It Suddenly Dawned on Me How To Deliver Really Bad News
By Bill Sardi
March 28, 2020
I’m not sure I know how to break this news.
At least not for a death this big.
Oh, some big people have died in my lifetime. But we’re not talking about a death with the magnitude of the passing of The King (Elvis Presley), or the death of Old Blue Eyes (Frank Sinatra), or Billy Graham, the man who led many millions of Americans to the altar. This is much, much bigger.
No, it’s a part of us that has died and awaits burial. I’m sorry, while we are all distracted with fear of the coronavirus, something much larger just passed from life to death. Nobody else will tell you. Certainly not the commentators on MSNBC, or CNN, or FOX NEWS. They are part of the propaganda and distraction and entertainment machine that has kept Americans in the dark as the nation crept closer to a cliff without a parachute. The idea was to give American consumers the false notion everything is OK. This is America, the greatest country in the world.
The coronavirus is a planned distraction. There will be no resurrection. No writing a book about an after-death experience.
We were all part of its passing. Every time we used a credit card, signed mortgage papers, got an auto loan, we were stealing from its future. Till we were living a certain lifestyle off our future income to a point where we just couldn’t possibly keep it alive any longer, couldn’t ever possibly make enough money to pay on what we owed in our lifetime.
And the banksters were more than happy to extend us credit whether we could pay our bills down or not because they sold off those loans to somebody else, and some of the bad loans were peddled off on a rich uncle named Sam.
I’m talking about America. The red, white and blue.
Today it is just “in the red, and it is very blue, and it’s waving a white flag.”
It dawned on me, suddenly, if the school teachers and their kids aren’t going to back to school till September. If senior Americans have been so frightened of a deadly virus that is transmitted by handshakes and coughing, will they ever go back to church? If the air travel industry is the conveyor of this historical plague, how will it ever get back into business?
What of the restaurants that are such an important part of what is American – deep dish pizzas, triple-decker hamburgers, chocolate Sundays. No restaurant, with its tables removed by health departments can weather such a cataclysm by selling take-out. Will restaurant customers suddenly forget what the health department said, that infectious diseases are spread and the only way to stop them is social distancing — six feet they say.
Sports stadiums are another social distancing hazard.
Is there any way to push a reset button? Only Elon Musk has a plan to leave this planet.
Who is going to pay the home mortgages of the teachers, and restaurant owners, and airline pilots? And the list goes on and on. Then the banks fold. Well you can fill them with trillions of dollars of electronic money which the President is promising, a trillion dollars a day they say, but does that make us feel safe? Then we have a totally phony economy, like Zimbabwe. As bond analyst Michael Pento emailed me: “Just wait till insolvency meets inflation.”
Aren’t home mortgages automatically in default, even with six-month extensions before mortgage payments are resumed? If there is no demand to buy homes, at least not now, then in a supply-and-demand, market-price-finding real estate market, does anybody really have any equity in their home? Didn’t home values just drop to zero?
With so many out of work (the federal government says it will halt issuance of unemployment numbers so we aren’t totally demoralized – come on, since when did the federal government ever issue true employment numbers?), there has to be demoralization. We’ve had 20% unemployment for a long time. We just hid that fact. Guess….. maybe 40% without a job. Didn’t the tax burden just increase on the remaining citizens who hold a job?
There are people I know who will never get back into the job market now.
We just figured out how to offer government-backed student loans and keep young adults out of the job market and off unemployment rolls, that’s all.
We’ve been establishing new ways to show our Gross Domestic Product is always growing. We have the plunge protection team so the stock market (and pension plans) are insulated from any reversals – a perpetual Bull Market. Till now.
Can you imagine the USA issues debt-based money? Yes, we buy cars from Japan and Japan holds US dollars which are lent back to the US at 2-percent interest, and Japan gets a US Treasury Note (and IOU). We put that borrowed money back into circulation. So, a ten-dollar bill is a promise to pay Japan ten dollars plus 2%. It is debt-based money. There should be a minus sign on our currency. But you never thought to ask where money comes from anyway, did you?
Oh mercy, we were living a lifestyle we hadn’t earned. We could never imagine an end to credit. Then we bailed out irresponsible bankers and lenders instead of homeowners, and via free money doled out by the Federal Reserve Bank, we created the financial classes that were suddenly making all the money, with little left for anyone else.
Someone asked me what is the future for retired Americans? I instinctively answered: reverse mortgages are their only lifeline. But then again, what is the value of their home?
I’m not sure I have a cogent thought about the future. But the future is certainly not about financial growth, it is about survival.
The federal government is locking down cities – they know when reality hits, not when the coronavirus epidemic subsides, panic will hit the streets. Just how will cities even afford a police department without incomes to pay local taxes?
I can hear it now – can we just have President “O” back and not President “T”? The blame game won’t make things better. Just tonight the Federal Reserve bank says (quote): “this is a planned shutdown of the American economy.” Yes, so why all the subterfuge, phony coronavirus epidemic and quarantines?
I haven’t time or energy to mourn. I have to assemble my thoughts. Lots of blanks that need filled in. I have to quickly learn the new rules for a new economy. The American standard of living is going to take a tumble. We are going to have to learn how to do our own doctoring. We have to take local vacations, that is, if we can afford to. We are going to have to secure sources of food. Maybe deal with farmers directly. I’m not sure we can rely on our country to see us through. What if I can’t make my car payment? What will I tell my son? How can I make a plan for the future when there currently is none? I have to have hope.
This unfolding death of a nation, the world’s greatest country, is high anxiety. I have three choices how to handle this: 1) duck my head and ignore reality (irresponsibility); 2) fret, worry and fear and lose sleep (anxiety); or 3) be concerned and deal with reality, and value what really counts most, our freedom and liberty.)
Copyright © Bill Sardi, writing from La
Verne, California.
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