Fantasy vs. Reality: Where the US is at...

 

The Democratization of Hollywood

 Chinese AI-produced miniseries are incredibly cheap to make. Now they go one step further: you can "localize" them easily. This is pretty revolutionary. The irony is that the Commies are going to democratize public spectacle...!

People are really not paying enough attention to this.

Last week, in the post below, I wrote that China would soon have AI tools to easily internationalize the hundreds of thousands of AI mini-series it produces every year, and "re-render the footage with local faces, languages… https://t.co/5mNOJeeQp9 pic.twitter.com/hfBudd9aQm

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) September 30, 2026

"Evil" and Donald Trump

 From ianwelsh.net

Donald Trump and the Age of Evil – By any standard of morality, Trump is depraved. But adorned with the power of the state, he descends to another level — the level of evil.

Chris Hedges, Sep 25, 2026

Donald Trump exhibits the classic traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation and incapacity for remorse or guilt.

But is he evil?

If, as the philosopher Susan Nieman writes, evil is not simply the opposite of good but inimical to it, if the aim of evil is to destroy all moral distinctions, then Trump qualifies as evil. Morality, for Trump, is for losers. All life is transactional. Self-interest and self-enrichment usurp all other considerations. No one else matters.

In her new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” Neiman argues that evil “isn’t cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary.”

She continues:

“There’s a difference between calling one action evil and calling another a crime. Crimes are things for which we have procedures—at least for punishing, if not for preventing. This means that a crime can be fit in some way into the rest of our experience. To call an action evil is to suggest it cannot—and that it thereby threatens the trust in the world that we need to navigate it. There’s no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed.” ….

“Once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as commonsense realism rather than a philosophical idea, moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naïve but suspect,” Neiman writes. “Sadists exist and cause no end of pain. But the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.” ….

The institutions designed to protect democracy, to safeguard civic virtues, to foster equality — including the courts, law firms, universities and the media, all of which have been captured by the billionaire class — swiftly fell to their knees to curry favor with the Trump White House. The titans in Silicon Valley showered him and his campaign with millions of dollars. The supposed virtues these institutions and individuals claimed they championed were jettisoned. These virtues, they illustrated, were nothing more than branding, performance art, a sham.

To an enraged public Trump’s transparent greed and cruelty is preferable to the slick hypocrisy of the politicians, Republican and Democrat, who preceded him. He does not engage in their faux empathy. In fact, he seems incapable of empathy.

Once morality is for fools, virtue makes no sense. Once we believe we should grab what we can, even at the expense of those around us, we surrender to evil.

“Unlike the rest of us, he permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are told are the true forces driving human behavior,” Neiman writes of Trump….

[TW: The organizing principle of capitalism is that everyone pursuing their own self-interest results in the greatest benefit to society. This is obviously counter to civic republicanism, and why I believe that we must rebuild a republican spirit of governance, and why I insist Adam Smith and John Locke in particular should be disdained, not venerated. Their ideas are hostile to the very basis of good governance.]

 

The Consequences of Private Equity

 

Last year I walked into a Jo-Ann fabrics because they were having a closing sale, got to talking to one of the managers and they said they'd been there for 15 years and that the store was one of the most profitable in the state, Was making a million dollars in profit each year.…

— Crypto Facts 🇺🇲🏳️‍🌈 (@Crypt0_Facts) September 22, 2026

What a Fool Believes [Part 2]

 The Fool's Recipe for Affordable Housing: 

How will we build more affordable housing? Why simply "streamlining" environmental regulation and zoning would unleash the MIGHTY MARKET whose decisions are always wise and fully informed! Why can't the peons understand this?!

Sure, Nixon stopped the feds from building affordable housing several generations ago, Reagan cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%, and Clinton signed legislation with the "Faircloth Amendment" that limits federal support for affordable housing, but it's the market's decision to build fewer affordable homes that's the problem. Those pesky regulations are the reason there's a shortage of (affordable) homes! (Note: the US currently has more vacant homes than its homeless population.)

update:

The US has essentially stopped building small/starter homes. pic.twitter.com/OM9LaLkVK4

— Hunter📈🌈📊 (@StatisticUrban) September 16, 2026

Update: (from Xwitter): [Canadian politician] Ford’s "less red tape" mantra is a scam. By slashing 35% of permits the PCs aren’t cutting bureaucracy they’re gutting water safety, housing standards & environmental firewalls. They are creating lawless corporate zones that sell out Ontarians to enrich wealthy developers 

The Fool's Recipe for an Affordable Economy 

The Federal Reserve recently announced that 40% of the US population can't afford a $400 emergency, while 60% live paycheck to paycheck. So we need to lower taxes on the wealthy so money can "trickle down."  A tax on vacant homes is off the table too.

