Category: Daily Escape

The US Jobs Market and The EU vs. Russia

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Lake Sammamish, Issaquah, WA – June 2022 photo by Gary Hamburgh

Two pieces of news to think about today.

First, you can always tell when an economic boom is nearing its end, because the jobs market begins to get shaky. That seems to be starting. The WSJ reports that:

“Businesses in several different industries are rescinding job offers they made just a few months ago, in a sign the tightest labor market in decades may be showing cracks.”

No need to panic just yet, the labor market remains strong, with an unemployment rate at 3.6%, near a half-century low. But signs of retrenchment in hiring shows that executives are having trouble predicting the economy over the next 12 months.

And when companies revoke job offers, it indicates their view of the future business outlook has changed so quickly that it’s undoing hiring plans made only a few weeks before.

Many hiring managers say signing up new recruits remains highly competitive. The WSJ reports on a Gartner survey of more than 350 HR executives conducted in May that found around 50% thought the competition for talent would increase over the next six months. Nearly two-thirds said they hadn’t made any changes to their hiring practices or HR budgets in response to economic volatility.

But it seems there are changes afoot. Country wisdom says that a storm rarely hits us without warning. The skies turn dark, the wind picks up, the birds go quiet. It’s possible to see the signs before the storm hits if you know what to look for. We’re seeing signs now of what’s to come.

Second, there’s an adage, attributed to Trotsky, but difficult to verify, that says: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Those words are apt in today’s situation between Europe and Russia. CNN is reporting about an emerging flashpoint between Russia and the EU:

“Tensions are mounting around…the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, an isolated but strategically significant territory on the Baltic coast…Russia has reacted furiously after Lithuania banned the passage of sanctioned goods…into Kaliningrad. But Lithuania says it is merely upholding European Union sanctions, and the European bloc has backed it.”

Kaliningrad is Russia’s westernmost territory and it has no land connection to Russia. It’s the only part of Russia that is completely surrounded by EU states. Here’s a map:

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland are all members of NATO, surrounding Kaliningrad militarily. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, experts have feared that Kaliningrad might become the next flashpoint in tensions between Moscow and Europe.

Russia says that Lithuania’s sanctions on goods transit is a blockade in violation of a 2002 agreement to allow goods to flow between Kaliningrad and Russia. Sanctions apply to about 50% of Russian shipments. The sanctioned products include construction machinery, machine tools and other industrial equipment. But food and personal travel are not sanctioned.

Since the Baltic freezes during the winter, resupplying Kaliningrad will become particularly difficult in about six months. Lithuania has also closed its airspace to Russia. A Berlin-style airlift could prove problematic as well.

Lithuania has spent years building a liquid natural gas (LNG) port and the infrastructure necessary to connect to Nordic and EU grids. She was therefore able to shut off Russian oil, gas, and coal quickly and is in a better position to do without Russia’s gas than the rest of the EU.

Lithuania imports 70% of its electricity from Sweden through a dedicated underwater cable. Sweden’s power is nuclear and hydroelectric, thus independent of Russia as well. Lithuania is also in a position to supply gas to Latvia, Estonia, and Poland through their LNG terminal.

So is Europe at a flashpoint? There’s little Moscow can do to Lithuania beyond threaten.

Is it just a matter of time before NATO and Russia are in a shooting war? Doubtful. Russia could try cutting off all oil, gas, and coal exports to the other NATO countries. Russia could then say they would sell to any countries that left NATO. That might not pop NATO’s balloon, but it might take some of the air out of it.

If Russia decided to do that, it would have to find a way to transport it’s oil, gas, and coal to alternate customers. That can’t happen quickly. Given that the adversarial relationship between Europe and Russia may last a decade or more, Russia will probably have to find alternative customers regardless.

Neither side wants to undertake drastic changes in energy supply too precipitously.

Wrongo doubts the Kaliningrad situation will lead to war, but each provocation and escalation increases the odds. We’re playing in a very high stakes game, given the nuclear weapons on all sides. But Europe and NATO can’t automatically bow to Russia’s threats.

NATO can’t be unwilling to fight, but there’s a difference between that and provoking a war. Right now, it’s difficult to see a peaceful end game between the US, NATO, and Russia

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Normalizing Violence Will End Democracy

The Daily Escape:

Bodie Island Lighthouse, Nags Head, NC – June 2022 photo by Jordan Hill Photography

America’s in a dark period, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see how we can come out of it.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way say:

“The Republican Party…has radicalized into an extremist, antidemocratic force that imperils the US constitutional order. The United States isn’t headed toward Russian – or Hungarian-style autocracy…but something else: a period of protracted regime instability, marked by repeated constitutional crises, heightened political violence, and possibly, periods of authoritarian rule.”

They say we’re heading into a period of protracted instability. They aren’t saying we face a civil war. It’s more subtle: a future of intermittent armed conflict, something like “The Troubles” in Ireland.

