My friend sold her house in March of this year, 2020. She got her asking price for it because some investors were bidding in search of a stable investment along with a few other people who wanted to live in her house and weren’t just looking for a place to park their money. The person who bought her house enabled my friend to get a townhouse in a larger city so that she could get a job in her profession which would provide her an income.

It has been her fourth move in the last nine years. She didn’t prefer her 90’s era townhouse in a larger city to the house she left behind in a smaller city, but she had to move in order to remain employed. She’s middle aged now and she has to remain employed in her established career because it’s so hard to get work in a new profession when you are older. She has wondered about going back to school to learn something new but she decided she probably couldn’t find work doing something new even if she invested in more education. She can’t increase her income by going back to school. School no longer offers a way for her to get ahead. The value in university schooling has declined for her and also for others who got an education but can’t find a job.

You can look on-line anytime to appreciate the high price of real estate across America. Everytime the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates since the Great Recession, housing prices in the U.S. have gone up. Even middle-sized communities offer no respite to high prices as compared with bigger cities. Even foreclosures are listed at high prices; even so when the property has been damaged. Retirees can’t trade a large house to buy a smaller house for less money. All houses that I see when I look on-line of every size and type are expensive now. Empty lots for sale are expensive too. The value in housing has been damaged by capital buyers in an easy-money low-interest system. There are no bargains.

If you imagine the future of real estate in a slow economy with high healthcare costs, high costs in tuition, high cost cars, high cost food, in an unstable economy with periodic crashes and less employment there aren’t likely to be buyers that can afford the use-value of a house and living in a community. It’s still desireable but no longer is it affordable. Many ordinary people can’t afford the high cost and their employment isn’t secure enough to risk a mortgage. Investors may be all that will remain of buyers in real estate. Even if investors trade houses with each other, the use value without a real market of family buyers is disappearing. Homelessness is rising. This is the new-normal economy.

Sometimes the new-normal economy has appeared to me as a poker game where the stakes are always high and the player across the table has way more money than me and no betting limits. I know the idea with poker is to win a big pot of money with a lucky hand of cards but if you can’t leave the game and you have to continue playing, you will eventually lose to the player with more money to bet who can stay in the game longer. That’s bad enough. But it’s worse than that. The player across the table can rely on the Federal Reserve to lend him an unlimited amount of money while my smaller amount of money is worth less every moment as the Treasury continues bringing more money into existence beyond the amount of money generated by GDP. Because the Federal Reserve has kept investors flush with money, some have bought out companies and fired the workers who take an income hit while they are unemployed. They have a lot of time to play poker but no money flow.

The number of living-wage jobs has fallen across America since the Great Recession when the Federal Reserve doubled down on their financial experimenting. Shall I sell my house in order to get some capital? My house seems to be worth more on paper than it once was. Investors bidded up the price of housing. But dollars when I cash out are worth much less than they once were when I earned them. And dollars can’t help me when they are worth less every day.

I read an article last week. Here’s a quote from Imprimis, with Heather Mac Donald writing in an article titled “Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance,”:

“Capital is accumulated effort and innovation, the sum of human achievement and imagination. Its creation is the aim of civilization.”

The word capital can mean more than one thing, according to the Dictionary of Banking and Finance. It can mean the money and assets needed to establish a business, for example a million dollars to buy a franchise with some of that money being used to buy equipment, some to hire workers and other money used for the franchise permission. A second meaning of the word capital is the money that people or companies own which they can use to invest.

What Heather McDonald said is not true if she is speaking of the second meaning where money and capital are terms being used interchangeably. Capital in the second meaning of money people own, is only a means of exchange. It isn’t the same as what people or societies make and do. Even if you mean the means to acquire assets when you say capital-like-money, capital in that instance is only the means to buy an asset or hire a person. Even if you buy a factory to make widgets, its isn’t the capital that makes them. Even if you buy robots to make the widgets, someone has to program and mind the robots.

In fact, as we live in this neoliberally broken economy, it is harder to use capital to make worthwhile exchanges at all or even use it to buy assets with a stable value. Capital is becoming worth less as it loses its mojo. This loss of mojo has happened after the Federal Reserve’s experimentation with our monetary system.

The Federal Reserve, in the Greenspan Put, put a backstop against investor’s losses in high risk capital markets. They decided to use tax dollars to backstop losses and guarantee that investors could keep betting with or without losses. Investing was considered to be the energy that turned the wheels of the economy. It was thought that the value of money could be kept high by the constant trading and buying of capital–capital like a commodity, like gold once was.