The Fool's Recipe to Prevent Crime 

Cops, courts, and cages always nab the bad guys. Just ask Hollywood! In real life, cops solve less than 15% of crimes (13.2% of felonies in California in 2022). But the public has countenanced massive increases in "justice-related" expenses. Since the 1980s, such spending has grown more than four times as fast as the population.

The US currently incarcerates (per capita) at five times the world's average, seven times Canada's incarceration rate, and Canada has a lower crime rate. One difference: The US has more than half a million medical bankruptcies annually. Canada has Medicare for all. 

 Update: California can jail people for offenses whose remedy is fines. The Governor has a bill on his desk that would prevent that. So if someone misses a court date, or has a late payment, jail would no longer be a "remedy."

The Fool's Recipe to Prevent Disease

At the top of this list is vaccine skepticism. The author's brother was such a skeptic. He died of preventable pneumonia. Meanwhile, as such skepticism becomes fashionable, diseases previously prevented by vaccines (e.g., measles) are now returning in record numbers.

Fools Want a Strong Dollar 

From a Steve Keen LinkedIn Post and Xwitter Post:

A strong dollar looks like a crown. But it can become a noose.

America didn’t become powerful because the dollar was the world’s currency.

It became powerful because its factories could produce weapons, ships, and machinery better than its rivals.

After Bretton Woods, the dollar gained an extra demand: every country needed it to trade with every other country.

That pushed its value above what American goods alone justified.
A 50% overvalued currency gives foreign producers a huge cost advantage.

Cheap imports feel like a victory. They aren’t, because the same process slowly destroys your manufacturing base.

America sent pieces of paper abroad and received physical goods in return. That looked like wealth. Over time, Japan, China, and other “vassals” became more complex industrial economies.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭?

- America moved from trade surplus after World War II to sustained deficits of roughly 3–6% of GDP.

- The dollar became stronger. America became weaker.

Keynes proposed something far more rational: a neutral international unit of account—the bancor—managed through an International Clearing Union.

Surplus and deficit nations would both face penalties. That matters because massive imbalances weaken deficit countries while strengthening surplus countries.

Instead, America chose the short-term advantage. Now the long-term bill is arriving.

If dollar dominance ends, imported inflation will rise because Americans rely heavily on foreign goods. Higher interest rates cannot solve inflation caused by a falling currency.

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑠 𝑠𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑒: 𝑑𝑜𝑛’𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑦 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑎𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟.

Use a neutral international unit, make trade balances sum to zero, and limit excessive surpluses and deficits.

That could reduce global instability. But ego and testosterone may get in the way. 

Fools Say Socialism is Bad; Capitalism Solves all Economic Problems!   

People present announced this conclusion after I pointed out that the local, publicly-owned utility (SMUD) was 35% cheaper than privately-owned PG&E, and, unlike PG&E, its executives weren't consulting criminal attorneys about the possibility of facing negligent homicide charges because they skimped on maintenance and literally burned down towns (Paradise!).

The participants in this discussion were sitting in a publicly-owned building, had driven there on publicly-owned streets, probably got their education from public schools...etc.

But socialism is alien and bad! The public shouldn't control markets or the toxic goods passed off as healthy! Private is always better! 

...Now excuse me as I chase those kids off of my lawn 

What a fool believes [Part 1]

 ...a wise man has power to reason away - Michael McDonald (What a fool believes)

There's an awful lot of foolishness passing as wisdom nowadays. I can't say I've been immune to being fooled, either, but I've managed to spot a few examples:

Foolish Politics 

 

The Fool's Inflation Remedy

Inflation is raising prices. The conventional (Monetarist) narrative says inflation always stems from the central bank issuing too much currency. Why it could never be a shortage of goods! Who could ever believe the COVID supply shocks and corporations colluding to raise prices (and profits) were behind inflation! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! 

As one commentator says, "Monetary policy is ineffective at containing supply-side driven inflation (unless you want to put the economy into a severe recession and even then inflation will persist ... see 1970s)."

