Markets Melt Down. Congress Can Stop It. If We Make Them.

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked man rules, the people groan. Proverbs 29:2

Markets are melting down all over the globe. Instead of reciting numbers, I’m going to show you a screenshot I took this morning.

As my Daddy would have said, “Ain’t that a dandy?”

Trump has issued a demand that the fed lower interest rates because he’s destroyed the economy and wants them to bring it back to life for him. The problem with that is that Trump has not only fired literally thousands of workers and gutted our government’s ability to respond to any crisis of any sort, he’s also spoon fed the inflation beast with the tariffs he had already put in place before his “Liberation Day” atomic blast of tariffs.

If the fed lowers rates, it will be like pouring rocket fuel on inflation. It will go totally and completely out of control so that nothing and nobody can bring it back down without massive raises in interest rates to 20% or more and a long period of years of super inflation, high interest rates and no jobs.

That’s why the fed is not going to lower interest rates. Our billionaire president and a select few of his billionaire buddies with the inside track may make a killing out the fall of America, but the rest of us are going to suffer, and, if it really goes in, many of us will die. That is the truth nobody wants to say.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell said it all in dry economist’s language this morning in response to the economic mess Trump has made of our country in a couple of months. He said that if the fed lowered rates it would raise inflation and that the inflation might be “permanent.”

We’ve had high inflation in this country before. I lived through the 80s with 20% interest rates. But we have never suffered hyper inflation like what hit Germany after World War I. We’ve never seen the day when a sack of potatoes cost $1000, and you could cash out your 401k and not even be able to buy a week’s worth of groceries.

We have seen the Great Depression. Our parents and grandparents stood in bread lines, and some of their cousins and siblings died from malnutrition and starvation. The programs Franklin Roosevelt put in place such as Social Security, FDIC, stock market regulations, and Unemployment Compensation have kept us out of a repeat of that catastrophe for a hundred years.

No matter what the market did, we came through because these programs kept a steady flow of money into our economy, prevented a mass banking failure and stopped people from losing everything and starving.

Now, we’re dismantling those programs. And at the same time, that crazy old man we made the mistake of putting in the White House is deliberately knee-capping our economy.

There is a bright side to this. If Republicans in Congress will remove their heads from Trump’s backside and join with Democrats to protect this country by doing their jobs, Congress can stop this. They can take back the power which the Constitution gave them to control tariffs and deep-six this whole mess.

It would take a few weeks. They’d have to pass a binding resolution in both houses, which, if they’re serious, they could do in three or four days. Then, Trump could spend two weeks “thinking” before he vetoed it. And it would take a few days for Congress to get it back and override.

But they could do it.

Republicans have a majority of both houses of Congress. This mess is on them.

If the Republicans in Congress weren’t such a bunch of worthless weasels, they would have never let it get this far in the first place. But they can still turn around and act like American Senators and Representatives.

All it takes is for us to make them more afraid of us than they are of Elon’s billions and Trump’s besotted MAGA followers. Trump is a bully with a bully’s instinct for weakness. He doesn’t mess with those who are unafraid of him. But he clearly enjoys humiliating and castrating those who bend over for him.

If Republicans in Congress will just stop being Trump’s finger puppets and behave like Americans, they can give him a whole new outlook on life. They can make him start behaving like an American president instead of King Herod in the Bible or Caligula from the Roman Empire.

It’s up to We the People to send a message to these bozos in Congress to stop cosplaying at being Senators and Representatives and actually represent us for a change. They need to know that if they want to keep their jobs, they have to show us with real action — not speeches on right wing media —  that they give a care about America and about us.