US Healthcare Administrative Costs Exceed OECD Countries'

 

Biden's legacy

 

Michael Conahan took $2,800,000 in bribes from a private prison in exchange for locking up 2300 kids, one of whom committed suicide.

Biden commuted his sentence.

Steven Donziger won a $9 bn lawsuit against Chevron & got locked up for 3.5 in retaliation.

He was not pardoned. pic.twitter.com/jR1G9Br0gx

— Climate Defiance (@ClimateDefiance) December 16, 2024

A little commentary on the CEO assassination

 

United Healthcare Rules the World!

 

🚨 🚨 🚨

ATTN: Everyone!

Listen to this incredibly invaluable breakdown of the situation with United Healthcare.

Gives some chilling context!! pic.twitter.com/B5P09y2o1b

— Krista Monroe (@MsKristaMonroe) December 6, 2024

Democrats Sabotage Progressives

 

NEVER FORGET IT WAS THE DEMOCRATS WHO DESTROYED DEMOCRACY AND PAVED THE WAY FOR DONALD TRUMP. pic.twitter.com/lOrKaYAGP9

— Power to the People ☭🕊 (@ProudSocialist) December 3, 2024

On CNN, Rahm Emanuel admits a refusal to hold Iraq War proponents accountable for their lies & a refusal to hold Wall St accountable for the financial crisis created big problems for Dems.

Emanuel was chief of staff of the Obama White House that opted to hold nobody accountable. pic.twitter.com/JvCin9M8ua

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) December 3, 2024

Here's the guy they're denying:

Trump has suggested that Canada become the 51st state in our union.

Does that mean that we can adopt the Canadian health care system and guarantee health care to all, lower the cost of prescription drugs, and spend 50% less per capita on health care?

I'm all for it. https://t.co/Nwkk7lykXd

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 3, 2024

News Humor

 

Breaking: Sources have confirmed that Juan Guaidó has declared himself interim President of South Korea. 🇰🇷🇻🇪 pic.twitter.com/kB5sSDXRuP

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) December 3, 2024

Colonial Power Sponsors Terrorism to Maintain Its Military Presence in Former Colonies

 

🛑🇹🇩- Chad should have learned from the AES!

When Mali 🇲🇱 was alone fighting terrorism, the French prevented @GoitaAssimi and his boys from pursuing the rest of the terrorists who fled to Kidal. That was the first betrayal that Mali 🇲🇱 experienced with the French, because they… pic.twitter.com/ImKOoOiGow

— Sy Marcus Herve Traore (@marcus_herve) November 29, 2024

Worth reading the whole thing.

 

Someone Vulgar "Won" The Election

(c) by Mark Dempsey

"What happened in this year’s election was not some kind of flowering of American fascism, but a rebellion against a hated, out-of-touch Democratic Party elite...The only thing the Democrats offered to working people was a recycled anti-Trump campaign....In my ten years of elected office in Seattle, as a socialist councilmember, the Democratic Party was at every stage an enemy of our movements. There are no Republicans on the Seattle City Council, so the Democrats alone carry the water for big business. I don’t mean Democrats were sometimes a hindrance. I mean they fought tooth and nail to either block everything we fought for or water it down — from the $15 minimum wage to our Amazon Tax on big business to our renters’ rights bills." - Kshama Shawant

I've read more than 75% of eligible voters did not vote for Trump, so his victory is hardly a mandate.

Harry Truman used to say there's nothing new under the sun, just history you don't know. The history of vulgarity and opportunism taking power is long but it also reminds us that the recent version of American vulgarity--Trump--is nothing new. Robert Caro's latest book his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), Master of the Senate, discusses this at length.

According to prominent press accounts Trump is supposed to be something exceptional. But LBJ had multiple mistresses, conducted press interviews while seated on the toilet, and even stole the election for his Senate seat--see Caro's Means of Ascent for the election theft details. Colleagues in the Senate used to call LBJ "Landslide Lyndon" since he won that Texas Senate seat by a modest 72 votes even after stuffing ballot boxes.

The big difference between LBJ and Trump: LBJ grew up poor.

But, despite his bigotry and vulgarity, LBJ was a key player in getting Civil Rights legislation, Medicare, and the "War on Poverty" passed. These were striking departures from the right-wing impulse to crush labor and the poor. Will Trump surprise his detractors by, for example, making peace* in the Ukraine and Gaza? Who knows?

Sadly, LBJ's accomplishments were overshadowed by his escalation of the Vietnam War, one he didn't start. The Eisenhower administration sent military advisors in the 1950s and installed a government that kept the French colonial oligarchy in power, despite a peace treaty promising a plebiscite that Communist Ho Chi Minh would have won handily. Eisenhower did not allow the plebiscite. 

Oddly, Vietnam was an American ally in WWII, but while Japan and Germany deposed their oligarchies and enjoyed blanket bankruptcies ("jubilees") for the population's obligation to the defeated elites, the US was unwilling to offer such a deal to Vietnam and defended the colonial oligarchy.

Besides the Democrats' fecklessness, one of the components of Trump's election victory is the population's aversion to continuing the Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars. Angry comments online from peaceniks who are "fighting for peace" by refusing to vote for Harris are common. As George Carlin says, fighting for peace is like screwing for chastity.

The protests against the Vietnam War encouraged voters to elect Richard Nixon. While Noam Chomsky calls Nixon our last liberal president, his opponent, Hubert Humphrey, LBJ's vice president, was far more liberal. If Humphrey were elected then we would have a very different country now.

Among other things, Nixon initiated a coup in Chile and started the drug war and the massive increase in US incarceration that's currently five times the world per capita average. He also quashed the federal government's program to build affordable housing, contributing to the current homeless crisis.

