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Kristalina Georgieva is the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. In the IMF’s blog last year, she stated: “Central bank independence is critical to winning the fight against inflation and achieving stable long-term economic growth.” In stark contrast to this point of view, President Donald Trump has been relentlessly attacking the independence of the Federal Reserve for several years, calling for Chairman Powell to resign and Governor Cook to be fired. He wants to control the Fed’s decision-making and the national economy.
Many economists believe that destabilizing the Fed will drive up long term interest rates, making payments on the US’ $30 trillion national debt to take up even more federal expenditures and increasing the debt further. It’s also worrying that arbitrarily lowering short term interest rates will probably increase inflation.
Awareness of these matters led me to watch the financial news station, CNBC, Thursday, 8/28, at 4PM after the stock market closed. The commentators focused on these sorts of concerns, and then said something that stuck in my mind: “The bond market isn’t paying attention. People ought to be really focused on these forces, and maybe they will be someday. But, at the moment, nobody seems to care.” (paraphrase)
So, some people are uninformed and apathetic about Trump’s attempts to pack the Fed. What the heck does that have to do with Newburyport?!
Well, it turns out that, if I’m reading him right, Dave Rogers, editor of the Newburyport Daily News, is a fan of the kind of apathy that the CNBC crew was describing.
The Townie has already referenced Rogers’ seeming astonishment at the heat generated by Mayor Reardon’s attempt to reappoint Donna Drelick to lead the city’s Human Resource department. Rogers referred to people like me who pointed out that Ms. Drelick made some serious mistakes in her tenure as one of “the 8 percent of residents who have enough free time on their hands to follow local politics intensely.”
Who knew that being an active citizen is a sign of not having enough productive things to do?!
Not paying close attention to a situational context doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening in it. A sample of matters that are worth caring about might include:
- Impending lawsuits for unjustified dismissal from Newburyport’s workforce,
- Not attending to a regional infrastructure that isn’t dealing with unmanaged sewage flows from up river
- The prospectively cataclysmic and completely predictable impact that climate change is having and will have on Newburyport
- How the 14% of the city’s population that is older than 65 will be housed and cared for over the next 25 years
These are not small potato items.
As America limps toward the 250th anniversary of its founding, it’s worth remembering that the men and women who fought, died and risked everything they had to set up our democratic system up were as intensively engaged as one can possibly be, including Newburyporters like Samuel Nelson and Jonathan Norton, who were killed in action during the Battle of Bunker Hill.
In an era where the President of the United States refers to members of the military as “suckers and losers” and Epstein and Maxwell’s victims are dismissed as “Democrat hoaxers,” it is not surprising to see vigorous engagement in political affairs at any level disparaged. Powerful people who control so much don’t want average citizens and others to pay close attention.
Over and over again, we’ve seen that complex systems can fail miserably when the folks who are most affected are busy doing other things. It can happen here. Let’s not let it.
Michael Sales
Newburyport resident
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