Category: Economy

Reynolds, Trump predict meatpackers ‘fully back up’ in 10 days or less

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and President Donald Trump predicted Wednesday, during a meeting at the White House, that meatpacking plants would be “fully back up” within a week to 10 days.

“Maybe sooner,” Trump said.

Reynolds said South Dakota plants are coming back on board “and we’ll have most of our facilities up and going and … we’re going to hopefully prevent what could have been, you know, a really sorry situation where we were euthanizing some of our protein supply and really impacting the food supply not only across the country but throughout the world.”

Reynolds said the response from the industry and government “I think has really maybe prevented what could have been really a serious situation.”

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue agreed, although he noted that meatpackers that have experienced outbreaks will take time to be operating at full capacity.

“But we think the stores will see more variety and more meat cases fully supplied,” he said.

Reynolds added, “We’re still monitoring it. We’ve turned a corner.”

Trump said Reynolds had “a great talk with the owners of the plants. The top people. Big people, these are big companies actually, you wouldn’t believe how many plants they have. And I think it was a very strong talk and I think they got the message.”

The remarks come a day after Iowa’s largest grocery store chain announced it would limit customer purchases of meat due to supply interruptions and customers stockpiling food during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Iowa public health officials reported Tuesday that more than 1,650 workers in four meatpacking plants had tested positive for COVID-19, including 58% percent of workers tested at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Perry.

Reynolds noted that the Perry plant “came back up at 60 percent capacity, which is really, that’s a strong startup.”

Vice President Mike Pence praised the president’s Defense Production Act executive order that “made it clear that our objective was to keep meat processing plants open.”

Asked whether workers were really being protected, Pence cited the deploying of Centers for Disease Control personnel to plant sites and federal assistance in supplying workers with personal protective equipment such as face masks.  “In most of these meat processing plants, we end up testing everyone in the facility and the people that are healthy are able to return with new countermeasures and new protection” such as masks and gloves.

Pence referred to Reynolds as a “great heartland governor” and said, “One of the great stories of the coronavirus outbreak has been how our food supply has continued to work every day from the field to the fork, from the grocers to the meat processors and thanks to the president’s decision to use the Defense Production Act, we now have uniformity and the objective is to work every day to keep those meat processing plants open and the ones that are coming down are going back online.”

Asked by a reporter about the soaring price of beef, Trump said he’d asked the Justice Department to investigate. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller on Tuesday joined attorneys general in 10 other states seeking an investigation into what they called possible price manipulation by meatpackers.

“I’ve asked them to take a very serious look into it because it shouldn’t be happening that way and we want to protect our farmers. But they’re looking into that very strongly.” Trump said. “They looking into the disparity, what’s going on. Are they working with each other? What’s going on.”

The Great Reset

My county out here in Krazifornia ostentatiously banned single-use plastic bags back in 2012, to “save the planet” naturally. So I whooped a whoop of joy through my mask when the local grocery store bagged my haul in plastic bags over the weekend. My guess is plastic bags will be back for good.

The aftermath of the virus crisis is going to change a lot of things—a process I’m calling “The Great Reset.” A lot of bad things are going to happen. A number of businesses have closed down for good already. Many others are going to shrink. Several department stores, like Macy’s, were already in trouble before the virus crisis, and J. Crew has filed for bankruptcy. General Electric has just announced that it expects to cut 25 percent of its workforce in its jet engine division permanently.

But not every business change will for the worse. The Wall Street Journal reports that another casualty of the COVID-Crash is corporate “sustainability” and other virtue-signaling luxuries of “corporate social responsibility.” The article opens with the confession of a green entrepreneur who specializes in selling products with minimal packaging and living a “zero-waste” lifestyle:

Ms. Singer, who prided herself on producing no trash that needed to be landfilled, stocked her kitchen with packaged food that would last for weeks. “I sacrificed my values and bought items in plastic. Lots of it.” She also learned a lesson: “I have many values and sometimes, as circumstances change, one of those values may take priority above another.”

Funny how that happens when things get real.

Today, every occupant of every C-suite is trying to figure out what they’re willing to throw overboard as the economic storm spawned by the pandemic is swamping their ships. Businesses that were planning to help save the world are now simply saving themselves. . .

