“ Several major airline hubs are located in battleground states, putting pressure on Trump and some senators seeking reelection to save those jobs just a month out from Election Day. Any layoffs would give challengers an opening to argue the incumbents didn’t protect industry jobs and local economies.”
I imagine that cancelled flights will effect campaigns re: events and moving staff.
Anyone who doesn’t understand we’re heading for a long term depression over this is either ignorant or willfully blind.
it also strikes me this would fit in the political fall out thread, too:
And it still baffles me how the stocks are continuing to set records. Its almost like there is no real connection between market value and the bloody market!
Because the stock market has become entirely uncoupled from the real economy…
It’s sort of that, but really that the value produced by actual labor is no longer really valued by “mechanisms” like the stock market.
Karl Polanyi weeps…
Seems like there was a recent book about him that just came out, but I can’t find it…
It’s almost like the rich have their own economy going on or most likely using the stock market as their personal piggy banks…
"Tara Sinclair, an economics professor at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told me she thinks the markets are also providing a better place for wealthy people to stash their money than alternatives like bonds or banks.
“People, particularly the rich, have cut back their spending, so they need to park their funds somewhere like the stock market (especially since interest rates are rock bottom),” she said in an email. “Inequality can mean that even with millions out of work, there might still be a glut of funds from the high-earning and/or high-wealth individuals.”
As Paul Krugman of The New York Times pointed out relatively early in the crisis, the yield on Treasury bonds is so low (see the chart above) that stocks are an attractive option — even in the midst of a recession caused by a once-in-a-generation pandemic.
“Recent stock market performance could be more about something like a savings glut rather than optimism on the future value of companies,” Sinclair told me. “It may be more about the S&P 500 being better than anywhere else to put funds rather than about actual optimism.”" -538
They have to stash our tax monies somewhere.
It’s manipulation of the markets, pure and simple. With so many people unemployed and multiple industries waiving payments, the amount of credit being extended must be huge. I’m expecting a repeat of the bank bailouts that were done in 2008. The financial sector will get the money back somehow (with interest), because that never changes.
Also…
That was a long and depressing read. I wish I could see a good ending to all this…
Money must always be given to corporations, not to people. That way you get the multiplier effect.
Wait a minute.
TIL; Today is National Physician Suicide Awareness Day. Holy shit, have we come to where this is that much of a thing? It can be a rough gig, but damn… Things I wish I did not know. Or worse, understand.
ETA:
“An estimated 300 to 400 doctors kill themselves each year, a rate of 28 to 40 per 100,000 or more than double that of general population. That is according to a review of 10 years of literature on the subject presented at the American Psychiatry Association annual meeting in May.”
And this is pre-Covid numbers. I have to think it has gone up since. Damn.
Are you familiar with the polemics by Dean and Talbot that reframe physician ‘burnout’ as ‘moral injury’? They appear to have a profound insight into what’s going on in the American system.
It would be cool if certain federal judges were forced to do this.
Well, that was an unexpected author!
I confess to never having heard of anyone else from Athens, Georgia…
Why? He’s one of the most prominent and well-known (former) denizen of Athens. He still cares about it, so why not speak out when it’s at risk?
B-52s, Neutral Milk Hotel, Widespread Panic, Pylon, Vic Chestnutt, Drive-by Truckers, Kim Basinger, Tituss Burgess, Jeff Daniels, NeNe Leakes, … Not from A-town, Alton Brown went to UGA…
That this 
is comparing lockdowns to all the ways the civil liberties of Black people in the US have been violated since slavery enrages me. I can’t even…
I’ll be checking The Root a lot today, because anyone there will do a better job summing up how disgusting this is. My bp just went up too many points. 
Making it free helps them hide the real cost and what they skim off the top. It’s all part of the grift.
