What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you recognize sarcasm?

When Donald Trump says something you think is stupid or a lie, you simply don’t recognize superior intellect.

You don’t realize he is kidding you or just being sarcastic.

So when he said people should inject themselves with bleach to kill the coronavirus, you actually took him seriously.

Obviously, no person as sane and intelligent as Donald Trump would really mean you should use bleach internally.

Trump’s followers all knew it was a sly joke that they understood, while you “Never Trumpers” were too dense to get it.

If you people had the brains to pay attention, you would know that Trump has a long history of making statements that sound like lies or idiocy, but really are clever bits of sarcasm his high IQ followers understand.

Here are just a few examples:Trump fingers crossed.png

1. His marriage vows. Donald Trump knows more about marriage vows than anyone. His wives, Ivana, Marla, and Melania knew he was kidding with that nonsensical “. . . I, Donald Trump, take thee [whomever], to be my wife, and before God and these witnesses I promise to be a faithful and true husband for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, ’til death do us part.

Total sarcasm.

Even Donald Trump’s childrens laughed about that one. “Really, daddy, the Democrats, Hillary and your wives believed the ‘faithful and true’ . . . ’til death do us part‘ line?? They can’t be serious.  Hahaha.”

His followers, especially the very religious evangelicals, know not to pay any attention to those “before God” words, which are meaningless, in addition to being humorous.

2. “Mexico will pay for the wall.” A real knee-slapper. Donald Trump knows more about walls than anyone, but all of  President Trump’s followers knew it was sarcasm. They voted for him because they love a good laugh.

Even the Mexicans howled (with laughter), while your liberal heads exploded.

Lysol Memes, Bleach Memes and Disinfectant Memes get them in there!
More great health ideas here.

3. Injecting bleach to kill the virus. Donald Trump knows more about bleach than anyone. “I see the disinfectant where it knocks [the virus] out [from a surface] in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that [by] injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number.”

President Trump kept looking at Dr. Deborah Birx, who demonstrated her total, but subtle, understanding of the joke by remaining stone-faced.

4. Belgium is a beautiful city. Donald Trump knows more about Belgium than anyone. This is just one of the thousands of what you call “Dumb Donald” statements, which are cleverly designed to demonstrate how stupid you are for thinking he really meant them.

He knows better than you and anyone else in the world that Belgium is not a city, but a waffle.

5. The vaccine is coming along well, and in speaking to the doctors we think this is something that we can develop fairly rapidly. It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner. Whatever happens, we’re totally prepared.”

 Nobody knows more about vaccines than Donald Trump.

Only a fool like you could believe that President Trump meant we actually are totally prepared. Because of his high IQ and jolly sense of humor, Trump has invented his own language. When he says “totally,” he really means “not at all.”

His followers understand, enjoy, and often use Trump-language, as in when they say, “Donald Trump is totally trustworthy.”

6. “I just think this (pandemic) is something … that you can never really think is going to happen.” President Trump’s highly intelligent followers knew that (non-citizen) Obama’s (useless) national security council created a 69-page book falsely titled something like, “How to fight pandemics.”

Without even reading it, President Trump in his brilliance immediately knew it was a misleading, fake-news, Chinese hoax, so he rightly paid no attention to it and joked about it. Nobody knows more about pandemics than Donald Trump.

In the same vein, President Trump cracked several other jokes that Democrats fell for and made complete fools of themselves as their heads exploded. For example:

–“I’ve always known this is a real – this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. I’ve always viewed it as very serious.”
–“Within a couple of days [the number of positive cases is] going to be down to close to zero.”
–“It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.”
–“Anybody that needs a test gets a test. We – they’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.”
–“You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus, you know you can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody even knows what it is.”
–I don’t know anything about” (canceling the National Security Council’s pandemic response unit in 2018.) OK, he knew about it. There’s a video to prove it. And Dr. Anthony Fauci said,“It would be nice if the office was still there.” But that is the mystical brilliance, and hysterical humor of the President’s sarcasm: Denying the obvious.  (Remember how funny Baghdad Bob was?)

