"Invisible Hand" job

 

         "Invisible Hand"Job (with a nod to                         Adam Smith)

        There's a strange phenomenon that occurs in American politics. In general, it goes something like this: If the party in power before you were elected committed The US government to some action and new administration follows through with that commitment and things go wrong then it's the fault of the current administration for carrying out the previous administration’s committed actions.

        Two cases in point. In the first, George W. Bush committed the United States to troop withdrawal from Iraq. Barack Obama carried out those, previously agreed upon, initial troop withdrawals and there was some criticism of that from the Right. In the second case, Donald Trump agreed with the Taliban that the US would pull out of Afghanistan. This commitment, made while Trump was president, was carried out, as scheduled, by the Biden administration. Of course, Trump's ardent sycophant fanbase immediately jumped all over Biden when the Taliban re-seized control of the country.

        In the same vein and along the same lines, Donald Trump constantly bragged about his “record breaking economy” as if we were to believe that he actually knew anything about economics. This runaway growth was fueled in large part by incredibly high federal deficits during what Trump himself styled as a period of “great prosperity.” Trump’s response to one staffer who dared caution him re: deficits, was “We won’t be here!” It is contradictory to common sense, but not surprising, that much of this deficit was what fueled economic growth and so it was, in essence, as if Trump was using the nation's credit card to make himself look good. Of course, he once referred to himself as “The King of debt” in his personal business dealings.

        We are currently experiencing a period of high inflation even as Republicans in Congress have complained about the Biden administration's spending plan, which was actually aimed at improving infrastructure nationwide, creating jobs in the process. The inflation, and this is really the bottom line, has been driven to great extent by one global occurrence over which we have little control, that of course being the COVID pandemic.

        Some of the fallout of this has been that many Americans have not gone back to work or are not going back to work in their previous occupations. Among these are longshoremen, warehousemen, truck drivers and others involved in the process of getting imported goods to consumers. As any 11th grade high school student could tell you, shortage causes prices to increase, ergo inflation. As the global economy began rebounding from the pandemic, the price of crude oil also skyrocketed – also contributing to inflation. High gas prices are one of the most frustrating phenomena for any White House because they affect almost every American, but they are essentially immune from presidential action.

        No matter how many Republican brickbats are hurled at Joe Biden, the awkward fact is that inflation is the job of the Federal Reserve Board and even their ability is limited. Of course, people are upset about inflation, and they want the president to solve their problems, but the harsh reality is that it isn't his problem to solve, and his scope of possible actions is extremely limited, as it is with gas prices and the other things which constitute the economic inflationary scenario.

        The Federal Reserve Board is charged with maintaining price stability and the current period of elevated inflation is anything but stable. Even so, the Fed continues attempts to stimulate the economy, keeping interest rates at low levels. The head of JPMorgan summed it up thus: "We put all of this on the President. We put him on a pedestal and pretend he has this power that he doesn't have. This is the Federal Reserve's job."

        There is one move which could help relieve the stress the pandemic-related supply chain crisis is having on US companies: Lift tariffs imposed by former President Donald Trump. Trump put tariffs on roughly $350 billion of Chinese-made goods. US importers have paid more than $106 billion to cover the cost of those tariffs to date, and many of them are now also dealing with skyrocketing shipping costs. The nature of these tariffs is that they aren’t necessarily apparent to the consumer, but they have caused inflationary pricing for auto manufacturers, and even companies such as Black and Decker who use foreign components in most of their tools. When have you ever heard any Republican critique of these punitive tariffs? Me neither.

        The Biden administration has taken some actions within the current system aimed at inflation, but specific legislation would be necessary for major change. The President signed an executive order last September directing rulemaking at the Agriculture Department to boost competition and improve conditions for smaller farmers. The White House has also tasked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate potential price fixing in the energy sector.

The White House has said (correctly) that consolidation in the meat sector is part of what has driven up food prices. Some economists say more aggressively pushing antitrust laws could help ease inflation concerns.         Robert Reich, who was Labor Secretary under former President Bill Clinton, summed it up like this: "One of the big puzzles today is that corporate profits are at record highs and yet the corporations are passing on all these price increases to consumers."  He continued: "If they were really in a competitive market, if we were not dealing with monopolies or what we call oligopolies, these companies would not so easily just simply pass these prices on to consumers. They'd be worried about their competitors. But they're not and I think antitrust enforcement has got to go after these sources of huge market power, this corporate market power in the United States right now."

        One mantra of the Far Right is constant railing about “excessive” government regulation. This actually reflects the current political position of the Republican Party which is, to great extent dominated by two groups whose real situations could hardly be farther apart. On one hand, we have industrialists and corporations which, in reality, border on oligarchy in some key commodities, meat production and some agricultural products among them. (higher grocery bills?) These people benefit from a laissez-faire, or “hands off”, government attitude which says, in essence, “As long as you don't blatantly break the law, whatever you do is fine.” This includes price gouging, price fixing and market controls which benefit the corporation at the expense of the consumer. In the first decade of the 21st century it also meant bundling high risk mortgages and selling them as legitimate investment instruments. (And we all know how that worked out.) Of course, one of Donald Trump's first initiatives upon taking his seat in the White House was to gut the Obama administration's Dodd-Frank legislation which had tried to bring some regulation and assurance of legitimate operation to financial markets.

        One of the chief criticisms of laissez-faire theory is that capitalism as a system has moral ambiguities built into it (you think?) It does not inherently protect the weakest in society, nor is it even motivated to do so by any tangible means. While laissez-faire advocates argue that if individuals serve their own interests first, societal benefits will follow, modern society has not seen that altruism in action. This is why regulation “in the public interest” as Republican Theodore Roosevelt dubbed it, has evolved, primarily in the 20^th century.

        At the other extreme, we have the Red Hat wearing MAGA power base, motivated principally by carefully inculcated racial bias, who don't understand that those they support only care about their votes and could care less about their economic situation, One quick example and then we move on: As things stand right now, in the labor market, increased immigration could go a long way towards filling those jobs such as warehousemen and other labor related jobs that would get the supply chain moving again. This, of course, runs counter to the Trumpist propaganda, therefore they will continue railing at President Biden because of inflation while opposing actions which might help ease the situation.

        Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, referred to the vast and complex web of market pressures and influences as “the invisible hand,” a metaphor he coined to characterize the mechanisms through which beneficial social and economic outcomes may arise from the accumulated self-interested actions of individuals, none of whom may actually intend to bring about such outcomes. Even Adam Smith however, publishing in 1776, could not have predicted the impact of interdependent and interwoven international markets on individual national economies. He used the invisible hand metaphor to describe economics and markets in a far simpler world, without modern communications, labor unions, interlinked economies, and global markets.

        Smith’s “beneficial” social outcome assume some altruistic behavior, which is seldom seen these days. This does not mean Socialism is better, but it does imply that, for market capitalism to be sustainable for all citizens, some overarching authority elected by all the people should aspire to insure fair play for those voters. This is the “government regulation” so detested by Trump, Musk, and others.

        As it always has, inflation will level out, but in the modern scenario of linked world markets, affected as they are by events on other continents over which we have little or no real control, and dependent on resources unevenly distributed, it is far from a simple exercise in that most vague of the soft sciences, economics.

Betsy McCaughey Off the Rails Again

 

      Betsy McCaughey Off the Rails Again

    In a recent column in the local rag, the loathsome Betsy McCaughey leads with the following.: “Schools are becoming indoctrination factories, trying to turn children against their country and their own parents’ values. It's what the teachers’ unions intend. Amazingly, that's just fine with President Joe Biden.”

    Digging deeper into the article, it becomes soon obvious that the real complaint here is that teachers may not teach or reinforce their students’ parental biases and/or bigotry or might present factual materials to refute the Far-Right anti-revisionist history that says, in effect, that, “America has always done everything perfectly and nothing we ever did was detrimental to anybody else.” This is somewhat analogous to insisting that German schools ignore the Holocaust. America has had its own holocausts if you define holocaust as an attempt to either relegate an entire race or group to secondary status or even, in the most extreme cases, eliminate them.

    Ms. McCarthy proceeds to lambaste teachers’ unions, the President, Secretary of Education, and anybody else who believes America is a great country which could be an even better country if all our citizens were given the treatment the constitution supposedly guarantees them. When Ms. McCaughey says schools are trying to turn children against their country that is an incredibly misleading statement because what schools are actually doing, if they're teaching honest unbiased history, is discussing all things that have been done historically, not just the ones that support the Far-Right narrative.

    In my position as a teacher of Advanced Placement U.S. History that meant that we talked about the Tulsa race riots. We discussed the fact that even though the Constitution had been amended to attempt to protect the Black minority in the South, social Reconstruction was largely farcical, simply because the law was not enforced or simply just circumvented at the State level. That's not fiction and that's not revisionist history. That is data-based analysis of the situation. It is Ida Wells Barnett publishing every time somebody black was lynched in the South. it is the NAACP being formed as a reaction to the lack of constitutional protection being afforded to Black people in America.

    Now, if you're a bigot or white supremacist, you may very well not want your children to hear that. If you fear your children being told the truth and the whole truth about those less savory moments in our history, then you're the problem, not the victim. We talked about white soldiers coming home from World War One believing that their jobs, some of which were now being held by Black workers, should simply be given back to them and the Blacks should be fired. It means that, in 1920, Black people in Ocoee Florida died, or had their homes burned because they tried to vote. It means discussing Wounded Knee as what it was - an unwarranted attack on Native Americans and the absolute lack of any control of the armed US Army forces who fired upon them.

    One example I used is that of George Armstrong Custer who has been lionized on the silver screen by such actors as Errol Flynn in the movie “They Died with Their Boots On.” In that version of the Custer story or more correctly, the Custer myth, Custer's 7th cavalry was attacked for no apparent reason by a brutal horde of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors. The facts are categorically contradictory to that and every single reputable historian who has evaluated the situation acknowledges this. But don't tell that to the Far-Right. To understand the present and put it in proper context, it is crucial and absolutely necessary to understand the past. The Far-Right fears this in some degree.

