  Medicare's insolvency in one extremely fell swoop.

The next lie that will be exposed too late by our Virus Expert: masks.

Only when it is far too late, since they're being told the opposite, will Americans start to realize that masks actually DO cut down on viral transmission. But, although Boris Johnson was the only one brazen enough to say it out loud, herd immunity, or lack thereof, is being let to run its course, the too-little, too-late formula of population control. The WHO's warning of what the outcome of such a stance would be serves only to deepen the conviction that Death to Seniors far out of proportion to the rest of the polity is just what the overworked doctor ordered for the ailing economies of the OECD that were all teetering toward collapse from contractual promises made that their economies couldn't possibly keep, contracts they wrote with no intention of honoring but that were now coming due.

The dire mortality figures are mucus music to their ears. Can you breathe?

Got airline stock? Ditch it and buy stock in Crematoria ... or coffin manufacturers.

You won't even need a new hat: Mine Americans' Grief Again.

When GS Sneezes every GSE Eases: The Fed’s Enterprise-free Free Enterprise.

The repricing of assets that the Coronavirus is resulting in is the first shot in a continued volley of the private sector's pirating of the Public sphere.

While castigating  government to "Get government out of The WAY" the private sector has been on FIRE (Finance Insurance Real Estate), inflamed by an infusion of GSE-enabled (That "G" stand for Government. Easy to understand why you would lose sight of that fact, though, considering that any Government sponsored entity is most decidedly not enterprising) financial debauchery of the economy that has redistributed wealth at an unprecedented rate into the control of fewer and fewer hands (enabled by the Pentagon-developed, ie labor-funded, technologies of computers and the internet) with nothing but a rare voice of dissent ever raised about the rank hypocrisy and utter sense of despoiliation condoned by the US elites. Although you never see it nowadays, in the eighties there were quite a few writers who questioned the wisdom of using the savings of US labor to move American jobs overseas (a process in which the newly-released Capital Crime-Queen, Milken, was King). Financiers nowadays object to the very idea that Capital is the product of Labor, since the capital they used is a gift bestowed on them by the Capitol, so, with more than $4.5trillion of unmarketable liabilities sitting on their books,  21'st Century Capital exists mainly as a product of the Fed's magic Wand:

"We make money the new-fangled way: We suborn it."

As the virus sets aFIRE a blaze fed by commercial paper that’s been supported by GSE's for this entire century, never more blatantly and outrageously as now, when every person in the US has been forced to underwrite the risk of REIT's, for example: Renters paying higher taxes than their landlords courtesy of the GSE's of the Federal Government. Meanwhile Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the FHA gorge themselves on trillions and trillions of dollars of Risky paper. Banks lending at ridiculously low levels of interest that they would never in a million years have taken on such high liability, so they sloughed it off, at the behest of the Central Bank, in ever increasing amounts, onto the public sector while writing dividend checks to their investors for the rise in revenue the ginormous profits gleaned from extending loans for property that's been overvalued to nosebleed levels. Levels that have resulted in the most frequent buyers being corporations that suck up the all-but-interest-free loans, then, renting them out to the very people who are actually bearing the onus of Risk for those loans, in the forms of government purchases of all but a mere 3% of all real estate loans in America; and the last indignity of all, paying a tax rate of half that of their tenants who pay on income derived from actual labor, scant as that income may y be: labor pays a full third of their income to taxes, while dividend and interest income is taxed at ~15%, despite the fact that it was/is the government,  which means the public, that somehow non-existent society, not the "investor" THAT TOOK ALL THE RISK ON THE INSTRUMENTS THEY PURCHASED.
.
That is the reason that Republicans are so set on maintaining the facade, "That this will never be a Socialist Country", Central rule suits their pocketbooks so much better.

Hence State-sponsored "Enterprises" assume all the risk of every bank in the country and then having the audacity to call it Free-Enterprise, while laughing right in our collective face, as GSE's create the worst of two worlds:

Unlike in a State Enterprise, where the State has responsibility, or in an actual Free Enterprise system, the way they like to wish you to believe the economy works, in GSE's no one’s responsible, while the taxpayers are saddled with the costs and risks, even as those costs increase the price of having a simple roof over your head to such an extent that a dwindling percentage of people in an economy boasting a GDP in excess of $20 Trillion can afford a place to live, while the FIRE industry pays the (it would be called bribes in any other country) people's representatives to maintain interest rates at next to nothing,  allowing the price to rise, with the renters paying even the low interest since they pay taxes that go up because the Owners of the building they live in can deduct those interest expenses from their own income taxes, shuffling that liability right onto their tenants.

Thus must the Socialist nature of the American economy be denied by a Populist president as he presides over the largest transfer of Labor's earnings to these bastions of Socialism. GSE's are merely a vehicle to disguise the unparalled propping up of every failing sector in the American economy:

The failing Airline industry
The failing Fossil Fuel industries (Trillions poured into ground: The SPR is a boondoggle to rape the taxpayer so as to pay dividend to shareholders in fossil fuel behemoths who can ignore risk because the fracturing industry can lose me than 189billion dollars over a decade, yet continue to pump and dump into the SPR
The failing housing sector (No GSE's, No housing ssector)
The Failing Automotive Industry (Nothing says oversold markets as well as 7-year, 0% loans)
The failing manufacturing sector,
The failing agricultural industry (Billions upon billions in never-ending subsidies without which there is no farming sector)

All of these are to all intents and purposes GSE's:

 No government: no Enterprise.

The virus has merely made manifest what was already true: as Obama said, ”We paid for that bridge”, WE funded that Airport, We were taxed, but never asked, to pay for those now-empty, failing sports arenas, GPS satellites, internet, Interstate Highway system.

None of these Corporate concerns, like the tourist traps of Europe, would be able to exist without the flood of money pouring in from outside their purview. By floating loans to emerging markets, loans that must be paid back in dollars, while simultaneously undermining those economies via "America First", tariff Wars and "Free" Trade agreements, which much like your credit card agreements, are honored until the big bully US decides to abrogate them,  with much the same logic the credit card issuers use to inform you that without reason, warning or morality, they can raise the rate of interest charged for what you have already bought anytime by any amount they deem necessary.

