Chinese Humor

 

In 🇨🇳Nanchang, Jiangxi, sanitation workers dress as Ming dynasty imperial guards as they patrol the streets!

They keep the city clean while bringing history to life and picking up litter along the way! pic.twitter.com/fab1lz3CVJ

— Dominic Lee 李梓敬 (@dominictsz) February 24, 2026

Is there an alternative?

A perforated corporate veil

Cory Doctorow, February 20, 2026 [Pluralistic]

“Capitalist realism” is the idea that the world’s current economic and political arrangements are inevitable, and that any attempt to alter them is a) irrational; b) doomed; and c) dangerous. It’s the ideology of Margaret Thatcher’s maxim, “There is no alternative.”

Obviously this is very convenient if you are a current beneficiary of the status quo. “There is no alternative” is a thought-stopping demand dressed up as an observation. It means, “Don’t try and think of alternatives.”

The thing is, alternatives already exist and work very well. The Mondragon co-ops in Spain constitute a fully worked out, long-term stable economic alternative to traditional capitalist enterprises, employing more than 100,000 people and generating tangible, empirically measured benefits to workers, customers and the region:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

…Brazil’s liability system “represented a distributive choice: prioritizing Brazilian workers’ ability to enforce their rights over foreign capital’s interest in minimizing costs through corporate structuring.”

Pargendler (who teaches at Harvard Law) co-authored a paper with São Paulo Law’s Olívia Pasqualeto analyzing the impact that Brazil’s limited liability system had on capital formation and corporate conduct:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6105586 ….

Denmark to the rescue!

 When the US (provocatively) sent a submarine to threaten Greenland, one of its sailors fell ill. The Danes graciously allowed him to go to a hospital in Greenland.

Meanwhile... 

 

😅https://t.co/p2yDtDSdDQ

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) February 22, 2026

Nice Try, Milton

 

This isn’t an explanation of inflation grounded in monetary reality, it’s a narrative designed to discipline the public.

Inflation is not some mystical punishment for government spending, nor a moral failing of society “living beyond its means.” It is a question of real… https://t.co/u3HPKxZHWm

— Ashish Barua/आशिष बरूआ #MMT (INDIA) 🍉 (@barua_ashish) February 21, 2026

Pity the Poor Norwegians

 

Are we great yet? pic.twitter.com/68ocDE19WE

— James Tate (@JamesTate121) February 20, 2026

The Carefully Contrived Spontaneity of the “Shocking” Epstein Files Release

The Carefully Contrived Spontaneity of the “Shocking” Epstein Files Release
by Edward Curtin

Whenever a “scandal” like the Epstein files dominates the news, we can be certain that it is meant as a distraction from something more sinister on the horizon.

The Epstein files have been in the hands of the F.B.I. for eight years or more. Then why have redacted files been released just recently? Cui bono?

And who is behind the release that did not occur over the course of the first Trump and the Biden administrations? Cui bono?

Does the genocide in Gaza and the U.S. proxy war against Russia, both supported by Biden and Trump, fit into the timing and redactions since we can assume that the Mossad, CIA, NSA, and MI6 have also long had access to the files? A U.S../Israel attack on Iran? For, like movies, all propaganda and coverups have carefully chosen release dates.

Last question: Why would anyone be shocked by the contents of the Epstein files, although many people seem to be? Yes, more names have been added to the list of degenerate elites who were happily part of Epstein’s criminal enterprise, but the revelation of more names only confirms how extensive it was.

We have long known of the criminal activities of the degenerate Epstein, the financiers, celebrities, politicians, and public figures who joined him. Sexual blackmail, cooperation between intelligence agencies and the underworld, secret financial deals, war planning in the name of peace, etc. are how capitalism has long operated. While those who research such things have long known this (see, e.g., Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail, two volumes), the ordinary person may be finally grasping it; but shocking it is not. And the “may” should be emphasized. All of us have long been living in a culture of increasing “shock” rot where the most grotesque news and entertainment are staples of the mass media from Washington D.C. to Hollywood and all around the internet the monkey chased the weasel. The monkeys thought it was all in fun, and then Pop! goes the weasel.

Being shocked seems to be very popular; it spices up lives, induces that frisson that only sex, death, and the weather can bring to daily conversations. “Can you believe it?” and “Unbelievable!” echo across the land and spring from lips, screens, and websites everywhere as they invite you to come hither to be flabbergasted and have your head spun vertiginously. Ordinary people have become Regan MacNeil, the young girl possessed by a demon in The Exorcist.

If the corporate media ever went very deep, they would have to expose themselves as agents of the same forces behind Epstein’s rise to power. How often do these media connect Epstein to Israel, the Mossad, the CIA, etc.? It is not only evil individuals who rule but a structure of evil, a system, if you like, a social system deeply ingrained, publicly run currently by the evil moron Trump who, in a recent interview with The New York Times, when asked if he felt there were any limits on his global power, said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” This statement let the cat out of the bag. It is the nihilist’s credo, basic to today’s ethos. No honor, no traditional ethical standards, no God, no love for humanity, just fake and deceptive news meant to shock and a “do your own thing,” U.S. president talking punk kid talk. Yeah. Unbelievable!. “I know words. I have the best words. I have the – but there’s no better word than stupid.” (Cue the soundtrack.)

The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously said, “To make a film all you need is a girl and a gun.” Well, we have the Epstein movie, and in it he and his venal and sordid friends had the girls, but who holds the guns and not the penises behind their criminal enterprises, is left unaddressed.

When caught in flagrante, the media loves to expose certain individuals who take their pants down for sexual abuse purposes, but they find it impossible to take down those depraved villains who commit atrocities on ordinary people day in and day out throughout the world. Let’s call them the producers. They shape and pay for the news.

The Reality-TV President Donald Trump – the face of explicit imperialism and dictatorial domestic rule, a gross brutish thug whose core maxim is “might makes right” and whose name appears manifold times in the Epstein files – knows well how the game is played. After his televised fight with Zelensky last year (or was it before the fight?), he said “This is going to make great television.” So too the Epstein movie. Maybe a series.

And as in the past, none engaged in this wretched and criminal activity – except for Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell – will probably ever serve prison time. No shock there either.

As for shocks, it is better to watch the Winter Olympics and be “shocked” by favored athletes falling on ice and snow. Those falls are at least real.

There is a painting in a villa still visible at the entrance to the House of the Vettii in ruined Pompeii that tells us much about the Epstein files and power and wealth. It perfectly symbolizes one aspect of the gap between the international ruling classes – i.e. the dirty details in the Epstein documents minus the answer to who has been running the blackmail operation and why – and the rest of us. It pictures the God Priapus weighing his penis on a scale of gold coins, as if to say, gold, God, wealth, and power – we rule. Fuck you! It’s an old story told by nihilistic men desperate to prove their potency by dominating vulnerable girls and women and the entire world.

Many have been asking how is it possible for Epstein and all those named and unnamed to have done such evil and criminal things? Evil seems to greatly perplex modern intellectuals. Do they think El Diablo is a salsa brand?

Hannah Arendt’s explanation of Adolf Eichmann’s behavior – the banality of evil – is one such explanation being coughed up now for Epstein’s behavior. Others say that he had no conscience or couldn’t reason like an adult; that he wasn’t very smart but was an excellent con man. That he was a narcissist. These are superficial explanations. None get to the heart of the matter. As usual, and completely erroneously, some blame it on Nietzsche and the obermensch idea (the overman or superman). Nietzsche (like Russia) is often blamed for every modern evil by those who have internalized false notions about his work. In fact, Nietzsche warned that since men had killed God “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.” He was not happy about it.

The brilliant, underrated late writer Edward Dahlberg, in an essay about Nietzsche – “The True Nietzsche” – has this to say about him: “He denounced race politics, another word for Jew-baiting, calling himself a “good European,” an “anti-anti-Semite . . . . Nothing helped; the anti-Jewish Parteigenossen presented him to the public as a Teuton Politiker.” And so he is presented to the present day, distorted for ideological purposes. One wonders who actually reads anymore.

Apropos of language usage and the degradation of understanding, Dahlberg adds, “We have made language so common that we have ceased to be symbolic readers. Unless we examine the total intellect of the poet as his text we shall misinterpret Blake or Shakespeare just as foolishly as Nietzsche has been distorted.”

To grasp words symbolically is to understand how good writers use them in their many meanings, not just literally, like spalls fallen from a scree littering a road to nowhere; but how they make them vibrate and sparkle and dip deep and fly high like luminescent birds so others may contemplate deeply and think once, twice, and maybe more.

Think of Trump’s crude use of language; think of Epstein’s; think of the culture at large. We have descended into a time of gross ignorance and our cultural decadence is reflected in the decadence of our language. Trump and Epstein reflect the larger culture in this respect. Clearly one reason for this is the internet and digital media, particularly the cell phone with its camera and text messaging. It is also an important reason for the vast and constant communication between Epstein and his “friends,” as well as the ease with which blackmail could be effected. This is no accident.

Some of us have been lucky to have experienced at a young age the rot at the heart of the system. I think of the recently deceased great journalist Michael Parenti who because of his anti-war views was blackballed out of a career in academia, but who used that experience to become a free teacher to the world.

In my early naïve twenties, I was working nights in the 42nd Police Precinct in the Bronx, interviewing arrestees in holding cells. There I learned that many were framed by the undercover cops who planted drugs on them; that the precinct had a hoard of illegal drugs for that purpose. Thinking I was his ally, one cop told me this, and that “we have to get these dirty fucking bastards off the streets (by which he meant black and Puerto Rican men). This was 4-5 years before the honest, courageous NYPD undercover cop Frank Serpico (who in later life became a friend) was set up by other cops to be shot in the face. A few years later, the movie Serpico, starring Al Pacino, was made about him.

There is always a movie.

At a school where I was teaching, a man who held a high position and whom I respected, knowing I was involved in anti-war activities, tried – to my great shock – to recruit me into Army Intelligence. These, and numerous other examples, set me on the early path of skepticism about the faces of authority. I am grateful for these early lessons.

Like all stories, the Epstein movie takes place within a larger cultural symbol system that is mythic in its dimensions. How else to explain the near ineradicable hatred for anything Russian among Americans? In the U.S. the big myth is called the American Dream, which the late George Carlin has said you have to be asleep to believe in, but which nevertheless exists, although it may be crumbling. Every society has such a symbol system. Through its stories and symbols, meanings and values are conveyed. And people live by stories, stories within stories. Myth means story.

For many decades, we have been undergoing a massive symbolic transformation in which the controlling symbolic (from Greek: to throw together) order is being replaced by its opposite, a diabolic (from Greek: to throw apart, the devil, el diablo) order with new stories to scramble people’s brains, dissociate their personalities, set them against each other, and create a general sense of uncertainty. God vs. the devil.

All power is fundamentally power to deny mortality. This is true whether it is the power of the state or church, or secret groups like Epstein’s. And it is always sacred power. Holy or perverted. Many often ask why do the super-rich and powerful always want more. It’s simple. They wish to transcend their human mortality and become gods – immortals. They stupidly believe that if they can lord it over others, kill, dominate, rape, achieve status, become billionaires, presidents, magnates, celebrities, etc., they will somehow live in some weird forever. Thus Epstein and his circle.

In a process that has spanned at least a hundred and fifty years or so, our traditional cultural/religious symbol systems have been radically undermined, most momentously by the Faustian creation of Lord Nuke. All forms of symbolic immortality (theological, biological, creative, natural, and experiential) that formerly provided a sense of continuity have been severely threatened. This is the haunting specter lurking in the background of life today.

What is death? How to defeat or transcend it? What’s God’s cell phone number? Quick. Improvise.

Little men like Epstein, and those voluntarily captured in his web, all those desperadoes with their hands in their pants, lying through their teeth as they went with Pinocchio and the Coachman to Pleasure Island . . . .

Cut!

Forget the script.

We ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Real Reason Europe is Dying (It's Not Just War) | James Galbraith

 

Indian General Strike (not at all in mainstream media, but the largest strike ever...in the world)

 I thought the previous 250 million people striking in India to protest Modi's policies was big...until I came across this:

Extraordinary.
Workers and peasants join forces to demand the reinstatement of India's Job Guarantee MGNREGA and the repeal of Modi's anti-worker labor codes. https://t.co/ndasd6rp0V

— Pavlina R Tcherneva (@ptcherneva) February 14, 2026

One commenter says: The Indian media also did not cover it at all, or cursorily at best

MMT Founder's comments (via AI) about China's economic approach

From Warren Mosler:
How about [MMT] in China?

Copilot said

China is a fascinating case because it hasn’t adopted Modern Monetary Theory in name, but many of its long‑standing institutional practices align closely with MMT’s descriptive claims. The influence is indirect, but real — and increasingly visible in China’s internal policy debates.
China’s relationship to MMT: not ideological, but structural

Several features of China’s system naturally resemble MMT’s description of a currency‑issuing government:

1. Central bank–fiscal integration is normal, not taboo

China’s People’s Bank of China (PBOC) routinely supports government-directed credit creation and liquidity management. One analysis argues that China effectively uses MMT‑consistent mechanisms by allowing the central bank to absorb or backstop local government debt, injecting liquidity without triggering destabilizing inflation Millbrook School.

 

2. China’s policy debates explicitly reference MMT

As China expanded fiscal deficits to record levels in recent years, economists inside the system split into “hawks” and “doves.” The doves increasingly cite MMT to justify higher deficit spending as safe and necessary for growth and employment, while hawks invoke Ray Dalio’s warnings about debt cycles to argue the opposite chinabankingnews.com.

This is one of the clearest examples globally of MMT entering elite policy discourse—even if only as a reference point in internal debates.

 

3. China’s historical practice resembles functional finance

From the 1940s through the early reform era, the PBOC acted as a direct fiscal agent—essentially financing government spending. Analysts note that if China were to “turn to MMT,” it would be less a revolution and more a return to earlier institutional norms, especially during periods of job‑creation priority and countercyclical stimulus anz.com.

4. China’s monetary framework differs from Western orthodoxy

China still relies heavily on quantity‑based tools (reserve requirements, credit quotas) rather than pure interest‑rate targeting. This structure makes fiscal‑monetary coordination more explicit and more aligned with MMT’s view that monetary policy is not meaningfully independent in a sovereign currency system Reserve Bank of Australia.

 So has MMT changed economics in China?

Where MMT has influence

• It provides intellectual ammunition for pro‑stimulus economists inside China.
• It helps frame arguments for higher deficits during downturns.
• It validates China’s long‑standing practice of using state-controlled finance to pursue real‑resource goals (employment, infrastructure, industrial policy).

 Where MMT has not changed China

China does not identify its framework as MMT.

• The PBOC does not adopt MMT language or policy prescriptions like a Job Guarantee.
• China’s constraints are political and institutional, not theoretical — the leadership prioritizes stability, not doctrinal shifts.

The bottom line

China hasn’t “adopted” MMT, but MMT has become part of the vocabulary in China’s internal debates about deficits and growth. More importantly, China’s actual monetary‑fiscal architecture already embodies many of the operational realities MMT describes. In that sense, China is one of the clearest real‑world examples of MMT‑consistent practice — even if it never uses the label.

If you want, we can compare China’s system to Japan’s or the U.S.’s to see where MMT‑style operations diverge or converge.

Dollar Collapse? (good historical background to our present predicament)

 

Protecting yourself and your family from deceptive technology

 

My wife calls me, panicked.

The call is from her number, and her voice is unmistakable- that’s my wife.

‘Babe, our son is hurt. He got in a bike wreck. I’m at the emergency room but they won’t take our insurance and I need cash to get him help. Please send me 3000 dollars as… https://t.co/Gbo9r96VsX

— Dustin Burnham (@ModernDad) February 11, 2026

What to do about wealth inequality

 

Very simple solution: set interest rates at zero, introduce a federal job guarantee at a living wage and let the wealthy take the full brunt of asset depreciation. https://t.co/GXWZhzs2EN

— David McNab @mcfab@home.social (@DavidMcNab17) February 11, 2026

Just Ask

 

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." - Jesus Chris 

Several online videos show elders--often late '80s or older--competing in triathlons and "iron man" competitions. This typically means swimming, cycling and running a half marathon. 

When asked how he managed to do this at his advanced age, one man responded that you can ask your body to do things like stay healthy, and it will generally respond by doing it. You can ask your body to run a marathon or swim, cycle and run a triathlon, and it will do it. 

Your body does what you ask.

So all we have to do to maintain our strength, endurance and flexibility is ... ask? 

Obviously, the "asking" isn't always simple. Training to do physically stressful things like triathlons isn't trivial, but the persistent asking manages to improve even a natural process like aging. One elderly triathlete suggests "food, fitness and fun" are the keys to graceful aging.

Another question is, really, what are we asking our bodies to do now? A population of obese, out-of-shape humans, dying early of strokes, heart attacks and diabetes has been asking their bodies to adapt to unhealthy food and a lack of exercise. "The wages of sin is death," says Jesus. Amen, I say. 

Where's the fun in that?

 

The truth about bitcoin...

 

Remember when the bitcoiners were telling us that bitcoin would eliminate wars and usher in global peace?

Die hard bitcoiners are basically goldbugs with a lobotomy

— Dow (@mark_dow) February 4, 2026

Realtor Baloney

(c) by Mark Dempsey

As a former Realtor, I was disturbed to read Tamara Suminski's, Sacramento Bee editorial (1/30/26 "California leaders can expand homeownership opportunities. Here's How"). She's President of the California Association of Realtors. In it, she promotes the "abundance" talking points, saying taxes and frivolous litigation are among the biggest obstacles to home ownership. As is common, the omissions are more important than the points she makes.

She makes no mention of the fact that, as of 2024, one in six homes purchased in the United States was bought by investment buyers and speculators, more than triple the number in 2000. In low-price homes, investment buyers bought one in four. Philip Pilkington says, "Housing in America is being treated as a financial asset from which investors extract wealth—this is not unlike how land and property were treated in the feudal era."

Ms. Suminski also ignores the fact that there are more vacant homes than our current, record-breaking homeless population, the biggest since the Great Depression. San Francisco has five times its homeless population in vacant homes.

Vancouver, Canada, had an epidemic of speculator-owned vacant homes, too. This reduced the supply of homes available for purchase, making home prices increase. Vancouver had some success keeping prices reasonable by by taxing vacant property, a measure that discouraged the speculators. Is there any discussion of that in the current housing "debate"? Nope. Taxes are always a problem, never a remedy. And rent control? Why that's completely taboo!

Everyone keeps saying America has a “housing shortage.”

It doesn’t.

Divide total homes by population and you get this:
We’ve never had more housing per person than we do right now.

The problem isn’t supply.
It’s prices. pic.twitter.com/KS9iIPyGXs

— Jon Brooks (@jonbrooks) January 30, 2026

The home ownership problem comes down to affordability. Banks are partly responsible for the prices increasing. They love making homes ever more expensive, and, as the subprime/derivatives meltdown in 2007-8 proves, they will even accept fraudulent appraisals if it means they can make bigger loans. For banks, bigger mortgages mean bigger profits! Meanwhile, government financing underwriters and insurers (VA, FHA, FNMA, FHLMC) and the Federal Reserve, our central bank, do relatively little to penalize misbehaving banks. Instead, they excuse and bail them out.

Public policy matters when it comes to affordable housing, too. Nixon stopped the federal government from building affordable housing, and, as he was cutting taxes on the wealthy roughly in half, Reagan cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. Clinton signed legislation with the Faircloth amendment, placing an upper limit on federal affordable housing programs. The attack on affordable housing has been a generations-long, bipartisan project.

Meanwhile, public policy was responsible for the possibility of home ownership in the modern era. The New Deal popularized 30-year mortgages and the FHA, a mortgage insurer that made such long-term mortgages safe for banks. More recently, government agencies like FNMA and GNMA have bought mortgages from the banks that originated them, creating a secondary market to encourage even more home-purchase lending. 

Ms. Suminski says that housing is "the most reliable engine of generational wealth...Over the past 33 years, California homeowners built approximately $165,000 in household net worth per capita..." This ignores the previous observation that "Housing in America is being treated as a financial asset from which investors extract wealth," and the fact that most of that "wealth" accrues in making housing unaffordable.

But did homeowners really build wealth with their homes? Never mind that the figure Ms. Suminski quoted favors the most expensive homes, not affordable ones; nobody "built" their equity. They passively let the asset inflation that has accompanied the financialization of the economy's productive activity do it for them. 

Such "wealth" is the definition of "economic rent," that is, money paid for nothing productive. Adam Smith observed that the wealthy feudal landowners who collect rent make money in their sleep. Home appreciation didn't create any new land, and didn't necessarily mean the homes were improved. Thanks to such omissions, the entire housing "debate" looks like Trump's declaration that he's going to make sure present homeowners keep the high values of their houses, while he'll make the homes more affordable. 

In related news, gambling is currently the second fastest-growing sector of the economy--an activity Warren Buffett called "a tax on ignorance." And ignorance sure looks like it's in the driver's seat when it comes to housing policy.

--

The author was a Realtor for more than a decade and a half, appraising property and representing those buying and selling it. 

 

Update 2/22/26:

if one can look at the fraying fabric around us, Epstein, ICE, Gaza, runaway consolidation of wealth, all protected by Palantir mass surveillance, and think the primary source of oppression is overly fussy environmental and labor regulations I simply don't know what to tell you

— Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonCHI) February 11, 2026

The Chinese Advantage

 

He does a good job of explaining China’s economy. Also covers some common misconceptions.

Much better than my ghetto one take top of my head videos ;) pic.twitter.com/CiQKqI1NzU

— Larry 長祥 (@jambuki888) February 3, 2026

 

Update: Meanwhile, China treats even its minorities better...

 

When a native American met a Uyghur from Xinjiang.

He discovered a shocking truth.

He thought China was doing the same thing to Uyghurs as the U.S. did to native Americans, only to find out no genocide towards ethnic minorities in China, minority languages and cultures are well… pic.twitter.com/A8ZnQshVyq

— Li Jingjing 李菁菁 (@Jingjing_Li) February 11, 2026

Jail, Jail, Jail, Jail, Jail

(c) by Mark Dempsey

The County is sponsoring "listening" sessions about the County Jail. Of course no alternatives to jailing are offered, further validating Boss Tweed's political wisdom: "I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates. Here's my email to the "listeners" and supervisors:

Dear "Listeners," Supervisors, and others,

The announced South Sacramento "Listening Session[s]" about jail planning are too far away, and too late at night for me to attend, so I'm writing this email to tell you what I would say if I were present:

First: People are easily influenced, and Hollywood tells us that detectives always nab the bad guys and that Perry Mason gets the ones the cops miss. In real life, though, the police and courts solve far fewer crimes--13% in California in 2022 (says Governing.com ). Cops, courts & cages don't get an A-plus; they get an F-minus. They are a terrible way to handle crime!

Nevertheless, since the '80s, spending on policing and prisons has increased more than four times faster than population growth. The influence of these fictions also appears in incarceration rates. 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 not as bad.

What's different in Canadian and French societies that lets them incarcerate at one-seventh the US rate and still have lower crime rates? For one thing, the US has more than half a million medical bankruptcies annually. Canada and France don't have those.

Could treating people better influence crime rates? Never mind Canada and France, multiple studies (here [pdf], and here, among others) conclude that treating poor people better lowers crime rates, and is cheaper than cops, courts, and cages.

Yet the US--and certainly Sacramento County--continues to believe that increasing people's desperation, not treating them well, is the way to solve the crime problem. True, the County has programs to lessen recidivism, but even the ineffective ones continue receive funding.

The vengeful impulse for punitive penalties has some local support, but Hollywood’s fiction and the media’s scary headlines keep the public anxious. Rather than house the homeless, open local free clinics, or experiment with basic job or income guarantees for the poor, the Board of Supervisors has actually considered enlarging the County jail more than once. spending millions that could conceivably fund more effective, less costly, and cruel alternatives.

Supervisor Rodriguez's newsletter even celebrated a court ruling that lets the County "sweep" (i.e., remove) homeless people camped on public land, whether there's alternative housing or not. Ms. Rodriguez apparently is in the running for the “Cruella D’Evil” award previously won by her predecessor, Sue Frost.

Meanwhile, the County's jail is full and has even lost a lawsuit about how its conditions mistreat prisoners. But 60 - 80% of its prisoners are convicted of nothing more than an inability to afford bail. They're doubly poor, too, because they'll likely lose whatever job they might have had if they await trial in jail, never mind the damage keeping them incarcerated does to their families and community.

Nevertheless, Sacramento County continues to send the message that you're not innocent until proven guilty, you're guilty until proven wealthy. Incarceration without trial also pressures innocent people to plead guilty just to get out of confinement sooner. That's not justice, it's an extortion racket.

As far as I know, the County has not considered supervised release or no-cash bail. In fact, the US and the Philippines are the only countries worldwide that require cash bail. That policy is a recipe for an expanding punishment bureaucracy, not a solution for crime. Incidentally, you'll seldom hear it from the Supervisors, but crime has been declining for decades now.



Opponents of a kinder approach to people accused might cite Yolo County's unfavorable experience--more crimes and more recidivism--when they released inmates early during COVID times. Yet Washington, D.C., and the state of Illinois have adopted no-cash bail for select offenses, and reporting from Illinois suggests there are ways to successfully do this. The headline: Nearly 8 months into Illinois' new era without cash bail, experts say recidivism and jail populations are trending lower.”

There are certainly ways to sabotage the kinder alternatives to incarceration. Oregon attempted to decriminalize drugs, then repealed that legislation as a failure. In Oregon, police were tasked to offer the alternative to drugs–rehab–with tickets. The drug users were not impressed, to say the least, and the police didn’t handle their defiance well. Why it almost looks like the police are tasked to implement such solutions to sabotage them!

Meanwhile, incarceration is seven times more expensive than medical addiction treatment 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 them--have successfully decriminalized drugs.

For those interested in more information, I'd recommend Alec Karakatsanis' Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, and Copaganda: How the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, which describe how pervasive the problems described here are. Getting this information would require reading as well as listening, but the Supervisors have surely mastered that skill. If they like, I'll send them copies, just let me know who wants one.

I've sent this information to the Supervisors repeatedly, so you'll pardon my skepticism about their ability to "Listen." I even sat on a County commission (a Community Planning Advisory Council) and can testify from my experience that County officials are at least hearing impaired when it comes to public input.

Grinding any opposition to pre-determined outcomes to dust with endless hearings (always halted once the opposition gets too close to success) and "listening" appears to be the County's preferred approach to public input. The County would rather continue its bankrupt strategy to ensure citizen safety than actually do something--competently, without sabotage--that's kinder, cheaper, and more effective.

Local Government Financing Shortfalls

 My letter to the local public media news publishers abridged@kvie.org

Hello,

I read your story about the financial troubles local governments have been facing lately. You have a few significant omissions. 

For example, there's a loophole in Prop 13 for commercial property that costs the state an estimated $12 billion annually. Prop 15 was narrowly defeated when it attempted to close the loophole. Did local politicians lobby for passage? Not that I could detect.

Then there's all the land speculation that could have served the public, but largely ends up in private coffers. 

Speculators bought, or more likely optioned, North Natomas farmland for roughly $2K per acre. It was cheap because it was 20' underwater ag land surrounded by weak levees. It was so unsuited for development that a federal grant to expand capacity included a $6 million penalty if local governments used that capacity to serve the North Natomas development.

The speculators went all the way to then-vice-president George Herbert Walker Bush and got that prohibitive, up-front penalty transformed into a pay-as-you-develop fee...oh yes, and they got $43 million to improve the levees to pre-Katrina standards.

After getting the entitlements to develop, they sold those acres to builders. Winncrest homes bought at $200K / acre. If your calculator isn't handy, that's a 10,000% (gross) profit...and I promise you that's after tax if they exchange out of the purchase.

Germany requires developers to sell outlying ag land to the local government at the ag land price, then repurchase it at the development land price. All that egregious profit inures to public benefit. And they have terrific benefits, including single-payer healthcare, excellent infrastructure, and free college tuition. The arts budget for the City of Berlin exceeds the National Endowment for the Arts for the US of A.

Finally, you didn't mention that sprawl is a Ponzi scheme. Outlying development is roughly twice as expensive to maintain as infill. So has that stopped the locals from approving more and more edge-city development? Nope.

All you're doing is documenting the fact that those maintenance costs are finally catching up to the locals. 

--Yours truly,

--Mark Dempsey