Kristian S. Blickle, - Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Stephan: This is what concerns me. I am just publishing the abstract, I urge you to click through and download the .pdf
White Militia and Neo-Nazis Credit: Mockingbird Paper
ABSTRACT
We merge several historical data sets from Germany to show that influenza mortality in 1918-1920 is correlated with societal changes, as measured by municipal spending and city-level extremist voting, in the subsequent decade. First, influenza deaths are associated with lower per capita spending, especially on services consumed by the young. Second, influenza deaths are correlated with the share of votes received by extremist parties in 1932 and 1933. Our election results are robust to controlling for city spending, demographics, war-related population changes, city-level wages, and regional unemployment, and to instrumenting influenza mortality. We conjecture that our findings may be the consequence of long-term societal changes brought about by a pandemic. Key words: influenza, pandemic, municipal spending, voter extremism
Stephan: We are now watching the Coronavirus move into a new phase where it is revealing the stupidity and incompetence of various organizations and the abject failure of Trump and his administration. Religious groups who thought Covid-19 was a hoax and did not practice self-separation are now dying from willful ignorance. Nursing homes, prison, jails, and meatpacking plants, and the country towns in Red states, are now the hot spots for the virus. Why? Because of greed, stupidity, and incompetence.
The American population constitutes about 4.25% of the world's population. And yet we have one-third (32%) of the world's Covid-19 cases. Why is that? Why does the richest country in the world have the worst pandemic figures? Because Trump and his administration are incompetent at a historic level. The truth is, and because of all the data I don't think this can be denied, Trump and his people don't actually care about the virus; they only care about profit. Their concerns about opening up businesses are about profit. The stimulus package is actually a compensation program for the rich.
The view of the rich seems to be: So what if a bunch of peasants die; there are too many of them anyway. We have access to testing and the money to isolate ourselves in luxury. And our reserves of wealth are such that the pandemic has no real effect on our lives.
Fundamentalist demonstrators
Countless non-fundamentalist churches in the United States, from Catholic to Lutheran and Episcopalian, have embraced social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic and temporarily moved their activities online. But many Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals have been irresponsibly downplaying the dangers of COVID-19 and doing so with deadly results: journalist Alex Woodward, in the U.K.-based Independent, reports that the pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 30 pastors in the Bible Belt.
“Dozens of pastors across the Bible Belt have succumbed to coronavirus after churches and televangelists played down the pandemic and actively encouraged churchgoers to flout self-distancing guidelines,” Woodward reports. “As many as 30 church leaders from the nation’s largest African-American Pentecostal denomination have now been confirmed to have died in the outbreak, as members defied public health warnings to avoid large gatherings to prevent transmitting the virus.”
Within Christianity, there are major differences between non-fundamentalist Mainline Protestant denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and fundamentalist Pentecostals. And Woodward, in The Independent, discusses the Pentecostals who have openly defied social distancing.
Stephan: Yet another anti-life program going on beneath the media's single focus on the pandemic. This is how corporate fascists are using willfully ignorant and White racist peasants for their own purposes. Here is a very good assessment of what they are doing.
Demonstrators in Michigan last month. Credit: Matthew Dae Smith/Lansing State Journal/Associated Press
America’s extremists are attempting to turn the coronavirus pandemic into a potent recruiting tool both in the deep corners of the internet and on the streets of state capitals by twisting the public health crisis to bolster their white supremacist, anti-government agenda.LIVE COVERAGEGet live updates and the latest news on the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.
Although the protests that have broken out across the country have drawn out a wide variety of people pressing to lift stay-at-home orders, the presence of extremists cannot be missed, with their anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic signs and coded messages aimed at inspiring the faithful, say those who track such movements.
April is typically a busy month for white supremacists. There is Hitler’s birthday, which they contort into a celebration. There is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the domestic attack 25 years ago that killed 168 people and still serves as a rallying call for new extremist recruits.
But this April, something else overshadowed those chilling milestones. It was the coronavirus, […]
Stephan: When you stress a system its weaknesses and flaws are brought into focus. Yet another example of this is the effect the virus is having on the economy of the professional class, basically the mid-middle and upper-middle class. The wealth inequality in the United States has reached a level that would make Louis XVIth, or King Croesus blush.
This really is an Earth 2. When you fly on private aircraft, cruise on private yachts, and live on an estate, and can basically buy anything you like without thinking about it, you are in another world.
There’s a viral pandemic going on, which has caused the economy to crash. Many U.S. residents who previously lived comfortably on a day-to-day basis are losing some or all of their income and having trouble paying bills. In response, government leaders from both parties have proudly announced generous new unemployment benefits, a massive “stimulus” that will deliver cash to individual Americans, a program of no-interest loans that will allow small businesses to retain workers, and arrangements with landlords and lenders to allow the deferment of rent and mortgage payments.
Credit: Eric Gay/AP
Sounds great! There’s a catch, though: None of those things work.
At least, they don’t work in the sense of reliably delivering relief to everyone who is eligible for the programs and needs them. You can’t get unemployment benefits until you register for unemployment, and many people can’t register for unemployment, even if they’re calling the office hundreds of times a day, because state systems are overloaded. You can get your stimulus if the IRS already has a direct deposit account number for you—but if you didn’t get a […]
Stephan: In the United States, if you have only limited means, you are a modern-day peasant, and things as basic as potable water may be hard to obtain. Can this possibly be true? Surely, I am mistaken. Consider this from this report: "A third of American households — about 120 million people — still risk having their water disconnected and racking up exorbitant fees, despite calls from a coalition of lawmakers and advocates to suspend all utility shutoffs until the country drags itself out of this unprecedented crisis."
Credit: Picture Alliance / Getty
Joshua Haynes was raised to work hard and take care of his family without asking for outside help. But when the utility bills arrived last month, he knew there would be trouble.
Haynes, 34, a construction worker from Newbern, Tennessee, was left without income after the governor issued a stay-at-home order in early April. As a cash-in-hand builder, he is not eligible to claim unemployment insurance, and the stimulus check still had not arrived.
“I always pay my bills on time, but without work, I just didn’t have the money to cover everything, so I asked for an extension. They said no,” Haynes said.
Haynes, who lives with his wife and three children, managed to get the money just six days after the bill was due, but the city refused to accept the payment unless he also paid a $70 reconnection charge. He didn’t have it, and the charge didn’t make sense as they had not been disconnected. A few hours after his payment was turned down, the taps were turned off, even as the