One headline today that seems especially distorted screams that "Saudi Arabia plans to flood the market by increasing its crude oil production from below 10 million bpd currently to 12.3 mil bpd" (Note that they call it "crude oil", we can make no such claim about the product produced by the US shale industry). The disastrous USA strategy of "America First", means that in times of crisis, unlike after 9/11, it has left itself bereft of allies in any real sense. Having informed the world that we intend to rip off as many of their assets as we can for as little as possible, threatening them with drone assassinations, fire bombings, pre-emptive wars, proxy wars, illegal tariffs, illegal torture, illegal sanctions, illegal renditions, unilateral abrogations of any treaty we have decided has become inconvenient, and nuclear "strategic" bombing or threats thereof, any goodwill built up between us and other countries of the world, not being able to put a monetary value on it, is now considered worthless and consequently ridiculed, along with well, pretty much anyone resisting these atavistic impulses. We have thus reduced our coinage to filthy lucre, having convinced ourselves that nothing else matters. To care what the ramifications our actions have on other nations is now considered to be just this side of treason. They are therefore hardly likely to offer any aid to such an entity, all the more so should some other, more trustworthy, country have a similar need.

All while we have, for decades now, based our entire geopolitical strategy and economy on precisely what the Saudi’s are being ballyhooed for doing:

"Flooding the market by increasing USA (crude) oil production from below 10 million bpd currently to over 12.3 mil bpd".

With no end in sight.

 Somehow the article failed to mention that that's almost the exact amount of bpd's the USA has dumped on the oil market since President Plump took office, ratcheting up production in an oil-saturated world by increasing the oil rig count exponentially. Despite US oil being the costliest to produce with the exception of the Canadian tar sands. All the while flaring such an egregious amount of  natural gas in the process that it could supply the electrical demand for a non-existent second nation (albeit smaller than the USA, at the same time, it would be far larger than our largest State).

Meaning that in the course of a few scant years, it is as though a fully-formed modern nation has risen from the Sea and immediately started contributing to the already burgeoning amounts of CO2 being vented into the atmosphere, in like amounts as a major industrial State. And with the added bonus that despite that enormous surge in CO2 production, not a single hungry mouth will be fed, not a single person clothed, nor was a single house built, nor extra mile driven by that ballooning of additional CO2 and its attendant amount of water vapor, (the 2'nd most potent GHG), and other associated gases, into the troposphere. All taking  place even as Exxon and other fossil fuel companies justify the continued mining and burning of  coal to market to undeveloped countries as being necessary so as to pull them out of poverty. Yet we flare, in our rush for a quick fix from our profits of doom, Profits which, because they go to a thin slice of the public, that slice that needs the money the least, gets put, regardless of risk, into the stock market, there being no alternative, thanks to the merry gandering of the Fed's punchbowl.

All that enterprise-free Free Enterprise has accelerated climate change unconscionably and left us poorer ... although that was the intention all along, it was us, the USA, not them, OPEC producers, it would, in little more than a decade, leave without energy-generating capacity (nothing is free, all money comes at a price. Yet this supposedly hyper-capitalist society insists on using that word ad nauseum). Now all that value that your children could have leveraged to fire electric power plants has gone up in acrid smoke. It's all been incinerated. For nothing. Yet without heating a single home, never firing a single kiln, nor electifying as much as a single microwave oven or server farm. Pffft! Who cares? As the stock market ascent that has been waved in the face of the world like a Red flag in the face of a bull market, that ascension has been buoyed by the DOE’s exultant release of “Freedom Molecules” into an atmosphere already besotted with them. Is it really so surprising that said market now tanks to below the value it boasted when the Trumpelstiltskin took office?

And now we are pulling all that oil our of the ground all over the country, flaring ever more copious quantities of valuable natural gas than ever, while the public pays an enormous price in energy, infrastructure, waste-heat and pollution, to truck it, rail it, pipe it, shale it, with no other intention than to pour it into another hole in the ground, in another part of the country, right in to the SPR. A hole in the ground that in the future we will need, should we ever care to use it, to truck it, rail it, pipe it, bail it, to whatever location there's demand for it.

 And yet the headline screams:

Saudi Arabia plans to flood the market by increasing its crude oil production from below 10 million bpd currently to 12.3 mil bpd!??!?

Hah! Liar!

The USA has based the expansion of its Fraud-riddled economy (remember, similar to 9/11, after the financial crisis that brought on a global depression, caused by the USA shuffling their toxic waste to the rest of the globe, the USA never bothered to fire anybody, or even chastise anyone, much less change the way in which they do business. A depression which btw, the Capitalist world relied heavily on Communist China to pull it out of). And, despite the Herculean efforts of Elizabeth Warren, still nothing has basically changed. Ever since the so-called Reagan-Revolution ripped those solar panels right off the White House roof, the US has had no other response to the myriad crises around the globe that it’s criminal behavior has spawned other than to double down, to ignore risk even more assiduously, lavish ever-increasing amounts of its precious treasure on its failing military, and rig the international system even into a more rickety mousetrap. One  sclerotic with corruption and creaking from papered-over weaknesses from the shuffling of the burden of Risk onto the public using ever-increasing levels of Black Pools, shadowy banking, opaque derivatives, insider trading scams, IPO’d confidence schemes and pump 'n dump stock offerings. An enticing smorgasbord of 3-card Monte games to play tricks with.

There's now more Risk, unknowingly borne by those who can least afford it, than there was before the financial crisis, or should I say before the 2008 financial crisis, since, with Trumpelstiltskin's declaration that, "This is not a financial crisis", it's eminently clear that this is going to be worse than the 2008 financial crisis. Because before that crisis, brought on, not surprisingly by the GW administration whose policies Trumpelstiltskin has used as a template for his own, the banks had drank a good portion of their own Kool -Aid. This time, in order to assume all that Corporate risk in your name, the GSE we call the Fed has lavished the bankers with free cash, bankers who are now little more than paper shufflers: To paraphrase Absolutely Fabulous' Edina Monsoon, "You can drop the attitude, you only work as a sop".

Now on a point unrelated to GSE'd Greed.

As the vitriol toward CHIna gets ramped up to slough the blame from those more deserving of our derision, it would be well to remember that it wasn't just Larry Summers, or that so-called Conscience of a Liberal ensconced at the NYT, Paula Krugman, who thought that the citizens of the USA shouldn't have to chew on the air-borne effluence created by the industrial processes that were creating the cornucopia of goodies to supply The Affluent Society (That was when we still hadn't destroyed the concept of public goods, so could still use the word "Society". A word which , together with the phrase, "We're all in this together", I've heard more in the last ten days than in the last ten years).

The argument used to justify the job losses and the destruction of the middle-class that such a major investment of workers' savings along with the largest technology transfer in the history of the world, (technology also paid for by the R&D conducted by the DOD ... ie tax dollars from US labor) dollars that they were Milken from labor so as to invest, not on the US workers that had made them their fortunes, but to take those dollars OUT of the Capitalist USA and Invest them in the Workers State of Communist China, a nation that was in the grip of a Communist totalitarian regime at at time when those same American workers were uncomplainingly relinquishing a large part of their paychecks in order to create a torrent of dollars that flowed to the Pentagon so as to "fight Communism".

