Week of 01/31/2022

 

Our Schizophrenic Economy
– by David Matthews 2

Imagine, if you will, being on a jet that just took off from the airport.  You’re climbing into the air at incredible speeds.  But, at the same time, some of the other passengers start screaming “We’re crashing!  We’re crashing!  The pilot is trying to kill us!”

Now, even when you can see and feel that the plane is still climbing, nothing you can say or do can dissuade the panicky passengers in their hysterical belief that the plane is really crashing to the ground.  Even as the plane levels off at its maximum height, these passengers are screaming that the plane is still crashing, that you’re all going to die, and that the pilot is doing this on purpose.  This goes on and on until the pilot, tired of the hysteria of some of the passengers, takes the plane to the nearest airport to get rid of those troublemakers, which only serves to validate these hysterical hypocrites in their collective belief that the plane is really crashing. 

Then, when the plane has successfully landed, pulled to the gate, and police are called to the plane to get rid of the troublemakers, these same people act like they did nothing wrong, and deny ever saying that the plane was crashing and denied that they accused the pilot of trying to kill them all.  They don’t know how “anyone” could think that *they* could cause a panic like that.

That’s basically what we are dealing with regarding America’s economy.

We have two conflicting beliefs going on.

The first is from all of the economic indicators saying things have been going phenomenally great since 2021.  Unemployment is down, job openings are up, the Gross Domestic Product is going up and is the strongest it has ever been, corporate profits are soaring, all signs that the economy is doing great.  And Wall Street... well, they’ve always been on crack and they’re never a good indicator of the economy.

The second comes from talk radio and so-called “conservative” media and good ol’ boys and red-hats and the party of hypocrisy and hysteria and nationalism and insurrection and orange-skinned narcissists.  The economy is supposedly “broken”, and President Joe Biden supposedly is “the worst president ever” who “ruined America”.  They point to the inflation rate – which hadn’t grown for decades until recently – and the lack of certain workers in the service industry, not to mention a continuing supply chain shortage.  This, of course, from the party of lies and con-games and phony “voter fraud” claims that led to the domestic terrorist attack of January 6^th, 2021.

The problem is that, as with many lies and con-games, there is a little bit of truth behind the Trumpist hysteria about our economy. 

Inflation really is an issue.  We’ve been getting more money in the past year, either through the relief package Biden got passed last year, or through higher-than-normal raises from our employers, but it also costs us more to buy the stuff we need compared to previous years.  And that’s presuming that we can get the stuff we need thanks to the ongoing global supply chain problems, which also contributes to inflation.  And, remember, this is a global issue, not exclusively an American one.

Yes, unemployment is low, but, as yours truly has been saying for years, it’s not a true indication of people out of work.  Many of those people who were unemployed had expended their unemployment money, especially in those Trump Party states that believed that those folks are just “lazy” and cut extended benefits faster than Leatherface’s chainsaw.  Single mothers who could not get child-care because of the pandemic can’t exactly go back into the workforce if they have no way to take care of those kids.

There’s also the matter of job openings versus people actually being hired.  Just because a company has a job opening posted doesn’t mean they will actually hire someone for that position.  Either the wages they offer are not acceptable (i.e. below poverty levels), the working conditions are too toxic (we are still in a global pandemic, you know), or the company really isn’t hiring people right now and are making do with their current staff.

How do I know this?  Because we’ve all been here before, back when President Joe Biden was Vice-President Joe Biden.

Biden was Vice-President during the Great Recession, when the economy supposedly was “gangbusters” after they bailed out the “Too Big to Fail” banks.  Not one of the corporate criminals aside from Bernie Madoff that screwed over the hard-working Americans were ever charged for their crimes.  We were told that the economy would go through a so-called “jobless recovery”, and Biden and the rest of the Executive Branch were a-okay with that.

So, yeah, everything was fine then just as long as the banks were making profits and Big Corporate were making profits and Big Medical and Big Pharma were making profits.  But the rest of us?  The ones forsaken by the White House and all the “Bigs”?  No, it didn’t seem like the economy was doing so great for us.  And that’s why a lot of the forsaken Americans who previously voted for Barack Obama twice ended up voting for the Narcissist in 2016.

Let’s get brutally honest here... we will always view the economy through our personal lenses.  If you’re a millionaire or a billionaire and you’re making big money from stocks and corporate profits, yeah, you’ll see the economy as going great.  But if you’re a hard-working American who has been struggling to make ends meet and you see empty shelves at the store and what you can get costs more and more, yeah, you’re not going to see the economy in a good light, no matter what the indicators say.