    This has been a paradox in many historical contexts, one example and then we move on. The great famine in Ireland was a result of not only a crop failure, but prejudice against Catholic Irish by Protestant British who had simply been given control of land by royal grant. As some Southerners would say of Black people during reconstruction, British MPs were treated to such verbal pap as, “The Irish must learn to live within their means.” Of course, those “means” included lands which they were not allowed to farm for food because even in the face of starving Irish peasants, exports of food to Britain continued. Ireland continued to export large quantities of food, primarily to Great Britain, during the potato blight. In cases such as livestock and butter, exports actually increased during the Potato Famine.

     In 1847 alone, commodities such as peas, beans, rabbits, fish, and honey continued to be exported from Ireland, even as the Great Hunger ravaged the countryside. Some luckier Irish managed to immigrate to the USA.

     Now flash ahead to the 1900s. Many descendants of these abased and poorly treated Irish immigrants became, themselves, some of the most racist residents of northern cities. One reflects on poor whites being some of the most bigoted, Trump supporting, Americans today. Teaching critical race theory without calling it that is one way to at least address this paradox 

        Shining the light of truth on racial, sexual, or religious discrimination is not “Turning children against their own country.” It should, one hopes, help them to see that it could be better.

    Then, in a turn for the worse (if that’s even possible) Ms. McCaughey then says, “All children deserve kindness but that doesn't mean kindergarteners should be instructed in how boys can transition to become girls or vice versa.” She then says nearly half of teachers agree those issues don't belong in the classroom. There are two significant errors in her method again. The first is that no one with a brain has ever suggested kindergartners should be instructed and how to transition if they’re gender dysphoric. No public-school teacher who even suggested such a thing would lose their job soon after a parent called the principal. That is far different from teaching or even mentioning transitioning at the kindergarten level. It just doesn't happen, it hasn't happened, and no responsible teacher (not “almost half”) thinks it should happen but, using the dog whistle political type of rhetoric made popular by Richard Nixon, Ms. McCaughey throws it out there just like throwing feces at the wall, hoping that some will stick.

    She then states that the American Federation of Teachers website declares that “The U.S. is facing health, economic, and racial challenges all made worse because of Donald Trump. All are demonstrably true. She just tosses it into the conversation because she wishes the unwashed Red Hatters to somehow link an under-educated (couldn’t even get into Grad school) buffoon to real education issues. Go figure.

    Finally, she ends with a union-bashing quote which declares, as if it were the threat of nuclear destruction, that the American Federation of Teachers website urges visitors to “Take action on student debt, voting rights and passing the Equality Act.” For the uninformed, the Act prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in areas including public accommodations and facilities, education, federal funding, employment, housing, credit, and the jury system. By implication, this seems as if Ms. McCaughey favors voter discrimination, predatory student debt lending and discrimination against some citizens for reasons which affect no one else. (And she probably does).

     I have to stop writing about Betsy McCaughey now, because my computer just threw up.

Star Parker, Still Writing, Still Lying

 

         Star Parker, Still Writing, Still Lying

 

        Our local newspaper runs a column periodically which they call “A View From the Right.” It is, too frequently, an op-ed piece from Star Parker who is, if nothing else, a mouthpiece for all things conservative. Ms. Parker is also a master of the big lie. In today's column her intent as always is to slam all things government as “interference” and “excessive regulation.” A second aim would seem to be to absolve corporate greed, corruption, and ignorance of any responsibility when the economy goes awry, while scathingly criticizing any subsequent efforts to mitigate underlying causes.

        She begins today's series of lies by harking back to the housing bubble and financial collapse of 2008. It is noteworthy that she blames no one, especially conservatives, for their part in creating what is commonly known as the Great Recession. What she has actually done is to provide a litany of false-flag reasons for the collapse and then use that to criticize Dodd-Frank and all other Congressional attempts to regulate the market players truly responsible for the housing bubble collapse.

        As others have, she attempts to pin the blame for all the woes of the housing market in 2008 on the 1992 Affordable Housing Goals act passed during the Clinton administration. The objective of this legislation was to override what is known as “redlining” or reflexive rejection of mortgage applications based on race or ethnicity. Interestingly enough, no one, not even Republicans, has ever denied that these practices were rampant in the banking and mortgage broker communities. In short, these policies involved requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to ensure that 30% of all mortgages they acquired for mortgage originators were targeted for low- and moderate-income borrowers. The big lie is that “moderate income” as defined in the legislation applied to middle class families in many cases. Additionally, this didn’t apply to other lenders.

        Ms. Parker, while blaming all the ills of the collapse on the 1992 law, overlooks the real bad guys in all this and denies the fact that the markets and the mortgage brokers and the corporate banking interests are the real reason for the collapse.

        So, what really happened? In the first place, mortgage brokers are not banks and are not subject to the same restrictions on reserve requirements or stringent review of mortgagees. Some mortgage brokers saw the federal effort to create fair lending as a license to steal by originating mortgages to people who they knew didn't even meet the standards or the goals of the legislation and the brokers simply didn't care. Why? Because they knew they were going to sell the mortgages to banks who would buy them, assuming they were legitimately entered into.