Others are making their own cuts in response to the downturn. Unilever PLC suspended a number of its “change initiatives” that tackle complex social and environmental problems. (The company’s initiatives include water conservation and sustainable farming.) General Motors Co. killed its car-sharing program. Ford Motor Co. canceled an electric-car projectand postponed autonomous vehicles. Starbucks has paused the practice of filling reusable cups.

The end of nonsense is even spreading, like a contagion, to decadent Europe. Behold this report from the Financial Times:

Investors Blast EU’s Omission of Oil from ESG Disclosures

Investors, politicians and campaigners have hit out at EU regulators’ “ludicrous” exclusion of oil and gas from a definition of fossil fuels, arguing it will lead asset managers to understate their environmental risks. Under draft proposals for the EU’s sustainable disclosure regime, the European authorities responsible for banking, insurance and securities markets define fossil fuels as only applying to “solid” energy sources such as coal and lignite. This means asset managers and other financial groups would have to follow tougher disclosure requirements for holdings in coal producers than for oil and gas company exposure. . .

The latest EU proposals represent a significant watering down of its ambitious sustainable disclosure rules, which aim to give end investors clear information on the environmental, social and governance risks of their funds. . .

Wolfgang Kuhn, director of financial sector strategies at responsible investment group ShareAction, said that the EU regulators’ proposal was “like disclosing the amount of fat in a chocolate bar, but conveniently failing to mention the sugar content”.

According to Mr Kuhn, the exclusion of oil and gas “could, at best, result in an underestimation of the true investment risk, and at worst, contribute to further support for energy sources incompatible with Paris goals”.

Yes, I think ignoring the Paris goals is precisely the point of this bowing to reality. The EU apparently (or conveniently) “forgot” that while coal takes the most heat for its pollution, the main target of environmental campaigning for 50 years now is the oil industry.

Meanwhile, in Britain, demand for electricity is expected to be so low this weekend that utilities want to reduce the load on the grid, lest an overloaded grid suffers blackouts. So how do they propose to accomplish this load-shedding? You’d think this would be the time for renewable sources to shine, so to speak. But no. The intermittency of renewables destabilize the grid in these circumstances. Heh:

Blackout risk as low demand for power brings plea to switch off wind farms

Britain could be at risk of blackouts as extremely low energy demand threatens to leave the electricity grid overwhelmed by surplus power.

National Grid asked the regulator yesterday for emergency powers to switch off solar and wind farms to prevent the grid from being swamped on the May 8 bank holiday, when demand is expected to be especially low.

In its urgent request to Ofgem, it warned of “a significant risk of disruption to security of supply” if the “last resort” powers to order plant disconnections were not granted.

National Grid has to keep supply and demand balanced to ensure stable voltage and frequency on the network. When there is an imbalance the network can become unstable, leading to blackouts.

In other words, corporate America and corporatist Europe are relearning Milton Friedman’s understanding of “corporate social responsibility”: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business— to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” Because if you don’t have profits, you can’t hire back a lot of the 30 million Americans who have lost their jobs. Think of it as the economic equivalent of Dr. Johnson’s famous quip about how the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind.

Nearly 20 Percent Of The U.S. Labor Force Has Filed For Unemployment Since Mid-March

Now in its seventh week, the U.S. unemployment crisis continues to deepen. According to Thursday’s data release from the Department of Labor, 3.8 million more Americans filed for unemployment insurance during the week ending April 25. Although that represents the fourth consecutive week of decline in seasonally adjusted initial claims, the number remains historic. (Remember, no single week prior to March 21 had ever seen even 1 million initial claims since 1967, the earliest year that data is available from the Federal Reserve.) If we add up all of the initial claims filed since the coronavirus recession began,1 more than 30 million people — or nearly 19 percent of the total U.S. labor force — have filed for unemployment claims over the past month and a half.

Experts have all had their eyes trained on initial unemployment claims, both because they tell us about the ongoing scale of the crisis and because they’re one of the rare weekly indicators of the economy at large. Some economists think this weekly trend of massive unemployment numbers includes industries that weren’t hit hard at first but are now beginning to feel the ripple effects of the recession as it spreads through the economy. “Job separations will likely remain high for a while, as softer demand spills over into industries not initially directly affected by shutdowns,” Citigroup economist Andrew Hollenhorst told Reuters. (This is corroborated by sources such as the hiring site Indeed, which has consistently seen 30 to 40 percent fewer jobs posted than the norm since late March.)