Certainly, no sane person would seriously make those comments, and because President Trump is known worldwide as a stable genius, the most stable of all geniuses in history, it should have been obvious, even to the Democrats that this was all sarcasm.

I can assure you that President Trump’s followers understood the jokes, and further, they know that virtually everything true either is a Chinese hoax or Fake News.

7. “And when I look at what’s happened in California with the votes, when I look at what happened — as you know, there was just a case where they found a million fraudulent votes…”

Of course, that never happened. Everyone knows that. But President Trump actually didn’t say “votes.” The White House has issued a statement saying that he either said “notes,” “boats,” “totes” “coats,” or “goats.”

Until the promised clarification comes next week, we suspect he said “goats,” — a million fraudulent goats. Once again, the fake news media doesn’t get it, but loyal supporters do.

No one knows more about fraudulent goats than Donald Trump.

8. “Windmill noise causes cancer.” Sure, those are the words he used, but as always, you don’t understand what he really said. And I’m not going to try to explain it to you, because you aren’t smart enough to see the real meaning.

Anyway, many people have said it. Many. Very many.

President Trump knows more about windmills and noise and science than anyone.

9. “We’re not paying for the tariffs; China is paying foer the tariffs, for the 100th time.” It was such clever sarcasm that he said it 100 times, It always got a big laugh, especially from people who understand trade and economics.

No one knows more about tariffs than Donald Trump.

Sure, there will be some lefty spoilsports who will tell you those tariffs are paid by American buyers, not by Chinese sellers, but they don’t understand the famous “Trump zigzag” that made him billions.

When the facts zig, he zags to confuse the opposition. And it works. Look how confused everyone was. Way too smart for you people who rely too much on facts.

10. “Sharpiegate.” President Trump told us what the meteorologists didn’t know: That Alabama was in serious danger from Hurricane Dorian.

James Spann backs up Alabama weather service in Trump's Dorian ...
Sarcasm

When the fake news scientists said that wasn’t true, President Trump proved them wrong by displaying a map showing it was both true and sarcasm, neither of which you people understood.

Because you are so dense, he had to make the same claim for 11 consecutive days , and even then you didn’t get it.

Some of you falsely claimed the line was made by a black Sharpie, which couldn’t have been true, because the President didn’t own a black Sharpie. So there.

Even so, Donald Trump knows more about using Sharpies on maps than anyone.

11. “They heard a whistleblower who came out with a false story — you know, people say, ‘Oh, it was always fairly close.’ It wasn’t close at all. What the whistleblower said bore no relationship to what the call was.”

Clearly it was sarcasm, that was too clever for you, because not only did witnesses verify the whistleblowers story, but the White House released a text of the conversation, that also supported the whistleblower.

The call was perfect, and no one knows more about perfect calls than Donald Trump.

This shows how clever, subtle, and intricate the President’s sarcasm was, because it directly contradicted proven facts.

Fortunately, Trump’s brilliant followers and 100% of the GOP understood the sarcasm, while the Democrats, in their ignorance, treaturously resorted to evidence.

12. Wisely reversing three decades of progress for consumers and the environment, the Trump Department of Energy cleverly proposed creating a new class of dishwashers that wouldn’t be subject to any water or energy efficiency standards at all.

Here is President Trump’s sarcastic comment, that Democrats didn’t understand, but you certainly must:

“Dishwashers — we did the dishwasher, right? You press it — remember the dishwasher, you’d press it, boom, there’d be like an explosion, five minutes later you open it up, the steam pours out, the dishes. Now, you press it 12 times. Women tell me.

“Again, you know, they give you four drops of water. And they’re in places where there’s so much water, they don’t know what to do with it. So we just came out with a reg on dishwashers — we’re going back to you.

“By the way, by the time they press it 10 times, you spend more on water — and electric! Don’t forget. The whole thing is worse because you’re spending all that money on electric. So we’re bringing back standards that are great.”

Now if that wasn’t sarcasm, I don’t know what sarcasm is. You probably thought it was a bunch of psychotic gobbledygook from a mentally deranged incompetent. But that’s your fault.