        Ms. Parker’s second lie is the assertion that the majority of people who went belly up on their mortgages when the market collapsed were lower income people, and that's simply not true. Sadly, some mortgage brokers also simply ignored the guidelines and financed individuals who were naïve enough to enter into lending agreements they could not satisfy when the bubble collapse cost them their job. However, in fact, some of the largest losses involved in the housing bubble collapse were for upper income people who were engaged in what had become the “fad” of buying and flipping homes in the hope of making a profit on the future sales of said homes. In just one example, a young middle-class woman in California was persuaded (and allowed) by a mortgage broker to serially purchase a number of condos (5!) , using the value of previous (mortgaged) ones as collateral for subsequent ones, on the premise that they would all continually appreciate in value, enabling her to pay them off and take the profit. Of course, once the mortgage broker sells a mortgage to the bank, they're off the hook, having no financial liability, but having banked the “loan origination fee,” most of which is a secretarial function.

        Ms. Parker uses her column to rail against government oversight and supervision of financial markets, but she blows right past the real reason for the bubble collapse which triggered unemployment, which then caused some working-class families who could have afforded a mortgage while working, to be unable to continue meeting their financial commitment to the mortgage lender. In a wild and wooly (and grossly under regulated) commercial banking market, someone who was and will remain unidentified, decided that it could be profitable to take individual mortgages and bundle them in groups or “tranches” and sell them as financial investment instruments. The assumption of course was that housing values would continue to increase, the mortgages would continue to pay the interest, and that the people buying these bundled mortgages would reap the benefits of the mortgage interest.

        As this practice gained footing in the commercial banking world, the less scrupulous of the people who are actually simply salespersons who work for these huge Wall Street organizations, decided to bundle mortgages of various quality, and sell the whole bundle as a single financial instrument. To do so requires that some creditable evaluation of the value of the whole bundle be made. In the American commercial financial world three principal companies do this rating - Standard and Poor, Moody's, and Fitch. What they are supposed to do is to evaluate an individual security with regards to credit worthiness and investment value. They assign ratings ranging from “AAA” to “D.” AAA, AA, A, and BBB are considered “investment grade” while the rest are classified as “junk” bonds. History reminds us (or should) that unscrupulous individuals (Michael Milken?) have been jailed for fraudulently misrepresenting junk bonds as reasonable and secure investment opportunities.

        In efforts to outsell the competition, some commercial banks began to bundle groups of highly rated mortgages with questionable or even high-risk mortgages. When submitted to Moody's or Standard and Poor for rating, each organization understood that if they didn't provide the rating desired, the bank might take their business elsewhere. This resulted in bundles of mortgages with good ones on top but the majority much poorer in grade being sold as safe (and high yield) investments to retirement funds, mutual funds, and pension funds as good investments. Sadly, CEOs, in some cases, of these investment banks only knew their salesperson we're selling a lot of product and they themselves did not understand exactly what the product was and that in too many cases the product was not what it seemed.

        To exacerbate matters, some large commercial insurers looking for a share of the action decided to sell what were called credit default swaps. In as simple a definition as I can give, this means that although “A” has no risk in the bundled mortgage game, I am willing to bet that your stake in it will fail, so I buy insurance which basically says if you default on your obligation payment the insurance company will pay me. What this meant in the market as it was at the time was that if those bundled mortgages proved to be bad investments and the people that had bought them were unable to receive the promised return on investment, then the issuer of those bundles would be responsible. This also meant that companies like Bear Stearns and other big Wall Street commercial banks would be on the hook for massive amounts of money they may not have had. But it also meant that the insurance companies who sold the credit default swaps and may have taken $100,000 premium payments were now liable for millions of dollars when bundled mortgages proved to be worthless. in this simplest analogy it’s rather like betting against the shooter at a crap table. When Wall Street woke up and realized the relative worthlessness of far too many of these bundled mortgage packages and the insurers understood that they were liable for huge payouts to the holders of the credit default swaps, the economy tanked. Republican President Bush used the term “Too big to fail” and asked for and got a large Federal bailout package for the commercial banking and insurance industries. Of course, there was no bailout for the newly unemployed mortgage holders, well off or low income, who lost their homes.

        Ms. Parker should, but like her idol Donald Trump, probably doesn’t, understand all the above, so she blames Barack Obama and Congress for trying to fix the holes and insure we don’t have a repeat. Trump, himself, a world class debtor, was a loud voice for trying to repeal the resultant Dodd-Frank financial markets and consumer credit regulation initiatives, some of which he accomplished. Isn’t it odd how those who can benefit financially from loose regulation and limited oversight want the government to close a blind eye to their nefarious dealings until after they cause economic collapse?

Truth is not a Commodity

 

                                    Truth is Not a Commodity


        By the above statement I mean that truth (i.e., the statement of factually accurate information) isn’t, or shouldn’t be, available to the highest bidder or the person with the loudest voice or media presence. In spite of that, we have talking heads such as Tulsi Gabbard, former four-term Congresswoman from Hawaii, who states her opinion as fact, while proving the opposite. Ms. Gabbard speaking to an interviewer on (what else?) Fox News made the below statement:

        "This is what’s so dangerous about the place that we’re in right now as a country, where this idea, this principle, this foundation of freedom of speech, freedom of expression is directly under threat and under attack. And you’re right, it’s not so different. What’s happening here is not so different from what we’re seeing happening in Russia, where you’ve got state TV and controlled messaging across the board. This is where we’re at."

