Lies

In the midst of a nice LA Progressive article about Trump's lies, the author quotes Hannah Arendt:

Writing about 50 years ago, the German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote:

"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end, you get not only one lie—a lie that you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such people, you can then do what you please."

"She wrote that as a German Jew who had escaped the Holocaust and made it to America, obviously, she was reflecting on how the Nazis had managed to take control of Germany, not by convincing people to believe their propaganda and their lies, but by leaving them bereft of a willingness to believe anything."

Personally, I'd add that the worst consequence of lies, really anywhere, is that the liar starts to believe his/her own bullshit. Then all that remains is delusional thinking--not a good way to guide public policy, or one's personal life strategy. Of course that is the cynical object of many Trump fans: destruction of the political system as it crazily motors off a cliff. That means Trumps "negatives" are all positives if he's simply a cluster munition aimed at D.C.

John Kenneth Galbraith was right: “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

County Supervisor Frost Supports Prop 36 and Requests Even More Incarceration,

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

County Supervisor Frost's latest newsletter touts her support for Proposition 36 - a measure that rolls back recent attempts to diminish our reliance on prisons to prevent crime, namely Props 47 and 57. Ms. Frost says "Our community has been increasingly troubled by crimes...over the past decade," [emphasis added] and she cites the "drug-addicted homeless...and rampant retail thefts." 

Her description of crime is the opposite of true.

As the population has aged, crime has steadily declined since its peak in the '80s. There is no massive surge in 2011 when Jerry Brown shifted felons from state prisons to local jails, or in 2014 when Prop 47 passed.

Incidentally, a recent Los Angeles survey of homelessness discloses the real culprit for the majority of the unhoused: rents have been rising faster than incomes. Where's Ms. Frost's support for rent control?

In "October of 2022, journalist Heather Vogell at ProPublica published a story on rising rent prices, which were spiking as the country opened back up after the Covid shutdowns. But Vogell’s investigative piece was not about Covid, it was how one algorithm of a single software firm - a private equity owned corporation called RealPage - was behind the increases. 'I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,' she reported one executive of the corporation telling clients." (from here)

In other words, illegal price fixing is behind rent increases. Where's the Frost comment about that?

Even now, with 5% of the world's population, the US has 25% of its prisoners. We need bigger jails like a hole in the head. Police spending is what has surged, not crime. It's currently 70% of the County's budget, and Ms. Frost has been voting to spend scarce County resources to build an even bigger jail--one that costs nearly a billion dollars. We may have lots of potholes in county roads, but we can console ourselves that our jail is bigger.

Hollywood says the cops almost always get the bad guys, but how are police/courts/jails at solving crimes in reality? In California, despite increased spending, they solved less than 14% of reported crime in 2022. 

What actually prevents crime? Better social safety nets. No medical bankruptcies making people desperate. Affordable housing--something Richard Nixon stopped the Feds from building in the '70s. 

 Given her record on the Sacramento Board of  Supervisors Ms. Frost's support of Prop 36 is no big surprise. By her lights, police, courts and jails are the smart response to crime. And that's true if 14% is your idea of an excellent outcome.

Update: "However, research overwhelmingly shows that criminalizing homelessness perpetuates the problem. It creates a cycle of arrest, incarceration and release, without addressing root causes, such as economic inequality, inadequate mental health and addiction services and a lack of affordable housing." (from here)

Medical Advice

 Seen on X/Twitter:

If your doctor prescribes medication without first asking about
-your diet
-your sleep
-your exercise routine
-your water consumption
-whether you have any structure issues &
-the stress in your life
Then you don't have a doctor, you have a drug dealer.

Meanwhile:

Are things 'back to normal'?
Hmm. pic.twitter.com/ttQcGMji4b

— tern (@1goodtern) September 24, 2024

And incredibly!...

Excellent speech by dr. Marty Makary:
"I'm trained in gastrointestinal surgery. My group at Johns Hopkins does more pancreatic cancer surgery than any hospital in the United States. But at no point in the last 20 years has anyone stopped to ask, why has pancreatic cancer doubled… pic.twitter.com/W3DefjkK3b

— Camus (@newstart_2024) September 24, 2024

And...

