Lounging Around the House - for Victory!

Here’s the deal. The closest analogy to the Plague Year is World War 2.

Except instead of getting drafted or building Liberty ships and B-24s that huge part of the public that was "the war effort" in the Forties in the Twenties is going to have to close their shops, lose their jobs, and stay the fuck home.

Now...B-24s were a dead loss to the public weal. Made nobody, everybody, every single American absolutely zero in terms of building the gross domestic product. They were crucially important for the job at hand - winning the war - but basically nothing but a huge metal hole in the sky into which the government threw money.

So the U.S. government’s job right now - right now, right fucking now - is to treat every restaurant the way it treated Consolidated in 1944, and treat every laid-off busboy and bookstore clerk like it treated a welder at Kaiser shipyards and turret lathe operator at Springfield Armory.

Pay them. They’re fighting a war. Pay them for their fight. Pay them for their sacrifices.

That means, no, Republicans, goddamnit, you don't get a goddamn payroll tax cut. That pays for Grandma and Grandpa to stay in their home and not be out under a fucking bridge catching the fucking plague. No, Trump, fuck no, you don't get a massive bailout for the damn fracking outfits or your CEO buddies. They can borrow at zero interest using their assets for collateral.

No, this goes to the troops; the baristas and librarians and truck drivers and (ahem) geologists who are idled in order to prevent this plague from wrecking the economy by getting people tossed out of their homes, gutting their savings, and destroying their lives.

Pay them...or this epidemic will wreck this country as thoroughly as any Nazi could have.

(And don't even get me started about how we're not but we should be cranking out medical supplies - everything from masks and gloves to ICU beds and ventilators - like Sherman tanks and B-24s thundering off the assembly lines in 1944.

The complete and utter clusterfuck that has been the Fraudulency Adminstration's "response" on this one would be legitimate cause for summary execution in any sane polity.)

Update 3/18 p.m.: Trump says he's going to do what he should have done several weeks ago and what I ranted about just above; activate national-defense-level production of essential medical materials under the authority of the "Defense Production Act". So the orange monkey gets "credit" for finally not flinging his poop, I guess, since that seems to be the low bar set for this dingus.

Mind you, this is Trump, so the clueless chucklefuck and his minions have no idea what to DO with this authority:

"Trump declined to say how, precisely, the Defense Production Act would be used and he suggested that the administration is still deciding. He said the administration had “targets” for equipment it wanted but did not say what those targets were."

Christ, what a maroon.

Update 3/20: So here we are, two days after I posted the first update...and Emperor Dumbfuckius Maximus still hasn't actually begun to use the DPA to, y'know, actually produce anything useful. States are still scrambling to find medical necessities like masks and ventilators. My guess? He and his gang can't figure out a way to make a profit out of it. They know if they order their CEO buddy at PharmaCorp to start cranking out masks, and their buddy follows his instincts (which will be to charge $6.95 for a mask that costs fifty cents to produce) they'll get found out and hammered for price gouging (which, in their minds, is just "being smart"; chiseling the suckers while they can which is, y'know, how it works...).

And the rest of the GOP just doesn't want to do anything to suggest that government isn't the problem.

So, yeah...we're still kinda fucked.

Update 3/24: Oh, for fuck's sake!

"From the start, the administration* has treated the DPA as though it were some sort of Damoclean weapon by which it can force compliance from American industries. "Watch out, Ford. Make them ventilators or the DPA’ll gitcha!” This is because, for politicians like Pence, a product of a Republican Party that married itself to supply-side snake oil and disdain for self-government, it is inconceivable to imagine that the federal government’s demanding that industries respond to a worldwide crisis cannot be more effective and efficient than waiting for those corporations to engage their civic consciences to do so. And they will adhere to that faith over your grandmother’s dead body."

These fucking people.

Honestly.

If I was a company commander in the 3rd US Infantry, I swear to God; I'd go through this White House and Senate like a dose of fucking salts. And after every last one of them; Dimwit Donnie and Moscow Mitch and Javanka and all the other rats had been put up against the wall I'd then surrender myself, plead guilty at the court-martial, and happily spend the rest of my natural life as the oldest private E-1 in Leavenworth knowing I had done a damn fine piece of work.