"Neoliberalism Kills"

It's difficult to imagine any return to normal once the coronavirus pandemic peaks and recedes. If a beltway television show like The Hill's Rising with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti is raising an alarm that sounds identical to radical Marxism, something is happening.

American Exceptionalism is officially dead, killed by the coronavirus; peak neoliberalism is dead too. Furious efforts will be made by the ruling elite to keep the zombie ambulatory. Massive propaganda combined with total surveillance and dire economic precariousness are on our horizon.

What we the people need to do first is check our head. There must be a broad acceptance of the obvious: The political economy not only failed us, it is killing us. Then we have to figure out a way to replace the system without capturing Washington, D.C. The Republican-Democrat duopoly needs to be destroyed. But that's a generations-long project, and we need transformation now.

The people need to capture a state or two -- the West Coast  (California, Oregon and Washington) is our best bet -- and pursue some sort of nullification.

"Back to Work" Recedes to May/June

"Back to work" declarations by state officials have gone from mid-April to some unknown date in the future. Trump now says that we should expect great things by June 1. New York City's public health system is teetering.

World Socialist Web Site sees the coronavirus pandemic as the end of the current system:

The economic and social consequences of such a public health catastrophe are incalculable. As production and the real economy continue to contract, not even the trillions in cash infusions approved by both big business parties will be able to stabilize the financial markets, the central preoccupation of the financial oligarchy and its representative-in-chief, Trump.

Social and class tensions will continue to build, leading to an inevitable explosion of popular opposition. And the utter discrediting of all of the political institutions of American capitalism—which has proven incapable of preparing for or responding to a long predicted flu pandemic—is fueling an enormous exacerbation of internal tensions within the ruling elite and its state.

The entire constitutional framework of the United States, including the relationship between the federal government and the states, is showing signs of fracturing.

It's noteworthy that nature had to intervene to remove the well past its sell-by-date socioeconomic paradigm which dates back to Thatcher-Reagan. 

Of course neoliberalism is not gone yet. It's going to take a lot more pain and suffering, and, inevitably, a complete economic collapse to usher in something new, and there's always the possibility that what's new will be be even worse.

Though the whole planet has been in pandemic crisis mode for a month now, there is still much that is unknown about COVID-19. Why so many asymptomatic positives? Some reporting casts doubt on China's amazing turnaround because of its practice of refusing to report asymptomatic positives in the overall COVID-19 numbers.

My feeling is that I must've been asymptomatic positive sometime in February. How do I know? I ran a horrible 5K on February 29. The only other times I performed worst in a 5K in the last ten years were 1) when I had a bad case of food poisoning and 2) when I had the flu. So something was wrong. Then in March I was mildly symptomatic. You couldn't get a test in Seattle. So I didn't try. Most people at work were already self-quarantining, so I didn't really worry about infecting others. And as for social distancing, I am the king and have been for years.

But here's the problem. While I feel much better than I did earlier in the month, I think the virus is hanging around in my body. So who is to say the coronavirus won't (re)emerge the next time all these asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic COVID-19 people are immune system zapped? Who can say that when the order to return to work is given that it won't set off another cycle of infection?

That being said, other than answering the phones, I am enjoying the time alone in the office.

Largest Bailout in History Another Corporate Giveaway

If you were hoping that there would more strings attached this go-around compared to 2008, think again. 

One Month of Plague

The big construction sites remain open in Seattle, as does the building where I work (because it houses a food bank on the first floor). I can still get a lunchtime coffee at the corner cafe. Not much if anything changed the first day following the statewide lockdown announced by Governor Jay Inslee.

I was the only one in the office all day, a day spent routing frantic calls from workers affected by the pandemic. Some were panicked by the prospect of a furlough with no income; others, by the fear of having to continue to report to work and risk exposure.

This is a tricky virus. We'll see how tenacious it is. I figure it has been present in King County since February. My guess is it takes about a month for the body to handle (or not). For those of us living in Seattle and its suburbs, we should be reaching the virus peak in the next week or two.

Soft Lockdown in Washington State

Washington State Governor Jay Inslee announced last night that all "non-essential" businesses must close for two weeks. Businesses can continue to function remotely and restaurants can remain open for takeout. All in all Inslee's order does not move the goalposts very far. Most offices have already shut.

I'll see this morning on my walk to work if the huge commercial construction sites on Denny Way are still bustling. Outside of maybe a day or two during the last couple of weeks they have remained humming. Scores of tradesmen tying rebar, pouring concrete, etc.

Inslee announced 48 hours until implementation. So there is a chance that activity, the reduced amount that there is, will initially be unaffected.

April Worse than March; May Worse than April.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York warned that the city’s hospitals were straining under a deluge of cases, and he again called on Mr. Trump to send more help.

“I want to see this help arrive rapidly,” Mr. de Blasio said, who said the city’s public hospitals were “10 days away from running out of really basic supplies.”

“April is going to be worse than March,” he said. “And I fear May will be worse than April.”

"Coronavirus Live Updates: World Leaders Beg Public to Stay Home; U.S. Lawmakers Fight Over Aid," The New York Times

Living in Seattle, one must assume exposure. The city is approaching a total soft lockdown; "soft" in that security forces are not yet enforcing "shelter in place" advisories.

Our office is officially closed as of today. I'm still going to report to work because someone has to open the mail and deposit the checks. If the building where the office is located is shuttered, that is going to make things more difficult.

My sense is that this virus is a tricky one; that it doesn't vanish in a couple of weeks like a normal virus; it lingers for a month, maybe more; hence de Blasio's rap that April will worse than March and May worse than April.

We'll see. But I think that this is the big unknown of a massive global lockdown. How do we know, given the tenacity and virulence of COVID-19, when it is safe to return to normal?

Bernie Goes Home

After another shellacking at the polls on Tuesday (Illinois, Florida and Arizona), the Sanders campaign emailed its supporters yesterday with the news that Bernie was returning home to Vermont with his wife Jane. The message was, basically, it's over.

Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joseph Kishore, writing for the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site, provides a withering assessment of "Bernieism" in "Bernie Sanders draws his campaign to an end: The political lessons":

The Sanders campaign in many respects mirrors those of previous “left” and “insurgent” Democratic Party candidates and political figures, including Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, Howard Dean and Barack Obama himself—the “transformative” candidate of “hope and change” whose election in 2008 supposedly inaugurated a sea-change in American politics. The results of these previous proposals to perform political alchemy on the Democratic Party are self-evident.

Not only in the United States, but around the world, working people have experienced the betrayals of organizations that claimed to represent an opposition to the capitalist ruling elite, and ended up doing their bidding. This includes Syriza in Greece, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Podemos in Spain, the Left Party in Germany, and similar “lefts” in France and many other countries.

Sanders, however, is seeking to carry out the job of channeling opposition into the Democratic Party under far more explosive conditions. Masses of workers and young people are moving to the left. The coronavirus pandemic will vastly accelerate the political radicalization that has already begun.

What Kishore says is true. But I don't think he is entirely fair to the Sanders campaign. The problem with Trotskyites is that all their theory begins with the fiction of a cohesive, class-conscious working class. And of course nothing could be further from the truth. There is no greater proof of the hacked, alienated nature of worker consciousness than Joe Biden's winter electoral juggernaut. Biden had no campaign presence in states that Bernie should have won but that ended up going to Biden. Biden beat Bernie in King County, Washington, the progressive population center of the state.

I agree with Kishore that the Democratic Party cannot be transformed; that was the guiding light for Nader's Green Party presidential runs. I believe that the Democratic Party needs to be destroyed.

Right now we are in the midst of a whirlwind. We don't know how long the virus is going to continue to spread. Governments are resorting to a soft form of martial law. We don't how bad the unemployment numbers are going to be and for how long mass unemployment will last.

My worry is that once we begin to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis there will be no greater worker demand for change than that exhibited by a Democratic electorate voting overwhelming for Joe Biden. In other words, another banker-led bailout and an even greater concentration of wealth.

U.S. Headed for a Depression

Yves Smith has an excellent "where we are now" write-up this morning in "Why Sending $1,000 Checks to Everyone Won’t Solve the Coronavirus Crisis":

Now we may get lucky. The cornavirus may mutate into a milder form. Perhaps someone will come up with a drug cocktail that can be administered to reduce the severity of most cases and thus result in a much lower percentage of the afflicted needing hospital care.

But absent that, things are not looking good. The Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team report makes for grim reading. Not only does it remind us that a vaccine is at best a year to eighteen months away, but it also points out that new vaccines often don’t have great efficacy. And the Wall Street Journal reported that Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, lauded for their early and effective responses to the coronavirus, are now seeing a second wave of cases. That strongly suggests that letting up much, any time soon, on serious restrictions on activity isn’t likely.

As many experts pointed out, the number of deaths resulting from an economic depression would be worse than from the coronavirus itself. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told senators that refusing to take forceful enough action could lead to 20% unemployment.

Smith then goes on in the rest of her post to critique the economic stimulus thus far proposed, particularly the Democratic response.

Since there is next to no testing at this point in the United States, it's impossible to say how many have been exposed and are now positive. My assumption, living in Seattle, is that I have been exposed, probably weeks ago. I ran a 5K race on February 29 and chatted with a young woman who said she was just getting over a brutal two-week flu.

What's particularly troubling are the reports of reinfection. As Mike Davis reminds us,

[L]ike annual influenzas, this virus is mutating as it courses through populations with different age compositions and health conditions. The variety that Americans are most likely to get is already slightly different from that of the original outbreak in Wuhan. Further mutation could be benign or could alter the current distribution of virulence, which now spikes sharply after age fifty. Trump’s “corona flu” is at minimum a mortal danger to the quarter of Americans who are elderly, have weak immune systems, or chronic respiratory problems.

In other words, ending school and business closures in mid-April might be greeted by another spike in the contagion as people return to everyday norms only to be infected by a mutated virus.

So we don't know how long the virus is going to hang around. We also don't know the number of unemployed it will create. My guess is that it will be worse than 2008/2009. A guy who works for the printer we use dropped off an order yesterday. He said that he was returning to the shop for a staff meeting where layoffs would likely be announced by the owner; there was no work.

I hadn't even thought about the impact of the pandemic on small printers. It makes sense though. Much of what we use the printer for is the announcement of upcoming meetings.

The longer it lasts the longer it will be to come back. The last remaining weekly newspaper in town announced layoffs last week and said that it would suspend production of its print edition.

Unemployment in the range of 15-20% does not seem outlandish. Given all the talk about the debt bubble in the private sector, it's looking like the U.S. economy is headed for a depression.

Russiagate 2016 is Dead. Long Live Russiagate 2020!

The legal test for Russiagate 2016 is being scrapped (see "Justice Dept. Moves to Drop Charges Against Russian Firms Filed by Mueller" by Katie Benner and Sharon LaFraniere):

The Justice Department moved on Monday to drop charges against two Russian shell companies accused of financing schemes to interfere in the 2016 election, saying that they were exploiting the case to gain access to delicate information that Russia could weaponize.

The companies, Concord Management and Concord Consulting, were charged in 2018 in an indictment secured by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, along with 13 Russians and another company, the Internet Research Agency. Prosecutors said they operated a sophisticated scheme to use social media to spread disinformation, exploit American social divisions and try to subvert the 2016 election.

