by Susan Rosenthal (5-4-20). http://susanrosenthal.com
Under pressure from employers and right-wing organizations, governments are forcing people back to work, despite no evidence that this is safe.
According to the World Health Organization a pandemic ends when disease transmission is reduced to the level of occasional new cases and small clusters of new cases. This is achieved through testing, contact tracing, and isolation of the infected. As I explained in an earlier post, this is not possible in a penny-pinching capitalist framework.
We still have no reliable test for the virus, so we cannot know how many people are infected, how many are dying from COVID-19 (and not from other causes) and how quickly the disease is spreading.
This pandemic could have been prevented or contained. Failure to do so has allowed COVID-19 to become embedded in the human population, with devastating effects for the most vulnerable. It could take years to develop a safe vaccine. And vaccines are effective only when they are freely available to everyone. This is unlikely, given the billions of dollars being invested.
Half a dozen pandemics have emerged over the past few decades, and more are expected. Over a million unidentified viruses could make the leap from wild animals to human beings, as COVID-19 did. As long as the capitalist class remain in power, these new diseases will also escape containment to ravage humanity.
Roller-coaster
We are riding a pandemic roller-coaster. Lifting social restrictions will lead to a spike in infections, provoking new restrictions. When restrictions are loosened, another spike may develop, and so on.
Capitalists are desperate to resume production, regardless of the risk. They put out contradictory or falsely reassuring information. They cry crocodile tears about how workers must return to their jobs so they can pay their bills and how poor children need school meals. They could afford to provide these things, yet they refuse to do so. Capitalists profit from workers’ labor; there is no profit in paying them to stay home.
Workers rightly distrust that they would be safe on the job or that employers care that they are safe. They have three good reasons:
‘Essential’ workers are not being protected, so why would it be different for other workers? Instead of redesigning work for maximum safety, businesses are demanding legal protection from pandemic-related lawsuits if they reopen and workers die. And instead of defending workers’ right to be safe, governments threaten them with loss of unemployment benefits if they refuse to return to their jobs.
Workers are in an impossible position: return to work under conditions that could kill them, or avoid work and starve. This dilemma is as old as capitalism itself.
Class war
Workplace safety lies at the heart of the class war between capitalists and workers. Capitalists risk workers’ lives to extract maximum profit, and workers demand the right to preserve life, limb, and sanity.
At any particular time, the balance of power between the two classes determines the level of workplace safety. As bosses gain power, they sacrifice safety in order to raise productivity. As workers gain power, they force improvements in safety.
Decades of capitalist assault have made work more dangerous and life more precarious.
Prior to COVID-19, American workers were suffering an epidemic of deaths of despair. ‘Normal’ had become intolerable. The risk of contracting COVID-19 on the job is a final straw that is breaking the willingness of workers to accept the unacceptable.
Fight back
The global economy serves as a transmission belt for disease. Currently, half the world’s workers face the immediate risk of losing their livelihood, if not their lives, to this pandemic. At the same time, international production and supply chains connect workers in all nations, making it possible to coordinate international struggles.
Before COVID-19, mass political protests had reached an historic high. Social restrictions interrupted this surge, but only temporarily. This pandemic has given the world’s workers a common cause – survival.
Across the globe, people are refusing to work without personal protective equipment (PPE), hazard pay, paid sick leave, and cleaning supplies on the job. The US has seen more than 150 pandemic-related wildcat strikes, some spanning multiple cities. And this is just the beginning.
Lifting pandemic-related restrictions will release a tsunami of pent-up demand that could challenge capitalist control.
Bosses retaliate
Who will pay for trillion-dollar government bailouts and lost corporate profits? If capitalists have their way, it will be the working class, just as they forced workers to take the fall for the 2008 recession. The current crisis is much deeper, pushing the stakes much higher.
To protect their profits, bosses counter workers’ demands with force.
They use the force of starvation – work under our rules or starve. They use the force of unemployment to drive down wages. They use the force of the media to blame people for getting sick. They use the force of racism to divide workers. And they use the force of the State to target troublemakers, attack protestors, break strikes, and bust unions.
Solutions?
Some call for shutting down the economy for as long as it takes to end the pandemic. This is not doable under capitalism because workers need a wage to survive, and the system refuses to support them to stay home.
Some argue that the working class can “use the power of the government” to make needed change. This crisis has starkly revealed that government serves as the glove for the capitalist fist.
Some call for mass strikes. This is premature. Capitalists treat mass strikes as a declaration of war, which they are, and workers have not yet built the political clarity and organizational base necessary to win such a war. The capitalists have littered history with the murdered corpses of failed worker uprisings. If we aim to win, we must lay the groundwork.
Unions
One anti-union consultant warned that “current employee insecurities” are increasing workplace disruptions and raising interest in joining unions. He reassuringly concluded that most unions are not equipped to take advantage of this opportunity. He has a point.
While organized workers have power to force improvements in job safety, union bureaucrats often sacrifice worker safety in contract bargaining.
Union executives manage the labor force for capitalism, and they cannot see beyond the existing system of worker exploitation. In a recent public statement, four top union executives wrote,
We look forward to sitting down with the nation’s business leaders, as well as the leaders of governments, universities, hospitals and school systems, to hammer out agreements that will restore profits and economic growth as we emerge from this crisis, and protect as many jobs as possible as we battle it.
Labor activists rightly condemn this as class collaboration. As they put it, “The only way to protect the lives and livelihoods of working people is through class struggle, not class snuggle.”
To escape the suffocating weight of union bureaucracy, workers need to build democratic, member-controlled unions that will not compromise their rights. [If only this was so easy. –former founding member & delegate for local 360, residential carpenters union, Olympia–]
If we must work, WE must set the terms
Capitalists need workers to produce profits, so they deprive them of any way to survive other than to work for a wage. At the same time, the economic role of workers gives them power to negotiate the conditions under which they will work.
The National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) has drawn up a workers’ Bill of Rights that includes: personal protective equipment, testing for COVID-19, safe staffing, proper training, input into decisions that impact their work, and protection for whistleblowers. Such declarations can be used to build workplace and community campaigns.
Workers can do more than set the terms of exploitation; they can redirect production and society.
An injury to one is an injury to all
Social crises demand social solutions, and workers are stepping up to the plate with demands that reach beyond the walls of their workplace.
After General Electric announced mass layoffs, workers in Massachusetts demanded that the company’s jet engine factories be reopened or converted to produce badly needed ventilators. Within a week, their protest spread to factories in New York, Texas, and Virginia.
Chicago teachers’ strikes not only demanded more pay and smaller classes, but also more school nurses and librarians, anti-racist hiring, and improved learning and living conditions, including access to affordable housing. These class demands won broad community support.
The concerns of healthcare workers also align with those of the people they serve. A coalition of health and social service workers’ unions launched a petition calling on the governor of California to secure their safety at work and also suspend rent payments, ban evictions, guarantee paid leave during the crisis, and establish universal access to free medical care.
All over the world, legions of ordinary people are producing, at their own expense and for no compensation, thousands of masks and gowns that the ruling class failed to provide.
Knitting ourselves together
Forcing workers to return to unsafe jobs will release an explosion of class rage. The challenge is how to connect rising struggles without reproducing the top-down elitism of the managerial class.
A successful workers’ revolt cannot be ‘managed from above.’ Workers must liberate themselves. Anything else would simply trade one master for another.
Workers cannot rely on bosses, bureaucrats, or experts to fight for them; they must fight for themselves and each other. And they are perfectly capable of doing this.
