Mood Swings for Farmers

Today I am having a real hard time as I think of all those industrial farmers who use the scarce land of this earth to grow corn for the "bio-fuel" industry.  To just imagine all those acres of land potentially sitting idle... Sigh

Oh but wait!  Congress has bailed them out to!  OMG Why didn't I think of such a scheme earlier... Oh I feel so much better now, especially when I pay my taxes!  I am helping them to!

From FDA website (note the highlighted pennies given to feeding those who need it vs absolutely no details on the $16 billion).

1. Direct Support to Farmers and Ranchers: The program will provide $16 billion in direct support based on actual losses for agricultural producers where prices and market supply chains have been impacted and will assist producers with additional adjustment and marketing costs resulting from lost demand and short-term oversupply for the 2020 marketing year caused by COVID-19.
2. USDA Purchase and Distribution: USDA will partner with regional and local distributors, whose workforce has been significantly impacted by the closure of many restaurants, hotels, and other food service entities, to purchase $3 billion in fresh produce, dairy, and meat. We will begin with the procurement of an estimated $100 million per month in fresh fruits and vegetables, $100 million per month in a variety of dairy products, and $100 million per month in meat products. The distributors and wholesalers will then provide a pre-approved box of fresh produce, dairy, and meat products to food banks, community and faith based organizations, and other non-profits serving Americans in need.

On top of these targeted programs USDA will utilize other available funding sources to purchase and distribute food to those in need.

• USDA has up to an additional $873.3 million available in Section 32 funding to purchase a variety of agricultural products for distribution to food banks. The use of these funds will be determined by industry requests, USDA agricultural market analysis, and food bank needs.
• The FFCRA and CARES Act provided an at least $850 million for food bank administrative costs and USDA food purchases, of which a minimum of $600 million will be designated for food purchases. The use of these funds will be determined by food bank need and product availability.

But you know... The important part is below:

In total, $16 billion will be handed directly to farmers, of which $9.6 billion goes to the livestock industry. This funding will be given largely as reimbursements for “losses” and will not be contingent upon providing food to those in need.

Wait!  Doesn't it look like the dusted off last years bill and just copied it and renamed it?  That was $16 billion to!

From 25 July 2019 This week, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue unveiled details of the latest aid package for farmers who've lost export sales. It includes $14.5 billion in direct payments to farmers, another $1.4 billion in government purchases of agricultural commodities that will be distributed to food banks, and $100 million in loose change to promote exports to new countries. This is on top of $12 billion in aid that the Trump administration distributed last year.

Uh, what?  There was another $12 billion doled out in 2018?  I am starting to feel elated now... So much so cause this most recent bill includes lots of money for "meat" farmers cause they need it since grain prices must be crumbling now with all that corn that can't be turned into fuel...

So, by not allowing market forces to adjust in 2018 and 2019 to the lower demand from the trade war and encouraging industrial farmers (smaller farmers and organic farmers and others that fed directly into the US food supply have been largely unaffected) to alter behavior, we now are throwing tons of food away... Plus farmers cashed out on earning more then market prices adjusted with the government program!  WOW, I am so happy now... Wait this looks like good old buying votes with taxpayer money!  Hmm

Farmers will receive payments simply based on how much land they've planted with crops that are affected by tariffs, how much milk they produce or how many hogs they own. "We want sign-up to be easy for producers [and] straightforward," said Bill Northey, undersecretary for farm production and conservation, "[so] that we can get these payments to them to address the challenges that they have due to these tariffs."

In his remarks, Perdue (WAIT PERDUE?  HAHA is this the chicken farmer?)  portrayed the payments as a modest contribution toward the enormous losses that farmers have endured.

Agricultural economists, however, disagreed. "This is going to be a lot of money pumped into the Corn Belt," said Scott Irwin at the University of Illinois.

According to the new study, Chinese tariffs caused the price of soybeans grown in the U.S. to drop by $.78 per bushel. Last year's aid package, however, paid farmers more than twice that much — $1.65 per bushel of soybeans that each farmer produced.

Now I am just confused again... I was hurting, elated and now confused by all this... What an emotional swing.  I love it so much and I have not even left my kitchen table!!