The U.S. Government is justifying the move by saying that "Concord seized on the case to obtain confidential information from prosecutors, then mount a campaign of information warfare."

The reality is that the U.S. is unable to prove any connection between the shell companies and the Russian government. Russiagate stands revealed as a massive U.S. Government/mainstream media PSYOP with the American voting public its target.

Aaron Mate tweeted that DOJ's decision to drop the case is proof that Russiagate was a massive waste of time. Mate's tweet was countered by another which argued that actually Russiagate was a great success: It turned broken down old Joe Biden into the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party.

I think that's the way to interpret this decision by the DOJ. Mission accomplished. Bernie Sanders blocked and confined to congress as the junior senator from Vermont. Embarrassing headlines about the flimsy foundations of Russiagate 2016 averted. Russiagate 2020 already deployed and Sanders neutralized. Next stop? The general election.

The Disintegration of Neoliberalism

This morning market news elbows the coronavirus out of its pole position. The Fed's Sunday rate cut to near zero, as well as a ramped up commitment to quantitative easing (QE), rather than stoking confidence has created panic. According to The New York Times,

Futures on Wall Street dropped almost 5 percent on Monday, following global markets downward, after an extraordinary move by the Federal Reserve aimed at shoring up confidence instead sparked more panic.

Trading in S&P 500 and Dow Jones industrial average futures was halted after their drop triggered a shutdown in trading, signaling a plunge in U.S. markets after the opening bell.

European markets tumbled on Monday, falling more than 6 percent. France’s main stock index briefly fell 10 percent.

Yves Smith's usual gimlet eye in assessing the financial press in on display this morning:

The central banks signaled desperation and lost credibility as well as firepower. And the timing, coming right after Trump said he had the authority to remove the Fed chairman, had the look, whether true or not, of the central bank capitulating to the President’s demands.

What is the point of cutting interest rates when they are so low as to not have a significant impact on funding decisions? Mr. Market has worked out that central bankers are pushing on a string and what the world needs is more demand to replace the massive deflationary shock of many people and businesses suddenly having or facing the high odds of a hit to their incomes. That means massive spending programs. Even Mark Zandi, whose role as a talking head is to put a happy face on distressing data, is in Defcon 1 mode. From the Wall Street Journal:

“The onus is now squarely on the Trump administration and Congress—there’s no other way out,” said Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics. The measures so far will help, he said. “But this is a tsunami. They need something that’s three or four times as large.”

[snip]

The slow, too small, and too narrow sought-after responses don’t merely reflect being in a fog of information gaps. The speed and aggressivenesses of the lockdowns, and their drastic impact make the broad outlines all too clear. Our supposed leaders are in a fog of denial. They cannot fathom that so much of what they had come to accept as the normal and proper operation of our system will crumble if radical action isn’t taken soon, yet that very radical action will also result in changes they deem inconceivable, or worse, aesthetically unacceptable.

If you watched the Democratic presidential debate last night you know that both Biden and Sanders basically called for a bailout of everyone.

But what Yves Smith outlines in her post this morning is the rapid disintegration of the entire global neoliberal economic order. A new system will have to be created, not just a temporary bailout.

If we learned anything from the last financial meltdown it's that political leadership cannot see, cannot accept that another world is possible; hence, for the last ten-plus years, we in the West have been frozen in a zombie shuffle.

Now finally the music has stopped at the zombie ball. Zero-percent interest rates and more QE can't paper over the problem this go-round.

Cash Crunch

There has also been a wide gap between the prices of certain “exchange traded funds,” which are easily traded, and the securities on which those funds are based. This is irrational, in theory — the equivalent of a 12-pack of soda selling for more than the price of 12 individual sodas. It suggests two things: sellers desperate to raise cash, and an absence of big banks or hedge funds in position to exploit the mispricing.

Gold futures have been falling, despite gold's historical role as a place for safety during tumultuous economic times. Its price has fallen to $1,610 on Thursday from $1,675 an ounce at Monday’s close.

All this suggests that major financial players are experiencing a cash crunch, and are selling whatever they can as a result. That would help explain the seeming contradiction of assets that should go up in value in a time of economic peril instead falling in value.

As the 2008 experience shows, it’s also a type of problem that the Federal Reserve is relatively well positioned to understand and respond to. In its role as lender of last resort, the central bank’s job is to try to prevent a cash crunch in the economy, even if it has to take unusual means to do that.

An announcement by the Fed on Thursday afternoon — it plans to inject up to $1.5 trillion in the financial system by the end of the week and begin buying a wide range of Treasury bonds — was meant to ease the strained liquidity. But in the hours after the announcement, there was precious little evidence it had succeeded.

"Something Weird Is Happening on Wall Street, and Not Just the Stock Sell-Off" by Neil Irwin

****

The news that the Federal Reserve (the fed) is to inject $1.5 trillion in the financial system is presented as "unprecedented," as new. But in truth it is not. Also, the intervention did not work. Today the Dow Jones lost a staggering 10 percent of its value; and at this point, all of the gains it made during Trump's presidency are only 2,000 points from being entirely eliminated.

The program to pump money into markets that deal with short-term paper began in the fall of 2019. It has been written about in the Wall Street Journal extensively. The problem is that WSJ and other mainstream publications reported it but did not analyze, let alone critique, the development. They left at this: Short-loan markets (and they are very short-term—often overnight—and are called repurchase markets, or repo) only grease the machinery of the whole financial system, and so the injection of government cash is simply this: putting more grease in the machine. Nothing deeper was said about it. And there was no public outcry, no nothing. In the process, a gigantic sum, $500 billion, was transferred from the public to the markets with little notice. And writers like me, writers who critiqued this bailout (again and again), were simply dismissed because we do not have the credentials of orthodox economists in the schools and press.