While capitalists accumulate capital, workers accumulate something far more valuable: skills, experience, problem-solving abilities, common interest, and the ability to cooperate. This is the workers’ wealth and, unlike money or capital, it grows the more it is shared.
Power for the working class means more than having a seat at the capitalist table. It means owning the table. It means workers deciding together what needs to be done and who will do it. No one is more qualified to make such decisions than those who actually do the work. As one Chicago teacher put it,
The strike has changed the conversation about education in Chicago. It made clear that we are the experts on education, not these consulting firms, not these millionaire dilettantes. They have a lot of money to throw around, but they’re not educators.
A central database
Workers are an international class, yet they are divided by workplace, industry, nation, and a host of other divisions based on skin color, gender, religion, status, etc. These divisions enable capitalists to defeat workers by pitting them against each other.
We can build working-class power by knitting struggles together, stitch by stitch, to build inter-union and inter-national networks of activists.
No worker should have to reinvent the wheel of effective struggle.
We need to construct an international database that gathers information about workers’ struggles from all over the world, a database that enables any worker to submit information and encourages all workers to discover who is fighting where, what was achieved, what worked and what didn’t, and what was learned.
Armed with such information, workers can build on each other’s successes, learn from each other’s setbacks, and forge international solidarity over common class concerns.
Many organizations, such as PayDay Report and Labour Start, collect strike information. Others draw lessons from major strikes. These are some of the building blocks on which a more extensive and international database could be constructed.
Conclusion
The capitalist class and their State cannot end this pandemic; they can only manage the damage, just as they ‘manage’ all the maladies that plague humanity because there is no profit in ending them.
The political downturn of the past 50 years is over. A new era of class struggle has begun.
The only way out of this deadly crisis is through revolutionary social transformation – from capitalist rule to workers’ rule. This path runs directly through the workplaces of the world.
by Andrew Mark Miller | April 25, 2020 05:39 PM
Conservative political commentator Candace Owens got involved in a Twitter argument between former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, accusing the New York congresswoman of hypocrisy in her response to the coronavirus.
“Trump has NO PLAN to get people safely back to work,” Ocasio-Cortez said in response to a Sanders tweet criticizing her comments calling for American workers to boycott their jobs. “GOP Govs like Kemp are sending vulnerable workers to die w/ false claims of safety. Trump also pushed an unproven, dangerous treatment as a ‘cure’ & firing experts who want to vet claims. Last thing you care about is safety.”
“You routinely complain that poverty is the reason that more minorities will die from Covid-19,” Owens responded. “But you advocate for a BOYCOTT of employment, thereby impoverishing millions MORE minorities. You’re an intellectual coward that only responds to white people that criticize you.”
“You’re a racist, radical communist that wants to expand government control and dependency— and you are using the plight of minorities to fulfill your sick and twisted goals,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez said earlier this week that low-income workers should boycott their jobs to protest economic insecurity when national stay-at-home orders are lifted.
Only in America does “liberation” mean going back to work.@AOC sits down with @anandwrites to talk about why a return to normalcy isn’t enough in a post-coronavirus world. SEAT AT THE TABLE premieres tonight at 10p. #seatatthetablehttps://twitter.com/i/status/1252982096743759874
“When we talk about this idea of reopening society, you know, only in America does the president — when the president tweets about liberation — does he mean go back to work. When we have this discussion about going back or reopening, I think a lot of people should just say ‘no’ — we’re not going back to that,” she said.
“We’re not going back to working 70-hour weeks just so that we could put food on the table and not even feel any sort of semblance of security in our lives.”
Thurston tenants, landlords brace for May rent [STRIKE] to come due An example of rent strike posters that have popped up around the Olympia areaBY ROLF BOONE (4-26-20) 360-754-5403, @ROLF_BOONERBOONE@THEOLYMPIAN.COMOlympia, WA — Thurston County property managers say most tenants paid their rent on April 1, the date falling only a couple of weeks after the governor ordered schools and businesses to close to combat the novel coronavirus.
But May 1 is likely to look a lot different, they say.
The economy has been further slowed by the virus, jobless claims have soared, and although jobless benefits have been enhanced and stimulus checks are arriving, average rents in the county still hover around $1,200 — the amount of the largest stimulus checks.
Some local tenants are calling for a rent strike, wanting to call attention to the economic burden placed on renters during the pandemic.
“It’s looking a lot worse,” said Andrew Barkis, a Republican state Representative and the longtime owner of Olympia-based Hometown Property Management, a business that manages 1,100 single-family residences in the county for an array of owners and their renters.
About 90 percent of tenants paid their rent on April 1, but come May 1, Barkis expects that to fall to 60 percent to 70 percent.
“People are going to have a tougher time,” he said, adding that he hopes tenants are receiving jobless benefits and a stimulus check. “There’s a lot of uncertainty.”
HOMES FIRST
That uncertainty extends to the nonprofit sector as well, such as Lacey-based Homes First, a provider and property manager of affordable housing in the area. It works with 277 tenants spread among 46 properties.
Chief Executive Trudy Soucoup said all but two tenants paid their rent on April 1, but come May 1, she expects rental income to drop as much as 20 percent.
She said those who can’t pay rent will not face any consequences, but she does expect tenants to eventually pay, or to seek assistance to pay rent.
“We will continue to do the things we do,” she said, which includes helping tenants with food and child care, “but tenants need to do the things they need to do.”
Rental income helps the nonprofit carry on with its mission, she said. Faced with a drop in income, the nonprofit lined up for a federal loan through the Small Business Administration called the “paycheck protection program.”
Homes First secured a $95,100 loan through the program, which converts to a grant if 75 percent of the money is used for payroll over the next eight weeks. That’s the plan to retain eight staff members, she said.
That money will help the nonprofit through the end of October. However, they also need to continue to raise funds through donations, and that has become more challenging, she said.
‘THERE HAS TO BE A BALANCE’
A small business like Hometown Property Management could seek a loan as well, but Barkis is not aware of a program to specifically help landlords themselves. He also was disappointed in Gov. Jay Inslee’s recent extension of an eviction moratorium through June 4.
“People have lost their livelihoods through no fault of their own and we must continue to take steps to ensure they don’t also lose the roofs over their heads,” Inslee said in a written statement at the time.
Under the latest moratorium, landlords are not able to raise rents or charge late fees, Barkis said.
Barkis isn’t seeking to add to the hardships of tenants, he said. He has worked with them on payment plans, breaking up rent payments and extending time frames, but, he asks, what about help for landlords? Many of them have to pay mortgages on their rental properties.
“There has to be a balance,” he said.
Some of the home owners that Hometown Property Management works with are investors, some are home owners who held onto their first home to rent, and some are members of the military who have been transferred out of the area but who want to return at a later date. In the meantime, they are working with Hometown to rent their property, he said.
There is a state landlord mitigation program, in which landlords can tap funds for certain rental situations, but in its current configuration he doesn’t think it could be used during the crisis.
Or could it? “There is a program and a framework for the crisis,” he said.
TENANTS STRIKE BACK
Meanwhile, Brian Wolcott, a student at The Evergreen State College is on strike — rent strike, that is.
He rents a house with three other roommates for about $1,500 a month. Rent wasn’t paid in April, and likely won’t be paid in May, but he said they are in contact with the property owner about their decision.
For Wolcott, it’s both political and practical: he wants to stand in solidarity with those who can’t pay rent, but work — such as the farm work, yard work and other odd jobs that he used to do — also has dried up.
