"Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan How can you ask for what you want, much less get it, if you don't know the words?
My whole life has had a broader Democratic party (electeds, magazine writers, think tankers, etc.) stuffed with people (not just! but them too!) whose primary purpose seemed to be relitgating the 1972 Democratic primary over and over again and making sure the fucking hippies (and women and gays and minorities) who voted for McGovern (and before that, RUINED EVERYTHING INCLUDING THEIR LOVELY LITTLE WAR IN VIETNAM) never worked in This Town Again.
That's exaggeration, of course, but The Discourse of the 90s and the aughts didn't make any sense to me until I understood that bit.
It is not an exaggeration to say that DC is filled with people who will back a genocide to the end, and put Donald Trump in power, rather than admit the hippies are right about anything. Yelling at hippies, and blaming them for their own mistakes, is why they are in politics.
Yes the hippies are almost dead, but the people in power will burn the world down before letting "generational shift" happen. Young (then) nerds like Jon Chait would write glowingly about Scoop Jackson (contrasting what could have been to "when the Democratic Party's foreign policy remained in the grip of McGovernism") in the aughts to please the editors who signed their checks.
The death and destruction caucus among professional Democrats remains powerful, and their second favorite hobby is yelling at hippies.
Reading the DaoDeJing (Tao Te Ching) with liberal democracy in mind is actually quite a scary proposition:
"The truth is not beautiful. Fine words are not trustworthy. The good do not argue. The argumentative are not good. The wise do not try to know everything. Know-alls are… https://t.co/PNA33e1UWn
“Why Did Harvard University Go After One of Its Best Black Professors? [Quillette]. Roland Fryer Jr. The article is interesting, but this factoid caught my eye: “Fryer’s first major published work, co-authored with Levitt, deconstructed the 1920s-era Ku Klux Klan…. [T]hey were surprised how expensive it was to become a KKK foot soldier: a $10 initiation fee, $6.50 for branded robes, a $5 annual membership charge, plus a mysterious yearly $1.80 ‘imperial tax.’ That’s equivalent to about $350 today—a lot of money for many of the joiners. Fryer tracked the money flow, and found that it fuelled lucrative paydays for upper management. An imperial ‘Kleagle‘ could pocket $300,000 a year (in 2006 dollars). D.C. Stephenson, the “Grand Dragon” of Indiana, made double that. The KKK has the look of what Levitt and Fryer call a ‘classic pyramid scheme,’ but for gullible racists.” • Hitler’s Nazis had to buy their own uniforms, too. I wonder if the Nazis got that idea from the KKK, just as they copied Jim Crow from us (see here “shirt movements” in interwar Europe, perhaps prefiguring the tactics of color revolutions).
...Meanwhile, it's worth remembering that when Harry Truman first proposed single-payer healthcare it was rejected by Dixiecrats because they might have to integrate their hospitals. So now the US has healthcare that's twice as expensive, and produces crap results. The WHO international study ranks the US 37th in healthcare outcomes like life expectancy, vaccination rates and infant mortality--between Costa Rica and Slovenia.
Imagination is more important than intelligence - Albert Einstein
Like most of my generation, I've watched the Star Wars series since I was young. One more recent addition is the "Light and Magic" documentary (on Disney+) about how Lucas' projects produced today's special effects. Lucas and his coworkers pioneered digital, computer-generated effects, even providing the impetus to invent Photoshop, the grandaddy of all photo-editing software.
Lucas himself has larger ambitions than special effects in his films, too. At one point in the documentary, he says cultures are all founded on myths. Lucas previously confessed Joseph Campbell's scholarship about myths was one of his inspirations. Star Wars is a myth, a story that can conceivably lead to a culture. The question of questions: would this new culture be an improvement, or simply the occasion for more drama.
The idea that myths are foundational to cultures is really nothing new. There's no record, for one example, that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and confessed he "could not tell a lie" to his father. That's a foundational myth for the USA. So is the idea that the founding fathers were some saintly men with special access to truth and wisdom. They were smart men, but seriously flawed. Many of them were slave owners. Thomas Jefferson even had a 14-year-old slave mistress, Sally Hemmings, something that would horrify the #metoo generation.
Lucas describes his pitch to Hollywood studios for Star Wars as a film that included World War II dogfights, but in space. That means that, in reality, Lucas is actually reviving nostalgia, dressed up with special effects. His "American Graffitti" film gave us nostalgia about cruising (driving around) in California's Central Valley, so that's not particularly new, either.