All while claiming that Capitalism is King.

Not a trumpet sounded the weakest of toots to ask why is it  the Capitalist system would crack like fracked shale without Chinese markets? The reason that was given was that the HEATHCARE system in the USA was so onerously expensive that, as the workers aged, they would demand more and more services from it as a result of decades of breathing in the toxic soup produced by the untrammeled production of consumer goods (the US was on the wrong side of peak oil by then, yet needed to continue to pay for growing quantities of imported oil to incinerate: a full fifth of total world combustion which, having moved most manufacturing production offshore, you would have thought would have alleviated that ... it didn't, thanks to the information Superhighway and SUV's, which eventually would suck up just as much fossil fuel, and spit out just as much CO2, as the relocated industries previously had).

The upshot of which is that it is precisely for what China is now being accused of, not having an adequate Healthcare system, that was the reason that US Multinational firms moved all those toxic industries there in the first  place: to deliberately poison their citizens to produce manufactures to satisfy American demand, but in a country where they’d not need to worry about the poisoning of those workers and the inflated healthcare costs associated with hat chronic, deliberate undermining of the health of an entire country. That's why they moved them to a Communist country, no modern Democratically elected leader could sell such a cynical bargain to its educated polity. Or was it that hippie rostrum to, "Work for the collapse of the system from within", by creating an aged population that would succumb to the toxicity of their toxic Cities as soon as an influenza potent enough raised its ugly corona.

The idea was inspired by England, (that Monarchy in the garb of a Democracy, its Parliament/PM lacking legitimacy unless/until the Queen gives them her divine Royal blessing). After the 1952 cloud of death that descended onto London,  4,000 people died as a direct result of the smog and 100,000 more were made ill by the smog's effects on the human respiratory tract. Most of the victims were either very young or elderly, or had pre-existing respiratory problems (sound familiar). More recent research suggests that the total number of fatalities may have been considerably greater, one paper suggesting about 6,000 more died in the following months as a result of the toxic air created by the combustion of tons of coal.

Sensitivity analysis reveals that only an extremely severe influenza epidemic could account for the majority of the excess deaths for this time period. Such an epidemic would be on the order of twice the case-fatality rate and quadruple the incidence (Similar to the numbers in China) observed in a general medical practice during the winter of 1953:

"These results underscore the need for diligence regarding extremely high air pollution."

Hence our plan to re-source all the nation's heaviest polluting industries to a Communist country: it was to fight Communism by using the leaders of the Communist  Party (who had no compunction about admitting it was to make them rich) to use chemical poisoning that would be capable of producing mass destruction events on their own population.  

No matter from who what where or how this virus sprang, the evidence from 1952 suggests that both the virility at its outbreak, and its suddenness of cessation, have at least as much to do with the ready availability of breathable air that resulted from the cessation of industrial activity and the slowdown in the combustion of COAL, (the same culprit as in the 1952 London massive death toll: More people than died in the bombing of New York City's World Trade Center), as with the quarantining of the millions of people in their homes. (to add fuel to the fire, or carcinogenic particle to their lungs, the US cigarette companies (also GSE’s) then started to move their advertising and sales campaigns to the REd Menace across the ocean. They were simultaneously receiving subsidies from that Free Enterprise Champion, the US Federal government, now armed with the irrefutable knowledge that smoking tobacco products endangers not only the smokers themselves, but the people around them. 

These facts are all well-know, and they were all well known in the eighties when the USA was on a rabid anti-Communist roll. While the Bush/Reagan junta raised the taxes on all Americans by doubling both the Federal deficit and the National Debt, knowing full well, per advise from Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman, that they would be long gone (well, they thought they would be, Bush Sr. got his comeuppance), theysuggested the same mindset to the Communist Party leadership in Beijing, wherein they would be made rich by industrialization, all while looking as though they were doing it for the people ... those same people that would have their miserable lives miserably shortened by chronic inhalation of known carcinogens and respiratory tract irritants. But, hey! Their lives would be improved until then, right? And by then we'll be out of power. A devil's bargain indeed. 

So now it's a Chinese virus? Because it comes from CHInuh, you say? That same China we set up to be in this exact situation, eerily echoing what happened in London in 1952? With the People's De-public'd made vulnerable to a ... let's see, how did they put it? ...  an extremely severe influenza epidemic.

And you then have the shameless heartlessness to blame the Chinese people for our own lack of preparedness when they sounded the alarm, LOUDLY, months ago? An alarm we chose to not only ignore, but, using Davos as a platform, assured the world that there was no problem, nothing to see here folks.

That's not just gall, that's Evil incarnate.

While back in the USSA , health insurance is only available to those who have jobs: and come the end of this month, millions and millions less of those people will have jobs, so that there will be that many more people without health insurance ... yet all of whom would still have health insurance if the first priority of our then-newly-inaugurated Furor hadn't to make sure that they wouldn't have health insurance in exactly this scenario. (Think about that. Then do you see how easy it is to believe that the increase in Chinese mortality from toxic fumes was an integral part of the America’s War on Communism? How else can one reconcile  the rabid-anti-Communism of the Reagan/Bush years, years spent fulminating against Communism and years spent funding and arming the mujahadeen's War against godless Communism? What other reason could they have had for investing billions upon billions of dollars garnished from the savings of US Labor to enable the rise to Power of THE major Communist State and the deliberate ballooning of that Communist nation's GDP by gutting our own, throwing millions of workers onto the street?) Also, Read that Larry Summers' memo he wrote while at the World Bank: The Economic argument for making their citizens sick to satisfy the consumer demand of your own is unassailable, he said.

Thus was the Economic War-mart created.

And now, because there are millions and millions less paying into it now, Health Insurance costs of those still employed are set to increase dramatically. That's how insurance works. So that first priority of the Trump administration, to push millions off the insurance rolls by gutting the ACA, and calling it an "Accomplishment", will likely result in raising the health insurance costs of all those well-heeled employees who whined about how expensive Obamacare was. Well, they may be about to find out just how expensive health insurance can get. Yet you can bet they'll be screaming for Federal assistance as soon as those rising prices (disguised as paycuts, more 'n likely) pinch too hard. But don't feel too sorry for them, at least their insurance is subsidized by the Federal Government, as it's taken out of pre-tax earnings. If your job doesn't extend coverage to you,  resulting in your having to provide it yourself, you must pay, as gig workers are already well aware, for it with after-tax dollars, so it costs ~ 33% more than those employed in the Corporate sector ... and that's on top of the higher rates charged to those outside of Corporate tax plans.

No matter.
No job?
You don't matter.

