Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 33

Letter To Politicians Re Corporate Looting During Global Pandemic

 Dear Corporate Tool,

The trillions being funneled to bankers so they can buy up distressed properties after workers and small businesses forced to shelter-in-place for months predictably can't pay their bills is a disgrace. The unanimous Senate vote (only one dissenting vote in the House) and the refusal of the recipients of such "Nanny State" largess to allow public equity in their companies, shows all too clearly the contempt in which the public is held by big business and its bought politicians. Believe me, the feeling is very mutual. You are breeding the conditions for violent revolution.

Yours very truly, 
US Citizen

Letter To Politicians Re COVID 19

 Dear Corporate Tool,

The trillions being funneled to bankers so they can buy up distressed properties after workers and small businesses forced to shelter-in-place for months predictably can't pay their bills is a disgrace. The unanimous Senate vote (only one dissenting vote in the House) and the refusal of the recipients of such "Nanny State" largess to allow public equity in their companies, shows all too clearly the contempt in which the public is held by big business and its bought politicians. Believe me, the feeling is very mutual. You are breeding the conditions for violent revolution.

Yours very truly, 
US Citizen

Bernie's "Pathological Liar" Tells More Truth Than He Himself Can

"Bernie Sanders is OUT! Thank you to Elizabeth Warren. If not for her, Bernie would have won almost every state on Super Tuesday! This ended just like the Democrats & the DNC wanted, same as the Crooked Hillary fiasco. The Bernie people should come to the Republican Party, TRADE!"

          ------Donald J. Trump, April 4, 2020

Sanders Suspends Campaign; Joe Rogan Says, "I Can't Vote For That Guy" (Biden)

ERIC WEINSTEIN: I think that in general people, when they are given no choice at all, express themselves moronically.

JOE ROGAN: When they are given no choice at all — How so?

WEINSTEIN: I want a choice of an actual president that’s viable. I don’t have one. Now you’re going to ask me which of the none-viable people do you like best?

ROGAN: This is the real issue with the Democratic Party. They’ve essentially made us all morons with this Joe Biden thing.

WEINSTEIN: Can you imagine?

ROGAN: I can’t vote for that guy.

WEINSTEIN: I can’t vote for him, I can’t vote for Trump.

ROGAN: I’d rather vote for Trump than [Biden]. I don’t think he can handle anything. You’re relying entirely on his cabinet. If you want to talk about an individual leader who can communicate, he can’t do that. And we don’t know what the fuck he’ll be like after a year in office. The pressure of being President of the United States is something than no one has ever prepared for. The only one who seems to be fine with it is Trump, oddly enough. He doesn’t seem to be aging at all or in any sort of decline. Obama, almost immediately, started looking older. George W. [Bush], almost immediately, started looking older.

What Shall We Do With The Democrats?

" I hate them. I want to burn the party to the ground and salt the earth, so it can never come back."

------TrueAnon co-host Liz Franczak on the Democratic Party

Billionaire "Job Creators" and The Keyboard Revolutionaries Who Enable Their Candidates

Capitalism's "invisible hand" gives us the middle finger with ever more contempt these days. 

 With the national unemployment rate soaring to Depression-era levels and beyond, the self-proclaimed "job creators" of our glorious free-market paradise are now drowning in gluttonous excess from sucking the tit of the "Nanny State" they allegedly abhor. While workers are prohibited from working by shelter-in-place orders, the private owners of what should be public assets get trillions of taxpayer dollars through the Federal Reserve, which they will use to buy up everything they don't already own at depressed, pandemic era prices. Then when foreclosures begin to soar they'll buy up the distressed properties for a song. In other words, we're paying them with our own money to kick us out of our homes. 

Meanwhile, the great dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky and friends (Mike Albert, Norman Solomon, Barbara Ehrenreich etc.) urge us not to vote for the Green Party this November, except in places where the vote won't have any effect on the outcome (the states where either Trump or Biden are sure to win). https://www.globalresearch.ca/left-liberals-liberals-first-left-last-reply-chomsky-friends-open-letter/5702159 These keyboard revolutionaries regard themselves as the vanguard of popular rebellion, but a key fact seems to have escaped their attention: Trump is a threat to elites; Biden isn't. Which is why so many Rust Belt workers took a chance on Trump in 2016. In other words, American workers are much more fed up with the system than Chomsky and his political friends are. Change will come from them, not keyboard revolutionaries. 