You may even think President Trump is a proven psychopath. But, you probably didn’t understand his sarcasm. Trump supporters and the GOP do. Really funny sarcasm, too. If  you still don’t get it, ask one of your Republican friends to explain it to you.

Believe me, no one knows as much about dishwasher explosions and water as Donald Trump.

And finally, we’ll end with this, because there simply are too many to go further:

13. Jared, and Ivanka, and R2D2, oops, excuse me, DJTJ. If you don’t find the humor and sarcasm in an inexperienced President appointing his three, inexperienced children to powerful positions in running the government of the most powerful nation in history, you simply have no sense of humor.

And no, he did not appoint them only because they are the only three people on the planet who, after leaving the White House, will not write an unflattering “tell-all” book.

By the way, whatever happened to Ivanka? Well, anyway . . .

These three inexperienced children have excellent, excellent, excellent attributes that I won’t mention, because you wouldn’t understand — attributes that make them the obvious and superior choices for political power vs. anyone else who may not be smarter or less experienced.

No one knows more about inexperience than President Trump.

At this point, you might believe that President Trump is a rookie at sarcasm, but in truth, he has great experience at fooling the fake media. Here are 5,276 sarcastic triumphs from yesteryear.

Clearly, President Trump is the world champion at sarcasm, though only his followers and White House apologists are smart enough to get it.

The rest of you confused souls call it “lying” or “stupidity,” which is impossible because President Trump is the most honest, most intelligent man ever to be in the Oval Office (and that even includes some of the cleaning ladies).

Donald Trump never has been known to lie or to say anything stupid, and if he ever did, the GOP, Fox News, Breitbart News, and the honest people he hired around him would immediately correct him.

Now that is what is known as “sarcasm.”

But the following, isn’t.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell
Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

THE SOLE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT IS TO IMPROVE AND PROTECT THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE.

The most important problems in economics involve:

  1. Monetary Sovereignty describes money creation and destruction.
  2. Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”

Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.

Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps:

Ten Steps To Prosperity:

1. Eliminate FICA

2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D, plus long-term care — for everyone

3. Provide a monthly economic bonus to every man, woman and child in America (similar to social security for all)

4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone

5. Salary for attending school

6. Eliminate federal taxes on business

7. Increase the standard income tax deduction, annually. 

8. Tax the very rich (the “.1%”) more, with higher progressive tax rates on all forms of income.

9. Federal ownership of all banks

10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99.9% 

The Ten Steps will grow the economy and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Either the federal government pays the postal service, and it costs you nothing, or you pay. Choose.

People, who do not understand federal finances, believe that when the federal government spends, taxpayers pay.Bernanke quote.png

Actually, that is true of state and local governments, but not true of the federal government.

The federal government uniquely is Monetarily Sovereign, meaning that federal taxes do not fund federal government spending.

Even if all federal tax collections were $0, the federal government could continue spending, forever.Greenspan quote.png

Keep that in mind as you read the following.

No post office aid without Amazon price increase – Trump
Apr. 24, 2020 3:55 PM ET|About: Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN)|By: Brandy Betz, SA News Editor
During a press briefing in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump said he would block federal aid for the U.S. Postal Service unless it raises shipping rates for Amazon and other online companies.

Key quote: “The Postal Service is a joke. Because they’re handing out packages for Amazon and other internet companies, and every time they bring a package, they lose money on it. The Post Office should raise the price of a package by approximately four times.”

The Postal Service says it might not make it past September without help, and Congress has authorized an up to $10B loan from the Treasury Department.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says his team is meeting with post office officials but that “certain criteria for a postal reform program ” would be part of any loan.

Trump has been calling for the Postal Service to raise shipment prices since December 2017, often mentioning Amazon by name in his arguments.

Bottom line: Trump is trying to exact personal vengeance on the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, because Bezos also owns the Washington Post, a frequent critic of Trump.St louis fed quote.png

So he wants you, a user of Amazon, and other delivery services, and the U.S. postal service, to pay more from your pocket, to satisfy his own petty grievances.

This is classic Trump.

And why does the federal government collect tax dollars it doesn’t need or use?