You’ve probably seen the campaign ad by Missouri Republican Senate candidate Eric Greitens, where he struts into a home after some camo-clad associates have broken in, saying their purpose is “RINO hunting”. After the team busts into the house, Greitens walks in through a cloud of smoke and says:

“Join the MAGA crew. Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

Hunting down one’s political enemies with guns hasn’t been the American way, but it sure is becoming so now. It’s only a matter of time before racial, sexuality and politically-based violence occurs at scale in America. The Brennan Center found that 17% of America’s local election officials have been threatened during the 2020 election cycle. There’s a growing domestic terror threat to civil servants.

But it was only two weeks ago that Republicans found it easy to have moral clarity when authorities arrested a man and charged him with the attempted murder of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The suspect turned himself in before anything happened. However, Republicans were outraged and questioned why Biden and other Democrats did not condemn what happened.

Candidates say outrageous things all the time in the heat of the moment and lately, hitting below the belt is often rewarded. But that is a far cry from a call to hunt down your political enemies in order to “save the country.”

The GOP is normalizing violence, and it became clear after the Republican response to J6. From Robert Hubbell:

“The Republican National Committee described the events of January 6th as ‘legitimate political discourse.’ Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde said that video of the attack on the Capitol looked like ‘a normal tourist visit.’ Mike Pence, whom rioters wanted to hang, said on Monday that Democrats were using the January 6th hearings ‘to distract attention.’”

Republicans try pretending that they have no idea what’s happening (“I haven’t seen the ad, so I cannot comment”). But the right thing is to take the risk that someone will yell at them on Facebook and Twitter and condemn it by saying loud and clear, “This isn’t the way for a candidate to conduct himself.”

Unless Republicans change their act, the normalization of violence will move toward its logical conclusion — election officials and politicians will be wounded or killed by someone who believes that violence is a legitimate political tool.

GOP candidates are posting ads about killing us in our homes. The Texas state GOP party wrote a campaign platform calling for the repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and seceding from the US, while saying that gay people should get back in the closet. They passed a resolution declaring that Biden’s election was illegitimate.

This is the platform of the governing party of the nation’s second largest state, and no non-Texas Republican has complained.

Pundits keep saying that Democrats have no chance in the 2022 mid-terms because of Biden’s low approval ratings. Wrongo has repeatedly said that there are “persuadable” voters who can be reached before the Fall. Proof of that is in the 6-point increase in public support for indicting Trump since the start of the J6 hearings.

If pundits argue that Biden’s unpopularity will affect the 2022 races despite Biden’s absence from the ballot, they must also agree that other issues not on the ballot— the J6 conspiracy, the Supreme Court abortion decision, Texas secession, and yes inflation, will also affect the 2022 races.

The 2022 election (not the 2024) will determine our future. Will people vote this Fall based on the price of gas? Or the threat of a recession? Or, will they understand that there’s a real possibility that democracy as we know it in the US could vanish?

Democracy is what’s on the ballot in 2022. Inflation comes and goes. Recessions come and go. If we lose our democracy, it won’t be returning any time soon.

Americans understand democracy. They’ve fought and died for it. Dems can make voters see that democracy is on the ballot this year, while inflation and other issues sadly need to take a back seat.

Let’s not make the mistake of selling Americans short. Democracy is more important than our pocketbooks. People will vote for democracy.

The slogan should be “Vote Democratic And Save Democracy”.

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Monday Wake Up Call – June 20, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Field of Valerian at Indian Henry’s Crossing with Mt. Rainier in background, WA – June 2022 photo by Edwin Buske Photography. Oh, and a deer.

For more than 100 years, there have been attempts to improve telephone, cable, and internet services in the rural areas of America. Most of them have failed because it isn’t profitable for private firms to string wire to a small group of users who live at great distance from the nearest phone, or cable company.

This is a problem that requires government help, in particular, from the federal government. And there’s an abundance of government grant and loan money available to help rural America build broadband connections in unserved areas.

Recently the bipartisan infrastructure bill created the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program (BEAD) and the State Digital Equity Act to provide money to underserved areas through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

The $42.5 billion BEAD Program automatically gives each state $100 million to start, but to receive additional broadband funding, local governments must apply for grants that are due by July 18. The State Digital Equity Act has $1.5 billion to allocate, and state’s letters of intent are due July 12. Not much time left.

The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) also has a pool of $10 billion to expand broadband through the Coronavirus Capital Projects Fund, supervised by the Treasury Department. States had until Dec. 2021 to apply for the fund program, and until Sept. 24, 2022, to submit a grant plan to the Treasury.

But as always, distributing government money efficiently is an issue. Early in June the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report “National Strategy Needed to Guide Federal Efforts to Reduce Digital Divide,” that found many flaws with these programs:

“Federal broadband efforts are fragmented and overlapping, with more than 100 programs administered by 15 agencies. Many programs have broadband as their main purpose, and several overlap…”

More:

“Despite numerous programs and federal investment of $44 billion from 2015 through 2020, millions of Americans still lack broadband, and communities with limited resources may be most affected…”

Here’s the GAO’s chart of the overlapping jurisdictions:

Looks impossible to navigate. The WSJ weighed in focusing on the FCC’s role. They concluded:

“…many residents are still stuck with service that isn’t fast enough to do video calls or stream movies—speeds that most take for granted. Many communities have been targeted for broadband upgrades at least twice already, but flaws in the programs’ design have left residents wanting.