Wolcott also acknowledged that he could probably find work, but then he wonders if he has his priorities straight, especially if he’s out interacting with people, possibly exposing others to the virus or being exposed himself. Rather than being guided by economic decisions, he’d rather follow the guidelines of health care professionals and scientists.
The economic burden placed on renters needs to be pushed up the ladder, he said.
“Financial institutions have the ability to weather this stuff, but it’s a real push for everyday people,” Wolcott said.
by Dennis Romero (4-23-20)
SAN DIEGO – A federal judge Thursday blocked background checks for ammunition buyers in California, calling the state’s law on the matter “onerous and convoluted.”
San Diego-based U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez granted a preliminary injunction against the rule after plaintiffs, including the California Rifle and Pistol Association and six-time Olympic medalist skeet shooter Kim Rhode, sued the state.
In 2016, Golden State voters approved Proposition 63, which included the background checks as well as a ban on high-capacity magazines for firearms. The same judge halted sales of the magazines as the state appeals another court challenge.
But in this case, Benitez was unequivocal.
“California’s new ammunition background check law misfires, and the Second Amendment rights of California citizens have been gravely injured,” he wrote. “In this action, Plaintiffs seek a preliminary injunction enjoining California’s onerous and convoluted new laws requiring ammunition purchase background checks and implementing ammunition anti-importation laws.”
The judge argued that the checks hurt legal ammo buyers while doing little to prevent criminals from obtaining firepower. “Criminals, tyrants and terrorists don’t do background checks,” Benitez wrote.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the state will appeal. The California Attorney General’s office but did not receive an immediate response Thursday evening.
The background checks went into effect in July, making California the first state to implement such a process. New York enacted ammunition screening in 2013 but it never went into effect. Four states — Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts and New Jersey — vet ammo sales through licensing.
“This is a devastating blow to the anti-gun-owner advocates who falsely pushed Prop 63 in the name of safety,” California Rifle and Pistol Association president Chuck Michel said in a statement. “In truth, red tape and the state’s disastrous database errors made it impossible for hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Californians to purchase ammunition for sport or self-defense.”
The nonprofit Brady: United Against Gun Violence said it would support an appeal and called the decision “unprecedented.”
“This decision is patently wrong, and we expect that it will be reversed on appeal,” Brady president Kris Brown said in a statement. “The Second Amendment does not provide felons or domestic abusers with the right to buy ammunition or firearms, and it does not prevent states like California from requiring background checks.”
by Richard Levitan (4-20-20)
Dr. Levitan is an emergency doctor.
I have been practicing emergency medicine for 30 years. In 1994 I invented an imaging system for teaching intubation, the procedure of inserting breathing tubes. This led me to perform research into this procedure, and subsequently teach airway procedure courses to physicians worldwide for the last two decades.
So at the end of March, as a crush of Covid-19 patients began overwhelming hospitals in New York City, I volunteered to spend 10 days at Bellevue, helping at the hospital where I trained. Over those days, I realized that we are not detecting the deadly pneumonia the virus causes early enough and that we could be doing more to keep patients off ventilators — and alive.
On the long drive to New York from my home in New Hampshire, I called my friend Nick Caputo, an emergency physician in the Bronx, who was already in the thick of it. I wanted to know what I was facing, how to stay safe and about his insights into airway management with this disease. “Rich,” he said, “it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
He was right. Pneumonia caused by the coronavirus has had a stunning impact on the city’s hospital system. Normally an E.R. has a mix of patients with conditions ranging from the serious, such as heart attacks, strokes and traumatic injuries, to the nonlife-threatening, such as minor lacerations, intoxication, orthopedic injuries and migraine headaches.
During my recent time at Bellevue, though, almost all the E.R. patients had Covid pneumonia. Within the first hour of my first shift I inserted breathing tubes into two patients.
Even patients without respiratory complaints had Covid pneumonia. The patient stabbed in the shoulder, whom we X-rayed because we worried he had a collapsed lung, actually had Covid pneumonia. In patients on whom we did CT scans because they were injured in falls, we coincidentally found Covid pneumonia. Elderly patients who had passed out for unknown reasons and a number of diabetic patients were found to have it.
And here is what really surprised us: These patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal. How could this be?
We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature.
Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs in which the air sacs fill with fluid or pus. Normally, patients develop chest discomfort, pain with breathing and other breathing problems. But when Covid pneumonia first strikes, patients don’t feel short of breath, even as their oxygen levels fall. And by the time they do, they have alarmingly low oxygen levels and moderate-to-severe pneumonia (as seen on chest X-rays). Normal oxygen saturation for most persons at sea level is 94 percent to 100 percent; Covid pneumonia patients I saw had oxygen saturations as low as 50 percent.
To my amazement, most patients I saw said they had been sick for a week or so with fever, cough, upset stomach and fatigue, but they only became short of breath the day they came to the hospital. Their pneumonia had clearly been going on for days, but by the time they felt they had to go to the hospital, they were often already in critical condition.
In emergency departments we insert breathing tubes in critically ill patients for a variety of reasons. In my 30 years of practice, however, most patients requiring emergency intubation are in shock, have altered mental status or are grunting to breathe. Patients requiring intubation because of acute hypoxia are often unconscious or using every muscle they can to take a breath. They are in extreme duress. Covid pneumonia cases are very different.
A vast majority of Covid pneumonia patients I met had remarkably low oxygen saturations at triage — seemingly incompatible with life — but they were using their cellphones as we put them on monitors. Although breathing fast, they had relatively minimal apparent distress, despite dangerously low oxygen levels and terrible pneumonia on chest X-rays.
We are only just beginning to understand why this is so. The coronavirus attacks lung cells that make surfactant. This substance helps the air sacs in the lungs stay open between breaths and is critical to normal lung function. As the inflammation from Covid pneumonia starts, it causes the air sacs to collapse, and oxygen levels fall. Yet the lungs initially remain “compliant,” not yet stiff or heavy with fluid. This means patients can still expel carbon dioxide — and without a buildup of carbon dioxide, patients do not feel short of breath.
Patients compensate for the low oxygen in their blood by breathing faster and deeper — and this happens without their realizing it. This silent hypoxia, and the patient’s physiological response to it, causes even more inflammation and more air sacs to collapse, and the pneumonia worsens until oxygen levels plummet. In effect, patients are injuring their own lungs by breathing harder and harder. Twenty percent of Covid pneumonia patients then go on to a second and deadlier phase of lung injury. Fluid builds up and the lungs become stiff, carbon dioxide rises, and patients develop acute respiratory failure.
By the time patients have noticeable trouble breathing and present to the hospital with dangerously low oxygen levels, many will ultimately require a ventilator.
Silent hypoxia progressing rapidly to respiratory failure explains cases of Covid-19 patients dying suddenly after not feeling short of breath. (It appears that most Covid-19 patients experience relatively mild symptoms and get over the illness in a week or two without treatment.)
A major reason this pandemic is straining our health system is the alarming severity of lung injury patients have when they arrive in emergency rooms. Covid-19 overwhelmingly kills through the lungs. And because so many patients are not going to the hospital until their pneumonia is already well advanced, many wind up on ventilators, causing shortages of the machines. And once on ventilators, many die.
Avoiding the use of a ventilator is a huge win for both patient and the health care system. The resources needed for patients on ventilators are staggering. Vented patients require multiple sedatives so that they don’t buck the vent or accidentally remove their breathing tubes; they need intravenous and arterial lines, IV medicines and IV pumps. In addition to a tube in the trachea, they have tubes in their stomach and bladder. Teams of people are required to move each patient, turning them on their stomach and then their back, twice a day to improve lung function.