And that's part of the problem with Star Wars. It's just more wars--as though we haven't had enough of them. And the warfare is a throwback. The idea that space wars will include tail gunners is frankly unrealistic. The myth looks to me to be more of the same, not a cultural shift.
One interesting sideshow is the work ethic of the Industrial Light & Magic workers. They were recruited from the special effects nerds who loved movies about Flash Gordon, King Kong, Godzilla and the Kraken. They were passionate about their work, and would often work 18 hour days to produce the special effects Lucas, James Cameron ("The Deep") and Stephen Spielberg ("Indiana Jones") would use to make their movies.
The passionate commitment to work was a driving force in the successful completion of the kind of effects now available for filmmakers worldwide. There are few such eloquent tributes to a love of work as "Light and Magic."
One special effects wizard tells how his daughter became reluctant to grow up. He answers by encouraging her to become a filmmaker, then she can remain a child.
Is science fiction influential? Scientific American notes that modern tech billionaires are striving to make the science fiction of past eras a reality. They love the gadgets (some of which can work, others not) and ignore the political assumptions behind the technology.
More and more, I've started reading the credits to films, and not just Lucas' sci-fi fantasies, just to see how many people have supported this particular illusion to make it believable. It takes some work not to be fooled.
Here are a few facts about dieting that are not widely known. I seldom write about diet since it is so personal, and often more controversial than politics or other soap operas. But here you go...
A pound of fat has 3500 calories. This means if you eat 50 extra calories daily for a year--and don't change your activity level--you will gain more than five pounds (50 x 365 / 3500 = 5.2 lbs). Do this year after year, and pretty soon we're talking some serious weight gain, not easily erased overnight.
If you adopt a low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet, without doing exercise, you can lose weight--just as you can lose weight if you get chemotherapy--but there's a downside. If you lose seven pounds this way, only two pounds lost will be fat, the other five are lean body weight. The lean body weight is what burns calories, so this type of dieting eventually predisposes people to get fatter, despite the weight loss. What such dieters lose is muscle.
Normal, healthy males typically measure roughly 15% body mass as fat; females are 22% fat. Because of the phenomenon in the previous paragraph, anorexics are actually very fat--as much as 40% of their body weight is fat. They may look skinny, but the fat is marbled through their muscles, so they're skinny but weak.
Not eating extra calories is important--so portion control and not over-stuffing or binge-eating is helpful if you want to lose weight. However, diet expert Covert Bailey says diets that are just low-calorie, without exercise, program your body for famine, so more of what you eat goes to fat--unless you ramp up your metabolism with exercise. He says that in his experience, most of the famous low-calorie diets are helpful, but only if you want to gain weight. Meanwhile, Oprah confesses she started using diet pills.
The bottom line: exercise is essential for any permanent weight loss. Exercise doesn't burn many calories, but it does start to re-program your metabolism so that more of what you eat goes to feed muscle mass rather than being stored as fat. Exercise also helps you avoid depression and think more clearly.*
Glycemic Index
Glycemic index measures how fast food consumed appears in blood as glucose--the fuel for most muscle and brain processes. Faster is not better, though. Refined sugar--a candy bar, for one example--would have a high glycemic index. When your blood sugar (glucose) spikes, it also makes for an increased level of insulin, a chemical which often lingers after the spike in blood sugar. When insulin has consumed all of the candy bar, and is still in your blood, you typically feel hungry, and often hungry enough eat another candy bar...which spikes the blood sugar. When your muscles don't burn that glucose, your body stores it as fat.
Eran Segal makes an important qualifier for generalized glycemic indexes. In his study, he found that how fast people metabolize different foods varies, as you might expect. After all, it's an evolutionary advantage to have a variety of different kinds of digestion, so humans can adapt to different environments.
So differences in genetics, and that microbiome--the bacteria in your gut--can have enormous impacts. Segal reports that some people can eat ice cream, and their glucose spikes upward, while others experience no such spike because their digestion doesn't assimilate it rapidly.
Fibrous foods, for example apples, can have a low glycemic index not because they lack sugar, but because digestion has to get past all that fiber to get to the sugar.
While it may be true that there is no one, ideal diet for humans, as Segal suggests, my money is on the fibrous foods, and avoiding the highly processed foods (white bread, refined sugar, etc.) to keep that glycemic index low.