The WSJ found that areas with a combined population of 5.3 million people had previously been fully or partially covered by at least one federal broadband funding program. But the FCC’s rules didn’t require ISPs or Telecoms to serve all customers equally, as long as they served a minimum number of locations statewide.

That allowed internet providers to pick only the profitable customers to upgrade. This meant they could take public money while leaving pockets of homes and businesses without access.

Wrongo detests that public monies are lining the pockets of private firms who won’t solve their own problems. He detests that our government can’t get out of its own way, even after Congress rouses from its slumber and allocates funds that can help out rural Americans.

Republicans blame big government inefficiency, and they have a point. They also laud Elon Musk’s Starlink low-earth orbit satellite internet service. They say it proves that private industry can solve this problem. Except that there’s a 2+ year wait for Starlink services in much of rural America. And it’s estimated that the Starlink ground antenna costs $2500 to build, but is sold for $600. Who’s paying the difference?

And Starlink satellites have to connect to ground stations (NOCs) that connect to the web. Starlink’s speeds have slowed recently because they haven’t built NOCs fast enough.

It will never be profitable for private firms to connect the last mile to very rural homes. So there’s a role for government, properly managed. We subsidize the farms, roads, postal service, telephones and now, the broadband needs of rural people. Apart from factory farms, these are among the least economically productive areas in our economy.

And the best part? They hate the people who foot the bill!

Time to wake up America! Our public-private “partnerships” that are trying to get internet services to the toughest to reach parts of the country aren’t working. They need more red-tape cutting and more corporate CEO feet held to the fire if they are to work.

This can be done. America went to the moon before we put wheels on luggage.

To help you wake up, let’s spend a few minutes with Paul McCartney, who turned 80 recently. Take this opportunity to cherish his presence. Here’s McCartney doing “Jet” live at Glastonbury in 2004 when he was 62:

Don’t worry, nobody knows what the song is about.

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Saturday Soother – June 18, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Rainy morning, with Vista House at Crown Point in right foreground, Columbia River Gorge, WA – June 2022 photo by David Leahy Photography

Wrongo has written before about the crushing burden of consumer debt in the US. Medical debt is an American disgrace, and Noam Levey, Kaiser Health News (KHN) Senior Correspondent has written an excellent piece about it. He says that 100 million people in America, some 41% of adults, owe some level of debt to healthcare providers.

But most studies don’t reveal the actual extent of the debt because much of it appears as credit card balances, loans from family, or payment plans arranged with hospitals and other medical providers. To calculate the true extent and burden of this debt, KHN partnered with NPR, and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) to conduct a nationwide poll designed to capture not just bills patients couldn’t afford, but other forms of borrowing used to pay for health care.

The results are contained in the KFF Health Care Debt Survey. The KFF poll found that half of US adults don’t have the cash to cover an unexpected $500 health care bill. As a result, many simply don’t pay their medical bills. The flood of unpaid bills has made medical debt the most common form of consumer debt in America.

Over the past five years, more than half of US adults report they’ve gone into debt because of medical or dental bills. Moreover, a quarter of adults with health care debt owe more than $5,000, and about 20% with any amount of debt said they don’t expect to ever pay it off.

Debt incurred for health care is forcing many families to cut spending on food and other essentials. The poll also found that millions are being driven from their homes or into bankruptcy:

So, if 100 million people were in debt and 17% declared bankruptcy or lost their home, that’s 17 million people! The KFF poll found that the debt is also preventing Americans from saving for retirement, investing in their children’s educations, or buying a home. And debt from health care is nearly twice as common for adults under 30 as for those 65 and older. And that age cohort is supposed to be much healthier than the elderly.

Perversely, about 1 in 7 people with medical debt said they’ve been denied access to a hospital, doctor, or other provider because of unpaid bills. An even greater share (two-thirds) have put off care that they, or a family member need because of the cost.

Hospitals are among the culprits. They are capitalizing on their patients’ inability to pay. Hospitals and other medical providers are pushing millions of patients who can’t afford to pay into credit cards and other loans. These are high interest rate loans, carrying rates that top 29%, according to research firm IBISWorld.

This collections business is fed by hospitals, including public university systems and nonprofits granted tax breaks to serve their communities, who sell the outstanding debt to collections companies.

Welcome to the best country on earth, (maybe) one that doesn’t have the best health care system (and certainly one without  health insurance for all). We have a system which shackles 100 million people to medical debt while at the click of a computer mouse, we send $billions in armaments overseas before those same dollars are recycled into the coffers of our Military-Industrial complex.