There is a way we could identify more patients who have Covid pneumonia sooner and treat them more effectively — and it would not require waiting for a coronavirus test at a hospital or doctor’s office. It requires detecting silent hypoxia early through a common medical device that can be purchased without a prescription at most pharmacies: a pulse oximeter.
Pulse oximetry is no more complicated than using a thermometer. These small devices turn on with one button and are placed on a fingertip. In a few seconds, two numbers are displayed: oxygen saturation and pulse rate. Pulse oximeters are extremely reliable in detecting oxygenation problems and elevated heart rates.
Pulse oximeters helped save the lives of two emergency physicians I know, alerting them early on to the need for treatment. When they noticed their oxygen levels declining, both went to the hospital and recovered (though one waited longer and required more treatment). Detection of hypoxia, early treatment and close monitoring apparently also worked for Boris Johnson, the British prime minister.
Widespread pulse oximetry screening for Covid pneumonia — whether people check themselves on home devices or go to clinics or doctors’ offices — could provide an early warning system for the kinds of breathing problems associated with Covid pneumonia.
People using the devices at home would want to consult with their doctors to reduce the number of people who come to the E.R. unnecessarily because they misinterpret their device. There also may be some patients who have unrecognized chronic lung problems and have borderline or slightly low oxygen saturations unrelated to Covid-19.
All patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus should have pulse oximetry monitoring for two weeks, the period during which Covid pneumonia typically develops. All persons with cough, fatigue and fevers should also have pulse oximeter monitoring even if they have not had virus testing, or even if their swab test was negative, because those tests are only about 70 percent accurate. A vast majority of Americans who have been exposed to the virus don’t know it.
There are other things we can do as well to avoid immediately resorting to intubation and a ventilator. Patient positioning maneuvers (having patients lie on their stomach and sides) open up the lower and posterior lungs most affected in Covid pneumonia. Oxygenation and positioning helped patients breathe easier and seemed to prevent progression of the disease in many cases. In a preliminary study by Dr. Caputo, this strategy helped keep three out of four patients with advanced Covid pneumonia from needing a ventilator in the first 24 hours.
To date, Covid-19 has killed more than 40,600 people nationwide — more than 10,000 in New York State alone. Oximeters are not 100 percent accurate, and they are not a panacea. There will be deaths and bad outcomes that are not preventable. We don’t fully understand why certain patients get so sick, or why some go on to develop multi-organ failure. Many elderly people, already weak with chronic illness, and those with underlying lung disease do very poorly with Covid pneumonia, despite aggressive treatment.
But we can do better. Right now, many emergency rooms are either being crushed by this one disease or waiting for it to hit. We must direct resources to identifying and treating the initial phase of Covid pneumonia earlier by screening for silent hypoxia.
It’s time to get ahead of this virus instead of chasing it.
Richard Levitan, an emergency physician in Littleton, N.H., is president of Airway Cam Technologies, a company that teaches courses in intubation and airway management.
by Bob Fredericks (April 15, 2020) New York Post
A pair of House Democrats have introduced legislation that would pay millions of Americans $2,000 a month during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The bill — the Emergency Money for the People Act — was proposed by Reps. Tim Ryan of Ohio and Ro Khanna of California.
“The economic impact of this virus is unprecedented for our country. As millions of Americans file for unemployment week over week, we have to work quickly to patch the dam — and that means putting cash in the hands of hard-working families,” Ryan said in a statement.
The act would provide significant relief to struggling Americans and includes a $2,000 monthly payment to every qualifying American over the age of 16 until US employment returns to pre-pandemic levels, which could take months or even years.
“A one-time, twelve hundred dollar check isn’t going to cut it,” Khanna said about the Trump administration’s current payouts, which were arriving for many starting this week.
“Americans need sustained cash infusions for the duration of this crisis in order to come out on the other side alive, healthy, and ready to get back to work. Members on both sides of the aisle are finally coming together around the idea of sending money out to people. Rep. Ryan and I are urging leadership to include this bill in the fourth COVID relief package to truly support the American working class.”
Every American adult age 16 and older making less than $130,000 annually would receive at least $2,000 per month, the statement said.
Married couples earning less than $260,000 would receive at least $4,000 per month.
Qualifying families with children will receive an additional $500 per child, and families can get payments for up to three children.
A married couple making under $260,000 with 3 kids would receive $5,500 per month, for example.
Those who had no earnings, were unemployed, or are currently unemployed would also be eligible.
A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning or a false assumption that might sound impressive but proves absolutely nothing. Sometimes they are completely unintentional, but more often than not, they are used by people during debates, arguments or presentations to mislead you into thinking, acting or behaving in a certain way.
As you might expect, salespeople, politicians and con artists use them all the time often very skillfully, and the public innocently continues to fall for them.
So, knowing how to spot a logical fallacy and call it out or refute it can be an incredibly useful life tool to have at your disposal.
Unsurprisingly there are a lot of logical fallacies, hundreds, in fact, so to learn them all is a big task. But to help you on your way here are the 10 most common ones for you to get your head around and start your learning journey.
1. The Ad Hominem
Let’s start with probably one of the most common offenders. Also called ‘poisoning the well’ or the ‘personal attack’ you will have, I am certain, seen the ad hominem fallacy used all the time.
How it works is that rather than refuting an opponent’s argument the person attacks the individual instead. This can be directed toward their character, morals, intelligence, reputation or credentials. In fact, it really doesn’t matter, the main thing to remember is that they are not addressing the actual argument being presented but relying purely on feelings and prejudices to win their case.
Here are some typical examples: “He is so evil you cannot trust a word he says about ______ ” or ”Of course you would say that because you support ________” (Incidentally, going forward, fill in all gaps any way you like!).
P.S. There is also a variation to the Ad Hominem called ‘Guilt by Association’ that you also need to watch out for and the clue to how is in its title!
2. The Appeal to Authority
This is another much loved and of course widely used and abused fallacy.
It works by stating that whatever is claimed is true because a ‘so-called’ authority said so rather than applying any logical reasoning providing any evidence to support the claim.
For example: “Raising interest rates by 3% MUST be in the best interests of the economy because the PM said so yesterday on the 9 o’clock news”.
3. The Straw Man
With this fallacy, you argue against a phony, weak or ridiculous position that you have created, and then proceed to easily knock it down.
For example: “Tree-hugging environmentalists are so dumb they think plants have feelings and are more important than humans”.
Basically every time you see one of those ever so funny comedy skits on Gootube ridiculing someone because they are (please take your pick here) vegan, meat eaters, millennials, GenX, silver surfers, gun owners, pacizsts, spiritual, non-spiritual, love tech, hate tech etc, you know how their little ruse works and what it’s called! [BTW, this argument is, in itself, a variant of the ad hominem attack.]
4. The Appeal To Ignorance
This fallacy works by using the premise that since we do not know (or cannot prove) something that it must be either true or false. Which, if you think about, is completely ridiculous as not knowing something isn’t proof of anything, well, other than you don’t know something.
Here are some simple examples:
‘We have no hard evidence that fairies exist. Which must mean they are so incredibly magical that they can make themselves completely invisible to humans’.
Or sometimes you might even see some ‘appeal to ignorance’ nonsense dressed up like this as a serious product endorsement:
‘This supplement is totally amazing because no one who has taken it so far has become sick!’