  1. To control the economy by taxing things it doesn’t like and by giving tax breaks to what it likes.
  2. To benefit the very rich, who run Congress, by giving them tax breaks you don’t have.
  3. To make you believe your tax dollars fund your federal benefits, so you will be discouraged from asking for more, or giving the poor more, benefits. (Think Medicare for All)warren buffet quote.png

There is not a single thing the federal government could not fund, even if it collected zero taxes. (See the Ten Steps to Prosperity, below).

So do not believe those who tell you that federal spending now means you (or your grandchildren) will pay later. That is the Big Lie of economics.

There is zero downside to federal deficit spending. No, not inflation. No, not taxes. None.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell
Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

THE SOLE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT IS TO IMPROVE AND PROTECT THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE.

The most important problems in economics involve:

  1. Monetary Sovereignty describes money creation and destruction.
  2. Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”

Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.

Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps:

Ten Steps To Prosperity:

1. Eliminate FICA

2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D, plus long-term care — for everyone

3. Provide a monthly economic bonus to every man, woman and child in America (similar to social security for all)

4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone

5. Salary for attending school

6. Eliminate federal taxes on business

7. Increase the standard income tax deduction, annually. 

8. Tax the very rich (the “.1%”) more, with higher progressive tax rates on all forms of income.

9. Federal ownership of all banks

10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99.9% 

The Ten Steps will grow the economy and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Proof there is no limit to what Trump’s GOP toadies will allow.

Evidence that the GOP will do anything to turn a blind eye to the disaster caused by the most crooked, incompetent President in U.S. history. As America dies, the GOP is complicit:

Trump fired America’s pandemic response team and other ways he ‘sabotaged’ our coronavirus response

1. Trump fired the pandemic response team

In 2018, the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command was let go.

Trump shut down the global health security unit within the NSC, and the DHS epidemic team was also pushed out. No one was ever replaced.

Why did Trump decide the pandemic response team was dispensable? Simple. It was another part of Obama’s legacy that he felt the need to destroy.

James Buchanan, only the 2nd worst President in U.S. history In the 2018 American Political Science Association ranking, Donald Trump held the distinction of the number one worst American president. Donald Trump has been criticized for inconsistent policies, a lack of political experience, the cutting of funding for social services, discriminatory immigrant policies and more.

2. The CDC is getting its budget slashed

Trump’s budget request for 2021 cuts the budges for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC by nearly 16%. The CDC is responsible for disease prevention and control in the United States.

But Trump isn’t worried about cutting funds to the entity that stops disease prevention because “it will all work out well.”

In addition to the cuts being made to the CDC, Trump is also proposing a cut to the global health fund, lowering it from $571 million to $532 million.

3. Emergency funds are drying up

Along with the missing response team, there is also the lack of a budget to contend with.

The Department of Health and Human Services has already notified Congress that it may need to transfer up to $136 million in funds to help combat the fast-moving epidemic.

This is partially because the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has already gone through the $105 million that was set aside for emergency public-health responses for infectious disease outbreaks.

4. Trump spreads misinformation

President Trump isn’t worried about the coronavirus because “the heat” will deal it, apparently.

Trump keeps repeating a false claim that Americans don’t have to worry because the Coronavirus will be defeated by warm weather.

There’s one big problem with this: scientists say the opposite.

5. The administration doesn’t heed warnings

Experts have been warning the administration, but those concerns have gone completely unheeded.

Ron Klain, for one, has been telling the Trump administration for two years that the United States was not capable of handling a pandemic. Klain served as Chief of Staff for two U.S. Vice Presidents and was also the Ebola response coordinator in 2014.

Even Bill Gates, the philanthropic billionaire, repeatedly met with John Bolton about the issue. Bill Gates warned that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would make the United States vulnerable to “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.”

The Trump Administration didn’t listen to the words of Klain or Gates. The CDC’s global health section has been cut so drastically that staff members have been laid off in droves. The section used to work in 49 different countries, but now they have a presence in just 10.