In the Nixon/Humphrey presidential contest, some antiwar voters believed Nixon had a "secret" way to end the Vietnam War. His "secret," it turns out, was commiting war crimes like bombing Cambodia, but given LBJ's Vietnam policies, it's hardly surprising Nixon employed this brutish "secret."

I regret dismissing Humphrey as simply an apologist for a despised war. My immature self didn't understand that democracy requires compromise, even betrayal, and declarations of loyalty--like Humphrey not criticizing LBJ's war efforts--or it cannot work. The most recent election's loyalty displays included Bernie Sanders' efforts to help his Senate friend, Joe Biden, despite Sanders' rejection of Biden's support for Israel in Gaza.

Odds are Humphrey would have been less callous than war criminal Nixon. And the Nixon presidency was a disastrous turning point in American politics. Here, Humphrey would have made a difference I was too clueless to appreciate.

Finally, many people are now angry at Trump and his supporters--something that plays into the elite's divide and rule strategy. A genuine solution to our public policy problems is more likely to require setting aside anger, despair, and frustration, no matter how legitimate are those feelings. Sure, genuinely anti-oligarchy public policy needs passion, but just as much, it needs calm deliberation about how to address our current problems and prevent disasters.

---

*Scott Ritter--a former arms inspector and current critic of American foreign policy believes Trump's appointment of Tulsi Gabbard may signal the beginning of a less aggressive foreign policy.

Sabotage destroys public programs

(c) by Mark Dempsey

“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” - Tacitus (Roman historian)

A friend who works on local low-income housing complained to me that he got to see some nice properties, when new, turned into trash when they became occupied by their low-income residents. The fact that poor people are inattentive to material things, or money apparently surprised him and those who anticipated the property maintenance budget.

But isn't that inattention one reason they're poor? And don't the public policymakers deciding to provide housing for the homeless know that maintenance will be expensive, especially when occupant neglect is expected? The failure to provide adequate supervision and repair is just one of many methods to sabotage these otherwise laudable programs. Ideally, "inclusionary zoning"--mixing incomes in such neighborhoods--would have the less-poor peer pressure the property-damaging poor people to take some pride in their environment.

Naturally, we don't do that. Sabotage has been a baked-in component of affordable housing even during liberal times. Sprawl subdivisions, which describes the bulk of what we currently build, are income monocultures, designed to keep poor people at arms length. Worse, they're the remnant of "white flight" which condemned central cities to a plague of slums.

There's an all-too-human tendency to believe that poor people don't deserve nice things, they're poor, and undeserving, because of their bad choices. Not realizing poor people have different priorities excuses sabotage and negligence.

What's the use of the poor people? I'd suggest they remind us of what it is to be generous. My poor in-laws would literally give me the shirt off their back if I needed it. This is a valuable corrective to the miserly behavior of our current ruling oligarchy which sabotages even palliatives for poverty, reducing social safety nets like unemployment insurance, welfare, and the dreaded (socialist!) Social Security. Both Democrats and Republicans have made those attacks too.

Our central bank, the Federal Reserve declares 40% of the population can't handle a $400 emergency without borrowing or selling something, and 60% of workers live paycheck to paycheck. To top it off, 65% of seniors have only Social Security and Medicare to fund their retirements--and the oligarchy's attacks on those programs are unrelenting, even though they are already plenty stingy. Medicare doesn't cover dental work, for one thing.

Sabotage isn't just a US problem, either. The UK has been de-funding its National Health System, privatizing portions of it, slowly sucking the life out of one of the crown jewels of Britain's public realm. The plan is to sabotage it so service will eventually be bad enough that the public will clamor to privatize it.

Among recent US attempts at enlightened policies, Oregon decriminalized drugs, but sabotage, or simply poor planning, made the Oregon legislature re-criminalize them. The idea behind adopting this decriminalization was to emulate other, successful programs. In Portugal, drug users can get a ticket which is also the pass to enter a rehab program. Switzerland legalized heroin, and crime declined by 85% around the clinic dispensing the drug legally, while needle-borne illnesses like AIDS declined dramatically.

But Oregon relied on its police to dispense the tickets/rehab. Unsurprisingly police did not welcome addicts' defiance. Consequently, the program failed in the short trial period when Oregon implemented it. Why police and not social workers? Perhaps this was an oversight, but it qualifies as a kind of sabotage.

More recently, CNN reported that more active lifestyles can extend life expectancy up to a decade. As someone who spent literally decades trying to get planners and builders to build pedestrian-friendly designs for neighborhoods*, I can testify that the current public policymakers' commitment to auto-centric, couch-potato-friendly sprawl is virtually impenetrable. Despite wide market acceptance for pedestrian-friendly design, public policy makers ignore and discard most steps in that direction.

One example development, Laguna West, attempted a pedestrian-friendly design that might make transit and neighborhood commerce viable. Both transit and commerce need enough potential customers within a walk to be successful. Unfortunately, when Laguna West proposed denser housing, lenders refused to make construction loans to build the apartment housing needed for such a neighborhood's success.

Yolo County tried no-cash bail when COVID first began, and basically turned prisoners loose. No supervision, no alternatives to meditating in one's cell, just turned 'em loose. Surprise, surprise! More crime and recidivism!

So...it pays to be at least a little suspicious of the crowing about the failures of the poor, drug programs, or anything short of brass knuckles to the skull in controlling socially undesirable behavior like crime. The sabotage--even unintentional sabotage--may have already decided the outcome.