Economic orthodoxy says the preferred inflation remedy is to have our central bank, the Federal Reserve, raise interest rates. There are actually people who believe the Federal Reserve doesn't control interest rates, and needs to borrow the dollars it makes, literally without limit. 

And no, raising interest rates won't open the Strait of Hormuz, or reshore all that industry the US has offshored since the Reagan administration. In fact, it will add money to the accounts of those already rich enough to own government bonds, but that's the remedy proposed. 

Bond yields are "welfare for rich people," says Warren Mosler. From the above linked article: "Japan has engaged in massive amounts of what is commonly called money printing for decades, yet remained stuck in borderline deflation."

China's economic success is based on de-financializing its economy, and instead of pursuing symbols of wealth (dollars, yuan, stocks, bonds, etc.), pursuing actual wealth - human capital and expertise, manufacturing capacity, scientific and engineering innovation, agricultural production, etc.

Note the bond markets' panic for all but China:

From Xwitter:

Eduardo Garzón

@edugaresp

(Translated from Spanish)
I challenge any economist to explain to me why the interest rate on China's public debt keeps falling despite the fact that its public debt volume keeps rising. Spoiler: they're not going to be able to, unless they use the postulates of Modern Monetary Theory.

 

Also: 

Eduardo Garzón

@edugaresp

·

9h

Translated from Spanish

I challenge any economist to explain to me why Japan has been creating money hand over fist for decades while inflation hasn't even flinched. Spoiler: they're not going to be able to, unless they resort to post-Keynesian or Marxist postulates. 

 Says economic historian Michael Hudson: "U.S. firms in recent years have spent 92% of their cash flow (overall profits) on stock buybacks and dividend payouts aimed at increasing the price of their common stock. That leaves only 8% of their returns to be reinvested in building new factories and employing more labor to expand their production. The effect of financializing Western industry has thus been to cannibalize it to make purely financial gains."

Here's Mosler's advice about the public policy needed to de-financialize an economy (Australia's). Hint: it's not raising rates. Higher bond yields actually put more money into the economy, causing more demand-led inflation!

 

China Ends Povery

 

China ended extreme poverty.

Citizens of the USA are returning to extreme poverty.

And please note, that this is just the World Bank definition.

China's definition also includes "Two no worries" meaning no worries about food and clothing, and "three guarantees" meaning… pic.twitter.com/WqbodnMy11

— Jason Smith - 上官杰文 (@ShangguanJiewen) September 19, 2026

Genuinely Addressing Homelessness Is Not Deregulating Our Way to Paradise

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

One of many similar editorials appeared recently in the Davis Vanguard, asking "How Can We Fix America’s Shocking Lack of Affordable Housing?" It notes the US is millions of units short of providing  needed low-income homes, and answers the headline question with what has become the orthodox standard advice about what keeps us from building such housing: Cut regulations, zoning restrictions and the rest of the bureaucratic, unproductive government bumpf that so frustrates builders of any type of housing. The fact that the same banks and builders who have built only for the wealthy for decades now profit from deregulation too is just a side benefit[!]

What the standard deregulatory advice omits is the history of public policy that actually produced what is now the largest homeless population since the Great Depression. The Nixon administration stopped the federal government from building affordable homes. To add insult to that injury, as it was cutting taxes on the wealthy roughly in half--so they'd "trickle down" their newfound wealth-- the Reagan administration cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. In the spirit of bipartisanship, the Clinton administration signed the Faircloth amendment limiting federal contributions to affordable housing.

So...I would agree that homelessness, and the lack of low-income housing is a failure of public policy, but the culprit isn't zoning or environmental regulations. It's literally generations of skimping on publicly-funded low-income housing. Incidentally, those regulation aren't always the most intelligent thing, but they exist because, before they existed, bad things happened in real estate, just as regulations about food followed meat packers shipping poisonous canned meat. Improving or even deleting them won't magically produce affordable housing.

Zoning arose because polluting industries were harming people in neighboring residential areas. Similar horror stories meant environmental restrictions were so popular that business-friendly Richard Nixon started the EPA, and Ronald Reagan signed CEQA when he governed California. CEQA is California's master environmental regulation. 

It doesn't take too much investigation to find the instances when wealthy interests bypassed those "restrictive" zoning regulations, either. Land speculators in California regularly turn less-profitable agricultural land into suburban sprawl with massive profits. When building a basketball stadium for the Sacramento Kings' wealthy owners, the state legislature passed an exemption from CEQA's environmental studies so the stadium could be built swiftly, before the public became disenchanted with the horrible deal it embodied.

Meanwhile, there are more vacant homes in the US than homeless people. San Francisco reportedly has five times its homeless population in vacancies. Unless the US does like Vancouver and taxes homes left vacant, what's needed is public policy that funds and builds affordable homes--preferrably at the federal level. The federal government not only creates the currency, so it has all the dollars it needs whenever it needs them, it can ignore local zoning restrictions and build wherever it wants. 

Here's something no one said, ever: "The Japanese just attacked Pearl Harbor, but we're a little low on dollars, so I guess we won't respond." 

One caveat: A tradesman acquaintance says, after servicing a low-income property, his observation was that those low-income renters "trash" their homes. This makes sense, since poor people are not as concerned about material conditions as the wealthy. It's why they're poor! So skimping on maintenance for those low-income units is covert sabotage that counts on citizen disgust to discredit any policy that accommodates them. Why those homeless people seldom even bathe! Ew!

As you might imagine, when China was much poorer than the US a couple of generations ago, it too had a homeless problem. Rural Chinese, desperate because of poverty, would come to the big cities to beg. So the Chinese said "Let's get rid of zoning and environmental regulations...Yeah, that's the ticket!"

No. That's not what they said. They said "Let's give these people jobs." And they did. Now there's no more homeless problem in China.  

And the US won't deregulate its way out of the trouble it's in now any more than raising interest rates at the Federal Reserve will open the Strait of Hormuz, or reshore all that offshored manufacturing. My question is this: When will op-ed writers and editors stop believeing the deregulatory baloney? Intelligent regulations are essential to a functioning economy...and ecology. 

---

The author sat on a Sacramento County Community Planning Advisory Council for nearly a decade. 

Making Peace with Death, the Japanese Way

 

The Rectification of Names

 

Urinal cakes are cakes. It's literally the name of the product

Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a Democratic Republic. It's literally in the name of the country

Jellyfish are fish. It's literally in the name

For the last time, read history

The Nazis weren't socialist. https://t.co/5933b5qSqc

— Pandemos (@ThePandemos) September 12, 2026

George Carlin weighs in (20 years ago)

 

I’m talking about the real owners now: the real owners, the big wealthy businesses that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice.…

— Human☮🇺🇸🇺🇦🇺🇸🌊 (@4HumanUnity) September 11, 2026

[continued]

You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations that long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, and the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want: they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs: lower pay, longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and a vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And, by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe, what to think, and what to buy through their media. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people, white-collar, blue-collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on, people of modest means continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on: the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white, and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners in this country know the truth: it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. Carlin said it 20 years ago. More true now. What a genius: George Carlin - It's A BIG Club & You Ain't In It! https://youtu.be/Nyvxt1svxso?si=3hSjwoWEHb0BS0Ec via

@YouTube

 

China Pursues Peace and Prosperity, Not Profit

 

(c) by Mark Dempsey

 

Isabelle M. Weber's book How China Avoided Shock Therapy describes how China industrialized a poor, largely agricultural society and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in a few generations. It also describes the way the Chinese did economics to avoid the meltdown that often accompanied socialist economies' "shock therapy" transition to industrialization and markets in Eastern Europe and the USSR. One of the oddities of the Chinese transition was that pursuing profit in business did not get state support, while free markets and competition ultimately did after a slow (non-shocking) period of adjustment. 

 

Weber notes that Chinese governments intervened in markets as early as 200 BCE, doing such intervention when agricultural goods were plentiful after the harvest was in. That abundance put downward pressure on prices, impoverishing farmers, and encouraging speculators to buy so they could sell when the harvest was not so plentiful. The government intervened to prevent that. China has a millennia-long tradition of government managing markets.

 

Such price supports also exist in the US. Agricultural subsidies reportedly supply 40% of farmers' income. Michael Pollan (in The Omnivore's Dilemma) quotes one farmer calling such subsidies "Laundering money for Cargill and ADM" - large, profitable agribusinesses. Like China, the US government managed the markets' transition to and from wartime footing in WWII. During that war, the US government took over 50% of the economy. The "Green New Deal" would only take 5% of the current US economy, but the political establishment now rejects that as unprecedented.