In the managed gold money system that FDR put into play, gold partially backed the value of the dollar. That was before our current fiat money system of dollars without any gold backing which we have had since the Nixon Shock. Investors in the managed gold money system maintained the value of gold by trading it. They agreed to buy enough of it to maintain its price. But gold as a traded commodity has a limited supply and the supply of capital is not limited.

It isn’t really possible to make the analogy between gold markets and capital markets working in the same way because the value of an unlimited commodity tends to decrease. Also, deciding to back investment risk with tax dollars caused an additional problem beyond dollars losing value. It undid the need for caution when investing. It made malinvesting seem of no consequence to risk takers by externalizing the consequences to tax payers. But wasting any resource has consequences for everyone. The economy we live in produces less and can accomplish less right now than it could before. Individuals have fewer opportunities. More money can’t change that.

If you want to learn more about our political and economic history and predicaments buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Part of my summer reading is a book by Hannah Arrendt titled The Origins of Totalitarianism, published originally in 1968. I decided to buy it after press coverage about covid-19 became fraught with exagerrations and the arguments about staying at home became strange.

I have only begun to read what promises to be an intellectually honest examination of totalitarianism from a well educated Jewish intellectual who lived through that horrible time in history when the Nazis tried to take over the whole world, waging war against all resistance. The volume that I have is a compilation of three books, the first on antisemitism, the second on imperialism and the third on totalitarianism. I’ve just read the preludes to all three.

According to Arrendt, attacks on Jews under Hitler’s fascism were outrageous in that they were unexpected and horrible and made no sense. Jews had assimilated into society across Europe and they were part of everyday life in many nations, participating as workers and property owners. After WWII, several histories claimed that antisemitism accompanied life in Europe all the way from the Middle Ages but Arrendt states that this is a false history that was assembled after WWII.

As a Jewish woman who aspired to becoming a scholar from a young age, she remembers that only crackpots cared about a person’s Jewish heritage. The commonplace of Jews living across Europe was exploited by Hitler to take away Jewish economic opportunity and give that opportunity to others. He used hurting Jews as a fulcrum for his power. No one expected that. The large numbers of Jewish Europeans made his final solution one that he could apply everywhere. It was outrageous, didn’t make sense, was murder on a gigantic scale and moved economic fortunes into new pockets while terrorizing everyone. It politically disempowered people who deserved to belong and cast them out as a demonstration of total power.

Why does this remind me of press responses to covid-19? First of all, illnesses from microbes have been common across all nations for all of history. They are widespread, much as Jews were widespread across many nations during WWII. To single out one microbe and make it a mascot-excuse for controlling people’s movements and choices doesn’t make sense–like how attacking Jews didn’t make sense. The original excuse of preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed by a new virus by isolating healthy people has been replaced with an argument that no one can be safe in public because of covid-19. This is in spite of the low threat that covid-19 poses for most people. Press coverage has been phony and has failed to enhance anyone’s understanding, appearing instead to be more like fear enhancing propaganda. It’s not science. Over history, isolating sick people has been how quarantine works. Isolating healthy people is a new strategy that has actually failed to prevent the spread of the virus.

Does isolating people across the globe because of covid-19 make sense? Not now. Is there a reason to single out this illness when the CDC says that the overall death rate in the U.S. hasn’t exceeded what was seen last year at this time? No. Is it outrageous? Yes. It’s not anything like Hitler’s plan for mass murder but it is an effort to control people and prohibit their lives in specific ways that don’t respect natural rights.

A long time ago, a psychologist warned me about being conned with “if” statements in everyday life. In philosophy, you can use if/then statements to make arguments. But prefacing a real world generalization by “if” usually means that you are departing from reality and entering the world of fantasy, where any idea may be deemed valid even when it’s contradicted by real experience. This morning I heard a radio announcer say that if covid-19 can be carried by children and make even one child sick then it isn’t safe for public school to go into session this fall. But wait. Illness often makes children sick. It is a commonplace happening. There’s no reason to keep schools closed now that it has become clear that the threat from covid-19 has passed from being huge threat to becoming a small one.

Is the resemblance between covid-19 phobia and the outrageousness of antisemitism just a case of one absurdity resembling another? Is the additional absurdity of arbitrary declarations calling people’s jobs essential vs. non-essential another resemblance because it singles out one group for economic hardships? A haunting detail of commentary from Arrendt is the idea that totalitarian systems get more power by destroying their economy. Ever since the Great Recession, parts of our economy have been destroyed. Homelessness increased after the Great Recession and it is thought to be increasing after the covid-19 economic downturn.

