Meanwhile, Texas is really effed up

There is no other explanation. Texas must be Satan's proving grounds for cutting edge social engineering. The Texas Tribune reports:

Adelyn — who stands tall at 5 feet, 5 inches and is outspoken in class — had been having panic attacks in school as she approached puberty. After she started seeing the doctors in North Dallas, the attacks stopped.

But last week, the panic attacks started again when [radical right extremist] Republican Gov. Greg Abbott — seven days before the GOP primary election in which he’s being accused of not being conservative enough — ordered state child welfare officials to launch child abuse investigations into reports of transgender kids receiving gender-affirming care.

Adelyn is terrified she will be forcibly separated from her mother. So great is her anxiety that she doesn’t want to sleep in her own bed. The Vigil family agreed to speak with The Texas Tribune but did not feel safe disclosing details about Adelyn’s medical care.

Abbott’s directive followed a nonbinding legal opinion from Attorney General Ken Paxton — who is also in the fight of his political life in Tuesday’s primary election — that said gender-affirming care constitutes child abuse.

Paxton’s opinion cited body modification surgeries that medical experts say are rarely, if ever, performed on children. But he also said it would be child abuse to administer gender-affirming care that is widely accepted by leading health care groups, like puberty blockers, which are completely reversible. Under the gender-affirming model of care, experts say, more time is spent allowing kids to socially transition instead of focusing on medical treatment. 

Advocates say that calling gender-affirming therapy child abuse could lead to it being weaponized in divorce cases, create legal issues for physicians and therapists who treat transgender youth and empower people to attack the young people themselves — as well as the family members and others who support them.

“It’s not a far stretch to think that you could be harassed, assaulted, killed,” said W. Carsten Andresen, an associate professor of criminal justice at St. Edward’s University in Austin.

In case people don't know, Ken Paxton is one of the most corrupt high level politicians in America. He is currently being prosecuted for securities fraud in Texas. That he is still in office is a Mount Rushmore-level monument to the failure of the rule of law to deal with white collar criminals. He ranks right up there in criminality with our rotten ex-president. Apparently, Satan finds enough of the people of Texas willing to participate in its experiments.

Paxton denies working for Satan, but still supports Trump

Newspaper headline: 

INDICTED ATTORNEY GENERAL KEN PAXTON EPITOMIZES 

TEXAS’ EXCEPTIONALISM ON CORRUPTION

Regarding Hillary's emails and Trump's stolen classified documents

Two days ago, I posted A short history note regarding official emails and documents. Comments by TopCatDC, someone who has worked with email and records administration for Department of State, were quite interesting. His comments, copied below, cast the matter in a somewhat different light:

If you want a deep dive into what matters and what doesn't regarding Hillary Clinton's emails (primarily) and Trump's classified documents, then read on. If not, feel free to skip. I have in the past worked in email and records administration for Department of State, so I know of what I speak.

Hillary Clinton intentionally broke US Government and State Department policy by not submitting relevant emails from her private unclassified mail server to the DoS archive. Every high-level employee at State knows the requirement to preserve anything that is defined as a "record" (an official document of government business or transaction). All of her staff would be aware of this.

But, I can tell you from first-hand experience, if a Presidential appointee does not wish to comply with the rules, there is little a civil service employee can do to make it happen. Unless you want to make a complaint to the Inspector General - and we saw in the Trump Administration what happened to people who took that route.

What's more, the very use of the private server indicates this was not an oversight, but her intent from the very beginning. She clearly wanted to prevent another Whitewater and not leave documents around available for a future fishing expedition.

It was not until this omission was made public, and Congress demanded copies of emails that she submitted them to the State Department.

And even then, she delivered them as printed copies - the most labor intensive way to store them. She could have done it electronically and they would have been easily added to the archive and searchable. Again, this seems not to be a mistake, but her intention was to make this as difficult as possible. These records then had to be scanned and error-checked before they could go in to the system - a process that was very labor and time intensive - we are talking about many weeks.

