A Memorial Day Note about Public-Spiritedness

My father, who volunteered for the Marines after Pearl Harbor, was on the first wave that landed on Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. He was lucky enough to get a non-fatal wound that the surgeons had just figured out how to repair, but he remained scarred by the experience, and was literally the most anti-war person I've ever known.

Later in life, he pursued a career in philanthropy, leading staff for Los Angeles area foundations that were established primarily as a tax dodge. Many did not have enough of an endowment to fund full-time staff, and as a consequence, their grant-making was haphazard, at best. Norton Simon hired my father to provide the staffing to evaluate the grants proposed to several foundations, so as a consequence, dad got to meet lots of the wealthy benefactors. One thing he said that I still remember: Most of these guys were born on third base, but they all want to act like they hit a triple.

More recently, I've tried to emulate at least a little of his public-spirited philanthropy with local (Sacramento) environmentalists. They face incredible odds in proposing local development practices be lower impact (see this post for a description). And they have limited success.

Nevertheless, the environmentalists soldier on...nibbling around the edges of what clearly needs to be dramantically transformed. Unfortunately, retired planners who were instrumental in building the high-impact development (sprawl) in the first place dominate most local environmental organizations opposing it.

Like the emperor in his new clothes, they have the option of saying "Oh thanks for pointing out my mistake...I'll go home and get dressed," or they could "grimly continue the parade." Most often they choose the second option.

Burned Australia Regenerates (time lapse)

REGENERATION: Timelapse footage captures bushland in the Australian state of New South Wales recovering after devastating wildfires in late 2019 and early 2020. https://t.co/dIvTIv28J0 pic.twitter.com/M2AobOCx2m

— ABC News (@ABC) May 22, 2020

Michael Pollan explains the food system's response to COVID-19

In nybooks.com. Excerpt: "The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform."

"The wages of sin are death..."

“but by the time taxes are taken out, it’s just sort of a tired feeling.”
~ Paula Poundstone

Steve Keen critiques conventional economics' evaluation of climate change.

...Let's just say conventional economics is not Steve's fave. He's outraged that minimizing the economic impacts, as the conventional economists do, will lead to a climate apocalypse.

What does an efffective COVID-19 response look like

Click the Tweet, then click "Show this thread" for the entire story. It's a reminder that government can do things well and effectively.

South Korea is open for business now with the preventive measures it describes. There are more cases of coronavirus in the White House than in all of South Korea.

This should remind us that public health is a systemic problem. Individual actions matter, but collective action matters most of all, despite all the libertarian claptrap we're fed daily.

As an American currently in South Korea, it’s very interesting to me the stark contrast of how different the two countries’ response to coronavirus is. I don’t think most Americans fully understand the lengths that South Korea has undergone, so I’ll try my best to explain.

— Michael Kim (@michaelvkim) May 9, 2020

Public Comment 5-14-20 / Ordinance No. STA 20-001

The following is the contents of an email sent the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors

boardclerk@saccounty.net

Public Comment 5-14-20 / Ordinance No. STA 20-001

(Please publicly read the following statement out loud into the record)

It's gratifying to read that the County is considering a half cent sales tax increase to improve roads and transit. I'd urge you to adopt this.

I know some oppose spending money on transit because it's so un-serviceable as currently configured in Sacramento County. Suburban sprawl densities are too low to provide enough riders within a walk of the stops, and the County's street design offers little or nothing in the way of pedestrian amenities. Sidewalks are often discontinuous, and adjacent to fast-flowing traffic. Given those circumstances, regional transit is designed-to-fail, and working as designed.




In the above photo of a transit stop at Kenneth & Greenback, no sidewalk connects the transit stop to any neighbors. Potential transit riders must stand on the gravel shoulder next to fast-flowing traffic without even the benefit of a curb to protect them from cars that might stray into the shoulder. I wish I could say this is uncommon, but unfortunately, it’s not.

It's unnecessary, too. About half a block away from the Kenneth and Greenback stop, there's an actual destination (a health club / medical office building) with a turnout where a bus could pull out of traffic, vertical curbs and wide sidewalks. Across the street from that health club is a retirement home and Winco supermarket that could provide riders and/or destinations for transit. But there's no transit stop at that location.

If Sacramento's transit were not designed to fail, like the above stop, it would likely be better used, and people would understand the need to fund it. In fact transit systems throughout the world, even in third world countries like Brazil and Bolivia, pay their own way and do not need subsidies like ours, when the design support exists. The low density and lack of pedestrian amenities makes failure the most likely option here, though.

Continued long commutes without the option of transit increase CO2 emissions. Fully used transit is cheaper too--about one eighth the cost per passenger mile of single-occupant autos. Add to that the fact that the fastest growing demographic in our population is adults older than 85. How eager are you to encounter them piloting their cars as you're driving down the road?