And:

Trump Fires Watchdog Overseeing $2 Trillion in Coronavirus Stimulus Funds

One of Democrats’ most critical hang-ups in passing Senate Republicans’ draft of the coronavirus stimulus package was that the president and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin would oversee a $500 billion slush fund for businesses, leading to concerns that Trump would dip into the money to bail out his own struggling resorts and hotels.

During the process, Trump assured Americans that he could handle the task responsibly: “I’ll be the oversight,” he told reporters in one of his coronavirus press conferences.

Despite efforts to hold him accountable, he has kept that vow, treating it as something between a promise and a threat.

He fired the inspector general leading the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Glenn Fine, the acting Pentagon watchdog who had served under both Obama and Bush, was appointed by a panel of inspectors general to ensure accountability for the $2 trillion stimulus.

And:

Trump retweeted a threat to fire Fauci after he said the US’s slow response to COVID-19 has cost lives

On Sunday, President Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci to his 76.8 million followers.

Earlier in the day, Fauci had told CNN that “no one is going to deny” that lives could’ve been saved if the US had implemented containment measures earlier in the novel coronavirus outbreak.

A week ago, at a White House briefing, Trump stopped Fauci from weighing in on using hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, for people with COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.

And:

Fact check: Trump wrongly declares some states don’t have ‘any problem’ with coronavirus

President Donald Trump inaccurately declared at Thursday’s White House coronavirus briefing that some states do not have “any problem” with the virus’s outbreak, minimizing the situation even in the least-affected states.

Trump also repeated his incorrect suggestion that he has the power to decide when governors lift their pandemic-related restrictions. And he argued that “people should have told us” about the virus, omitting the fact that he continued to downplay the virus for weeks after public warnings.

And:

‘They’re killing us,’ Texas residents say of Trump rollbacks

Danielle Nelson’s best monitor for the emissions billowing out of the oil refineries and chemical plants surrounding her home: The heaving chest of her 9-year-old asthmatic son.

On some nights, the boy’s chest shudders as he fights for breath in his sleep. Nelson suspects the towering plants and refineries are to blame, rising like a lit-up city at night around her squat brick apartment building in the rugged Texas Gulf Coast city of Port Arthur.

Ask Nelson what protection the federal government and plant operators provide her African American community, and her answer is blunt. “They’re basically killing us,” says the 37-year-old, who herself has been diagnosed with respiratory problems since moving to the community after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

“We don’t even know what we’re breathing,” she says.

Under President Donald Trump, federal regulatory changes are slashing requirements on industry to monitor, report and reduce toxic pollutants, heavy metals and climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions, and to work transparently with communities to prevent plant disasters — such as the half-dozen major chemical fires and explosions that have killed workers and disrupted life along the Texas Gulf Coast over the past year alone.

And that plunge in public health enforcement may be about to get even more dramatic. Last month, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler, a coal lobbyist before Trump appointed him to the agency, announced enforcement waivers for industries on monitoring, reporting and quickly fixing hazardous releases, in cases the EPA deems staffing problems related to the coronavirus pandemic made compliance difficult.

And:

US high court rejects Trump pro-pollution view of Clean Water Act 
By Mark Sherman Associated Press

Rejecting the Trump administration’s views, the Supreme Court held by a 6-3 vote that the discharge of polluted water into the ground, rather than directly into nearby waterways, does not relieve an industry of complying with the Clean Water Act.

“Wpolluiton.pnge hold that the statute requires a permit when there is a direct discharge from a point source into navigable waters or when there is the functional equivalent of a direct discharge,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court.

The decision came in a closely watched case from Hawaii about whether a sewage treatment plant needs a federal permit when it sends wastewater deep underground, instead of discharging the treated flow directly into the Pacific Ocean.

Studies have found the wastewater soon reaches the ocean and has damaged a coral reef near a Maui beach.

The Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump reversed the agency’s position that Breyer noted has appeared to work well for more than 30 years.

Right-wing Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented. “Based on the statutory text and structure, I would hold that a permit is required only when a point source discharges pollutants directly into navigable waters,” Thomas wrote, ignoring the fundamental purpose of the Clean Water Act.