Either way, vegetables and fruit have a tremendous caloric advantage over meat and dairy.
A hundred calories of meat can fit in the palm of your hand. A hundred calories of spinach, watermelon or strawberries fills a fair sized container.
I've heard many people complain that cereal (refined grain) leaves them hungry after a short time. This is typical for refined, low-fiber food. A serving of unsweetened oatmeal typically has an lower glycemic index than bacon, eggs and toast, so it will "stick to your ribs." It has plenty of fiber, so it digests slowly, releasing glucose into your bloodstream gradually, unlike the refined food. I've seldom met anyone who complains that the bulky, low-glycemic index food doesn't satisfy their hunger especially if it's heavy on beans and rice. Vegetarian Indian food, or Mexican food is extremely filling, and keeps that hunger away for a while.
However, hunger pangs are not always to be avoided. If you want to lose weight, hunger pangs may appear as your body consumes fat. No need to give in to that impulse to snack at midnight...if losing weight is on your agenda.
And speaking of calories, tea has none, but look at the following:
12 oz Coke: 140 calories 12 oz (regular) beer: 153 calories 12 oz (higher alcohol, craft beer: 170 - 350 calories
Iced tea, even with two teaspoons of sugar only has 32 calories.
I hope this is useful when you make dietary decisions, especially during the holiday.
===
Disclaimer: I'm not a dietician or MD. The advice above is not strictly anecdotal, but a lot of it comes from a variety of sources, including my own experience. I've been (mostly) vegan for more than 30 years now. Eating that diet is not particularly hard to do, even when dining in restaurants, as long as one can adapt. I'm not a perfectionist about this. For example, I won't ask the Chinese restaurant to eliminate egg from their fried rice (it's such a small amount, anyway) and I'll eat pastries without being concerned if they aren't entirely vegan. I'll even eat an egg or sausage from time to time, and a slice of turkey at Thanksgiving. But I'd estimate 95% of the calories I consume are neither meat, nor egg, nor dairy, nor refined food (sugar, oil).
When I had hernia surgery, the Kaiser surgical team took a look at my mostly naked body and told me I was an inspiration [blushes]. They may have just been trying to encourage me before they anaesthetized me, but I'm pretty sure they were sincere. The bottom line: This diet has served me well.
*The facts about dieting and weight loss above rely largely on a lecture by a nurse/dietician who measured my body fat content the old fashioned way--weighing in air, then in water. Many modern scales do this the digital way, with sensors, but this lecture predated the availability of such scales.
As the Eran Segal video shows, your mileage may vary. Still...when it comes to ice cream vs. fruit or veg...I'd stick with the latter.
The elimination of public housing programs,
beginning with the second Nixon administration in the early 1970s. New
public housing was no longer built, and some existing public housing
project were demolished.
The State Legislation dissolved California’s 400 local redevelopment agencies in
2011. They, like the Community Redevelopment Agency in Los Angeles,
were required to spend 20 percent of the budgets on public housing. The
elimination of these subsidies was a major blow to the construction of
new non-market low-income housing.
Wage stagnation while housing prices continued to rise, priced many people out of housing.
Two
forms of up-zoning have raised the market value of private parcels and
existing housing, forcing some residents into homelessness. One form of
upzoning was parcel level zone variances and zone changes, granted by
the LA’s City Planning Commission and City Council 90 percent of the
time. The second form of up-zoning was through City Council ordinances
often attached to Community Plan updates.
In
the United States homelessness is a choice made by public officials. It
cannot be whisked away by ignoring the causes listed above.
Planning Watch – Abroad: My
previous columns focused on local planning and housing policies,
explaining how they increased the numbers of unhoused, rent-gouged, and
overcrowded people. But I have not written about US foreign policy.
After all, the same elected officials whose housing programs produced so
much homelessness and dead homeless people, also support U.S. foreign wars that lead to similar outcomes, homelessness and death.
This was clear in many Henry Kissinger obituaries. For example, according to Yale historian Greg Grandin, in Kissinger’s Shadow,
between 1969 to 1976 Kissinger was responsible for the deaths of 3 to 4
million people, as well as the systematic destruction of
infrastructure, buildings, and housing.