That’s all for this week. It’s time for our Saturday Soother, when we take a break from the J6 public hearings and whether Ginni Thomas was another Trumpist plotter. Let’s focus on calming ourselves for whatever insults are coming next week.

Here at the Mansion of Wrong, we’re engaged in an air conditioning project, adding more central air to our home. Hey, we’re aware of the crummy stock market, and the rampant inflation, but consume we must.

To help you clear your head on this warm weekend, grab a seat outdoors and brew up a cup of Supernatural coffee ($18.45/12 oz.) by Lee, MA’s own Barrington Coffee Roasting Company. This espresso is said to have flavors of Concord grape, dark chocolate, plum and tangle berry pie!

Wrongo has no idea what tangle berries look like, much less what they taste like.

Now, put on your wireless headphones and listen to the “Adagio for Oboe, Cello, Organ and Strings”, also known as “Elevazione” or “All’Elevazione” by Domenico Zipoli.

Zipoli was an Italian Jesuit priest who lived much of his life in what is now Argentina. He studied with Scarlatti, became a Jesuit, worked as a missionary, and died in 1726 in Argentina at age 38. If fate had granted Zipoli another 20 to 25 years, he might be regarded today as a major composer. Here it’s performed in 2015 by the Collegia Musica Chiemgau conducted by Elke Burkert :

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America’s Homicide Policing Paradox

The Daily Escape:

Lupine, Steptoe Butte SP, WA – June 2022 photo by Francisco B. Aguilar Photography

German Lopez in the NYT writes about how urban gun crime is very concentrated, saying that a small number of city blocks often account for most of the gun violence in US cities. He says that just 4% of city blocks account for the majority of shootings in Chicago:

“The violence is so intensive that a few neighborhoods, blocks or people often drive most of the shootings and murders in a city or county. And this is true in both urban and rural areas, said Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton.”

Let’s pick up on the comment that this is true in both urban and rural areas. The WSJ has an article that says there’s been a big spike in murders in rural America:

“Homicide rates in rural America rose 25% in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was the largest rural increase since the agency began tracking such data in 1999. The CDC considers counties rural if they are located outside metropolitan areas defined by the federal government.”

That’s pretty close to the 30% increase in urban areas. But the WSJ points not to a lack of tough-on-crime policies causing the spike in rural homicides, or a lack of social services, safety net, or investment in anti-poverty measures. Instead, it says that the primary culprits are Covid lockdowns and a lack of “pastoral care” from churches.

As Adam Johnson, who writes on media and politics, points out, in January, the same WSJ said the culprits of increasing urban crime were:

“Progressive prosecutors take the approach of not prosecuting some low-level offenses like drug possession. In Philadelphia, for example, cases brought by the district attorney’s office from 2018 through 2021 dropped by nearly 30% compared with the prior four years. This week, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner defended progressive prosecutors while promising to tackle gun violence at the swearing-in ceremony for his second term.”

The Conservative formula is simple: When crime increases in liberal cities, the cause is: reformist prosecutors, bail reform, and defunding the police movements.

But when murder spikes in counties coded as white or rural, and controlled largely by Republicans, the causes are societal and therefore blameless —namely the fraying of the social fabric brought about by the pandemic. They fail to mention the persistence of drugs in rural America, or how corporations have hollowed out the economies of rural America by moving abroad.

Johnson says that we’re caught in a “Narrative” by leaders in both Parties, that the Covid-era surge in crime was the result of lax DAs, bail reform, and other far-left measures. And the only way to combat it, was to remove the reforms, fund more police, and to effectively sunset the Black Lives Matter movement.

And Johnson says:

“…data very clearly indicates that crime—namely, murder rate—increases appear to be entirely divorced from the policies of the prosecutors and police budgets of the affected areas. Despite the widespread, casual lie that radical, far-left reform prosecutors or defunded police budgets have caused a spike in crime…”

Despite everyone knowing that socio-economic problems are also at the heart of the homicide rates in urban areas.

Still, the “Narrative” is having an effect on Democratic politics. We saw the recall of the progressive DA in San Francisco last week, and the NYT had an article about how Maryland’s Democratic primary for governor is now focused on better solutions to urban crime:

“In Democratic strongholds like Maryland, a rise in violent crime has pushed the party’s candidates to address the issue of public safety in newly urgent terms….Long seen as a political wedge for Republicans to use against Democrats, crime is increasingly a subject of concern within the Democratic Party and the big cities that make up much of its political base.”

The homicide spike is transforming the Democrat’s playbook on law and order. It’s forcing the Party to seek ways of balancing its determination to overhaul the criminal justice system with the imperative to protect some of its most loyal voters from a rising tide of violence.

The challenge is to walk a fine line: How can urban Democrats make the police more responsive but not militarized or heavy-handed; how to move police departments away from the often discriminatory tactics favored by the law-and-order mayors.

Still, when crime goes up in urban areas, it’s the reform efforts that are to blame. When crime goes up (by roughly the same percentage) in rural places where no such reforms exist, the “Tough on Crime” approach and the lack of robust social services can’t be blamed.