Diet-Related Diseases Are the No. 1 Cause of Death in the US – Yet Many Doctors Receive Little to No Nutrition Education in Med School

 

 

 
...thanks again to Naked Capitalism

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

 Missouri executes a man whose prosecutor requested they not.

Excerpt:"Missouri’s execution of Williams puts the U.S. one step closer to a grim milestone: With four states slated to conduct four executions by the end of this week, the country will soon reach its 1,600th execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. While public support for capital punishment continues to decline and juries are voting far less to impose capital punishment, officials in states like Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma continue to schedule executions — including in cases like Williams, where questions about the underlying conviction and its fairness persist — Democrats scrubbed their long-standing goal of ending capital punishment from their platform this year. To date, 200 people on death row have been exonerated: a rate of 1 exoneration for every 8 executions carried out.

"In the days leading up to Williams’s execution, more than 1 million people contacted Parson’s office asking that he spare Williams’s life, and billionaire abolitionist Richard Branson took out a full-page ad in the Kansas City Star asking readers to do the same. In denying to offer clemency, Parson criticized the media as biased and said that nothing from the 'real facts' of the case lead him to believe Williams was innocent"

True internationally, too:

Militarism Abuse Disorder

Excerpt: "The Peter G. Peterson Foundation estimates that, in 2023, the United States of America spent $142 billion buying weapons systems and another $122 billion on the research and development of future weaponry and other militarized equipment. And keep in mind that those big numbers represent only a small fraction of any Pentagon budget, the latest of which the Pentagon’s proposing to be $849.8 billion for 2025 — and that’s just one year (and not all of what passes for “national defense” spending either). A recent analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University calculated that, since September 11, 2001, the United States has used an estimated $8 trillion-plus just for its post-9/11 wars. Talk about addiction! It makes me pretty MAD, if I’m being honest with you!"

And...

Former MI5 Agent Annie Machon says Israeli intelligence service Mossad bombed their own embassy in London in 1994

They then stitched up two prominent Palestinian activists to take the blame

Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh received 20 year sentences for a crime they didn't commit pic.twitter.com/IiCZXYQ5fX

— Khalissee (@Kahlissee) September 24, 2024

Trump Derangement Syndrome

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

The interesting question is not "Who is going to win?" it's "Why is it even close?"

My friends in the Democratic Party have not been shy in expressing their distress about Trump, or in making fun of his many foibles. But the rush to denigrate Trump entirely misses the point. He's an agent of destruction, and the more chaotic and destructive the better. 

Yes, this is a tantrum in response to Democratic malfeasance, not a sensible public policy solultion, but as one Australian observed "You Yanks don't consult the wisdom of democracy; you enable mobs." Americans are emotional about their politics. 

What are people dissatisfied with? First, Trump is the anti-Obama in just about every respect. What's wrong with Obama? Not only did he not prosecute the war crimes of Bush/Cheney, he almost entirely ignored what is arguably the largest theft in human history--the "Global Financial Crisis" (the GFC is the subprime/derivatives meltdown). 

Local Democratic loyalist Phil Angiledes conducted hearings about the GFC and even he expressed surprise at how little the Obama administration did. When Reagan/Bush 41 encountered what was then the largest bank scandal in US history--the Savings & Loans--their regulators reacted. They filed 30,000+ referrals for criminal prosecutions, and prosecuted 1200+ cases with a 90% conviction rate. They got big fish, too--Mike Milken and Charles Keating among them. 

The GFC was 70 times larger than the Savings & Loans. So..how many referrals for criminal prosecution from the Obama regulators? Zero!

The GFC included 8 - 10 million fraudulent loan foreclosures that tanked the economy. Obama's response was to bail out Wall Street with the Federal Reserve extending, by its own audit's estimate, $16 - $29 trillion in credit to the same financial sector that crashed the economy. For only $9 trillion the Fed could have paid off everyone's mortgage. 