Cambodia. As Richard
Nixon’s Secretary of State, in 1969 Kissinger was responsible for a
secret war that dropped 540,000 tons of bombs to destroy Cambodia’s
insurgents. This resulted in 300,000 deaths and the destruction of
one-fifth of the country, including people’s houses.
East Timor.
Under President Gerald Ford, Kissinger encouraged Indonesia to invade
East Timor. Done in secret, the US proxy war resulted in enormous
destruction, including 200,000 deaths.
Chile: Under President
Nixon, Kissinger turned to the CIA to violently overthrow and murder
Chili’s elected leader, Salvador Allende. The US instigated coup results
in the death, torture, and imprisonment of 40,000 Chileans.
Argentina:
In 1976 Kissinger orchestrated the overthrow of Argentinian President
Isabel Peron by Argentinian General Jorge Rafael Videla. The Videla
regime’s “dirty war” resulted in the death of between 10,000 to 30,000
opponents, many dropped into the ocean from helicopters.
Bangladesh:
In 1976, Kissinger and Nixon backed the Pakistani invasion of West
Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The resulting genocide murdered 300,000 to
500,000 Bengalis.
Vietnam: On behalf of Richard Nixon, in 1968
Kissinger was able to stall the Paris Peace Talks initiated by President
Lyndon Johnson. Since the new Nixon administration was unable to
re-start the stalled peace talks, they pursued mass bombing of North
Vietnam to terrorize the country’s government into submission. In
total, the war resulted in 3,800,000 deaths and the destruction of much of the country.
Indonesia: A decade before Kissinger was Secretary of State, in 1965-66 the U.S. government supported
the Indonesian government and their proxies in the anti-communist and
anti-Chinese genocidal murder of 500,000 to 2,000,000 people.
Iraq: Under the Clinton administration (1993-2001), US bombing of Iraq’s no-fly zones killed 500,000 people and destroyed public and private infrastructure. Beginning in 2003, the second Iraq War resulted in the 300,000 more Iraqi deaths.
Gaza:
This leads us to the current Israeli war on Gaza. Despite the enormous
propaganda blitz, we know that the US government has provided enormous military aid to Israel,
stationed two US Navy aircraft carrier strike groups near Israel, given
diplomatic cover to Israel at the UN Security Council, and shared
intelligence with the IDF.
As for the results, there is no
information on the number of Hamas fighters killed or captured by
Israel, but there is data on non-combatants killed by Israel.
Furthermore, Israel has blocked the entry of food, water, fuel, and
medicine into Gaza for the past nine weeks. As of December Reuters reports
the Israeli military has killed 15,899 people in Gaza, 70 percent of
whom are women or children under the age of 18. Al Jazeera English gave
an updated Dec. 5 total of 1.9 of 2.3 million people displaced, 16,248
overall deaths, including 4,885 women, 7,112 children, 79 media workers
and journalists, 130 UN staffers, and 150 health workers.
Regarding housing, according to the Scientific American, as
of December 1, 2023, 1.7 of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been
displaced because Israel destroyed or damaged their homes. Israel also
destroyed much of Gaza’s infrastructure, including half of all
buildings.
While the US military is not directly involved in the
Israeli attacks on Gaza, it has actively supported Israel with weapons,
intelligence, and diplomacy, similar to previous US proxy wars in
Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, and East Timor.
Even
though the mainstream media does not connect the dots between US
domestic and foreign policy, common themes of death and destruction of
homes and infrastructure link the two. Even though these domestic and
foreign policies have enormous bipartisan support in Congress and the
White House, most of the public disagree. .They want an immediate Gaza cease-fire.
Dick Platkin
is a former Los Angeles city planner and veteran Planners Network
member who reports on local planning issues for City Watch LA, which
published an earlier version of this article. Please send any comments
or corrections to rhplatkin@gmail.com.
Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d
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In the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress just empowered the Pentagon to learn who owns the defense contractors that supply it. This is good for national defense and bad for private equity.
Today’s piece is short. It’s about two useful provisions that Congress quietly slipped into a major defense bill. These new legal requirements will force private equity firms to tell the Pentagon whether they are mucking around with weapons makers.
These provisions are especially important at a moment when the U.S. is supplying, or failing to supply, three areas of possible conflict - Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
Seeing Like a Pentagon
Using metaphor of blindness to sight is common throughout human history, because everyone understands what it means to open your eyes. It suggests not just a change in the ability to sense light, but a step change in how we think. “I was blind but now I see” is in the bible, a metaphor for seeing a spiritual truth, being able to reckon with the profundities of reality. In “Seeing like a State,” James C. Scott conveys a similar notion for bureaucracies. How a state collects information, aka sees, is a highly political question, because you can’t govern what you can’t see.