Both Democrats and Republicans want police budgets to grow. But neither have any answers as to how incremental dollars will reduce homicide rates, or make the police more effective at their jobs.

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Monday Wake Up Call – June 13, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Safety Harbor, FL – June 2022 photo by Jacqueline Faust Photography

A new study by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) shows that 875 state lawmakers (11.85% of all state lawmakers in the USA) representing all 50 states, have been engaging with far-right Facebook groups:

“After insurrectionists tried to overthrow the presidential election on January 6, 2021….Several state legislators took part in state-level efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 election.…Forty-eight state and local officials, including ten sitting state lawmakers, were outed as members of the far-right paramilitary group, the Oath Keepers.…”

IREHR has identified 789 different far-right Facebook groups, ranging from militia and sovereign citizen groups, antisemitic conspiracy groups, militant COVID Denial groups, Stop the Steal groups, and others:

“These 789 groups were joined 2,115 times by the 875 legislators identified in this report, an average of 2.4 groups per legislator. Some legislators are members of as many as 24 different groups.”

When will we decide that Facebook must be reined in? This is a clear sign that extremism is making its way into elected office everywhere in the country. And that extremism is thriving due to the role played by the internet and social media.

But this didn’t all begin with Jan. 6. We’re dealing with a challenge that began 60+ years ago with a group we rarely hear about, the John Birch Society (JBS). From James Mann in the NY Review of Books:

“The John Birch Society may be little remembered today, but in its time it had a dues-paying membership of at least 30,000, a staff of 240 people, and more than 400 bookstores across the US.”

The JBS was founded by Robert Welch in 1958, along with a group of 11 conservative business leaders. They had been complaining that America was moving toward socialism and that President Eisenhower, the first Republican president in a quarter-century, was doing little to reverse the drift. But the JBS went further than earlier anti-New Deal activists. They portrayed them as the result of foreign conspiracies.

Mann, reviewing Edward H. Miller’s new biography of Welch, A Conspiratorial Life, says that many of the issues, themes, and causes the Birchers seized upon six decades ago are still alive and well on America’s political right today.

Welch complained that department stores didn’t have enough “Merry Christmas” decorations, saying that they were trying to take Christ out of the holiday. The Birch Society called for defending the police against charges of brutality. They opposed water fluoridation with the same fervor as today’s anti-vaxxers. They vigorously fought efforts at gun control, which they said was a preliminary step for confiscation of guns and a Communist takeover of the US.

Sound familiar?

Birchers opposed FDR’s New Deal reforms. Mann says that when Nixon signed into law the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Welch called it “the worst piece of tyranny ever imposed on any people by any government.”

Maybe a bit over the top? They opposed the Brown v. Board of Education decision integrating US public schools. Welch wrote about Brown:

“The storm over integration….has been brought on by the Communists.”

Welch also enlisted doctors who were opposed to the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. His conspiracy theories suggested either that Communists had orchestrated these changes in American society, or that the changes were themselves a form of creeping communism.

For the Birchers, “communism” became a term used to smear liberalism and Democrats. Doesn’t this sound familiar 64 years later? For example, Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington said this on Friday about the J6 Committee:

“This is a communist committee that has shown that there’s nothing they won’t do.”

Much like Trump’s base, the Birchers refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of political opposition, suggesting that those who disagreed with them were acting in bad faith, or were part of a conspiracy. And like Trumpists, Birchers had considerable influence upon Republican politics. Republican politicians worried about alienating the Birchers in much the same way that Republicans today worry about running afoul of Trump.

Back then, Republicans used the same type of evasion as do today’s Republicans. Barry Goldwater called the Birchers “the finest people in my community” and said they were “the kind [of people] we need in politics”, something very much like when Trump said that there were “very fine people on both sides” after the 2017 riots by neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Time to wake up America! In many ways, J6 was the coming-out party for a new coalition of far-right groups, aimed, as was the John Birch Society, at undermining our democracy.

To help you wake up, listen to U2 and Mary J. Blige perform “One”, their song about the search for unity. We featured a 1997 version of this tune in 2021, and this one is from 2009:

Bono told the BBC:

“The concept of oneness is of course an impossible ask….Maybe the song works because it doesn’t call for unity. It presents us as being bound to others whether we like it or not. ‘We get to carry each other’ – not ‘We’ve got to carry each other’.“

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Saturday Soother, Inflation Edition – June 11, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Blackfish Creek, Wellfleet, MA – June 2022 photo by Jo LF

Wrongo and Ms. Right are on the road again, this time on Cape Cod visiting family. So this column will be brief. We saw on Friday that the Bureau of Labor Statistics gave us more bad news, that inflation jumped higher in May. That caused the Dow to decline by 880 points or about 2.7%.