5. The False Dilemma
This is also sometimes known as the False Dichotomy, the Black and White Fallacy, or even the Bi-Furcation Fallacy. This is how it works:
Essentially you reduce an argument down to only two options despite the fact that there may be many more (and far better possibilities) to choose from e.g: ‘You’re either with us or against us’ (note #1: This sucker even helped start a horrific war!)
or
‘You either love me or you hate me’ (note #2: Hang on a minute, what about words such as; ‘like’, ‘fancy’, ‘adore’ or ‘respect’ – or the multitude of other hundreds of attitudes, opinions and emotions you can have about another person???).
6. The Slippery Slope, AKA: Domino Theory
This fallacy works by taking an argument from a sensible moderate place and moving it to an extreme place [reducto ad absurdum?] via a one thing leads to another kind of route regardless of any logic or rational evidence to support the claim.
Of course, like most fallacies, you will see it played out everywhere, but it is an extremely common occurrence in houses with strapping teenagers who have sensible, concerned parents. Typically the arguments go something like; “You simply must let me go to the psychedelic Goa trance music festival this weekend, if I don’t go my friends will think I am totally square and a complete loser, they will then dump me and I will end up with no life whatsoever, and be forced to spend the rest of my life living as a sad recluse with no job, no money, no job, no love life, no social life, and absolutely no future…”.
7. The Circular Argument (Petitio Principii or ‘Begging the Question’)
As well as the Circular Argument, Petitio Principii and Begging the Question it also has a fourth name which is; The Vicious Circle. It is
called this for a very good reason because it works by repeating what has just been said which, hey presto, creates a completely closed loop, AKA: a circle!
Here are some basic examples:
‘Everyone wants to go see the new Star Wars movie because it is the hottest film going at the moment’,
or
‘Psychic powers exist because I have witnessed what can only be described as extraordinary psychic power
(Note #3: This fallacy gained fame when it featured in the plot of a really good book called Catch 22. In it the protagonist claims he is mad in order to avoid fying dangerous bombing missions. However, he finds his claim rejected on the grounds that by claiming he is insane it actually proves he must be sane – as only a sane man would try and claim he was mad to avoid flying the deadly missions!).
8. The Alphabet Soup
This is the overuse of acronyms, abbreviations and occulted language to bamboozle people into thinking that they know what they are talking about and therefore must be right (and you are wrong and ignorant to boot). Sad to say the well-being industry is rife with this sort of hogwash often used to impress and confuse poor saps into taking a dubious course of treatment often at great expense to their body and wallet.
Example: “It is very often the case that someone suffering from DSW2 deficiency in their lymphatic C5X chromosome system will also show a 6% increase in IOK17 regression marked with a surge in B523C plasma filament growth. The obvious solution is a course of XbandPharm FSX17 meds twice daily and 6 XbandPharma HFD tablets every three days in the morning with a glass of water.”
9. The Bandwagon
The bandwagon fallacy works on the basis that something is correct, good, true, right or whatever the heck you want it to be just because most people think it is as well. Named after the horse-drawn cart that politicians used to travel around on shouting their dubious election promises and drawing attention to themselves so that people would give them their support and vote for them. If you were dumb enough be one of them, you could literally jump on the bandwagon and enjoy being taken for a ride!
Anyway, no surprises here but it is a completely fallacious argument. Just because lots of people might all agree with each other about something or another it doesn’t mean for one second they are all correct.
For example; ‘One billion people drink diet _____ every year so it must be the best soft drink in the world’.
10. The Red Herring
You may well have heard of this one. It’s pretty famous after all!
But you may not recognise it in real life as we mostly hear it mentioned in whodunnit TV crime shows.
So how does it work? Well, the red herring is a clever irrelevant argument that distracts you from the real topic being scrutinized.
Apparently named after the smelly fish used when training hunting dogs, it is most frequently employed by crafty individuals who lead the conversation (read; argument) away from an area that they are vulnerable into one that they feel is a safer territory.
As you might well imagine ‘guilty’ politicians absolutely love the red herring and will use it in almost every answer that they can possibly get away with e.g. ‘Why are we raising taxes? Well…hmm…we need to raise taxes to generate more revenue to support the existing commitments to primary school education. After all, children represent the future of the nation, don’t they? So we must always support them 100%. Don’t you agree?’
11. Political Correctness (special bonus fallacy)
Lastly, and as bit of a special added bonus the ‘PC argument’ (aka Language Control).
We are all for equality and fairness, but please bear with us on this one. This post-modern day piece of fallacious sophistry used to have another name. Ironically it was once simply known as the Name Calling Fallacy.
How it works is you change the nature of something by giving it another name. You must have seen the sort of thing on the news or in the papers all the time.
People are no longer ‘poor’ but ‘economically disadvantaged’, they are not ‘broke’ but ‘have a temporary negative cash flow situation’ and, of course, they no longer live in ‘slums’ but in ‘economically depressed urban environments’.
Naturally, the world of commerce and industry are masters of it just as much as governments are.
Have you noticed how ‘bad debt’ is now ‘an underperforming asset’ and that organizations love giving employees ‘up titles’ instead of raises’?
There is also another way that PC logic (often the total opposite of factual correctness) can be used very effectively. Rather than simply naming things, words can also be weaponized by turning them into ‘control words’ which can be employed effectively especially via name calling strategies.
These are typically used to shut down debates, inhibit critical thinking and corral the target down carefully constructed mental pathways (safely away from the issue being discussed).
Of course, as mentioned at the start, there are literally hundreds of other logical fallacies such as the Hasty Generalization, Fallacy of Sunk Costs, False Analogy, Ad-hoc Reasoning and even the Fallacy Fallacy to name just a few more.
What are your thoughts on the ones presented here? Have you been caught out by a ‘logical fallacy’ lately? Perhaps you have a ‘favorite’ fallacy you would like to share? Let us know in the comments.
15 Logical Fallacies You Should Know Before Getting Into a Debate
https://thebestschools.org/magazine/15-logical-fallacies-know/
https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL2ZyZWFrb25vbWljcy1yYWRpbw&episode=NGRjMDEzODItM2YzOC00ZGI5LTg4NTUtYWI5ZTAxNjI0N2E5&hl=en&ved=2ahUKEwin0MavmPPoAhUNsJ4KHXa7BB8QieUEegQIChAE&eFreakonomics Radio – 413. Who Gets the Ventilator?V0010596 A man with a torch walking alongside a cart of plague victim
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
A man with a torch walking alongside a cart of plague victims; a woman is holding a dead child. Chalk drawing by E.M. Ward, 1848.
1848 By: Edward Matthew WardPublished: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Seldom is heard more alarming God complex discussions about who has a greater right to life. It’s cut from the same warp & weave as the public discussions heard surrounding when torture was “OK” during the Bush administration.
The takeaway is if you’re over a certain age, there’s little incentive to answer questions about your COVID-19 status/contacts since you’re already calculated as disposable and less entitled to life. i.e. The medical establishment and the state are greasing the skids for the very souls most in need and at risk of dying.
Anytime people appoint themselves as arbiters of who lives and who dies, bias, discrimination, and prejudice inevitably crop up. What was the point of beating the Nazis only to become just like them?
The right to life is self evident. Those who reckon they can parse that natural law with their own arrogant calculus and broken moral compass are delusional, far more dangerous than the virus itself. It is better to be a mouse in a cat’s jaws than a patient in the hands of these self anointed demigods.
