Supervisor Rodriguez's Magical Thinking

(c) by Mark Dempsey

In her latest communication with her constituents, Sacramento County Supervisor Rosario Rodriguez deflects concerns about the region's mismanagement of homelessness with magical thinking. Her (magical) excuse for the growing homeless problem is the lack of coordination between agencies whose mission is to address homelessness and the addiction and mental illness that produce that problem.

But Ms. Rodriguez' constituents elected her to solve problems, not formulate better excuses. And somehow, despite local governments' "lack of coordination," they still manage to perform homeless sweeps, evicting people and their meager possessions from whatever shelter they've managed to secure. One Sacramento woman even rented port-a-potties for the homeless population near her, but local government put a stop to that. The homeless must continue to be a health hazard!

To understand such public policies, it's helpful to think of homelessness as a kind of torture. Torture is a terrible interrogation technique if you're interested in accurate information, but when publicized, it lets the rest of the population know what's in store for them if they step out of line. 

Meanwhile, studies say the majority of the unhoused are homeless because rents have been rising faster than paychecks. In one poll, 82% of the homeless said they'd rent a house if they could afford it. Remember: 40% of them are employed and still can't afford rent. Sure, homelessness can produce a variety of PTSD, just as any torture can, but money and resources, not addiction or mental illness, are at the root of the problem. Poverty is.

Finland's public sector solved its homeless problem by building public housing. Poor rural people in China would flock to cities and become homeless beggars. The Chinese solved that problem by giving these  people public sector jobs in their city of origin. These solutions worked even though both Finland and China are poorer than the US. 

US public policy has deliberately produced and perpetuated homelessness for generations now. Richard Nixon put a moratorium on building federal affordable housing, and Ronald Reagan, as he cut income taxes on the wealthy roughly in half, reduced HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%.

You might think financing is a problem, but Sacramento County has enough money that it's seriously considering a $2 billion expansion of the County Jail, and the City of Sacramento somehow produced a quarter billion dollars to build the Kings Stadium. Also worth remembering: the US has more vacant homes than homeless people. San Francisco has five times their homeless population in vacant homes. We're not short of resources, they're just distributed badly.

Ms. Rodriguez may believe she can excuse the County's lame response to homelessness, but rent subsidies, rent control, public employment, publicly-financed and built housing, taxing vacancy and property hoarding--as Vancouver, Canada, did--would all more directly and successfully address and perhaps even solve the problem. 

Some might say deregulating and unleashing the private sector would magically solve homelessness. Even building unaffordable, gold-plated publicly built housing ($600K per unit!) is touted as another obstacle, while the silence is deafening about programs that would actually solve the problem. 

But housing for the homeless is unreachable without real resource redistribution. Confronting entrenched interests and building affordable housing, not just clearing red tape for luxury condos and sports stadiums needs to be on the public policy agenda. It means pursuing the solutions to poverty, not just fabricating more, better, and different excuses.

--

The author sat on a Sacramento County Planning Advisory Council for nearly a decade, and recommends this article from the Davis Vanguard for more about this issue.

Trump is Shocking but not New

The headline comes from one of Ted Rall's blog posts. Here's an excerpt:

"Government oppression of dissidents in America has a rich and foul history. During the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, which included many college students, Bill Clinton’s Immigration and Naturalization Service (the predecessor of ICE) detained and initiated deportation proceedings against students from Canada and Europe who were arrested for opposing free trade agreements. Under Reagan, the INS moved to deport African students who participated in rallies urging colleges to pull investments out of apartheid-era South Africa. Nixon’s FBI and INS worked to revoke the visas of students who protested the Vietnam War, particularly those from Canada and Latin America. George W. Bush conducted “extraordinary renditions,” including off U.S. streets, where individuals like Maher Arar, who was entirely innocent, were detained without charge and sent to third countries for interrogation that included torture, under the guise of national security."

...

"Though the Trump Administration will almost certainly fall short of its goal of deporting a million people it alleges are in the United States illegally, this White House looks exceptionally aggressive against illegal immigration due to moves like deporting 238 alleged (but probably not) Venezuelan gang members to a private for-profit gulag in a third country with which they have no affiliation, El Salvador, and refusing to bring back one it admits was expelled illegally as the result of an “administrative error.”

"But the real Deporters in Chief were Bill Clinton, who 'removed' 11.4 million undocumented workers from the U.S., and George W. Bush, with 8.3 million. The Bush Administration kidnapped 'enemy combatants' without due process and shipped them the U.S. concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay.Detainees from countries like Afghanistan, Yemen and others were held in a third country (Cuba) without being returned to their home nations. Some were later transferred to fourth countries like Albania or Qatar for resettlement or further detention."

Rall omits mentioning that the Obama administration tripled his predecessor's (Bush 43) rate of deportation, but you get the idea. 