From the Bondad blog: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“People who were hoping inflation would abate did not get the news they wanted from the May CPI. Consumer prices rose 1.0% in that month alone. Inflation less energy rose 0.7%, and “core” inflation less food and energy rose 0.6%. On a YoY (year over year) basis, prices are up 8.5%, tied for a multi-decade high with a few months ago. Core prices are up 6.0%, down slightly from their February and March peak…”

Bondad says that this means that the Fed will continue stomping on the brakes. The big question is whether the Fed can engineer a relatively short and gentle recession, perhaps in 2023. Or whether instead, they engineer a good, old-fashioned “bust” that hurts all of us.

A recession happens when the economy contracts for two successive calendar quarters. In the first quarter of 2022, GDP declined 1.6%. If we see a similar result for the second quarter, this will meet the classic definition of recession.

Will that happen in 2022? Maybe. Will it happen in 2023? Probably. It is highly unlikely that the Fed’s actions alone will bring aggregate demand down to normal levels relative to supply.

Republicans are messaging that it’s the Biden administration’s fault that inflation got out of control. But if you remove politics from the equation, the reasons are the pandemic’s severe global economic impacts, and the efforts by both the Trump and Biden administrations, along with the Fed, to stimulate the US economy.

The stimuli led to a booming economy, even though it didn’t help everyone. The Fed’s inability to react quickly then left them behind the curve. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created an oil shortage, that pushed gasoline prices even  higher.

The complex causes of our current inflation doesn’t lend itself to either Party presenting workable solutions in the short term. And they certainly can’t do that by using sound bites. And you shouldn’t expect the media to either provide both sides of the argument, or to detail what’s being offered to solve the problem.

After all, we’re in an election year.

Wrongo will wait a few more days before saying much about the J6 public hearing. We didn’t get to see much of it, but the WaPo says that about 19 million people watched the first public hearing. The preliminary data come from Nielsen and do not include the millions more who watched the hearing on streaming apps or social media, where a few clips of the testimony went viral.

The Post also provided some context, comparing the viewership of this hearing to Watergate and to Trump’s first impeachment:

“….some 71% of Americans told Gallup that they watched some of the Watergate hearings live back in 1973, the first televised hearing of Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial drew only about 13 million viewers in 2019…”

It’s time to let the millions of words about the hearing slip from your mind, and to get yourself into a place of calm reflection. That means it’s time for our Saturday Soother. We’re here on the Cape trying to do just that. The weather so far is fantastic. And we’re scheduled for dinners at two fabulous restaurants over the next two nights, in both cases, eating outdoors.

So, take a few minutes to center yourself by grabbing a chair outside, putting on your wireless headphones and listening to Lili Boulanger’s “D’un matin de Printemps” (On a spring morning). Lili wrote this piece in 1917 when she was 23. Boulanger was a child prodigy, but she battled bronchial pneumonia throughout her short life, dying a year later at age 24.

Here is the piece played in 2017 by the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Allen Tinkham at Orchestra Hall, in Chicago:

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Some Factors Affecting The Mid-Terms

The Daily Escape:

Before dawn, Kennebunkport, ME – June 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo.

Even though the first public hearing about the Jan. 6 attempted coup happened last night, Wrongo doesn’t intend to write about them for a few days. The hot takes are all over the media, and it’s doubtful that we will know much about how the public is reacting for a few weeks. Once again Wrongo cautions that the media will cover this like a political contest when it isn’t. It really is about the health of our democracy.

And did you realize that only 21% of Americans over 18 read a newspaper every day? Cheryl Russell of Demo Memo has statistics from the General Social Survey showing how precipitously newspaper readership has fallen. She says that in 1972, 69% of the American public read a newspaper every day:

“Now, the share of adults who never read a newspaper (40%) is far greater than the share who read a newspaper daily. Fully 57% of the public reads a newspaper less than once a week…”

This also has implications for how broadly the findings of the Jan. 6 committee will be shared. As does the fact that FOX won’t be airing the hearings and plans to counter-program with GOP members of the House and Senate presenting real-time disinformation as the facts are aired.

Speaking of not knowing the facts,  YouGov reports on an economic survey showing that seven out of 10 Republicans think we’re currently in a recession. More than half of all independents and 43% of Democrats also think the same. They sampled about 1,500 US adults online between May 28 – 31, 2022, with a margin of error of ± 3%. Here are the results:

How can we be in a recession when our unemployment rate is at 3.6%? When wages are up 5.6% over the past year, and consumers still are spending money like crazy?

People may believe we’re in a recession, but the US economy added 1.2 million jobs in the past three months. Yes, inflation is the highest it’s been in 40 years, but higher gas and food prices don’t mean we’re in the midst of an economic slowdown. Maybe the survey was poorly worded, or maybe, since people really never read in depth about what’s really going on in America, they never learn what’s really happening. This will be very damaging to the Democrats’ mid-term chances.

Next, you may have heard that there was a “political earthquake” in the California primaries, that Dems did poorly because of the “crime” issue, and that will hurt Democrats all across the nation.

A recalled San Francisco District Attorney didn’t cause an earthquake, and neither did a Republican-turned-Democrat’s advancing in the LA Mayor race. Former Republican and billionaire Rick Caruso spent $40 million on his mayoral primary! His opponent, Karen Bass, spent $3 million on her campaign. He won the primary by 3 points, although she is the likely winner in November.

