Bee Letter responding to George Will's column lobbying for even *more* military spending

Responding to George F. Will's column in the Sacramento Bee 7/28/23 "It's time for the US to end the 'era of the Great Distraction'"

Mr. Will is the distracter here. He cites the inadequacy of the US military budget and says we could dedicate more of our GDP to things military. What he doesn't mention is that the military budget is three times China's and ten times Russia's–more than the sum of the next ten nations’ military budgets, and many of those are US allies..

Will also says we used to have more than ten thousand defense firms. Could the consolidation into the defense industry oligopoly impair actual production? Could the US be wasting money to ensure the military-industrial complex gets ever higher profits? Could Senator Wm Proxmire's old book about the defense industry--"Report from Wasteland"--be prescient?

The US is responsible for more than 80% of the military aggression since World War II. Could making peace actually be cheaper? Gee, I wonder.

Today's Bee Letter: Responding to Sacramento County DA's approach to homelessness

7/24/23 "Sacramento's DA on why he's pressing the city on homelessness."

After reciting a litany of offenses committed by Sacramento’s homeless, County District Attorney Thien Ho writes "Past approaches have failed." That's why he's promising a "new, improved" approach of doing exactly the same thing to the homeless -- hassling them with police and prosecuting them.

Meanwhile, Finland has effectively ended homeless. How? By providing them with homes.

Studies validate Finland's approach as both cheaper and more humane than prosecution and incarceration. Recent studies of the unhoused in the U.S. point to rising rents, not mental illness, as the primary driver of people sleeping rough.

Meanwhile, San Francisco has five times more empty houses than its homeless population, and the U.S. as a whole has more empty homes than homeless.

Ho is pandering to an angry, vengeful public, but does nothing to end the problem.
 

See: https://youtu.be/kbEavDqA8iE for the Finnish solution.

What to do with ugly streets

 

Lancaster, CA transformed its downtown in just 8 months by redesigning it's main street from a mini-highway to a tree-lined boulevard.

For the cost of just $11.5M, the project has generated $273M in economic output since 2010, creating 800 jobs, and nearly doubling tax revenue! pic.twitter.com/kS3E4dpjGq

— Coby (@Cobylefko) July 20, 2023

 

...Incidentally, the street is the "public realm"...space accessible to all. It's not a gated community or a yacht club!

So...why are our streets so impoverished? Why to make the poor suffer! Labor discipline!

 

Adults in the Room Failed Us on Fossil Fuel Divestments

The people who run everything don’t have a realistic plan to address climate change at all, and even 2030 may be too late for aggressive goal setting.

by Coleen Bondy from LA Progressive
Jul 20, 2023

You know you’re in trouble when the Church of England beats you to the progressive punchline.

In environmental writer Bill McKibben’s enlightening op-ed in the LA Times on June 16, he lays out the case for California’s two largest public pension funds to divest from fossil fuel investments. It’s an airtight financial case, with the side benefit of literally helping to save the planet.

So far, CalSTRS and CalPERS are not having any of it. I am not sure what kind of evidence they are holding out for, but the latest science is convincing enough for the Church of England, not to mention nearly every top university in the United States, to finally decide to divest from oil companies.

It’s far past time for the state teachers’ retirement system to stop funding an industry that is actually killing our planet.

It’s far past time for the state teachers’ retirement system to stop funding an industry that is actually killing our planet. Not only is it a money-losing proposition, it’s morally indefensible.

Teachers teach…young people. The future of our planet. The ones who will inherit this mess we made. The ones we pay a lot of lip service to caring about.

When I found out about the extent of CalSTRS’ investment in big oil in 2021, I wrote to the board to protest and demand divestment from fossil fuels.

I received an email signed by “External Affairs” assuring me that the CalSTRS board does indeed care mightily about the environment, and it was aiming for a goal of a “net zero investment portfolio by 2050 or sooner.”

The rest of the email is basically filler-babble.

This coming school year will be my 18th with the Los Angeles Unified School District. In my time as a high school English and journalism teacher, and now as magnet coordinator of a social justice-based media program, I have tried to educate my students about climate change and also empower them to create the changes we need to ensure a livable future for us all.

Nearly 10 years ago I ordered a class set of McKibben’s book Eaarth, in which he argues that we have already altered the plant beyond recognition, and the best thing we can do is create community and do our part locally to create sustainable societies.

At the time, it was a fairly radical idea that we had altered the Earth beyond any easy fix, and even more radical to teach high schoolers about it.

I thought I was empowering my students when I told them that my generation, and all the generations before mine, had completely dropped the ball on climate change, and that it was up to the young people to save everything.

In the beginning, I think they liked the idea of an adult who not only told the truth, but apologized for our sins, and believed they had the intelligence and the collective power to save the planet. Pretty cool, right??

Now that same speech just generates indifference, irritation, or worse, anger.

At first I was puzzled, but then a student put it to me bluntly. “Adults completely stress us out when they tell us we have to fix this enormous problem on our own. If you couldn’t do it, how do you expect us to do it?”

Every year of teaching gets harder, for many reasons. But for me, the worst is that I no longer know what to tell my students to give them hope. I often feel angry and hopeless, too.

The fact that my own pension, my own hope for retiring securely, depends on burning the fossil fuels that will make my students’ futures even more hellish just makes my generation’s own hypocrisy even more unbearable.

Environmentalists have long been told that it was idealistic and naïve to think we could quickly transition away from fossil fuels. That it would hurt the economy if we transitioned too quickly.

Basically, we have been told for decades that the adults in the room were taking care of it in a grownup way, and we should just go back to eating our granola.

But the truth is, they weren’t. The people who run everything don’t have a realistic plan to address climate change at all, and even 2030 may be too late for aggressive goal setting.

I was listening to NPR recently and Tonya Mosley was interviewing Jeff Goodell, the author of the new book The Heat Will Kill You First.

Goodell does a great job of scaring the heck out of us about the many ways the increasing global temperatures could kill us all, and its link to climate change.

And then he is asked the requisite question in this kind of story…what about having children at this point in time? Is it irresponsible?

As a father of three children, he said that he believes children are the “hope of the world. They’re the ones who are going to change things. They’re the ones who have everything at stake.”

He pointed to Greta Thunberg. He said we need young minds to fix this. He stated the obvious…us old people aren’t going to fix it.

I couldn’t help it as I listened. I did my best impression of a jaded high school freshman and I rolled my eyes.

The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.
climate changeFossil FuelBig Oil

By Coleen Bondy

Coleen Bondy is a former journalist and current LAUSD high school English teacher. She is also the coordinator of the Global Media Studies Magnet at Cleveland Charter High School.

Inflation vs. Inflation

 

Can Kindness Scale?

(c) by Mark Dempsey

It would be cheaper, as well as much more effective and humane to solve a variety of social ills by restoring or even enhancing America's social safety nets. These have been attacked and reduced in recent years. Poverty, crime, and (contagious) disease all thrive in a dog-eat-dog society where isolated individuals take no responsibility for each other, never mind the "least of these." The question is whether humane public policies could ever scale up to address these issues in entire societies.

Whenever society at large addresses the inevitable problems of systemic malfunctions like poverty, crime, and disease, the frustration of too-large or too-slow-to-respond remedies inevitably leads to either society-wide anger or depression. Taking advantage of this understandable frustration, the political right in particular--the representatives of those who have the economic high ground--has pushed back against compassionate remedies for social ills.

For example, the Wall St. Journal recently published an article citing increases in crime in Portland after it implemented more humane treatment of the poor and homeless. These kinder policies led to population declines. The Journal even includes interviews with Portlanders who left but doesn't mention COVID, which is at the root of downtown's problems according to one native I contacted. Back in California, Sacramento Supervisor Frost's newsletter decries recent initiatives to decarcerate or reduce sentences of prisoners as counterproductive, appealing to that same frustration about crime and problems in society at large.

