It's been 13 years since @NaomiAKlein's Shock Doctrine described the neoliberal playbook: crises are seized as a moment to smuggle in policies that could not pass public muster under normal circumstances, ratcheting private gains at public expense.

https://tsd.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine.html

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In March, Congress pass the CARES Act, sweeping law that nominally offered relief to Americans. It was the opening salvo in a fusillade of interventions whose workings are poorly understood - which have served to make the already wealthy immeasurably wealthier.

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If you've wondered how the stock and bond markets could be soaring even as unemployment has also climbed to apocalyptic levels, as an eviction crisis looms, as Americans form mile-long lines for food banks -- this is how.

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Start with the full scope of the bailout: the $454b that Congress gave to America's largest corporations is table-stakes. Congress also created a bull market in corporate debt by guaranteeing to buy bonds issued by the companies if no one else wanted them.

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Even junk bonds issued by companies whose mismanagement and corporate autophagia - buybacks, executive compensation, layoffs - had driven them to death's door BEFORE the crisis.

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That guarantee allowed corporate America a tenfold leverage of its "relief" through debt, yielding ~$4.54 TRILLION. The public's relief budget - unemployment, cash, and student loans weighed in at a mere $603B.

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Put that another way: the USG just handed the largest companies in the US 200% of their total annual profits in "relief," with no strings attached, save for some minor constraints on the aviation industry.

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And while the bills that created this corporate welfare program originated with Senate Republicans, that's only because Congressional Dems explictly asked them to do so, abdicated Congress's power of the purse to let the GOP decide who would get money, and how much.

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It's hard not to interpret this as Dems handing the donor class a cash bribe on the eve of an election. It's not just letting the Senate write the bills - it's passing them by "voice vote," which lets Dem Congressjerks vote in favor without having their support recorded.

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It's an unbelievably idiotic piece of tactics, a bet that corporations will reward Dem complicity with GOP looting by helping Dems, instead of the GOP. The bet that plutes will hate racism more than they love money is painfully stupid.

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Contrast that with what Dems COULD have spent on: health care, more unemployment/paycheck protection, food and rent money. The could have DARED the GOP to deny Americans the basics of human survival - again, on the eve of an historic election.

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Instead, they sat idly by as the Fed's bond guarantee ensured a supply of easy money for corporations whose ability to borrow had vanished prior to the crisis as investors had finally wised up to the foolishness of loaning to firms dedicated to devouring themselves.

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That ready access to credit then boosted the stock market: the bull market for bonds begat a bull market in stocks. If you want to know how America's billionaires made more billions during the crisis, that's how.

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It's not merely investor confidence in e-commerce that made Bezos his excess billions: its Amazon's ability to borrow $10 BILLION AT 0.4 PERCENT ON A THREE YEAR BOND.

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The corporate wing of the Dems is pretty open about all this. Look at Richard Neal, who trumpeted that he wasn't voting for "stimulus" (which would help all of us), but rather "relief" - for the investors and execs he'd just bailed out.

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Neal was an architect of the post-2008 bailouts too, playing a key role in the decision not to help everyday Americans - who had been preyed upon by unimaginably wealthy financiers - with their mortgages, but rather, to make the finance sector whole.

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Congressional Dems have, once again, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The CARES Act they let the GOP write and then rammed through into law includes $174b worth of new tax breaks for the super-rich that were jettisoned from Trump's 2019 #TaxScam as too extreme.

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We are living through a shock doctrine. This could be the moment in which America recognizes the brittleness of its public sphere and corporate arrangements and restructures them to survive the wave of climate emergencies on our horizon.

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Instead, both parties have conspired to double down on that brittleness, that fragility, that precarity, with hardly a peep in objection from lawmakers in either house.

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The major exception, naturally, is @AOC, who called it "One of the largest corporate bailouts with as few strings as possible in American history [with] crumbs for our families."



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