Let’s keep our eyes and ears and hearts open to a better understanding about covid-19 than the one being handed to us in the press. Let’s recognize that arguments about the continued necessity of social distancing are not credible and that human rights are being abused by our government when it restricts people’s freedoms.

If you want to learn more about politics in the world and how economics and politics combine in everyone’s life to affect opportunities, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Press coverage continues to blather about increasing virus risks.

It’s time to notice that these arguments aren’t rational.

There’s no science behind them.

There’s no scientific method in the definition of death or even illness by covid-19/ SARS-2/novel coronavirus.

A person who has antibodies to the novel coronavirus is counted as a new infection and not an old one.

Tests have never been reliable.

Multiple tests each count as a new positive case of covid-19 even when they come from the same patient.

If you have already gotten over an infection with SARS-2, no one will say that you should stop being afraid.

Quarantine powers will never end according to some.

The emergency will continue screaming into the future.

It’s up to you to decide what you think about this.

How much influence do you want these fear-managers to have over you?

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com to get some new insights into politics, economics and what they mean for you.

Happy Independence Day! Today, I sit in my office reviewing our recent history since Dec 2019 when I first heard of the novel coronavirus breaking out in Wuhan. Many months have gone by and what I notice is how poor our information about covid-19 continues to be. It’s also obvious that some in politics and in the press want that fuzzy obscurity to continue. It should end.

Our federal state and municipal government response to covid-19 was too authoritarian and it continues to confuse rather than clarify. In fact it makes clear to me and perhaps also to you that our government shouldn’t be involved in healthcare because politics doesn’t belong in healthcare.

Declaring that some businesses should be shut down to isolate healthy people from a new infection was costly and didn’t protect people from catching the virus. In history it has been common to isolate sick, not healthy people. People are suffering economic harms right now because so much of the economy was shut down. Even after the death rate has fallen, there are many who call for mask wearing and isolation of healthy people.

If most people don’t get sick and many don’t get any symptoms, there’s already some level of immunity. There’s no need for a free-for-all spree of new rules that flout historical precedents for dealing with new contagious illnesses. It’s time to update the deathrate and admit that it’s not that different from regular seasonal flu. Covid-19 stopped being worthy of quarantine when the death rate dropped from the millions that had been estimated in March.

Exagerrations of covid-19 fatalities should stop. Covid-19 declared deaths should be followed up and checked to see if they can be confirmed in the laboratory. If they can’t, they shouldn’t be counted. People who did multiple tests for covid-19 should be counted as a positive once; right now they are being recounted as a new positive covid-19 test as though they are a new covid-19 patient each test.

Back when trains were improving transportation and connecting the nation in a new way, the press gained a new importance because people started travelling and getting to know their neighbors within a train’s ride from where they lived. Suddenly news could expand beyond local information. Social problems in far away places gained a new importance because there was a new audience that could read stories that made far away cities suddenly more real. During covid-19 news coverage we’ve been saturated with global misinformation and panicked descriptions of millions of soon to be seen deaths everywhere. Covid-19 press coverage has been intoxicated with fear, intoxicated with fake statistics and models that failed to approach real experience.

Who wins? Banks got a multitrillion dollar subsidy. Jobs evaporated, putting more downward pressure on wages. Online buying increased as compared with stores that were closed down.  Some people gained a temporary enhanced level of importance as experts and they continue to believe that you should heed their warnings. I agree with Rand Paul who thinks that Fauci and crew have overplayed their expertise and abused your trust.

What do we still need? We still need a treatment regime that works and I heard recently that hydroxychloroquine is back in focus as an effective treatment. We need to change what’s not working in healthcare and in politics and in banking and in our economy. Covid-19 shouldn’t continue to distract us from doing that. If you want to learn more about the United States and how we can solve our current problems in the twenty-first century, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

I know we still can’t stop the common cold but luckily, most of us will get over it. Even the novel coronavirus.
I know that police can only do so much and when you ask them to follow up on what isn’t a crime against property or people, they can’t be safe or keep the peace.
I know that police aren’t supposed to be revenue generators and making them meaner with military tools won’t help anyone.
I know that people like to work when work expectations are reasonable and when they can get ahead by working.
I know that the Federal Reserve doesn’t stimulate the economy but instead can only limit opportunities for some people or groups relative to others.
I know that politics is more than force and repairing harm is a worthy political goal.
I know that politics has a moral side because legislators are meant to legislate for the sake of happiness and security.
I know that deregulating banking has caused malinvestments and fraud to grow.
I know that the economy consists of mutually beneficial exchanges and our government doesn’t have much influence over what people think of as beneficial.
I know that some people suffer from mental illness and those people need compassion.
I know that ignoring mental illness leads to more suffering.
I know that ignoring our economic and political problems is making them worse.
I know that humanity shares opportunities best when everyone can develop into their best self with their own realized talents and abilities.
I know that both organizations and individuals have important roles to play in society.
I know that most people hope that tomorrow will be better than today even if they have to work toward an improvement.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

