Trump's Failure: Federal Debt Approaches Size of US GPD

The president touts his "miracle economic recovery" in terms of lies, not exaggerations. His miracle is driven in large part by increased federal debt and the gushing up of wealth to the top 1-2% who are freed from both taxes and society and environment defending regulations. A Washington Post article, U.S. government debt will nearly equal the size of the entire economy for first time since World War II, CBO finds, reports what the title says:

“By the end of 2020, the amount of debt owed by the U.S. will amount to 98 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, the highest level since the end of World War II, the CBO said. Total government debt will surpass the U.S. economy’s size next year, CBO said.

Fueling this rise is a big jump in the government’s annual budget deficit, which is projected to widen to $3.3 trillion by the end of this fiscal year, more than tripling since 2019. The deficit was already on track to be very elevated because of recent tax cuts and spending increases, but the government’s response to the pandemic changed things markedly.”

WaPo points out that republicans routinely claim they want to reduce the deficit. But as far as I can tell, that is only when democrats are in charge. When the GOP controls government, federal debt is irrelevant as the GOP passes laws to increase the rate of wealth gushing up to the top 1-2%. That has been standard GOP practice for decades. When democrats are in charge, republican hypocrites, about 97% of the GOP in congress and ~97% of elected GOP politicians, scream bloody murder about the federal debt. They rarely give even little squeak of mild milquetoast protest when the GOP is in charge.

It is true that democrats helped to increase unfunded spending and thus the debt by passing a major COVID-19 spending bill. That spending was in the face of a pandemic and an economic collapse. By stark contrast, the president and the GOP passed a budget-busting tax relief bill that mostly benefited rich people bill in 2017 while the US was in its 7th year of economic expansion. 

What is a reasonable conception of an economically successful federal policy?

Is it fair and balanced to call economic policy that adds to federal debt in times of economic growth a failure? Or, is increased economic growth at the expense of trillions in added federal debt in a growing economy a success? Or, does it not matter? If debt expands during times of growth, what about times of no growth? Is no growth a good time to shut federal spending down? 

Glazed eyeballs

I know, many eyeballs glaze over when the concepts like federal debt and economic policy are mentioned. That is unfortunate. Those concepts "run amok", as one person here likes to say, could help kill democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law as we used to know those concepts. Public detachment from, or boredom with, those economic concerns can and just might usher in a corrupt, incompetent authoritarian kleptocrat government. When that happens, people like me will probably be shut up in due course. Maybe in a year. Maybe in two or three. But it will come if past demagogic tyrannies are reliable evidence.

Regardless of the details, a veil of darkness will fall. Then cruel, corrupt, incompetent, deeply immoral self-serving beasts will control our fates.

Dissecting the Reality of Propaganda About Dysfunctional Democratic Cities

The New York Times reports on democratic cities and the history of how they got there and why they are there. The NYT writes:

“With this refrain, Mr. Trump has sharpened his party’s long-running antipathy toward urban America into a more specific argument for the final two months of the campaign: Cities have problems, and Democrats run them. Therefore, you don’t want Democrats running the country, either.

But that logic misconstrues the nature of challenges that cities face, and the power of mayors of any party to solve them, political scientists say. And it twists a key fact of political history: If cities have become synonymous with Democratic politics today, that is true in part because Republicans have largely given up on them.

Over the course of decades, Republicans ceased competing seriously for urban voters in presidential elections and representing them in Congress. Republican big-city mayors became rare. And along the way, the Republican Party nationally has grown muted on possible solutions to violence, inequality, poverty and segregation in cities.

Mr. Trump and his surrogates have pushed that history to its seeming conclusion: Rural and suburban problems in America today are national problems — but urban problems are Democratic problems.”

Asymmetric warfare: Advantage - liars 

The NYT goes on to point out that politicians of neither party blame Republican county executives for rural opioid problems. The republican argument also gives Democratic mayors no credit for 25-year decline in urban crime since the early 1990s. The NYT also points out that mayors have limited control over crime rates. Some researchers looked for studies suggesting that a mayor's party affiliation has an effect on crime, but found none. It is true that homicides have spiked this year in big cities, but that is also true by similar amounts in some smaller cities with Republican mayors, including Tulsa, Okla., and San Bernardino, Calif. 

Also, the president harshly criticized Chicago for failing to control gun violence despite the fact that the city tried to deal with gun violence. The city outlawed handguns and gun sales, but federal judges overturned those efforts. That shows how constrained local officials including mayors are. 

