Watching the stock market soar today as the worst job numbers in history are reported is beyond infuriating. The delusion happening on Wall Street right now is incredibly deep. <short rant in the form of a thread>
The stock market bounce seems to be based on a series of delusional thoughts. Chief among these is the notion that the economy was strong in February and will soon bounce back to where it was. That's just beyond absurd. 2/
For starters, we are nowhere near past the health impacts of this disease. Nearly every medical expert is currently unequivocal that we are re-opening too early and with too few systems in case to prevent a renewed surge in cases. 3/
But let's set that aside for a second - though it's really disturbing to 'set aside' tens of thousands of my fellow Americans dying - and address the lie at the core of that argument. The economy wasn't all that great a few months ago for lots and lots of folks. 4/
Decades of corporate greed and destruction of the social safety net meant that, while lots of Americans had jobs in February, the underlying financial health of American workers was deeply fragile and built on a dangerous house of cards. 5/
How many times have we had to hear the stat that, before all this started, 40% of Americans could not handle an unexpected expense of $400 if they had to. That's not exactly a healthy economy. It's a fragile one. 6/ cnbc.com/2019/07/20/her…
That house of cards is in the process of tumbling down as damn near every family is being faced with far more than $400 in a combination of unexpected expenses and/or lost income, which really amounts to the same thing. 7/
If you can't handle an unexpected $400 expense because the rent is too damn high, you have a mortgage of student loans, or your healthcare costs are through the roof, then you sure as shit can't pay those same bills if you lose $400 in income as tens of millions just did. 8/
So no, the economy wasn't doing just fine for tens of millions of Americans, and then someone didn't just take one card out of the house, they swiped the entire bottom row of cards away. 9/
It won't take long for the results of that to come into focus. It will look like foreclosures, bankruptcies, and all sorts of other economic pain in the real economy. And again, through all of that thousands of us will be dying every day from a still raging pandemic. 10/
It's truly baffling how Wall Street doesn't see this, except that it's not at all baffling when you remember how utterly disconnected the ultra wealthy in this country are from the 99%. 11/
There's not 2 Americas. There's a small island of luxury that a few thousand folks live on surrounded by an entire country struggling to get by and enraged by the endless failures of a gov't hopelessly corrupted by the richest of the richest rich. 12/
Last thought. While we'd be in a world of pain right now no matter what bc of decades of economically decimating everyone but the 1%, every ounce of it is made worse by failure after failure of Donald Trump. So if you're like me and feeling furious today, rage on. 13/13