"Americans Need to Know That the $1.5 Trillion the Fed Just Handed to Banks Is Actually Old News" by Charles Mudede

Megadeath

In his paralysis in the face of a crisis expanding outside of his control and his sociopathic indifference to human suffering, Trump was merely giving particularly perfidious expression to the response in nearly every country to the pandemic.

Less than 24 hours earlier, German chancellor Angela Merkel told a dumbstruck group of lawmakers she expects 60 to 70 percent of the German population to become infected with the deadly disease.

Merkel’s declaration was less a statement of fact than of policy. She was saying, in effect, that no serious measures would be taken to prevent the outbreak from becoming a mass casualty event in her country.

Earlier in the week, a visibly distraught World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom warned that a “moral decay” was taking hold in capitals throughout the world.

Shocked at the seeming rapidity with which governments were giving up on any serious effort to contain the disease, which he attributed to its disproportionate effect on the elderly, Adhanom insisted that “any individual, whatever age, any human being matters.”

Adhanom stated: “Whether it kills a young person or an old person or a senior citizen, any country has an obligation to save that person. So that’s why we’re saying no white flag, we don’t give up, we fight. To protect our children, to protect our senior citizens, at the end of the day it’s a human life. We cannot say we care about millions when we don’t care about an individual person.”

"Trump’s coronavirus address: Ignorance, xenophobia and helplessness" by James Cogan and Andre Damon

****

Behind closed doors, Dr. Brian Monahan, the attending physician of the US Congress and Supreme Court, informed the senate staff that he expects a staggering 70 to 150 million people in the United States to become infected with COVID-19, according to NBC.

In Europe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has stated a similar figure, that up to 70 percent of Germany, some 58 million people, could become infected.

The report from NBC came amidst data showing a sharp increase in total cases worldwide to at least 126,000 and more than 4,600 deaths—a 50 percent increase in new cases internationally, compared to a 30 percent increase the previous day. The number of cases outside of China has increased 13-fold in the past two weeks to more than 40,000, and the number of countries where infection has been reported has tripled.

At the current rate, there will be a million cases outside of China by the end of this month and one million cases in the United States alone sometime during the second week of April.

Monahan’s comments were made public just hours after the World Health Organization (WHO) formally declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic and cited “alarming levels of inaction” by governments to prevent the spread. At the same time, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that it wasn’t just some countries lacked “capacity” or “resources” but that “[s]ome countries are struggling with a lack of resolve.”

[snip] 

Even if the quarantine measures implemented in China were imposed on the US population today, the number of infected would likely rise to between 150,000 and 200,000 by early April. Upwards of 30,000 will require serious medical intervention in order to live. There are not enough hospital beds in the country to provide life-saving care for such a number of critical cases, much less the millions predicted by Monahan.

While the United States was not explicitly named, the total inability of the US health care system to meet the demands of the coronavirus were spelled out near the end of yesterday’s WHO briefing.

Executive Director Dr. Michael Ryan stated: “Some countries clearly, and you’ve seen this through the infection of health workers, have not yet got in place necessary measures to stop infections transmitting. Our hospital systems are designed to deliver at 99 percent efficiency. They don’t have any space to deliver more.”

"Congressional doctor expects up to 150 million Americans to contract the coronavirus" by Bryan Dyne

The Sanders Collapse, or, the Spectacular Success of Russiagate

The collapse in support for Bernie's presidential campaign is difficult to comprehend. Yesterday Joe Biden easily won Michigan and Missouri. According to Shane Goldmacher's "5 Takeaways From Tuesday’s Democratic Primaries":

In Michigan, where Mr. Sanders had focused much of his attention in the last week, he was leading in none of the state’s 83 counties as of early Wednesday, and trailing Mr. Biden by double digits statewide. In Missouri, Mr. Sanders was also trailing in every single county in a state where he won dozens of counties in 2016. And in Mississippi, Mr. Sanders was getting thrashed, with Mr. Biden topping 80 percent of the vote.

To put the Sanders collapse in perspective, Nate Silver wrote yesterday:

Biden’s ascent has been so rapid that it’s hard to entirely grasp its scope. Biden’s rise in national polls over the past two weeks — from 15.4 percent on Feb. 24 to 51.7 percent today — has been perhaps the fastest in the history of the primaries. He has massive polling leads in states all over the map that were once expected to be competitive.

With Sanders recently having enjoyed a substantial advantage in national opinion polls, not to mention a robust record of state victories in 2016, his present predicament, 160 delegates behind Biden and fading, seems to me best understood as a massive hack of voter consciousness.

Remember, the Democratic establishment had been freaked-out and wrong-footed for the last year-plus. One neoliberal after the next -- Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg -- was pulled from the pot and tossed against the wall. None really took. All the while Bernie was building strength and, seemingly, broadening his base.

What happened? How did the hack work? I think the correct answer here is the Democratic Party's years-long, gigantic investment in Russiagate paid off. Bernie's post-Nevada wings were clipped by placing him on the wrong side of Russiagate. Putin wanted Sanders, the old Fidel-loving Vermont hippie, to win in order to lock in a second term for Trump, or so the story was told. There went the black vote. There went the suburban vote. There went the rural vote.

One thing I have come to realize over the years of producing this page is that a principal function -- if not the principal function -- of mainstream corporate mass media is to manufacture official enemies. By manufacturing official enemies -- Emmanuel Goldstein of 1984 -- the mainstream corporate press can control opinion.

From the first mention of Russiagate in the summer of 2016 the goal of its manufacture was to staunch the loss of credibility afflicting the Democratic Party. And basically it worked. The Democratic Party has a much more cohesive bloc of African-American and suburban voters now than it did in 2016.