That being said, the charge that she mishandled classified information was all smoke and mirrors.

While she deserved rebuke for her handling of her unclassified email - the vast majority of official State Department business is conducted on the classified system, where official messages are still sometimes called "cables". And what seemed to go unreported is that all of her classified messages were sent to the archive and available to Congress from the beginning. So, from the beginning of the Benghazi investigation(s), Congress had all of those messages. And if you want to know what the official communication was during that tragic event, it was all in the classified system.

Finally, the charge that classified information was found on her private server - that is a huge and deliberate mischaracterization. It rests on the difference between classified information and classified documents.

Classified documents (either printed or in the classified email system) are marked with their classification on every page. It is impossible to mistake what they are. What's more, there is no network link between the two systems. You can't "accidentally" copy documents from one system to the other. They are different computers, usually in different rooms. (Classified computers can only be in physically secured rooms.)

Classified information is something different. It is information that an agency has designated as classified and should only be discussed in the classified system.

Here's the problem - different agencies have different opinions on what information is classified and what isn't. And since email discussions go on between high and low ranking individuals in multiple agencies, one really has no way of knowing if someone somewhere in the US government has decided that data is classified.

What became controversial for Hillary is that there were some topics discussed in her unclassified emails that other agencies decided after-the-fact should be restricted to the classified system only. None of these emails were sent by Hillary, by the way, she was just on the receiving end, so they appeared on her server.

But, here's the thing - this is no different than what happens on the State Department Unclassified email system every day. This has nothing to do with having a private server. The data would have been just as out in the open on unclassified State Department email as on Hillary's server.

This was a total red herring publicized to make Clinton a punching bag in public.

Contrast this with President Trump who took physical documents marked "Classified" on every page out of the White House and down to his private home in Florida. Those documents can not ever leave a secured enclave or it breaks the system as a whole.

That is not only inexcusable, it directly damages US security.

And, in addition to that - why aren't those documents in the official archive?

Once again, the public has been disinformed and deceived by partisan political propaganda. Republican Party and politician hypocrisy, lies and slanders here are clear and outrageous as usual. About all that one can say about believing political rhetoric from chronic liars is caveat emptor. 

Russia update

A Washington Post headline nicely sums up an important point: E.U. to ban Russian flights from airspace as Putin puts nuclear forces on high alert. Nuclear forces on high alert means chances increase for a little mistake to have a colossal impact on civilization.

New Hampshire and a couple other states are agitating to ban Russian vodka in their states. Russian vodka constitutes about 1% of the American vodka market.

Germany to send weapons directly to Ukraine. Germany will send 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles. Berlin has also dropped some restrictions on German-made weapons being sent to conflict zones so that third countries can send more arms to Ukraine. This is a major policy shift for Germany.

Shockingly, some or maybe most Republican politicians are criticizing Putin and his invasion. Apparently their polling must indicate that at least some of the rank and file isn't happy with Putin's unprovoked invasion so they change their tune from dictator praise to dictator criticism. But, the Republican Party Füherer, our glorious ex-president likes the invasion. Once the dust settles, coward Republican politicians will revert back to attacking democracy and kissing asses of dictators like Putin and Orban.

Putin has ordered a clamp down on news reporting, calling the Ukraine invasion either an invasion or an attack damaging misinformation. He has shut down much of what's left of an independent press in Russia. At the same time, Putin has (i) launched a massive disinformation and smear campaign about Ukraine, e.g., falsely saying that the Ukraine government is committing genocide. 

Meanwhile, social media companies are letting Putin's poison run free and wild. Good old capitalism. As usual for capitalists, profit talks and truth and democracy walk. Apple's CEO Tim Cook exemplified the capitalist response so far, Tweeting that he was "deeply concerned with the situation in Ukraine." Ukraine's digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov had posted on Twitter, "I appeal to you... to stop supplying Apple services and products to the Russian Federation, including blocking access to the Apple Store!"