The consequences of the additional CO2 from those autos are not pretty, either:



There's nothing saying California couldn't have conflagrations like those pictured above in Australia. Heck we already burned Paradise, Calfornia to the ground thanks to the global-warming-fueled drought that made Australia's and our forests into tinder.

The County could remedy the above shortcomings of transit-unfriendly development by supporting more multi-family development in suburbs--like four- or eight-plexes instead of duplexes at the corners, even in low-density building, for example. The County could also encourage redeveloping commercial properties to include residences above or beside the stores. This could provide transit hubs if the pedestrian-friendly Complete Streets requirement for new development were included.

Redeveloping malls like this could revive failing commercial sites, and provide more affordable housing, while providing the transit customers that sprawl development so actively discourages with its low densities and poor pedestrian amenities. The owner of Arden Fair even mentioned such mixed use as a potential option for the future as he announced Nordstrom's closing in today's paper.

A reminder: the U.S. is "over-stored" with more commercial property than others, so is more vulnerable:



I'd also urge you to approve funding for a public bank. Roughly half of the cost of large infrastructure projects proposed with that sales tax increase goes for financing. There's no sense in sending all that money to Wall Street if we could recycle it locally.

There are many other uses for public financing, too. For example, Supervisor Frost has complained in her newsletter about how low Sacramento County's reserves are. A public bank could provide a line of credit that would enhance or supplant those reserves.

Finally, I'd urge the Supervisors to endorse the "split roll" proposal that will be on the November ballot. This would provide an additional $11 billion in annual tax revenue statewide by closing an egregious loophole in proposition 13.

The loophole says commercial property will only be reassessed if more than 50% of the property changes hands. So Michael Dell (of Dell Computers) can buy a Santa Monica hotel, split title between himself, his wife and a corporation he controls, and the sale does not update the property tax assessed to current values.

Throughout the state lots of properties have taken advantage of this loophole and are, in effect, still assessed at 1978 values, plus a modest inflation adjustment, even though price increases of real estate have far exceeded that adjustment.

This tax would not impair businesses either. If a new business wants to build its own facility, it would pay a higher property tax in the current setup. That setup is as likely to impair business as it is to support it.

I recently saw a political sign in my neighborhood that said it supported "Any Sensible Adult, 2020." I urge you to be those adults.

--Regards,
--Mark Dempsey
--Vice chair emeritus Rio Linda/Elverta Community Planning Advisory Council

Comparative Coronavirus...by nation

Well that’s a fascinating way to present it... pic.twitter.com/zwIFMyzGoN

— Scientists for EU (@Scientists4EU) May 3, 2020

Angels, the Rerun

(c) by Mark Dempsey

"If it weren't for lies, there wouldn't be any politics" - Will Rogers

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” ― Noam Chomsky

The civil discourse of the U.S. has been polluted with lies and misdirection since its inception, but never more than now. One of the latest attempts to limit debate is "Braver Angels"--the name is a variation of Abraham Lincoln's "Better Angels," to whom he appealed in his first inaugural speech. The civil war began three months after Lincoln's appeal.

Conservative christian billionaire Phillip Anschutz provided the initial funding for Braver Angels/Better Angels, and the organization now sponsors seminars and "debates" and supposedly is bipartisan, although I've been unable to find any trace of left-of-center organizations providing funding for them.

I've written about their seminars before, but not about the "debates" they sponsor. Their latest debate resolution:  "Is Socialism a Threat to Freedom?"--a trick questions like "Have you stopped beating your wife?"

Of course any government that regulates the population, never mind one that owns or regulates productive enterprises, is a "Threat to Freedom." The publicly-owned (socialist) enterprise known as  the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) provides electricity 30% cheaper than privately-owned PG&E. And PG&E management was bad enough that its executives had to consult with criminal attorneys since their negligence in maintaining their infrastructure caused serious fires in Northern California, burning to the ground the ironically-named town of Paradise.

Not debated by "Braver Angels": How bad a threat to freedom, never mind the pocketbooks of the customers, is such private ownership? Could Socialism remedy the abuses of monopoly, at least in some cases?

The "freedom" debate is illegitimate enough that one could say having to drive on the right side of the road within the speed limit limits freedom. A New Year's resolution to go to the gym, is a threat to freedom. How about debating "Resolved: Getting married is a threat to freedom"?

Even the Libertarians threaten freedom. They do support the freedom to ingest any drugs you want, or the freedom to have legal prostitution, but they also want to enforce draconian property rights that prevent meddling governments from interfering with factories' freedom to dump their carcinogenic toxic waste into rivers. Are the people downstream "free" to get cancer?

In practice, Libertarian, "free" markets produce a kind of feudalism. The successful Libertarians can persecute the less successful because they have "earned" their success. Those born on third base have even "earned" the right to claim they hit a triple. (see "Dark Leviathan" for one example.)

So the "freedom" debate is just more ideological pollution. How about "Do private monopolies limit freedom"? Nah! That would be outside the spectrum of acceptable debate questions.