--

*The author spent nearly a decade on a Sacramento Community Planning Advisory Council, and continued to lobby for such civic design while working as a real estate broker and mortgage lender.

What should we eat?

 One of the most comprehensive experimental examinations of the connection between diet and health is an interview Eric Topol conducted with Kevin Hall. Hall reports on the connection between ultra-processed food and appetite (unsupervised, people consumed 500 calories more of the ultra-processed food). 

The interview also examines the weight loss and immune system effects of low-carb (keto) vs. low-fat (plant-based) diets. 

...and a good deal more.

Re: Ukraine - Links/videos for today

 Glenn Greenwald's interview with Scott Horton discloses the US role in the Ukraine Coup. This is a pretty detailed account of how Western provocations led Russia to attack.

Jeffrey D. Sachs: Reveals the complex history of the Ukraine War:

How to Cut $2 Trillion in Federal Spending Without Breaking a Sweat

 How to Cut $2 Trillion in Federal Spending Without Breaking a Sweat - Modern Money Theorist Stephanie Kelton explains...it's easy. Short version: cut interest rates.  Alternative: buy all the interest-bearing treasury bills/bonds with non-interest-bearing dollars. The bulk of the spending to cut is interest.

See also my post: "How Money Works"

Matt Stoller Explains Spirit Airlines' Bankruptcy

Spirit Airlines CEO Got A $3.8 Million Bonus A Week Before Its Bankruptcy

by Matt Stoller

In January of 2024, a judge blocked the attempted merger of Spirit Airlines and JetBlue. “The airline industry,” wrote Boston-based Judge William Young, “is an oligopoly that has become more concentrated due to a series of mergers in the first decades of the twenty-first century, with a small group of firms in control of the vast majority of the market.”

Young was correct in his assessment. But at the time of the decision, I made the point that a re-regulation of airline travel was essential if we are to end a cycle of bankruptcies and consolidation. “You can’t just hope competition will win out,” I wrote, “in an unregulated industry, the result will be mal-investment, bankruptcies, consolidation, and then mass bailouts.”

Eleven months later, on Monday, Spirit declared bankruptcy, negotiating a deal with its creditors to reduce its debt, wipe out its shareholders, and continue flying as an independent airline. All tickets are still being honored, it’s still a going concern, so there’s no actual change to the air travel system. Still, a lot of observers have used this example to show why antitrust enforcement is bad. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, wrote an editorial making this point directly.

Meet the latest victim of Biden Administration antitrust policy: Spirit Airlines. Spirit declared bankruptcy Monday after the Justice Department cut off a lifeline by blocking its merger with JetBlue Airways. Too bad the government won’t compensate the workers, flyers and creditors harmed by its blunder.

This argument isn’t correct, and I am going to explain why. But let’s start with something that you won’t hear from from most of the people making the argument about how antitrust drove the bankruptcy. The CEO of Spirit Airlines, Ted Christie, a man who presided over the insolvency of the firm, was paid a $3.8 million retention bonus the week before the bankruptcy filing. The reason such a fact matters isn’t just because it’s outrageous, it’s because it’s one more bad decision by a bad management team that is blaming the government for their own choices.

Let's start at the beginning. Prior to Covid, the big four trunk airlines - American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, and United Airlines - had focused on business travel, while ultra-low cost segment of carriers, which includes Spirit Airlines, had targeted price-sensitive leisure travelers. After Covid, demand for air travel shifted from business to leisure as businesses replaced in-person conferences with Zoom meetings. So the big four began going after leisure travel.

The big four have significant competitive advantages. They control a disproportionate share of airport infrastructure, and can cross-subsidize money losing routes. They have more flights, erect barriers to entry through loyalty programs, and can hire away pilots during a staff shortage. So when they started competing, it put pressure on the low cost airlines.

One result is that Frontier, in 2022, sought to merge with Spirit Airlines to create a significant ultra-low cost network that could match some of the advantages of the big four. Only, at that point, JetBlue, which had already engaged in a quasi-merger with American Airlines through a joint program called the Northeast Alliance, made a hostile bid for Spirit. They proposed, on overlapping routes where they competed, to rip out seats and hike prices, which is a classic indication of a strategy to lessen competition.

Spirit's board hired a consultant to evaluate the deal, who told execs/shareholders that the JetBlue offer would likely violate the antitrust laws. Their CEO publicly recommended against the JetBlue bid, saying “The latest offer from JetBlue does nothing to address our Board’s serious concerns that a combination with them would not receive regulatory approval.” The board even presented this legal analysis to shareholders. Here’s one of the slides.

What ensued was a bidding war between Frontier and JetBlue over Spirit Airlines. JetBlue raised their bid, and ultimately, shareholders and executives accepted the higher JetBlue offer. The result was exactly what the Spirit Board had predicted; the Antitrust Division sued in 2023 to block the JetBlue-Spirit deal. The law is the law.

That’s not all. In 2024, during the trial over JetBlue’s proposed acquisition of Spirit, the judge directly asked Spirit executives if they would go bankrupt should the merger fail. The reason is that there’s a special loophole in merger law, such that if your firm would otherwise fail absent a merger, you can get special dispensation to sell your company even if such a sale would erode competition. And that makes sense, if the company goes out of business then there wouldn’t be competition anyway. So what did Spirit executives tell the judge? They said, no, we’re not a failing firm, we’ll be fine if the merger doesn’t happen.

In other words, they turned down the Frontier merger and accepted JetBlue’s proposed illegal one to get more money. Then the executives misled the court or themselves on the firm's financial condition so they wouldn’t have to admit they had run the airline into the ground.

