Where are all the homeless poor coming from? Generations of attacks!

(c) by Mark Dempsey

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the street, and stealing bread. - Anatole France

In a recent political conversation, my (male) friends were clucking their tongues at the current epidemic of homelessness, telling me it was a shame and unprecedented. However, few mentioned its origins, and fewer still had a remedy--and, as women know, men always want to fix problems. 

The specific policy suggestion in that conversation was term limits for legislators. That'll make 'em honest! 

But we've tried term limits in California, and it produces knowledgeable, unelected staff, who actually run things, and a layer of transient, elected "useful idiots" (i.e. politicians) to insulate the unelected staff's decision-making from the public. In short, it does not work as advertised and weakens the connection between the public and the government's response. So much for men's solutions!

The origins of the current attack on the poor probably began in ancient times, when poverty was interpreted as deserved punishment for bad behavior, and wealth was a sign of the god's approval. This is the same kind of thinking that leads its adherents to believe they deserve to be born without serious health problems. After all, there are no accidents, only just deserts!

A more recent source of the rise of homelessness was well intended. JFK had a special needs sister and decided he would try to close the big "One-Flew-Over-the-Cuckoo's-Nest" asylums, transferring patients to smaller facilities that could integrate them into their communities. In a vote that Daniel Patrick Moynihan described as one of the most shameful in his political career, congress approved closing the asylums but did not fund the replacement housing, turning many patients out into the street. In California, Governor Ronald Reagan just closed the state asylums. 

Science tells us that special needs schooling is most effective with eight or fewer students in classrooms, but the government doesn't fund that either. On the other hand, the military gets more than it requests from congress and even "progressives" vote for that.

The asylum closures left the former patients "footloose and fancy-free" -- free to self-medicate with both legal and illegal drugs. As one consequence, in 2016, the opioid epidemic produced more fatalities than the Vietnam war--in just that one year--and not just among former patients. 

More origins of homelessness: In 1971, Richard Nixon stopped the federal government from building affordable housing--and federal programs were never generous in the first place. But hey, the poor deserve their poverty! 

After cutting taxes on the wealthy roughly in half, and with his successor raising payroll taxes eightfold, Ronald Reagan cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. Could this impact our current lack of affordable housing and even wealth inequality? Gosh! I wonder!

In the '90s, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton conspired to "end welfare as we know it," turning the LBJ-era poverty program, AFDC (Aid For Dependent Children), into TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). While AFDC was a federal program, TANF is a block grant administered by the states. So if states are stingy in distributing public assistance, they may not reduce poverty, but they can still use the money they save by not helping the poor for something else. Of those needing public assistance, 76% got AFDC, but only 26% got TANF. And only 22% of the TANF money actually reaches the poor. 

LBJ's "Great Society" war on poverty programs cut poverty in half while they lasted. The increase in current poverty is obvious from the number of beggars and homeless on street corners even in suburbia. Meanwhile, Phoenix, AZ food banks report an 18% increase, year-over-year, in families relying on them for food in 2022, even after the height of the pandemic.

This generations-long attack on the poor--even those who deserved poverty--has finally got results. Sixty-five percent of seniors have only Social Security to fund their retirement. Forty percent of the U.S. population doesn't even have a $400 rainy day fund and must borrow or sell something to deal with emergencies like new tires. Building cities as sprawl means viable, unsubsidized transit is not available either, so the poor must own autos--in effect, a regressive tax.

The cumulative effect of these public policies has been an impoverished, desperate population, desperate enough to try crime. Even Forbes admits it: "Several studies have shown public assistance programs such as cash payments and housing aid can help reduce criminal activity." So poverty begets desperation, and desperation begets drug addiction and crime. 

As a testimonial to poor people's commitment to morality, thanks to the generosity of the poor--and they are far more generous than the wealthy--crime has been in decline in recent years, despite the impoverishment and immiseration of the population. "In the last 5 years Sacramento has seen decreasing violent crime and decline of property crime," says City-Data.com. Notice that website documents an increase in crime around the subprime-derivatives meltdown in 2007-8, so the economy at least correlates with crime rates.

