
“When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.” — Comedian George Carlin (1937-2008)
Winter Watcher readers younger than 28 years old may not know how the 2008 financial bailout went down. Many adults who witnessed it and experienced it first hand still don’t really understand it or its significance.
The markets had already been whacked when, in 2008, former President George Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke went to Congress with an $850 billion bailout package and stimulus plan referred to as a “bazooka.”
The first vote in Congress failed, and the market had yet another ugly day with the S&P 500 Index bottoming at 666. This enabled the extortion to be carried out on the second vote, and a deeply oversold stock market rallied back, seemingly affirming the plan.
And it’s GONE! S&P 500 closed at 2131 on November 7, 2016 & will open limit-down at 2128 Monday. So much for MAGA & the boaster-in-chief’s hideous Greatest Economy Ever. He inherited a debt & bubble-addicted mess & made it worse. Covid-19 just the catalyst for the reckoning.
— David Stockman (@DA_Stockman) March 22, 2020
This scenario and narrative is being washed, rinsed and repeated with all of the time-tested drama of 2008.
Fast forward to the $2 trillion coronavirus bazooka stimulus (10% of GDP) being proposed to Congress today. The initial balking centers around big bucks and vague details. It harkens back House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Obamacare appeal from ’10: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
This is the apparent partisan divide on how to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Based on what other governments have already announced, the bazookas could grow to more than $10 trillion.
Germany is proposing a stimulus of 10% of GDP. Typical of neo-liberal Washington Consensus, much of the measures include more credit expansion and government-backstopped loans.
I switched on Bloomberg and CNBC today for the first time in years. I felt like Rip Van Winkle. The bailout and spending narrative was a dead ringer for what I witnessed in 2008, often with some of the same empty suits promoting it and with the same general narrative. And nobody mentions the negative implications of such borrowing, monetizing and spending.

The appropriate name for this deluge of spending and borrowing is “The Friends of Steve Mnuchin Rolodex Rider.” (A Rolodex was a type of address book back in the days before cell phones.)
Isn’t it ironic that when these mega bazookas materialize, Treasury secretaries who are Goldman Sachs alumni are front and center: Hank Paulson in 2008, and Steve Mnuchin today. Whodathunk?
When former President Barack Obama entered office in 2009, he appointed Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary. “Turbo Timmy,” as he was known, took over the Obama end of the bailouts and was a member of the Kissinger Associates posse.
Pelosi (D-Calif.) will take whatever Senate Majority Leader Mitch “The Turtle” McConnell (R-Kentucky) negotiates in the Senate on the corporate side: $50 billion for airlines; $150 billion for anyone Mnuchin wants, likely Boeing; $8 billion for cargo air carriers; and $150 billion for “other distressed businesses,” a category left notably undefined.
The plan all along was about allowing Mnuchin and his posse to set the terms of all aid, allowing the consolidation of power in the hands of a few.
CNBC is reporting that the hotel industry wants $150 billion. The restaurant industry wants $145 billion. The National Association of Manufacturers wants $1.4 trillion. The International Council of Shopping Centers wants a guarantee of up to $1 trillion. The American Hospital Association wants $100 billion.
A $46-billion emergency supplemental funding proposal the White House Budget Office submitted to Congress last week to battle the coronavirus outbreak has ballooned to $242 billion in the Senate amid frenzied negotiations.
The beer industry wants $5 billion. The candy industry wants $500 million. The retail industry, through the National Retail Federation, asked for direct, government-based loan program.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezo want “$5 billion in grants or loans to keep commercial space company employees on the job and launch facilities open.” They also want the IRS to give them cash for R&D tax credits.
“The bailout requests are mind-boggling,” said Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of advocacy group Better Markets. “And it’s going to be a matter of who’s going to win and who’s going to lose.”
Tucked away in the bazooka are speeding up of payments to defense contractors. Other Transaction Authority caps for the Pentagon will be lifted to shovel money to defense contractors without restrictions.
In an election year like this, every lobbyist in Washington, D.C. is descending on Capitol Hill to capitalize on the crisis. No doubt each is slyly implying that crisis dollars today ensure donation dollars and votes months down the road.