Though Chomsky regularly reminds his audiences that trying to predict the future is hopeless, that we can't even predict tomorrow's weather, let alone complex political trends, he nevertheless regards his judgment as infallible in determining how we should vote! But as John Dewey used to say, individuals know better than experts "where the shoe pinches, the troubles they suffer from," a quote Chomsky is well aware of, as he cites it himself. Who the hell are we to tell people how they should vote? Or run their political campaigns?

Of course, Chomsky counters that the Greens have themselves stated that they want to see Trump defeated "as much as anyone," and on that basis he counsels a "safe states" strategy, i.e., voting Green in the 40 states where the outcome is a foregone conclusion, but not in the 10 states that are "in play," that is, where it can't be safely predicted whether Trump or Biden will win. Here Chomsky is correct that the Greens are not as eager as he is to see Trump defeated, but there is no reason they should be. Again, Biden poses no threat to the establishment, and is so out of it that he frequently lapses into outright gibberish. It took him six days to come out with a video in response to the corona virus crisis, one in which he appeared in a darkened basement with a confused look in his eyes mumbling incoherently to the effect that the government should do something about medical shortages. Duh. On other occasions he has said that poor kids are just as capable as white kids of high achievement, and that parents should turn on the record player at night so that they can learn new words. His record is so appalling and his gaffes so prolific that his handlers carefully shield him from all but the most limited public contact, and even Barack Obama didn't initially want him to run.

But we simply have to vote for him.

In short, it is not at all obvious that Trump is the greater evil. On the issues, Trump is slightly worse than Biden, but also more prone to sparking massive popular resistance, while Biden is clearly suffering cognitive disintegration whereas Trump is not.  The choice between the two is all too much like "Sophie's Choice" in the movie starring Meryl Streep, in which Nazi guards force a terrified Polish mother to choose which of her two children shall live and which shall die. She makes the choice - perhaps "rationally" - and ends up committing suicide. We will, too (as a nation), if we continue to take such choices seriously.


In 2016, the Republican base recognized Trump was a threat to the establishment and voted him into office, in spite of a tsunami of articulate opinion saying it couldn't be done. In 2020, elite fear-mongering divided the Democratic base, insuring that it failed to nominate Bernie Sanders, a different and better kind of threat to the establishment. Polls show that Sanders' signature issue - Medicare For All  - captures a substantial majority even among Biden voters, and in fact his New Deal politics are very popular across the American population. A successful elite campaign to falsely convince everyone that "other people don't think like me" is the only reason he won't be the party nominee.

To an electorate already drowning in manipulative fear, Chomsky and friends recommends we adopt a "rational" fear - terror actually - of Trump, on the pretext that he is destroying the world with his indifference to climate change. Though this is a possible outcome, it is far from a certain one, and it cannot plausibly be blamed on a single person in any case.  Simply put, the claim that a vote for Trump invites "global catastrophe" is alarmism, not analysis.  We are in the midst of a global catastrophe right now with COVID 19, but Chomsky himself credits four decades of bi-partisan profiteering, not just Donald Trump. If that is so, it is difficult to see how voting Democrat helps, as not one voted against the recent multi-trillion dollar give-away to Wall Street - not AOC, not Bernie Sanders, not Rashida Tlaib, not Ilhan Omar, not Tulsi Gabbard. And those are the best Democrats, far superior to Joe Biden. The lone opponent of the greatest financial heist in history was Republican Thomas Massie, who called for a quorom and a formal vote on the package that passed by voice vote.  

Clearly there are no "safe states": all the states are always "in play," and are currently bleeding badly from the anus.
  
Chomsky's fear-mongering contrasts sharply with what he advised vis-a-vis nuclear weapons in the 1980s, another issue that portends massive and possibly terminal self-destruction. Back then he correctly pointed out that the Nuclear Freeze's obsession with giving detailed descriptions of the massively destructive consequences of dropping nuclear bombs on human cities was intellectually insulting and politically paralyzing, preventing the change it hoped to foster. The correctness of this view has been confirmed by events, as the Nuclear Freeze was ultimately absorbed into official arms control efforts, and forty years later the world is closer to nuclear war than ever. 