        No, madam, it isn’t. The fact that this aired on broadcast TV without repercussion proves that it is untrue. The fact that Fox news and others attack the nation’s chief executive with impunity multiple times hourly proves it. As too many do, Ms. Gabbard conflates righteous reaction to racism and hate speech or even just a difference of political point of view, as suppression of same.

        If any of what she says in the quote were true, there would already be a mass grave of Fox anchors dead of polonium poisoning as has been the fate of some of those who dared oppose most anything Vladimir Putin says. In fact, in Russia, one can now face up to 15 years in prison for simply calling a war a war, while in the U.S., citizens such as Tulsi Gabbard are free to make not only truthful but untruthful statements without fear of legal sanction. The reality is that the U.S. government lacks any power under the Constitution to engage in the kind of actions taking place in Russia.

        The last time any effort to legislate even the possibility of such repressive actions in peacetime was 224 years ago with the Sedition Act of 1798, during the John Adams administration. The act was so immensely unpopular with the public that it actually contributed to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800. Under the newly elected Jefferson administration, the Sedition Act was allowed to expire on March 3, 1801. Arguments made for and against it and the surprisingly negative reaction to it by the public, shaped most subsequent debate about constitutional protections of free speech. (But Ms. Gabbard wouldn’t know that)

        Examples of this Fox News “truth for sale” mentality abound. Here’s another:

         Another member of Fox’s “frequent liar” program, Maria Bartiromo said that U.S. “dependency on Russian oil imports” would cause gasoline prices to continue rising. “The United States is "reliant on Russian oil. We have doubled our imports from Russia in the last year," speaking on Feb. 22. "No question why President Biden is begging OPEC and others to pump more oil."

        What has been lost, and in the interest of candor, by both sides of the argument over current high gasoline prices is that the US still, today, exports 17 times as much oil annually as it has imported from Russia. Yes, that’s 1700% more! The word “dependent” is a rhetorical false flag. If, as she and other Fox hosts periodically imply, we truly lived in a nation where the president ruled by simple executive fiat, as Donald Trump lamented that he could not, simply banning US petroleum exports would change the situation instantly. Of course, it would be a disaster for the 176 countries and 4 US territories which depend on US petroleum. High gas prices are a blip, not a fixture. What we call an economic imposition has been a European way of life for decades.   

        And finally, (for now) over the past year, both Newsmax and Fox News have run several spots critical of the Biden administration and blaming (actually non-existent but claimed nonetheless) Biden “policies” for shortages in consumer goods. Adding insult to injury, they accompanied such drivel with what they presented as “current photos of empty shelves” as proof of their allegations.

        So? Newsmax host Chris Salcedo interviewed Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., about the supply chain issues. Comer shared a clip from the interview on Twitter, writing that the "high prices and empty store shelves are a direct result of Joe Biden's reckless spending policies."

        In an accompanying short clip, a Newsmax host specifically faulted Biden’s economic policies and COVID-19 vaccine requirement for large employers for labor shortages, high prices and depleted store shelves. The problem, however, with the whole thing was that the photos shown as “proof” were as follows: 

 The first photo showed empty shelves and long lines at a London supermarket in March 2020. A second showed an aisle of empty shelves at a Hispanic specialty market in Los Angeles in March 2020, again, back when Donald Trump was in office and the coronavirus pandemic was first breaking out.

         Even worse: a third photo showed empty shelves that had been depleted at a convenience store in Japan as the country prepared for a typhoon in September 2020. A fourth showed empty toilet paper shelves at a supermarket in Melbourne, Australia, as the city began a seven-day lockdown in late May 2020, while a fifth showed a sign seen at a London supermarket in July that read, "Please bear with us. We’re experiencing high demand."

        The topper, however, was the final photo which showed a customer walking through a drugstore in Berlin on the last day the store was open before it permanently closed in March of 2012.

        Truth for sale, cheap! See your local Fox News outlet for details.  

Why Ukraine? The Roots of Conflict

 

Why Ukraine? – the roots of conflict

 

        Recent world events are harsh enough without the mind-numbingly ignorant comments of several Americans who should know better. To understand the current Ukraine crisis requires more than just reading the headlines. It requires trying to understand Vladimir Putin and his mindset. Even more significantly, it requires understanding what lies before the present unrest - in other words, a sense of history. (You knew it was coming, didn’t you?)

         As for Putin it’s fairly simple: In December of 2021 he called the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago as the demise of what he called "historical Russia." He then said, "We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost," said Putin, saying 25 million Russian people in newly independent countries suddenly found themselves cut off from Russia, part of what he called "a major humanitarian tragedy."

         The greatest lie here is that those “Russians” were in the main immigrants pushed by the Rulers in Moscow to settle and overwhelm these formerly non-Russian political units. Consider Kazakhstan as just one example of how it worked. The forced settlement of the nomadic Kazakhs in the Soviet period, combined with large-scale Slavic in-migration, strikingly altered the Kazakh way of life, and led to considerable settlement and urbanization in Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs’ traditional customs still, uneasily coexist alongside forced incursions of the modern and still Russian influenced world. During the 19th century (not 1000 years ago!) about 400,000 Russians flooded into Kazakhstan, and these were supplemented by about 1,000,000 Slavs, Germans, Jews, and others who immigrated to the region during the first third of the 20th century. The immigrants crowded Kazakhs off the best pastures and watered lands, rendering many tribes destitute. Nominally a fairly permissively Muslim people, (as were Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan etc.,) Russian incursion served primarily to harden their mindset as Russian was forced as the national language.