Nevertheless, we read of increasingly desperate police confrontations--after all, they're dramatic and headline-worthy. In response, the City of Sacramento just purchased an armored vehicle ("the Rook") and the County just approved a $450 million addition to the jail, producing what amounts to a militarized homeless shelter and a replacement for those closed asylums. 

In response to the increase in desperation, the U.S. has increased its police spending enormously, too. The U.S. population increased by 42% between 1982 and 2017. In that same period, spending on policing increased by 187%. Now, with 5% of the world's population, the U.S. has 25% of its prisoners--five times the world's per-capita average, and seven times more than the Canadians' per-capita incarceration rates. 

So...is Canadian crime worse than U.S. crime? Nope, it's about the same. It does make some sense, though, since there are roughly a half million medical bankruptcies in the U.S. annually and zero in Canada. People in desperate situations adopt desperate solutions--even the desperate "solutions" of living on skid row or car-jacking for transportation. All these attacks on the poor demonstrate the way crime is a systemic, not just an individual problem. No Canadian has to start cooking meth to pay his spouse's hospital bill (the plot of Netflix's Breaking Bad series).

The U.S. has gone very far down this particular rabbit hole. Perhaps the next step is to change its motto from e pluribus unum ("From many, one") to "The beatings will continue until morale improves." This would have the virtue of being truthful because it's been generations now since the American public's sense of "justice"--actually, vengeance--has been harnessed to its attack on the poor.

--

Side note, you might read How Mental Health Care Is Near-Impossible to Get on Medicaid from the Intercept--reporting that implies that if you're poor and have a mental illness, you're just out of luck.

Update: The U.S. does so much more to subsidize affluence than to help the poor. (The Financial Times) Excerpt: "Landlords in poorer areas earn 'basically double' those in more affluent districts — an extra $50 per apartment per month, after expenses. The outperformance, calculated from national surveys, held even when researchers factored in faster price rises in richer areas. 'The reason is that property values, mortgages and taxes are much lower in downmarket neighbourhoods, but rents aren’t that much lower,' says [sociologist] Desmond."

Update #2:

Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong

[Noahpinion, via The Big Picture 3-19-2023]

A failure or unwillingness to carefully look at the data has led countless people to believe that the primary drivers of homelessness are drugs, mental health, poverty, the weather, progressive policies, or virtually anything and everything that isn’t housing. And while some, but not all, of the aforementioned factors are indeed factors in homelessness, none of them, not a single one of them, are primary factors. Because if you want to understand homelessness, you have to follow the rent. And if you follow the rent, you will come to realize that homelessness is primarily a housing problem.

Update #3:

From an online petition:

The United States housing crisis is dire, and public housing remains one of the only tangible options preventing children and families from experiencing homelessness. But for too many, public housing remains increasingly inaccessible. The U.S. has the Faircloth Amendment to thank for that.

Passed in 1998 under a GOP-controlled Congress, the Faircloth Amendment prohibits any net increase in public-housing units, maintaining public housing units at 1999 levels and effectively preventing housing authorities from ever maintaining more public housing than they did then. Since the 1990s, some 250,000 public housing units have been demolished. Many major cities, including Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, have chosen to eradicate much of their public housing stock to stay within the limitation of Faircloth, with some cities even providing far less than the number of units Faircloth allows.

The Faircloth Amendment is the result of the villainization of low-income communities and welfare recipients. Those pushing Faircloth believed those who would need public housing were dependent on the government or abused taxpayer money.

But today, affordable housing continues to be increasingly out of reach for middle to low-income Americans. There is currently no locality in the country where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment priced at what the Department of Housing and Urban Development defines as “fair market rent.” Between the lack of affordable housing, the surge in communities experiencing homelessness, and the recent trend of local governments making moves to criminalize homelessness, Congress must act.