No one went to jail, no one had to repay their bonuses. The typical story was the malefactor paid a fine that was dimes on the dollar of their loot. This is why ordinary people in Frank Luntz's focus groups during the Obama administration wept with anger and frustration--reportedly the first time Luntz saw that.

You might also see this (something I'd never thought of before): Hypnotic suggestion.

Update: An Anthropologist suggests five reasons peoplel support Trump.

Do Prisons Prevent Crime....really!? (the Comments edition)

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

A previously published editorial of mine got some comments that are startling, if only because one commenter who read the article, simply did not comprehend the argument. It made no difference in his thinking.

Here are some comments:


Keith Olsen says:
September 14, 2024 at 8:03 am


“DO PRISONS PREVENT CRIME?”

Short answer is YES,
Think of all the crimes that don’t get committed because people don’t want to end up in prisons.



---

Another commenter answered Keith:

 Adam Eran says:
September 15, 2024 at 3:19 pm Keith, you’re under the impression that fear is the sole human motivation. It’s a powerful one, I’ll grant you, but hardly the only one. The lower crime rates that accompany lower incarceration rates in France and Canada are evidence to the contrary. There’s not nearly as much incarceration, yet crime is lower than the seven-times-higher incarceration US. How is that possible? The studies that find crime diminishes when people are treated better also contradict your conclusion. One example not mentioned in the article: the Swiss legalized opiates, including heroin, distributing the drug at reasonable prices from (legal) clinics. Crime declined 85% around the clinics. So both fear (being busted for opiates) and crime diminished. There are too many examples like this to take your hasty conclusion seriously.

The Ridiculous Retirement Crisis

Re the 9/11/24 Sacramento Bee Op Ed title: Why aren't we talking about America's retirement crisis*
© Mark Dempsey

What’s the retirement crisis? Why we’re running out of money! And everyone knows dollars grow on billionaires. That’s why a country that makes its own currency must borrow from its population! Don’t you know this? Okay, sarcasm doesn’t become me, but you get the point. All of the hand wringing about Social Security running out of money is baloney…heck, it’s baloney squared.

We don’t even print most dollars any more–they exist as electronic entries in the Federal Reserve’s computers. The Fed (for short) is the US central bank, and to make a dollar, a technician sits at a special computer terminal and types a “one.” He’s just made a dollar. Add three zeros, and he’s made a thousand, three more zeros and he’s made a million… et cetera. We’ll run out of dollars when the Bureau of Weights and Measures runs out of inches. Never. I’m not saying we need to make infinite dollars, but worrying about running out is ridiculous.

The worry that Social Security taxes (FICA) won’t keep up with the demand for Social Security payouts is equally baloney. The government is the only fiscally unconstrained player in the economy. It would be like a household, if households made dollars….but they don’t. Taxes create the demand for dollars, they do not supply the creator of dollars with dollars it needs. (See former Fed governor Beardsley Ruml’s paper “Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete” … from 1945)

The Bee's editorial talks as though national “debt” is a problem we have to solve by cutting those programs–a talking point that originates with a fundamental misunderstanding of double-entry bookkeeping. Your mortgage may be your liability, but to the people collecting the payments, it’s an asset. Your bank account is your asset, but the bank’s liability. You could march down to the bank and demand it reduce its debt, but all they would do is reduce the size of your account. Not very sensible.

National “debt” includes the dollars in your wallet. They are “Federal Reserve Notes” (“note” is legalese for an IOU). Andrew Jackson’s administration eliminated national debt entirely in 1835. That meant there was no public currency. People did their business with specie (monetized gold) and over 7,000 varieties of private bank notes, of varying reliability. It was a nightmare. After people’s savings got sucked out of the economy, there was a massive wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures called the Panic of 1837. In fact, whenever there’s been a significant reduction of national debt the economy tanks…100% of the time following such fits of “fiscal responsibility™.”

Why aren’t we talking about America’s retirement crisis? Because it’s as real as the monster under the bed…useful to scare the children, but certainly not real.

*(authors: Christopher D. Cook is a senior writer at the New School for Social Research. Teresa Ghilarducci is professor of economics and director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School, and author of "Work, Retire, Repeat.")


Update: The British debunk of the same American false anxiety: