One of the few good things about the COVID-19 lockdown as far as I’m concerned has been the fact that we have concentrated on important issues like police racism and stopped emphasizing things like sports and religion.
Goodbye Opiate of the Masses
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
6 Comments. Leave new
Hey, you want some opiates? I’ve got some shit that’ll blow the top of your head off.
Here.
What does the chart say? Well, it shows unemployment rates, so the higher the line, the worse it is. In October 2009, it hit 10%. Don’t worry, thanks to Barack Obama, every banker on Wall Street did okay. Some had to flush their toilets with domestic champagne, but, thank God, they all came out okay and were able to catch up by simply giving themselves bigger bonuses.
It took until about 2016 for the unemployment rate to return to pre-crash levels.
And then the unemployment rate kept going down: 3.5% in February 2020, right before coronavirus hit, and it soared to 14.7%.
Got that? Under Obama, it went from 4.7% to 10%. A 5.3 percentage point increase in unemployment in 23 months. FOR TWO YEARS, it just kept getting worse and worse. And it then took 64 months to drop 4.5 percentage points. (It took 60 months to drop the remaining two percentage points to the historic low of 3.5% in February 2020.)
It took TWO months (February to April 2020) for the unemployment rate to rise by 11.2 percentage points during this epidemic. And from April to July 2020 (the most recent date on the chart), 4.5 percentage points have come off that 11.2. It’s now down to 10.2%, which puts it — more or less — right at the height of the housing bubble collapse.
Now, flip the numbers around. If Obama had managed to reduce the unemployment by 4.5 percentage points in 3 months — INSTEAD OF 64 — while Trump took 64 months, we all know exactly how it would play out.
But here we are, in what looks very much like a V-shaped recovery — for now; it could all fall apart in a week or a month — but not one mainstream media person I can find wants to compare the two crises in a way that would call Obama out on his terrible policies or his tremendous failings as a president.
Sports might be an opiate, but msm adulation of Obama? It makes the speedball that zeroed out John Belushi look like baby aspirin.
No doubt that Obama and the thought of a Hillary Clinton presidency as an extension of the Obama supply-side cash-for-trash bailout of the Wall Street criminals contributed mightily to the ascendancy of Trump.
And a Biden presidency will likely take the wind out of the sails of the present opposition to the corruption (now known as the “government”) with a Biden honeymoon. It was Obama’s policies that fueled the desperation and made an easy target for Trump in his misleadership of the “Deplorables”.
I think both parties are so corrupt that maybe a popularly discredited Trump “victory” over Biden might keep more pressure on the corrupt Wall Street criminal-sponsored government. And maybe even better if Trump wins by a transparently apparent cheat in order to maximize the pressure to make the extortionist government loosen its choking grip on an increasingly angry demos.
I would hate to see a demobilization of the demos’s opposition when the popular opposition gives a President Biden a honeymoon that chills popular support of the present fevered popular opposition.
After demobilization it might take a long time for a popular movement to rebuild a head of steam again.
FDR saved capitalism by confronting the 1% with the reasoning that 100% of nothing is less than 50% of something, a new deal they couldn’t refuse.
The democracy can’t make this new deal a reality within electoral politics.
You got that right, Ted.
All the corporatists care about is what people think about them.
Cultural appropriation is their game.
It sickens me to think of how sheeplike the corporatists flock to the green grass of a new mass sentiment, and how fast they will move away from it after the grass has been nibbled down to its roots, all without ever having had any real sense of obligation other than to their advertisers and corporate bottom lines.
Just to be clear, I’m happy to see people seeing the world that exists beyond the spectacle of sports and other entertainment.
There’s a whole world out there beyond pixelated screens.
Welcome to the world as it exists, beyond corporate illusion, for as long as you can keep it.
Point well taken about sports, Ted. But I got to say, I don’t think I’m the only one whose religion/spiritual outlook on life drives me to support BLM and other social/economic justice demands.
Any decision process that results in support of BLM and other social/economic justice demands is OK with me as far as it goes.
It’s just that the many gods diverge from the simple dictum of “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” that I object to.