Sen. Kevin Cramer Leads Effort to Protect Firearm Businesses from Loan Discrimination During COVID-19

GOP Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) is spearheading an effort to ensure that firearm related small businesses do not receive discriminatory treatment from banks, after the Senate passed additional funding to the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Sen. Cramer penned a letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Small Business Administrator Jovita Carranza asking the trio of administration officials, all of whom play a role in the execution of PPP loans, how this type of discrimination would be prevented. A group of GOP senators joined Sen. Cramer in defending the Second Amendment during COVID-19:

States Should Not Receive Bankruptcy Protection.

There are a couple of good reasons for this.

Mitch McConnell believes he has hit upon a solution for states that are upside-down on their pension obligations and other financial commitments: “I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route,” he told Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday. “It’s saved some cities, and there’s no good reason for it not to be available.”

There are a couple of good reasons for denying the states bankruptcy protection. One is the fact that there is no such thing as state-bankruptcy law in the United States. A second reason, related to the first, is the Constitution.

In the United States, we have a bankruptcy law for individuals, another one for businesses, and yet another one for municipalities and their subordinate agencies. We do not have a bankruptcy law for the states or for the federal government, for the same reason: They are sovereigns.

The several states are not administrative subdivisions of the federal government. They are powers in their own right, superseded by the U.S. government only in certain matters that involve more than one state………

Because bankruptcy law is federal law, putting states into bankruptcy reorganization would upend our basic constitutional arrangement, making state governments answerable to federal bankruptcy judges and, behind them, to Congress. ……..

Republicans often talk about the public-pension fiasco as though it were a uniquely Democratic problem — Hewitt listed California, Illinois, and Connecticut as states with such troubles. But Senator McConnell’s home state of Kentucky is no less troubled. Oklahoma has substantial unfunded liabilities in its pension system. At the municipal level, Chicago has pension troubles, but so does Dallas.

Badly managed cities and states hope to use the coronavirus epidemic as a pretext for federal bailouts. This is a cynical and shameful ploy: These problems have been decades in the making as states systematically underfund their pension systems. Why do they do that? It is a way to increase compensation for a politically powerful group — government employees — without raising taxes to pay for those benefits, or even to put them on the budget in a halfway honest fashion. (The numbers government budget-writers use to calculate their pension liabilities are fanciful, as obvious an exercise in book-cooking as you will find.) One interest group gets promised benefits in the future, and another gets benefits in the here and now that are paid out of the money that should have been used to fund those pension liabilities. It is a way of spending the same money twice, in effect.

Sovereigns don’t go bankrupt. Sovereigns default………..

Eventually, the political problem becomes a math problem, with the states obligated to spend more money than they have or can borrow. Even the Supreme Court of Oklahoma cannot produce blood from a stone.

The most likely way forward — the only plausible way forward short of gutting the Constitution — is for states to engage in a long, painful, disruptive negotiation with their creditors, their pensioners, and other interested parties. There will be endless lawsuits, unpopular budget cuts, unpopular tax hikes, and much else that is designed to make no one happy except for the lawyers. (The lawyers always get paid.) But these are the decisions the democratically elected representatives of the people of the several states have made, and they will have to live with them.

Call me an optimist, but: The more it hurts, the less likely they are to repeat the error.

America Shouldn’t Have to Play by New York Rules.

In 1976, the artist Saul Steinberg drew a cover for The New Yorker — “View of the World from Ninth Avenue” — that became an instant classic. You know the one: Manhattan heavily in the foreground, the Hudson River, a brownish strip called “Jersey,” the rest of the America vaguely in the distance.

It could almost be a map of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States.

Even now, it is stunning to contemplate the extent to which the country’s Covid-19 crisis is a New York crisis — by which I mean the city itself along with its wider metropolitan area.

As of Friday, there have been more Covid-19 fatalities on Long Island’s Nassau County (population 1.4 million) than in all of California (population 40 million). There have been more fatalities in Westchester County (989) than in Texas (611). The number of Covid deaths per 100,000 residents in New York City (132) is more than 16 times what it is in America’s next largest city, Los Angeles (8). If New York City proper were a state, it would have suffered more fatalities than 41 other states combined………..