        Soviet Russia has had the same issues with Chechens and other minority groups. Since almost all of the primarily Islamic “istans” have great mineral wealth, Putin’s real concern is the most likely possibility that truly independent entities might choose not to share with Moscow. Sadly, a number of these, now just nominally independent, nations have replaced corrupt regimes subservient to Moscow with corrupt local demigods subservient to Russian oligarchs and themselves. Since Ukraine is much more western and historically a trade partner of Moscow, subjugation was harder and cruel to an incredible degree.     

        At the heart of the matter is an episode of history that many Americans have either never heard of or have purged from their memory banks. Ask the average American what the word “Holodomor” means, and a blank stare will probably be the response. Ask the same individual what the Irish Potato famine was, and they will probably have some reasonable answer. Why is this?

        The Irish potato famine, although a 19^th century disaster happened to English speakers who were of western European stock. It also spurred a wave of Irish emigration, much of it to the US. Without the gory details, the high-end estimate of the death toll in the Great Famine is about 1.5 million deaths.

        Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means "death by hunger", "killing by hunger, killing by starvation", or alternately, "murder by hunger or starvation." In English, the Holodomor has also been referred to as the artificial famine, famine genocide, terror famine, and terror-genocide. Since the events triggered a wave of Ukrainian emigration for those with the means to escape, many to the US and Canada, the term was used in such print media as were available to those groups. It was used in print in the 1930s in Ukrainian language in Czechoslovakia as Haladamor and by Ukrainian immigrant groups in the United States and Canada.

        in the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was (by implied threat of military force) a constituent republic, any references to the famine were dismissed as anti-Soviet propaganda, even after de-Stalinization in 1956, until the declassification and publication of historical documents in the late 1980s made continued denial of the catastrophe unsustainable.

        So, what was it and why is it important? The roots of the famine lay in the decision by Soviet Communist leader, Joseph Stalin, to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party representatives forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property, and sometimes housing, to collective farms, and they deported (or “liquidated”) kulaks, or wealthier peasants—as well as any peasants who resisted collectivization altogether. Collectivization led to a sharp fall-off in grain production, the collapse of the Ukrainian rural economy, and food shortages. It also resulted in peasant rebellions, including armed uprisings, in some parts of Ukraine.

        The rebellions worried Stalin because they were unfolding in a region which had, a decade earlier, fought against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. (So much for the “happy Socialist family” myth). Even Ukrainian Communist party officials showed anger and resistance to the state agricultural policy.  That autumn, the Soviet Politburo, in Moscow, enacted a series of measures which deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Farms, villages, and entire towns in Ukraine were placed on blacklists and prevented from receiving food. Peasants were forbidden to leave the Ukrainian republic in search of food. Despite growing Ukrainian starvation, food requisitions from Ukraine were increased and aid was not provided in sufficient quantities. The disaster was measurably worsened in 1932–33, when organized groups of police and communist apparatchiks ransacked the homes of peasants and took everything edible, from crops to personal food supplies to pets.

        The result of Stalin’s brutal campaign was an inhumane catastrophe. Between 1931 and 1934 at least 3.9 million Ukrainians died of state enforced starvation. Official records, repressed by Stalin for years contain numerous descriptions of instances of cannibalism, brutality, and lynching. Mass graves were dug across the countryside. Hunger also affected the urban population, though many were able to survive thanks to ration cards. In Ukraine’s largest cities, corpses could be seen on the street.

        Also, on Stalin’s orders, the famine was accompanied by a systematic state-sponsored effort to undermine and dilute Ukrainian identity. As millions of peasants starved, agents of the Soviet secret police undermined the Ukrainian political establishment and intelligentsia. The famine was accompanied by a campaign of repression and persecution that was carried out against Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian religious leaders, most of whom were too weak to resist. The previous official policy of encouraging the use of the Ukrainian language, was halted by decree. Persons connected to the former short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic that had been declared in June 1917, after the February Revolution, but dismantled after the Bolsheviks conquered Ukrainian territory—was subjected to vicious reprisals. All those accused during this campaign were publicly vilified, jailed, sent to Siberian Gulags, or executed.

        Even as the famine was happening, all news of it was deliberately silenced by Soviet bureaucrats. Party officials did not mention it in public. Western journalists based in Moscow were instructed not to write about it. Stalin even ordered suppression of the results of a 1937 census. Officials supervising the census were arrested and murdered, primarily because the figures revealed the decimation of Ukraine’s population.

        Although the famine was discussed during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in World War II, any mention of it was quashed again during the postwar years. The first public mention of it in the Soviet Union was in 1986, in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, which was also initially kept secret by Soviet authorities.  Because the famine was so deadly, and because it was officially denied by the Kremlin for more than half a century, it has retained a huge place in Ukrainian public memory, particularly since independence.

        By early 2019, 16 nations, including the Vatican, had recognized the Holodomor as a genocide, and both houses of the United States Congress had passed resolutions declaring that “Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against the Ukrainians in 1932–1933.”

