Monday Wake Up Call – Page 9

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…”

“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.

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’.“

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:

Monday Wake Up Call – May 9, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Lynden, WA – May 2022 photo by Randy Small Photography

A final thought about our radical Supreme Court: They should give up their black robes. White robes would be much more appropriate.

But for today, let’s talk about the Victory Day celebrations in Russia. This year marks the 77th anniversary of the end of World War II, and Russia observes it every year with military parades and patriotic messages.

Wrongo is publishing this before we learn exactly how Putin will mark the celebration. Certain pundits think that Putin will use the occasion to escalate his war in Ukraine.

UPI reported that in remarks Putin made to commemorate Victory Day, he blasted what he described as “Nazi filth” in Ukraine. He also sent congratulatory messages to the Russian-appointed figureheads of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, which together make up the Donbas region, for “fighting shoulder to shoulder for the liberation of their native land.”

That certainly doesn’t sound like he’s backing down on his currently stalemated war.

Others think that Putin is more likely to make the political choice to declare victory, or partial victory in the “special military operation”. They think that Putin will postpone any decision regarding mobilizing more troops, which could be politically difficult. Pat Lang, a former US intelligence officer, worries about Russia using a tactical nuclear weapon against the steel plant in Mariupol, a frightening possibility for the world.

Despite the speculation, let’s spend a few moments thinking about how the Ukraine war might end.

“Tell me how this ends” is what General Petraeus famously asked in 2003 at the outset of the Iraq War. It lasted until 2011, and then morphed into the war on ISIS, that lasted until 2017.

Since the Russian war hasn’t resulted in a clear victory, certain US and British officials are talking more openly about a “victory” in Ukraine, meaning that the West decisively degrades the Russian military’s capability. Also, there’s some talk about regime change in Moscow.

A more likely scenario is that we’ll see an extended standoff between Ukraine and Russia, without an agreed end to the war, but where neither side wishes to continue active combat. In this case, Western sanctions would continue. Russian forces would occupy all or most of the Donbass region and control a land corridor linking Crimea with the Donbass and Russia.

This outcome would have few rules of engagement, since most of the guardrails that would be part of a negotiated settlement wouldn’t exist. The US and Europe would face years of instability and the constant threat of a military miscalculation causing a spillover in Europe. A forever war in Ukraine also runs the risk of eroding support for Kyiv in the US. America isn’t emotionally able to endure another grinding military conflict, even with no troops on the ground.

Finally, there may be a negotiated settlement. But what is the compromise that all parties can live with?

Zelensky has indicated that Ukraine might agree to be a neutral country; but only on condition of stringent security guarantees, the terms of which both the US and Russia might find objectionable.

Ukraine has understandably ruled out territorial concessions, but Putin would almost certainly not agree to any settlement in which Russia were forced to leave the Donbass and Mariupol. And separatist groups there would be unhappy living under Kyiv’s rule after years of war. Also, it’s hard to see Putin compromising unless the US and Europe ease economic sanctions as part of a settlement. Removing sanctions without a Ukraine “victory” might be a difficult political pill for Biden in particular, to swallow.

We like to think that all wars end, and eventually, they do. Remember that may not happen quickly or completely. The surrender of the Confederate Army at Appomattox didn’t settle hostilities, or political and cultural tensions in the US. It didn’t resolve the related racial prejudices and political differences, which still linger today.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that in the Ukraine war, there may not be a discrete moment marking the war’s end for many years. A protracted war would be a favorable outcome for Moscow. It would certainly be a terrible outcome for Ukraine, which is already devastated as a country.

Time to wake up, America! What’s our strategy in Ukraine? Are we even following a strategy in the Ukraine war? To help you wake up, listen to Jon Batiste perform McCartney’s “Blackbird” on The Late Show in 2016:

Note Batiste’s overture on piano which McCartney originally wrote for guitar, was inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Bourrée in E minor, a well-known lute piece.

Monday Wake Up Call – April 25, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Dory, Jodrey State Fish Pier, Gloucester Harbor, Gloucester, MA – April 2022 photo by Juergen Roth Photography

Utah is in the news, first for the death of Orrin Hatch. He was the longest-serving Republican and the sixth longest-serving Senator in the history of the Senate. Hatch decided not to run for reelection in 2018, clearing the way for Mitt Romney to be elected in 2018.

Hatch blocked labor law reforms and fair housing bills. He voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, he proposed a Constitutional amendment to make abortion illegal. He helped draft the USA Patriot Act and supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hatch also opposed the Affordable Care Act and backed Trump’s anti-immigrant initiatives and Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accords on climate change.