I write this from New York, so it’s an argument against my personal interest. But I don’t see why people living in a Nashville suburb should not be allowed to return to their jobs because people like me choose to live, travel and work in urban sardine cans.

Gina Raimondo, the Rhode Island governor, was on to something when, a few weeks ago, she wanted to quarantine drivers arriving from New York. The rest of America needs to get back to life. We New Yorkers prefer our own company, anyway.

The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation

The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.

Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.

Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.

The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.

In New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 percent, or 11 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that. For people under 18 years old, the rate of death is zero per 100,000.

Of all fatal cases in New York state, two-thirds were in patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 percent were over 50 years of age; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of 6,570 confirmed COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520, or 99.2 percent, had an underlying illness. If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.

Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding.

We can learn about hospital utilization from data from New York City, the hotbed of COVID-19 with more than 34,600 hospitalizations to date. For those under 18 years of age, hospitalization from the virus is 0.01 percent per 100,000 people; for those 18 to 44 years old, hospitalization is 0.1 percent per 100,000. Even for people ages 65 to 74, only 1.7 percent were hospitalized. Of 4,103 confirmed COVID-19 patients with symptoms bad enough to seek medical care, Dr. Leora Horwitz of NYU Medical Center concluded “age is far and away the strongest risk factor for hospitalization.” Even early WHO reports noted that 80 percent of all cases were mild, and more recent studies show a far more widespread rate of infection and lower rate of serious illness. Half of all people testing positive for infection have no symptoms at all. The vast majority of younger, otherwise healthy people do not need significant medical care if they catch this infection.

Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.

We know from decades of medical science that infection itself allows people to generate an immune response — antibodies — so that the infection is controlled throughout the population by “herd immunity.” Indeed, that is the main purpose of widespread immunization in other viral diseases — to assist with population immunity. In this virus, we know that medical care is not even necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected. It is so mild that half of infected people are asymptomatic, shown in early data from the Diamond Princess ship, and then in Iceland and Italy. That has been falsely portrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation. In fact, infected people without severe illness are the immediately available vehicle for establishing widespread immunity. By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat. Extending whole-population isolation would directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing.

Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections.

Critical health care for millions of Americans is being ignored and people are dying to accommodate “potential” COVID-19 patients and for fear of spreading the disease. Most states and many hospitals abruptly stopped “nonessential” procedures and surgery. That prevented diagnoses of life-threatening diseases, like cancer screening, biopsies of tumors now undiscovered and potentially deadly brain aneurysms. Treatments, including emergency care, for the most serious illnesses were also missed. Cancer patients deferred chemotherapy. An estimated 80 percent of brain surgery cases were skipped. Acute stroke and heart attack patients missed their only chances for treatment, some dying and many now facing permanent disability.

Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures.

The overwhelming evidence all over the world consistently shows that a clearly defined group — older people and others with underlying conditions — is more likely to have a serious illness requiring hospitalization and more likely to die from COVID-19. Knowing that, it is a commonsense, achievable goal to target isolation policy to that group, including strictly monitoring those who interact with them. Nursing home residents, the highest risk, should be the most straightforward to systematically protect from infected people, given that they already live in confined places with highly restricted entry.

The appropriate policy, based on fundamental biology and the evidence already in hand, is to institute a more focused strategy like some outlined in the first place: Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large-group precautions. This would allow the essential socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals and limiting the enormous harms compounded by continued total isolation. Let’s stop underemphasizing empirical evidence while instead doubling down on hypothetical models. Facts matter.

Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.

In other words, these crap-for-brains econutz want the world economy to continue going backwards as much as it has so far this year, each year, for at least the next ten years.

The Coronavirus Economy Is a Preview of the Green New Deal Economy

Eric Holthaus, a popular online climate-change activist, points out that the allegedly positive environmental effects of the coronavirus crisis are on “roughly the same pace that the IPCC says we need to sustain every year until 2030 to be on pace to limit global warming to 1.5C and hit the Paris climate goals.”

“We’re doing it. It’s possible!” he adds.

It’s nice to see an environmentalist finally acknowledging the inherent economic tradeoff of their vision. Holthaus is absolutely correct that implementing a plan like the Green New Deal would hold approximately the same gruesome economic consequences as the coronavirus crisis — except, of course, forever. The point of modern environmentalism, as Greta Thunberg has hinted, is the destruction of wealth. This process is what Holthaus, and others, euphemistically call “degrowth.”