And yet:

Donald Trump said this yesterday:

        "You say, what's the purpose of this? They had a country. You could see it was a country where there was a lot of love and we're doing it because, you know, somebody wants to make his country larger or he wants to put it back the way it was when actually it didn't work very well,"

        This apologia is nauseating from a man whose nose is so far up Putin’s arse that he can barely breathe. He then, in another burst of blather, stated that “No one was as tough on Russia as I was.”  This would be laughable if it didn’t so clearly point to Trump’s narcissistic belief that everything Trump is the best, accompanied by his abysmal lack of knowledge of the history involved. He has become an American embarrassment to many, while, sadly, retaining his blindly allegiant sycophant core. And by the way, we used to refer to “wanting to make his country larger” as Imperialism and criticized western European powers for it. The United Nations, of which Russia is a member, at least on paper, also has verbiage on self-determination in its charter  

        This litany of misinformation has been further exacerbated and distorted by allegations of persons such as Candace Owens who stated categorically that “NATO Eastward expansion was prohibited in writing by its own charter. This is, simply put, a lie, furthered by Putin’s assertion of the same falsehood. There is absolutely zero written statement of any sort which specifies limits to NATO, but Putin uses his own expansionist mindset when lying about it. The assumption that NATO threatens Russia is a figment of his own psyche, projecting his own motives on the Western allies.        

        Worse yet, Fox News has apparently revived Axis Sally, and Lord Haw Haw (American William Joyce, who broadcast Nazi propaganda to the UK from Germany during the Second World War) in the personage of Tucker Carlson.

        The Kremlin has apparently instructed Russian state media to feature Fox News host Tucker Carlson "as much as possible” in a leaked 12-page war memo, titled "For Media and Commentators." The official release told Russian media that it is "essential" to use more Carlson segments in their coverage because of his positions on the war in Ukraine. Carlson "sharply criticizes" the actions of the United States and NATO and their "negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine," the memo said, per the media outlet. He is also critical of the "defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally," the memo continued. According to metadata reviewed by the media outlet, it was produced by a Russian government agency called the Department of Information and Telecommunications Support.

        Meanwhile, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent on Thursday accused Carlson of "almost a plagiarism" of Putin, adding that the Fox News host copies him "almost word for word." Josef Stalin would have been so proud of “Moscow Tucker.”

        Ukraine is an independent state which simply wants to remain one in the face of aggression and expansionist efforts of a nation which inflicted an unforgiveable genocide against its people less than a century ago.   

                          

More "Invented" News

 

More “Invented” News

 

        On the off chance that you actually ever believed that Fox News was a real news organization, here are some examples of why that’s an incorrect assumption.  Additionally, if you were ever foolish enough to believe that Sean Hannity is the only pathological liar hired by Fox News, scratch that as well.  

        Recently, Dan Bongino, another Fox News professional prevaricator did a segment on which he essentially attacked Democratic municipal administrations and their policies as being responsible for what he proclaimed were the “Top ten unhealthiest cities in America.” He then produced a map showing said cities, which he claimed were these mismanaged cesspits of sickness.  As Fox switchboards and the internet lit up, it soon became evident that Mr. Bongino actually had taken the list of cities from a study which proclaimed them as “The 10 healthiest places to live in the United States.”  Apparently, Fox was so besieged with protestations and calls that they actually, in a rare example of acknowledging a lie, forced Bongino to do so as well. That’s one in a row. As a footnote, Bongino also confused Irvine, California with Irving, Texas! (Which isn’t easy if you are sentient)

        Another Far Right politician, Mike Pence, has recently seemed to have been attempting to distance himself from his former boss Donald Trump and has seemingly backed away somewhat from far-right rhetoric. However, Mr. Pence, apparently unable to refrain from slamming Democrats, said recently that President Biden's cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline dramatically increased American dependence on Russian oil. It's sad enough that he said it and more unfortunate, in that some people will believe it even though the cancelled Keystone XL pipeline has never carried any oil to or through the United States. Mr. Pence certainly knows this but apparently the chance to take a cheap potshot at the current President was just too much of a temptation.

        While vice former Vice President Pence was lying about Keystone XL his former boss in a recent interview is quoted as saying, “Energy prices - We were energy independent and now we're going begging, OPEC please send this oil we have no oil please send us oil. California just hit $7.75 in certain areas of California. Can you believe it?” (sic) At that point, Trump then said, “Gas was $1.86 a gallon when I left.” (This, from the man who has never actually bought and paid for gasoline for the last 25 years).

        The lies within this exchange are several-fold. First, at the time when Trump claims we were energy independent, we were actually still importing 500 million barrels of oil annually. As I previously discussed, we have never been energy independent (as defined by not importing energy) in the 21st century and earlier in the Trump administration we were importing 3/4 of a billion barrels of oil per year.