Over and over, I heard from well-off  Democrats I was dumbfounded to find out had voted for Trumpelstiltkin, a bankrupt Wheel of misFortune they imagined could spin gold from straw dogs, told me they wanted "Change".

Well Baby, Change is just what you've now been handed. Just be sure to wash your hands after touching it.

Entre Nous, C'est Déjà Vu: The Mad Max 737 Economy now Sports a Corona.

The Mask of the Red Death. 

Dr. Li Wenliang: Like Trump, Xi Shuts up Whistle Blowers.

As we were discussing the economy a few weeks back, someone asked what the justification was for the Fed's moves and the administration's use of every economic stimulus in the book to goose an economy he never stopped extolling as "perfect".

Then that horrible Nascar accident happened in which the driver of the car impossibly survived.

Those cars and drivers are hyper-tuned, optimized for speed and acceleration: Performance overrides Safety.

Safety becomes not just an impediment, but a drag on that performance they so ardently wish for so as to Wow their fans and maintain the illusion that such hair-trigger control at reckless speed by mere mortals is sustainable.

It's not.

And it's not sustainable for an economy either.

Yet, Presidents, having the desire to out-perform their predecessors, and to get re-elected, don't really care about sustainability/safety. If they learned nothing else from the Reagan/Bush era, they learned that you can pull the rug right out of the economy's future yet stoke its current performance by incurring mountains of Federal debt to create a Bonfire for the Vanities of your constituents, and, despite the "Family Values" rhetoric, destroy any chance of our own children's tomorrow by giving them that dream childhood your ego feeds on today. Reagan is idolized to this day, even as the economy careens out of control and threatens to crash in Nascar spectacularity for the exact same reason: it  has been so fine-tuned, stoked to such a blistering heat with all its "inefficiencies" ironed out that, like Ryan Newman's perfectly running machine, it can countenance not the least bump, the slightest abnormality in its trajectory or it will quickly start doing completely unpredictable spins in the air that can leave it nowhere else but on the ground in pieces.

But, for presidents, that's their successor's problem.

Sound familiar? That's because it is.

Boeing (stock symbol BA) not only engineered a plane with similar characteristics to Nascar's racing machines, it did so for a product that would stuff and snuff the hundreds of passengers who were on board for the ride.

BA-BA, black sheep.

Although it should come as no surprise, coming from an administration and a mindset that thinks the government should be run like a business, The Plump Administration followed the exact same arc as Boeing did in handling its Max factor:

Denial.

Minimize the problem.

Ridicule critics.

Blame someone else.

Claim you did everything right and thereby deny any responsibility.

Pretend the problem will just go away after a quick fix.

Underestimate the response from the public; that same public you're counting on to bring you back from the abyss.

And like Boeing, we think "We'll get through this", which of course, some of us will. But like Boeing, if we do, we, or you, as I may not be included in that group, will not be the same. Like Boeing, we think this will  "wash out", as though it's shampoo, and we can all go back to how we lived before.

Facts suggest otherwise.

And last but not least, the US economy is just as dependent on the false stimulus and corrupting influence of the constant increase of unproductive, markets-skewering Military spending, such that Boeing apparently all but forgot that not all of their machines are supposed to kill people. They instead firmly believed that the fact that their most profitable products are designed to wreak mayhem has no effect on the behavior of the people working there. But just as in the rest of the economy, which also depends on the build-up of Death Machines and Nuclear Annihilation scenarios to maintain the Overkill capacity of its deadly massive missile force, the widest profit margins are reaped by the deadliest systems, precisely because those systems will never be used, and therefore, the customers can't complain. As far as any of us knows, the entire nuclear arsenal could be a total sham. I mean, given that they are all private contractors whose only requirement under law is to return the maximum dividends to their Shareholders, not to provide a superior product to their customers, who can, at least theoretically, go to another vendor, the US military in the arena of nuclear arms has no such choice, and hasn't the legal go-ahead to test nuclear weapons, so must accept them as though they work when in fact the incentive is in the opposite direction: to provide a Potemkin product and funnel the cash thus saved  to fatten investors' IRA's instead.

The Princess and the Petri Dish:

Just as no matter how much or when the FAA and Boeing tell people the Max 737 is safe, no one's going to be chomping at the bit to climb on board one, likewise, the Princess can claim she removed the pee under the mattress, but still no one's going to want to lie on it during a cruise on those ships for quite awhile. So if they expect that paying customers are just dying to be floated off to foreign climes in their petri dish ships after a few weeks of self-isolation, I can't but feel that they are sadly, tragically mistaken.

And then there's

OIL: We've rigged the economy such that the US is now a Petro-State, with its economic future completely tied to ever-expanding fracking and the resultant Petrochemical plants springing up like mushrooms as though we're all in the cast of The Graduate, and plastic's the industry of the future on which we should all pin our hopes. But the drop in oil prices didn't just drop US oil companies' income, it caused the value of the dollar and the enormous pile of claims on them it is a promissory note for, to lose value just as the costs and magnitude of US debt is set to dramatically increase (hence the "Pro-active" Fed response. But the only thing that pulled us out of the Great Recession, besides China, was oil ... without those, US debt becomes toxic. So the Fed can lower interest rates all it wants, but the more it does so, the more its balance sheet balloons, because there'll be no one left, there already WAS no one left, to buy our debt except Kung-Pao Powell's Fed).

 In 2008, in mid-December, a full three months after the market debacle that precipitated the Great Recession, or what most economic analysts not pushing a narrative, refer to more accurately as the century's first depression, although the price of oil dropped precipitously, prices for U.S. crude (WTI) for January 2009 delivery never sank below $40.06 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

It's currently trading for April contracts at $27.77.

Remember "Pro-Active"? That's what the Fed chairman called the cut in interest rates, long before the virus, during that short-lived span of time last year when they made a farcical attempt at "rate normalization" (See that embedded "normal" in there?) That phrase was used a lot in 2008. Not only has it never happened, but had Powell considered continuing along the path the FOMC had turned down, the one thing he could be sure of was that President Plump would have simply fired him and put in his place someone who would do his bidding ... that's what he does. So like that other infamous Powell, Colin, despite his misgivings he did what was expected of him in order to keep his job. Which reduces said position to that of a sinecure. Anyone can sit there and obey orders, but that means there is no responsibility in your own hands any more, it's an empty position you retain just to collect a paycheck.

 "I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and goddammit, people like me!”

The Man With No Plan: The USA's Corona-in-Chief.

"These aggressive moves that have to be taken by the Fed are really not good for oil right now," ...

That gives a whole new spin to Gresham's Law, which states that, "Bad money drives out good". And now we have Fake money driving out Real money, with the loudest accuser of Fake News (yes, that's right, he called the virus not only a hoax, but fake news, as well. His One-man show has an extremely limited repertoire) becomes the loudest advocate for Fake Money.

