WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 02, 2020
Smokey Eye
A way in which the NORMS which keep things glued together, whatever their merits in isolation, are maintained is through social pressure, sometimes extreme, on the people expected to live up to them and on the people who appoint themselves as their guardians but fail to do so.
If the legal system can’t touch an inhumane and corruption administration, then yelling at the individuals involved in restaurants for the rest of their lives is about the only enforcement mechanism left, especially when the perps have become the favored sources of the elite press.
by Atrios at 12:56
That this is the best we can hope for, after 300,000 Americans are dead…
I am always here for Katie Porter reading the riot act (or in this case, the CARES Act) to idiot up-failing manchildren who can’t stand that a woman might be more qualified than they are.
Thursday, December 03, 2020
Thursday Is New Jobless Day
712K new lucky duckies.
Every week since this began has been higher than the peak week of the Great Recession.
Yeah, but the Dow…
…is going to drop like a rock when this holiday season retail numbers go public because no one can afford to buy anything.
I’m sure the whole point of the current “stimulus” is to keep the numbers up until Biden takes office…
Then blame the crash on a Democratic administration, of course.
Well, technically the “liberal” media will do that for them.
“Political fallout” indeed. May this amoral lickspittle quickly fall right into an intubated coma.
Munchkin’s “are you a lawyer?” is the absolute chef’s kiss of reply guy.
There are currently over 500,000 homeless in America, while more than 750,000 have died from drug overdoses in the last 20 years. One out of five people incarcerated in the world is in the U.S., while we represent only 4 percent of the world’s population. Then there are the unemployed and the underemployed. A lot of Americans are not participating in the dream of upward mobility. In fact, more and more Americans see their lives trending downward, drowning in debt and facing diminished life spans — a trend that the coronavirus and the federal response to it has in many ways exacerbated.
You could be forgiven for not being familiar with the term Lumpenproletariat, a term coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels denoting a class below the working class that is oppressed but disengaged from politics. Marxist studies in general and this specific aspect of Marxist theory have been sidelined in the past century. But University of Texas Professor Clyde W. Barrow’s new book “The Dangerous Class: The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat” (University of Michigan Press), brings a Marxist clarity to why capitalism has created so many disenfranchised citizens.
“In the last century Marxist political theorists generally ignored the lumpenproletariat, because they believed it would simply disappear as the result of a socialist revolution,” Barrow told me. “But obviously that revolution did not happen — at least not in the form envisioned by Marx.”
Thursday Is New Jobless Day
853K new lucky duckies.
by Atrios at 09:27
Blah, blah, blah, how’s the stock market?
North Korea accused of using virus for rights crackdown
What rights did they have to crack down on?
While we contemplate what poisoned, deeply insufficient unemployment extension bill the Democrats will have to prostrate themselves before King McConnell to receive,
Eschaton
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country.”
Sure, fucking Republicans, but “our side” didn’t push for automatic stabilizers or a longer package generally, in March, because influential economists on “our side” were running around saying things like that.
The old joke was that the stock market had predicted 9 out of the last 5 recessions, but now it’s more like economists have predicted 47 out of the last 2 recoveries.