A short history note regarding official emails and documents

A radical right Republican Party propaganda talking point has been and sometimes still is self-righteous moral outrage over Democrats' sloppy handling of emails and official documents that belong to the US government and are supposed to be archived. Hillary Clinton was vilified and investigated for it while improperly using a personal server. The GOP howled in sanctimonious outrage over Clinton's alleged sloppiness and incompetence on this point. She was a severe national security threat and whatnot. The Republican rank and file was foaming at the mouth over this outrage and demanding justice.

LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! 

And, when the ex-president was recently found to have stolen documents, including some classified papers, his shameless party said nothing. It was just hypocrisy as usual for the Republicans. The ranks and file was just hunky dory with the theft.

But, there was another incident about improper document handling that has been mostly forgotten but should be mentioned for convenient recall. Under president Bush, his email communications were run through Republican Party servers, not government servers. In yet another failure to vindicate the rule of law, the Republican Party erased millions of Bush emails. No criminal prosecution resulted. Newsweek wrote this about it in 2016:

For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton's personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished.

Clinton's email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House "lost" 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America's recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. "It's about as amazing a double standard as you can get," says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. "If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers' emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton's emails set up on a private DNC server?" (emphasis added)

And, lest  we forget, one other quick point merits mention. The email issue was a non-trivial factor that lost Clinton the 2016 election. That disaster resulted in election of a mendacious, corrupt, demagogic tyrant-wannabe. So, don't forget about Republican Party hypocrisy and official documents and emails. They are wicked important.

Note the date: Oct. 28, 2016, 

about 1 week before the election

That's been your daily serving of political history. 

Russia's propaganda: Does any of this sound familiar?

The con-artist accuses the US of being a con-artist and, to deflect  

from his own corruption and failings, he has festering historical  

grievances and accusations of a relentless Western plot

The New York Times writes:

PARIS — President Vladimir V. Putin has ordered Russian troops into Ukraine but made clear his true target goes beyond his neighbor to America’s “empire of lies,” and he threatened “consequences you have never faced in your history” for “anyone who tries to interfere with us.”

In another rambling speech full of festering historical grievances and accusations of a relentless Western plot against his country, Mr. Putin reminded the world on Thursday that Russia “remains one of the most powerful nuclear states” with “a certain advantage in several cutting-edge weapons.”

In effect, Mr. Putin’s speech, intended to justify the invasion, seemed to come closer to threatening nuclear war than any statement from a major world leader in recent decades. His immediate purpose was obvious: to head off any possible Western military move by making clear he would not hesitate to escalate.

Given Russia’s nuclear arsenal, he said, “there should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.” He added: “All necessary decisions have been taken in this regard.”

Mr. Putin’s move into Ukraine and his thinly veiled nuclear threat have now shattered Europe’s notions of security and the presumption of peace it has lived with for several generations. The postwar European project, which produced so much stability and prosperity, has entered a new, uncertain and confrontational stage.  

Europe has rediscovered its vulnerability. Mr. Macron said on Thursday that Mr. Putin had “decided to bring about the gravest violation of peace and stability in our Europe for decades.” Of Ukrainians, he said, “Their liberty is our liberty.”

But no European country, nor the United States for that matter, will put lives on the line for that freedom. The question, then, is how they can draw a line for Mr. Putin.

After his short war in Georgia in 2008, his annexation of Crimea in 2014, his orchestration in 2014 of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine that created two breakaway regions, and his military intervention in Syria in 2015, Mr. Putin has clearly concluded that Russia’s readiness to use its armed forces to advance its strategic aims will go unanswered by the United States or its European allies.

“Russia wants insecurity in Europe because force is its trump card,” said Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador. “They never wanted a new security order, whatever the European illusions. Putin decided some time ago that confrontation with the West was his best option.”  

“Nearly everywhere, in many regions of the world where the United States brought its law and order, this created bloody, unhealing wounds and the curse of international terrorism and extremism,” Mr. Putin said. America’s conduct across the globe was “con-artist behavior.”