So that’s the situation. But an additional question is as follows. Is the bankruptcy actually bad? Sure shareholders will get wiped out. Guess what? GOOD. They deserve it. They opted for an illegal deal instead of a legal one. Plus Spirit will keep flying as a competitive airline, at least for now. This particular kind of bankruptcy isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just means you reorganize the creditor relationships but keep the entity as a going concern.

Financial failure in the airline industry is exceedingly common and has been since the 1970s. American Airlines, Delta, United, Northwest, U.S. Air, they all went through it. Why? Well it's a a function of deregulation, as I noted in 2022 during that nightmarish travel summer.

To understand the roots of this instability, we have to go back to legal changes in the 1970s. At the time, a government agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board set routes and prices. Airlines were a regulated public utility service, with essentially a guaranteed reasonable return on their capital. They didn’t have to harm their customers to earn money, and they weren’t subjected to the same boom and bust cycle regularly buffeting the industry. Despite the more intrusive public rules, there was a lot more competition, with new airlines entering on a regular basis. And air service was evenly distributed around the country, you didn’t have mid-size cities cut off from the air grid when an airline decided to close a hub, as happens today.

The reason for the success and necessity of this particular regulatory framework has to do with the economics of flight. It is costliest to take off and land, so airlines like flying long routes over short ones. And it is cheaper to serve a busy airport than an empty one, because you can use the same equipment on more flights. So everyone in the industry naturally wants to serve long flights between big cities, not short flights or small cities. 

The result is that, absent any regulation, airlines will all cut flights to smaller cities, and pile into the popular routes. If a bunch of airlines are all trying to compete on the New York to LA route, they will be willing to cut prices to nearly nothing simply to capture an additional customer, since the plane is already budgeted to fly the route. The net effect, if everyone is doing this, is that the industry becomes structurally unprofitable, airlines go bankrupt, and then there’s consolidation. As with ocean shipping and rail, air travel is a high capital cost industry, and without public rule-setting ‘ruinous competition’ takes over and bankrupts everyone.

When we deregulated airlines in 1978 and let airlines charge whatever they wanted and fly wherever they wanted, that’s what happened. Service to small cities ended, and the busiest routes went way down in price to consumers. The Department of Transportation saw promoting the financial health of airlines as its charter, so it didn’t really protect consumers for fear of harming the airlines financially. Then came waves of bankruptcies and consolidation, leading to price regulation, only this time privately through monopoly.

Part of this change, from public price-setting to private price-setting, involved refusing to enforce predatory pricing laws, which allows larger airlines to intentionally lose money and drive smaller ones out of business. We can see this dynamic in a different airline merger the DOJ did recently allow. After the Department of Justice challenged Spirit’s merger attempt with JetBlue, those same enforcers allowed Alaska Airlines to buy Hawaiian Airlines.

Why? Well, financial fragility. About five years ago, Southwest entered the Hawaiian market, and it did so by vastly undercutting pricing, such that it was almost certainly losing money to drive Hawaiian out of business. That’s probably an illegal predatory pricing strategy, but predatory pricing law is notoriously hard to enforce, such that the practice has driven consolidation across many industries, including airlines. There really was no choice but to let the two firms combine, or have Hawaiian go under. Hawaiian is now cutting jobs after its merger, showing that mergers are not panaceas for poorly run or financially fragile companies.

This financial attack happened to Hawaiian, but the ability of large players to undercut ultra-low cost carriers with money losing strategies, cross-subsidized by higher tickets elsewhere, has hit a whole host of smaller airlines, including Spirit. Only, instead of doing a legal combination, or being honest about their financial fragility, Spirit executives and shareholders demanded enforcers let them violate the law.

In other words, the real reason for blaming this bankruptcy on antitrust enforcement is because it’s too embarrassing to point to the real problems, which are poor management, lax predatory pricing law, and ultimately deregulation. But again, just remember the CEO’s multi-million dollar payday. This guy drove Spirit into bankruptcy, got a big bonus, and then blamed enforcers for upholding the law. Nice work if you can get it.

---

Thanks for reading. Send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or comments by clicking on the title of this newsletter. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues of BIG, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation and democracy. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

cheers,

Matt Stoller

Thomas Frank on the Election: The Elites Had It Coming

The Elites Had It Coming

Thomas Frank [New York Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-13-2024]

"...At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats….

“Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out. I have been writing about these things for 20 years, and I have begun to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the lightbulb for the liberals….

"Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage. It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals. That seems a long way away today. But the alternative is — what? To blame the voters? To scold the world for failing to see how noble we are? No. It will take the opposite sentiment — solidarity — to turn the world right-side up again....”


"The overturning of the New Deal Democrats, the Great Society Democrats was a generational story. I don’t know if there’s a social science term for it but people never betray their betrayals. Once you do something like that, once you turn the Democratic party, which these guys did in the 1970s, once you turn on the Democratic party and say we’ve had enough of organized labor, and we’ve had enough of the party of the New Deal and all that, you’re never going back. That is what you did as a generation. It is your accomplishment. They’re psychologically incapable of saying “Oh, we were wrong, our great moment as a generation was a mistake.” No human can do that.”

Update #1: Democrats and the Cult of Learned Helplessness - from former congressional staffer, anti-monopolist Matt Stoller.