So why should we repeat the mistake today, spreading apocalyptic visions of total destruction via climate change? No reason that a sensible person should embrace. After all, the only prediction we can safely make about climate change is that electing either Biden or Trump will make our current bad situation considerably worse. The only electoral result that could make it better would be one that put the Green Party platform in power, an outcome that will never be achieved if Green voters feel compelled to vote for candidates bought by the fossil fuel industry. 

We need to stop the incantations of "existential threat" and "special danger" about Trump. He isn't Hitler. He doesn't believe in the genetic superiority of white people. And at least he hasn't started any new wars during his 38 months in office, which is unlikely to have been the case with Hillary Clinton. What's different about him is his eagerness to insult rather than utter focus-group tested banalities, but this carries no policy implications. So where is the argument that Trump has dramatically deviated from the plutocratic policies embraced by both establishment parties? 

"Real solutions require Trump out of office," chorus Chomsky and friends, just as they did about Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, John McCain and Ronald Reagan. No. Real solutions require a society committed to real solutions. As long as profiteers run the government, this is impossible.

Apparently, Chomsky and friends are for radical change every day except election day.

Billionaire "Job Creators" and The Keyboard Revolutionaries Who Support Their Presidential Candidates

The self-proclaimed "job creators" of our glorious free-market paradise are, even more than usual, drowning in gluttonous excess from sucking the tit of the "Nanny State" they allegedly abhor. While workers are prohibited from working, the "job creators" get trillions of taxpayer dollars through the Federal Reserve to buy up everything they don't already own at depressed, pandemic era prices. Then when foreclosures begin to soar they'll buy up the distressed properties for a song. In other words, we're paying them with our own money to kick us out of our homes. Is capitalism a great system or what? 

Meanwhile, the great dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky and friends (Mike Albert, Norman Solomon, Barbara Ehrenreich etc.) urge us not to vote for the Green Party this November, except in places where the vote won't have any effect on the outcome (the states where either Trump or Biden are sure to win). These keyboard revolutionaries think they're the vanguard of popular rebellion, but a key fact has escaped their attention: Trump is a threat to elites; Biden isn't. Which is why so many Rust Belt workers took a chance on Trump in 2016. In other words, American workers are much more fed up with the system than Chomsky and his political friends are. Change will come from them, not the keyboard revolutionaries. Stay tuned.

Interview With Tucker Carlson About His Trip to Mar-a-Lago To Warn President Trump

Tucker, are you unable to critique Trump directly? His response has been panicked. It started with denial, has moved into panic and is completely ineffectual and causing worse problems. He’s fighting with the governor of New York right now on Twitter. I mean, are you able to directly criticize him?

I am able to do whatever I want. I mean, I haven’t gotten a single directive from the company I work for. They haven’t said literally one thing.

But are you critical?

I was the only person in media to say that in America, to say that the State Department, the Trump State Department, was lying about the Syrian gas attacks, which they were. They were lying. Yeah. And we twice killed people with prison missiles in response to what was the lie, and I said that out loud and I meant it and I was the only person who did. And so yeah, I mean, of course I can criticize Trump directly.

Are you critical of his handling right now of this pandemic? Do you think he’s done a good job? Yesterday Trump was asked how he rated his own handling of the pandemic on a scale of 1 to 10, and he gave himself a 10.

I’ve been really critical of the administration’s response to this, repeatedly every night on my show. I think the mistake that people make, and I’ve felt this for three and a half years, is making everything about Trump. It’s all about Trump. And so really at a certain point, it’s like, no, it’s all about your emotional problems. I’ve lived in Washington since I was a child. My dad ran a federal agency [Richard Warner Carlson was an assistant director of the United States Information Agency under Ronald Reagan]. I know how the government works and there are many layers to this. It’s not all about one guy’s mercurial personality, and anyone who thinks it [is] is a child and should get out of the fucking news business, right? And I look around and it’s all children. It’s all people like Jim Acosta, Oh, Trump’s a racist—who cares? There’s a freaking pandemic, dude. Just stop whining about whether he calls it the Chinese coronavirus or not. Like, this is insane. Look, there are many roles that people play in American life and in the news media, but my role, I don’t want to make every show about Trump. Not because I’m covering for Trump, but because I don’t think it’s that interesting and I don’t think it’s actually the truth. And the truth is this: We have all kinds of systemic failures here, big time. And no one wants to say that because actually they’re covering for the people who created those problems in the first place. Do you know what I mean? So I would love to hear somebody on why does it fall to Bernie Sanders to make the obvious points about corporate America’s role in all this? Bernie Sanders is a completely mediocre guy who doesn’t even really mean it—but why is he the only one who’s saying some things that are true? That’s what the media should be doing, but they’re not. Because they’re so focused on Trump. Trump is tweeting too much. Well of course he’s tweeting too much! Okay, I got it, maybe don’t read his tweets. All right. But like, there’s a lot else going on, right? That’s my opinion.


