Last Call For The Boomers Pack It Up

One of the big reasons why unemployment is so low is that Covid deaths have left close to a half-million people being removed from the workforce. But as tragic and as awful as that is, the real workforce reductions in America's worker pool is coming from the fact the oldest Boomers turned 75 in 2020 and that they are starting to retire by the millions.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell struck a particularly somber note at his press conference earlier this week when he mentioned that one reason the labor market is so tight right now is that many workers died from COVID-19.

The big picture: Economists have theorized for a while about the impact of COVID deaths on the labor market. Now, research has started to emerge and key public figures like Powell are starting to talk about it explicitly."Close to a half a million who would have been working ... died from COVID," Powell said while talking about the U.S. labor shortage.

Go deeper: In a footnote to a speech he gave on Nov. 30, Powell estimates that 400,000 working-age Americans died in excess of what was anticipated pre-pandemic.

State of play: Compared to pre-pandemic projections, there are around 3.5 million people effectively missing from the American workforce, as Powell explained in that speech at the Brookings Institution.This number includes older workers who left the labor force earlier than expected. "These excess retirements might now account for more than 2 million of the ... shortfall," he said.

The other 1.5 million comes from a decline in immigration and "a surge in deaths." Overall, 1.09 million Americans lost their lives to COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins data.

Our thought bubble: The role these deaths play in the economy often gets overlooked, possibly because it's so devastating to contemplate.But when considering the state of the U.S. workplace, it's worth remembering that many Americans lost colleagues, friends and loved ones over the past few years. It's a toll that will take many years to understand and lifetimes to grieve.

 

With hundreds of thousands of Americans retiring every month, no wonder Republicans want to dismantle the economy and Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs, and no wonder they want Covid precautions to end. 

Dead Boomers don't collect benefits.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

We're at the point where House Republicans are proudly displaying symbols widely adopted by white supremacists at their Capitol offices in a post-January 6th terrorist insurrection America, in full support of  the people who tried to overthrow the government, and frankly they no longer care about or fear the consequences of doing so.

U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman has a Christian nationalist flag connected to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol displayed outside his congressional office.

On Friday morning, Grothman posted a picture of the flag — which shows an image of a pine tree and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven” on a white background — to his Twitter account with a message inviting people to visit him in the Longworth House Office Building.

“With the 118th Congress underway, the People’s House has finally reopened to visitors,” Grothman wrote. “If you’re in Washington DC, I encourage you to stop by my office and say hello!” A white flag with a pine tree and the phrase “Appeal to Heaven” is visible in the photo, placed closer to the door than the U.S. and Wisconsin state flags.

Grothman’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the decision to display the flag, but experts say it has ties to a sect of Christian nationalism that was deeply connected to the planning of the Jan. 6 riot. Christian nationalism is a belief that Christians must fight to take back America from non-Christians.

Matt Taylor, Protestant scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, tells the Wisconsin Examiner there were possibly hundreds of Appeal to Heaven flags flying on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6 and at least two documented instances in which the flags were flown by rioters who breached the building that day.

The Appeal to Heaven flag, which was designed during the American Revolution and used by the Massachusetts Navy, is associated with George Washington because he commissioned a number of ships that flew the flag. The phrase is taken from the philosopher John Locke and is meant to symbolize citizens’ right to armed revolution against tyranny.

“It’s a reference to John Locke, saying human beings can appeal to government but at some point you have to appeal to heaven, you have to have a revolution and fight it out,” Taylor says. “There’s a revolutionary, anti-democratic dimension to it. They’re saying ‘democracy isn’t working so we have to appeal to heaven for God’s will to be done.’”

Taylor’s research has found that a group of Christian leaders heavily involved in the planning of Jan. 6 have adopted the flag as a symbol of their beliefs.

The flag has also been displayed in a number of state capitol buildings, including Arizona, Missouri and Illinois. Former Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano appears to have a particular fondness for the flag, having made a number of television and public appearances with the flag nearby.