For his superb work in making the nation worse, Trump presented Hatch with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.

In other Utah news, Democrats want to defeat Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) badly enough in November to nominate non-Democrat Evan McMullin instead of one of their own. From KSL.com:

“The Utah Democratic Party made an extraordinary decision on Saturday. A majority of delegates decided to not put forth a Democratic candidate to face off with Republican Sen. Mike Lee and instead back independent candidate Evan McMullin.”

At Utah’s state Democratic Convention, McMullin received 57% of the votes to 43% for his Democratic Party opponent Kael Weston.

McMullin ran an unsuccessful independent presidential campaign against Trump in 2016. He was a CIA operations officer from 2001 to 2010. He holds an MBA from Wharton and worked as an investment banker. He’s a (former?) Republican who was a senior adviser on national security issues for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. He also served as a chief policy director for the House Republican Conference in the US House of Representatives from January 2015 through July 2016.

Backing McMullin has big implications for Utah’s Democrats. Having finally accepted that Utah Dems have been at least comatose if not dead for years, they’re not bothering to field their own Senate candidate. More from KSL.com:

“It’s an unprecedented measure for Utah’s Democrats, who grappled between party loyalty or backing an outsider to increase the likelihood of defeating a Republican in November. The Democrats were motivated by the prospect of unseating Sen. Mike Lee, who is running for his third term this year…”

After the vote, the losing Democrat Weston said:

“Of course, you want to be the candidate that walks out with a unanimous degree of support, but I knew this was always going to be an important conversation to have and I think with a great team, and a lot of supporters who drove from all across the state, it was a real conversation….Today was a crossroads and a certain path was taken. It’s a path that has not been taken before.”

Weston also said he’s more concerned about ensuring Utah has a:

“healthy political marketplace, and that’s not going to be possible if we don’t have Democrats on the ballot…”

Seems like the wound-licking will last for a while. McMullin said after the vote:

“Democrats are putting country over party….This is our democracy and, yes, it can be messy at times as we saw today, but it’s sure a heck of a lot better than the alternative.”

That sounds pretty mealy-mouth to Wrongo.

In 2022 we are facing some hard truths. Democrats at least in this Red state have decided that it’s time to do whatever it takes to stop sitting Republican seditionists like Mike Lee. It’s also a tacit admission that the Democratic Party brand is toxic in many Red states. So some Democrats are acting on the idea that coalition-building may not be such a bad strategy. They’re thinking that combining Democrats with Independents and a few never-Trumpers adds up to a huge chunk of real estate.

Maybe enough to win.

Time to wake up Democrats! Your Party is fractured and isn’t going to be healed by November. Since the states are often called the “laboratories of democracy”, maybe a few experiments in coalition-building with the center-right will tell us something more than simply being waxed in another Republican wave election like in 2010.

To help Democrats wake up, listen to Carlos Santana & Eric Clapton play “Jin Go Lo Ba” at the 2004 Crossroad Guitar Festival held at Cotton Bowl in Dallas, TX:

Trust Wrongo, you won’t spend a better eight minutes today.

Monday Wake Up Call – April 18, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Sequoia Lake, CA – April 2022 photo by An Pham

Today is tax day, and Wrongo will get his in on time. But the question of how America deals with its taxing is rightly under scrutiny. Blog reader Ottho H. commented on Wrongo’s Sunday post about the IRS:

“To me it’s an enduring mystery, and a source of anger and disgust, why Congress starves the IRS…. Doubling the IRS budget (by, say, $12B per year) seems like the best and most “sure thing” ROI the gov’t can make….To the extent that the “starve or defund the IRS” movement is due to lobbies and Congressmen out to protect and further enrich the already rich, then at least that should be made more transparent to the public. This is a no-brainer cause that I can get behind.”

The IRS is chronically underfunded. Government data show that millionaires and billionaires are rarely audited, while lower-income families are disproportionately targeted (five times more likely) for enforcement actions. The agency is severely understaffed. It works with outdated technology, meaning that any paper returns must first be transcribed into a computer. It also means hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes go uncollected.

The answer to so many of the IRS’s woes: antiquated tech systems, congested phone lines, threadbare enforcement – is more funding. It’s one of the few federal agencies that would generate a large and nearly immediate return on investment if it could spend more.

But many Republicans don’t want to fix it. Yesterday’s WaPo article quoted Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL):

“This additional money for the IRS to target all Americans is absolutely wrong…It will target our families, it’s going to target our small businesses, and it’s going to go after them to get them to pay more money.”

And Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) about how new IRS funding would be used:

“We know that most of this $80 billion will be used to enhance the ability of the IRS to target middle Americans…”

The Economist says that the IRS entered this tax season with a backlog of 24 million returns, 20 times worse than normal. At the end of this tax season, it will be nearly two years late in processing many of our returns:

“Spending [at] the agency has declined by nearly 20% since 2010. At the same time, the number of tax returns has increased by 20%. The backbone of the system, a nationwide taxpayer database, is built on top of a 1960s computer language rarely taught in schools.”

The IRS is in the process of hiring 10,000 workers to help clear the backlogs, but the biggest challenge is retaining their senior auditors. About a fifth of agency staff are eligible for retirement. Many have already left as a result of Covid, and they were exactly the kind of people needed to maintain the agency’s enforcement efforts.

The Economist says that the IRS audited 0.3% of corporate tax returns filed in 2018, down from 1.6% in 2010. The number this year may be even lower. They quote Charles Rettig, IRS Commissioner, as estimating that the government loses about $1 trillion in tax revenues annually because of cheating.

Even if new funding is appropriated, it will take time to re-build the agency. Money that is appropriated now for that purpose would be spent over the course of the next fiscal year (which ends on 9/30/2023) and the effects of those reforms probably wouldn’t start to show in the statistics until then.

It’s always been easier to destroy than it is to build. Credit the GOP for understanding this truth.

Time for the Republicans in Congress to wake up! No one likes paying taxes. Even for those who recognize that there’s a societal gain when we all pay them, filing our tax returns is a hassle. It’s time we had a better funded agency that could return the enforcement efforts back toward the richest corporations and wealthy individuals first.

To help our Congress Critters wake up, watch and listen to Mavis Staples perform “Love and Trust” from her album “Live in London”, recorded in 2018 at London’s Union Chapel. She’s joined by Jump Bluesman Rick Holmstrom on his Telecaster:

Sample Lyric:

The simplest things can be the hardest to do
Can’t find what you’re looking for even when it’s looking for you
The judge and criminal, the sinner and the priest
Got something in common, bring em all to their knees

[Chorus]
Do what you can, do what you must
Everybody’s trying to find the love and trust
I walk the line, I walk it for us
See me out here tryin’ to find some love and trust
(Love and trust)
(Love and trust)

Monday Wake Up Call – April 11, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Cactus flowers – April 2022 photo by Renee Phillips

The Right-wing Washington Times quotes Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) saying on CNN’s “State of the Union”, that Congress is mulling whether to issue a criminal referral to the Justice Department against Donald Trump for “unlawfully” seeking to obstruct certification of the 2020 election.

Cheney said that the Jan. 6 House Select Committee has uncovered significant evidence that Trump and aides had acted improperly:

“It’s absolutely clear that what President Trump was dealing with, what the number of people around him were doing, that they knew it was unlawful [and] they did it anyway….I think what we have seen is a massive, well-organized and well-planned effort that used multiple tools to try to overturn an election.”

But talk is cheap. At a dinner last week, Wrongo was asked if he thought anything would come of the work by the committee. He wasn’t encouraging.

We can infer from Rep. Cheney’s comments that the House panel may have sufficient evidence to make a criminal referral of Trump (or some of his advisors) to the Department of Justice (DOJ). But recent reporting seems to indicate that some Committee members may not have the will to pull the trigger. From the NYT:

“The leaders of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack have grown divided over whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department of former President Donald J. Trump, even though they have concluded that they have enough evidence to do so…”

The question seems to be whether the Committee’s work would somehow hurt the DOJ’s ongoing investigative work:

“The debate centers on whether making a referral — a largely symbolic act — would backfire by politically tainting the Justice Department’s expanding investigation into the Jan. 6 assault and what led up to it.”

Can anyone imagine Republicans having what they thought to be sufficient evidence of a crime acting conflicted about delivering a criminal referral to the DOJ? Say about Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton, because it might saddle the DOJ’s criminal case with partisan baggage? That’s unimaginable.

For Democrats, this is another failure of political analysis. Even if there had been no Select Committee, and the DOJ decided to prosecute Trump or some of his enablers for Jan.6, the political firestorm would be consequential, and unending.

Wrongo believes in following process and in patience, but soon, the politics of the mid-terms and the looming 2024 presidential election must also be considered. If the Republicans take control of the House, the Select Committee will be disbanded. In that event, it must wrap up its work right after the November elections.

If you’re hoping that the Democrats will hold the House, then a referral to the DOJ needs to happen right now, regardless of whether that fact has any impact on the deliberations inside the DOJ.