I get it. But there’s a catch-22 here, which is that the way that Trump has been successful is to create a cult of personality as a guy who can cut through the bullshit and make things happen. Suddenly that strategy is no longer functioning. His strength has become a weakness. Don’t you agree?

There’s a moment in the life of every administration when you realize that your schtick isn’t working. And you see it play out in every administration—Holy shit, we didn’t plan for this. And that’s the point where you need to think of a new way to respond to things like you do. You have to be flexible.

I wouldn’t say flexibility is a major strong suit of the Trump administration.

I think that’s a fair criticism. But I would also say, because I think it’s really important to be totally honest—if you took Trump out of the picture entirely, if he retired this afternoon, it wouldn’t fix the problems. And by the way, if you retroactively fix every bad decision he’s made for the last three and a half years, we still wouldn’t be prepared for coronavirus. And you still wouldn’t have a clear path to mitigating the effects of that virus on our economy. So if you’re only thinking about Trump, you’re missing it. You’re missing the point. This is a call to fix some pretty basic things that are broken that nobody wants to fix. And because they don’t want to fix them, they spend a lot of time talking about Trump. And Trump is happy to play that game. So it’s not just a question of conservatives deflecting blame by casting stones at the media. It’s much bigger than that.

The Trump–media relationship and the way that it subsumes everybody’s attention has turned into a real Achilles heel for us.

Ya think? That’s been obvious since day one. Day one of the campaign. And coverage is just so childish and stupid and repetitive and boring—

But can I say something? You could say the same thing about Trump himself, and I know—

But of course. This is a symbiotic relationship. But okay. So that does not obviate anybody’s responsibility. So he did it too, so, okay, great. Yeah, but we’re all adults here. So now is the time for people to start acting responsible, try to do the right thing; you can express your political views, but do the right thing and stop with this crap. And I know it makes everybody feel virtuous. And I know the real root here is every educated person that’s really frustrated because they understand they’re never going to be as rich or prominent as they thought they were going to be because the economy is changing and they’re filled with rage about that. I know what’s going on ’cause I live in that world. Yeah. And they’re just placing all of that rage onto one guy. Some of it’s deserved, some of it’s not. But it’s not actually going to fix what’s making them mad in the first place. When do you start to ask, “Why are only private equity people prospering right now?” That’s the conversation you need to have. Instead the conversation is, “Can you believe he tweeted this?” Okay. But he’s never going to stop.

When I criticize the media, I say that as someone who’s been here since 1991 and worked in newspapers and doing magazines and all three networks, and, like, I know the landscape pretty well, as well as anybody does, and so my criticism is not reflexive partisanship. I’ve never been a reflexive partisan, and you can check—it’s totally sincere. I’m appalled by the dumbness. I’m appalled.


Do you acknowledge your own role in that?

Of course I acknowledge my own role in it! Are you joking? Of course I do.

Do you acknowledge your role in this ridiculous symbiotic thing that’s made us less cohesive as a country and less rational as a country and less able to function? The reason that we’re in this?

No, I don’t. I acknowledge my role in saying a lot of stupid things over the years. I acknowledge that I probably shouldn’t have gone and talked to the president about this since I’m not any kind of policy adviser, I’m not an epidemiologist. I acknowledge all of that. What I don’t acknowledge is playing the “Donald Trump is the only story” game. I have not done that. And you can look at my show rundowns every night for three and a half years, and you’ll find that we’ve done less Trump on TV. It’s not that Trump doesn’t deserve criticism, obviously I don’t think that. It’s that there are all these massive and profound [things] going on in American society that are being completely ignored, and coronavirus was one of them. And that’s the context in which I first introduced it to our viewers.

This is one of the things that’s happening that you should know about that no one was even mentioning because—the problem with impeachment as a news story is that it had a foregone conclusion. So why does this merit wall-to-wall coverage? I never understood that. And there’s a cost to that. It’s not necessarily a cost to Trump. He benefited from it. By the way, his approval numbers went up, Trump was helped by impeachment. The problem was that interesting and important stories that everybody should kind of be thinking about were totally ignored, and coronavirus was one of them. And that’s what I said and that’s what I think now.

