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.

Know-Nothingism and Nullification

In Wisconsin, failed candidate Scott Walker is making it harder to investigate the alleged corruption of his governor’s office or his election by allegedly illegal means. He is supported in this effort by a state supreme court dominated by justices who allegedly used the same corrupt means to get elected. But if we cannot investigate it, then it must conclude no crime was committed.

This brash arrogance is described brilliantly by Charles Pierce in his Esquire column.

In the lobbyist-ruled halls of our nation's capital, the NRA asserts its role as chief health research officer by blocking all research into the health hazards of being shot with a gun.

Public Radio International reports on efforts to hide, cover up and shut down such research before it can be done.

Meanwhile the leading candidate in the GOP presidential sweepstakes is an odd, twinkly-eyed sociopath named Ben Carson M.D. Here are some of his odder beliefs, notably his bizarre comparisons of healthcare and the institution of slavery and his idea that freedom of thought should be enforced on college campuses by censoring liberal ideas.

ThinkProgress lists Dr. Carson's nuttier ideas. (Don't laugh. He might win the nomination.)

This shutting down of investigations (while your own witch hunts proceed unchecked) and shutting down scientific inquiry that might harm some corporations’ profits and shutting down freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedoms in general at the Boss’s discretion, all of it flows from the central concept that has energized the radicalism of the white South since the age of Lincoln. The theory of nullification. Lincoln fought and won a war to kill the idea, but it laid eggs. All across the white South and the Right Wing West folks are taught and firmly believe that obeying the law is optional. If you disagree with the law you ignore it. Unless, of course, it’s a law they hold sacred. Then failure to obey it to the letter is treason. Again: if they like the law disobeying it is treason. If they dislike the law obeying it is treason. All authority resides in the gut (specifically in the large intestine) of god-fearing, gun-carrying, white-ancestored, non-scientist folks of the American South and West, with its various extremist outposts in northern backwoods and suburbias.

Nullification is the blunt refusal to respect federal law, especially on the subject of slavery and equal rights for persons of color. The Confederacy was an armed nullification, which followed the legislative nullification practiced by various Southern legislatures in the 19th century. Followed by the violent nullification of the Civil War defeat, a period we know as Jim Crow.

I’d be curious to know if anyone else has encountered nullificationists as I have. I had a disagreement with a lawyer once. To disprove his point I cited a state law on the books. He replied by saying that state law was invalid because it had not been fully litigated up to the Supreme Court of the land. By which logic, most laws are invalid, because very few laws are argued up to the Supreme Court. And if nullificationists disagree with a Supreme Court ruling they still maintain it is illegitimate while they relitigate it.

The reductio ad absurdum of this being that the only valid law is whatever each individual wants to believe. A mixture of narcissism and libertarianism and our beloved Wild West Yahoo Yosemite-Sam-gunfight-free-for-all.

David Brooks, the Explainer of the Working Class

Today’s Fun Facts. How deeply unfair has the American system become? Read on.

Libertarianism is an invention of a mischievous corporate cabal. It’s about their liberty not yours. Read and Learn Here.

David Brooks: “Bernie Sanders doesn’t get the working class…” Priceless omniscience from Brooks can be enjoyed here.

And David Brooks understands the working class completely. Like God. Underneath that smooth expensively suited Brooksian facade is a true working man, complete with sweat, weariness, worry about paying the mortgage, fears about some venture capitalist looting his pension, concern about his kids’ lives being poorer than his own. Yeah, Brooks is the working man personified. He knows that the triumph of the working man will only come when he realizes his interests are best served by following instructions. People who work for a living are meant to serve the people who own for a living.

Here ends the Gospel.

Why democracy isn’t working has something to do with the antidemocratic unAmerican concentration of wealth and power. Learn more here.

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.

Your Weekly Reader

Kiss Up/ Kick Down (How to remove the poor)

A child told her mother she wanted to be a libertarian when she grew up. Her mother said she can’t be both. (A funny story about Ayn Rand)

Modern Christianity (How not to convert the unbeliever)

(How Republicans are harming the Christian brand)

Adventures in Republican Misogyny (The meat market of Republican thought)

O’Reilly’s make believe war journalism (Bill O'Reilly has an amazing imagination)

Ron Paul celebrates the New Confederacy (Secession and violating the Constitution are patriotic!)

The Giuliani Story (Giuliani explains how he cannot possibly be racist)

(Guiliani's Inspiring Tale of Patriotism)

“They’re all around us” (The strange secret club of vigilantes who are the guardians of Freedom)

(They even have a secret handshake)

We went to war to stamp this evil out in Europe and Asia. (It was called WW2. What do we do when it happens here?)