Roe v. Wade Has Fallen

Well, after nearly half a century, it actually happened:  the landmark Roe v. Wade decision has officially fallen.  Today the US Supreme Court struck it down completely.  Forced-birther Republicans are thus now emboldened to further ban or restrict abortion at the state level, as several states have already done recently.  That is, women's hard-won reproductive rights are now in grave danger, and this goes WAY beyond abortion.  Undoubtedly, birth control and things like that will be next on the chopping block, and so on, and thus we are just a few steps away from Margaret Atwood's worst nightmare.  In fact, Clarence Thomas himself implied as much, actually saying the quiet part out loud.

Add to this the fact that the recent lockdown-induced "recession" (more like depression) has actually hit women harder than men and set back women's progress by decades by dumping even more unpaid work on them at home, and the future looks even worse still.

Democrats in Congress are still looking to pass a bill that would codify Roe v. Wade into federal law, superseding the abortion bans in any state that attempts such bans.  But alas, success in that regard is far from guaranteed.

We at the TSAP are pro-choice, and hereby condemn this travesty in the strongest possible terms. 

The Root Cause Of All Economic Woes Of The Past Half-Century: "Financialization" Of The Economy

The year was 1971, just over half a century ago.  The utterly costly (in both lives and money) and protracted Vietnam War was gradually winding down but still raging, inflation was getting out of control, and the Bretton-Woods system of an international (fool's) gold standard and fixed currency exchange rates was rapidly collapsing on itself due to rampant cheating and attrition.  On August 15, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon decided to effectively suspend the gold standard, first temporarily, though it would soon become permanent by 1973.  And by 1975, any nominal and vestigial links between gold and the dollar had been severed completely.   

Since this "Nixon Shock" of 1971, the money creation capability of the federal government and the Federal Reserve were no longer constrained by gold or anything else (except the remaining arcane and archaic rules of Congress left over from the defunct gold standard, and thus no longer make any sense).  Thus, Congress could really create as much money as they wanted from then on, and the Fed could create as much as Congress would allow them to.   The money supply had clearly exploded exponentially since then, and a fortiori after 2008 and 2020.  

So where did nearly all of those newly-created dollars go?

Wall Street, of course.  The result?  A perpetually yawning chasm between the financial sector (which grew exponentially along with the money supply) relative to the real, physical economy (which has basically stagnated and hollowed-out ever since).  That absolute and relative advantage was then weaponized against the bottom 99% of Americans, as the financial sector is dominated by the top 1% and especially the top 0.01%.  Extreme inequality and very much harm followed.  Decades of utterly remarkable progress against poverty stalled and even reversed somewhat.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the real root of all economic woes of the past half-century.

Prior to 1971, the financial sector moved largely in lockstep with the rest of the economy.  And not coincidentally, prior to 1973, wages grew largely in lockstep with labor productivity as well.  But ever since then, both have seen an ever-widening divergence, to the detriment of the greater working class.  While the oligarchs literally laughed all the way to the bank.  And that was clearly no accident, but rather by design.

Imagine if even a fraction of all that newly created-out-of-thin-air money since 1971 was rained down upon We the People directly instead of Wall Street and the big banks.  How different would America, and indeed the world, be today?  If that doesn't make you feel RIPPED OFF, check your pulse 'cause you might be dead!

The cure for this disease is indeed very, very simple.  All it takes is a simple Act of Congress to 1) scrap the remaining arcane and archaic rules that prevent Overt Congressional Financing, 2) implement Overt Congressional Financing, and then 3) use it to benefit We the People instead of the oligarchy.  UBI, Medicare For All, expanded Social Security, free college, debt cancellation, Green New Deal, oh my! Basically, the entire progressive economic agenda and more can be paid by the federal government for without any borrowing or taxes unless Congress wants to.  

That is the real logical conclusion of Monetary Sovereignty:  when a government issues it's own currency, by definition it has infinite money, which is constrained only by the laws that the government passes.  Time to end the Big Lie and act like it for once.

(And no, going back on the gold standard now would be a dumb idea, as that would only lead to artificial scarcity of money.)

As for inflation, that can be cured by 1) raising interest rates (in the short term), and 2) counterintuitive as it sounds, increased federal spending to cure shortages by incentivizing increased production of goods and services that are experiencing shortages (food, energy, labor, computer chips, etc.) in the longer-term.  Problem solved.  Next.

(And of course, stop creating shortages via supply chain problems due to lockdowns!)