The rhetorical warfare on this point is, as often the case, asymmetric. This line of propaganda will be hard for democrats to refute because it requires an explanation. In propaganda wars, whenever a person has to explain something, they usually lose the debate. That is just a potentially lethal aspect of the human condition, specifically how the human mind processes propaganda or dark free speech. 

Why we should stop chasing the happiness rainbow

 OPINION by Zoë Wundenberg

https://www.youngwitness.com.au/story/6882168/why-we-should-stop-chasing-the-happiness-rainbow/?cs=13499

Happiness, noun, the state of being happy. Aristotle identifies happiness as the main purpose of human life and as a goal to achieve in itself.

Perhaps I'm in the throes of a COVID-19 pandemic-induced existential crisis, but I can't help but wonder at the futility of such a pursuit.

As humans, we seem intent on measuring our lives. Are you successful? Are you making a difference? Are you useful? Are you happy? We measure our lives by imagined abstract yardsticks.

Why do we have to weigh and measure ourselves? Why do we have to compare the measurements of our lives to each other's?

I am finding it increasingly astonishing that the very basis of our understanding of who we are is based on a constructed idea of what we should be.

In order to be accepted, we have to conform - and yet the people we admire are the people who stand out as different. It is, perhaps, one of the greatest paradoxes of human society.

The pursuit of happiness is so ingrained in our western culture that it is written into the US Declaration of Independence as a right.

While we don't live under this constitution in Australia, our global community has led to us assuming certain parallels to (at least the good bits of) the cultures of neighbouring national communities.

Our commercial arena has certainly latched onto the idea.

Happiness is now more of a pre-packaged consumer good than an abstract goal, recognizing that "the consumer society even has the capacity to absorb and co-opt that which seeks to transform it" .

We confuse happiness, I think. We confuse it with satisfaction, with contentment, with joy, with pleasure.

The state of happiness often involves all of these abstracts, but there are important distinctions to be drawn in our understanding here.

Contentment, joy and pleasure, for example, are largely thought of as the result of our actions, the by-product, effect, of what we do.

We accept them as fleeting, temporary, enjoyable outcomes of the activities and work we undertake. However, we rarely focus on their pursuit.

In what is perhaps a cruel twist of fate, researchers have discovered that people who consciously pursue happiness are less likely to actually achieve it and the pursuit itself can undermine their wellbeing.

Happiness isn't a destination. It's not a place that you arrive at as a reward for hard work and purposeful activity. It's not "what you get" when you serve others or make a sacrifice.

Psychologists tell us there are two general categories of the concept of happiness: hedonic (the pursuit of pleasure over pain) and eudaimonic (the result of the pursuit and attainment of life purpose, meaning, challenge and personal growth).

Some psychologists believe chasing happiness is pointless, others believe it can be purposefully increased.

Ultimately, what makes us feel happy will likely change as we evolve throughout our lifespan and our ideas of contentment and joy will be sparked by different experiences as we age.

I have a rainbow theory of happiness.

People constantly trying to catch it are too busy chasing it to appreciate it when it's there. If we are constantly measuring our lives, deciding if we've "made it yet," what happens if we achieve our goals and we still don't feel that warm buzz of happiness we've been told about?

What happens if we've been working towards achieving a goal that we believe will result in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, only to discover that the rainbow has moved again and we still haven't "arrived" at destination happiness?

If Aristotle was right and happiness is the primary purpose of human life, I think living our lives pursuing a state of being that is, by its very nature temporary, is a cruel joke of the gods.

To spend one's life chasing rainbows when one could take stock at any moment and revel in the beauty of the colours that light up the sky, is to miss the point entirely. Life is a series of moments.

Whatever your goals in your life are, pursue them for the journey. Happiness tends to capture us when we aren't looking.

Zoë Wundenberg is a careers consultant and un/employment advocate at impressability.com.au.

How Some Oil and Chemical Companies Operate

A plastics-laden waste dump in Nakuru, Kenya

In a New York Times article today, the focus is on a new trade deal with Kenya that the oil industry is pushing hard to get. The oil sector is under enormous economic pressures from low profits and growing social concerns about the environment generally, including awareness of the severity of increasing plastic waste problems. Plastics are profitable and both big oil and chemical companies want to make and sell a lot more plastics than they are now.