Repealing Faircloth and investing federal funding into public housing will go a long way in addressing America’s homelessness crisis, ensuring safe and affordable housing for children and families, and helping America stay afloat during a deadly pandemic and economic hardships caused by record-breaking inflation.

Sign if you agree: Everyone deserves access to affordable housing.

Participating Organizations
BOWL PAC
Bring American Home Now
Cedar Key Progress
Democratic Values
Daily Kos
ManagingLove
MICAH- Metropolitan Interfaith Council on Affordable Housing
People Demanding Action
Progressive Reform Network
Street Samaritans 

Update #4: Poverty in the U.S. should be considered a ‘major risk factor for death’ — and is associated with more fatalities than guns or homicides, study finds MarketWatch. Pro-life indeed! 

Jon Stewart vs. Larry Summers

 

Commentary from Lars P. Syll: Absolutely lovely! Comedian and television host Jon Stewart turns out to no much more about real-world economics than mainstream Harvard economist Larry Summers. Don’t know why, but watching this debate makes yours truly come to think about a famous H. C. Andersen tale …

Public Policy Saboteurs

Some people have an agenda that includes sabotaging, or at least making public entities look bad. If you’re interested in that last topic, try Rick Perlstein’s histories of the rise of the conservative movement, from Goldwater (The Gathering Storm) to Nixon (Nixonland), to Reagan (The Invisible Bridge, Reaganland). Thomas Frank also wrote The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves and Beggared the Nation. Or...Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.

One thing Perlstein makes crystal clear: to make their opposition to the then-popular Democrats effective meant Republicans had to “organize [and encourage] dissent.” The principles involved did not matter. The late Jerry Falwell actually supported abortion before he opposed it. The point is not to be consistent, it’s to divide and rule. It’s been very effective.

Meanwhile, one pundit says Republicans go for the jugular; Democrats go for the capillaries.

One other example of that unprincipled dynamic: Republican strategist Jude Wanniski, a supporter of supply-side/trickle-down economics, advised the Republicans to run up as big a deficit as possible when in power, and then complain as bitterly as possible when out of power. Reagan took his advice and had a still record-breaking deficit increase. Reagan’s deficit exceeded the sum of all previous administrations’ deficits. He got an economic revival, too, called “Morning in America” by the Wall St. Journal. It was an average business cycle recovery, but the marketing has been flawless. Here’s a graph of GDP from the St. Louis Fed:




Note the very large spikes for the New Deal and that big public works project we call “World War II” … and notice how the Reagan recovery is in line with the rest of the business cycles since 1950. But hey, it’s “Morning in America!”...or an average business cycle recovery marked by lower-than-average capital investment. See Paul Krugman’s Peddling Prosperity for more about this.

One more comment: if orthodox economics theories of “crowding out” (government prevents private sector access to resources) or “loanable funds” (government borrowing prevents private sector access to money) were accurate, wouldn’t GDP decline during these two massive injections of federal spending in the ‘30s and ‘40s?

Awards are stupid - Jerry Seinfeld

 

Public Policy Surveys at the Nexus of Bad Decisions: Sacramento County

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Josh Hoover, my California State Assemblyman, recently conducted an email survey of his constituents to understand what legislation he should support. To his credit, he shared the results of the survey. To his discredit, many of the questions asked were, in effect, push polling --Do you think crime has increased? His constituents responded "yes!"  Says City-Data.com:  "In the last 5 years Sacramento has seen decreasing violent crime and decline of property crime." 

That website also shows that crime increased when the economy tanked as the subprime/derivatives meltdown occurred, but economic remedies are seldom explored for either poverty or crime, despite studies showing they are connected. Already 70% of the County's spending, justice-related budget items are slated to consume an increasing share of Sacramento's budget. Sacramento City recently purchased an armored vehicle, and the County approved a $450 million addition to the jail. 

Are people fearing more crime because it's real, or because the news reports it so much? After all: "If it bleeds, it leads" is the mantra of the "ambulance news." I wonder.