Here We Go Again

We are back to the insanity of 2008/9 multiplied by 500% for what was essentially a global shutdown orchestrated by the elites, ie; those at most fear of loosing their lives, billionaires, politicians and the like, while around 6 billion people are left loosing their businesses, livelihoods and putting about 20% of these right back into poverty, reversing the well orchestrated false lifting of the bulk of them out of poverty over the last 30 years... My thoughts are below:

I have been thinking of the last 2 years where our "front line" emergency response people around the country were steadily being supplied Naloxone to keep overdose cases alive and rubber gloves to prevent any skin exposure to the chemicals they ingested that if improperly handled could kill a first responder... Yea, 75,000+ OD's a year by 2018 with a small decrease in 2019 mostly to the emergency response being able to jolt people back in the world of the living... Very little mention of the 70.000 alcohol related deaths ever made the press or the 35,000 gun related deaths 60% self inflicted, ie; suicide.  Oh, then there is the health epidemic where millions suffer digestive issues, diabetes, hypertension etc. directly related to the guinea pig effect of Americans being subjected to the worst quality food on the planet.  The "drug" industry has exploded in riches providing "solutions" to these "diseases".  Hell I get back to the US and see Narcolepsy ads on TV!  Narcolepsy!

Anyway, what is going on now with all that?  We are all chasing a virus that fortunately for most is mildly deadly.  We have shut down the global economy on a dime as the billionaires, global elite and politically powerful run scared and pull all the stops to keep from getting it, putting the livelihood of billions of people at risk.  I just read that it is likely roughly 500,000,000 people will fall back into poverty immediately, yea 1/2 billion people drop to impoverished to save the 1%... We are in dire straights but not from the virus.  We are in dire straits because the US was the only developed nation on the planet that tried for less then 2 years to normalize the Fed balance sheet and bring interest rates back to market levels in a global overly leveraged universe.  But they failed miserably.  By September 2019 the "swaps" market froze.  Underlying interest rates spiked more then during the financial crises and the Fed reversed course on a dime and cut rates rapidly and pumped $500,000,000 into the "financial system" to effectively bail out hedge funds that had been playing a game with increasing leverage to scrape a few pennies out of a system that had to low interest rates for to long and when things went the other way they got caught flat footed and had to be bailed out.  This all happened behind the scenes and almost nobody knows about it.  All they know is from that point forward all the money printing went directly to the stock market which reached all time highs by February.  Stock buyback's by corporations reached nearly $ 1 trillion a year for the last 3 years (following years of records preceding) further pumping up stock prices to enrich the CEO's and "investors" in these companies debt.  Any company could sell debt there was so much money chasing any yield above the Central Bank manipulated low rates that went on for far to long.  Investment was sluggish, regular wages stagnant and we were told there was no inflation.  All the inflation was in asset prices and for average wage earners, "health care", "education" and "rents", which by government accounts are under appreciated.

Why am I mentioning this?  Well because the debt accumulated to buy back that stock and the "off balance sheet" debt accumulated by the Private Equity / Hedge Fund Industry gambling in that same debt dwarfs that which existed in 2008 before the last financial crises and was looming over our economy BEFORE this current crises.  What has been the reaction?  US gov creates over $2 Trillion in additional taxpayer debt (10% increase in total debt in one bill) to further bail out a heavily leveraged corporate world.  Yea the couple hundred billion doled out in checks to citizens takes front and center in the mass media which is desperate to convince Americans "this time is different".

NOTE: Just like the heavy media campaign to glorify the military after 911, glorify entrepreneurs after 2009 and now glorify health care workers after this latest crises, each time no one is held to account, not the military and it's near $10 trillion in pointless wars against people in mud huts since 911, not questioning or convicting any financial firm for the 2009 crises and not one mass media person questioning why in a "developed nation" where more people go into bankruptcy over medical bills and nowhere does any human civilization spend more on medical care then the US with no positive metrics to show for it but wealthy "health care" intermediaries, billionaire CEO's and executives, wealthy on the backs of the American Citizenry.
Yet the Government has to step in to quell a crises!, the same government that claims any interference in the desperately broken health care system is some kind of a socialist... where we have laws on our books that even stop the government from bargaining for medicine and supplies in that they in the end pay for at huge markeup with taxpayer money (debt).

But in reality the Fed is also increasing it's balance sheet by $2.3 trillion immediately on as part of it's 10x leverage of $440 billion handed to them to "replace the banking system" as the banks have all but ceased ALL LENDING outside of the new government programs and they will expand to over $4 trillion over the next 9 months to "re capitalize" already over-levered corporations... Really?  Who is on the hook for all this money printing?  Taxpayers.  Who created the crises?  Billionaires and Elites.  Who gets ultimately crushed, billions of people, including billions who "social distancing" is a joke cause they live on top of each other already! 