The whole thing is worth a read 

Also worth a look: 

The Dirty Little Secret the Democratic Party Keeps

Excerpt: "If there’s one thing Democrats are good at, it’s performance. The Democrats have made a cottage industry out of selling themselves as champions of marginalized communities. They hoist their rainbow flags, drape themselves in kente cloth, and drop Black Lives Matter tweets like they’re passing out free samples at Costco. And yet, when you look at their actual policies and, more importantly, the people they choose to surround themselves with? It’s the same tired donor class with deep pockets and shallow empathy." 

This reminds me of Cory Booker's "Filibuster"... there was no legislation he was holding up. He was just showboating.

Rites, Rituals and Confucius

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

This paper describes the relationship between Confucian virtue, traditional rites, and ritual.  Confucianism emphasizes rituals, which encompass ceremonies, etiquette, and social norms, all designed to promote order, harmony, and respect. Rituals are crucial for maintaining social cohesion and for understanding one's place in the world.

 

"The superior man thinks only of virtue; the inferior man thinks only of comfort." -- Confucius' saying that prompted the search for the meaning of virtue: Connecting virtue and rites (quoting Confucius):

“Courtesy without rites is labor lost. Prudence without rites is timidity. Courage without rites is disorder. Honesty without rites is impatience. When a gentleman cherishes his family, the people are inspired towards benevolence. When he does not desert that of long standing, the people are not stealthy.”

 

Do you believe in magic?

Do You Believe In Magic?

Aurelien, April 30, 2025, via Naked Capitalism 05-01-2025]

…In one of my very earliest essays, I pointed out that the West has very largely lost its capability to think and plan in any kind of long-term sense. Thus, we are continually out-pointed and disappointed when dealing with states who at least make an effort to look to the future in an organised fashion….

Visions are easy, but the West has progressively lost the capacity to formulate and operate mechanisms for putting them into practice. In part, this is because there is very little inherited understanding left of the necessary practical steps. For example, re-shoring manufacture of some pharmaceuticals would involve activities that most politicians and pundits have never heard of, let alone be able to describe. Finding and importing supplies of chemicals, designing and building factories, recruiting and training skilled technicians and graduates in chemical engineering (having set up the necessary courses first, naturally), dealing with all the various health and safety hazards, setting up a distribution system for the products … I doubt if much of our current ruling class and its parasites has any idea even of the steps involved, let alone how to sequence them. By contrast, there’s a great deal of experience in closing factories, making workforces redundant and tying yourself to overseas suppliers….

The Anglo-Saxon (now more broadly western) fixation with archetypal heroic entrepreneurs and university dropouts has obscured the historical fact that no significant industry, and no key technology, has ever been developed without some level of planning and government encouragement. Very quickly, for example, states realised that iron ore, coal, and steel-making capability were important national assets, and acted accordingly. The modern idea that even strategically-important goods can come from anywhere so long as they are cheap would have seemed incomprehensible even half a century ago….

The British Conservative government elected in 1979 decided on an entirely different approach. Rather than imitating Britain’s successful competitors, it decided to do the opposite of what they did, and essentially to rely on magic. Now I don’t use that word idly. I don’t mean magic in the austere High Magic sense, but in the vernacular sense of rituals and spells which are supposed to bring about changes in the real world. Thus, all the government had to do was to create the right magical environment (low taxes, few regulations) and the “animal spirits” (interesting choice of words, that) of entrepreneurs would spontaneously do the rest, through the “magic” (interesting choice of words, that) of the “market.” The magician, however, having summoned up these powers, should make sure to stay well away from the working.

This ideology, entirely devoid of any empirical foundation at all, came to dominate quickly, because it was culturally acceptable in a country that disliked vulgar manufacturing, which preferred manipulation of abstruse symbols to actually doing real work, and which secretly hoped to find a magic lamp which would generate money without the need for actual effort. This was most obvious in attempts to control inflation, which, the government argued, was the principal obstacle to a national economic revival, because it “complicated the calculations” of businessmen, the poor things. Because inflation was believed to be a result of too much money in the economy, then the amount of money had to be reduced by making it expensive to borrow, hence high interest rates would bring inflation down, no matter how paradoxical it might seem to attempt to reduce prices by putting them up. But that’s magic for you. Of course, the rate of inflation could be measured in many different ways, and the flow of “money” in the economy depended on which definition you used. Nothing daunted, the government began to “target” the growth of M3, one of the definitions of money, convinced that through symbolic manipulation and the recital of incomprehensible formulae, the rate of inflation would come down. (Thus, the story of the dazed Conservative MP leaving the Chamber after one more jargon-infested announcement by the Chancellor, and muttering “I thought M3 was a Motorway.”)….

I dwell a little on this story because it was the first real sighting of the faith-based approach to government which has characterised the modern era. Instead of doing things, governments “create the conditions” for others to do things, and sit back in hopeful anticipation. Serial failures, in true New Age fashion, meant that the spell was not right, or more usually that it was not used with enough will and conviction. The idea that governments should actually do things is considered a quaint anachronism. The idea was to have a Court Magician who would make amazing things happen: the most recent incarnation is the misnamed AI, whose output can fool you into thinking it’s an oracle, if you don’t look too hard.