I went to Macrotrends this morning. I went there to compare the rate of death in the United States in 2020 so that I could see if covid-19 is causing an increased number of fatalities as compared with the past. I was happy to see no change in the death rate in the United States when comparing 2019 to 2020. But then I noticed that Macrotrends is only estimating death rates for 2020 based on 2019 and that site doesn’t have official numbers yet. If you go back to 2018, the rate of death was slightly higher then than that being reported for 2019.

According to an article published by American Thinker, by Matthew Vadum in April, the CDC doesn’t have hard data either. They’ve been running estimates. Those estimates probably exagerrate the number of covid-19 deaths. Also, there isn’t a standardized way to declare that a death has been caused by covid-19. Some say there are several examples of deaths attributed to covid-19 that were actually caused by something else like a gun shot wound. The press continues to dramatize covid-19 deaths. It is up to you to decide what you think. In any case, there’s no reason today for you to be afraid that deaths from covid-19 today are outpacing the death rates in March. Deaths from covid-19 are declining even with some wrong reporting.

There’s another interesting statistic that you can see for yourself when you look at the Macrotrend numbers at the posting that I list for you below. The rate of deaths in the United States started going up in 2009. The Great Recession marked a turning point in U.S. mortality statistics. Previous to that time, people were living a little longer every year. 2009 was the year that the death rate stopped decreasing and started increasing. Increasing rates of mortality has been with us ever since. And that was before covid-19.

Dire assumptions were made about covid-19 in the early months that have proven false. One of the most serious mistakes was the assumption that everyone had no immunity to the novel coronavirus. But now it appears that many people are either immune to it or don’t become seriously ill from exposure to covid-19. As the virus passes through our population, fewer illnesses will break out over time. That’s why we see declining death rates since March.

If you want to learn more about the United States, about global politics and economics and about U.S. policies that affect your opportunities, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries, available at Amazon.com.

U.S. Death Rate 1950-2020, Macrotrends, http://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/unitedstates/death-rate, accessed 26 June 2020.

Matthew Vadum, American Thinker, The CDC Confesses to Lying About COVID-19 Death Numbers, https://canadafreepress.com/article/the-cdc-confesses-to-lying-about-covid-19-death-numbers, April 13, 2020, accessed 26 June.

ADDENDUM: According to a Reuter’s article, found at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-cases/coronavirus-may-have-infected-10-times-more-americans-than-reported-cdc-says-idUSKBN23W2PU, the peak of infection was in April and the CDC considers that many more people have already recovered without symptoms. A lot of new cases include people without illness. Isolating healthy people and wearing masks appear to have failed to stop the virus.