In August, I wrote up an important shift among antitrust enforcers, in a piece titled “Government Stupidity Is a Design Choice.” In it, I described how the Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Division, prompted by Congress, tweaked a form, called the Hart Scott Rodino form, that companies must fill out when they want to engage in any corporate acquisition worth over $100 million.
Dealmakers will now have to answer basic questions, such as “Why are you merging?” “Who is on your board of directors?” “How does your industry work?” “Who is lending money for the buy-out?” They will have to give information upfront about subsidiaries, their product lines, defense contracts, their power in labor markets, and previous acquisitions, which is particularly important when a firm is rolling up a lot of smaller entities. If China is financing the bid, or a giant private equity firm, they will now have to tell the government.
The old form required none of this. The government got virtually no useful information from it, meaning that every day a government lawyer would receive a bunch of notifications that two random companies are merging, and he’d have to start with virtually no information, and then with a few hours of research decide which were worth investigating. No matter how smart you are, no one can learn a lot about, say, the paint industry, the mail sorting software industry, the pool cleaning industry, and the semiconductor design industry in one day starting from zero. So a lot of unlawful mergers just went through, because the government was blind.
The old form was the equivalent of being told to do an X-Ray and being given cardboard X-Ray glasses from the 1950s. The new form is an actual X-Ray machine.
While the new form hasn’t gone into effect yet, it will be very effective. How do I know? Well the big D.C. and New York corporate law firms that advise all large companies, private equity funds, foreign governments, and large institutions were absolutely furious about the shift. (Here are, for instance, angry notes to clients from Wilmer Hale. Steptoe. Kirkland and Ellis. Dechert. Wilson Sonsini. Sullivan and Cromwell. Covington & Burling. Etc.)
But while corporate lawyers might be mad about this change among antitrust enforcers, now they’ll have to deal with another part of the government getting that same X-Ray machine. The Pentagon.
12/10/23 re: “Sacramento has an ugly addiction to sprawl” p.D13
The Bee correctly decries Sacramento's addiction to sprawl. Sprawl is not just a polluting mess, it’s an unhealthy, regressive “tax”–every driving age adult must own a car to shop or get to work. Seniors who can’t drive and children are, in effect, second-class citizens.
As someone who protested this for literally decades both in a Community Planning Advisory Committee and as a private citizen, government’s tone-deaf response has been beyond frustrating. My best guess is that land speculators (i.e. "developers") are firmly in command, and their proxies in government have difficulty understanding that alternatives exist since their paycheck is conditioned on them not understanding. The late Grantland Johnson once said that it's widely acknowledged that, in all of California, the Sacramento region is the most in the hip pocket of development interests. That's not a contest anyone would want to win.
Meanwhile, the region has 20 years of unbuilt infill.
"The study’s findings were striking in their similarity to [Soloman] Asch’s original results. In the non-incentivized group, the average error rate in the line judgment task was 33%, closely mirroring Asch’s findings. However, in the incentivized group, the error rate dropped to 25%. This suggests that while financial rewards can reduce the impact of group pressure, they do not eliminate it. [emphasis added]
“When we started the study, we could not imagine to be able to replicate the original findings as close as it turned out,” Franzen and Mader told PsyPost. “We thought Asch’s findings were overstated. We also believed that providing incentives for correct answers would wipe out the conformity effect. Both did not happen. The replication turned out to be very close to the original results and providing monetary incentives did not eliminate the effect of social pressure.”
The conclusion is also of interest to contrarianism.
Regarding what people should take away from the findings, the researchers remarked: “Here we like to cite Mark Twain, ‘Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.'”
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My observation of local political clubs aligns perfectly with the above. Such clubs are far more interested in social cohesion, rubbing their hands together as they huddle around some political bonfire ("Isn't Trump awful!" "Aren't those Democrats corrupt!") than in discussing public policy alternatives that might extinguish the fires.
It's essentially "My tribe is better than other tribes" ... which degenerates into a game called "Ain't it awful." It's the essence of inside-the-box thinking...or not thinking at all.
