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)