Freakonomics Radio – 413. Who Gets the Ventilator?
V0010596 A man with a torch walking alongside a cart of plague victim
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
A man with a torch walking alongside a cart of plague victims; a woman is holding a dead child. Chalk drawing by E.M. Ward, 1848.
1848 By: Edward Matthew WardPublished: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“The development of our financial oligarchy followed, in this respect, lines with which the history of political despotism has familiarized us: usurpation, proceeding by gradual encroachment rather than by violent acts; subtle and often long-concealed concentration of distinct functions….
……which are beneficial when separately administered, and dangerous only when combined in the same persons. It was by processes such as these that Caesar Augustus became master of Rome.
The makers of our own Constitution had in mind similar dangers to our political liberty when they provided so carefully for theseparation of governmental powers”.
(1914) Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It– Chapter I: Our Financial OligarchyWhat you are to read is a collection of stories that have been buried by the captured financial news media. The author takes tremendous risk by posting this online, and it is strongly recommended that you archive this page before it is removed…
As they say, “the golden rule is: he who holds the gold makes all the rules”, and the mega-banks that have seized control over governments worldwide have crowned themselves emperors of our time.
They own the regulators; they own the brokerage houses; they own the clearing houses; they own all of your investments; and it’s even been shown that they can exert complete control over the government.
Over the years, like all despots throughout history, these mega-banks have proven that they can get away with practically whatever they want.
They will print fake shares with absolute impunity, and in effect, artificially control their supply and demand; manipulate corporate elections via their ownership of the shareholder communications infrastructure, influencing who sits on the board of American corporations; and worst of all, they will block anything that threatens their hegemony — even if it can save the elderly 100’s of billions of dollars and revolutionize entire industries.
But why should we be surprised? From the Trail of Tears to the Rape of Nanking; and the Wounded Knee Massacre to the Bataan Death March ; over the ages, history has shown time and time again:
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
ClearingHouse
The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation
To understand the essence of their supremacy, one must first understand the securities clearance system. If you happen to be new to all this information, that’s okay — it is very easy to understand.
A clearinghouse is the middleman that sits between a trade, guaranteeing both the buyer and the seller receives their cash or securities. If a buyer or seller fails to deliver the cash or securities, the clearing house guarantees delivery to the counterparties by making up for the loss with their own money.
Without this essential service, a stock exchange will struggle to survive because nobody will be sure if the counterparty will deliver, and all it takes is the slightest bit of doubt for the entire system to collapse. The exchange may be able to operate on a small scale, but not at the capacity that you would expect to see on the NASDAQ or NYSE, and if you have competitors, bankruptcy is not only a possibility, but a certainty.
In the United States of America, there is only one central clearinghouse: The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, and for almost 50 years they have maintained a virtual monopoly over this essential service.
It is a private corporation that is owned by these mega-banks and brokers:
Just to give you an idea of the influence these banks have over this institution, we are going to analyze a recent lawsuit filed by a consortium of pension funds against the largest banks and brokers in the United States. It perfectly illustrates their stranglehold over our capital markets, proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that not only will these massive corporations work together behind closed doors to stifle competition, but they also have the ability to instruct the directors of the DTCC to block new entrants that pose a threat to their hegemony.
Before we go any further, it is important for you to understand that there is tremendous risk for those who post this online, and much of what you are about to see has been buried. Don’t be deterred by the length; the article looks much longer than it actually is because of all the screenshots, and everything has been condensed so it should only take you about 60 minutes to read.
If you plan on finishing this later, it is recommended that you archive this page because there is a strong chance that it could suddenly disappear.
A backup bibliography tagged with all the linked keywords is included at the bottom just in case archive.is decides to go under one day.
The links alone took months of research, and many of them are not easily found online. The world of finance is very opaque and litigious, so everybody minces their words and beats around the bush; shrouding simplicity in a long maze of bullshit phraseology and inventive acronyms. There will be none of that in this article — it will be straight to the point. The average millennial — those born between 1981 and 1996 — only has a net worth of $8000, and the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is almost double that of every other country in the western world. They’ve even started censoring us with Orwellian algorithms that watch and listen to everything we say online. The time for mincing words is over.
But let’s get back to the story.
Stock Loans
There is probably no better example of their anti-competitive behavior than in the stock loan industry, where for the past 20 years, pension funds, endowments, and mutual funds have all been forced to use their services for lack of any viable alternative.
Most of the time, retirement funds tend to hold their investments for very long periods of time, and in order to take advantage of these dormant positions, fund managers will often attempt to increase their clients returns by loaning out these shares to short sellers and market makers so they can be used for arbitrage.
But there is one big problem: still to this day, there is no centralized exchange available for the stock loan industry, which forces massive money managers like Blackrock and CalPERS , along with every hedge fund in America , to employ brokers to match borrowers and lenders, siphoning $100’s of billions from our retirement savings.
Today, most of these transactions are still facilitated over-the-counter, meaning lenders and borrowers have no way of accessing live price data. Only the brokers and “TBTF” banks have access to this information, and this allows them to charge practically whatever they want without anybody knowing if they received a fair market price.
I think the securities lending market is just like the mob. I think it’s completely rigged...It’s a completely manipulated black hole…
–Marc Cohodes, Copper River Partners
The stock loan industry has been described by experts as “the mother of all dark pools“, and people have been calling for change for practically two decades now.
Pictured below is an example of how this process works:
“The current stock loan market involves high search costsand inefficient pricing.
It can take numerous phone calls over several hours to locate a hot stock and negotiate pricing. The lender has no indicative level of pricing other than the demand information provided by the brokers, which the lender has no way to verify. In other words, the securities lending market requires considerable manual effort to complete transactions that in other markets take seconds or minutes at most. Because of the fragmented nature of the market, identical loans can trade simultaneously through different channels at very different prices. These high search costs preclude arbitrage across liquidity pools”
https://archive.is/c0Qt6#selection-24833.5-24875.41
Four companies — Quadriserv/AQS, SL-x, and Data Explorers — all spent several years creating an electronic exchange for this massive $1.75 Trillion market, and their technology could have finally put an end to this backward and opaque system that has been plaguing pensioners, endowments, and hedge funds for more than 20 years. Unfortunately, even though their technology took decades of collaboration and $100’s of millions in start-up capital, they were all blocked by these mega-banks.
It threatened their cartel
The mega-banks that dominate this industry simply had too much to lose by allowing us to have access to this information, so in order to stop this technology from reaching the market, they banded together and refused to provide key services to these bright start ups, even going so far as to threaten their top hedge fund clients with the loss of critical prime brokerage services if they found out they were using their platforms.
In 2016, it was estimated that these brokers were extracting as much as 65% of the revenues from the stock loan market, most of which was going to a very small group of investment banks.
The cumulative effect this can have on our pension funds is astronomical. Just to put that into perspective, Frontline estimated that as little as a 2% annual fee charged by your average mutual fund over a period of 50 years would result in a 66% reduction to your retirement savings.
On an annualized basis, the stock loan industry is said to produce $9 billion in revenue. That equates to $180 billion in profits over a period of 20 years, and this is without accounting for compounding interest. Quadriserv — one of the companies that attempted to challenge these brokers stranglehold over the industry — estimated that their platform could have saved pensioners $4.5 billion per year, and one veteran bank executive was even quoted as saying that it could “do the work of six traders in one ”.