Understanding The Election

 

Early predictions of tonight’s election are in and it’s a landslide victory for the oligarchs. pic.twitter.com/ZPTSYxuBMS

— Danny Haiphong (@SpiritofHo) November 5, 2024

I really encourage people who think the Biden economy was great to read this paper from May by Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm. "Trump versus Biden: The Macroeconomics of the Second Coming." Need to understand the economic context of this catastrophe. https://t.co/LI41QPehjV pic.twitter.com/UoCREFlp3u

— Neal Meyer (@nealmeyer) November 6, 2024

 

 

Nothing to see here, just a centrist losing by half a million votes in a state where leftwing labor policy won. https://t.co/MiRq73hkis

— Aren R. LeBrun (@arenrlebrun) November 6, 2024

Abortion rights are beating Kamala in every single state that voted on them.

Progressive policies aren't unelectable - unpopular Democratic politicians are. pic.twitter.com/Akum3h67jZ

— Holding Dems Accountable (From the Left!) (@PushBidenLeft) November 6, 2024

...

"Never underestimate Joe [Biden]'s ability to f**k things up" - Barack Obama. At first glance, I took Obama's statement to be a kind of insult. Now I think it's praise for Biden's abilities as a "defender" to disrupt the "offense" of federal programs that help the poor.

...also worth remembering: "The Biden—now Harris—campaign committee raised $997.2 million and Trump’s campaign committee raised $388 million in total between Jan. 2023 and Oct. 16, 2024, the most recent date for which Federal Election Commission filings are available, ending with $118 million and $36.2 million in cash on hand, respectively." - Forbes

If your calculator is not handy, that means the Harris campaign raised a little more than two-and-a-half times the Trump campaign, and spent slightly more than that two-and-a-half times what the Trump campaign spent, yet lost decisively, despite the advantages of incumbency and more money. (Note: this doesn't include spending outside the campaigns...which hit record levels)

Update #1:

 

 Post election prediction: D's will blame everyone from the Russians, to the electorate, to aliens from Mars, but will never accept responsibility for the disastrous policies that put them so far in the hole. More validation that it's difficult to get someone to understand something if their paycheck depends on them not understanding.

Update #2: Chris Hedges take on the American Culture of Despair that gave us Trump.

Update #3: Democrats lose...on purpose...[posted 10 months ago].

 

The idea that American elections are as staged as professional wrestling matches, with predetermined outcomes means that the US doesn't have elections, it has election theater. It's like the TSA that's supposed to keep us safe in air travel but missed 19 of the 20 (fake) bombs sent through airport security. We don't have security, we have security theater. It's not a big surprise, at least in retrospect, that someone who thoroughly understands pro wrestling like Trump should emerge victorious.

 

Update #4: (From Michael Roberts' blog, thenextrecession.wordpress.com...one of the best analyses of the composition of voting in the recent presidential election)

 

 
In line with Update #3, "Harris lost the election heavily because the Democrats campaigned on the identity issues that concerned voters much less, while Trump campaigned on what mattered most to Americans in 2024: inflation, the cost of living and what is perceived as uncontrolled immigration.

"Three out of four Americans who said that inflation caused them and their family severe hardship in the last year voted for Trump. And as I have argued in previous posts, the perception that average American households have suffered a loss in living standards in the last four years is no myth, contrary to the views of mainstream economists.

"Between 2020-2023, real pretax income growth for the bottom 50% of income earners in the US was basically zero. Prices of goods and services are up over 20% since the end of the pandemic and for basic foodstuffs it is even higher. Moreover, the huge hike in interest rates by the Federal Reserve to ‘control’ inflation drove up mortgage rates, insurance premiums, car lease payment and credit card bills.

"Inflation and the drop in living standards for many Americans was blamed by sufficient numbers of voters on the Biden-Harris administration. As in many other countries, incumbent governments that presided over the post-pandemic period have been ousted. Indeed, it is the first time since the beginning of universal suffrage that all the incumbent parties in developed countries have lost vote share. The Democrats are the latest – Germany next.

"In 2020, Trump was the incumbent and was blamed for his disastrous handling of the COVID pandemic. But in 2024, the Biden-Harris administration has been blamed for the failure to deal with inflation and for not stopping immigration. Many Americans saw ‘uncontrolled immigration’ as causing a loss of jobs and rising crime – against all the evidence. Nevertheless, this irrational fear had traction, especially in small towns and rural areas where there are few immigrants visible.

"Biden and Harris crowed about a vibrant, healthy, low unemployment US economy, better than anywhere else. Sufficient American voters were not convinced of this message coming from the so-called ‘liberal elite’, given their own experience. They reckoned they were losing out because of high prices and costs, precarious jobs and uncontolled immigration that threatened their livelihoods, while the rich and educated in Wall Street and in mega hi-tech companies made billions.

"Of course, Trump won’t change any of that – on the contrary, his pals and financial backers are a bunch of rogue billionaires who look to gain yet more riches from cuts in taxes and deregulation of their activities.

"But elections are just a snapshot of public opinion at one moment – nothing stands still."

More of the effects of daylight savings time...

 

Busy, cold night at Stonehenge as we move the stones backwards an hour... pic.twitter.com/V1f3Ws712r

— Papa Woof und Krampus und Bleaken (@woofknight) November 2, 2024

How Money Works: The Overview

© by Mark Dempsey


Since before the Renaissance, businesses have used double-entry bookkeeping to track their finances. This means financial items have two names: asset and liability (debt).

If you have a note and deed of trust—the California equivalent of a mortgage—that is your liability. The note is the IOU, and the deed of trust specifies the security for the loan. People buying a house with a note and deed of trust pay the note holder, that is their liability. But the note holder collects their payments, so to the note holder, the same thing is an asset, not a liability. Similarly, if you have a bank account, that is your asset, but to the bank, it's the money they owe you. It's the bank's liability.

You can march down to the bank and demand it reduce its debt because you hate the word "debt," but it's not a very sensible thing to do. The bank would just make your account—your asset—smaller. Most people don't connect this to national accounting, but the same double-entry naming system applies there, too.