In response to the economic pressure, the oil sector has decided to try to force Africa to open itself up as a great place to dump hundreds of millions of tons of plastic waste. The oil and chemical (plastics) sectors have formed a trade group, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, to deal with the massive and growing plastic waste problem. The solution is to dump the waste in Africa. The companies behind that lobby power include Exxon, Chevron and Dow. The group is lobbying US trade negotiators to demand a reversal of the Kenya’s strict limits on plastics. The NYT writes:

“According to documents reviewed by The New York Times, an industry group representing the world’s largest chemical makers and fossil fuel companies is lobbying to influence United States trade negotiations with Kenya, one of Africa’s biggest economies, to reverse its strict limits on plastics — including a tough plastic-bag ban. It is also pressing for Kenya to continue importing foreign plastic garbage, a practice it has pledged to limit.

Plastics makers are looking well beyond Kenya’s borders. “We anticipate that Kenya could serve in the future as a hub for supplying U.S.-made chemicals and plastics to other markets in Africa through this trade agreement,” Ed Brzytwa, the director of international trade for the American Chemistry Council, wrote in an April 28 letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

The United States and Kenya are in the midst of trade negotiations and the Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has made clear he is eager to strike a deal. But the behind-the-scenes lobbying by the petroleum companies has spread concern among environmental groups in Kenya and beyond that have been working to reduce both plastic use and waste.

Kenya, like many countries, has wrestled with the proliferation of plastic. It passed a stringent law against plastic bags in 2017, and last year was one of many nations around the world that signed on to a global agreement to stop importing plastic waste — a pact strongly opposed by the chemical industry.

The plastics proposal reflects an oil industry contemplating its inevitable decline as the world fights climate change. Profits are plunging amid the coronavirus pandemic, and the industry is fearful that climate change will force the world to retreat from burning fossil fuels. Producers are scrambling to find new uses for an oversupply of oil and gas. Wind and solar power are becoming increasingly affordable, and governments are weighing new policies to fight climate change by reducing the burning of fossil fuels.

Pivoting to plastics, the industry has spent more than $200 billion on chemical and manufacturing plants in the United States over the past decade. But the United States already consumes as much as 16 times more plastic than many poor nations, and a backlash against single-use plastics has made it tougher to sell more at home.”

Plastic waste clogs the Narobi River in Kenya

The NYT article goes on to note that American exporters shipped more than 1 billion pounds of plastic waste to 96 countries including Kenya in 2019. In theory the waste was to be recycled, but much of the waste is not recyclable and it ends up in rivers and oceans. China closed its ports to most plastic trash in 2018. Since then, exporters have been looking for new dumping grounds and Africa looks to be the best place.

The NYT article makes this critically important point: The plastics industry’s pro-waste dumping proposals would make it hard to regulate plastics in the United States. That is because the trade deal under negotiation applies to both sides.

Plastic waste mixed with other waste 

This is how it arrogant, corrupt government works

The NYT points out that Kenya was one of the countries that signed a global agreement to stop importing plastic waste. The chemical industry strongly opposed it. The Times reviewed emails showing that industry representatives, including former US trade officials, are worked with US trade negotiators to try to block or stall those rules. The emails show close ties between the trade representatives, administration officials and industry representatives.

In March of 2019, a recycling trade group executive wrote to federal officials including trade negotiators to show them a recent useful statement by environmental activists. The executive wrote: “Hey ladies. This gives us some good fodder to build a strategy.” The chemical industry rationale to oppose bans on plastic waste exports is that they prevent recycling of what plastic there is that is recyclable.

Of course, that rationale ignores the facts that the waste can be recycled in the US and much or most  plastic waste cannot be recycled for practical and/or economic reasons. A 2018 article by National Geographic commented: “Of the 8.3 billion metric tons that has been produced, 6.3 billion metric tons has become plastic waste. Of that, only nine percent has been recycled. The vast majority—79 percent—is accumulating in landfills or sloughing off in the natural environment as litter.” In other words, 91% of plastic waste is not recycled.

Clearly, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste is an alliance to increase plastic waste and spread it throughout the land and the oceans where it will be out of Americans’ sight and minds. It's a win-win for the oil and chemicals sectors and a lose-lose-lose for the environment, the American people and Africa.

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste hates mandatory recycling in Kenya and everywhere else --
the NYT writes: “Kenya’s efforts to restrict plastics and encourage re-use are worrisome for plastics makers, whose leaders see the country as a promising market”
-- Specifically, what is worrisome is the threat to profits that recycling constitutes
Credit...