Now, you might find this part hard to believe, but it has also been alleged by reliable sources that for several years these mega-banks and brokers have been conducting “private gatherings” for the purpose of coordinating elaborate schemes so they can maintain their dominance over this essential financial service; what they jokingly refer to as a meeting of the “Five Families” — a mafia related term that they will often use to describe themselves collectively. This should clearly indicate to anybody how little these people probably care about the lives of average hard working people (or even how much they should be trusted for that matter).
Just click on those links and see for yourself. It should take you to the exact line of text. If the link stops working, just highlight the keyword and you can find an excerpt at the bottom of the page.
The New York Clearing Association
As we all know, history has a tendency to repeat itself, and the brazen anti-competitive behavior showcased in that stock loan lawsuit is certainly not the first time something like this has happened. It almost perfectly emulates the Cartel from the days of the New York Association, when a consortium of the country’s largest financial institutions could shutdown any bank in the nation simply by refusing their services. In fact, it was this very behavior that eventually went on to become the primary focal point of the Pujo Committee in 1913, immediately before the passing of the Federal Reserve Act.
Included below are key excerpts from this Committee that will show you the true power of a clearinghouse. Quotes from the book, “Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It” (1914), a collection of essays written by Louis Brandeis during that time period, will also be included, and everything has been broken down so it will only take about 5 minutes to read.
Robber Barons
From the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation’s 2018 Annual Report
(February 28, 1913) “Report of the Committee appointed pursuant to House resolutions 429 and 504 to investigate the concentration of control of money and credit”.
Knickerboker Trust was banned from using the clearing services of National Bank of Commerce of New York, leading to its immediate collapse.
Without the services of the the New York Association, the most dominant Clearing House at the time, it was well known by customers and bank owners alike that they would almost certainly fail within as little as a few days.
Even so much as a rumor would cause a bank run
The New York Clearing House forces Oriental Bank to stop working with two Brooklyn Banks, even though they pose no risk to anybody and represent an important percentage of Oriental Bank’s profits.
“The men who through their control over the funds of our railroads and industrial companies are able to direct where such funds shall be kept and thus to create these great reservoirs of the people’s money, are the ones who are in position to tap those reservoirs for the ventures in which they are interested and to prevent their being tapped for purposes of which they do not approve. The latter is quite as important a factor as the former. It is the controlling consideration in its effect on competition in the railroad and industrial world.”–(1914) Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It
A sort of gentleman’s agreement decided the fate of the entire country..
“These bankers are, of course, able men possessed of large fortunes; but the most potent factor in their control of business is not the possession of extraordinary ability or huge wealth. The key to their power is Combination….
“There is the obvious consolidation of banks and trust companies; the less obvious affiliations–through stockholdings, voting trusts and interlocking directorates–of banking institutions which are not legally connected; and the joint transactions, gentlemen’s agreements, and “banking ethics” which eliminate competition among the investment bankers”.
–“Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It”, (1914)
All it took was 1/4 of its members to block somebody from joining, regardless of their qualifications, and even if these people were competing with the appellant.
Even if the bank was a member of the club, in the event of a change of control, the bank would be expelled if the members did not approve of the new management.
It’s a clique; a private club; a Cartel.
Do you see how powerful these organizations are? They shutdown two healthy banks for no reason whatsoever. People’s life savings were in those banks, and this was before social security, so you could literally starve back then; you and your family.
What most people fail to recognize is that profits are only secondary to these mega-banks. Following the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Banking Act and the massive bailouts that followed, these corporations have becomes empires, and there’s a reason why the blood drained out of that banker’s face at the mere mention of Quadriserv’s technology, but it has very little to do with profit.
It’s about control.
If the stock loan market were to emerge from the shadows of the “OTC” and on to a public exchange where everything is closely scrutinized, it would be much easier to track who was borrowing stock, and at what price, which could potentially reveal what these mega-banks are up to behind the scenes. People might even start recommending that they include all these loans into a Consolidated Tape, making it much harder for them to hide their activities.
“Under Graber, I learned that Wall Street was an illusion,”.. “There were different magicians using different tricks in different ways. But everyone cheated. It shocked me so much in the beginning. I admired these people. And they cheated”.
—Samuel Israel III
Keeping this market in the dark doesn’t just give you control over the spread, like what is seen here:
It gives you control over the supply of equities, and it also allows you manipulate voting outcomes in contested elections.
“And then as time went on and/or a position got bigger, the rate would get jacked up on us…… So our cost of doing business in a particular name would go from not costing us anything to costing us tens of millions of dollars”…
—Marc Cohodes, Copper River Partners
The same thing happened before the financial crisis when CDO’s were still popular. They refused to allow anybody to access live pricing data, so everything had to be traded on the OTC markets with no centralized clearing.
Even when they were offered the opportunity to trade on a public exchange, they still refused, and it would’ve saved them money..
Give me control over a nations equity supply and I care not who makes its laws..
If somebody were to tell you that you do not technically own your shares in a public company, you probably wouldn’t believe them would you? That seems rather ridiculous, doesn’t it? Many people have their life-savings invested in the stock market, and how could somebody else own something that you paid for with your own money?
Unfortunately it’s true, and you are not the legal owner of your investments. The banks and brokers are the true legal owners, and you are just issued an entitlement; an unusual relationship that they characterize as “street name” ownership, and all shares are held in book-entry form (electronically) at the DTCC, with the banks and brokers acting as the registered holders on the company’s books.
By transferring ownership to the DTCC and registering the brokers as the true legal owners of your investments, it solved the problem of constantly having to transfer physical certificates from one location to another; a process that was cumbersome and created liability issues.
Back the in the 70’s, they describe this unusual relationship as a “Jumbo Certificate”
A perfect example of this ownership structure is illustrated in the document snapshot pictured below from a recent Broadridge Financial Services note offering, dated Dec.5th, 2019, only a few months ago.
They refer to this debt obligation as a “Global Note ” that is owned by the DTC (a DTCC subsidiary).
It also says that the owners of the “beneficial interests” will not be legally considered owners of “any notes ” under the “Global Note”. A “beneficial interest” would be you, as you are the brokers’ customer for which they have granted you “entitlements ” to these investments.
“Under Article 8, the beneficial owner of the shares held in a custodial account with an intermediary (such as a broker) is considered to be the holder of a “securities entitlement” in a “financial asset” which is ultimately held by a depository”,
—Marcel Kahan, The Georgetown Law Journal
They say explicitly in the first paragraph that the DTC will credit the “beneficial interests ” represented by the “global note ” to the accounts of the “participants“.
But who are these participants?
The “participants” are the same banks and brokers that are buying the debt securities from Broadridge.
But doesn’t that make them the indirect owners of this “Jumbo Certificate ” — or in this case, “Global Note ” — through their ownership of the DTCC?
The answer is yes, it does.
In the age of artificial intelligence, crypto currencies, smart phones and quantum computing, you might be wondering why we still need these brokers and banks to act as the legal owners of our investments. Nobody uses paper certificates anymore, and certainly there should be some kind of SAAS technology out there by now that could solve the liability and book-keeping issues that come with transferring these ownership interests back and forth between accounts.
In reality, this system hasn’t been necessary for practically 20 years, and many experts are equally as perplexed by this unusual “entitlement ” system as they are about the opaque black-hole that governs the stock loan industry today, where retiree’s (“the elderly “) are literally being forced to utilize middlemen that actively collude to separate buyers and sellers so they can charge higher spreads.
They don’t even let companies send “proxy” (voter) materials directly to their shareholders; the company is forced to send the voting materials to the brokers first, and only then will they send them to you.