Holthaus, who doesn’t celebrate coronavirus, reminds us that merely to keep pace with the IPCC recommendations on carbon emissions, Americans would be compelled to shut down virtually the entire economy. They would need to restrict air travel, place most Americans under virtual house arrest (or raze all the suburbs), halt international and interstate trade, destroy millions of jobs, shut down large swaths of manufacturing, and stop people from using their cars — or buying gas.

How would it work? The only “Green New Deal” that we’ve ever actually seen was authored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her plan, one supported by the Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, calls for the banning of all fossil fuels, 99 percent of cars and planes, and meat-eating, among many other nonsensical regulations, within the next decade.

Also, you’d have to compel people to participate. I feel confident that Americans won’t voluntarily relive the 19th century because, whether intuitively or not, they comprehend that by nearly every quantifiable measure their lives are better because of the affordability and reliability of fossil fuels. One day that reality might change. Today is not that day.

It took a deadly worldwide pandemic to get Americans to suspend modernity, so you can assume it would take authoritarian measures to shut down the free movement of people. But Holthaus reminds us that the fight to stop climate change is often about more than separating your plastics and papers or installing some state-subsidized solar panels, it’s about a fundamental, societal economic upheaval that would throw millions into poverty.

Moreover, the Green New Deal would necessitate that capitalistic society be displaced by a technocratic regime that dictates what you consume, sell, drive, eat, and where you work. This, says Holthaus, “is what ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ looks like.”

Indeed.

Four Southern California Counties Start Declaring Independence From Wuhan Virus and the Governor.

California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that his state will be reopened to business activity slowly but that now is not the time.

Still, businesses in four southern California counties have begun declaring independence from the Wuhan virus and from Newsom.

Golf courses in Riverside, Ventura County, will begin allowing golfers to head back out to the course this weekend. Orange County will open golf courses soon. Golfers will play in foursomes and adhere to social distancing. No food will be served on the premises. Ventura County, home to Simi Valley, Oxnard, and Camarillo, has pronounced that gatherings of four or more in one place are illegal. Exercising will be allowed outside, however. Riverside County has ordered golfers to wear face masks. No caddies are allowed and only one person is allowed to be in a golf cart.

Hikers, bikers, horseback riders, and tennis players in Ventura County can resume their activities as long as masks are worn.

Operators of the Mt. Baldy ski resort in San Bernardino County have chosen to reopen, offering probably the last chance to ski before summer sun turns the snow to mush. The resort announced that social distancing measures would be enforced:

Similar to how a golf course operates Mt Baldy will check-in a maximum of 4 individuals at 10 minute intervals. … In stark contrast to a golf course (150 acres), Mt Baldy Resort (800 acres) has more than 4x the area and will be operating at less than 10% of occupancy under this plan.

The ski resort requires face masks to be worn at all times.

Car dealers will be able to sell a car to a single live person in Ventura County as well.

People 75 years old and older are still ordered to stay home in Ventura and “non-essential” travel is forbidden.

We’re still waiting for them to reopen the vast expanse of ocean to surfers and swimmers.

The taste these bureacraps got of nearly unlimited power overrode their mental ethical limitations -if they had any in the first place- and has let the inner dictator hiding just under the surface of their personality come out in all its glory. We should be thankful that this has occurred at at time when we have a president in office more business minded and attuned to the economy (the cure can not be worse then the disease) than political.

CDC Director Lays the Groundwork for Perpetual Lockdowns and Social Distancing and Economic Depression

CDC Director Robert Redfield gave an interview to the Washington Post on the Wuhan virus panic and he made it clear, as have other so-called public health authorities that these people really have no intention of letting us getting back to our lives and they have willing allies in the national media.

Even as states move ahead with plans to reopen their economies, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Tuesday that a second wave of the novel coronavirus will be far more dire because it is likely to coincide with the start of flu season.

“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And when I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean.”

“We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” he said.

Having two simultaneous respiratory outbreaks would put unimaginable strain on the health-care system, he said. The first wave of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has already killed more than 42,000 people across the country. It has overwhelmed hospitals and revealed gaping shortages in test kits, ventilators and protective equipment for health-care workers.