But we've already discovered that large amounts of coercion and policing do not solve the problem of crime. The U.S. is already the world champion in incarceration in absolute or per-capita numbers. With five percent of the world's population, the U.S. has 25% of its prisoners--five times the world's per-capita average, and seven times the Canadian per-capita figures. Yet Canadian and U.S. crime are insignificantly different.

Funding social safety nets is cheaper than building bigger cages, even if someone undeserving profits. Nevertheless, the County wants to spend $450 million to expand its jail--a significant expense--and law enforcement already consumes 70% of the County’s budget.

One contributing factor to the population's faith in the all-sticks-no-carrots approach to social problems is the "Copaganda" of TV detective shows, from Dragnet to Law & Order. These tell us repeatedly that detectives solve the vast majority of crimes, and bad people are, by and large, punished. Yet "police 'have never successfully solved crimes with any regularity, as arrest and clearance rates are consistently low throughout history,' and police have never solved even a bare majority of serious crimes, University of Utah College of Law professor Shima Baradaran Baughman wrote in another 2021 law review article, including murder, rape, burglary, and robbery." (from Reuters)



Another indicator sticks-not-carrots is ineffective: U.S. population increased by 42% between 1982 and 2017, but spending on police increased by 187%, more than four times faster than population growth. Yet crime clearance rates were steady or declining during that period.

The FBI reports "blue collar" crimes like robbery, carjackings, and muggings cost the economy $12 billion a year, yet wage theft costs $50 billion but "white collar" crimes like derivatives and subprime mortgage land mines cost $1 trillion. Where are the efforts to prosecute employers and Wall St. criminals?



And do we really need more money for police and prison? How has it worked so far?

Meanwhile, 40% of the population can't handle a $400 emergency, 58% live check-to-check, and ~50% of seniors have Social Security to fund ~50% of their retirement. Providing a dignified, healthy life for poor people is unlikely to produce instant results, but how bad do things have to be before we do something different? The U.S. already has roughly 50,000 deaths a year from opioid overdoses--more casualties than the Vietnam War--as evidence of the depression felt by the population about the current state of affairs.

Because anger and depression seldom lead to clear thinking, it's likely any move toward more humane treatment of the poor would be set up to fail, or too modest to have a big impact, and those who prefer police be an army of occupation will say "See! It doesn't work to be nice! We must have brutal, draconian labor discipline!--the reminder that if people don't take whatever crappy job is on offer, they will suffer, or even be put in cages.

Because turning society away from punishment is difficult and complex, there's a bias toward the simplicity of cruelty, vengeful thinking, and pandering to public frustration. It's actually more difficult than hiring more police to make sure everyone is housed, fed, and unburdened by crushing debt.

There's even a perverse incentive for police to ask for more money as their performance degrades.



From 2010 to 2021, San Francisco's police budget increased 15%, yet total arrests declined 41% and although reported offenses were up (+28%) crimes cleared (-33%) and total arrests (-41%) both declined. Knowing this should make the public skeptical of the effectiveness of those massive investments in punishment.

Economist Michael Hudson says what we need succinctly: "...make sure that everybody can support their basic needs without running into debt." A job guarantee would be an affordable way to keep unnecessary job insecurity at bay and would mean far fewer desperate people, and far less crime for far less public money than bigger jails. Such a guarantee would provide a comprehensive price stability framework with a buffer stock of labor. The employment guarantee would also be a tool in the fight against poverty

You wouldn't train a donkey with all sticks and no carrots, but that's what's being promoted as the way to retain social cohesion and solve these systemic problems. Currently, our system is still not configured so the benefits of being a member of society outweigh the costs for large portions of the population.

Meanwhile, of necessity, modern nation-states are always ambiguously extortion rackets or utopian projects. We are still learning how to minimize the former while maximizing the latter. Unfortunately, as one scholar says "evolution has equipped us ...for very rapid and effortless formation of cooperative structures, but at the expense of limiting the scale of these institutions."

Solutions for Homelessness: Finland Ended It