Houston is Only the Latest Libertarian Disaster

The middle of the country has been the laboratory of right wing and libertarian experimentation and the results keep coming in.

Houston is the latest. Libertarianism didn't create the hurricane, but 35 years of laissez-faire economics and rolling back environmental science did set up the worst case that has unfolded. The richest irony is Houston is the home of Big Oil, the industry that fueled the surge in global warming and hid the warnings of their own scientists.

The city itself is a libertarian paradise, with no urban planning, no regulation of land use, no real preparation for what happened. A worst case scenario, like the other "libertarian paradises" we've read about in recent years. Nobody predicted this deluge...

Actually scientists did predict it. The oil companies’ own scientists saw this coming but they were silenced by their employers. Scientists said not decreasing use of fossil fuels would lead to this kind of event. The fossil fuel industry spent millions denying it and hiding what they knew. Talk about "natural consequences."

There's been a lively discussion of the Trump administration's re-instatement of civil asset forfeiture, confiscating property and wealth from persons suspected of crimes. It's a medieval device but maybe there is a proper use for it here: pay for the huge costs of climate change by confiscating the massive wealth of the companies who have caused it.

HOUSTON

From QUARTZ

"The Harvey-wrought devastation is just the latest example of the consequences of Houston’s gung-ho approach to development. The city, the largest in the US with no zoning laws, is a case study in limiting government regulations and favoring growth—often at the expense of the environment. As water swamps many of its neighborhoods, it’s now also a cautionary tale of sidelining science and plain common sense. Given the Trump administration’s assault on environmental protections, it’s one that Americans elsewhere should pay attention to.”

OKLAHOMA

From the Guardian

"Added up, the facts evoke a social breakdown across the board. Not only does Oklahoma lead the country in cuts to education, it’s also number one in rates of female incarceration, places second in male incarceration, and also leads in school expulsion rates. One in 12 Oklahomans have a felony conviction.

"Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center wrote in an essay that states begin to fail when the contract between citizens and public institutions breaks down. States “lose control over the means of violence, and cannot create peace or stability for their populations or control their territories. They cannot ensure economic growth or any reasonable distribution of social goods.” "

KANSAS

From USAToday

There are many lessons from this fiasco, none more important than the need to be wary of free-lunch promises that sound too good to be true.
Gov. Sam Brownback pitched his tax-cut plan with classic "supply side" economics. Lost revenue from lower rates, he argued, would be made up with surging growth and rising incomes.

That never happened. In 2014, the first year in which the cuts were in effect, revenue from the state’s individual income tax plunged by more than $700 million, a 25% drop. Since then, tax receipts have stagnated at their reduced levels.

The promised revenue from increased business activity and higher wages never materialized. In fact, Kansas’ economy has not responded to this enormous fiscal stimulus in any measurable way. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the state's annual rate of growth in personal income has been stuck in the low single digits since the tax cuts went into effect.

This lesson should be particularly relevant to lawmakers in Washington, where the Trump administration is pushing what Vice President Pence last week called "the largest tax cut since the days of Ronald Reagan." The irresponsible plan slashes taxes so much that it would likely hasten the arrival of a debt crisis already on the horizon as the result of surging spending on benefits.

COLORADO SPRINGS

From Politico

"The city’s experiment was fascinating because it offered a chance to observe some of the most extreme conservative principles in action in a real-world laboratory. Producers from “60 Minutes” flew out to talk with the town’s leaders. The New York Times found a woman in a dark trailer park pawning her flat screen TV to buy a shotgun for protection. “This American Life” did a segment portraying Springs citizens as the ultimate anti-tax zealots, willing to pay $125 in a new “Adopt a Streetlight” program to illuminate their own neighborhoods, but not willing to spend the same to do so for the entire city. “I’ll take care of mine” was the gist of what one council member heard from a resident when she confronted him with this fact.”

"…One of the lessons: There’s a real cost to saving money.