He continued: “Therefore, one can say with good reason and confidence that the whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same ‘empire of lies.’”  

He appeared to have forgotten that Ukraine once had a vast nuclear arsenal before it gave it up in 1994 under an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum. Russia was one of the countries that signed the accord, promising in exchange that it would never use force or threats against Ukraine and would respect its sovereignty and existing borders.

A couple of points merit comment.

Putin threatens nuclear war. That arguably is apocalyptic talk. People have criticized me for raising the issue of the threat of nuclear war in the Ukraine mess. Accidents and/or mistakes sometimes happen because humans sometimes accidentally or mistakenly do stupid. Stupid includes nuclear war. Now, Putin is making explicit nuclear threats. Something stupid could happen, but we all hope the chances of that are very, very low.

Putin, like our tyrant-wannabe ex-president and his morally rotted, autocratic political party, is a chronic liar. When they accuse others of lying, con-artistry and the like, they are projecting onto others what they do themselves in spades and with a shameless vengeance. Once again, it is clear that to demagogues, tyrants, crooks and liars ('bad people'), shameless hypocrisy and double standards are not concerns, morally or otherwise. It is just what bad people do. Those tactics sure do sound familiar. It sounds a lot like the rhetoric and behaviors from America's radical right. 

Putin is probably right that confrontation is his best option, assuming something stupid doesn't happen as an consequence. Due to its crippling corruption and authoritarianism, Russia's GDP is a paltry ~$1.5 trillion, while the US GDP is ~$21 trillion and California's GDP is ~$3.3 trillion. Putin just doesn't have an economy that he can leverage. That is his fault, no matter how hard he blames the EU, NATO and the US. But he does have a powerful military and nuclear arsenal. Since he is rigidly demagogic, kleptocratic and autocratic, he won't cooperate or negotiate with the EU, US or NATO in good faith. All he has left is brute force and the threat of nuclear war.

Free markets vs. the public interest

Private sector profit centers in public markets

As far as I know, all or essentially all neoliberals, laissez-faire capitalists and other free market advocates uniformly argue these days that free markets do better for the public interest or general welfare than government. That is rock solid dogma and not questioned. Dissenters are attacked and smeared as socialist or communist crooks, liars and tyrants or totalitarians. Current evidence indicates that the free market dogma on this point is false. Arguably it has to be false for undeniable structural reasons. 

Specifically, (i) free markets usually demand and get higher returns than governments, making the product or service more expensive right from the get-go, (ii) alleged private sector efficiency and alleged government fraud and waste do not compensate for the difference, and (iii) actual, real-world evidence indicates that free market efficiency usually does not translate to lower prices or better products ands services for the public for government products and services. 

But for some capitalists and ideologues at the top, the wealth and power rewards for believing and living the pro-free market myth are gigantic. The free market mega-incentive demands blind, absolute adherence to the myth of its superiority. Belief in the myth is unshakeable, just like the Republican's 2020 stolen election myth.

Salon writes:

The Privatization of Everything is a book that sneaks up on you. Or at least it snuck up on me. Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian's subtitle should have prepared me: "How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back."

Slowly but surely, it dawned on me that the authors had articulated a sound, sensible and compelling vision about how realize the promise embedded in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: "to promote the general welfare." That vision holds the promise of a pathway to rebuilding civic trust and a sense of common national purpose. That might seem to be wishful thinking, especially at this historical moment. But public goods are highly popular across the board, with Republicans as well as Democrats and independents, ....

Salon: Let's start with some of the basic, broad principles or perspectives in your book, starting with the idea that what's been privatized is the entire notion of public goods.  You argue that they shouldn't be understood in terms that economists have used, as "non-excludable non-rival goods," but rather should be defined by the public itself. Why is that important?