Yet prices could fall even further as the battle for market share heats up.

And lest we forget, the seditious Birther is now following in Obama's footsteps and pulling oil out of the ground in one part of the country to pour it into the ground in another; filling the SPR, not as a future emergency supply, but to keep pumping oil out of the ground for which there is no demand in order to pump dollars into the failing oil companies' coffers. So that Exxon, majority holder in Texas' Permian Fracture zone, can continue to pay dividends to its shareholders. Blatantly  using public money to enable failing Corporations that used their Trump Tax cut to buyback their own shares, now use yet more public money to lard onto their shareholders monies wrested right out of the pockets of taxpayers. The Free market, they call it. Where the Market meets every demand, every eventuality being reflected in the price and government needs to, in Ronald Reagan's words, "Just Get out of the Way", "Shrink it until you can drown it in its own bath water", insisted the same Republicans still ruling the roost in the Congress as they shut down the US government, insisting its spending would push us over a "Fiscal Cliff". Exactly where they planned to work should that eventuality occur they were never worried about, as they're cynical diatribe was all for show for their Mad Hatter's Tea Party: Showboating. But the bitter brew they steeped continues to hamstring effective governance, the only outcome they ever really desired, to this day.

The upshot being that the world, like Boeing, is being forced to learn that, No, life's not going to go back to "normal", for the simple reason that what we, and Boeing, have come to consider to be normal is so far afield from anything remotely resembling normal. Just look at who we've put in charge should you doubt that.

cOvid's Metamorphoses: Global Eyes Realize Society DOES exist!

A tiny package of DNA has already, within the span of but a quarter of a year, done more to curb CO2 production, in the form of fossil fuel incineration, or cessation thereof, than an entire generation of blather.

As the ocean heats up to a full degree celsius warmer than the maximum monthly mean, a total media blackout accompanies the threatened acceleration  of the pace of Global Warming. Thus the world faces the year of 2020 with distorted vision.

With all eyes focused instead on its own plight, humanity has chosen to ignore the fact that a slowdown in economic activity, in but one country, has already spiked the temperature of the earth.

Trump's reaction? Line up billionaire "Geniuses" at the government trough to skim off their share of the Corona "MAMAMAMAMY Corona" bonanza, because, after all, just as in WW2, all of a sudden "We're all in this together", it's just that exactly who the "WE" in the "We're" is only made abundantly clear when anyone who is not a billionaire genius tries to get tested:

Now, if you were the leader of a country with basically zero capacity to test suspected carriers of the virus (as an example, a friend of mine just jetted back from Vegas, a destination he never should have gone to, which I told him, but everyone in authority was insisting there was no problemo, so why would anyone listen to me? So he confidently sauntered down the aisle to his seat at the airport and they took off. So there's that).

However, this man is > 65, & immuno-suppressed, so upon his return, he went right to his doctor @ UCSF where they gave him various tests, yet although he had a "bit of a sore throat and  a slight cough", no test for CV-19, not even any advise to self-quarantine.

Now in a country where the tests are beautiful, "They are available and they are beautiful", why would this be? And lest you think lies make no difference, if the Administration weren't insisting that tests were available to anyone who wanted them, they could suggest that, where test kits aren't sufficient, anyone coming into ANY clinic complaining of problems, but that can't be tested, be given a face mask so as to at least not spread the virus to others ... instead, because, "They are available, and they are beautiful", there's no such dictum. Instead, because they refuse to admit that tests aren't available, and form a policy to address that reality, such as insuring anyone who suspects they have the virus wear a mask to protect others, here in this, "We're all in this together" non-society of ours, it's preferable to pretend that we have tests kits aplenty and therefore give no suggestions to the vast majority of places that don't have them as to what to do. Instead, NO masks are allocated to provide to those who suspect they have the virus and thereby prevent spreading it to others ... I guess it's "who cares if they're not MY family?" We've been conditioned for so many generations now to actually laugh in people's faces when calamity strikes them ("You're FIRED!"  ... and the crowd roars their approval ... and anyone who doesn't, anyone who feels an ounce of compassion for the poor sucker that just lost their livelihood knows not to show it since that puts themselves in jeopardy of losing their own job, since they're obviously, oh so, so obviously, simply not the Right Stuff). In fact, all the better for me (Somehow) as I have no responsibility to them, and they certainly have none for me.

The Chinese live by their own law.

Although I'm sure you've seen the mobs at the US airports as a result of our "I'm from Trump's government and I'm here to help" policies, here in San Francisco, where our Mayor declared an emergency before any other county in the State of California, the picture is less blatant. But that photograph above is of my neighbor's backyard. Those are all garbage piles, the refuse from my other neighbors' garbage cans dutifully set out on the curb to be collected by well, presumably Recology. But in actuality they are scavenged through by elderly Chinese, (not US citizens, they are mostly from China, where they have no Social Security, but their relatives who snuck them over, demand they troll through the filth of others to glean a pittance of an existence by stealing from Recology, absconding with the only part of the trash that gives Recology a profit margin, thus raising the bills of every Recology customer so as to pay the old-age pension for these poor UNdocumented workers).

From trash bin to trash bin they troll nightly, dragging the filth of San Francisco with them and leaving the bins with any Corona virus thus deposited to spread to their unsuspecting citizens (many people somehow have no idea or more  often, simply don't think about it because, heaven forbid, they will get severely sanctioned for being insensitive, or racist ... never mind that the Chinese will break both your legs should they see you horning in on their action).

Make no mistake, this is big business, with payoffs at City Hall to allow this grand theft to continue. Which no one really cared about, but how can a City declare an "Emergency", a health emergency no less, and simply shrug their shoulders at this extremely likely vector of contagion: Every person in the City has to take in these bins that have been gone over by Chinese who wear gloves for their own protection, but those gloves don't prevent them from spreading infection to the actual OWners of the bins who must drag them INSIDE (or receive a citation) to their living quarters or garage, where they have to touch the exact same lids, in the exact same places their nocturnal visitors have handled them, every time they put garbage in them.

Let me make it clear: none of that debris pictured above that is daily being dragged through their house to the backyard is collected from anywhere but other people's trash (I see them every night and many days, other people's Recology bins: Every single one of those cans and bottles pictured above would have already been collected by Recology and safely trucked out of the City weeks ago. Instead, they are collected into these enormous piles of germ-infested heaps hidden throughout the City (just think of what goes into your garbage that they then paw through to reap their ill-gotten gains: tissues discarded after blowing your nose being the most dangerous, but there are plenty of other nasties). Even in the best of times this is a Public Health hazard, and now, it's unconscionable that a full three weeks after declaring a "Health Emergency" (yeah right), and now insisting that everybody else remain in their domiciles, San Francisco's "leaders" sanction this off-hand dismissal of their efforts to protect the public from a Pandemic.  