We already know what is the worst thing that can happen. It’s that Democrats lose both the House and Senate in November. Having the Select Committee stay silent now as an act of political expediency simply shows voters that Democrats do not have what it takes to lead in the 21^st Century.

Voters need to see Democrats willing to fight for justice. No one gets excited about voting for the conflicted or the meek.

This is the third time that we’re trying to hold a thoroughly criminal man and his corrupt regime accountable for the harm they have inflicted on America. The DC Dems’ efforts are a combination of Lucy pulls the football out from under Charlie Brown meets “Groundhog Day”. We’ve seen this over and over and over again.

It is now time for Merrick Garland and the DOJ to prevent a seismic collapse of our civil society and our democracy.

It’s also time for Congressional Democrats to wake up! There is nothing to be gained by failing to deliver a tsunami of criminal referrals to the DOJ. To help them wake up, here’s the masterful slide guitar player Roy Rogers (not THAT Roy Rogers) doing his version of “Terraplane Blues”. “Terraplane Blues” was written and recorded in 1936 by legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. Back then, the Terraplane was a brand of car built by the Hudson Motor Car Company between 1932 and 1938. They were inexpensive, yet powerful vehicles.

In the Terraplane Blues, Johnson uses the Terraplane Car as a metaphor for sex. His car won’t start, and Johnson suspects that his girlfriend let another man drive it when he was gone. Here’s Roy Rogers playing at the Sierra Nevada Brewery Big Room in 2001:

Monday Wake Up Call – April 3, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Makapu’u Lookout, Oahu, HI – January 2022 photo by TwoBongs on Tour

Let’s talk about the “Wealth Effect”. It’s the notion that when households become richer as a result of a rise in asset values, such as stock prices or home values, they spend more and stimulate the broader economy. The idea is that consumers feel more financially secure and confident about their wealth, even if their income and costs are the same as before.

This concept has been endorsed by two recent former Fed Chairs, Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke. It’s simply another term for trickle-down economics.

In 2019, after nearly 11 years of the Fed’s policy of adding money to the economy, by “Quantitative Easing” (QE), the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) did a study on the Wealth Effect, to quantify how much richer the rich would have had to become to have x% impact on the overall economy, and how long this boost lasts before it fades.

They found that QE makes 10% of the population a lot richer, producing immense concentration of wealth at the top 1%, and mind-boggling concentrations of wealth at the billionaire level. After which, there were some very muted trickle-down effects on the economy.

Wolf Richter used the Fed’s wealth distribution data to create a chart he calls the Wealth Effect Monitor. The Fed divides the US population into four groups by wealth: The “Top 1%,” the “2% to 9%,” the “next 40%,” and the “bottom 50%” to report on wealth.

Richter divides this data by the number of households in each category, to obtain the average wealth per household in each category. Here’s his chart for the past 21 years:

Note the immense increase in the wealth for the 1% households after the Fed’s latest QE effort that began in March 2020. They have been the primary beneficiaries of the Fed’s policies since 2020.

True to the Wealth Effect’s concepts, the Fed’s policies helped to inflate asset prices, and thus only asset owners benefited: The more assets held, the stronger the benefit. Here’s Richter’s analysis of average wealth (assets minus debts) per household, by category in the 4^th quarter, 2021:

“Top “1%” household (red): $36.2 million
The “2% to 9%” household (yellow): $4.68 million
The “next 40%” household (purple): $775,000
The “bottom 50%” household (green): $59,000

The Fed doesn’t provide separate data on the 0.01% and the Billionaire class, but they were the biggest beneficiaries of the Fed’s monetary policies. The top 30 US billionaires have a total wealth of $2.12 trillion, sliced into 30 slices for a wealth of $70.8 billion per billionaire, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Compare that to the bottom half of the US population (the “bottom 50%”) who have a combined wealth of just $3.7 trillion, divided into 165 million slices for each individual. The way percentages work, you would think that households in the bottom 50% would have the largest percentage gains since they start from a lower base. But because they own fewer assets, when adjusted by population, they stay mired in last place. From Richter:

“When the wealth of the bottom 50% increases by 5%, they gain about $3,000. And when the average wealth of the top 30 billionaires increases by 5%, they on average gain $3,500,000,000.”