"Take the streetlights. Turning them off had saved the city about $1.25 million. What had not made the national news stories was what had happened while those lights were off. Copper thieves, emboldened by the opportunity to work without fear of electrocution, had worked overtime scavenging wire. Some, the City Council learned, had even dressed up as utility workers and pried open the boxes at the base of streetlights in broad daylight. Keeping the lights off might have saved some money in the short term, but the cost to fix what had been stolen ran to some $5 million.

“Sometimes the best-laid plans don’t work out the way you’d hope,” says Merv Bennett, who served on the City Council at the time and asked officials at the utilities about whether the savings were real.

The Wisconsin Shell Game

"Even before Kansas, Wisconsin was the lab rat for an assault on the political commons on behalf of the modern oligarchs. If they could do it in Wisconsin, the theory went, they could do it anywhere. And so they did. And they have."

Charles Pierce explains the disaster of Scott Walker's Wisconsin (in Esquire).

But there is always a reason for cutting public funds for unnecessary frills and luxuries like universities and schools and roads and hospitals. Being thrifty, for instance. Can’t spend money we don’t have, they say. (When you cut taxes to the people who have most of the money, you do wind up with less money to spend. Unless you are one of the few with the most money and lower taxes.)

Or there may be better more sensible places to spend that money, giving it to those who need it more, for instance. In the case of Scott Walker, he decided the great public university system in Wisconsin was less deserving than the new basketball stadium some hedge fund billionaires wanted but didn’t want to pay for.

SLATE reports on where Scott Walker's spending cuts were more usefully spent.

The same shell game reported in Forbes.

How do you persuade the public that a .500 basketball team with attendance fifth lowest in the league is more deserving than the college students of Wisconsin (and the advanced science and industry that is created by those college graduates)?

First you rubbish education and educators. You begin by rubbishing any system you want to get rid of, whether you want to pocket the money or give it to your friends.

You say they think they’re superior to regular folk. This creates resentment.

Then you defund what you have carefully rubbished.

Defunding leads to poorer performance and dysfunction, which you can point to and say “See? This is rubbish!” thus justifying your funding cuts.

Dysfunction will make people dislike just about anything, especially if it’s something they’ve relied on.

Defund and create dysfunction. This dysfunction leads to dissatisfaction. It’s like shooting someone in the leg and mocking them because they’re limping. Humanity is very fickle in its affections.

While one hand has been accomplishing this nasty deed your other hand has been handing the “savings” to people you like better than university know-it-alls who might understand what a crook you are, who might also know how you’ve been crooked and how your crookedness is harming everybody.

A less educated population is easier to push around.

Wisconsinites: get ready to be a more obedient and servile population! Prepare to be less than you used to be! Wisconsin is becoming more like the backward southern states where income, life expectancy, health, education and functioning social fabrics are all near the bottom.

The leading Wisconsin newspaper tells the sorry tale of Wisconsin's decline since Walker took over.

It’s the same story in GOP governed Michigan (Flint water anyone?), Kansas, Florida, Louisiana (Where Jindal drove the state into the ditch and then left the scene of the accident). In state after state the Republican experiment with lowered taxes has put the economy into crisis. Today’s Republicans love breaking things that work. They’re a lot different from the responsible, practical Republicans we knew a few decades ago.

The Atlantic reports on the failure of GOP governed states to keep up with the rest of America.

Breaking News: A Southern Republican Calls Republican Party A Cult

I watched this bit of video over breakfast. A Republican politician from the solid south has noticed that the Republican Party is a cult run by crooks and idiots.

A GOP sheriff in one parish in Louisiana has finally noticed the GOP emperor is naked.

He calls the Republican Party a cult. Which it is. He compares former Gov Jindal to Jim Jones and his fellow Republicans to the people who drank the Koolaid.

