Day 819 Friday April 5, 2019
577 Days to the 2020 election and 655 Days to Inauguration Day
Folks on the Mueller team are pissed and the word is getting out. Apparently, Bill Barr’s review of their findings is not accurate. Shocking that a trained attorney acting as Attorney General could get that wrong, but he did! It was, apparently, way too positive in Trump’s favor. Who could have seen that coming? (Okay, anyone based in reality, but some 40% of the country is not…so, here we are.)
As to the summary that Barr gave (It’s not a summary! Yeah, I know. It’s a giant lie – deny that.) was not only inaccurate, legally questionable, and legislatively not necessary, the Mueller team had prepared a summary of each section of their report and, I think, an overall summary. Barr says he didn’t release that because parts of the summary were marked “may contain sensitive information” or some such warning. He also said that there is grand jury testimony and other stuff that is under the grand jury guise and that stuff can’t be released so Barr, ever the good man, is personally taking it upon himself to cut all that out before showing it to anyone. It turns out both of these excuses are hogwash. Every page in the Mueller report is stamped with a warning about “may contain sensitive information.” Doesn’t mean it does. Folks found it odd that the Mueller team would write summaries if they didn’t intend for them to be made public, and it turns out they damn well intended them to be made public and this is an excuse because of a rubber stamp image on every page of the report. As to the grand jury excuse, a lawyer goes to a judge and asks that the information be releasable to the public. It was done during Watergate. Boom. Done. Next?
Then there’s the weird argument by Trump and the right that the Mueller report completely exonerates him, so why are the underlings standing in the way (ie the Senate) of releasing the report? Well, shucks, I don’t know. I’d have to take a wild guess here and mind you it is only a guess on my part but if I were to guess I’d have to say THE MUELLER REPORT DOESN’T EXONERATE TRUMP. In fact, I’m guessing that any sane person reading it ( and in our country that’s all of us minus the Trump supporters or between 60-67% of the country ) would conclude the opposite and that he’s guilty as shit and he knows it. In fact, and this is a little known fact to those in that Trump base but Trump’s lapdog AG said in his wacky letter that Mueller didn’t exonerate the president. But, of course, they didn’t hear that because after running it through the Trumpolater it came out just the opposite, which is what we’ve come to expect.
In other news Big Pharma has put a provision in some health care bill that Trump is trying to pass that would permanently lock in their absurdly high prices here in the USA. And why not? That’s capitalism. A person’s gotta make a buck. Of course, Canada, Europe and every other country in the world said no and they pay much lower drug prices for the same stuff. How much lower? Well, from personal experience I can tell you in my case it was 80% lower. For the exact same thing, we get here. Meanwhile people are dying who can’t afford their drugs.
Speaking of dying, the heart breaking story on 60 Minutes of the couple whose daughter was murdered by one of those mass shooters. They sold everything, bought an RV and travel around the country from one mass shooting to another offering aid and comfort to other victims. They help folks with grief and with the practicality of how you ship a body, and stuff like that. They are kept extremely busy, going from one shooting to the next. Gawd, It took Australia one shooting to change their laws and they haven’t had a mass shooting since, and gun owners can still own guns. Now, New Zealand is following suit. One mass shooting and that’s it. But we can’t seem to manage that.
Doesn’t seem to matter if its guns or drugs we can’t stop our politicians from being bought off. It’s no surprise I guess because when a whole major party goes in the tank for a known, proven liar and con-man, what can we expect? In both cases it’s really all about the same thing – money.
And just when we thought Trump couldn’t go lower, couldn’t do something stupider, he proposed Herman Cain for the Federal Reserve. OMG! Interest rates will go to 9.99% (get it? Remember the 9-9-9 plan?) Herman Cain, Mr. Godfather Pizza, former Republican hopeful who didn’t seem to know much about anything in foreign policy (or anything else for that matter) who tried to fake his way through questions on Libya, and most dangerously a man who believes that we should return to the gold standard. (I thought we had that argument with William Jennings Bryant and is was over. Sorry he wanted silver, not gold, but the problem is the same. )
For those of you who haven’t had an econ course, or don’t understand the problem with the gold standard argument lemme ’splain. The idea behind the gold (or silver, or any precious thing) standard is that you put a bunch of gold in a bank vault and you give folks a piece of paper and tell them that the piece of paper represents an amount of gold you have in your vault. This saves lugging around gold, which is heavy, and hopefully stops you from getting robbed of your gold – handy. An economy is the exchange of goods and services. To make an economy work you need a method of exchange. You can trade stuff, called bartering, but then you have to find someone who has what you want and you have to have something they want and then you have to agree on how much of each you each are willing to part with to get what the other wants. It can get complicated and hard to actually get what you need,
For instance, I understand in Japan wedding guests are given a rice bowl as a present for coming (maybe they are inscribed like for instance “Donald and Melania” or “Donald and Marla” or … you get the idea, I hope.) Rice bowls cost about one dollar to make. Imagine if you wanted to buy a Cadillac? That’s a lot of rice bowls. Can you imagine a seller of Cadillacs wanting 50,000 rice bowls? So barter is a tough way to go, but works in limited circumstances.