The Things That Unite Us

 By Best in Moderation

Integration comes in both positive and negative forms, and each relies on a shared set of values. Either we build towards them or we fight to defend them, but in both cases that set of values should be explored, shared and defined. So with that very short introduction, the focus of this piece:
What are the things that Unite the USA?
We're in potentially the most divided period of our nations history since the Civil War, and IMO we are even more divided than then. See, back during the CW most people still believed in the same values on most issues except for race and slavery. People were however divided on which entity was better at building or defending those values. Now, however, I'm not sure we are united in what things we value, or at least we are not defining our values well enough to make a good choice.
The DNC ran a convention on highlighting not policy but values that underscore those policies. The RNC ran a convention on highlighting values they felt were under threat (though most of the focus was on the threat, not the values). But neither was particularly able to separate the political choice from the value, and I think the value is worth exploring.
To that end, I suggest the following set of values that define US unity:
- Bravery
- Righteousness
- Independence
- Resourcefulness
- Curiosity
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Bravery:
The people of the USA admire the brave, the impulsive, people who jump into the fray. Some confuse it with strength, but we've not always been the top nation in terms of strength, and yet the bravery of our people has led us to victory against much more powerful foes. It has also allowed us to take grand steps in innovation and exploration, such as social and technical changes and the space programs, for example. The people of the USA value bravery in the face of adversity, and pride themselves in always taking on a challenge, even when it is not strictly necessary to do so.
Righteousness:
The people of the USA define themselves by being Good. Many conflicts are defined as us fighting for the freedoms and rights of other people, thus that righteousness is not just focused on the self. There is a sense that to do right is very valuable not just as a person but as a nation. Americans pride themselves in an identity as the "good guys."
Independence:
The people of the USA value their independence. Typically one solution does not help all people, so the choice to opt in or not is pretty valued by individual Americans. The opportunity to do something different and choose not to be joined to an existing entity is as valued as our search for entities we do choose to join. Ironically, the value of independence to Americans is one of the prime unifying values.
Resourcefulness:
The people of the USA value resourcefulness, the ability to make much out of little. Whether in pop culture or in legend, the idea that someone can take their bare bones existence and turn it into a flourishing successful business or organization is a staple of American culture. Often we measure our success not only by what we achieved but where we started from, and value the latter more.
Curiosity:
The people of the USA are curious, and skeptical. It's not enough to see something work somewhere else or be told an idea exists; Americans tend to need to explore it themselves. This often leads to new innovations and perspectives, and when we're at our best, Americans value and pursue their curiosities to the best of their abilities.
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My hope by highlighting these values is that we can stop the petty and circular arguments of what policies work better than others theoretically, and turn it more to which policy is more likely to support the things we as United Americans value most.
Please discuss your agreement or disagreement with my list, add some of your own, and how we can build up those values in the coming times.

The Influence of Leaders

A Washington Post article discusses how leaders can radically shape opinions of their followers. The article describes how the president has been able to change positive views in the GOP of foreign trade and low tariffs from 56% approval in 2015 to 29% by October 2016. The WaPo writes:

“These trends can seem disconcerting, because they appear to reverse the idealized direction of influence in a democracy, where the views of citizens are supposed to guide their politicians. Leadership surely involves the art of persuasion, but should it really drive such mercurial shifts on core issues?

Political science research shows that this ‘follow the leader’ dynamic is hardly limited to Trump. It occurs throughout history, on both sides of the aisle and in other countries. It happens even when party elites try to stop it. In general, the people who run our political parties — particularly the most prominent and charismatic figures — have the ability to reshape what voters in those parties think. 

‘Leader persuasion’ is a well-documented phenomenon in political science. Before the 2000 election, for instance, more than two-thirds of Americans broadly supported giving workers the option to invest Social Security funds in the stock market. Then GOP nominee George W. Bush promoted the idea and Democrat Al Gore opposed it, and the issue became central to the election. .... Gore voters soured on the policy. 

Nowhere are the consequences of voters’ deference more clear than in the coronavirus pandemic. For months, Trump has downplayed the severity of the contagion, condemned shutdowns that public health experts endorsed, ridiculed mask wearers, and pushed to reopen businesses and schools. Unsurprisingly, the resulting partisan divides on recommended behaviors have undermined our collective response to the crisis. In late April and early May, for example, the rate of mask-wearing among Republicans lagged that of Democrats by more than 20 percentage points, according to one survey.

Some observers have suggested that Trump has “hijacked” his party — and in attempting to explain why Republicans would follow him, they have focused on his distinctive (and unarguable) opportunism and disregard for norms. But the lesson of this vein of research is that all political parties are vulnerable to dramatic shifts and “takeovers” by prominent leaders (perhaps especially in presidential systems, which grant the chief executive inordinate prominence). Long after Trump is gone, American politicians who win top positions will be tugging the views of their partisans much closer to their own, adding yet more instability to an already hostile and polarized system.”

This suggests that maybe some people do not always think for themselves, and instead simply follow the leader. Maybe that is fairly common.