Whether this bloc, with a wilting, addled machine pol as its standard-bearer, can best Donald Trump, with his limitless resources and his state-of-the-art digital attack, appears to me to be a long shot. But Trump was a long shot in 2016, and I didn't think he would win.

The Democratic Party has been reconfigured around Russiagate. It is a thoroughly xenophobic political construct at this point. I hope Bernie stays in the race as long as possible and inflicts as much damage to the organization as he can. If there is to be any hope, the Democratic Party must be destroyed.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Seattle has been dubbed the coronavirus capital of the United States because of the number of deaths at a nursing home in Kirkland, a suburb northeast and across Lake Washington from the city.

Last Thursday afternoon I noticed that streets usually choked with traffic for the homeward-bound commute were mostly empty. They have remained that way. Apparently the large employers who occupy the office towers in the northern part of downtown, what's known as the Denny Triangle, instructed their workers to stay home. This has made for a much more pleasant commute to and from work.

I would guess that area shops and restaurants are operating at about one-fifth of their usual clientele. I have one entire section of the cafe where I usually get a lunchtime espresso all to myself.

Deliverymen are still making the rounds. Gallows humor sprinkled with a touch of awe is common. Yesterday morning on my way into work I noticed that the enormous commercial construction sites that line Denny Way have gone mostly silent. A race I've run every March since 2011, the St. Patrick's Day Dash, has been cancelled.

My memory of Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year is pretty much like what's happening now, except I am the one wandering around an abandoned city. Fortunately, COVID-19 is not the bubonic plague.

The End of Peak Neoliberalism

Extremely bad news from The New York Times this morning:

Oil lost nearly a quarter of its value in futures markets on Monday, dragging shares of energy companies lower. It was what one analyst called “another acute shock to markets.”

[snip]

Even before the weekend’s developments, stocks in the United States and other major financial markets had fallen by more than 10 percent in a sudden downdraft that began as the coronavirus began to spread outside of China.

The problem globally is growing worse.

[snip]

To keep cash flowing smoothly through the financial system, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Monday said it will ramp up the amount of short-term loans it offers banks.

Starting Monday and lasting through Thursday, the New York Fed will increase its daily offering of overnight repurchase agreements — essentially short-term loans to eligible banks — to at least $150 billion from $100 billion. It is also increasing its offering of two-week loans starting Tuesday, to at least $45 billion from at least $20 billion.

The Fed had already been active in the market for short-lived loans between banks and financial institutions — called the repurchase or “repo” market — for months. Those operations started after rates in that obscure but important corner of the financial system’s plumbing spiked in September. It had recently been shrinking the size of its injections as markets calmed.

The moves on Monday “are intended to ensure that the supply of reserves remains ample and to mitigate the risk of money market pressures,” the New York Fed said in a statement.

All this before disruptions in the global supply chain have yet to deliver their full impact.

What's bizarre about the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting freak-outs in global stock markets is that it comes at a time when the mainstream corporate press is ejaculating all over itself because of Joe Biden's apparent triumph and voters' rejection of democratic socialism.

Amid the panic selling, panicked self-quarantines and stripping of store shelves of toilet paper is this unseemly self-congratulation and chest-thumping about the genius of neoliberal centrism and the great political gifts of a senile second-tier pol like Joe Biden.

If this doesn't augur an end of peak neoliberalism, I don't know what will.

Bernie Has to Win Michigan

If yesterday I was hopeful that the Sanders campaign could easily reverse Biden's Super Tuesday momentum, today I am far less so. The red-baiting has started again, and Bernie appears to be tacking to the right, aligning himself with Obama's legacy, in a bid to win over older African-American voters and suburban centrists. I guess this makes sense now that the #Youthquake model of bringing new voters to the polls apparently has been scrapped. Elizabeth Warren's departure did not translate into an endorsement of the Sanders campaign, and I doubt it will anytime soon.

Then there's Nate Cohn's analysis of the upcoming Michigan primary. It's not favorable to Bernie:

Mr. Sanders has so far failed to match his 2016 strength across the white, working-class North this year, and that suggests it will be hard for him to win Michigan.

This pattern has held without exception this primary season. It was true in Iowa and New Hampshire against Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. It was true in Maine, Minnesota, Massachusetts and even Vermont on Super Tuesday against Mr. Biden.

Over all, Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Sanders by 10 points, 38 percent to 28 percent, in counties across Maine, Minnesota and Massachusetts where white voters made up at least 80 percent of the electorate and where college graduates represented less than 40 percent of the electorate. According to the exit polls, Mr. Biden was tied or ahead among white voters in every state east of the Mississippi River on Super Tuesday.

This is a marked departure from 2016. Back then, Mr. Sanders tended to excel among white, working-class and rural voters across the North. This made Michigan, where white voters represent a well-above-average share of the Democratic electorate, one of his stronger states. He dominated in Michigan’s small towns and rural areas, losing only in few counties that tended to have older voters.

It is hard to say why Mr. Sanders has faltered among these voters, given the consistency of his message and his improved name recognition. One possibility is that many of his 2016 supporters were casting protest votes against Hillary Clinton. Another possibility is that many former supporters of Mr. Sanders ultimately backed the president and are now lost to the Democrats.

One sliver of hope is that Michigan's black vote is far less disposed to the Obama administration because of its handling of the Flint water crisis. But if Bernie loses the rural vote, it might not matter.

In 2016 voters were reacting to the offensiveness of Hillary Clinton and the failed neoliberalism of the Obama administration. Now voters are reacting to the exhausting spectacle of a Trump White House. You would think that Joe Biden's reduced cognitive abilities, if not outright dementia, as well as his long spotty record of supporting free-trade deals and foreign wars, would make him radioactive. Unfortunately, voters in the Democratic primary appear to have decided on the addled Biden as the anti-Trump, and they are willing to the pull the lever back to Obamatime.