Cohen: .... health care is a private good. you can exclude people, and we do, and of course there are only so many doctors and nurses and hospital beds. So if it's a private good, the market drives and the market rules. But if it's a public good, then we get to say that everyone should have it. We should be able to do that democratically and not let the neoclassical market definition of public goods define what we can do.

Salon: You repeatedly make the point that privatization is more expensive, even when it appears cheaper upfront. This is glaringly obvious in one way, since private investors routinely expect double-digit returns while public bonds typically return around 4% a year.

 

Cohen: Businesses have legitimate business expenses, as well as pretty high executive compensation packages, in the millions, depending on the corporations. They have returns to investors, profit. They have political expenses, lobbying, and they also have debt, because they're involved in mergers and acquisitions, buying up other businesses. All of those are business expenses, none of which, fundamentally, is being spent on the service.

They say they're efficient, but efficiency is just spending less to get more. There's a finite list of things you can spend less on. You can have fewer workers, which they do. It happens in private prisons, they have higher ratios of prisoners to corrections officers. You could pay them less, lower wages and fewer benefits, which they do. You can use lower-quality equipment or supplies, that happens as well. And ultimately, you can give less service. When they privatized Medicaid in Iowa and Kansas, know what happened? Simple math. You got less care. So it's it's really a fallacy when they say "more efficient." There may be things you can do to make services more efficient, we should always strive to do that. But when they say "more efficient," really what they mean is they're going to spend less, and quite often that's very much counter to our interests.

Salon: My next question is about the basic logic of who's being served with public versus private financing, where interests and incentives aren't well-aligned. That's perhaps clearest in your discussion of public-private partnerships, or P3s.

Cohen: Yes, particularly involving infrastructure. The way you build stuff is design, build, finance, operate and maintain. That's how infrastructure is built. So, design/build is often private. When you bring in private finance capital, which is more expensive than public finance — often a lot more expensive — then the private financiers, usually along with the consortium, want to take control of the asset, do the operations and maintain it for decades.

So several things are true there. One of which is they're paying more for capital. The second thing is, they say they'll do it cheaper and faster, and they often say "with no new taxes," when they're advocating for public-private partnership. But there's a real simple truth: Things cost money and there's only one place to get money. From us. If it's not a tax it's a toll, if it's not a tax it's a rate hike. There's no free lunch. There's no free money out there. So that's the first thing you have to put aside. It's going to cost money. The question is who's going to get it.

I use the example of Chicago parking meters as the example on P3s. [Private investors, led by Morgan Stanley, paid the city of Chicago $1.16 billion for a 75-year operating contract in 2008. That had realized a $500 million profit as of 2019, with 64 years to go.] There are two things wrong with the deal. It was an incredibly stupid way to borrow money on your future revenues. But even if that was the only option, they got taken. They sold $1 billion too cheap.

But here's the real problem with P3s. If the city wants to eliminate parking spots, to get people out of cars with rapid transit or dedicated bus lanes or pedestrian street malls or by changing housing patterns — the responsibilities of a city — they have to buy the parking spots back. That's the core of what the problem is, because when [private entities] get control of the asset, they get control of the decisions that we ought to have. The city of Chicago's elected leaders — the city council, the mayor — their hands are tied if they want to expand transit.

The interview is long and it goes on and on. The quoted portions make the point. Free markets are inherently and, because humans are human, intractably at odds with the public interest or general welfare. 

To be blunt: Free markets are there to maximize profits for the people at the top and un-subverted government markets are there to minimize costs for the public good. Or put another way, the business of business is business, but the business of government is service to the public interest or general welfare, which includes providing the best at lowest cost. 

To flog this dead horse one more time, free markets do just one thing: They look to maximize profit by selling stuff at the highest price with the lowest production, worker, social and environmental protection cost, risk and accountability. By contrast, governments look to meet public needs and wants at the lowest cost for the most people. Those are two fundamentally different things. Both want the lowest cost for different reasons, profit for the private market and maximized public good for government. That generally makes the two intractably at odds.