Day: May 10, 2020

Briefings

Background Briefing: May 10, 2020

On By gram

 

The Attorney General Has Branded Law Enforcement the Enemy of the People

As the coronavirus reaches into the White House with Vice President Pence’s press secretary testing positive, what President Obama calls “a chaotic disasters” worsens as the country’s top health officials, Dr. Fauci and the heads of the CDC and FDA, who have been sidelined for two weeks, are now in quarantine. This means as the country opens up, politicians are in charge of dealing with the most devastating health crisis in a century with Trump telling a room packed full of Republican lawmakers not wearing masks, that testing and vaccines don’t work and that the virus will soon just go away. Meanwhile the brains behind the buffoons on this ship of fools, AG Barr, is setting the table for the Russians to reelect Trump by dropping the charges against General Flynn while burying the un-redacted Mueller Report at the Supreme Court as Barr builds cases against the FBI investigators and DOJ prosecutors who have been criminalized as operatives of the “deep state”. Bill Yeomans, a Professor of Law at Columbia Law School who served for 26 years in the Department of Justice in a series of management positions including Acting Assistant Attorney General, joins us. We will discuss how as Obama remarked, “the rule of law is at risk” because Barr has made the Alex Jones – Q-Anon extremist view branding law enforcement as the enemy of the people, official U.S. policy.

 

Unemployment Numbers Are Worse Than the 14.7% Announced Friday

Then we look into the outrageous contrast between the alacrity with which money flies out the door to bail out Wall Street and corporate America with trillions from the Fed made available at the speed of a keystroke on a computer, while 50% of the almost 34 million unemployed have yet to receive unemployment benefits eight weeks later as they run out of money and food. Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst for social insurance at the National Employment Law Project who worked for the Obama Department of Labor and for Senator Tom Harkin and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, joins us to discuss an unemployment rate worse since the depression at 14.7% which was counted in the second week of April so the actual numbers now are much worse.

The Underreported Bailout of the $4.7 Trillion Money Market Funds

Then finally we look into how the Money Market Fund Industry on Wall Street, now at $4.7 trillion but not insured like the banks are through the FDIC, is being bailed out because of a regulatory failure of the Trump era SEC which as been captured along with the Financial Stability Oversight Council. Dennis Kelleher, the President and CEO of Better Markets Inc., a Wall Street watchdog known as “a persistent thorn in the side of Wall Street”, joins us to discuss how Money Market Funds are able to reap profits in good times, but whenever a crisis hits, the U.S. taxpayer covers their losses.