Did your meeting with Trump have a result? Did it cause some shift? Was there a pivot in the way that Trump himself absorbed what was going on?

I don’t know. You can assess that yourself. You can look at the timeline, but my only comment would be that it’s not my job to do that. All I felt was I just want to say what I think and that’s my responsibility. And then I’m leaving and I’m not on some CDC conference call. I can tell you that. I could feel—I could just feel a sense of real danger. Not every premonition is accurate, but I just had a really, really strong one that I couldn’t shake and I have to do this.

And so, well, let me just ask that again. You saw the timeline afterwards. I mean, you saw with his reaction was, maybe it was like a week later or it was the Friday and Saturday of last week that he steps up and takes some actions.

I think the reality of it spoke a lot louder than anything I said.

Well the question all along has been: Is Trump in touch with that reality, or could he see it through the distortion of the media that he imbibes? And I guess that’s the question I have had all along is that the first reactions from a lot of people in his political sphere was that this was a hoax. Right? Even up until like three days ago, we had California Republican Devin Nunes and then Kevin Stitt, the governor of Oklahoma, telling people to go out to the bars and hang out and gather. I mean, this is where the political media vortex has become dangerous.

I don’t think that you should encourage people to gather in large groups right now, that does not seem wise. I also don’t think you should shut down public institutions like restaurants, hotels, without thinking through the very real economic consequences to people. That’s gotta be a factor. It has to be. And anyone who says it’s not a factor is an idiot, because it has to be. And I’ve noticed that a lot of the people who say that “if we can save one life,” they give you that speech. They’re people who will not be affected by that at all, except to the extent they can’t get fresh burrata.This is a lot of people I know, and love, and I understand where they’re coming from. I think most people are being sincere. I think the hardened partisans on all sides will always lie because that’s what they do. But most people, even most politicians, want to do the right thing in the face of the crisis. I know them! I know almost all of them. So I know that that’s true. Some of them are dumb. There are a lot of dumb ones. But who else would go into politics? It’s mostly dumb people. Not all, but mostly. So I do think there’s a very, very complicated balance, and there’s a war between competing imperatives and it’s totally real. And I think it requires a kind of subtlety that almost nobody in our leadership class is capable of.

The populist politics that Trump has practiced has made him distinctly bad at dealing with this particular moment. What made him strong as a populist has made him a terrible manager of this particular crisis.

Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe. You don’t get populist politics unless your institutions are failing. Because satisfied people don’t resort to populist politics. So once again, if you believe that the current paralysis is all Trump’s fault, you’re absolving an awful lot of guilty parties, maybe including yourself. That’s what I’m saying.

Well here’s my last question for you. Given how it’s been managed, given where we are, given the unknowns of the next two to six weeks to three months, do you think Trump can survive this in November?

I haven’t the faintest idea. I mean, I spent months telling our viewers that Joe Biden could never get a nomination. So I mean, I have literally no idea. I know things are changed so completely in the last 10 days. Where will they be 10 days from now?

Do you think his management of this pandemic has damaged him politically?

I think this has scared the hell out of everyone, left and right. And we’re at the very early stages of this, and according to what epidemiologists say, we’ll be where Italy is three weeks from now. And if you extrapolate from their population, that’s a lot of people in the hospital and a lot of people dead. And so that will be a completely different country at that point.

I mean, this is all happening so fast, it’s hard to think it through, but there are a lot of potential consequences to the society. Not political consequences necessarily, but social consequences to this—to the economy, to the way people live, the higher education. I mean, you’ve got the entire college-age population home right now taking classes online at a time when college debt is overwhelming families and actually creating a really dangerous overhang, economically, in the economy. So why does this not result in fewer people spending 70 grand a year to go to G.W.? I don’t know. It might.
The divisive nature of Trump’s political style has driven half the population mad and the other mad in a different way. And you know that the dysfunctionality of it is precisely ill-equipped to deal with what we’re dealing with right now.

So if you really believe that explanation, which presumably you do, you have to ask yourself, this is a sincere question: What institution do you really trust right now? Honestly.

I was watching 60 Minutes last night. Did you see it?

No.

I was surprised to learn about the kind of state-level medical operations that they’ve put into place that are being built to deal with this. There’s a world of nurses and medical people out there who are pulling together in a MASH unit style to cope with this. It’s the people on the ground who are going to help us. It’s not the people at the top.