Seasonality, explained: What warm weather could mean for the novel coronavirus
President Trump has said warm weather could slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, but experts explain it’s too early to know if the virus is seasonal. (John Farrell, Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)
In a wide-ranging interview, Redfield said federal and state officials need to use the coming months to prepare for what lies ahead. As stay-at-home orders are lifted, officials need to stress the continued importance of social distancing, he said. They also need to massively scale up their ability to identify the infected through testing and find everyone they interact with through contact tracing. Doing so prevents new cases from becoming larger outbreaks.

Asked about protests against stay-at-home orders and calls on states to be “liberated” from restrictions, Redfield said: “It’s not helpful.” The president himself has tweeted encouragements of such protests, urging followers to “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” and “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

First, let’s strip away some of the bullsh** the Washington Post is trying to peddle. Even the worst hit state (at least according to its own numbers which are highly suspect), New York, was never short of hospital beds, respirators, ICU beds, or staff. In fact, the major overflow facilities represented by the hospital ship, USNS Comfort, and the Javits Center have seen only a handful of patients. Across the country, the number of deaths is at record lows. Below is a data table from my post If Wuhan Virus Is So Bad, Why Are Deaths So Low?

CDC Director Lays the Groundwork for Perpetual Lockdowns and Social Distancing and Economic Depression

This is the same data graphed

CDC Director Lays the Groundwork for Perpetual Lockdowns and Social Distancing and Economic Depression

NOTE: the last week’s data from this year drops precipitously because the data were only 58% complete when I downloaded the dataset. The x axis is not labeled because I’m too lazy to manually insert the labels, they are available on the table.

By itself, this is no big deal. There is no human intervention that is going to eradicate the Wuhan virus, it is part of the North American ecosystem forever. Of course, there is going to be a ‘second wave’ and a ‘third wave’ and a ‘fourth wave’ and an ‘nth wave.’ But this statement does not exist in a vacuum. Let’ go back a couple of days to an interview given by Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Center for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the key architects of the national response to the Wuhan virus (read Dr. Fauci Decides He Is Galactic Commander and Warns That Protests Will Delay Reopening the Country). In that post, I cover his statements to the effect than an early opening would create a larger ‘second wave.’ But there are two other equally important points. First, the tests being bought from all sources, like the 500,000 my own RINO governor purchased from South Korea, aren’t terribly reliable. As the entire strategy for opening the country is predicated on widespread testing, this seems important. The other point was that there is no evidence that having had and survived Wuhan (which is probably something that 99+% of the people with it do) gives you any immunity. That is entirely consistent with the finding of more than 30 mutations of Wuhan virus, the corollary to that being that there will be no vaccine for this virus.

So, no immunity and no vaccine. What does that mean? It means the people who foisted this disaster upon us are going to try to make us go through lockdown and ‘social distancing’ and all that other crap again in November and again in March. Forever. They have to push for that because if there is a ‘second wave,’ which there will be, and we don’t shutdown again, then they are going to have to answer some very tough questions as to why we did it this time. And they don’t have any answer to that……..

The result of a ‘modern’ college education

A new bout of mind-boggling economic illiteracy from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

By Monica Showalter

Oil prices went into negative territory yesterday, meaning there was more oil sloshing around on the market than buyers, and for the first time producers were literally offering to pay people to take it way. The prices actually went negative.

That’s an indicator of a crashed economy.

And a dinner triangle for morons. Who should show up but Boston University economics major, professional socialist, and Milton Keynes fan, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

She tweeted this:

Hear that? She celebrated.

Hear that? She celebrated.

Then when someone alerted her that the cheer was ill-advised, given all the oil workers who were losing their jobs, she got rid of the tweet, but in the way of a stubborn banjo-kid-level ignoramus, stood her ground. According to Fox News:

After deleting her post, Ocasio-Cortez tried again, writing: “This snapshot is being acknowledged as a turning point in the climate movement. Fossil fuels are in long-term structural decline. This along w/ low interest rates means it‘s the right time to create millions of jobs transitioning to renewable and clean energy. A key opportunity.”

Throughout the day, Ocasio-Cortez has also reposted various messages essentially saying the oil crash presents an opportunity for environmentalists.