You have to watch the short video in this link:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/09/chamath-palihapitiya-us-needs-to-let-hedge-funds-billionaires-fail.html?__source=twitter%7Cmain

It's the part where the answer to the CNBC anchor's question is "yes' when answering whether airlines should be allowed to fail.  Think about what he says... Who is getting bailed out here AGAIN.  This whole thing is as bad.  Capitalism has built an entire set of rules and ways to deal with the natural loss of value during a crises.  Those who hold the debt, those who old the equity, they loose.  That is called risk.  It is how things operate.  As of now, the Fed has jumped in, buying corporate debt directly and through ETF's etc.  They are basically funding credit markets, mortgage markets, off balance sheet debt markets and businesses that have no revenue and who have used all their reserves and taken on incredible amounts of debt to enrich those debt and equity holders over the last decade, since the last crises.  They paid each other back to the tune of trillions, further enriching themselves and stratifying the global income / wealth divide to levels never seen before in human history.  And WE ARE BAILING THEM OUT AGAIN!

Depression? Mental Illness? The US is the most medicated, unhealthy, over levered and overly financialized nation on the planet (well China and Japan and Europe all are competing for who can be the most in debt).  We were already on the edge.  This virus has become nothing more then an excuse to "reset" the debt, extend it further out to the future and to print money to buy votes.  I am so incensed by this whole thing I don't know what to do... I can't believe what I see happening every day to prop up an already failed economic system.. I went back to college to learn more and perhaps gain a voice.  I learned more, but what I learned is they were still teaching late 19th and early 20th century theory that has long become obsolete as the economic system has become several degrees separated from any theory emulating at that time.  We have no models any more.  We most definitely have no model for what to do to rescue an economy that stops on a dime, let alone a simple thing like letting interest rates rise.  Now we have stopped on a dime and we are throwing 20-30% of the population of a "developed" nation into immediate unemployment (look what can happen in less fortunate nations).  Where there is NO cash flow to pay all that debt, none. What are the effects 6 months from now, 1 year from now? The money has to be printed, to re-capitalize.  Just like in 2008, bailouts to re-capitalize all the cash that was taken out of the system, evaporated overnight?  One could do some simple math and see how about $3 trillion was removed from the financial system from 1999-2008 after the deregulation of the banking sector.  It went directly into the hands of the players in the gambling game of financial markets.  It was the largest transfer of wealth since the tech bubble of 1998 and that the largest transfer of wealth since the bond bubble in 1988 and you can trace that back to the international debt crises brewed from the oil shock in 1973 forward.  Where we are now is no-mans land.  God help us.

If you think what I write here is in the right direction, write your congress person / senator and tell them, "All the capitalist system to work as it was designed and stop bankrupting our future.  The money printing  experiment of the last 10 years proves irrevocably, it does not work.

Portugal Taxpayers (ahem, Citizens) are Screwed Again

I just finished, well I almost finished reading, an article about another bailout of another bank in Portugal.  I got so pissed off I decided to rant for a minute here.

The article published by Zerohedge also sites articles in the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Bloomberg about the bailout of or "rescue" of Madeira-based bank Banif. 

Why the F&%@ do these governments keep bailing out banks?  It is plain and obvious that the elites that run the financial world have the governments in their pockets.  They keep getting bailed out over and over with billions upon billions of citizens money while said citizens struggle to stay ahead of the "non-existent" inflation that consistently runs ahead of their purchasing power.  

Since when are governments bound to consistently bail out capitalist enterprises.  Capital sloshing around the world exceeds income for crying out loud!  There is plenty of it.  If a business is worth rescuing, capital will rescue it.  Otherwise, it should die.  That is the brutalism of capitalism period.  To bail out owners of capital when they have made an investment that goes sour smacks in the face of the entire capitalist logic.  To allow capital to be gambled with recklessly, when the gambling involves citizens hard earned money, is where governments are failing globally.  Then bailing out financial institutions that fail after sanctified reckless gambling with citizens money puts governments in the same soup as legalized gangsters.

When a bank "fails" there is a simple process.  Dissolve the bank, pay the depositors with the insurance in place and move on!!  What the hell is so hard about this?  If there is a desire in the economy for that bank's services to exist, another will rise, simple as that.  The capital is there and the capitalist are there to fill the void.  If the bank's services were no longer needed, then it wouldn't be missed! 
When are citizens going to say "enough" and just mow over the idiots that keep doing this and start over?  Because until that happens, they are going to get screwed again and again while capital and the capitalists keep getting richer and richer on their backs.  It's pathetic and to see how it plays out in the "emerging" economies around the world, esp. China for example, it is down right sickening.  The established "democracies" with established capitalist "economies" should be setting and example of how things work, instead they are setting examples of how things fail over and over again. 

We are told a bunch of sand monkeys with guns mowing over innocent people are evil. Well the real crime on the citizens of the planet are being played by their governments and the capitalist that keep stealing from them while giving nothing in return.  I personally am totally and utterly pissed and tired of reading how capitalist are bailed out with every tool of every government and every tool of every central bank.  It is time, high time, to stop this madness!