I think it's doomed and desperate. There's no going back to Obamatime, and Biden might not even make it to the convention -- that's how compromised I believe his mental health to be. Maybe the DNC will push the Biden people to adopt a front-porch campaign like William McKinley's; at least it would limit Biden's stress and strain.

In any event, Trump could easily defeat Joe Biden with social media memes alone, and Trump has the unlimited budget to do it.

There's one scenario where Biden could win the presidency; it's the one I mentioned in January: stock market collapse and economic recession. We do seem headed for an economic downturn.

Bernie has to win Michigan. If he can't, with Florida right around the bend, I don't think he can do it.

The Day After the Day After Super Tuesday

As California results continue to come in -- right now Sanders is up 1.25 million votes over Biden in the Golden State with 87% of the precincts reporting -- Super Tuesday is looking more and more like a draw. No wonder The New York Times is spotlighting Biden's big win in Virginia, not to mention dismissing Bernie's idea of increasing the youth vote. All Biden has to run on is his post-South Carolina bounce. But that bounce didn't end the race -- it might not even deliver a delegate advantage -- and there a lot of states yet to vote.

The primary campaign is going to change, and Biden is not in a position to fluidly adapt to that change. Now that it is a two-person race, with Elizabeth Warren paddling away to irrelevance, Sanders is going to start placing attack ads. Biden, with his history of fulsome support for free trade, is a sitting duck in the swing states. Bernie will tag Biden with gutting the manufacturing base of the industrial Midwest. That's the overhand right. Bernie's left jab to the snout will be Biden's role as the senate architect of the disastrous Iraq war.

There is a helpful FiveThirtyThirty roundtable discussion posted this morning (see "Does Sanders Need A New Strategy?"). What is surprising is how bullish, from a mainstream perspective, the participants are regarding Bernie's chances going forward.

Right, we are entering a new phase of the race. The field isn’t as crowded, and to some extent it’s a two-person race now, which will change both Biden’s and Sanders’s strategy. The race can definitely flip again, and I do think Sanders will pivot in some way moving forward. The Obama ad is evidence of this even if its timing felt off.

Biden “won” Super Tuesday, but we’ve still got a ways to go. And Sanders is still very much in this race.

The Sanders campaign got rocked back on its heels Tuesday night. It didn't go down, but it got rocked back. Now it is going to start counterpunching. Now we're going to see the strength of Sanders' organization, the state of its conditioning, the depth of its volunteer commitment. Michigan is the next battleground.

All is not lost. The goal here, as I see it, is not to go silently into the night as Bernie did in 2016. The goal here is to capture the Democratic Party. Absent that, absent winning the nomination, burn the motherfucker to the ground. The presently-configured Democratic Party isn't going to protect the republic from Trump. It didn't protect organized labor from Janus. So why pledge allegiance to a militaristic, plutocratic octopus that is hellbent on plunder?

Bernie needs to fight on as long as possible. Take it all the way to a convention. If it is brokered, let the superdelegates show who they are.

Super Tuesday Postmortem: Red-baiting Works!

A good overview of Joe Biden's incredible Super Tuesday is "5 Takeaways From a Super Tuesday That Changed the Democratic Race" by Lazaro Gamio and Shane Goldmacher

Momentum, not political organization or money, is what mattered.

Mr. Biden’s incredible 72 hours between his victory in South Carolina and the first poll closings on Super Tuesday exerted a kind of gravitational pull rarely seen in politics. Three opponents dropped out (Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer) and then three former rivals endorsed him in dramatic fashion on Monday in Dallas (Mr. Buttigieg, Ms. Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke).

Political operatives marveled at the thoroughness and speed of his consolidation of support. Kevin Cate, a former adviser to Mr. Steyer, noted that the cumulative value of Mr. Biden’s final three days of almost pure positive media coverage amounted to a staggering $72 million, according to Critical Mention, a monitoring company.

The question remained: Would there be enough time for all that to sink in and affect the Super Tuesday results? The resounding answer was yes.

For all of Mr. Bloomberg’s money — he spent more than $100 for every $1 that Mr. Biden invested on television in Super Tuesday states — and the organizational advantages that he and Mr. Sanders had, the momentum and free media attention proved far more important.

In Texas, which Mr. Biden won, he captured half of those who decided on primary day or “the last few days” — well more than double Mr. Sanders, who drew more support among those who decided earlier. It was the same story in Massachusetts. And Maine. And Virginia. Just about everywhere.

[snip] 

Even Mr. Biden seemed taken aback by the breadth of victories that would have seemed nearly unimaginable a few days ago. He won in Minnesota, where barely 36 hours earlier the home-state senator had been strongly favored and where Mr. Biden was not even seriously contesting.

On Mr. Biden’s own website, his “find a field office” page featured only eight offices in the 14 states that voted on Tuesday (an aide said the total was actually nine). 

Calling the lockstep coordination of mainstream corporate media with Democratic political leadership "momentum" obscures the establishment freak-out that occurred post-Nevada.

On the eve of the Nevada caucus, the Washington Post and New York Times reported that the intelligence community suspected Russia was working to elect Bernie Sanders. Then, on the Sunday after the Saturday Nevada caucus, Anderson Cooper of 60 Minutes interviewed Bernie Sanders, playing a videotape from the 1980s showing then Burlington mayor Sanders praising Cuba's efforts to increase literacy. Next came the Tuesday debate in South Carolina where Biden and Buttigieg tag-teamed Bernie for backing Fidel Castro. Wednesday James Clyburn endorsed Biden.  Saturday Biden won a commanding victory in South Carolina, which was followed by Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Biden on Monday, Super Tuesday eve.