Her simpleton logic was that with the oil industry crashing, a new green energy industry would rise as a result.

It’s ridiculous. The green energy industry, such as it is, came about because of high oil prices. High oil prices meant buyers were looking for alternatives, and if oil prices were going to be high, then it might not make that much difference price-wise if one got one’s energy from wind power or ethanol or solar power or manure fires, or whatever it takes to call an energy source ‘green.’ Ocasio-Cortez, of course, has big plans to end all fossil fuel use in the country and convert it all to the pipe dream of green energy.

She reads the crash of the oil industry as the wake up call to go green.

In emitting her gaseous cheers, she demonstrated with perfect pitch that she doesn’t understand the simplest laws of supply and demand.

Oil prices are crashing because people aren’t buying.

And if cheap oil can’t be so much as given away by sellers because of the lack of buyers, why would anyone want to buy more expensive green energy instead? The oil industry is literally paying people to take their oil away and nobody’s doing it because the economy is dead. And here she thinks economically battered people somehow have lots of money to pay for green energy, which even if they did, would choose overpriced, under-performing green energy instead getting oil for free? The idiocy of this creature boggles the mind.

What’s especially stupid here in this brain-of-a-seven-year old cheering is that big league socialists, the ones with real power, have always grasped the importance of high oil prices. Hugo Chavez, the late socialist dictator of Venezuela, and a clown who didn’t know a whole lot about economics either, understood that little detail. Less than 20 years earlier, he vowed to drive oil prices up to $200 a barrel and leave America prostrate by cutting off our access to oil as a means to “defeat” us. Instead of watching America grovel, he ended up with an own-goal, triggering the great fracking boom that effectively ended his capacity to use oil as a weapon.

All petrotyrants went downhill after fracking transformed America into the world’s largest oil producer as well as a net exporter of energy. Vladimir Putin loves high oil prices and bankrolls greenie groups in Europe to encourage a stranglehold on fossil fuel production in the name of going green. Other socialist tinpot dictators in Africa and elsewhere also thrive on high oil prices. Not a one of them wants these prices to go down, because they recognize that high oil prices keep them in power.

But then we have Ocasio-Cortez, babe in the woods, imagining that in this hellish oil price situation, a green paradise beckons.

And speaking of power, oil also keeps the lights on in Ocasio-Cortez’s New York City, too, as Fox News noted:

Added Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas: “I don’t ‘love to see’ oil & gas workers & their rural communities suffering as a result of this devastating price collapse, @AOC. Places like West Texas & hard-working men & women in the oil patch power the bright lights of NYC… including the hospitals!”

It just doesn’t get stupider than this. Ocasio-Cortez has revealed a lot about her economic illiteracy with this ignorant tweet. It’s time for Boston University to be investigated for issuing diplomas to fools this ignorant. Nobody should pay attention to another thing this blithering idiot says.

 

More and more people are getting the cluebat upside the head informing them about globalism and the fragility of the international supply chain.

Donald Trump: Coronavirus Exposed Dangers of Supply Chains Dependent on China

President Donald Trump said Saturday the biggest lesson of the coronavirus crisis was that the United States should not rely on China for their supply chains.

“We’ve learned a lot about supply chains,” Trump said. “We’ve learned that it’s nice to make things in the U.S., I’ve been saying that for a long time.”……

 

 

Oil price goes negative as demand collapses; stocks dip

NEW YORK (AP) — Oil futures plunged below zero for the first time on Monday as demand for energy collapses amid the coronavirus pandemic and traders sought to avoid owning crude with nowhere to store it.

Stocks were also slipping on Wall Street in afternoon trading, with the S&P 500 down 1.2%, but the market’s most dramatic action by far was in oil, where benchmark U.S. crude for May delivery plummeted to negative $35.20, as of 2:30 pm. Eastern time. It was nearly $60 at the start of the year, before business-shutdown orders swept the world and idled factories, offices and automobiles.

Much of the drop was chalked up to technical reasons — the May delivery contract is close to expiring so its trading volume was light, which can exacerbate swings. But prices for deliveries even further into the future, which were seeing larger trading volumes, also plunged. Demand for oil has collapsed so much that facilities for storing crude are nearly full.

Tanks could hit their limits within three weeks, according to Chris Midgley, head of analytics at S&P Global Platts. And traders are willing to pay someone else to take that oil for delivery in May and shift the burden of figuring out where to keep it.