This is a shame not only because it means the public remains uninformed--they are too busy huddling with their homies--but because political inertia, not sensible thinking, rules the land. These are nice people, but, as Abe Lincoln said, good intentions are a second-rate virtue.
The insistence on adhering to one's own (and typically one's parents' own) ideology is a quasi-religious phenomenon. Persecuting heretics is part of that particular tendency.
----
A little bit of the consequences of tribal loyalty rather than clear thinking driving public policy:
1. Sacramento County just voted to postpone any climate mitigation actions for 15 years. (Meanwhile, a tree fell on my house, thanks to a powerful windstorm in early 2023...it was bad enough that my homeowners' policy was canceled. But hey, that global warming is a hoax.)
2. Sacramento County just paused it, but they previously voted to spend $1 billion to enlarge the jail.
3. The Federal reserve says 40% of the US population can't handle a $400 emergency without selling something or borrowing. Around 60% of wage earners live paycheck-to-paycheck. An estimated 65% of seniors only have Medicare and Social Security to fund their retirement. Congress is moving to consider reducing those social safety nets, though, and can get away with that because the tribes are at odds.
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
letter to Lord Lytton, 15 June 1877; in Lady Gwendolen Cecil Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (1921–32) vol. 2
First, here's a handy graph of your odds of getting exposed to COVID according to the size of gathering you attend:
That's put together for a county in Georgia, but I'd suggest it applies wherever you are.
Why be concerned if only one person has spread-able COVID?
For more about Sacramento County COVID and flu positivity, the best current public health policy has is this website/dashboard. It's only updated weekly, and not at all during holidays.
American healthcare ranks 37th in the world in outcomes like life expectancy, vaccination rates, infant mortality, etc. according to a study by the World Health Organization, between Slovenia and Costa Rica. The Sacramento Bee said "It's as though we have the healthcare of Costa Rica and pay six times more"...double what most single-payer countries pay, and single-payer ranks highest in that study.
Meanwhile, with 5% of the world's population, the US has experienced 22% of its COVID deaths.
If you're interested in more medical information about COVID and medicine in general, the Ground Truths blog is a good place to start.
Loren Kay, from a Chamber of Commerce “think” tank, and Republican State Senator Ted Gaines write that (surprise!) California must lower taxes and reduce regulation to “spread the wealth,” despite all the evidence of the past two generations that such policies concentrate wealth at the very top of the income distribution.
Since 1972, deregulation and tax reduction have been tried and tried again, yet since 1972, the bottom 90% of incomes have experienced median, inflation-adjusted gains of only $59 a year. The rest of the gains--and productivity increases made enormous real income gains possible--have gone to the top 10%, and the top tenth percent. Investigative reporter David Cay Johnston says that if that $59 were an inch on a bar graph, the bar for the top 10% would be 141 feet tall, and the bar for the top 0.1% would be five miles high.
Kay’s and Gaines’ editorials ignore any positive contribution of government research. For one example, most of the iPhone’s innovations are based on government-funded research into transistors, integrated circuits, the internet, GPS, etc. Government-funded research produces seventy-five percent of pharmaceutical innovation.
Besides the tired narrative that the government contributes nothing but hassles, Mr. Kay believes deregulated builders and developers will provide adequate affordable housing. Yet most nations without such acute housing problems understand subsidies are what really support affordability.
Unfortunately, America’s subsidies--like the mortgage interest deduction--do not support low-cost housing. Add the rest of Kay’s prescription--like the deregulation of the private sector mortgage banking that gave us the subprime mortgage/derivatives meltdown--and you’ll see new housing starts ground to a halt, demonstrating yet another of those “miracles” of the market in action.
Kay also believes whatever is cheapest is always best when it comes to energy--never mind the climate consequences of continued petroleum dependence. So...drill baby, drill!
The confidence that markets are always right in setting prices is an article of religious faith. God has an invisible hand, and markets always price in the long-term consequences, is what that religion believes. Sure, global warming means hurricanes are stronger than ever, and going to unfamiliar places like Vermont, but we can ignore the climate to save a few nickels on our electric or gas bill.
It’s sad that any mature human being could continue to promote this short-sightedness as beneficial.
If all of this pseudo-foresight manages to look like prescribing a sledgehammer to cure a headache, well that’s about what it is. Gaines’ and Kay’s cluelessness resembles nothing so much as a hypnotic trance that allows them to ignore anything that does not serve their corporate masters. We’ve had this for the last few decades, and we can see the result: the headlines proclaim that more than 60% of Americans don’t even have enough savings to handle a $500 emergency.