And:

Trump calls fired IG who sparked impeachment a ‘disgrace’ and says someone should ‘sue his ass off’

Trump fired Michael Atkinson Friday night over the whistleblower complaint against him and urged someone to take legal action against the former official.

Atkinson was the first to tell Congress about a whistleblower complaint last year that described Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son.

The president said “he did a terrible job, absolutely terrible,” at a White House briefing Saturday. “He took a whistleblower report, which turned out to be fake, and he took it to Congress,” Trump said.

He said Atkinson didn’t request to meet with him before sharing the “fraudulent” report. Trump claimed again the conversation he had with the Ukrainian president was “perfect.”

“They give this whistleblower a status he doesn’t deserve,” he raged. “He’s a fake whistleblower and frankly, somebody ought to sue his ass.” Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a statement of support for Atkinson.

He praised the IG’s “integrity, professionalism, and commitment to the rule of law” Saturday.

“That includes his actions in handling the Ukraine whistleblower complaint, which the then Acting Director of National Intelligence stated in congressional testimony was done ‘by the book,'” Horowitz wrote.

And:

Trump Administration Nixed Key CDC Job in China Months Before the Coronavirus Outbreak

Ever since the coronavirus outbreak began, the Trump administration has complained that China was not as forthcoming as it could have been with information in the initial weeks.

But the United States could have had someone from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the ground who may very well have been able to detect hints of the coronavirus outbreak earlier. If the White House hadn’t eliminated the position that is.

The Trump administration nixed the position of the medical epidemiologist who was embedded in China’s disease control agency months before COVID-19 began spreading, reports Reuters.

“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said Bao-Ping Zhu, who served in the role between 2007 and 2011. “If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster.”

Please Nominate FMLA Insights for the ABA Blawg 100 | FMLA Insights

And:

Head of vaccine development alleges ‘cronyism’ after being removed from post

The head of the federal agency charged with overseeing the rapid production of a vaccine to fight the novel coronavirus pandemic said Wednesday he was removed from his post after trying to push back against what he called “cronyism” infecting the federal effort.

Dr. Rick Bright said he was transferred “in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit.”

“I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way,” Bright said in a statement that came less than 24 hours after the Department of Health and Human Services circulated an internal memo, reviewed by ABC News, saying he had been promoted to a position in another agency. “Sidelining me in the middle of this pandemic and placing politics and cronyism ahead of science puts lives at risk and stunts national efforts to safely and effectively address this urgent public health crisis.”

And the dumb idea winner is:

Doctors condemn Trump idea of treating COVID-19 with disinfectant injections
After a Homeland Security official explained that sunlight and bleach can kill the coronavirus on surfaces, President Trump suggested treating COVID-19 patients by hitting their lungs with ultraviolet or “very powerful light,” or injecting them with disinfectant.

“Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?” Trump said during the daily White House coronavirus briefing Thursday.

Doctors said that injecting or ingesting cleaning products was a terrible, potentially deadly idea. “It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves,” said Dr. Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist and NBC News contributor.

Dara Kass, associate professor of emergency medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, said a U.S. emergency room will “probably get a bleach ingestion because of this.” [NBC News, The Washington Post]

Had any Democrat President made just one of the awful suggestions and decisions Trump has made, the GOP would be screaming. But now, they sit by, like dogs begging for a tidbit from their crazed, incompetent leader.

And America pays the price for the GOP neglect of duty.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell
Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

THE SOLE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT IS TO IMPROVE AND PROTECT THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE.

The most important problems in economics involve:

  1. Monetary Sovereignty describes money creation and destruction.
  2. Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”

Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.

Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps:

Ten Steps To Prosperity:

1. Eliminate FICA

2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D, plus long-term care — for everyone

3. Provide a monthly economic bonus to every man, woman and child in America (similar to social security for all)

4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone

5. Salary for attending school

6. Eliminate federal taxes on business

7. Increase the standard income tax deduction, annually. 

8. Tax the very rich (the “.1%”) more, with higher progressive tax rates on all forms of income.

9. Federal ownership of all banks

10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99.9% 

The Ten Steps will grow the economy and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

State bankruptcy? Another really ignorant idea from GOP’s McConnell

From getting rid of “Obamacare” (with no plan for a replacement), to torturing

Sen. Mitch McConnell files for seventh term in Kentucky
GOP Mitch McConnell

immigrant children at the border, to cutting taxes on the rich, to firing the people who were hired to deal with pandemics, to getting rid of anti-pollution laws, and on and on, the GOP is a veritable fountain of truly ignorant ideas.