Benchmark U.S. crude oil for June delivery, which shows a more ”normal” price, fell 16.5% to $20.90 per barrel. Big oil producers have announced cutbacks in production in hopes of better balancing supplies with demand, but many analysts say it’s not enough……..

Brent crude, the international standard, was down $2.46 to $25.62 per barrel. .

North Dakota Governor Issues Guidelines to Reopen State May 1: Statement

NEW YORK (Reuters) — North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum issued guidelines for reopening the state as soon as May 1 in a statement issued late Wednesday, according to a statement from his office.

Ohio Governor Announces Economic Reopening Starting May 1

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine was one of the first governors to start closing down his state when the coronavirus hit, but now he’s offering one of the first economic reopenings in the nation.

 

Another 5 million people filed jobless claims last week, bringing total to almost 22 million in one month

Around 5 million more people filed first-time unemployment claims last week as the coronavirus pandemic continues to devastate the job market in every sector of the economy.

The staggering weekly number comes as President Donald Trump weighs plans to pull back on the social distancing measures that have shuttered businesses across the country and to reopen parts of the economy as soon as May 1.

State-mandated lockdowns have choked vast parts of the once-booming economy, kicking a total of 22 million people out of work and launching the nation into the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Still, even that number may not tell the whole story, as state unemployment offices continue to struggle to process the unprecedented number of people rushing to file claims………..

On that Friday, the federal government is scheduled to release unemployment data for April, and economists agree that it is likely to be pretty grim, with job losses totaling at least 20 million.

Neumeyer: “This is the Perfect Storm! Governments Have Put Themselves Into a Corner”

Keith Neumeyer recently sat down for an interview with Crush the Street and made it clear that mints are being overwhelmed by the demand for silver. Neumeyer also opined on the government’s response to the pandemic saying “governments can’t keep businesses closed.”

And we’d agree with him. At some point, even if restrictions are never lifted, people will leave their homes to look for work. Humans cannot be locked up house arrest for much longer, and have already been asked to endure too much. Neumeyer said “already they [the government] are destroying small businesses…” and “governments can’t prevent everyone from going bankrupt.”

Unfortunately, the big corporations will be fine and come out even bigger as the small businesses go under and are no longer able to stay in business. This is crony corporatism at it’s finest. Neumeyer says the government has overreacted and caused massive damage that cannot be undone.

No, an incipient economic collapse will determine when.
If people don’t start getting back to work, and soon, the definition of ‘safely reopen’ won’t be what some doctors think it means.
The cure must not be worse than the bug.

Dr. Fauci: ‘Virus Is Going To Determine’ When U.S. Can Safely Reopen

OAN Newsroom- According to Dr. Anthony Fauci of the coronavirus task force, the virus is ultimately going to determine when the nation can safely reopen.

In an interview Tuesday, he suggested the capability to efficiently carry out contact tracing and get people who are infected out of circulation has to be in place when the country reopens.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director also said assuming all infection curves are going to be down in two weeks from now is “overly optimistic.” The health official emphasized controlling the spread of the virus will be key to restarting the economy in communities like New York City.

“I think how you reopen, if you want to use that word, the economy in those communities is going to depend a lot on the ability to contain what we know will happen,” he stated. “I’ll guarantee you, once you start pulling back, there will be infections…it’s how you deal with the infection that’s gonna count.”

Trump to Make Key Announcements on Reopening Economy This Week: Kudlow

President Donald Trump will make a number of “key, vital” announcements about reopening the U.S. economy in the next day or two, his top economic adviser said Tuesday.

“In the next few days, he will be making some very important announcements regarding those (social-distancing) guidelines,” National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow told Fox Business Network.

“We want to get folks back to work,” he added. “We want to do it as quickly as possible. It has to be safe. It has to be driven by the data from our health specialists.”

Kudlow, when later fielding questions by reporters in the White House driveway, reiterated his conviction that within a few days, Trump would announce the guidelines on reopening the economy.

A reporter asked Kudlow what COVID-19 case metrics the administration would be looking at as decisive in making the determination to open the economy.

“It’ll be data-driven,” Kudlow said of the decision, adding that “the process is heavily dependent on data and we’ve always said that.”