And this is the same thing happening in Kansas, where the Republican governor totally crashed the economy. It happened in Michigan where the Republican governor screwed the economy and also poisoned an entire city. It’s happening in other states run by Republicans right now. Blow the budget, give tax breaks to rich friends, sell off state infrastructure or let it fall down, defund education, privatize prisons, turn public services into private profit centers for friendly businessmen. It happened nationwide when W was president. He cut taxes and launched a bogus war without knowing what he was doing. Cheney knew what he was doing; it made billions for the company he’d recently run, which he’d nearly run into the ground. Cheney is now very very very well off. But W’s people have spent the past 8 years blaming Obama for the vast load of shit the Bush administration dumped on America.

And we have this ridiculous slate of clowns on the Republican side of the presidential race. They make us laugh. We should not be laughing. We should be throwing that vast load of shit at them, because that is the same load of shit they are selling us all over again. Cut taxes on the rich, cut wages for working people, cut infrastructure, build a giant wall, build a bigger military, cut education so we can’t figure out what they are doing to us.

Money is speech? That’s what the Republican majority of the Supreme Court says. Well who has the money? Not most people. So we are supposed to shut up and sit down. And the president elected twice isn’t given a full second term because a Republican Supreme Court justice died while on a free hunting trip with some bizarre secret Austrian hunting fraternity of billionaire businessmen and his seat is reserved for another Republican. No, it doesn’t say that in the Constitution.

This Republican sheriff from Louisiana has had enough. He's tired of the con game. I don't think he has time to change the party before the coming election, but I hope a lot of Republicans hear him and listen to what he's saying. The Republican Party IS a cult. On the economy, on climate change (which will submerge Louisiana if we don't wake up). On the flim-flam of Republican budgets, he is spot on.

Some establishment politicians are saying Bernie Sanders' math is fuzzy. It is ambitious. It is a major change. It may not get enacted exactly as he proposes, but it does set out clear responsible priorities and we need to change our priorities. We need to go back to government working for working people.

Bernie's math isn't fraudulent and destructive and dangerous like Republican math has been for the past three decades. Nobody checked the Republican math. They took it on faith and the Republicans have shown they act in bad faith. They are a cult, a con game, a massive fraud, a scheme, a power grab, a large billionaire-funded conspiracy to turn the U.S. into something more convenient for them and screw the rest of us.

The single unifying characteristic of Trump supporters may surprise you, or it may not. It's love of authority. They want a powerful boss, a bullyboy, a Mussolini with hired muscle, a tough guy who will tell them exactly what to do. That's new in this country, but we've seen it in other places. It's called fascism.

The GOP Math Problem

FoxNews morning hosts are disappointed with 271,000 new jobs. They were expecting more than 180,000.

Congressional Republicans show a graph that contradicts the numbers on it.

The ur-document of all the goofball Republican math is something aptly called “The Laffer Curve.” Don’t laugh.

Republican math is given more active heroic labels like “Dynamic Scoring.” DS measures what will happen after their next tax cut in the Republican Utopia. (Reuters offers this explanation.)

Like in the Republican Wonderland called Kansas where lower taxes was supposed to increase revenues and balance the Kansas budget but did the opposite.

(Forbes examines the corpse.)

TIME gives a second opinion on cause of death.

Salon explains the mathematical deficiencies of Reaganomics' faith-based math.

Doonesbury explains Kansas more humorously and clearly than anyone else.

In Kansas the people who live there are living with their mistake. How much do they regret electing the math-impaired Governor Brownback? The view from Kansas.

In Wisconsin, Brownback’s evil twin, Scott Walker, has similar problems with the numbers. The Washington Post explains.

Despite all the evidence, Republicans keep doubling down. Down is Up. Subtracting makes the number larger. The Atlantic reports.

If you have a dismal record as a CEO that makes you a stellar Republican candidate for president. Carly Fiorina is the reincarnation of W, the perfect Republican who fails upward and upward.

Is it real math or “Republican math”? Even FoxNews's favorite Fox Blonde has her doubts.

In Congress the math is also upside down. The Democrats got 1.4 million more votes nationally and still have far fewer seats in the House. Bloomberg explains, or tries to.

Since the Right and the GOP begin and ends with FoxNews, here is a graphic they used to describe the failure of Obamacare.