Pictured below is an illustration of how this process works:
If you had trouble with that first one, this next illustration might be easier to understand. The other one is kind of old — from 1976 to be exact.
Yes, the same system that existed back then is still being used today.
Take a guess who these brokers contract out to send you these “proxy” materials (voting cards).
Broadridge Financial Services..
They control 80% of the “proxy” (voter) communication industry. Don’t worry, we’re just getting started. It gets much worse.
Did you know that you can borrow shares immediately before a corporate election for the sole purpose of influencing the outcome? Yes, in America if you borrow shares, the voting rights will be transferred to you.
You get to keep the dividend, but not the vote? Seems rather counter intuitive, doesn’t it? Or better yet, rife for exploitation?
..That’s because it is..
“The existing system of shareholder voting is crude, imprecise, and fragile. Gil Sparks, a leading Delaware lawyer, estimates that, in a contest that is closer than 55 to 45%, there is no verifiable answer to the question “who won?”“
—The Hanging Chads of Corporate Voting
Over and over again, and for multiple decades, it has been shown that votes are constantly being misappropriated, yet the only entity that can reconcile this problem is owned and controlled by them: The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation.
Broadridge, the company they contract out to send us our proxy (voting) materials, even admits in their corporate filings that their relationship with these brokers constitutes as a “conflict of interest “.
Should we really trust these people to fairly tabulate our votes? You can make $100’s of million’s from being on the right side of a corporate merger, and as recent history has shown, these banks will rig anything so long as they can get away with it. Only 30% of shareholders were shown to have voted in 2014, and as we all know, there is no better industry than Wall Street at finding legal loopholes, so rigging such an opaque and outdated system should be a piece of cake for these mega-banks.
That alone should be enough cause for concern, but combined with the fact that they can borrow shares for the sole purpose of influencing an election, and it’s easy to see how this system could be manipulated. They even have a name for this practice: Vote Buying
Yes, Vote Buying..
From now on we’re going to try to avoid using the word “Proxy” because it acts to cloak what is actually going on: a vote, not a “proxy”. That word makes it sound much more complicated than it actually is, especially considering all the technology we have today. Every country in the western world holds elections, yet for some strange reason, the only place that exhibits such unusual complications is on the stock market; the lifeblood of the American economy.
Bob Drummond wrote an article about this for Bloomberg years ago, but in typical Bloomberg fashion, it was deleted).
“It is an abomination,” says Thomas Montrone, chief executive officer of Cranford, New Jersey-based Registrar & Transfer Co., which oversees shareholder elections. “A lot of the time we have no idea who’s entitled to vote and who isn’t. It’s nothing short of criminal.”
“In a little-known quirk of Wall Street bookkeeping, with the growth of short sales, which involve the resale of borrowed securities, stocks can be lent repeatedly”. https://archive.is/PR9Ww#selection-3583.0-3586.0
….”The loans allow three or four owners to cast votes based on holdings of the same shares”.
https://archive.is/PR9Ww#selection-3587.0-3590.0
Drummond later described three specific contested elections where this was known to have occurred. As you can see in the image below, all one needs is a few extra shares to tip the pendulum in a contested election, making the corporate executives and wolf -packs who front-run these predatory schemes millions from carefully facilitated mergers, acquisitions and hostile take overs.
(CARL T. HAGBERG AND ASSOCIATES) “Over-voting is, quite simply, untenable. Allowing it to continue makes a mockery of the idea of corporate democracy. There is ample evidence that people do try to “game” the system, since votes do indeed have value – especially when the voting outcomes have the potential to move the stock price, as often they demonstrably do. (See, for example, “Vote Trading and Information Aggregation” which is easily accessible on the Internet and which documents huge spikes in share purchases near meeting record dates and corresponding sales immediately thereafter). There is also a great deal of evidence that the “gamesters” quite often succeed in gaming the vote, since, (a) as the study pointed out, one can buy votes for about $6 per million votes and (b) vote buyers will vote 100% of the time, while long-term owners tend not to vote at all, which allows the voters with “duplicate voting credentials” not just to go undetected, but to have their way in terms of the election outcomes. It is especially important to note in the context of election “gaming” that the interests of short-term and long-term owners are, almost always, diametrically opposed in election contests”.
https://archive.is/aUv1Bhttp://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-14-10/s71410-68.pdf
“The customer doesn’t know this is happening,” says John Wilcox, head of corporate governance at TIAA-CREF, the biggest private U.S. pension plan for teachers. Often, the broker still permits the customer to vote the shares even though they’re out on loan. That policy is not sound. It definitely means that shares can be voted twice.”
https://archive.is/PR9Ww#selection-4015.0-4018.0
But most of the time none of these tactics are necessary, because again, people usually don’t even show up to vote anyways.
“It’s invisible,” says Paul Schulman, executive managing director of Altman Group Inc., a proxy solicitor based in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Most of the time you don’t get overvotes because so many shareholders don’t vote.”
They’ve certainly shown that they are perfectly capable of rigging everything else. These companies will do anything to buff up those quarterlies; they will even instruct the directors of the DTCC to block new technology that can save pensioners hundreds of billions of dollars.
Pensioners: those people who worked their whole lives and finally want to settle down after decades of toiling at their job 5, maybe even 6 days a week. They took you to school, fed you while you were a child; taught you everything you know about life..
Think about it this way: not only will these banks steal from the future by printing trillions of dollars so they can cover their reckless stock market bets, but they will also steal from the past by siphoning value from your retirement savings..
None of this is a conspiracy. You can click on the image below and it will take you directly to the exact line of text.
Just imagine the power you would have if you could manipulate the voting outcomes in a corporate election.
Just going off the Wilshire 5000, the combined market cap of every publicly traded company in America is equal to roughly $33 trillion, and some of these corporations are larger than most countries. Directors can also exert significant control over the company finances, and they pour billions into our elections.
“How Broadridge and its customers—the bank and broker custodians—adjust overvotes, revocations, and other problems within its system is entirely opaque”.
—The Hanging Chads of Corporate Voting
If you wanted to influence the outcome of an election, what do you think would be the easiest way to accomplish this? You would probably want to wait until you could see the results first, right?
Guess what, that’s how they can do it! It’s up to them whether they want to count the votes before, or after receiving the tallies. Yes, they can literally wait until they know the results, then tabulate everything knowing what the outcome is going to be.
Just imagine if the American people found out a political election was being handled like that? There would probably be a revolution the very next day..
… “there is no guidance in the rule (NYSE’s Rule 452) itself or from the Exchange in any other form as to how a member firm is to handle a situation where it receives proxy voting instructions for more shares than it holds in record ownership. Thus a member firm apparently enjoys substantial flexibility when it cannot act on all the instructions received, and in particularit presumably may select at its own discretion which voting instructions it will disregard“ . . . (SEC (1991), p. 28) Vote Trading and Information Aggregation,
This is just the beginning. There is much more.
Let’s say there is a voting discrepancy because these TBTF banks and brokers decided to issue more voting entitlements than actually exist; it turns out that the entity that counts the votes doesn’t even have a fixed procedure for dealing with this problem.
Sometimes they will count the votes on a “first-in” basis, and other times they will count the votes on a “last-in” basis, meaning your votes could be completely discounted in favor of somebody who borrowed stock immediately before the record date, or worse, they could include fake votes because one of their better customers had an interest in the outcome. Again, they own the DTCC, and Broadridge openly admits in their company SEC filings that their relationship with these brokers constitutes as a “Conflict of Interest”