        The second lie is the statement that we are claiming we “have no oil.” The United States still has the largest oil reserves of any country in the world and President Biden has authorized more public land drilling in the first year of his administration that Donald Trump did in his entire administration. The irony is that although we were a net exporter of petroleum in 2021, we still imported half a billion barrels of foreign oil. The rationale for this is, I would imagine, hidden somewhere deep within some foreign policy program. Trump clearly doesn’t understand that exporting more than you import doesn’t mean you don’t import foreign oil. American refiners produced 11.185 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2021, compared with 11.283 million a year earlier under Trump. The amount produced in Biden’s first year exceeds the average daily amount produced under Trump from 2016 to 2018.  As of now, thousands of drilling permits of federal lands go unused. That's because it is up to oil and gas companies, and the finance firms that back them, to do the actual drilling. Additionally crude oil prices are a global, not national statistic. Crude oil prices are determined by global supply and demand, not by individual countries, politicians, or even the oil companies themselves, according to industry experts.

        The final lie in Trump's litany of untruths is that gas was $1.86 a gallon when he left office. In fact, when Trump left office, gasoline was 28% higher than the figure Trump quoted, at $2.38 per gallon. Additionally, while Trump seems to feel a constant need to take pot shots at California, his stated $7 was actually just about twice as high as actual California gas prices the week he left office. During Biden’s term in office, the average weekly price in California has risen as high as about $4.55, but nowhere near $7.

         It should be noted that that figure is an average for the state. There will always be places conveniently located in downtown areas where gasoline prices are far higher than the state average. Several years ago, I saw gasoline priced at about twice the state average in Seattle. The station was simply located in an affluent area and was a convenient (although God-awful expensive) place for people on their way to or from work to fill up the Beemer or the Porsche.

        And, finally, in case recent events have weighed on you to the point that you’ve asked yourself how it could be any worse, here’s how. Four days ago, in a nearby Polk County landfill, an employee was answering a call of nature in a port-a-potty. Meanwhile, a bulldozer was driving up an embankment at the landfill with the front blade of the vehicle several feet above the ground, preventing the driver from seeing around it clearly. Once the driver was level on the embankment, he began to turn his bulldozer and heard a loud “crumble”, as he described it.    

        When law enforcement arrived on the scene, the driver, greatly distressed, said he was unaware the port-a-potty was near the staging area, according to the sheriff’s report. When the dozer driver went to see if anyone was inside, he found the victim, a 40-year-old employee, unresponsive, deputies said. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was contacted, and an autopsy will be conducted at a later date. One has to wonder why an autopsy even need be done. What a shitty way to go!

         

Straight Talk About Gasolline

 

Straight talk about gasoline.

        What follows will be relatively short and sweet. We continue to hear abysmally ignorant and Right-Wing partisan smack talking, blaming President Biden for high fuel prices. Sadly, facts have little impact on these blissfully and aggressively ignorant bumpkins. It’s as if they think that, like Dorothy Gale in Oz, Joe Biden can just click his heels three times and say, “I wish gas was cheaper.” No amount of factual data seems to reach these rubes who want only to genuflect to Trump and bash anyone who isn’t him. So here goes one more exercise in critical thinking.

        In 1929 a gallon of gasoline cost 21 cents per gallon. In 2022 it has hit $4.17. The horror, the horror! In fact, we in the USA have been spoiled by artificially low gas prices for almost one hundred years. If gasoline costs had simply kept pace with the rest of the cost-of-living commodities (based on the actual consumer price index, or CPI) a gallon of regular gasoline today should cost $6.03 per gallon. Fact, not partisan fiction. The CPI in 1929 (pre-crash) was 9.7. The CPI now is 28.87 times as high at 281.15. That means that gas, if it simply followed all other commodities, should be 28.87 times as costly as in 1929. And this isn’t the highest we’ve ever seen, adjusted for CPI, either. That was in 2008 when it was $4.11 (national average). Adjusted for inflation, that 2008 price was the equivalent of $5.46 per gallon. Did you blame Bush 43 for that? If not, you might want to STFU about the current POTUS as a factor in high fuel prices.

         The most dangerous individuals are those who don’t know what they don’t know. If memory serves (and it does) the gasoline price spike of 2008 was an immediate result of the financial crisis triggered by Wall Street under-regulation and malfeasance. Read The Big Short to get the sad story. Although the Bush administration had been very lax in financial market oversight, no one blamed ole George for gas prices.

        Today, the market has lost about one million barrels of daily petroleum-refining capacity compared to since early 2020, when the U.S. was producing about 19 million barrels of refined petroleum a day. Trumpist  bullshit notwithstanding, the US was then importing, in 2019, half a billion barrels of oil annually from the Middle East. In the first two years of the Trump administration imports were actually closer to three quarters of a billion barrels yearly, and only dipped in 2020 because of the COVID pandemic and much lower US consumption. We as a nation in recent modern times have never been fuel self-sufficient.

         This current spike has zero to do with Keystone XL. Zip. Nada. Keystone XL never pumped a drop of oil. Rather, it has a great deal to do with a Russian madman’s insane megalomania. It also has to do with voluntary production slowdowns during the worst of the Covid pandemic and the fact that the Energy industry is still playing catchup.

         “How fast?” is a valid question, but remember that the profits right now are immense for the Energy giants and it is a simplistic supply and demand equation. For the companies which also own the crude production processes, it’s the same oil, extracted at the same cost, refined at the same cost and then sold in a market economy. Shortage creates demand and, when demand exceeds supply, prices are raised. If you truly want a command economy you’ll have to move to a totalitarian state like, oh I don’t know,….Russia?