But that's how San Francisco handles an emergency.

That our unfortunate fellow human beings have to stoop to this in order to be allowed to live with their family (when a black man in the Bayview  accosted one of them for their theft, a woman started screaming at him ,"It's for the FAMily" it's to feed his FAMily" (How does SHE know? She didn't even know the guy) ... in other words, back off: Chinese lives matter, Black lives don't ... I guess they learned that from us).

Tonight is trash night. They're'll be swarms of them back out there just like every other trash night. They are too  down-trodden themselves to really care about what effect their activity has on anybody else.

Which highlights the hypocrisy of being a Sanctuary city: Especially here in America. It's deplorable that the citizens whose labor actually pays the taxes that pay the salaries of the best-pensioned Public employees in the State allow their demagoguery to endanger its citizens by allowing people who pay NO taxes, and in fact deliver only higher Trash Disposal bills to those who do, to endanger its citizens' health.

THEY won't be taking 14 days off work, they can't. But the City of San Francisco needs to stop acting like the President they revile so much by copying his favorite dodge and pretending that as long as you don't see it it can't hurt you.

The Hoax that Chokes: "The Extremes" Greatest Hits.

Maybe it is time  Americans learned exactly what "Extreme" really means, but I doubt it.

My fellow US citizens are so besotted with the concept of their own exceptionalism and the joined-at-the-hip connection of the Extreme with that perception, it's highly unlikely they're about to dial back their embrace of it despite the fact that extreme weather, extreme QE, extreme fire danger, extreme weapons build-up to such Overkill capacity we can incinerate anything that gets in our way, having built up our military arsenal to such an extreme degree we can obliterate every living person on the planet hundreds of times over for no more reason than that it enables the Pentagon and their Neo-con Masters in their extreme desire to maintain extreme military control over every nation in the world, in its well-published extreme goal of Full-Spectrum Domination over the entire Globe.

 Is that too extreme?

Well, judging by the fact that QE is starting up again, despite the reluctance to call it that, or by the fact that the Congress, one of its bicameral houses now run by Democrats (lest you have the mis-guided notion that they are less war-mongering then their Republican counterparts, which the Obama/Biden/Clinton dominated "center" demonstrates is anything but the case (while "Black Lives Matter" were fulminating over their treatment in the US under the only black President in American history's tenure, they voiced nary a whisper of protest as that same Black President destroyed the African nation of Libya and gave his cheerleading approval to the horrible evisceration and  murder of its leader. Perhaps OBAMA should be their name : Only Black Americans Matter Anyway, has voted to allocate Trillions of dollars more to upgrade our extreme Overkill capacity to an even more obscene,  inhuman scale, even as the "This is not a Socialist Country" President has already promised not just billions, but trillions to "Upgrade" the USA's Extreme Overkill capacity. Meanwhile billions  more goes to farm support to the most rabid anti-Socialist contingent of his base base: failing Midwest farmers. Then our "This will never be as Socialist Country" President offered yet billions upon billions more to the failing fracking industry, while QE ad infinitum and 0% interest rates prop up the failing banking and insurance industries, so that the failing flailing Wall St weak can have their Free Market valuations artificially boosted by our "This will never be a Socialist Country"'s Central Government yet again ... because that incomprehensible $4.5 Trillion QE gusher, (an amount in excess of a full 25% of annual US GDP), fracturing any basis for the belief in Free Markets, simply hasn't proven to be enough.

They like to call it the "Wealth Effect", but it's only a euphemism for fraud, but by which they mean, "the Central Government's contrived maneuvering to enhance the general public's perception of their net worth", thereby, with 0% interest rates as an added incentive, they will naively sink their pitiful dollars into the failing economy's sinkhole on that Street that has erected a Wall around the economy, having constructed a medieval keep where labor's dollars go in, but only used toilet paper comes out". Papering over Risk to hide a massive inability to make good on promised returns on any number of hyped-up investments (IPO's being the most odious and obvious strategy of vacuuming savings out of the hands of the novice investor and into the accounts of private hedge funds and investment firms).

Of course, being the Central Planning Committee of an America that will NEVER be a Socialist Country, they can call it anything they want, but what it is in fact, is FRAUD.

And as you weigh the impact of that on our lives and our very concept of Capitalism and free markets, a word that comes to mind is "Scale", and I don't mean from the heartbreak of psoriasis, but
the enormity of QE-generated "dollars" and what that does to our perceptions.

In an article documenting the rising number of suicides in the Farming community, well, more specifically, the American Midwest's farming community (as in the so-called "global Village" which in terms of trade, we very much still live in, the thousand of farmers committing suicide on a yearly basis in India, thanks to American TNC's such as Monsanto and ADM, simply doesn't register even a blip on our self-reverential radar) produces nearly all of the country’s food and bio-fuel and contribute some $133 billion annually to the gross domestic product.

Sounds like a lot, doesn't it?

But during the aughts, the Fed was injecting $85 Billion/month into the US economy, surpassing in a scant four months the entire combined annual contribution of the entire farming sector plus the largest category within retail, automotive, which generates approximately $212 billion,  which gives us:

$133 billion + $212 billion = $334.5 Billion. (Real money from actual labor and productivity),

Four months of QE4 = $334 Billion (Fed counterfeit money issued to convince investors their "securities" are not worth less. Can I say it again? Fraud!).

Yet month after month Rachel Madcow can rail about "Russia", yet never once use her soapbox to educate her public about the kleptocratic rule of the Keptocracy. Her sponsors would have disappeared as fast as cockroaches scuttling for cover when the light's snapped on in the middle of the night.

(As an example of how we are purposely kept ill-informed, in researching the internet for articles on the subject, I clicked on a piece entitled, "The 5 Industries Driving the U.S Economy". Nowhere in the article does it mention the US GDP, the still-used gross measure of our National Output (not GNP), nor a dollar amount, or even a percentage of the economic pie that each or any of those 5 industries contribute to it. The same holds true for the Fed's Beige Book. This report of economic activity in the US by Federal Reserve District makes such statements as "Residential real estate activity grew modestly", "Residential real estate activity grew slightly", "Lending activity grew further", "Activity in the agriculture sector increased slightly", while "Sales of retail goods increased markedly" ... (But from what dollar-amount base to how much now? Remember this is the FED, the organisation that monetizes EVERYthing, yet they give not a single dollar figure in any of the industries they cover, never mind a designation of what percentage of total GDP each industry represents. As you might realize, in order to get the percentage growth you need the actual dollar amount before the period measured and then after, yet site after site offers such percentages while none of them give the actual dollar amounts on which those percentages are based. In other words how can this be anything but a deliberate omission?).