Monday Wake Up Call – March 28, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Soaptree Yucca at sunset, White Sands, NP – March 2022 photo by SkyVista Photography by Steve Luther

Biden ended his four days in Europe with a speech. It was designed as a call to democratic countries to stay unified even as Putin’s forces trash Ukraine. But with nine ad-libbed words at the end of a 27-minute speech, Biden created a furor by calling for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to be pushed out of office. Biden said:

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,”

That last line was a logical conclusion to Biden’s argument in the speech about the struggle between democracy and autocracy. But it prompted many pundits to treat what Biden said as a gaffe, since it changed his long-standing insistence that the US is not engaging in regime change but is supporting Ukraine’s right to exist.

From Charlie Sykes:

“The moment was electrifying — a sort of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” moment — until the White House hastily walked it back, insisting that what the president really meant to say was that the butcher of Ukraine should not be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors.“

Sykes says: “Biden had it right the first time.” David Rothkopf hit the nail on the head with his reaction:

“There is within Biden’s comment a kernel of truth….Vladimir Putin can’t lay waste to a country, kill tens of thousands of civilians, commit serial war crimes, and expect to be welcomed back into the community of nations. If Russia wants to be part of the community of nations, then they are going to have to produce change.”

Support for Biden’s idea also came from former Russian Chess champion Gary Kasparov, who said what the world is thinking:

This is precisely correct. Many pundits are critical of Biden for saying something provocative. But there shouldn’t be a resumption of the status quo ante, even once there’s an agreement between Russia and Ukraine. By attacking Ukraine, Russia has become a pariah state. It will remain so as long as it threatens its neighbors and as long as Putin is in power.

There can be no lifting of sanctions or concessions of territory (unless Ukraine insists on conceding it), and no reward or face-saving after the fact for Putin’s War.

Biden’s goal isn’t to negotiate an end to the war. If Ukraine wants to make concessions to Putin which allow him to keep huge chunks of their country, pay no price for the damage he’s done, do nothing to rebuild Ukraine’s flattened cities, and wait a minute until the sanctions are lifted, they can make that call themselves. Neither Biden nor our allies should press that kind of decision on them.

But let Wrongo be the first to say that Russia must be made to pay reparations for the destruction of infrastructure in Ukraine. And keeping sanctions in place until Russia pays up is the right thing to do. You don’t just get grounded for a week when you invade another country.

Russia must leave Ukraine and pay reparations. Russia must work to rejoin the community of nations. That means reestablishment of normal diplomatic and economic relationships. That won’t be possible with Putin in charge.

Russia’s military leadership certainly understands this. And they’re the ones who will have to remove Putin from power and negotiate the peace. So Biden’s frank talk makes transparent what was sub-rosa: The West is using Putin’s War as a way to weaken him to the point where he is ousted from power.

So, when pundits and foreign policy experts get upset with Biden, saying that he gave Putin less reason to negotiate, you have to ask what is there to negotiate? And who, other than Zelensky, should be negotiating with him?

Putin will leave office one way or another, and what Biden said didn’t change that.

It’s time for the pundits and foreign policy wonks to wake up! While it’s true that words matter and can sometimes express risky things that cannot be taken back, what Biden said was worth saying. Biden wasn’t talking to Putin; he was speaking to Russians with the power to remove Putin. And that’s the right strategy.

To help them wake up, listen to Sting reprise his song “Russians” originally from his 1985 debut album titled “The Dream of the Blue Turtles”. The tune was based on the Cold War. Here is his March 2022 version for guitar and cello:

Sting says:

”I’ve only rarely sung this song in the many years since it was written, because I never thought it would be relevant again. But, in the light of one man’s bloody and woefully misguided decision to invade a peaceful, unthreatening neighbor, the song is, once again, a plea for our common humanity.”

Monday Wake Up Call – March 7, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Watson Lake, near Prescott, AZ – February 2022 photo by Steve Matten

Last week, the Labor Department released its monthly Nonfarm payroll report. It showed strong hiring, and a substantial decrease in unemployment. Employment rose by 678,000 in February, the unemployment rate fell to 3.8%, wages rose by just 1 cent to $31.58 per hour, although wages have risen 5.1% over the past 12 months.

We still have 2.1 million fewer jobs (1.4%) than we had in February 2020 just before the start of the pandemic. At the average rate of jobs growth for the past 6 months, it’s about 4 more months before we get back to where we were. From Krugman:

“…what people are actually experiencing in their daily lives is a very strong job market. For example, according to the latest survey from the Conference Board, 53.8% of consumers said that jobs were “plentiful,” a near-record, while only 11.8% said that jobs were hard to get.”

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Monday Wake Up Call

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Monday Wake Up Call – March 28, 2022

Monday Wake Up Call – March 7, 2022