No, it’s not all Joe Biden’s fault.  Some of it is because of corporate greed.  Some of it is because we don’t have enough people vaccinated and/or masked to bring the pandemic infections and hospitalizations and deaths down.  Some of it is because we don’t have the supply chain problem under control yet.  But President Biden and his folks need to see the economy from our perspective, not just the perspectives of the people with all the money.  They need to learn the lesson they failed to learn the last time around, otherwise the hysterical hypocrites from the party of the orange-skinned narcissist will have us all convinced that the economy is crashing instead of climbing.

Week of 01/24/2022

 

Grading President Joe Biden
– by David Matthews 2

For those who are new to this column, since 2001, this commentator has given every incoming president a chance before condemning them and no longer referring to their tenure as an “administration”.  How long this chance lasts depends entirely on them and their people.

For President George W. Bush, he was given 4 years before I started referring to his tenure as the Bush Imperium.  Part of that was because of the events of 9/11 and the continual fear of more terrorism.

For President Barack Obama, he had six months before his tenure was dubbed the Obama Fail.  We were still in the Great Recession, and not only did they do little to help those who were victims of the recession, but they consciously refused to hold any of the “Too Big To Fail” institutions or their executives to account for their criminal acts.  Not only did this result in prolonging the recession, but it allowed the criminals to continue to screw Americans over again and again.

For Narcissist President Donald John Trump, he screwed over his chance in just twenty-four hours.

Twenty-four hours!

He had no “administration”.  He had a cult.  From day two, it was the Cult of Trump, complete with “alternative facts” and a literal cheering squad.  Boasting about how “big” he won – in ever-exaggerating numbers - while at the same time whining about being a victim of “voting fraud”.

So now the narcissist is out of the White House and we have President Joe Biden, and we are one year into his tenure as of this article. 

Does Biden have an “administration”?

As far as this commentator is concerned, yes.  But maybe not for long.

Yes, President Biden has done some good things in that year.  He got the Congress to pass a much-needed stimulus program that put money in the pockets of Americans.  A bailout for people, not corporations.  That is not “nothing”.

“Infrastructure Week”.  Remember it?  Eight years of political stalling and sabotage from the psychopaths and sociopaths that called themselves “Republicans” during the Obama Fail.  Four years of nothing but talk and empty con-man promises from Narcissist Trump.  President Biden got it passed and signed in six months.  That is sure as hell not “nothing”.

Yes, there are some problems.  COVID is still a threat, with all the variants out there.  And the people who have been the problem when it came to wearing masks and social distancing in 2020 are also refusing to take the vaccinees.  Unfortunately, everything that Biden has tried to do to help get people vaccinated and help get the hospitalizations and deaths down have been openly sabotaged by those cult followers, including all the Trump party state governors and legislators, not to mention the Trump-appointed members of the judiciary, throwing screaming Wal-Mart tantrums about mandates.  That’s not a fail for Biden.  That’s sabotage from the Cult of Trump.

The so-called “immigration crisis” was more of a manufactured Trumpist BS than an actual “problem”.  And, yes, Biden did address it.

The pull-out and fall of Afghanistan?  Biden didn’t create it.  He just went along with the plan that his predecessor – the narcissist con-artist – had set up with the Taliban rather than to listen to the war-hawks and chickenhawks and their demand for endless occupation and conflict.  Is that on Biden?  Not entirely.  But the cultists and the air-fluffed ego-driven media sure as hell want it to be.

Yes, inflation is on the rise for the first time in a decade or two, but that’s connected to the global supply chain problem.  Operative word being “global”.  As in... it’s not just America.  It is global.  Between COVID and not enough people to work the jobs needed, it’s going to get rough.  And that’s not just here in America.  You can’t blame Biden for something that is going on around the world.  It sucks, yes.  It hurts like hell for all of us who aren’t big corporate execs or a member of the Kardashian family.

Biden’s dream plan of “Build Back Better”?  Always been a dream.  He got the stimulus passed and he got the infrastructure plan signed.  Anything after that is gravy.

Voting rights?  Even if he could get it passed and signed, you know that the Trump cultists in the various Trump Party state governments would be throwing tantrums and filing lawsuits like two-bit ambulance-chasing attorneys.  They’ve been spending the last year fixing things so they wouldn’t have another loss like they had in 2020.  They’ve been changing the rules so they could have their one-party rule like any fascist party needs.  Not just for their defeated narcissistic cult leader, but for their own power-preservation.  They sure as hell will not let some federal bill promising voting rights to the people they really don’t want to vote get in their way.

Is that Biden’s fault?  Only in his naivete.

