What a sham of a system we have. Principles of "decent" government have been corrupted. At least whatever principles that supposed to be good when you understand that government is slavery of a covert form. Almost unanimous support for the corrupt misbehavior is given by all politicians.
Source
What am I talking about? The bailouts for crooked corporations under the current CARES act (what an Orwellian term). While millions of Americans lose their jobs, President Trump signed the first ever spending bill with a T in it. T is for trillions. And it was at $6 trillion. Americans got just over $600 billion if I recall.
This is all happening because of government. Not just the bailing out in trillions of dollars, but the loss of jobs. Government did this. Sure, they and the media try to spin it as "economy destroyed by coronavirus pandemic" or some such nonsense. But the corona virus didn't do shit. The government imposed the lockdown/shutdown of businesses.
What else has the government done? Well, they've introduced a bill to give Israel $38 billion. Yes, $38 billion was slipped into a pack of bills to be approved by the Senate. It's called the United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2020. To to provide:
assistance provisions and to authorize the appropriations of funds to Israel, and for other purposes.
So whatever they decide are "other purposes" they can just go throw money at Israel to keep up it's war mongering in the Middle-East, like attack Syria, Lebanon, and of course keep oppressing, occupying and stealing Palestinian land while forcing people out of their homes and demolishing them. It used to be that the US would give over $3 billion to Israel each year, which is ridiculous, but this bill is a whole other level of insanity.
Will it not get passed? I doubt it. Everything is totally pro-Zionism and fuck whatever criminal shit they do. If you don't support it, you get deduced political brownie points and get labeled anti-"Semitic".
Back to the dirty corps, who are binging on debt to make money for their shareholders and their management while sticking it to the employees. The Fed is pushing this along in a crooked bail out scheme.
The Fed is buying corporate debt. Yup. Insane, I know. Corporations can just get int o debt, and sell it to the Fed, and then they reward themselves at the top of the executive ladder, as well as to their shareholders with dividends. What about the employees? Well, they get nothing or get fired. Then when the company fails, they expect the government to bail them out rather than let them fail, as has been the case this millennium.
Food-service giant Sysco got some of the Fed debt buying action. As they cut 1/3 of their workforce (more than 20,000 employees), but dividends to shareholders would continue to flow. They did this from March into May.
That process repeated itself in April and May as the coronavirus spread. The Fed’s promise juiced the corporate-bond market. Borrowing by top-rated companies shot to a record $1.1 trillion for the year, nearly twice the pace of 2019.
Since selling $4 billion in debt on March 30, Sysco has amassed $6 billion of cash and available liquidity, enabling it to gobble up market share, while cutting $500 million of expenses, according to Chief Executive Officer Kevin Hourican. Sysco, which is based in Houston, will continue to pay dividends to shareholders, Chief Financial Officer Joel Grade said on a May 5 earnings call.
Companies as diverse as Sysco, Toyota Motor Corp., international marketing firm Omnicom Group Inc. and movie-theater chain Cinemark Holdings Inc. borrowed billions of dollars -- and then fired workers.
Great plan to help the economy Federal Reserve! Keep the fleecing ball rolling on Americans. Scamming them with fiat currency in 1913 wasn't enough.
The Fed is buying junk bonds, yes junk, bad debt that can't be repaid. All to "preserve jobs", according to Fed chair Powell. At least that's the BS spin they tried to sell Congress on. They debt they buy only enriches the rich fucks. It doesn't help preserve jobs at all.
“They could set conditions, say to companies, hire back your workers, maintain your payroll to at least a certain percentage of prior payroll, and we will help,” said Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor for President Bill Clinton who now teaches economics at the University of California, Berkeley. "It’s hardly clear that if you keep companies afloat they’ll hire employees."
Of course they didn't do that. It wasn't about keeping jobs going. We are in a great wealth transfer leading into another great depression.
Where did all the hundreds of billions in newly issued debt go? Well, dividends for one. Without provisions for employees, “the credit assistance will tend to boost financial markets, but not the broad economic well-being of the great majority of the population,” Marcus Stanley, Americans for Financial Reform’s policy director, told Bloomberg.
Here is another company, Cinemark, who gets money and pays dividends instead of employees:
Movie theaters were one of the first businesses to close during the pandemic. Cinemark, which owns 554 of them, shut its U.S. locations on March 17. Three days later, the company paid a previously announced dividend. It has since said it will discontinue such distributions. Cinemark borrowed $250 million from the junk-bond market on April 13, the same day it announced the firing of 17,500 hourly workers. Managerial staff were kept on at reduced pay, according to company filings. Cinemark, which is based in Plano, Texas, said it plans to open its theaters in phases starting June 19.
Management and shareholders win. Employees lose.
Omnicom issued $600 million in bonds in late March. In an April 28 conference call to discuss quarterly earnings, CEO John Wren said the company was letting employees go but didn’t say how many. He said the company was extending medical benefits to July 31 for employees furloughed or fired.
Toyota borrowed $4 billion from investors on March 27. Three days later, the Japan-based car company said it would continue paying dividends to shareholders. Eight days after that it said it would drop roughly 5,000 contract workers who helped staff its plants in North America.
200 academics, led by Stanford University Graduate School of Business Professor Jonathan Berk, called lending programs aimed at corporations “a huge mistake.”:
"Bailing out investors who chose to take high-risk investments because they wanted the high returns undermines capitalism and makes it an unfair game."
No fucking shit. Capitalism hasn't running going for decades. We have corporate cronyism, fascist corporate-government intermingling to fucking rob the populace with coercive enslaving taxation.
The goal is to keep investors who own stock happy, and pay them off to prevent them from selling the stock. But it's all an illusion. Eventually, it's going to crash. So many companies are going to blow up. But at least the rich will make money off of it. Thank god for that! We can all be relieved.
Agreed, this is cronyism and corporatism, not a free market.
It's also quite close to classic fascism.
Doesn't really matter the ism... it's definitely corrupted to the core, and not fixable.
Your title summed it up well.
And I had no idea about that additional 38, wow... gross.
Yeah, it's corrupted bullshit and makes us living in an unreality.
The loss of so many jobs will only make matters worse. This is greed at another level. The virus was the perfect excuse for justifying so many actions of the government. Give'em a virus while we pile up some extra cash. The worst of human nature.
It's all being planned well to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor.
This is happening for so long that it has become a way of living. For both of the classes
All we get at the end of this is a cashless society with electronic debt. Basically, it's modern slavery.
Yup, it's a covert form of slavery, paying off debt to the banksters for generations.
What can the common man do? Hard times ahead for Americans.
Yup, hard times coming. I swear there will be a day when I see the dollar crash and burn. People do not believe me — but I swear I see this coming.
Local community comes in handy for mutual support, revamp a local economy by buying local, drop the big chains.
There will have to be a new group of elect people to take over. The world can't operate in chaos & confusion for very long. The planet was not created to just be a ground for it. Just a part of the evolutionary process. Keep your seatbelts buckled. Some are going to crash, fall off, but hey.
Yeah elect new people, magically government will work, we won't just get more of the same shit. Or maybe things can keep going back and forth over centuries while the corruption comes in more until protests revolt and then "laws" can fix things and then corruption goes away then comes back over and over.
Record unemployment, jobless numbers are the worst since World War 2 and still we hit All Time Highs in the markets. We are truly living in the upside down!
Ywe really thank God for everything better days is ahead
Keep working, stop paying.
Why we agree to sell our labor for wages, buy back our labor at a discount(corporate profits), and then can't figure out why we have to 'work harder', but never get ahead.
Smdh.