Well see, you’re sort of making my point for me. What you’re saying is you trust the decency and the resilience of normal people.

Maybe as we’re forced to come together, we’re going to realize that the political storms that we’ve been living through are not really what life is about.

I really fervently agree with that—really fervently, as much as I agree with anything. And I really hope for that. And I, again, I think you’re kind of reiterating what I’m saying, which is that the institutions have failed so completely that what we’re left with is each other.

Again, when you say failed institutions, I include the Trump administration in that. We shall see what happens next. But please get a test and don’t needlessly expose your children to the coronavirus.

Nope. I’m not gonna. I’m waving at them through glass right now.

Source: Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/...

[Through a Fox News spokesperson, Carlson said he is “symptom free and feels healthy.” He broadcasts from a home studio in Florida.] This post has been updated.

Statistical Soup - COVID 19 Is Dangerous, But It's Not Killing Us All

As of today, reports the New York Times, 325,000 people world-wide have been sickened by the coronavirus, and there have been "at least" 14,390 deaths. The virus has been detected in 157 countries. In the figures below, remember that the death rate is a percentage of the people confirmed to be sick with coronavirus, not the percentage of the whole population.

In China, a country of 1.3 billion people, there have been 81,054 confirmed cases and 3,261 deaths. In other words, slightly more than six out of every 100,000 people have gotten sick and about 4% of them have died. 

In Italy, there are 59,138 cases, and 5476 deaths. The total population of Italy is 60,461,826. So roughly one Italian in a thousand has gotten sick, and 9.25% of them (the sick) have died.

In the USA, there are 31,722 confirmed cases and 400 deaths to date. The current population of the U.S. is 331,002,651. So just under one in a thousand Americans have gotten sick, and 1.25% of those people have died.

Spain has 28,572 confirmed cases and 1720 deaths in a total population of 48,750,000. So 61 Spaniards out of every 100,000 have gotten sick, and six percent of them have died.

Iran has a population of 81,160,000. It has 21,638 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 1685 deaths.  So 267 Iranians out of every million have gotten sick, and 7.8% of them have died.

Germany has a population of 82,790,000. To date it has 18,610 confirmed cases and 55 deaths. That's 22 out of every 100,000 people getting sick, and 0.3% of them dying (three patients out of every thousand).

France has a population of 70,000,000. It has 16,018 confirmed cases, of which 674 have died. That's roughly 23 people out of every 100,000 getting sick, and 4.21% of those dying.

South Korea has a population of 51,269,185. To date it has 8897 confirmed cases and 104 deaths. That means that roughly 17 out of 100,000 people have gotten sick, and 1.17% of them have died.

Switzerland has a population of 8,637,124. It has 7014 confirmed cases and 60 deaths. In other words, eight of every 10,000 people have gotten sick, and 0.85% of them have died (eighty-five of every 10,000) 

Great Britain has a population of 67,260,000. It has had 5683 cases and 281 deaths. So about eight of every 10,000 have become ill, and 5% of them have died.

Source: "Corona Virus Map: Tracking The Global Outbreak," New York Times, March 21, 2020

Change Is In The Air

Quite literally.

In a single week air pollution cleared up, housing was found for the homeless, evictions were banned, the stock market ceased being the gauge of social well being, water shut-offs ended, jails were emptied, debt peonage was suspended, universal basic income was proposed by "free market" die-hards, people started caring about the elderly and front-line workers, personal competition gave way to mutual aid networks, kids abandoned digital serfdom to go outside to play, and Donald Trump outflanked Bernie Sanders to the left, calling for public equity in bailed-out corporations, in other words, public profit.

The only restrained observation one can make is: Holy Shit! 

The battle has barely begun, but there is no doubt that socialism is squarely on the table, even as Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign fades rapidly away, like Joe Biden's mind.

The neo-liberals may grasp power again, though that is far from guaranteed, but legitimacy will elude them, as an aroused populace in revolt will not heed their irrelevant commands once it becomes clear that the crumbs they are willing to toss the public's way will not in any way arrest exploding indebtedness, much less bring economic security. A second consecutive generation of young people - Generation Z - has no future, while politicians continue indulging economic masturbation fantasies about a mythical free market bringing prosperity to all. "Gigs" are nothing to hang one's hat on.