The GOP ignorant-idea fountain still flows, for here is yet another one: Have states go bankrupt rather than giving them federal aid.

Gov. Pritzker rejects state bankruptcy call
McConnell floats solution to get out of pension debt
By Rick Pearson

Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday rejected Republican U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s call for a pause in federal coronavirus relief aid to the states and support for allowing states like Illinois to file bankruptcy to unload heavy public employee pension debt.

Asked about the comments during a daily coronavirus briefing , Pritzker said McConnell is “certainly important to the process of getting things done in Washington, D.C.,” but noted that “there are an awful lot of senators on both sides of the aisle that disagree with him.”

Yes, McConnell is “important”  to the process of getting things done. But there’s one problem. He doesn’t actually get anything done.

Instead, he sits on hundreds of bills, mostly because they are Democratic bills and/or are bills that would help the non-rich rather than the GOP’s favored group, the very rich.

He is worse than useless. Things happen despite him, not because of him.

“So, I’m hopeful that as a result of work that they’re doing, those (other) senators believe that states and local governments deserve and need additional support,” Pritzer said.

And seeking bankruptcy protection, Pritzker said, was not an option he has considered. The governor’s remarks came after McConnell appeared on the nationally syndicated Hugh Hewitt radio show .

The head of the Senate’s GOP majority reiterated his belief that there should be a pause to doling out additional federal aid to states to cope with a downturn in local revenues due to the pandemic.

“We’re going to push the pause button here because I think this whole business of additional assistance for state and local governments needs to be thoroughly evaluated,” he said.

“This whole business” is called pumping anti-depression dollars into the economy,” a concept either McConnell doesn’t understand, or he knows it would help prevent a depression, which he actually wants.

Why? The GOP is the party of the rich, and the rich benefit comparatively from recessions and depressions, i.e. the Gap between the rich and non-rich grows during hard times.

The wider the Gap, the richer are the rich, for it is the Gap that makes them rich. (Without the Gap, no one would be rich. We all would be the same.)

McConnell went further during a discussion about states with large public pension shortfalls, saying he would be in favor of allowing them to “use the bankruptcy route.”

Individual states do not have the power to file for bankruptcy to get out from under debt obligations, however.

“There are two reasons why state governments currently cannot use the federal bankruptcy system to reorganize their debt. First, the federal bankruptcy code does not allow—and has never allowed—state governments to declare bankruptcy. Since 1937, the bankruptcy code has allowed ‘municipalities’ to declare bankruptcy.
The term ‘municipality’ is defined in the bankruptcy code as a ‘political subdivision or public agency or instrumentality of a state.’ This definition is broad enough to include cities, counties, townships, school districts and public improvement districts. It also includes revenue-producing bodies that provide services which are paid for by users rather than by general taxes, such as bridge authorities, highway authorities and gas authorities. But it does not include state governments.
“The second reason stems from the U.S. Constitution. The contracts clause of the U.S. Constitution prohibits state governments from ‘impairing the obligation of contracts.’ As originally understood and enforced, this clause prohibited state legislatures from passing any laws to relieve either private debt or the state government’s own debt.
Beginning in 1934, however, the Supreme Court began to interpret the contracts clause more flexibly and not as an absolute bar to state debt relief laws. Even under the flexible modern approach, however, the Supreme Court in 1977 reiterated that ‘a state cannot refuse to meet its legitimate financial obligations simply because it would prefer to spend the money (on something else.)’
Thus, were Congress to amend the federal bankruptcy code to authorize states to repudiate debt, the Supreme Court would then need to decide the novel constitutional question of whether such debt repudiation would nonetheless violate the contracts clause of Article I, Section 10.”