To understand the connection, we need to understand a little federal fiscal policy. First of all, the federal government is the monopoly issuer of currency. Dollars don't grow on billionaires. The Federal Reserve ("the Fed"—the US central bank) and Treasury issue dollars at the direction of Congress.

Incidentally, most of those dollars are electronic entries in Fed bank accounts. A Fed technician types "1" in a special computer terminal to make a dollar. If the technician adds three zeroes, it's a thousand dollars. Three more zeroes and it's a million; three more zeroes and it's a billion...et cetera. We will run out of dollars when the Bureau of Weights and Measures runs out of inches. Never.

The usual description of federal fiscal policy is "tax & spend." That's deceptive but plausible since it's the fiscal sequence for a household. But households don't issue currency. The question the tax & spend crowd needs to answer is this: Where would taxpayers get the dollars with which they pay taxes if the monopoly provider of dollars didn't spend them first? Dollars don't grow on billionaires; the federal government issues them.

So, unlike a household, federal fiscal policy must be "spend first, then retrieve some dollars in taxes." Notice that, unlike a household, the spending is completely independent of tax revenue. This is not a new observation, the chair of the New York Fed, Beardsley Ruml, wrote a paper in 1945 entitled "Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete."

Taxes are important because they create the demand for the currency, among other things. Taxes do not, and cannot provision federal spending. If you went to the local IRS office to pay your taxes in paper dollars, they would mark your bill paid, and then shred the dollars.

And what are the dollars spent by the government, but not yet retrieved in taxes—you know, the dollars in your wallet? Answer #1: the dollar financial assets of the population. In other words, part of peoples' savings. Answer #2: part of the national debt. Both answers describe the same thing.

You might notice that your dollars are notes—the phrase "Federal Reserve Note" appears on one side. The notes—IOUs—are from the Fed to the note holder. What does the Fed owe you for your dollar? Answer: a dollar's worth of relief from an inevitable liability: your taxes.

Confusing currency creators like the federal government with currency users like households is the source of some mischief, too. And the "Fiscal Responsibility™" illusion has persuaded governments to reduce national debt significantly seven times since 1776. The last of these reductions was the Clinton surplus. Perhaps the most dramatic occurred in 1835 when Andrew Jackson paid the national debt off entirely and refused to renew the charter of the US Central Bank.

That debt payoff meant there was no public currency. People did their business with monetized gold ("specie") and over 7,000 varieties of private bank notes of varying reliability. Jackson effectively sucked all the dollar savings out of the economy. It was an economic nightmare, too, culminating in the "Panic of 1837," a large depression. Speaking of depressions, the Coolidge and Hoover administrations also sought to significantly reduce the national debt which led to a wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures now known as the Great Depression. Significant economic downturns follow all the substantial reductions in national debt.

So...why are Wall Street financiers who should know better still lobbying for a smaller national debt? Remember, that a government that issues fiat currency, like the US, is fiscally unconstrained. It can pay any debt owed in that currency, and would never be involuntarily insolvent. Why would otherwise financially sophisticated people try to trigger a wave of asset forfeitures or foreclosures?

Unfortunately, we have a plague of vulture capitalists who are eager to take advantage of a population impoverished by national debt reductions. Some want to dominate labor by reducing social safety nets for the sake of "labor discipline"—the message that you had better take whatever crappy job is on offer or suffer the indignities of poverty, even homelessness, and starvation....and if you're rebellious, we'll put you in a cage.

Currently, the US is the world's leading incarcerator. With five percent of the world's population, the US has 25 percent of its prisoners. Labor discipline and vulture capitalism (AKA "disaster capitalism") are currently ascendant. Until people know how money works, this will likely continue, too.

The object is to get cheap labor and pick up distressed assets for cheap. Labor discipline and fiscal austerity serve the wealthy and keep their wealth intact, inflating stock and real estate prices while draining the pocketbooks of the poor.

One frequently heard objection to this overview is this: "If the government just prints lots of money, then we'll get [gasp!][hyper]inflation." This is a theoretical possibility, but history does not support this concern.

The (right-wing, libertarian) Cato Institute published a study of 56 historical hyperinflations. How many originated with a central bank printing too much money? Answer: zero. The typical inflationary episode began with a shortage of goods accompanied by a balance of payments problem.

The classic examples of Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany support that observation, too. In the former Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the colonial farmers left and the natives were unable to produce the same amount of food. For one thing, raising European livestock requires a tsetse fly eradication program—otherwise the herds die of sleeping sickness. So a country that had previously fed itself was forced to rely on imported food. Hyperinflation followed after the food shortage and balance of payments problems.

In Weimar Germany, the French were impatient that the Germans didn't provide their WWI reparations (in this case, some telephone poles) so they marched their army into Germany's industrial heartland, the Ruhr, and shut it down. A shortage of goods ensued. The reparations were already a balance of payments problem.

The most devastating episode of US inflation in recent years occurred in the '70s when the OPEC used the "oil weapon" to protest the Yom Kippur war fought by the Israelis. US pre-fracking peak oil was in 1971 when the price of oil was $1.75 per barrel, so the US couldn't produce its way out of the OPEC shortfall. The price quadrupled virtually overnight, peaking at $42 per barrel in 1982. The shortage of this critical commodity produced a wave of inflation throughout the country, and not incidentally, a balance of payments to OPEC problem.