Apparently Hoovers' constituents feel the economy is in a downturn or headed for one. This echoes public opinion elsewhere: "According to public opinion, the U.S. is seemingly in a semi-permanent recession, and the Fed has failed to improve matters….In reality, the economy is hot, unemployment is at record lows, and there’s no sign of a downturn any time soon."

But hey, an anecdote is as good as a statistic! Hoover's response to the survey: "This needs to change, and I look forward to working with you to work on fixing our state and turning things around."

These survey exercises remind me of one conducted by former Orangevale (Sacramento County) Supervisor Roberta MacGlashan. At a public meeting she asked the crowd to tell her the issues in County governance. Her assistants recorded these issues on big post-it notes stuck on the wall around the room, handed out three stickers to everyone, then had the crowd put stickers on the issues they thought important. After she counted the stickers, here are the top responses:

1. Keep Orangevale's tax revenues local.
2. Keep Orangevale's rural character
3. Get better retail (a big issue because Walmart just came to town).

It's plausible to ask people what they want, but without any mention of costs or consequences, it solicits fantasies and anecdotes. In short: it's a waste of time. It's roughly like asking a three-year-old what she wants for Christmas. 

So it's no surprise that the "issues" are phony. Orangevale is a primarily residential community, and such a place does not pay its own way in taxes--a fact cited during MacGlashan's meeting but ignored by the crowd. Keeping tax revenue local is roughly like keeping the Pope a Catholic. 

Orangevale's rural character conflicts with better shopping. Nieman-Marcus goes where the shoppers are; fewer shoppers in a rural area means more limited shopping. So the poll--cited repeatedly by Supervisor MacGlashan--was just an exercise in political kabuki.

Unfortunately, MacGlashan's successor, Sue Frost, is worse. Among other things, Frost voted to hand the land speculators in Elk Grove a massive payday by approving outlying development for a city with more than enough infill land. Ms. Frost also voted to burden the County with a $450 million dollar militarized homeless shelter (an addition to the County jail) but has not even considered handing the unhoused a voucher for housing. 

The City of Denver handed out vouchers and discovered arrests declined by 40%, and 77% of those assisted this way ultimately found their way out of homeless. It is cheaper and more compassionate not to put people in cages. But hey, the beatings must continue until morale improves!

Frost's survey just arrived too (could she and Hoover share political consultants?). My bet is the results will be similarly misguided. For example, her survey question about crime omitted white-collar crime. "Blue-collar" crime like muggings and burglaries costs $12 billion annually, says the FBI. White-collar crime costs $1 trillion. Per usual, the survey strains at a gnat while swallowing a camel.

Hoover and Frost are MAGA Republicans--not necessarily my favorites--but their party affiliation doesn't matter to me. What bothers me is their presumption that they know what the real issues are, when they are really just using outrage ginned up by their attacks on government--the only likely remedy to these problems--to fuel their own ambition for political power.

Meanwhile:

We've criminalized the poor.
We've criminalized the unhoused.
We've criminalized the hungry.

And now we're criminalizing humanitarians.

When you spend over 65% of your county budget on law enforcement, everyone begins to look like a criminal.
https://t.co/sQjRgn1Vkb

— Krish Gundu (@kinsngops) March 4, 2023

A Little Commentary on Silicon Valley Bank's Failure from The Pundits

 

They are all libertarians until they are hit by higher interest rates.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) March 11, 2023

Silicon Valley Bank bought bonds when interest rates were low. Now that they're high, the bonds are worth (much) less, and the bank failed...after successfully lobbying to be exempt from some bank regulation. 

For a more detailed explanation, see Steve Keen's essay here. He, and many others, blame the Fed's speedy increase in interest rates, and the subsequent decrease in value of the bonds SVB had bought. This is a case of iatrogenic medicine--where the treatment causes the disease.

From Mike Norman, commenting on the fallout from being unable to meet payroll thanks to SVB's failure: "If youre a big firm you’re going to have to get all your USD to a 100% govt money market fund and establish your own credit union staffed by your own people for the firm to use for payroll and current accounts payable/receivable... US banking system completely unusable with these Art degree monetarist morons trying to operate it…"

Meanwhile:

Jerome Powell testified in front of the banking committee this week.