What WAS an earthquake was the anemic voter turnout. Only about 19% of California’s registered voters actually voted.

There was no sign of an anti-Democratic wave in CA. Candidates from both parties that were expected to make the general election did so. Probably the weakest performances by incumbents were posted by Republicans David Valadao and Young Kim, who struggled to defeat challengers running to their right. In particular, Valadao, who voted to impeach Trump, appears to have advanced to the general election.

And in CA-41, moderate Democrat Will Rollins advanced to the November election against Republican incumbent Ken Calvert, who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. Rollins has a decent chance to win in November in what is a 50-50 district.

Finally, Larry Sabato reports on the redistricting landscape now that most state redistricting is complete:

  • The total number of competitive districts has declined from 84 to 75.
  • The number of super-safe Republican districts (those where Biden won 40% or less) increased from 112 to 131.
  • The number of super-safe Democratic seats, 127, while similar to the Republican total, is down slightly.
  • There are 211 seats where Biden received 49% of the vote or less, and 202 seats where he won 53% or more.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates Republicans having 214 seats as safe, likely, or leaning Republican. That means that if they hold those seats, they are just four additional seats from controlling the House. They rate the Democrats as having 193 seats as safe, likely, or leaning Democratic.

That means if both Parties hold serve, there are just 28 seats in play in the 2022 mid-terms. For the Democrats to retain control of the House would require them to win 25 of those 28 seats.

If the Dems want to retain control of the House, what message should they be telling voters who: a) Don’t read newspapers; b) Think the economy is crashing; and c) Fail to turn out in Democratic and Independent-leaning Congressional Districts?

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How Democrats Should Message The Midterms

The Daily Escape:

Sunset along the Last Dollar Road (from Telluride to Ouray), CO – photo by Rich Briggs Photography

Democrats are messaging like mad about the Jan. 6 attempted coup public hearings that start tomorrow. The NYT is asking whether the “Jan. 6 Hearings Give Democrats a Chance to Recast Midterm Message.”

The NYT thinks the real question is whether the “message” of the Jan. 6 hearings will “resonate” with voters. We know that the Republicans now deny that Jan.6 was an attempted coup. We know that the Big Lie, the Great Replacement Theory, and the idea of the Second Amendment uber alles, are mainstream views of the GOP. The Times shouldn’t be covering the mid-terms and the hearings as if they are sporting events – the future of the American experiment is on the line.

Along the way to becoming a Party that totally supports violence, for years, Republicans have been a Party of Senators who do nothing to solve America’s problems.

And it isn’t simply their position on government spending. Once upon a time, Wrongo considered Republican concerns about government spending and budget deficits a serious viewpoint. But since they give tax cuts to the wealthy and to corporations whenever they’re in power, they have lost all credibility on spending.

Under Republican rule, the US left the international consortium to blunt climate change. They walked away from an Iran nuclear deal that leaves the world in a much less safe place. They politicized the pandemic and mocked efforts by public health officials to prevent Covid from becoming the endemic disease it is today.

Going back five decades, they steadfastly opposed national health insurance for the millions of Americans who had none. Their opposition continued by causing the Clinton plan for health insurance to crash on takeoff. Republicans fought the ACA during the Obama administration, although it passed without a single Republican vote in 2010. They fought to overturn it throughout the Trump years.

Today, the Senate is in a position to act on multiple measures, including gun control, that would improve the lives of millions of Americans. They could vote tomorrow. But they won’t because neither Party can muster a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

The 2022 mid-terms provide a moment for all Americans, including Democrats, Independents, and a few Republicans to do some serious soul searching. They need to answer the question: Do you want a government that does nothing or a government that tries to solve problems?

Do you want to elect representatives who despise government, or do you want men and women who bring informed views and respect for our Constitutional democracy to the House and Senate?

Wrongo was in high school when the book “Profiles in Courage” came out. It was ghost-written for then-Senator John Kennedy (the original JFK, not the current empty suit from Louisiana). The book profiles Senators who defied the opinions of their Party (and constituents) to do what they felt was right. Most of them suffered severe criticism and losses in popularity because of their actions.

Today, no one expects to see a Senator of either Party act solely on the basis of moral courage. It is a terrible shame that it takes more courage for a politician to say or do the right thing than they can muster.

But there’s no public mandate for do-nothingism. And the structure of the Senate empowers a minority who doesn’t want anything to get done. When legislators refuse to legislate, they’re telling the American people that they couldn’t care less about urgent issues like gun violence, fair wages or voting rights.

They’re happy to sit on their hands despite Americans needing their help.

This is anti-democratic. If there was strong public support for do-nothingism, at least our governing institutions would reflect public opinion. But the Senate doesn’t reflect what the public wants.