So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  We would be remiss if we did not also enumerate the more proximal causes in addition the more distal root cause of financialization.  Those include:  

• Legalization of usury (lifting of federal 12% usury cap on interest rates) (1978)
• Union-busting re-legitimized by Reagan against the PATCO strike, which made an example of them for the private sector going forward (1981)
• Legalization of stock buybacks (1982)
• General deregulation and tax cuts for the ultra-rich and corporations (1980s)
• General deregulation of big banks and Wall Street (1980s)
• Shrinking the social safety net by stealth, letting it lag behind inflation (1970s through 1990s))
• NAFTA (1994)
• Shrinking the social safety net again via welfare deform (1996)
• Repeal of Glass-Steagall Act, the firewall between commercial banks and investment banks (1999)
• China joining the WTO as a "most favored nation" (2001)
• More tax cuts for the rich (2001-2003)
• NOT learning the lessons of 2008, particularly the moral hazard created by the Wall Street bailouts (2008-2009)
• Offshoring/outsourcing of manufacturing jobs (ongoing)
• Pandemic relief money disproportionately going to, and benefitting, Wall Street much more than Main Street (2020-2021)
• And of course, the lockdowns which, when combined with the above, constituted the largest wealth transfer in history, from the poor and middle class to the ultra-rich and Wall Street, both nationally and globally (2020-2021)

Shout It From The Rooftops: LOCKDOWNS KILL!

LOCKDOWNS KILL.  We have always known from the get-go that collateral damage, up to and including excess deaths, would occur from lockdowns.  From delayed and denied medical treatment to missed cancer screenings to poverty and hunger to suicides to drug overdoses to violence to simply dying of loneliness and isolation, and so on, these brute-force blunt instruments are known to intrinsically inflict serious harm by design, and cannot ever be made "safe" in any meaningful sense no matter HOW many trillions of dollars (or pounds, euros, yuan, yen, rupees, bitcoin, etc.) you happen to throw at these problems.  Of course, poorer and/or more unequal societies generally experience the very worst outcomes of all, but even the very wealthiest and relatively equal societies still cannot be completely spared such consequences for very long either.

But now for the first time we can actually roughly quantify the magnitude of the short- and medium-term collateral deaths that occur.  In the USA, a new study the National Bureau of Economic Research found that lockdowns and related restrictions killed at LEAST a whopping 170,000 Americans, based on the number of non-Covid deaths among younger Americans in 2020-2021.  The Economist puts the number even higher at just under 200,000 deaths, and the NBER finds proportionally similar numbers in stricter European countries as well (but notably NOT Sweden, who famously eschewed lockdowns and most types of mandates).  And having already established long ago that lockdowns don't really save any significant number of lives in the long run, this makes lockdowns all pain and no gain.  And the zealots who pushed these tyrannical policies, especially those who did so persistently in the face of mounting harm, have a LOT of blood on their hands!

Of course, those excess deaths include an unknown number of jab injury deaths as well from 2021 onwards.  But either way, the numbers are NOT flattering to the lockdown zealots OR the jab zealots for that matter.  And longer-term effects still remain unclear, though they are most likely NOT good at all.

And just like the Covid zealots themselves luurrrve to remind us all ad nauseam, deaths are merely the tip of a very large iceberg of overall harm.

And keep in mind that even "soft" or "organic" lockdowns (and ubiquitous masking) via social pressure are far from harmless either, at least when they drag on long enough.  Just ask Japan.  Their suicide rate, after two decades of impressive progress in reducing it, unfortunately spiked once again in 2020 and remained elevated through 2021.  Looks like antisocial distancing is still, well, antisocial, even when it is not formally mandated by the state.  That said, Japan's all-cause excess death rate was still ultimately better on balance than nearly every single "hard" lockdown country in the world.

Seriously, this was all a grave mistake that must NEVER, EVER be repeated.  Like, ever.

UPDATE:  Now even the UN admits that lockdowns killed hundreds of thousands of children globally.  Yes, really.  Let that sink in.  Lockdowns clearly took far more lives (and especially life years) then they saved on balance.  And it goes way beyond deaths too, as children's education, mental health, physical fitness, and overall development have also deteriorated as well, with associated long-term consequences that we will all have to reckon with at some point.  All this to very temporarily delay the inevitable at best.  In other words, we effectively destroyed a generation for nothing.  Will that generation, and future generations, ever forgive us?

Oh, and just in case you thought that lockdowns were still needed to prevent hospitals from being overrun in the short term, not only is there no hard evidence of lockdowns having had any such benefit in that regard compared to the Swedish no-lockdown strategy, but we also see that artificial scarcity from state-imposed policies was the real problem all along.

And next time someone says the "kids are resilient" platitude, be sure to show them this.