COMMITTEE: “Do you see any systemic risk in the banking system because of the rapid rise of interest rates?”

POWELL: “No”

🥴

— Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA (@GRDecter) March 12, 2023

It’s Like Über, but for Deposit Insurance

Posted on March 13, 2023 by mikethemadbiologist

In light of the Silicon Valley Bank bank run and subsequent rescue, David Dayen points out there’s a solution for businesses, known as Insured Cash Sweep, which chops up your money into FDIC-insurable units of $250,000. That would mean these businesses worried about losing their excess cash wouldn’t. Why SVB didn’t use this for its clients is… unclear, though given the bank officers’ recent behavior, such as paying out a bunch of bonuses right before the FDIC closed them, I’m guessing they didn’t want to spend the money to set this up.

Of course, the larger context is that Trump, Republicans, and some ‘moderate’ Democrats voted to decrease regulations which, had they still been in place, would have prevented the bank run (boldface mine):


Back up: How is it that Silicon Valley Bank [SVB], Thursday the 16th-largest bank in America by assets, is shutdown, in receivership, with every chance of a wild financial ride to come over the next week as every organization with more than $250K in any one bank frantically moves money around to try to get all of its deposits under the $250K FDIC insurance maximum?

…And the answer is:

“As a banking organization, our liquidity is subject to supervision by our banking regulators. Because we are a Category IV firm with less than $250 billion in average total consolidated assets, less than $50 billion in average weighted short-term wholesale funding and less than $75 billion in cross-jurisdictional activity, we currently are not subject to the Federal Reserve’s LCR or NSFR requirements, either on a full or reduced basis…”

What Dan does not mention is §401 of the 2018 Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act:

§165 of the Financial Stabiity Act of 2010… is amended… in the matter preceding paragragph (A), by striking “$50,000,000,000” and inserting “$250,000,000,000”…

supported by 50 Republican and 17 Democratic Senators (and by 225 Republican and 33 Democratic House members), and signed into law by President Trump.

If not for this action of “regulatory relief”, SVB would have been subject to the original Dodd-Frank NSFR, and would have been unable to have taken on the asset portfolio it took on, and so it would not have crashed—at least, not the way it did, and not now…

If we lived in a good world—one in which Dodd-Frank had, as it should have, established the principle that all commercial banking deposits are insured (and that banks pay insurance premiums on all of their deposits) and if the 2018 EGRR&CPA had not been passed exempting SVB from NSFR, et cetera, then Peter Thiel’s chaos-monkey appearance would not have made a difference. No one would have an incentive to pull their money out of SVB. If anyone had felt the urge, SVB would have had a very different portfolio—one without this mark-to-market loss and the expected-future-capital-gain offset—because it would have had to maintain its NSFR ratio above 100% throughout.

It’s fucking stupid all the way down. One other point: if this had been a bank in Michigan that lent mostly to small manufacturers (let’s less than fifty employees), would the titans in Silicon Valley call for helping the depositors?

You already know the answer to that question.

Added: It’s weird how the Fed argues it needs to raise rates to cause unemployment so they can lower inflation, but also needs to make SVB depositors whole to prevent job losses. I suppose some jobs are less inflationary than others.

 Update: From The Intercept:

“There is definitely a class element,” economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research said of the federal intervention in an email to The Intercept. “Look at how easily we can toss tens of millions of dollars at people who couldn’t figure out how limits on FDIC deposit insurance work, but the idea of giving $10k in debt relief to a student who might have used bad judgment in taking out a loan when they were 18, gets so many people upset about moral hazard and individual responsibility.”

Perhaps no one embodied this contradiction more than Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary and a vocal critic of student debt relief. “This is not the time for moral hazard lectures or for lesson administering or for alarm about the political consequences of ‘bailouts,’” he said in a tweet on Sunday.