Finally, here's a statement no one said, ever: "Hey, the Japanese just attacked Pearl Harbor, but we're a little low on dollars, so we won't respond." On the contrary, the government took over roughly half of the US economy in World War II. Federal taxes increased, not to pay for the war, but to suppress the demand for resources needed to fight the war. Supply shortages might cause inflation, but not if people don't have the money to spend.

The Green New Deal would only consume 5% of the economy, and we would not need to raise taxes to implement it.

That's how the money works.

-----------

The author teaches "Heterodox Economics" for the CSUS Renaissance (senior education) program.

Update #1: One person reminds me that we could balance the budget with a trillion-dollar coin. Congress has authorized Treasury to issue coins of any denomination for coin collectors, but the Obama administration turned down the suggestion of the trillion-dollar coin. It's admittedly a gimmick, and Treasury doesn't count coins as "notes" (debt). The inflationistas could be placated by simply depositing the coin--or several of them--in the Treasury's account at the Fed without spending it. It would make the Treasury's Fed account "balance," but it's too gimmicky to really amount to anything, at least in this writer's opinion.

Sue Frost weighs in on the side of global warming

In County Supervisor Sue Frost’s recent newsletter, she lets us know what’s important to her. No, it’s not the billions of dollars in damage that make the Southeastern US virtually uninsurable because of record hurricane seasons, it’s not the record droughts, subsequent record forest fire seasons and floods that originate with global warming. It’s not continued petroleum dependence that fuels that warming, and is the motivation for the endless wars in the Middle East. And it’s certainly not that important we’re draining county resources available to deal with the enormous climate-related damage barreling down the track toward us, choosing instead to spend a billion dollars to enlarge the County Jail.


No, none of that is important. What’s important is it may take truckers longer to fill their batteries than their gas tanks. That’s what’s important. To Sue.

Socialism = Shock and Awe

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

A while ago I told some politically interested people about the difference between publicly-owned SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District) and privately-owned PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric). It turns out SMUD's electricity rates are roughly 35% cheaper than PG&E's. In addition, PG&E has had to settle lawsuits for their poor infrastructure maintenance, including an explosion of a gas line in a residential San Bruno neighborhood, and powerlines causing the fires that, among other things, burned down the ironically-named town of Paradise. At one point, PG&E executives were consulting with attorneys about their liability in criminal negligence lawsuits for these little faux pas.

My conclusion, declared aloud: "Socialism! It's cheaper and works better." The conservatives present opened their eyes wide in astonishment. One "liberal" said "Well, that's your opinion!"

Yes, the "s" word ("socialism") is taboo! The idea of public ownership must be unspeakably bad!

In an odd coincidence, this meeting was in a publicly-owned building, in the midst of a publicly-ownd park to which we had all driven over publicly-owned roads. We all drank water from publicly-owned water districts, and our sewage was processed in a publicly-owned regional sewer plant. Several of us were of the age that we enjoyed public pensions and (socialist!) Social Security, never mind the (socialist!) single-payer healthcare for the elderly we call "Medicare."

The idea that something so ubiquitous as public ownership would be taboo, even shocking, is simply bizarre. Yet, that is the current state of play in the US. Anti-socialism has been so heavily marketed that many people simply can't conceive of something good coming from public ownership. 

This doesn't imply that public ownership is perfect. Just like privately-owned PG&E, SMUD has made mistakes. SMUD's mothballed nuclear reactor would be one example. But profit-driven PG&E thought skimping on maintenance would be a good way to boost stock prices and dividends, and SMUD doesn't have that motivation. 

Publicly sponsored projects help private industries too. If you have a smart phone, roughly 80% of the inventions it uses--cell technology, GPS, lithium-ion batteries, etc.--are the fruits of government-funded research. Economist Mariana Mazzucato says 75% of innovative pharmaceuticals come from government-funded research. Privately-owned big Pharma tends to spend its money on marketing (55% of gross profits) not research and development (15%). And big Pharma spends most of that private R&D on extending the life of already-patented drugs (think "time-release Viagra"). 

The government also had a hand in lots of Silicon Valley companies, supplying startup grants to the likes of Google, Yahoo! and Apple--all of whom had immigrant founders, incidentally.

But socialism is taboo. And immigration is a burden.

During big emergencies--World War II is a good example--government takes over large swaths of the economy. WWII meant government took over roughly 50% of the US economy. The supposedly unaffordable Green New Deal would only consume 5% of the current economy.

During a break in this meeting, one of the facilitators spoke to me, saying that if I had my way, his 401K which consisted in stock in privately-owned companies, would diminish, impoverishing his retirement. I had to remind him that the stock mark took a dive all on its own in 2007. The trouble with this point of view is that it believes burning up the planet to make bigger profits is okey-doke. What would his 401K wealth buy then? Nothing but ash would be for sale. Not very sensible.

All of which goes to show that it's easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.

Bonus conclusion: Secret policy formulation follows when governments are too weak to make policy themselves.

This was ok to broadcast in 1974 on the BBC.

You can’t say these things in 2024.

We have become more intelligent, informed and evolved to do so.

This is novelist and former intelligence agent John le Carré. pic.twitter.com/eI9fU8q3pp

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) October 19, 2024

Words, Symbols, etc.

 "Man lives in a world of ideas. Any phenomenon is so complex that he cannot possibly grasp the whole of it. He abstracts certain characteristics of a given phenomenon as an idea, then represents that idea as a symbol, be it a word or a mathematical sign. Human reaction is almost entirely reaction to symbols, and only negligibly to phenomena. As a matter of fact, it can be demonstrated that the human mind can think only in terms of symbols.