The $2 trillion stimulus hysteria is due in large part to ignorance and a lack of critical thinking in the face of the media onslaught deliberately designed to keep us terrorized. Everyone is using this for their own agendas, and no one wants to be seen as being weak on their coronavirus response. Much like the The Emperor’s New Clothes story, no one wants to be the first one to point it out. Except of course a few lone voices like Winter Watch. We call it like it is: a national bankruptcy and financial suicide.
The irony of this abject opportunism is that we actually see the light at the end of the tunnel on the treatment for Covid-19.
Read “New York Times Concocts Fake News Stories to Dispel Real Evidence of Covid-19 Treatment”
Important Update: They knew about hydroxychloroquine as effective treatment all along! Read “Chloroquine Known as Effective Against Coronavirus Since 2005″
Disregarding this instead, they’re going full ‘tard on the fear narrative, outdoing each other every 10 minutes to justify any policy action. Before you know it, the Fed will buy and own everything.
Winter Watch Takeaway
All of this is by design and well planned ahead of time.
Yes Virginia, this has been going on for a long, long time..
“Lincoln did not “foil” the bankers. He made the big ones even richer by creating a more centralized banking system. And why not? He had been a rich lawyer for the Illinois Central Railroad. The Illinois Central funded its operations through the sale of bonds. The entire industry did. Anything that threatened the bankers threatened Lincoln’s post-Presidential career.
As economic historian Thomas DiLorenzo points out,
By 1860 Lincoln was the most prominent attorney/lobbyist the railroad industry had. He was so prominent that the New York financier Erastus Corning offered him the job of general counsel of the New York Central Railroad at a salary of $10,000 a year, an incredible sum at the time. Lincoln turned down the offer after agonizing over it.
As soon as he was elected President, he pressured Congress to pass a law for the government to subsidize the westward expansion of the railroads. He specified that the eastern terminus for the Union Pacific Railroad be Council Bluffs, Iowa. Lincoln had bought land in Council Bluffs several years earlier.”
https://www.garynorth.com/public/6875.cfm
The Rothschilds put Lincoln in the White House by means of the rigged election of 1860, and thus catalyzed the Civil War. He had previously been considered an unelectable radical. By splitting the Democratic party, creating a Constitutional Union party out of whole cloth, withdrawing South Carolina from the national vote, creating a Republican thug army, the Wide Awakes, and a general spree of vote buying and wholesale corruption, they managed to get Lincoln 38% of the vote and the presidency. The symbol of the Wide Awakes? the All Seeing Eye.
And, of course, Hollywood, AMC Theaters, Big Music, Big Publishing…the entire entertainment industry including sports–imagine NFL owners wanting bailouts if the lock down lasts until August or September!–will want their bailouts as well. https://www.rt.com/op-ed/483575-coronavirus-hollywood-best-thing/
Isn’t giving every one a 1200 dollar check socialism? “We will never have socialism in this country.” (DJT) or some such hooey. He borrows money on our behalf and acts like it’s the United States governments’. 1200 dollars will only make the line at the liquor store longer, and the banksters richer, of course.
One last party in the USA? This Cash Bonanza is what the Big Swinging D!kks should have done in 1929? If the party will be over soon, then currency deflation and gold confiscation, like a bad Hollywood remake, will happen again, when we are all out of ideas!
The Holocaust and the WHO Coronavirus Public Health Emergency …
Haaretz : The first Holocaust Remembrance Day
https://www.haaretz.com/the-history-of-holocaust-remembrance-day-1.5246317
The first Holocaust Remembrance Day took place on December 28th, 1949, a year-and-a-half after Israel’s independence.
Wikipedia : On 30 January, the WHO declared the outbreak to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.[258]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic
*
From The first Holocaust Remembrance Day on December 28, 1949
to the WHO Declaration of the coronavirus global health emergency on January 30, 2020
= 666 months, 666 weeks, 666 days
https://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadded.html?d1=28&m1=12&y1=1949&type=add&ay=&am=666&aw=666&ad=666&rec=
MG