Why Do Republicans Believe Spending Dedicated To Helping People Is Wrong?

According to new information (reported by VOX) anti-poverty spending does far more good than we’ve been told. Why do Republicans hate helping the poor? Maybe it’s their way of looking at things. If you measure everything in dollar terms, obligation is bad, therefore irresponsibility is good; spending is bad, therefore not spending is good.

Republicans, believing what corporate lobbyists tell them, assess problems in dollar terms too. If you spend a lot of money on a problem it’s a big problem. If you spend no money on a problem it’s not a problem at all. They choose the second approach. Problems which no money is spent on don’t exist. Poor and sick people die more quickly, quietly and (above all) more cheaply if you limit their access to healthcare. If you can use their health problems to extract maximum profits out of them that’s not a problem either, that’s a good thing. But obligation to heal people is expensive and therefore a problem.

Food benefits to poor people are a relatively small part of government spending but if you don’t know any poor people it seems like an easy item to cut when you’re trying to maximize tax benefits to your wealthy contributors and the people you golf with. From where the average Republican lives you hardly notice children going hungry. If it causes them to do poorly in school you can tell yourself it’s their moral failure. If they have to work three minimum wage jobs to feed their kids you can say that is a measure of high morality. By refusing to give them a food subsidy you are doing them a favor by making them better people. They're setting a better example for the children they are never home to see or interact with.

The effectiveness of anti-poverty spending isn’t measured in the same way on the Republican side. It’s not effective if it helps poor people because the good done by spending is not measured by the Republican accountant unless that money is spent in an upward direction. Money spent on people down the income scale is measured as a negative, the way accountants measure employee pay and benefits. The good we do in life almost always subtracts from profits.


Meanwhile, in Kansas, the capitalist utopia, where corporate tax cuts bloom like sunflowers and there are no public needs because there is no money to spend on public needs… a governor is hurting. Poor pitiful him. (The whole sad story is in the Kansas City Star.)

Brownback isn't the only example of Republican nuttiness. There's Dan Burton, former Republican senator from Indiana, now a lobbyist for bogus science and cult worship. (Reported in Forbes.)


The Republican Right seems to be certifiably insane. It believes the best way to fiscal responsibility is to cut taxes. The best way to make a fair society is to make sure all tax liability falls on people who work 9-5 jobs. And the best way to handle healthcare is to make sure it’s unaffordable for sick people and poor people so they die more quickly, cheaply and quietly.

And the best medicine apparently isn’t the kind pioneered by Pasteur and Salk and the other lifesaving scientists who delivered us from mass epidemics. Republicans used to be a practical and sensible lot. A bit stodgy and stingy but sound. Now they are represented by fruitcakes and sociopaths and hypocrites. A sad end to the once progressive party of Lincoln and T.R.

Are We Like Greece?

There’s also this view of Greece. From the Daily Beast, a review of a new book about the Greek dilemma.

Is it a nation of tax dodgers? A place where nobody wants to pay the cost of public necessities?

What does this sound like? Sounds like America.

Sounds more than a bit like those Americans who bank in the Caribbean to avoid the taxes that would pave the roads––and employ construction workers. This 2013 article in the Economist estimates rich Americans have hidden $20 Trillion offshore.

Sounds a lot like the very profitable American corporations who pay no taxes and instead get corporate welfare paid to them. GE? Boeing? Verizon? Citigroup? Bank of America? FedEx? Senator Bernie Sanders compiled a list.

The grim austerity Greece is experiencing now sounds like Kansas, Louisiana, Wisconsin and a handful of other Republican-run states where austerity policies have taken a severe toll. They’ve lowered taxes on the wealthy and paid for it with deep cuts to public sector needs like schools and healthcare. Sounds a lot like what Germany is forcing on Greece, where the wealthy Greeks still evade taxes but teachers and doctors and nurses go unpaid.

The Founding Principles of Kiss Up, Kick Down.

