It Was Just One More Lie

Here's a headline today from CNBC, after the market started the new quarter with a nearly thousand point drop:

"Dow falls 900 points as Wall Street fears coronavirus will shut down economy longer than expected"

Longer than expected, based on Donald Trump's prediction a week ago that the country could end its state of siege as early as Easter, a week and a half ago.

Well, that claim only lasted a few days, but it certainly accomplished one thing: it stopped the slide of the stock market into a depression...at least for a week or so.  And that is all that Trump wanted- to end the bad press.  So he got a couple thousand points up in the market, and then, convinced that he had once again saved the world, he admitted that he was not going to come through on his promise.  The result? The market is on its way into the garbage again.

Naturally, the mainstream press has pretended to fall for his trick again, and when he went back on his clearly undeliverable promise, they have raved about how Presidential and serious he has become, and how he listened to his advisers at last.

After the last three years can anyone really believe that?  He thought he got what he wanted from his empty promise, and so he moved on to his new gigantic lie, that 200,000 American deaths would be a tremendous victory for him personally.  So, now we get stories like the following, from Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post today:

"When I began writing about economics in the early 1970s, I made a private vow that I would never use the word “depression” in describing the state of the economy. The economists and politicians who occasionally did so were, I thought, engaged in partisan hyperbole. Their game was to scare people into thinking the end of the world was at hand or to pressure Congress to enact a favored piece of economic legislation. 

Well, times change. I revoke my vow...For the first time in my life, I think a depression is conceivable"

Welcome on board the train, Robert.  Didn't you figure out in 2008 that Republican economics could cause a depression any time, if Democrats didn't stop them?  What did you think was going to happen when Republicans elected a criminal who is even stupider than George W. Bush, and then egged him on to indulge himself in his worst instincts?

Well, whatever people thought, this is what they have now got.  On March 18, I had this to say, and I stand by it:

"Let me be clear:  This country is now far more in danger of a massive depression than it is from the coronavirus.  And the sole cause of this is the Republican party and their leader, Donald Trump."

People who die of  Coronavirus may turn out to be the lucky ones.