The big question is how long Americans are going to play the sucker in this particular game of three-card Monte.
Thomas Franks’ "Too Smart to Fail" essay explains the way we delude ourselves with "expert" opinion. As one wag says: "An ex is a 'has-been' and a spurt is a drip under pressure." Anyway, Franks documents in excruciating detail the way Americans are more interested in "pretend and extend" than genuine change.
Franks says public policy is too often insane, doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different outcome. Making sanity, not “extend and pretend,” and not a financial advantage, a foundation for public policy is what’s desperately needed. Taking that next step to share sanity with a larger community is not trivial, either.
Twelve-step programs are one example of an institution designed to bring sanity to addicts and their families. Nevertheless, if you're familiar with these programs, you'll know that one of their traditions specifically forbids the organization from taking public policy stands. They humbly admit they're too crazy to handle the turbulence that comes from going public.
Giving up taking any public policy stand has some pretty dramatic repercussions too. These programs spend an awful lot of time educating members that addiction is not a moral failing, it’s a disease. That means addicts should be treated, not punished. But what is public policy?
Primarily because of the "drug war," the U.S. incarcerates, per-capita, five times more people than the world average. America jails seven times more than the Canadians. How effective is it? Even though U.S. and Canadian demographics are similar, crime rates between the two countries have differed insignificantly for 40 years--essentially since Reagan put the drug war on steroids.
This is a very big problem, suppresses a significant portion of the population, wastes an enormous amount of resources. Medical treatment for addiction and mental health problems is one-seventh as expensive as incarceration. The Swiss de-criminalized even heroin and found crime around its clinics declined 85%.
Worse still, incarceration continues the racism that preceded the Civil Rights era. More black men are in jail now than were enslaved in 1850. Even though whites and blacks use and sell drugs in roughly the same proportion, by a wide margin people of color are disproportionately targeted to harass, prosecute and jail. So while it's illegal to discriminate based on skin color now, once someone has a felony record, discrimination is perfectly legal in housing and employment. Some states disenfranchise felons, eliminating their rights to privacy, forbidding them from using public housing. See Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness for details.
So can we persuade the public to set aside their animosity toward felons, and their racism toward people of color, to make society more humane? Twelve steppers are silent, by design, about this.
My sister suggests I’m missing the point. Twelve-step programs are practically Buddhist in their detachment (and in fact promote “detaching”), and are not suitable places for social action, she says. Besides, their precepts forbid them from endorsing public policy measures.
But don’t these people use the infrastructure and human capital our public policies maintain and support? Are we to believe that the formerly robust public participation of the American public is to devolve into a bunch of powerless drones hypnotized by TV screens?
Boy, I hope not.
Suggested Flyer for 12-steppers:
Let’s Stop Punishing Addicts, Really
Twelve-step meetings educate attendees that addiction is an illness, not a moral failing. The Open Letter from the Alcoholic often read in such meetings says “Don't lecture, blame or scold me. You wouldn't be angry with me for having cancer or diabetes. Alcoholism is a disease, too.”
Yet punishing rather than healing addicts is what official U.S. public policy does now. Currently, U.S. prisons are full to overflowing with people arrested in the drug war. The U.S. is tops in the world in incarceration at 756 per 100,000 population. The world average is 150 per 100,000.
Canada imprisons 111 per 100,000. Its demographics are similar to the U.S., and its crime and U.S. crime have differed only insignificantly for more than 40 years.
Furthermore, treating addiction rather than punishing it is more effective and cheaper. It costs one-seventh as much to treat as to incarcerate. Imagine jailing diabetics...or burning witches. About the same thing, really.
Worst of all, even though the evidence is that all races consume drugs in equal proportions, people of color suffer disproportionately in the drug war. They are many times more likely to be harassed, arrested and jailed than whites. It may be illegal to discriminate because of skin color, but it is not illegal to discriminate against felons. They often cannot even vote, nor use public housing.
Action Items:
1. Let your state, local and federal representatives know you disapprove of this policy of incarceration.
2. Work to repeal three strikes and determinate sentencing laws. (fcnl.org is one organization doing this)
3. Let your 12-step program’s reps know that ordinarily taking stands on public policy is not this organization’s role, but this case is an exception.