I came across an interesting article from the Economic Policy Institute. Look at the graph. 1. Reaganomics killed the middle class 2. Productivity rose by a greater percentage when workers were paid better.

The business end of the Reaganomics tool sees need and vulnerability as a business plan and profit opportunity, an opportunity to exploit people. The Washington Post describes ways hospitals exploit the uninsured by jacking up their costs.

That was the hospital/healthcare business, here’s how they exploit need in the judicial/penal business. John Oliver explains. (Funny and true as hell.)

The poster child for pure Reaganomics is the state of Kansas, where Governor Brownback hoped to prove lower taxes would increase revenue like Papa Reagan promised. I’ll let Doonesbury explain how well that works out...

And SLATE reports that if the Kansas courts rule against him, Brownback “has a way of shutting that whole thing down.”

If Reagan was the messiah, who wrote the gospels? (Ayn Rand. Here are some interesting conclusions we're meant to draw from Atlas Shrugged.)

A purer libertarian and Republican world functions on a mixture of wishful thinking and “I don’t have to if I don’t want to.” This one's from The Onion, which is nearly as hilarious as Ayn Rand herself.

Middle America Has Gone Insane

In Nebraska, a coalition of Republicans and Democrats voted to repeal the state’s death penalty. So the Republican governor says he’ll have all the inmates on death row put to death before the law takes effect.(Reported in the Atlantic)

Kansas is falling apart because of the extreme Republicanness of Governor Brownback's fiscal policies. Even the rather conservative USNews and World Report knows this is a crazy way to run a state.

In Tontitown, Arkansas, in that obey-your-husband-and-older-brother church life isn't as pretty as you might think. (Reported in Salon)

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, Scott Walker says women made pregnant from incest or rape are only upset about it for a very short time and will accept the blessing of bringing a new life into the world... (New York Magazine reports)

Scott Walker is also eagerly defunding the state’s top university system and public schools. (Reported in the Washington Post)

The latest idea (reported by an NBC affiliate in Wisconsin) is to allow public school students to be taught by teachers who never graduated from college.

Kiss Up. Kick Down.

The massive shift of wealth upward is being engineered as if it’s a war on debt. Make the working class feel pinched, get them in debt, and use that fear of debt as a rationale for paying them less and less, and cutting public efforts to ease the unfairness and relieve distress.

Paul Krugman wrote an excellent piece about The Austerity Delusion for the Guardian.

Another Nobel economist, Joseph Stiglitz, has been warning about the same things. But concentrated wealth can create its own reality.

The class who own for a living use large amounts of cash (they have trillions) to create ads warning about the debt being placed on the children of the people who work for a living.

But this is a bogus warning. They are placing the debt on working people by shifting their tax burden onto working people.

They say public debt will burden our children, but they only want to stop the spending that helps working people.

They are gung-ho about corporate military contractor spending and private prison spending. They oppose education funding and infrastructure funding, calling it wasteful. They oppose fairer taxation that would place the tax burden where it was when we actually had a prosperous working class and functioning infrastructure.

They oppose public spending, calling it a burden on our children. This is as insane as saying we should starve our children to protect their inheritance. It carries enormous social costs. This kind of narrow, self-serving greed is what erodes civilizations. It ultimately leads to collapse. Of course, the wealthy will have offloaded their wealth to remote islands by then.

Even in Kansas, working people are talking back. One waitress has caused quite a stir.

Would you like to see a picture of vast wealth on parade? They always gather to watch two persons of color beat each other up. Now they come in luxury jets instead of limousines. Who paid for that airport? The working taxpayer.

The Republican solution is to give the small class of people who own for a living (whose irresponsible behavior caused the Great Recession) a big fat bonus. A bonus that will perpetuate their wealth and eliminate their obligations to the society that made them rich.

Their hubris is breathtaking. Perhaps because their billions will buy ads to persuade the public to do what they want the public to do. They have only contempt for those who dislike concentrated wealth. People like Pope Francis. In this political climate Jesus wouldn’t have been let near a microphone.