Red-baiting still works. Biden, who prior to his win in South Carolina, hadn't campaigned in a Super Tuesday state in a month, won in Massachusetts and Minnesota, which is incredible.

The state I was keeping an eye on was Texas. I figured if Bernie could win there he could win the nomination. Sanders didn't win there. Biden narrowly beat him.

We have to consider Super Tuesday's result in a league with other spectacular electoral achievements of peak neoliberalism -- Macron's 2017 En Marche! victory and Boris Johnson's 2019 Tory landslide. The zombie paradigm is displaying an increasing number of marvels at the polls.

Nonetheless we're talking right now about a Super Tuesday delegate haul of 390 for Biden, 330 for Sanders, far short of the FiveThirtyEight's Biden overperformance scenario, which had Biden winning 614 delegates to Bernie's 445. Delegates remain to be allocated in California. AP called the state immediately for Sanders. Though the late vote shifted to Biden in other states, Gamio and Goldmacher think Super Tuesday will basically end close to a draw, and the national polling average still shows Bernie in the lead.

So it's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

There's only one path forward for the Sanders campaign. It has to go negative and start hammering Biden's lengthy, loathsome voting record in the senate. Biden shepherded the invasion of Iraq through the Foreign Relations Committee, which he chaired. Up until now the Sanders campaign has yet to run one negative television ad. That has to change.

After the 2016 electoral debacle, I figured that Bernie would run again; that once again the DNC would block him; and then the Democratic Party would split.

We're not quite there yet because Biden might win the nomination outright and paper over and tape up any fissure. More Democratic voters appear to be willing to go whistling past the graveyard than I imagined.

Sanders has to win Washington and he has to win Michigan on March 10, and he has to do it by spotlighting Biden's neoconservatism and neoliberalism.

Some Thoughts on the Morning of Super Tuesday

Beto O'Rourke joined Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg yesterday in endorsing Joe Biden. This circus of filth and corruption is meant to juice the addled former vice president's momentum coming off his Saturday South Carolina blowout win, a win obscured by domestic jitters over the fatal coronavirus, heading into today's important Super Tuesday primary.

FiveThirtyEight's Democratic Primary Forecast now, improbably, has Biden significantly ahead of Sanders, 31% compared to 8%, to win the nomination.  Based on what? One state in Dixie that is going to vote for Trump in November no matter what? It is hard to say for sure because no one knows what goes into Nate Silver's special sauce.

What I did notice is that the faux-hipsters of FiveThirtyEight were starting to climb aboard the Bernie bandwagon after Nevada. Then panic in the ruling class took hold and Nate Silver and his pals started to climb down off the bandwagon.

Having paid close attention to FiveThirtyEight the last couple of months I've come to the conclusion that Silver's forecasts, ever changing, are not forecasts but snapshots of the present corporate hive-mind; they don't predict the future but tell us what the future looks like currently in the neoliberal corporate now. I don't want to say it is entirely useless because a snapshot of the corporate political hive-mind is illuminating, but it is basically corrupt.

That being said, let's keep our eyes on the Lone Star. Polls won't close there until 9 PM. If Bernie can win in Texas, and then rack up big wins in California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Minnesota and maybe even North Carolina, he'll be in control, particularly with elections in Washington and Michigan next week. Nate Silver will have to rejigger his forecast yet again.

If Biden beats Bernie in Texas then we must acknowledge that the Democratic establishment still has quite a bit of game left. Reanimating a cadaver is no easy feat. Biden was DOA after his horrendous debate performances, Iowa and New Hampshire. A Biden win in Texas, Alabama and strong showings elsewhere means that superdelegate fantasies of a brokered convention are likely to come true.

One thing that has not been sufficiently factored in during this second-wave Biden boom is Mike Bloomberg's appearance on the ballot for the first time. Bloomberg has spent so much money I don't see how he fails to make a splash. Bloomberg will hurt Biden in the South, and I think he will hurt Biden in California. I think the touts at FiveThirtyEight and other outlets have prematurely written off the diminutive media mogul.

So Long, Pete. We Hardly Knew Ye.

Good riddance Mayor Pete. The New York Times is reporting that Buttigieg will likely endorse Biden:

Mr. Buttigieg talked with Mr. Biden and former President Barack Obama on Sunday night, according to a Democratic official familiar with the conversations. Mr. Biden asked for Mr. Buttigieg’s support and the former mayor indicated he would consider the request. Mr. Buttigieg wants to sleep on the decision, he told aides, some of whom believe he should move quickly to endorse Mr. Biden.

Mr. Obama did not specifically encourage Mr. Buttigieg to endorse Mr. Biden, said the official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations. But Mr. Obama did note that Mr. Buttigieg has considerable leverage at the moment and should think about how best to use it. Should Mr. Buttigieg endorse Mr. Biden on Monday, it could reshape the Democratic primary if many of his supporters shift to Mr. Biden, creating a more formidable centrist challenge to Mr. Sanders’s progressive movement.

In his remarks, Mr. Buttigieg directed criticism toward Mr. Sanders, without naming him, that he has previously made on the debate stage and on the campaign trail.

“We need leadership to heal a divided nation, not drive us further apart,” he said. “We need a broad based agenda to truly deliver for the American people, not one that gets lost in ideology. We need an approach strong enough not only to win the White House, but hold the House, win the Senate and send Mitch McConnell into retirement.”

As Cenk Uygur correctly points out: 1) Buttigieg dropped out at the behest of his large donors, and 2) Buttigieg dropped out because he is going to get shellacked, blanked, tomorrow; a loss so resounding it would likely tarnish his brand for the foreseeable future.

The problem for the Democratic leadership class is that Obama neoliberal centrism no longer commands majority support, and it certainly doesn't command majority support if Biden is the standard-bearer.