Update #2: From Naked Capitalism

This post makes a point that is glossed over in nearly all mainstream coverage of the collapse of SVB and resulting bailout: the discount window liberalization and the creation of the Bank Term Funding Program together achieve what is just a hair’s breadth away from a full backstop of uninsured deposits, while letting the officialdom pretend it hasn’t made that huge extension of subsidies to banks. Biden officials claim that banks will be made to pay for all these new goodies, when even now, they don’t pay the full value of FDIC deposit insurance.

However, the post gets a key element of the SVB-depositor power dynamics wrong. It was not the venture-capital backed companies that chose or agreed to keep all their deposits at SVB. It was their venture capital investors that forced this arrangement on them, confirmed by a reader: “Speaking as a former customer as dictated by my VCs.” This distinction matters because it puts the locus of influence and favor-trading much higher up the food chain.

 Update #3: From Modern Money Theorists Stephanie Kelton and Randall Wray.

This is an extensive history of the Fed's actions as they appear in bank failures. SVB is nothing new.

 

Poverty Programs in the U.S.

 From the NY Times. Excerpt:

Antipoverty programs work. Each year, millions of families are spared the indignities and hardships of severe deprivation because of these government investments. But our current antipoverty programs cannot abolish poverty by themselves. The Johnson administration started the War on Poverty and the Great Society in 1964. These initiatives constituted a bundle of domestic programs that included the Food Stamp Act, which made food aid permanent; the Economic Opportunity Act, which created Job Corps and Head Start; and the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which founded Medicare and Medicaid and expanded Social Security benefits. Nearly 200 pieces of legislation were signed into law in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s first five years in office, a breathtaking level of activity. And the result? Ten years after the first of these programs were rolled out in 1964, the share of Americans living in poverty was half what it was in 1960.

But the War on Poverty and the Great Society were started during a time when organized labor was strong, incomes were climbing, rents were modest and the fringe banking industry as we know it today didn’t exist. Today multiple forms of exploitation have turned antipoverty programs into something like dialysis, a treatment designed to make poverty less lethal, not to make it disappear.

This means we don’t just need deeper antipoverty investments. We need different ones, policies that refuse to partner with poverty, policies that threaten its very survival. We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets, instead of being captured by companies whose low wages are subsidized by government benefits, or by landlords who raise the rents as their tenants’ wages rise, or by banks and payday-loan outlets who issue exorbitant fines and fees. Unless we confront the many forms of exploitation that poor families face, we risk increasing government spending only to experience another 50 years of sclerosis in the fight against poverty.

The best way to address labor exploitation is to empower workers. A renewed contract with American workers should make organizing easy. As things currently stand, unionizing a workplace is incredibly difficult. Under current labor law, workers who want to organize must do so one Amazon warehouse or one Starbucks location at a time. We have little chance of empowering the nation’s warehouse workers and baristas this way.

 

Context for the Scott Adams Story

Recently "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams issued a rant saying he won't help black people because of a Rasmussen poll that found blacks did not agree with "It's OK to be white." But that "It's OK to be white" phrase is part of the racist backlash against blacks' civil rights.

From The Present Age

Excerpt: "Salon writer Amanda Marcotte delved this point further on Twitter: 

'Part of the problem is that if, hypothetically, someone flashed white supremacist symbols at the camera [like the 👌..."OK" sign] the point of the stunt would be to get liberals wound up, so they can then claim that liberals are just imagining things,' she wrote. 'That was what the OK symbol was literally invented to do: Both serve as a white supremacist symbol and also one that is just ordinary-enough looking that when liberals expressed outrage, the white supremacist could play the victim of liberal hysteria.'

'It’s okay to be white' is the very same thing. It’s something that, if you take it out of context, sounds harmless. If you’re familiar with the context, however, it quickly becomes something one would quite easily object to.'