Meanwhile:

China unveils world’s fastest hard drive. Is ‘Poxiao’ the dawn of new flash memory?

Zhang Tongin, 18 Apr 2025 [South China Morning Post]

Rice-sized memory device breaks speed barrier once thought impossible, capable of erasing and rewriting data 100,000 times faster than before
 

...and...

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 05-03-2025]
Arye Lipman
@aryelipman
Highway 1 in Big Sur has been closed for 838 days. In that time China has built 3500 miles of high speed rail, and California hasn’t been able to fix a quarter mile of highway.

...but you knew that already, right?

 

 

Cats to the rescue!

 

pic.twitter.com/vEjf9We35T

— contents that ll heal your depression 🌻 (@catshealdeprsn) May 3, 2025

China Leapfrogging the U.S. in Tech Innovation

From China Leapfrogging the U.S. in Tech Innovation

...an article about the startling lead China now has over US technology.

Excerpt:

"I really don’t want the focus to be on Trump. He’s not the fire; he’s just an accelerant. The fire is the greed of the rich, their capture of government, and their constant shortsightedness when faced with the gleam of more wealth.

"How crass, how tragic, how low, how mean their desires. That we went along, that we fed them, how sad for ourselves."

Mayday! Mayday! Are the Trump Tariffs Killing 20,000 UPS Jobs? [Hint: Nope, it's financialization]

Mayday! Mayday! Are the Trump Tariffs Killing 20,000 UPS Jobs? (from Scheerpost)


UPS By Les Leopold / Substack

It’s such a tempting storyline: UPS announces that it will lay off 20,000 workers, citing “changes in the global trade policy and new or increased tariffs.”

There you have it. A perfect example of how Trump’s tariffs are screwing working people, many of whom voted for him.

Or is it?

UPS, like every major U.S. corporation, is in business to extract as much wealth as possible and shovel it to its shareholders and top executives in the form of stock buybacks and dividends. And like every major corporation, UPS will pay for that wealth extraction by laying off as many workers as possible. That may reduce the production of goods and services, but so be it, if it generates more money for shareholders and executives. In big business today, wealth extraction always comes first.

Let’s look at some of UPS’s numbers. In 2023, the company authorized $5 billion in stock buybacks, starting in 2024 with $500 million and another $5.5 billion in dividends. In 2025, UPS plans to spend another $1 billion on stock buybacks, as well as $5.5 billion more in dividends. In 2024, not incidentally, UPS posted $8.5 billion in profits. This is not a company struggling to make ends meet.

(Stock buybacks are when a corporation uses its own funds to repurchase shares and thereby raise the price of those shares, which greatly pleases its largest shareholders. Before deregulation in 1982, a company buying its own shares was considered illegal stock manipulation.)

To maintain this wealth pump for its investors and top officers, who are primarily compensated with stock incentives, cash needs to be generated and replenished. The simplest way to do that without acquiring more debt is to lay off workers.

Before the deregulation of Wall Street that came with the Reagan and Clinton administrations, no corporate manager would dare to lay off workers during profitable periods. To do so was a sign of poor management, a blemish on the CEO and his/her team. Workers and their communities were considered corporate stakeholders, right along with shareholders.

But after deregulation, the only stakeholder that mattered was the shareholder. The hell with workers and their communities. In short order layoffs during good times became a symbol of smart management. Greed is good reigned supreme. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers for the gory details.)

The Teamsters union, which represents 300,000 UPS hourly workers, will fight these recently announced layoffs. Sean O’Brian, the Teamster president who spoke at the Republican national convention in 2024, sees any layoffs as a violation of the contract:

“United Parcel Service is contractually obligated to create 30,000 Teamsters jobs under our current national master agreement. If UPS wants to continue to downsize corporate management, the Teamsters won’t stand in its way. But if the company intends to violate our contract or makes any attempt to go after hard-fought, good-paying Teamsters jobs, UPS will be in for a hell of a fight.”

We can be sure that the Teamsters will be looking closely at UPS’s finances, especially the large amounts going to stock buybacks and dividends. They will not sacrifice their members’ jobs on the altar of obscene wealth extraction.

Will the Trump tariffs have a major impact on UPS jobs?

We just don’t know that yet. But one thing we know for sure: Do not lend any credibility to corporate PR announcements. Their job is to do all they can to obscure how much they are shoveling to Wall Street. Their credo: The extent and consequences of the wealth extraction machine must never be revealed.

Blaming the Trump tariffs for every sin imaginable may be emotionally satisfying. But letting larger corporations and their Wall Street handlers off the hook when it comes to job destruction, which the Democrats have done for more than a generation, is in large part why we have Trump in the first place.