DeLauro And The Recession At The End Of Connecticut’s Dark Tunnel

Eventually, necessary information trickles up to Connecticut’s left of center media.

On April 23, days after Governor Ned Lamont announced a date positive for the partial re-opening of Connecticut’s shuttered economy in June, CTMirror ran a story titled “Coronavirus is breaking the food supply chain.” But Coronavirus is doing no such thing. The supply chain has been broken by the very first, intentional national recession. And the national recession has been caused by businesses shuttered by politicians who have settled upon the shuttering of businesses as a way to contain Coronavirus.

Not every nation has done this. In Sweden, children under the age of 14 are permitted to attend school on the grounds that lethality within that grouping is so minimal as to be unnoticeable. While it is true that children of that age may unknowingly carry the virus, monitoring in open schools is much more efficient than in Connecticut, let us say, where affected children may pass the virus on to their sequestered parents or older siblings. And transference is more likely in Connecticut, let us say, where personal doctor visits have been severely restricted, even to people whose continued health depends upon close personal monitoring.

And, in any case, rational people reason, the politically induced recession must end sometime. At that point, one must confront the same paralyzing fear that the virus may re-erupt.

This CTMirror piece presents a "which comes first, the chicken or the egg" conundrum. Are shortages in the supply chain due to a lack of supply or a lack of demand? Most rational people will reason that any break in the supply chain will have been caused by a demand constriction. What has caused the lack of demand? Answer: an artificial, political policy -- near universal shutdowns in the face of the Coronavirus infestation, about which we know little to nothing -- has caused constricted demand.

If you shut schools, you shutter school cafeterias. If you shut down restaurants, you reduce the demand for farm produce. If you shut down large businesses, the shutdown will adversely affect smaller businesses, including the nearby pizza shop. This is not supply side shortage. There was nothing wrong with the supply chain before that chain was broken by political policies. If by means of the only politically caused recession in US history, you reduce demand and businesses toss excess food or go out of business altogether, of course the supply chain will be interrupted.

Connecticut – meaning all the people in Connecticut, working or not – are even now affected by our politically induced recession. And, of course, the poor among us always receive the first blow to the social solar plexus. But we always knew this:

Them that's Got shall get
Them that's not shall lose
So the Bible says
And it still is news

Social inequities in our society do, and should, wound our consciences. “God Bless the Child” was written by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr. in 1939, as the Great Depression was winding down. World War II finally dispatched the depression – because the war spurred the greatest business expansion in US history; plentiful jobs are to recessions and depressions what holy water is to the Devil. “A rising tide,” President John Kennedy said, “lifts ALL the boats” -- most mercifully those of the poor. Recessions verging on depressions lower all the boats. It is true, as the Bible says, we will always have the poor with us. But here in the United States, under a free market system offering a ladder out of poverty, the poor are not always the SAME poor. Under autocratic socialism of the sort peddled by US leftists, the borders of poverty are enlarged along with the powers of the socialist state, which keeps the SAME poor in poverty as wards of savior politicians.

US Representative Rosa DeLauro is given more than a bit part in the CTMirror story. For DeLauro, the chief issue has nothing to do with dangers posed by a politically caused recession to our food supply chain. “The issue for us in U.S. at the moment,” a “frustrated” DeLauro told the CTMirror reporter, “is we have an abundant food supply… What are the logistics of how you can prevent people from going hungry? We need this on such a massive scale that only the full weight of federal government can solve this.” DeLauro, we are reminded, “has fought in support of food access, safety and funding for decades.”

Among distributors of food for the poor in Connecticut are Christian churches, all but shuttered by a highly political response to Coronavirus. But DeLauro seems hardly to have noticed the dislocations caused by the ONLY POLITICALLY INDUCED RECESSION IN US HISTORY, an oversight on a par with failing to notice China’s Trojan Horse trades to Connecticut and the nation: 1) China gave us Coronavirus, and we gave them manufacturing jobs in return for products made by low cost labor. The exportation of manufacturing from the United States to China fairly ended our World War ll economic surge, the most explosive business expansion US history.