"Imagine if the KKK adopted an unofficial slogan of 'Sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns for everyone.' If you were familiar with it, and 'sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns for everyone' had been associated with the Klan over a span of years, how would you answer the polling question, 'Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns for everyone?' Good pollsters don’t try to trick people into saying they agree with slogans (if they wanted to ask about whether it’s okay for white people to exist, they could have done that, but they, instead, decided to take something that the Anti-Defamation League added to its Hate Symbols Database)

"And that, among many other reasons, is why Rasmussen is not a good pollster." ... and why it's disingenuous for Adams to ignore the context for that slogan.

A Little Shade for Bill Gates

 

Ukraine Updates from the New Yorker, My Comments

The following is partly from a New Yorker interview (2/27/23) with Jeffrey Sachs. The interview is extraordinary because it breaks the wall of silence from Western media about how complicit the U.S. was in instigating that war. Note how Sachs has to consistently resist the interviewer's insistence on the official line that Putin is a maniac who is solely responsible for an "unprovoked" invasion of Ukraine. Sachs very clearly recounts the provocations. 

Why does the interviewer insist on the official narrative? "[T]here will always be an 'official version' of reality--say, that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only have the best interest of their slaves at heart--which no one, neither masters nor slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when 'offstage' and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insists subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event." From a description of Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), by James Scott

And if you don't believe the media are waging an information war, ask yourself when was the last time you heard about Seymour Hersh's exposee about the U.S. sabotaging the Nordstream Pipeline. There's radio silence about that too, and when it's mentioned, there's a concerted effort to discredit Hersh, the reporter who revealed the My Lai masscre in Vietnam--another inconvenient truth.

Excerpts:

"The [Ukraine] war began...nine years ago, with the U.S. participation in the overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych, in February, 2014—the very active U.S. role in that. We’ll only perhaps know the full extent of it when the archives are opened, decades from now. We know enough that this was why the war actually occurred....

"In late 2013, when protests against Yanukovych broke out, the U.S. took the occasion to play extremely actively in this and in ways that were rather direct, let us say—paying a lot of money to those who were leading this so-called movement and helping to finance what became a coup.

"(Interviewer) So you think what happened in 2014 was a coup?

"It was a coup, of course. It was an unconstitutional seizure of power when very violent groups, well armed, stormed the government buildings in February, 2014. [Protesters, angered by Yanukovych’s rejection of a trade agreement with the European Union, were killed by security forces after trying to occupy parts of Kyiv; afterward, Yanukovych was isolated politically and fled to Russia with the assistance of the Kremlin. I asked Sachs over e-mail for a source for his claim about the role played by the U.S. He responded, “It is public knowledge that the National Endowment for Democracy and US NGOs spent heavily in Ukraine to support the Maidan. I have first-hand knowledge of that spending.” The N.E.D. told The New Yorker that it provides funding to civil-society groups but “does not provide funding to support protests.”]....

"I’ve been an adviser economically all over the world, and I know leaders all over the world and have known leaders all over the world for many decades. I’ve seen a lot, and what I’m trying to convey is something very basic about American foreign policy, and that is that it is devastatingly based on lies and covert actions, and I see those lies all the time.

"I happened to be on a talk show the night that Colin Powell presented the U.N. testimony. There were six panelists. They went around the table, and they finally came to me. I said, “It’s lies. It’s clearly lies,” which it was. It wasn’t just wrong intelligence; it was lies cooked up to justify a war. Then I happened to know about the lies of the U.S. in Syria. You keep talking about Putin bombing people in Syria; the United States both provoked the disaster and stopped it from ending. I know that.

".... I am telling people that the narrative that we have is leading to an escalation of deaths, and it’s putting us on a path to nuclear devastation."

You might also read political scientist John Mearsheimer's 3/1/22 interview (here), which agrees. The U.S. provoked the Ukraine war.

Excerpt:

"For years, Mearsheimer has argued that the U.S., in pushing to expand NATO eastward and establishing friendly relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive position toward Ukraine. Indeed, in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that 'the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.'"

I'll remind readers that "truth is the first casualty of war." You will have no trouble finding editorials and news stories in the West about how bad the Russians are, so the above interviews very rarely see the light of day. 