“The prevalence of the Pine Tree flag could be viewed as a dog-whistle signaling kinship between these far-right and white supremacist movements and the Christian Nationalist and Christian Dominionist movements,” Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism reported in 2021.

Grothman knows exactly what he's doing, and he knows exactly who he's sending a message to, and he'll continue to do it until he can no longer get away with it.

Brazil arrested thousands of their insurrectionists.

America elected theirs to run the House.

Phantasma Santos, Con't

Professional con man and Republican Congressman (but I repeat myself) George Santos is discovering the hard way that when your entire life is a juicy lie and that the GOP crime family had dirt on you, there's no longer a reason for the press to stop digging.

 

In late 2021, as he prepared to make a second run for a suburban New York City House seat, George Santos gave permission for his campaign to commission a routine background study on him.

Campaigns frequently rely on this kind of research, known as vulnerability studies, to identify anything problematic that an opponent might seize on. But when the report came back on Mr. Santos, the findings by a Washington research firm were far more startling, suggesting a pattern of deception that cut to the heart of the image he had cultivated as a wealthy financier.

Some of Mr. Santos’s own vendors were so alarmed after seeing the study in late November 2021 that they urged him to drop out of the race, and warned that he could risk public humiliation by continuing. When Mr. Santos disputed key findings and vowed to continue running, members of the campaign team quit, according to three of the four people The New York Times spoke to with knowledge of the study.

The episode, which has not been previously reported, is the most explicit evidence to date that a small circle of well-connected Republican campaign professionals had indications far earlier than the public that Mr. Santos was spinning an elaborate web of deceits, and that the candidate himself had been warned about just how vulnerable those lies were to unraveling.

Fraudulent academic degrees. Involvement in a firm accused of a Ponzi scheme. Multiple evictions and a suspended driver’s license. All of it was in the report, which also said that Mr. Santos, who is openly gay, had been married to a woman. The report did not offer conclusive details, but some people briefed on the findings wondered whether the marriage was done for immigration purposes.

It remains unclear who else, if anyone, learned about the background study’s contents at the time, or if the information made its way to party leaders in New York or Washington. Mr. Santos, 34, managed to keep almost all of it from the public until after he was elected, when an investigation by The Times independently unearthed the problematic claims documented by researchers and others that they missed.

After The Times sent a detailed list of questions for this story, a lawyer for Mr. Santos, Joe Murray, said “it would be inappropriate to respond due to ongoing investigations.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Santos’s congressional office did not respond to a similar request for comment.

Mr. Santos himself has admitted to some fabrications, but insists he was merely embellishing his qualifications. He has vowed to serve out a two-year term in Congress. State, local and federal prosecutors are now investigating his activity.

So it's no longer an issue of whether or not Kevin McCarthy and the crooks, thieves, and grifters will protect their fellow criminal George Santos, it's all about why they have to do so in order to save their own hides.

They knew.

The existence of the vulnerability study underscores one of the most vexing questions still surrounding the strange saga of George Santos: How did the gate-keeping system of American politics — Republican leaders, adversarial Democrats and the prying media — allow a fabulist who boasted about phantom mansions and a fake résumé get away with his con for so long?

Interviews with more than two dozen associates, adversaries and donors, as well as contemporaneous communications and other documents reviewed by The Times, show that Mr. Santos inspired no shortage of suspicion during his 2022 campaign, including in the upper echelons of his own party.

Well-connected supporters suspected him of lying and demanded to see his résumé. Another former campaign vendor warned a state party official about what he believed were questionable business practices. And the head of the main House Republican super PAC told some lawmakers and donors that he believed Mr. Santos’s story did not add up.

But in each case, rather than denounce Mr. Santos publicly, the Republicans looked the other way. They neglected to get the attention of more powerful leaders or to piece together shards of doubt about him, and allowed him to run unopposed in the 2022 primary. Some assumed that Mr. Santos’s falsehoods were garden variety political embellishments; others thought Democrats would do their dirty work for them and Mr. Santos would be exposed in the heat of a general election campaign.

 

"We ran a crook, but it's the Dems' fault they didn't find out!"

 

Sure, Jan.