(There I go with my rambling rows again).

Such extreme numbers must be hidden, disguised, or glossed over so that the Japanification of the economy can proceed uncommented on. But when an industry, and the livelihoods that go with it, such as the shrimp industry in the Gulf of Mexico that is being destroyed by the Dead Zones created by fertilizer runoff from the failing farm sector, and the media quotes the financial damage at, let's say $8.5 Billion, such a large amount, even though it affects tens of thousands of people, sounds trivial, when you know that the Fed can just create 10 TIMES that amount in the blink of an eye without anyone batting an eye, never mind forcing them to account for their legerdemain.

But here in the Extreme States of America, Just Do it:

So going to the extreme with monetary intervention by the Fed dovetails nicely with Extreme
Driving, Extreme Sports, Extreme Fitness, Extreme Terrain, Extreme Ownership, while the Extreme unction of Extreme oil production is considered just normal: okay, get outta the way even as it results in extreme downpours that cause ex-stream flooding, or Extreme droughts that result in Extreme fires forcing governments to take Extreme measure because of the resulting extreme homelessness.

So now, as a microscopic organism forces government after government into extreme measures, and the extreme heat that is rolling our way as a result of the extreme curtailment in aerosol production in the atmosphere from coal-fired power plants and airliners' jet trails, both of which have a net cooling effect, we remain at 415 ppm of CO2, the most extreme level of that gas in mankind's entire history, an amount of atmospheric carbon appreciably higher than last year's, which amount then resulted in the hottest year on record. Hence, at this same time, now and going forward, when we are bereft of that cooling effect from the extreme burning of coal and the jet trails emitted by the Industrial Nations' extreme level of global air travel, it is entirely likely, and grows more so on a daily basis, that here in the northern hemisphere, this growing level of heat every government is ignoring as much as they ignored the corona virus, will prove perhaps to be one extreme too many.

Maybe then the USA will finally take the extreme step of recognizing that yes, it is the actual invisible-to-the-naked-eye world of REAL life, not the invisible supernatural world of their imagination, that delivers real and EXTREME repercussions when we choose to pretend that we believe that what you can't see can't hurt you. Likewise the rostrum that " ... but words can never hurt me", is also being proven untrue as President Plump's extremely ignorant and mindlessly accepted insistence that both of them are nothing but a Hoax gets tragically exposed as the self-serving deliberate lies they are.







            

The International Criminal Courts Disaster.

The Toxic Shock Doctrine seems to be at work in our globalized world, n'est-ce pas?

Some give good Headlines du jour:

Oil prices crash 30%, sending global stocks tumbling FT.

Saudi Arabia kicked off an all-out oil war on Saturday, slashing official pricing for its crude and making the deepest cuts in at least 20 years on its main grades, in a bid to push as many barrels into the market as possible.

The Financial Times reported “Russia has had enough of the shale guys living off Opec-plus,” said one person familiar with negotiations, referring to the cartel and allied non-members.

https://moneymaven.io/mishtalk/economics/trump-blackmails-germany-with-sanction-threats-over-nord-stream-2-tvWVjwRnrEGS2XEk4AWceg

“Angela [Merkel] you got to stop buying gas from Putin,” said Trump.

 The liquidity crisis will quickly spread far beyond energy.

George W. Bush , the price of gasoline increased from $1.60 per gallon when he took office in January 2001 to $4.40 per gallon in July 2008, a jump of 275 percent.

That spawned a liquidity crisis that spread far beyond energy.

Oil Production

 2017: OPEC’s total production at the time of President Plump's inauguration was  33,140 (in thousands of barrels a day), while

Total U.S. production was ~ 9,000 (in thousands of barrels a day). In

2020: OPEC’s total production sunk to: 29, 000  (in thousands of barrels a day)

While U.S. production surged to 13,000.

That was exactly the amount needed to displace entirely the output of the smaller countries, one of which, not surprisingly, was Iraq, but also Bahrain, Gabon, Nigeria, and other small producers that could ill afford it, had their production side-lined to make way for US production that was made possible by fracturing the rock that the remnants of US oil supply were trapped in.

As the USA, the only major oil producer in the world without any production agreements with any other oil producer in the world, stole market share from the smallest of the small producers, on top of collapsing oil prices, by flooding the market with diluted product (the oil condensate that the Permian and other fracturing wells produce in larger quantities than oil is considered so far from being oil that Russia has wrangled a dispensation: it need not count any oil condensate it produces in its oil production figures. That same condensate that US is pouring onto the market, because that's essentially what "Light Tight Oil" is comprised of.

 In the U.S., a growing volume and percentage of the produced associated gas is intentionally worse-than-wasted by flaring it in such outsized quantities since about year 2000, that it's surpassed by far the 50-year highs of 500 billion cubic feet, a full 7.5%, reached in 2018.

Meanwhile, the burst in supply has encouraged the growth in the entire world of all the wrong industries.

As everyone vilifies Trump, no one seems to have noticed that, like the Capitalistic system he so ardently embraces (who can blame him? What other system would continue to shower money on a known serial bankrupt, con man and Liar?) is ensuring that nothing we do will effect its continued rampage over the natural world, like a Hummer it simply rolls over anything in its path, squelching complaints with the same heavy-handed insistence the Hummer utilizes: its bigger, it's butcher, and goddammit, it's Made America Grate again.

For the last decade, using so-called QE Cash and the bonanza of oil it's drowned the oh-so-concerned globe with, as we rush to save the Planet by freeing it of all those hydrocarbons buried in its nether regions to fund bio-fuel production that reduces vast tracts of rainforest into piles of ash and transforms pristine prairie vistas into polluted agroswamps that pour their fossil-fuel-based fertilizer runoff into the Mississippi to be drained into the Gulf of Mexico to ruin the livelihoods of Gulf fisheries and trawlers by creating an ever-widening deadzone so as to implement a "green" solution to burning gasoline by diluting it with a  product whose energy efficiency is an order of magnitude lower so as to pad the pockets of its sponsors in Congress, the White House and every Red State  in the nation (each of which is demanding less interference from that same Washington swamp while they glom onto ever larger shares of tax dollars from the very Blue States they revile).

While determining that the vast store of energy reserves must "stay in the ground" to stave off disaster, industry after industry that is totally dependent on fossil fuels is making sure we are doing exactly the opposite, as they become the only engines of growth in the modern world.