When the recent stage of the war began, my niece sent me a Tweet alleging the Russians were so bad that when the Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island responded to a demand they surrender with ""Russian warship, go fuck yourself!" the Russians killed the Ukrainians. Even that was a lie (see Wikipedia here)

Finally, I'll mention my father was a soldier in World War II, in fact he was on the first wave landing in one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific, Iwo Jima, where he was wounded. I know of no one more anti-war than my father, who actively encouraged me to avoid the draft during the Vietnam war. When I was in college, he bought me a subscription to I.F. Stone's newsletter. To give you an idea of Stone's take on U.S. belligerence, and the narrative used to excuse it, his biography is entitled All Governments Lie. My conclusion, based on conversations with Dad, was that he was deeply ashamed of having participated in even a "good" war.

Update: A (suppressed) Ukrainian political scientists demonstrates that the snipers killing protesters were part of a false flag operation, and actually protesters themselves. In other words, the outrage at the elected, Yanukovich government, was manufactured. Excerpts from the link above:

:In the final months of 2022, Katchanovski submitted a new investigation on the Maidan massacre to a prominent social sciences journal. Initially accepted with minor revisions after extensive peer review, the publication’s editor effusively praised the work in a lengthy private note. They said the paper was 'exceptional in many ways,' and offered “solid” evidence in support of its conclusions. The reviewers concurred with this judgment.

"However, the paper was not published, a decision Katchanovski firmly believes to have been 'political....

"Among those fervently supporting Katchanovski’s appeal was renowned US academic Jeffrey Sachs. 'You have written a very important, rigorous, and substantial article. It is thoroughly documented. It is on a topic of great significance,' Sachs wrote to the scholar. 'Your paper should be published for reasons of its excellence…The journal will only benefit from publishing such a work of importance and excellence, which will further the scholarly understanding and debate regarding a very important moment of modern history.'"

 

The Systemic Incentive for More Crime

 Answering a bunch of bloggers asking for bigger carjacking penalties:

"The law, in its magnificent equality forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the street, and stealing bread [or transportation]" - Anatole France (1844 - 1924)

Treating crime as a problem of individuals naturally brings one to condemn the criminal. But crime has a large systemic component. When 40% of U.S. population can't handle a $400 emergency, and 65% of seniors have only Social Security to fund their retirement, then lots of people are in desperate situations. My friends on the police force must face them more frequently, too.

It's far cheaper and more humane to fund social safety nets, even if some "non-deserving" criminal profits. Currently, the U.S. is doubling down on domination and suppression. U.S. population '82 - 2017 increased 42%. Police funding increased 187%.

Crime is actually in a decades-long decline thanks to our aging population. Canada, with identical age demographics, incarcerates one seventh as many per capita, and has insignificantly different crime stats than the U.S.

Meanwhile, "blue-collar" crime (robbery, mugging, etc.) costs $12 billion annually, while white collar crime (fraud, embezzlement, etc.) costs $1 trillion, says the FBI. Where are the Wall St. guys doing the perp walk? [crickets]

The City of Denver discovered handing homeless people vouchers meant 40% fewer arrests in that population. Cheaper and more humane, I say.

The clamor for more draconian penalties is straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.

More:

As for "soft on crime" D's who want to "Defund the police"...Every Democratic candidate I've seen campaigning has repudiated that (very accurate) slogan. Every one, without exception.

As for being "soft" ... I'd settle for not being stupid. If you have a stick and a carrot, but only use the stick, not even a donkey will behave. The U.S. is stick-addicted. It's a thug, starting wars overseas, and on its own people. Just remember that the next time you read Putin was "unprovoked."

 

Propaganda Backfire

 

Ukraine's charm offensive in Berlin did not go as expected.

Russian destroyed tanks were brought to Berlin from Ukraine. They were supposed to remind the Germans of giving military aid to Ukraine.

But instead,the citizens of Germany began bringing flowers to the tank.
😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/e189llE02H

— Richard (@ricwe123) February 25, 2023