A section of the Democratic electorate might be afraid of Bernie or put off by his style, but this doesn't mean that there is a majority for Biden's cadaverous business-as-usual neoliberalism.

Erdogan has Run Out of Room to Maneuver

According to Carlotta Gall, "Turkey Declares Major Offensive Against Syrian Government":

Sunday’s announcement appears to be a declaration of what was already underway for days, but also signals a sharp increase in the level of activity, Turkish analysts said.

Turkey has sought support from the United States and other NATO allies in its attempt to thwart the Syrian and Russia offensive in Idlib, but it appears to be conducting the operation alone.

Western officials have ruled out an engagement of NATO troops but have been helping Turkey in other ways, in particular with information. Jens Stoltenburg, the NATO secretary general, said after an emergency meeting Friday that NATO was providing airborne radar surveillance over Syria.

Reuters is reporting the recapture of Saraqeb:

Syrian state television broadcast live footage from inside Saraqeb, which lies on the country’s main north-south highway, and said it was under government control. Rebels denied the report, saying they still held the town despite heavy shelling.

Saraqeb has already changed hands twice in less than a month, reflecting its importance both as a gateway to the government-controlled northern city of Aleppo and to the rebel-held Idlib city to the west.

Rebels said Turkish drones had been striking Syrian army positions on the Saraqeb frontline, hitting at least two rocket launchers.

Colonel Cassad is less hesitant: The Syrian Arab Army fighting alongside Hezbollah has taken the city from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), ISIS and Turkey.

A scramble is underway prior to Erdogan traveling to Russia to meet with Putin this Thursday. Presumably, some sort of ceasefire will be announced because Erdogan is on shaky ground. Russia control the skies over Idlib, with the exception of some sort of allowance for Turkish drones, and this means that any sort of mechanized offensive by the Turkish army becomes a "turkey shoot" for Russian pilots.

Erdogan is skillful at managing the press. But so far his turning on of the refugee spigot has backfired. Greece and Bulgaria have blocked their borders with Turkey and are repelling the refugees; the Western corporate press has uniformly tagged Erdogan's decision a cynical ploy to engage NATO in a war with Russia.

No, Erdogan has run out of room to maneuver. He needs a ceasefire from Moscow. It'll be interesting to see if all Erdogan ends up with is the Gaza Strip along the Turkish border with northern Idlib that Gall predicted last month.

Biden's Blowout Win in South Carolina: Can a Cadaver Get a Bounce?

Biden notched a commanding, campaign-saving win yesterday in South Carolina, beating Bernie Sanders by 30 points. The corporate press is going to boom Biden's first-ever win in a presidential primary as proof of life going into Super Tuesday and an omen that the former VP will reclaim his front-runner status in the national polls.

Unfortunately for Biden and Democratic superdelegates, such is not the case. Nate Silver, in rattling off the possible scenarios post-Palmetto State, mentions that Biden's big win might be merely a "dead cat bounce": "Hypothesis No. 1: This was a “dead cat bounce” for Biden because voters were sympathetic to him in one of his best states. It may have been a one-off occurrence."

That's my reading, a reading backed up, believe it or not, by the anti-Sanders New York Times (see "Joe Biden Had a Big Night. He Needs Another in 72 Hours." by Matt Flegenheimer and Katie Glueck). Flegenheimer and Glueck make the obvious point, a point that elections guru Nate Silver inexplicably avoids, that, unlike billionaire Tom Steyer, billionaire Mike Bloomberg is not dropping out before Super Tuesday, and it's Bloomberg's presence on the ballot in Super Tuesday Dixie states like Alabama, where the media mogul has acquired the endorsement of the Alabama Democratic Caucus, that will block a repeat of Biden's South Carolina showing:

Top Democratic officials in key battleground states that go to the polls Tuesday, from Alabama to Texas, have said that Mr. Bloomberg poses an acute threat to Mr. Biden, eating into his standing with moderate voters. It does not help that early voting has already been underway in many states against the backdrop of Mr. Biden’s bleak finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.

So, yes, South Carolina was a "dead cat bounce" for the cadaverous candidate Biden. Bloomberg's colossal campaign spending -- I received two pieces of literature in my mailbox Friday from Bloomberg 2020 (Washington's presidential primary election is March 10), which I guess is part of a saturation mailing to all four-for-four voters in the state -- in Virginia, North Carolina and elsewhere on Super Tuesday will act as a firewall to any national bounce that Biden might receive for his blowout South Carolina victory.

It is a delicious irony that Bloomberg's entire strategy of avoiding the first four boutique contests in order to dominate Super Tuesday with enormous ad buys will end up benefiting Bernie, the democratic socialist, rather than saving the fraudulent centrism that most voters despise. Just as Bloomberg buying his way into the presidential debates lethally backfired, so too now it appears that his plutocratic "outside-the-box" primary strategy will backfire as well.

Super Tuesday for decades has been the way in which the Democratic National Committee guaranteed that the most corrupt, machine-driven bloc of votes decided the presidential nominee; it was the corporate firewall of Dixiecrat states that would vote Republican in the general.

But Super Tuesday is no longer just the "Southern Primary." Big important progressive Democratic states vote on Super Tuesday as well -- California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Minnesota. Sanders will do well if not win all of these states outright. Biden and Bloomberg won't even get close.

The corporate masterclass and the mainstream media circled the wagons after Nevada. Fidel Castro was disinterred from his crypt; Putin's Oz-like visage was once again conjured. But the fundamentals of the primary remain unchanged. Bernie's campaign is the only one that is a popular movement; the rest are concatenations of lobbyists, party apparatchiks, big-dollar donors, with a grassroots sprinkle here and there.

Biden is not a viable nominee.