"When we think, we let symbols operate on other symbols in certain, set fashions—rules of logic, or rules of mathematics. If the symbols have been abstracted so that they are structurally similar to the phenomena they stand for, and if the symbol operations are similar in structure and order to the operations of phenomena in the real world, we think sanely. If our logic-mathematics, or our word-symbols, have been poorly chosen, we do not think sanely." - Robert Heinlein 1940 short story “Blowups Happen”

...

We carry about with us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that totally is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young. Not to know is the beginning of wisdom.

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

The wall is the idea; the reality, the truth, is on the other side.

The mind must be empty in order to see clearly.

--Jiddu Krishnamurti

 ---

Alfred North Whitehead calls the dominance of symbols "The fallacy of misplaced concreteness" and compares it to going to a restaurant and devouring the paper menu. The Bible calls this "idolatry," and commands devotion to the geniune article, not a symbol for it.

Of course, in economic terms, it’s “Midas Disease”–the belief that more stocks, bonds and cash is wealth, not the things they can buy. How much good would they do if we burn up the planet to get more of those symbols of wealth?

 

How Kamala Loses; How Kamala Wins

 (c) by Mark Dempsey     

A blogger I read--Ian Welsh--notes that Kamala is making the Hillary mistake. When asked what she would change about the Biden administration's policies, she answered "Nothing comes to mind."...just as Hillary asserted America was already great. 

Wasn't doing more of the same while expecting a different outcome the litmust test for insanity?

Harris' approach discounts the extraordinary discontent embodied in Trump's candidacy. He's the neutron bomb of candidates, set to wipe out Washington D.C.'s smug patricians who have bungled crisis after crisis. To feign ignorance of Trumpists' discontent--and it's got to be feigned, or Kamala is sleep walking through the campaign--ignores so much of what motivates voters.

Let's face it, American voters primarily vote against candidates. In fact, they don't bother to vote if it looks futile. In 2016, if "Didn't Bother to Vote" was a candidate, it would have beaten both major party candidates (Hillary and Trump) handily. Here's 2020...and didn't bother to vote is still a huge factor.

That Trump got more votes than any previous presidential candidate in 2016 is a gauge of just how deep that discontent runs. 

So Kamala can say something like "I admire Joe Biden, but I'm my own person, and I plan to make some changes to address Trump voters' concerns." That would at least acknowledge some things need to change--and change enough for voters to support a lying serial bankrupt abuser rather than her own campaign.

 

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:

Do Prisons Prevent Crime?

(c) by Mark Dempsey

I've said it before, but people are very easy to influence, particularly with the stories we tell ourselves, via Hollywood. These stories include crime dramas, police procedurals, detective stories, and courtroom dramas. Solving the crime typically drives the plot, and the bad guys perish, or are appropriately punished roughly 90% of the time. Is there any murder plot so complex Perry Mason can't solve it? I don't think so!

In real life, the police and courts solve far fewer crimes--13% in California in 2022 (says the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice here).

Meanwhile, Hollywood's stories have an effect. Between 1982 and 2017 the US population increased 42%, while spending on policing increased 187%.  The influence also appears in US prison spending. With five percent of the world’s population, the US has 25% of its prisoners–five times the world’s per-capita average incarceration rate, seven times Canada’s or France’s rates, per-capita. Is Canadian or French crime worse than US crime? No, it's a little lower.

What’s different in Canadian and French societies that lets them incarcerate at one-seventh the US rate? For one thing, the US has more than a half million medical bankruptcies annually. Canada and France have none. 

Could bankruptcy drive people to consider desperate solutions like crime? Could treating people better rather than driving them to bankruptcy for health problems have an influence on crime rates? Never mind Canada and France, there are several studies (here [pdf], and here, etc.) that demonstrate treating poor people better lowers crime rates.

Yet the US continues to believe desperation cures crime, not treating people well. The impulse to punish more has local support, too. Rather than house the homeless, open local health clinics, or experiment with basic income guarantees for the poor, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors has voted to spend nearly a billion dollars enlarging the County jail.

In fairness to the County, the current jail is full, but 60 - 80% of the prisoners are convicted of nothing but being unable to afford bail. They're doubly poor too, because they'll lose whatever job they might have had if they await trial in jail. 

The County avoids any discussion of supervised release, or no-cash bail. Opponents of this kinder approach might cite a neighboring (Yolo) County that had a less-than-optimum experience (more crimes, and more recidivism) when they released inmates during COVID times.

Yet Washington D.C. and the state of Illinois have adopted no-cash bail for select offenses. In fact one headline from Illinois--“Nearly 8 months into Illinois' new era without cash bail, experts say recidivism and jail populations are trending lower”--suggests there are ways to successfully do this.

There are also ways to sabotage kinder programs. Oregon attempted to decriminalize drugs, then repealed that measure as a failure. They tried to get police to offer the alternative–rehab–with tickets. The addicts were not impressed, to say the least, and police didn’t handle addicts’ defiance well. 

Meanwhile, incarceration is seven times more expensive than medical treatment for addiction (rehab), and has a lower success rate. One study says: “if 40 percent of offenders receive rehab vs. incarceration, it saves the system $13 billion. Choosing drug treatment leads to fewer crimes, lower addiction rates, and saves society money.”. Other countries--Portugal and Switzerland among others--have successfully decriminalized drugs.

I’d suggest our addiction to incarceration is as bad an addiction as any drug. To start to address this, perhaps what’s needed, besides a change of heart, is something like tobacco's warning labels for crime shows. Here are a few:

Warning:This show might lead you to believe police solve all crimes. They don't even solve half.

Warning: Believing abuse cures criminal behavior is worse than believing in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus.

Warning: Believing punishment cures criminal behavior is expensive an ineffective.