And then we come to the really ignorant part.

“There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations,” McConnell said.

“My guess is their first choice would be for the federal government to borrow money from future generations to send it down to them now so they don’t have to do that,” he said. “That’s not something I’m going to be in favor of.”

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is st-louis-fed-quote.pngIf you understand the previous, ignorant paragraph, please let me know what it means.

The federal government does not borrow. As the Fed says, the federal government (unlike state and local governments) is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational.

What wrongly is termed “borrowing” actually is the acceptance of deposits into Treasury Security accounts (T-bills, T-notes, T-bonds).

The deposits remain in the accounts, earning interest, until maturity, at which time they are returned to the account owners. No taxes or taxpayers are involved.

The federal government never touches these deposits. Why? Because being Monetarily Sovereign, the federal government has the unlimited ability to create U.S. dollars. It never can run short of dollars.This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is greenspan-quote-2.png

So why does the government issue T-securities, if it doesn’t need or use the money? Two reasons:

  1. To provide a safe place to park unused dollars, which helps stabilize the dollar, and
  2. To help the Fed control interest rates, and thereby control inflation.

McConnell either knows all of the above, in which case he is lying to the American public, or he doesn’t know it, in which case he is far too ignorant to be a U.S. Senator, much less the Senate Majority Leader.

Illinois has a worst-in-the-nation $138 billion unfunded public employee pension liability. Some Republicans have discussed whether the state should ask the federal  government to allow it to file for bankruptcy.

At present, such a move is prevented by the “sovereign immunity” clause against states afforded by the U.S. Constitution.

It also would be fraught with complications, potentially increasing costs for states to borrow if investors were not protected for bonds taken out for things like road construction.

More importantly, McConnell’s idea (if one can call it an “idea”) would transfer dollars from one part of the private sector and give it to another part of the private sector.

This would bring no net value to the economy, and do nothing to prevent recessions or depressions.

By contrast, if the federal government financially supports states, it creates brand new dollars, a net benefit to the entire economy and part of the effort to prevent recessions and depressions.

You can decide which.

Democrats in Washington, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have said federal dollars for state and local governments have to be part of the next coronavirus relief package.

The House is scheduled to vote this week to approve a measure to replenish the federal Paycheck Protection Plan aimed at helping small businesses keep workers on the payroll.

McConnell and Senate Republicans rejected Pelosi’s attempt to inject federal aid to states in the small-business funding measure.

The GOP doesn’t want to help the states for two main reasons:

  1. The states having the most difficult financial problems are those having the largest cities, where minority voters are given voice, i.e. “blue” states. The GOP states are the ones doing the most to prevent minorities from voting.
  2. Helping the states would help the non-rich, thus narrowing the Gap between the rich and the rest. The GOP, being the party of the rich, does not want the Gap to be narrowed. As the GOP demonstrated with its tax revisions, it wants the Gap to be widened.

But she told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday that the Senate GOP leader had pledged not to exceed $250 billion in funding in the latest measure and “now, we are up to $480 (billion),” including assistance to hospitals and for enhanced coronavirus testing.

The above paragraph merely demonstrates that McConnell has no real plan for growing the economy, but only wishes to obstruct anything the Democrats propose.

In summary, there are no good reasons why the federal government should not support the states. In fact, such support would cost taxpayers nothing, while helping fend off recessions and depressions.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell
Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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THE SOLE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT IS TO IMPROVE AND PROTECT THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE.

The most important problems in economics involve:

  1. Monetary Sovereignty describes money creation and destruction.
  2. Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”

Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.

Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps:

Ten Steps To Prosperity:

1. Eliminate FICA

2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D, plus long-term care — for everyone

3. Provide a monthly economic bonus to every man, woman and child in America (similar to social security for all)

4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone

5. Salary for attending school

6. Eliminate federal taxes on business

7. Increase the standard income tax deduction, annually. 

8. Tax the very rich (the “.1%”) more, with higher progressive tax rates on all forms of income.

9. Federal ownership of all banks

10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99.9% 

The Ten Steps will grow the economy and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY