Catapulting the Propaganda Locally

(c) by Mark Dempsey

I’ve come to believe a sizable percentage of reporters don’t know that their sources are funded by the government, or that they’re repeating government messaging not just occasionally but all the time.  - Matt Taibbi

After reading some columns (here and here) advising how to solve California's problems building affordable housing in the supposedly un-conservative Sacramento News & Review, I was amazed at what these columns omitted. Then I noticed who was funding the reporting: the Solving Sacramento journalism collaborative, part of a larger organization--"Solutions Journalism"--whose funders include the likes of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates also promotes the "Green Revolution" in Africa so those former colonies will remain indebted to their colonizers for fertilizer, energy, and genetically modified crops. 

In other words, the omissions in these "Solutions" have an agenda. They omit what is unpalatable to the powers that be. The "Solutions" people are not getting government funding, but it doesn't take a political scientist to see the interests of a governing oligarchy and its non-government cronies and think tanks are identical. Next, they'll promote "public/private partnerships" like this.

What is missing from the discussion of options to make housing affordable? Perhaps the biggest omission is what keeps real estate prices high. Those who have studied such prices¹ say 80% of increases stem from land costs. 

In Sacramento, land speculators purchase outlying agricultural land for a few thousand dollars an acre, then, after they persuade local governments to permit development, sell it for 50 - 100 times that much to builders. If the speculators swap for income-producing real estate like apartments or shopping centers, that 5,000% - 10,000% gross profit defers income tax indefinitely too.

That means Sacramento's public policy favors commute-lengthening outlying development (sprawl) that is roughly twice as expensive to maintain as compact development, increases global warming, and produces a class of plutocratic land speculators called "developers." The late Sacramento County Supervisor Grantland Johnson declared that it's widely acknowledged throughout the state that the region most in the developers' hip pocket is Sacramento--not a contest we want to win.

Were these facts mentioned in the "Solving Sacramento" articles? Nope. According to them government regulation makes things expensive. Government is bad! They must be reined in by partnering them with the private sector!

Yet publicly-owned utilities like Sacramento's Municipal Utility District are cheaper (35% for SMUD) than privately-owned utilities like PG&E. As an added bonus, SMUD executives are not facing charges of negligent homicide because they defunded maintenance and started both fires (power lines) and explosions (gas lines) like PG&E. So...cheaper and better managed by public ownership.

Another omission: Could government build housing? Nixon stopped federally-built affordable housing in the '70s. Then, while he was cutting taxes for the wealthy roughly in half--and with his successor raising payroll taxes eightfold--Reagan cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. Even New Deal programs for affordable housing were destined to fail. 

England built "council housing" to make housing affordable following World War II, but Margaret Thatcher sold that housing to its occupants at discount prices, pleasing British voters for the time being, but setting the scene for rising U.K. home prices for years to come. The U.K. has a similar affordable housing problem now.

Incidentally, did you know that thanks to proposition 13's tax limitations, unless California's local governments collect their infrastructure costs in up-front building fees, they won't get reimbursed? That's in addition to the $12 billion annually the State forfeits because of prop 13's commercial property loophole--commercial property is never reassessed if less than 50% changes hands, so many properties remain assessed at 1978 values plus the modest increase prop 13 permits.

So the "let's be like Texas and deregulate" pundits are ignoring the fact that Texas has no such prop 13 tax limitation, and even taxes petroleum at the wellhead while California doesn't. Yes, California building fees are large--and vary significantly--making home purchases less affordable, but lower property tax requires a big up-front fee and does not incidentally make holding property off the market affordable, so it also enables land speculation too.

The "Solving Sacramento" pundits who decry California's (Ronald-Reagan-signed) CEQA law as the source of expensive housing are simply ignoring too much to be credible. That such advice appears in a supposedly left-leaning publication is all the more deplorable.

¹Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, and Laurie Macfarlane

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Mark Dempsey is a former member of a Sacramento County Planning Advisory Council.

Chris Hedges on "Woke Imperialism"...a real problem

See the whole "Woke Imperialism" article here. Excerpt:

"Identity politics and diversity allow liberals to wallow in a cloying moral superiority as they castigate, censor and deplatform those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech. They are the new Jacobins. This game disguises their passivity in the face of corporate abuse, neoliberalism, permanent war and the curtailment of civil liberties. They do not confront the institutions that orchestrate social and economic injustice. They seek to make the ruling class more palatable. With the support of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, academia and social media platforms in Silicon Valley, demonize the victims of the corporate coup d’etat and deindustrialization. They make their primary political alliances with those who embrace identity politics, whether they are on Wall Street or in the Pentagon. They are the useful idiots of the billionaire class, moral crusaders who widen the divisions within society that the ruling oligarchs foster to maintain control.

 "Diversity is important. But diversity, when devoid of a political agenda that fights the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed, is window dressing. It is about incorporating a tiny segment of those marginalized by society into unjust structures to perpetuate them."

As I've quoted previously:

Why "70 million votes for Trump? (Trump won 74 million votes, nearly five million more than any previous presidential candidate) Says Thomas Greene (from Noteworthy): “Trump will not be defeated by educating voters, by exposing his many foibles and inadequacies. Highlighting what’s wrong with him is futile; his supporters didn’t elect him because they mistook him for a competent administrator or a decent man. They’re angry, not stupid. Trump is an agent of disruption — indeed, of revenge.....Workers now sense that economic justice — a condition in which labor and capital recognize and value each other — is permanently out of reach; the class war is over and it was an absolute rout: insatiable parasites control everything now, and even drain us gratuitously, as if exacting reparations for the money and effort they spent taming us. The economy itself, and the institutions protecting it, must be attacked, and actually crippled, to get the attention of the smug patricians in charge. Two decades of appealing to justice, proportion, and common decency have yielded nothing.""

The housing problem as covered in Sacramento News & Review

Responding to an interview with North State Building Industry Association (NSBIA) president Michael Strech in the Sacramento News & Review:

Mark Dempsey | February 3, 2023 at 4:54 pm | Reply

“Let’s just deregulate (no CEQA!) like Texas” is a constant refrain from these jokers. But the real problem is the cost of land, not the regulations. Studies demonstrate 80% of the cost increase comes from land costs. Lumber and labor is not more expensive in CA.

Oh yes, and building fees in CA have to be higher because if you don’t collect the money in fees in CA, Prop 13 tax rates are so low and unyielding you won’t be able to maintain the infrastructure. That’s right, Texas doesn’t have Prop 13 property tax limitations. You might remember Butte County flirted with bankruptcy because it had building fees lower than its infrastructure (roads, schools, fire & police, etc.) during a building boom a few years ago. Prop 13 had Butte County in a vise.

NSBIA is really just parroting some right-wing meme, not really interested in solving problems here. Besides building fees, the really big problem is land speculation. Land speculators (“developers”) can buy ag land cheap ($2K/acre in N. Natomas floodplain) then, after they get permission to develop, sell it dear to builders ($200K/acre to Winncrest homes). That egregious 10,000% profit not only accrues exclusively to private benefit, it’s even tax sheltered if the speculators swap for income-producing real estate like shopping centers or apartments. Quite the racket.

It’s no accident that Sacramento has the “Tsakopoulos Galleria” rather than the “Sacramento Galleria” — meeting space next to the central library. We gave all the money to Angelo! Plutocrats! Gotta love ’em!

In Germany, the developers have to sell outlying land to local government at the ag land price, then re-purchase it at the development land price. All the benefit accrues to the public. And German universities charge no tuition, they have single-payer healthcare, and the arts budget for the City of Berlin exceeds the National Endowment for the Arts for the U.S. of A.

NSBIA is strictly distracting from these inconvenient truths with its “all regulation is bad” line of talk. Perhaps we should ask Mr. Strech which toxic food he would feed his children. After all regulations are bad, right? Back in the good ol’ unregulated days, the big meat packers were fine shipping botulism with their product.

How Crooked Are Corporations?

Is corporate wrongdoing on the rise? Statistics certainly suggest so. The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s latest annual report on its whistleblower program showed a record 12,210 tips were provided in 2021 – a 76% increase against 2020, itself a record-breaker. The commission also made more financial awards to whistleblowers than in all previous years combined – in other words, the information given was real and significant enough to lead to real consequences.

From I’m a corporate fraud investigator. You wouldn’t believe the hubris of the super-rich (the Guardian)

How the west came out on top

 In the Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington argued:

“The immediate source of Western expansion, however, was technological: the invention of the means of ocean navigation for reaching distant peoples and the development of the military capabilities for conquering those peoples… The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerns often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do”.

Answering Mr. Strech from the NSBIA

Sacramento News & Review published an interview with the CEO of the North State Building Industry Association (NSBIA).

Here's my answer:

“Let’s just deregulate (no CEQA!) like Texas” is a constant refrain from these jokers. But the real problem is the cost of land, not the regulations. Studies demonstrate 80% of the cost increase comes from land costs. Lumber and labor is *not* more expensive in CA.

Oh yes, and building fees in CA have to be higher because if you don’t collect the money in fees in CA, Prop 13 tax rates are so low and unyielding you won’t be able to maintain the infrastructure. That’s right, Texas doesn’t have Prop 13 property tax limitations. You might remember Butte County flirted with bankruptcy because it had building fees lower than its infrastructure costs (roads, schools, fire & police, etc.) during a building boom a few years ago. Prop 13 had Butte County in a vise.

NSBIA is really just parroting some right-wing meme, not really interested in solving problems here. Besides building fees, the really big problem is land speculation. Land speculators (“developers”) can buy ag land cheap ($2K/acre in N. Natomas floodplain) then, after they get permission to develop, sell it dear to builders ($200K/acre to Winncrest homes). That egregious 10,000% profit not only accrues exclusively to private benefit, it’s even tax sheltered if the speculators swap for income-producing real estate like shopping centers or apartments. Quite the racket.

It’s no accident that Sacramento has the “Tsakopoulos Galleria” rather than the “Sacramento Galleria” — meeting space next to the central library. We gave all the money to Angelo! Plutocrats! Gotta love ’em!

In Germany, the developers have to sell outlying land to local government at the ag land price, then re-purchase it at the development land price. All the benefit accrues to the public. And German universities charge no tuition, they have single-payer healthcare, and the arts budget for the City of Berlin exceeds the National Endowment for the Arts for the U.S. of A.

NSBIA is strictly distracting from these inconvenient truths with its “all regulation is bad” line of talk. Perhaps we should ask Mr. Strech which toxic food he would feed his children. After all regulations are bad, right? Back in the good ol’ unregulated days, the big meat packers were fine shipping botulism with their product.

What Police Reform Should Look Like

From Ted Rall

Each high-profile killing by police of an unarmed Black citizen—this week he’s Tyre Nichols, 29, of Memphis—prompts calls to reform the police. But how?

We should begin with two questions:

What is the police for, currently?

What should they be for?

Police currently fulfill two primary roles: generating revenue for local municipalities and terrorizing marginalized people.

If you’re white, middle- or upper-class, almost all your interactions with law enforcement will come in the form of a traffic stop, most likely in a small town, rather than in a big city, because big cities enjoy strong tax bases, and even more likely in a cash-strapped municipality.

Tickets for speeding and equipment violations, both of which can generate fines costing hundreds of dollars each, are by far the most common reason for a traffic stop. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis conducted a fascinating study of North Carolina traffic stops which concluded that “significantly more tickets” were issued when localities experienced financial difficulties, suggesting they were “used as a revenue-generation tool rather than solely a means to increase public safety.” Some towns finance as much as 90% of their annual budgets from traffic tickets.

Defenders of the status quo will argue that the flashing disco lights in your rearview mirror enforce public safety. Indeed, motorists who speed or run red signals are a danger to themselves and others. If safer roads is the goal, however, why fine money for a moving infraction? Adding points to your license for dangerous violations, with suspension of driving privileges over a set sum, serves as ample deterrence to the wealthy and poor alike.

Only 9% of traffic stops involve suspicion of criminal activity, according to a national RAND survey of police officers.

Policing in poor and minority neighborhoods assumes the character of foreign troops patrolling hostile occupied territory. “Jump-out boys” squads like the Scorpion unit that murdered Nichols snatch people on little to no pretext, eager to rack up arrests in order to please police executives who themselves serve “tough on crime” politicians.

Cops in tough areas roust the homeless, purportedly for the “crime” of loitering but really to sweep away the unwholesome evidence of poverty that would reduce property values and street traffic to businesses if it were visible.

Police respond to countless domestic disputes—romantic relationships turned toxic, parents struggling with out-of-control children, drug abusers and their long-suffering family members, victims of schizophrenia and other untreated mental illnesses—to which a saner society would dispatch social workers and welfare case officers.

Armed cops enter homes, not to help (they can’t) but to enforce the simulacrum of peace that allows landlords to find takers for bedraggled rental properties. Recruited from the ranks of returning war veterans (who are more likely than other cops to use excessive force), jacked with steroids and trained to throw their weight around, the threat of violence is omnipresent when a uniformed officer arrives at the scene of people in emotional and psychological crisis. Shut up and calm down or we’ll lock you up/take your kid/beat you down.

What should police be doing instead?

They should make us safe. And make us feel safe.

We want cops to arrive quickly to defend us against violent people and thieves. We need them to protect us during natural disasters. We want them to provide deterrence by being present and ready to help in places where we are afraid: subway platforms, deserted city streets, public parks. But public safety is incompatible with revenue enhancement: “Police departments in cities that collect a greater share of their revenue from fees—conceivably because their governing bodies put pressure on them to generate revenue—solve violent crimes at significantly lower rates,” a recent NYU study found.

Cops should not be intimidating. They should present as friendly, polite, affable, calm, eager to help with our problems and unfailingly professional. The Nichols snuff video, in which the killer cops repeatedly shout profanities, urge one another to escalating violence and are laden with combat gear, portrays the exact opposite of what we want cops to be.

How could we get from where we are to where we want to be?

Police departments should change their training and incentive structures away from the current warrior mentality, in which cops see us as potential enemies and their main objective to return safely home every night, to a guardian mode in which their own safety is secondary, even to people suspected of lawbreaking.

We should disarm the police. Three out of four cops have never fired their weapon on the job. Among those who have, a surprisingly high proportion have done so repeatedly. In the United Kingdom and 17 other countries with unarmed policemen, being a cop is as safe a job as any other. Separate SWAT teams can respond to unusual situations like hostage standoffs.

“Three strikes” laws turn fugitives into desperados with nothing to lose. These statutes, which incentivize shooting a police officer, should be repealed.

The police should be demilitarized in every respect, including their equipment and their uniforms. When I see a NYPD officer wearing Kevlar, it conveys that he sees me and other New Yorkers as a threat rather than a taxpayer who pays his salary. Cops should lose the bulletproof vests in favor of uniforms designed to look friendly and approachable.

Use of anabolic steroids, which cause aggressive behavior, should be banned. Current recruitment policy, which favors officers hired straight from the battlefields of the Middle East, should be abolished in favor of cultural, social, class, racial and gender diversity.

No little girl or little boy dreams of becoming a cop to write speeding tickets. Municipalities should wean themselves off revenues from traffic stops but until they are able to do so, they should assign their cash-gouging duties to separate traffic enforcement agencies and speeding and red-light cameras. Free the police to focus on public safety.

Similarly, no one ever became a cop because they wanted to deal with crazy people in a psychotic crisis. Social workers and other mental health professionals should be recruited into new social-service agencies specialized in dealing with the mentally ill.

Unless we enact these and other forward-looking changes to American policing, we will continue to see promising young people like Tyre Nichols destroyed by the people paid to protect them.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)