You see, this is what Biden’s problem really is... he has been operating under the delusion that the Cult of Trump and the Trump/Q Party was an aberration that would end when their cult leader was out of the White House.  He assumed that “sanity” would supposedly return to the Trump Party members in Congress and that he could negotiate to get things done like he thinks used to happen “back in the day”.  That didn’t happen.  The cult is still there in Congress.  All the people who were elected under the narcissist’s name and with the narcissist’s blessing and all those who enabled the narcissist for those four years are still there and are still following his orders... more or less.

Here’s the thing: the extreme partisan mentality didn’t start with the narcissist.  It was going on back when Biden was still in the Senate.  It was going on while he was Vice President under Obama.  It wasn’t an aberration.  It’s how the former GOP now Trump Party have been all this time.

President Biden still hasn’t fixed everything that the Party of Trump broke.  The US Postal Service is still under the rule of the dime-store imitation of Marvel’s Kingpin.  While Biden can’t directly fire the Postmaster General, he hasn’t been too quick to replace the members of the board that can fire Louis DeJoy.  Same with the Federal Communications Commission.  Same with a lot of agencies that have been gutted by Narcissist Trump and his cronies and enablers.

And that brings us to the biggest problem President Biden has... the fact that his narcissistic predecessor is still out there, a free man, despite all the criminal activity he is accused of doing, including but not limited to inciting the insurrection of January 6^th of last year. 

Robert Mueller has a report that listed all of the things that Narcissist Trump could be criminally charged with now that he is no longer in the White House.  So why hasn’t Attorney General Merrick Garland, the man who claimed to have sent the Oklahoma City bomber to his death, acted on this?  Is he not aware of the statute of limitations?  Why has his Department of Justice been focusing on the low-level participants of the insurrection?  Why have the New York prosecutors, who supposedly had all of these sealed indictments ready to be released, been focused on the underlings and not the narcissist himself?  Why hasn’t his Department of Justice acted on the contempt charge filed against former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows?  Why are they treating the narcissist’s enablers like they are above the law?

The longer that the narcissist is free and continues to spread his lies and whip up his cult followers, the more problems that will exist.  That faction is already hostile if not violent.  The airlines and medical workers and now school board members are seeing acts of violence either threated or materialized.  The rhetoric from the Trump/Q Party members has escalated into threats of violence, with references to supposed “Second Amendment remedies”.  That means guns, people.  Shootings.  From the folks that have already committed acts of insurrection and sedition this time last year.  Do we really need to have another act of domestic terrorism before Garland’s people bring the perpetrators to justice?

This is the same problem Obama had for eight years.  His Department of Justice also failed to act when it came to the criminals of the time.  They let the banks get away with their criminal acts.  They bailed out Wall Street instead of Main Street and let our streets fend for themselves.  That is why Obama’s tenure was dubbed the Obama Fail; because they failed the little Americans in favor of Big Corporate and Big Business and Big Banks and Big Insurance and Big Medical and Big Pharma.

You know what else is not helping?  The air-fluffed ego-driven media and their “both sides” and false equivalents lie, as well as sucking up to the Trump Party script in their need for ratings.  They’re out there continuing to proclaim Biden is “failing” and a “disaster” right out of the Trump Party script instead of giving him credit for the things that he actually did accomplish for the past year, like the infrastructure law.  Yes, I have a problem with them about that, especially with the Washington beltway media, whom I think should all be sent back home to cover tractor pulls and dog shows and have a bunch of new people in there – reporters and editors and publishers and producers – that will be honest and accurate about what is going on.

Let’s get brutally honest here... if I had to grade the tenure of President Biden and his people for the past year, I’d have to give them a solid “C”.  There’s been some good stuff so far, but also some stuff that they’ve dropped the ball on.  He still has an “administration” as far as this commentator is concerned, but he may not have it for long.

We needed Joe Biden in the White House, because the alternative was keeping a criminal narcissist in power, driving America into a fascist state.  But part of that is that he needs to fix the damages of his predecessor.  And, no, we will never get to the hunky-dory “let’s work together peacefully” state that Biden thinks we will be in now that he’s in the White House.  We are dealing with fascists.  Psychopaths and sociopaths and Karens and the rest of the self-entitled arrogant lot that had spent the past four years getting their way, and they will not compromise.  The only compromise they believe in is the other side surrendering.  That is not an exaggeration.  That is the truth.  They need to be called out, they need to be confronted, and, when they act on their hostility, they need to be arrested and incarcerated.

Whether or not President Biden will still have an “administration” or a flop in the next few months will depend entirely on him and his people.  There is work that needs to be done, and it is up to him and his people to make sure it is done.