CSotD: Didn’t we already discuss this?
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I don’t like to say “I told you so,” because (A) it seems grandiose and (B) it would be much nicer to live in a world where someone had listened and also because (C) I wasn’t the only voice out there, so I can hardly take credit.
But let’s look at what is essentially one big Juxtaposition, starting, above, with Ann Telnaes setting the stage for the next level of disaster.
It’s hard at this point to read Dear Leader’s mind and sort the ignorance from the deliberate disinformation from the desperation, amid the astonishing Twitter storm he launched last night, as he apparently sat re-tweeting everything that came across his feed.
What is plain is that he’d like to get everything back to normal and that “normal” means nobody complaining.
Now, in all fairness, it’s not his fault that the coronovirus struck during his administration.
Then again, it’s absolutely his fault that his transition team had not only ignored all the resources and advice and information provided by the previous administration but had actively disabled and destroyed it.
Not simply his fault, but if you probe his background in business, it’s his pattern.
And part of that pattern — ask Deutsche Bank — is to simply brazen his way through a crisis instead of addressing it, much less changing his approach.
So, as Matt Davies suggests, he’s intent on getting everything back on track while ignoring the fact that it can’t happen until he has addressed problems he won’t even admit exist.
You can look around at the rest of the world and see that other leaders got on the coronavirus problem sooner and faster and more efficiently, but let’s not forget that, before the virus struck, we had adequate warning that this business genius didn’t even understand, for instance, how tariffs work, and was unwilling to bother finding out, for example, how NATO funding was set up.
It’s not that he isn’t an epidemiologist. It’s that he’s genuinely convinced that he doesn’t need anyone else’s advice on anything at all.
This mashup is admittedly from a virulently anti-Trump site, but I had to sort through half a dozen similar compilations because he constantly proclaims his own genius. This one had the fewest interruptions and explanations.
And nobody knows more about interruptions and explanations than I do.
Though Guy Badeaux knows how to cut to the chase, because all the chatter about the stock market is irrelevant except to people who make their money by gambling on the stock market.
We cover the ups and downs of the Dow Jones the same way we offer horse race coverage of our elections: It’s a quick way to quantify an otherwise complex issue.
We even guess at what’s causing what: “The Dow fell upon worries about …” and insert the major news story of the day which may have rattled a few people but isn’t why the entire Dow fell.
And unless you are selling stock to buy groceries, it doesn’t have a helluva lot to do with you anyway.
Well, except, as Mike Thompson points out, that your boss may be under orders from his boss, who is under orders from the stock swappers at Corporate HQ to make sure their options remain profitable.
Orders, that is, coming from people who have no idea how the product is made nor any particular interest in the grubby details, but who have goals that must be met and that are based not on the cost of doing business but on the price of their stock.
John Deering makes an interesting point here by having his homeless person — destitute despite the market recovery — not the grubby, tattered, perhaps mentally ill person we see shuffling down the street, but, rather, a fairly “normal” looking average woman.
She may not be homeless in real life. She may move in with family or Ebay her most prized possessions or go without meals or find some other ways around her desperate situation, but the desperation remains and, as he notes, is not linked to the Dow Jones average.
And while conservatives mewl and puke over the cost of making small businesses whole while continuing to propose cutting taxes for the plutocrats, Adam Zyglis points out the damage being done to those small businesses who, unlike Dear Leader, can’t just go back to Daddy for another few millions or bullshit someone at Deutsche Bank into bailing them out again.
Whether or not anyone at Corporate HQ admits it, Ed Hall is right on in his vision of the greatness towards which Dear Leader is taking us: The Greatness Depression.
And, yes, goddammitall, I told you so, 25 years ago, and I’m still waiting, hoping that our current leaders will finally push things to the point where people stop believing them.
My point isn’t that I’m a stable genius. My point is that 25 years is a long time to wait.
The kids I wrote about then are the parents of the kids trapped in today’s hopeless morass.
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