The Senate has changed drastically since its “Profiles in Courage” days. It was conceived as the body that would cool the passions of the House and consider legislation with a national perspective. But today, the Senate has become a body that shuns debate, avoids legislative give-and-take, proceeds glacially, producing next to nothing.

Wrongo worries that in the mid-terms, Democrats will run mainly against the Big Lie, and their sparse record of legislative achievements. They should run against the “Do Nothing Republicans” in the Senate.

The Democratic Party is more diverse ideologically than the Republicans. This is a messaging challenge for them. The Republican’s coalition is narrower. It’s more ideologically homogenous. Given the Senate’s skewed geography, Republicans need only appeal to their base and little else, to succeed. That allows them to use simpler messages.

In “The Cause, The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783” by Joseph Ellis, he says that before the revolution, colonists didn’t think of themselves as Americans. They described their fight for independence as “The Cause”, an ambiguous term that covered diverse ideas and multiple viewpoints. It succeeded in unifying them against the British.

Running against “Do Nothing” Republicans would also use an ambiguous term covering multiple viewpoints. It would allow Democrats to move away from the idea that they have to sell a wider array of ideas to a wider group of voters.

It might also energize both Dems and Independents at a time when they are dispirited.

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Monday Wake Up Call – June 6, 2022

The Daily Escape:

St. John’s Bridge, Columbia River, OR – June 2022 photo by David Leahy

In The American Prospect, Alexander Sammon asks a really big question: Why Are Police So Bad at Their Jobs? Sammon points out:

“Cops nationwide can’t stop crimes from happening or solve them once they’ve occurred.”

According to data published by the FBI, the rates at which police forces are solving crimes are at historic lows. In the case of murders and violent crime, clearance rates have dipped to just 50%, a startling decline from the 1980s, when police cleared 70% of all homicides.

We know that murders have increased since 2019, and violent crime (broadly defined), has also inched up over the same period. OTOH, property crimes are down, contrary to what Republicans and their Party’s news outlets would have you believe when they obsessively show videos of LA, San Francisco, and Portland.

And all crime, including the murder rate, remain well below 1990 levels. Sammon points out that crime today is much more distributed geographically than before. It used to be that Los Angeles and New York accounted for 13.5% of all murders nationally; now it’s only 4%.

While crime clearance rates have dropped to all-time lows, police budgets have reached all-time highs. In the business world, we would say that the marginal dollar of investment is producing a negative return compared to the forecast. In the business world, that gets you fired. Sammon quotes University of Utah law professor Shima Baradaran Baughman:

“Increases in police officers or police budgets have not been shown to reduce crime or make us safer.”

And clearance rates can be easily manipulated. They are not a proxy for crimes that have been solved since they equate to arrests. More from Baughman:

“All they tell us is whether there has been an arrest made in a case…not whether that person is actually ….eventually convicted of the crime…”

He says that convictions are a better measure of whether a crime was actually cleared, and those numbers are substantially lower than the already abysmal national clearance rates.

The Guardian points out that proponents of increasing police budgets argue that more law enforcement is the solution to more violence. But Samuel Sinyangwe, a policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence and Police Scorecard, notes that:

“…fewer than 5% of arrests nationally are for serious violent crimes. And research has shown that when police forces expand, there are more arrests for low-level offenses…”

Since the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations call for police budgets to be defunded, not a single major American city has slashed its police funding. In fact almost all of them have increased spending on their police forces. Biden released a budget proposal for an additional $30 billion in law enforcement and crime prevention efforts, including funding to put “more police officers on the beat”.

America needs to answer the question of why police departments haven’t been able to convert increasing budgets into more effective crime-solving.

Meanwhile, the Uvalde murders underscore police forces’ inability to prevent crime from happening and/or stop them in progress. We’ve been slow to get the real story from the local police, but it’s clear that the police response to the shooting in progress was shameful.

While record police budgets aren’t keeping crime from happening, there’s some evidence that more resources in investigative work might improve clearance rates. But today’s police budgets prioritize presence on the streets instead.

The problem is that police reform is really hard. There are what appear to be intractable cultural issues within departments. The police unions need to be brought to heel. More accountability is a necessity. And their relationships with the community are terrible. If you suggest that your town or city shift some law enforcement resources to support the social work aspects of the job (thereby freeing cops to focus on actual law enforcement), you will be accused of wanting to “defund the police”, and the idea will die.

Time to wake up America! Both Democrats and Republicans want police budgets to grow. But neither have any answers as to how incremental dollars will help make the police more effective at their jobs! Progressives have been scapegoated by Republicans for their anti-police funding attitudes, but they’re the only political group saying we shouldn’t continue throwing more good money at a failed solution.

It’s a fact that our police departments aren’t solving crimes, despite devoting larger and larger sums to them. And heavily policed communities have good reason to continue to mistrust police involvement, thereby also depressing case closure rates. Failing to solve crimes only adds to that; why would marginalized communities respect a police force that doesn’t do its job particularly well?

To help you wake up, watch and listen to Rob Hustle’s 2021 rap, “Call the Cops”. It’s a lyric video:

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