So you get a medium of exchange, could be gold – actual gold, or it could be a currency – like dollar bills. Whatever it is people have to have faith that it’s going to hold its value. Currencies can change in value, that means the amount of goods and services they can buy can change.
Here’s where economists go crazy constructing thought experiments and models trying to explain what is happening in the real world. (Spoiler alert: no one really knows what is happening in the real world. We only have rough ideas, and they can be inaccurate, but at times those generalizations are the best we can do.) If you think of an economy as a box and everything happens inside this very large box then we can create some models to try and explain what is, or should be, happening. In this box we have people buying and selling stuff (and services). Let’s say everyone is making $5 an hour and a six pack of beer costs $2.50. You’d have to work for half an hour to buy a six pack. Now let’s say everyone got a raise to $10 an hour. All of a sudden you can work for 15 minutes to buy that six pack. What’s happened? More money has been put into the system. In fact, it doubled. Do you think the person selling beer is going to keep their price at $2.50? Heck no. He has expenses, everything is going to cost twice as much in terms of dollars. Because as everyone got more money they are willing to pay more because they have more money and the value of the money goes down because the beer guy is going to raise his prices to keep up. This is called inflation. Most economies have a little bit of inflation in them.
Let’s look at the other side of the situation, prices and wages go down, called deflation. This is where the gold standard comes in. There’s only so much gold in the world. I’ve been told that if you put all the gold in the world in one place you could fill two tennis courts to a height of six to eight feet. That’s it. Yes, we might find a little more each year but it’s not going to change the overall height of the pile of gold much. So we say the amount of gold is fixed. If you peg your currency (ie the dollar) to the amount of gold you have then you have a fixed amount of currency that your rectangular box can have. It doesn’t matter how many more people are born, each of which will need some money. There is only so much money to go around. What happens is everyone gets desperate to get some money. They’ll sell things really cheap, if only they can get some currency. This is called deflation. This is what happened during the Great Depression, which was started by the stock market crash of 1929 but made really really bad when the bankers (all Republicans) refused to loan out money in the early 1930s. It took FDR coming in in 1932 and spending money, a lot of money to put money back into the system to get things back to normal. That’s not to say that the Republicans and the bankers didn’t fight him every step of the way – they did. It wasn’t until WWII that it would have been unpatriotic to do so, and besides they were skimming so much gravy off the top from the war effort that they went along with it.
Governments try to control the amount of inflation by putting money into or taking money out of the economy via the banking system. They do this by adjusting the interest rates on treasury notes. This is done by a central bank. In our case it’s the Federal Reserve. If the interest rates are high, banks will buy those notes rather than putting their money somewhere else. Once the treasury note is issued then that money is out of the system and the effect should be to slow down the rate of inflation. If those interest rates are low then people won’t buy the T-bills and they’ll put their money elsewhere, thus leaving it in the economy. Certain treasury bills are constantly coming due so this will put money, more money back into the system and the supply of money will increase and therefore inflation will rise and one’s dollar won’t be worth quite as much.
This is basic basic economics. If you don’t understand this you have no business being on the board of the institution that regulates this sort of stuff. Neither Herman Cain or Stephen Moore, both of Trump’s most recent picks for the Federal Reserve, have any idea how this works. It’s hard to say which man is more dangerous to the economy. The man thinks the gold standard is the way to go, thus creating a depression, maybe on the scale of the Great Depression, or the man with a proven track record of ruining an economy (ie Kansas.)
The one thing that continues to astound is the ability of Trump to not only go lower, but to go stupider. Neither the bottom, nor the brick wall are in sight, as we hurdle down the track or fall deeper into the pit.
I’d say God help us, but that ain’t gonna cut it. We need to help ourselves. What I can’t figure out is how many of these clowns don’t really know or understand and how many are just playing the system?
577 Days to the 2020 election and 655 Days to Inauguration Day
PS The Annunciation, Jan Van Ecyk 1434/36, in the National Gallery, Washington DC. It is all alleged that when this painting was last bought in the 1920s the price paid was the highest per square inch, coming in at approximately $20,000 per inch.