To wit:

Oil production itself

Petrochemical output drowning the world in its waste;

Natural gas production: to such an irresponsible degree of excess that more than ten percent of its production is simply flared; 

Air travel and its byproduct,

Tourism, and its byproduct,

Hotel Occupancy;

Cruise Industry;

Arms production and sales;

Electronics;

The Internet;

Automobile production.

The latter item for all practical purposes consists of robofacturing (Workers need not apply ... Your job is now to drive drive drive ... anywhere, for anything just get in that goddamn car, turn the IGNITION switch and burn up that gas. Consume! It's the only right you have left) 35 million new ICE machines every year (if you put an end to EV production, it would barely register a blip on the only measures that matters to markets: stock prices and Stock Market performance, bond prices and sovereign debt, CEO salaries and pension plans, tax receipts and military budgets. Not exactly a Green Machine we've spent the last dozens of years creating, is it?).

But more importantly, it leaves no provision for a Green Machine for the next generation either, does it? Only fraudulent claims akin to the Ethanol boondoggle and the bio-diesel programs that purported to be Green, yet which at their dark core had only the Slime Green of the almighty dollar. And there is nothing currently in the works to change any of that. Only this time the lies we're being molly-coddled with are the EV claims of 100% decarbonization (Lol) of the transportation sector, a lie so momentous, its foundation in Evil so entrenched, we will see it, as per Goebbels' dictum, repeated over and over until we believe it (which won't take much; we cling to our rides that fiercely that it is at the cold-hearted core of the American Dream: No Car? You're a Failure! A loser; a mamby-pamby Libtard. Why are you even alive!?).

But since the Western world need keep up the facade of a Free-for-all Enterprise system that requires no input from government, and must have its animal spirits let loose to do whatsoever it deems necessary to turn a short-term profit, the planning that goes on in boardrooms and government offices alike to further the economic plans for the next generation must be conducted secretly. Yet no economy the size of the USA can possibly be run without plans for the future.  But the electorate has voluntarily recused itself from that planning, as it would rather envision a future that, like the Wars we've so recently "ended", just "happens". Otherwise it sounds too much like Socialism.

After all it's so much more logical to do like New York, say, and like, let's say Exxon, just hide the data so that we can sue (ie blame) them for all the oil products we purchased from them and then ignited. (Somehow a company selling someone a gun leaves the buyer responsible if they fire it; but sell them gas and it's the seller's fault if they ignite it). While making a ton of money in the process, and running over all opposition with the petrol-powered military (Which all on its lonesome burns more gasoline than the entire country of Sweden). Like cancer from cigarettes, it's so much easier to blame "Big Tobacco" (which doesn't actually exist: "Major Transnational Corporate money-making profit-machines enabled by our Federal Dollars' subsidies", though, now those entities really do exist).

But one little germ, one microscopic virus has done in less than one of Wall Street weak's quarters,  more to reduce carbon exhaust, bunker-fuel pollution, and automobile futures than all the promises of any Green Raw Deal ever has or will do. Like GW Bush's collapse of the Ponzi scheme of CDO's, MBS, Covenant-Lite, CDO squared, SIV's, shadow banking, Fracking bonanza, the Trump economy is a bag of gas that's not going to be pricked and seep out like the methane from the tens of thousands of leaks fracturing the earth's surface. It has far more potential to blow up in our faces like Paradise that was purportedly caused by a transmission line and had nothing to do with the myriad hotspots caused by methane not being flared, as California law dictates, thus leaving it to accumulate, increasing the probability it would ignite in a 100degree plus environment.

(As if money weren't enough to blame as the underlying culprit in the Corona virus's rapid spread within China and now the rest of the world, the actual reason for its being "weaponized" isn't even being discussed ... it wasn't as a bio-weapon it was being tested as, but as a VAccine. But because the pharmaceutical companies already have plans for a vaccine against it in the future, this fact is never mentioned. But among non-government scientists, it is the # 1 suspect for the corona virus's explosive growth, and the most obvious reason that the Chinese Communist Party leadership cared more to keep that secret than to stop its spread. Which brings up a second, related, query:

Why, when deaths from the virus first became known, was it universally accepted that the numbers were being down-played, yet right now, as the world chomps at the bit to get back to "normal", are the figures from that same Chinese Communist Party, figures that claim the number of  new cases is declining, accepted as Gospel? Since when do we believe numbers circulated by apparatchiks working for a totalitarian regime? 

While the USA, as explained on the Desmog blog, continues its investor fraud to pump up its oil industry, the largest, and most appropriately named, pump 'N dump operation in history, aided and abetted, as surely as the housing fraud under Plump's predecessor was a scam, so too, and on as continent-spanning a scale, more akin to a GSE than any Company, is the fracturing bonanza set to fracture into myriad shards of loss.

Yet for all its evil, the housing Ponzi hadn't that extra kick in the groin that the shale leash hales:

Environmental destruction and weather calamities of unprecedented scale as the Southeast US and much of the farmbelt is turned into a watery swamp to enable the exponential growth in flaring, which growth rate now far exceeds that of actual oil output. In fact, as the fracturing boom ages, the growth in the output of gas balloons while the amount of oil per drilled rig declines. This is following such a path that the increase in flaring is becoming an embarrassment even to the Texas oil industry. But one thing they fail to inform the public of, but of which the Furor is well aware, is that as this condition continues, and it only promises to worsen, the prospect of the US in and of itself, ratcheting up the extreme consequences caused by such extreme measures would, you might think, cure Americans of their fondness for everything Extreme (it won't of course, or maybe like the Afghanistan and Iraqi Wars, will do so only when it is in the rear view mirror and all the harm's already baked into the yellow cake).

This doesn't simply court disaster, it ensures it.

As OPEC has now dropped its price for oil, a price kept artificially high to enable US fracking to continue despite its non-profitability in this our Markets know everything world, the prospect that the Plumped economy would end in the same crack-up and depression that the Bush (both père and fils) presidencies ended in will come as a surprise only because nobody has bothered to point out that  what's being said now, (or was being said ) about the resilience of the US economy, even before its defalcations threatened to come to light, were exactly what was being said then. And by exactly, I mean verbatim; yet as GW so adroitly pointed out, 

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again". 

...and just like our smirking chimp president, we can't quite bring ourselves to say the real corollary. They laughed at GW because he couldn't remember the 2'nd part, but that's not how I read it. He remembered it alright, and then it flashed into his little pea-brain exactly what he was about to say and he choked not so much on the very idea of HIM being fooled twice, but on the tacit admission that he could be held responsible for any possible events that the "Fool me Twice, Shame on me" conclusion would  have left him culpable for. Well, you know what?

 We will be (as in are being) fooled again.

And then, "Who could have seen it coming?",  that bromide of our mass suicide, will be trotted out yet again.