 

In contrast to China, profit is what neoliberal Western economies pursue, and that pursuit guides how Western economies develop and build. In the energy arena, Brett Christophers' The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet notes bankers tend to deny loans to renewable energy sources because their profits take longer to arrive than conventional energy sources. 

 

Drilling for petroleum profits more quickly, so loans are more readily available. Renewables often have up-front costs like expanding the grid to access the power generated remotely so the electricity produced can actually reach its consumers, in addition to the up-front cost of the renewables' equipment. So while loans for such projects are necessary, bankers are reluctant.

 

Christophers makes the case that government subsidies or loan guarantees are not optional if we want to build the kinds of energy projects that favor sustainability. Meanwhile, China has pursued renewables aggressively enough that their carbon emissions are have been in decline.

 

This Chinese experience also explains the extraordinary efforts made by the petroleum industry to influence public policy in the West. Oil companies are indifferent to whether the planet burns up as long as they make a profit now, and they know government support can create eco-friendly competitors, so they spend millions to dominate government. In 2016, the oil-refinery-building Kochs spent $889 million on politics. Pseudo-lefty George Soros spent less than one thirtieth as much opposing them.

 

 

 

That said, the video above describes how Chinese public policy thwarts savers and investors whenever they try to speculate for profit. Chinese real estate, stock market, or bank accounts do not have the returns investors expect in the West. Ironically, while many Western investors appear eager to cash in on the rise of China's economy, its own population's wealthy try to circumvent China's capital controls so they can export their savings to take advantage of Western economies' pursuit of higher returns in their stock markets and bank accounts. 

Classical economics describes the "law of declining profits." In markets that are perfectly competitive with low barriers to entry, firms often compete for customers by reducing prices, which, in turn, reduces their profitability. 

Western firm managers know this and engage in many strategies to make sure markets are not free--including lobbying for barrier-to-entry regulations, buying out competitors, dumping products at below production costs to bankrupt less-well-capitalized competitors, and engaging in unproductive, but profitable activities. Typical within that last pursuit are military cost plus contracts. In such contracts, the cost to produce a weapon determines its profitability--the "plus" is the profit, and is a percentage of the cost. 

This is one reason American weapons are costly, and finicky. The F-35 fighter jet spends a significant amount of time in maintenance, even though it's a very expensive plane. Profit, not durability or military readiness, is what drives the design. (See William Proxmire's Report from Wasteland for an earlier account of just how costly US weapons are.)

So...does profit-pursuing capitalism require expensive weapons and the warfare that uses them? One editorial describing the dynamics at work in the Ukraine war seems to believe so. That editorial concludes that the war will continue indefinitely because it's so profitable. 

Meanwhile, the Chinese government understands the law of declining profits and does not permit Chinese companies to abandon productive, competitive enterprises to pursue profits at the expense of society's benefit. Chinese public policy places its bets on productive enterprise, which is a significant reason the cars they manufacture are roughly half as expensive as US equivalents. 

Making housing into a speculative investment, as the US currently does, rather than a necessity of life is the epitome of what's unproductive. House price inflation doesn't produce more house. It just enriches speculators and homeowners at the expense of those who want affordable housing.

That dynamic is one reason the US now has the biggest homeless population since the Great Depression. Successive federal administrations have stopped the public sector contributions to house affordability. Nixon stopped the US building affordable housing and Reagan cut subsidies to low-income renters. Clinton signed legislation with the "Faircloth Amendment" limiting federal low-income housing relief, so the attack on the homeless has been bipartisan.

When it was a poor country, Chinese from the countryside would come to cities to beg for food, so China had a homelessness problem too. But, rather than open homeless shelters, the Chinese offered the beggars work in their hometowns. It wasn't necessarily profitable, but that work meant China doesn't have a massive homeless population, despite its poverty compared to the US. 

Profit also is the source of billionaires. As the video discloses, China made many real estate investors unhappy with public policy that keeps house prices low, and they've even imprisoned a billionaire who encouraged real estate speculation (See: China Evergrande founder sentenced to life in prison). The US, on the other hand, leads the world in billionaire production and actively encourages building homes as investments rather than necessities, continuing the US' commitment to a dog-eat-dog economy some call "Disaster Capitalism."