I usually turn the radio on to hear the news while I ride my stationary bicycle for exercise, early every morning. There’s a lot of propaganda every day still telling us it’s good that we’re staying in and staying safe. Reporters still are eager to tell you whenever there are some more positive tests that show infections. The infection rate is so small right now that they make it sound scarier by presenting numbers in percentages. If there are only 7 people in the hospital and 2 more with covid-19 come in, how many scary percents is that?
What they aren’t saying is that most people who come in contact with the virus don’t get sick. They also don’t tell you how many people have fully recovered. They have been happy today to talk about dexamethazone’s effectiveness at reducing ventilator fatalities by about 20% but they won’t admit that hydroxychloroquine works well against covid-19 to eliminate the disease and to moderate the immune response. They absolutely won’t admit that it’s safe in careful dosages.
The recent press attacks claiming that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work were based on a study that was done so poorly that it has been retracted. Too bad that they fail to mention that to you. The strategy to isolate healthy people has wasted a lot of money and destroyed a lot of jobs, but the press is eager to say to people who have lost their work that we are all in this together. That is a meaningless quip. I see a lot of informational efforts to continue economic disruption. Don’t you want to know why that is happening?
It may be happening in order to put more downward pressure on wages. Labor costs abroad are still cheaper and it would delight many employers if Americans got paid a lot less. Some businesses call that being more competitive. Monopoly enterprises that have high prices which don’t reflect market conditions keep causing a demand gap. You’d think employers would recognise that the demand gap is a growing problem. Perhaps the solution to small demand is to force people to buy like Congress tried to make everyone buy Obamacare. I hope not.
Prolonging the economic shut-down may also be happening as a political effort to destroy economic prosperity before the coming election–making President Trump look bad. It may also be happening so that an unnecessary vaccine can be marketed for release this fall.
Blacklistednews.com has a feature titled, “Ron Paul: is the second wave another covid-19 hoax?” According to this feature, covid-19 propaganda has nothing to do with healthcare at this point in time. Other online sources suggest that covid-19 and riots are just a distraction designed to help corrupt money handlers advance a new global money system. The old money system is being destroyed on purpose. This destruction will priviledge a new class of winners and make losers of everyone else.
So much of every day since the 2008 Great Recession seems unlikely—like it doesn’t make sense if you compare it with historical models that worked to advance American prosperity in the past. Why would covid-19 have been exploited in order to print trillions of new dollars unless it is a deliberate effort to wreck the United States monetary system? What do you think?
If you’d like to learn more about American history, about the relationship between politics and economics, and even about our current economic and political mess, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Founding documents from the classical liberal period can provide clarity at times like these when people in our government have exceeded their allowed power according to our United States Constitution. The monopoly press will ignore one problem in favor of another and it is now ignoring economic transgressions against people’s livelihoods in response to a virus scare while they turn their spotlight on George Floyd’s death and try to win a good opinion from you by virtue signalling instead of doing real journalism. You can contrast their deceptions with the truth revealing approach of our Founders. The Founders believed that paying attention to the function of government and limiting its power could keep peace in our nation. The Founding documents contain wisdom. This is some of the wisdom that influenced the men that wrote the Constitution.

Quotes from Thomas Hobbes Leviathan published 1651:

“I authorize and give up my right of governing myself, to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person, is called a COMMONWEALTH, in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather to speak more reverently, of that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defense.”

“LIBERTY, or FREEDOM, signifieth, properly, the absence of opposition….a FREEMAN, is he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to.”

“The obligation of subjects to the sovereign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them.”

“Competition of riches, honour, command, or other power, inclineth to contention, enmity, and war: because the way of one competitor, to the attaining of his desire, is to kill subdue, supplant, or repel the other.”

Quotes from John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690:

“The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.”

“When any one, or more, shall take upon them to make laws, whom the people have not appointed so to do, they make laws without authority, which the people are not therefore bound to obey;”

“Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins, if the law be transgressed to another’s harm; and whosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law, and makes use of the force he has under his command, to compass that upon the subject, which the law allows not, ceases in that to be a magistrate; and acting without authority, may be opposed”

“The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands; for it being but a delgated power from the people, they who have it cannot pass it over to others.”

“But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see wither they are going; it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouze themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected;”

Here are some quotes from Charles de Secondant Baron de Montesquieu from his Spirit of the Laws, published 1748:

“Before laws were made, there were relations of possible justice.”

“The united strength of individuals …constitutes what we call the body politic.”

“In republican governments, men are all equal: equal they are also in despotic governments; in the former, because they are everything, in the latter because they are nothing.”

“Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. Is it not strange, though true, to say that virtue itself has need of limits?…to prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power. A government may be so constituted, as no man shall be compelled to do things to which the law does not oblige him, nor forced to abstain from things which the law permits.”

“There would be an end of everything, were the same man or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals.”

Here are some quotes by Thomas Paine, “Commonsense” was published in 1776:

“Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a Government, which we might expect in a country without Government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”

“A government of our own is our natural right: and when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance.”

We have seen Federal Reserve experiments that are destroying the value of our money. These experiments, ZIRP, QE, unregulated derivatives trading, TARP, damage people’s wealth and property. We have also seen government officials who don’t respect our nation’s Constitution and choose to do whatever they imagine will give them money or power over other’s people’s money and property. We see trouble now on every side. George Floyd’s death happened because of local police using stronger policing tactics. They are the wrong tactics. It’s time for all Americans to reflect on the history of our nation. Consider next steps carefully.
It’s time to hold officials accountable for operating outside of our laws and principles of good government. It’s time for those officials to gather together some humility and admit that they have made mistakes that have hurt other people. It’s time to end abuses of power that exceed the powers allowed in the Constitution. It’s time to address hurts and harms that are being done against ordinary people across America. This isn’t a game where game theory is all-important. This looks like it could be a turning point that requires good care and attention so that our nation ends off better instead of worse.

If you want to buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries, it’s available now at Amazon.com.

Recently I read a book called Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. The book’s heart isn’t really centered upon achieving better communication. It concerns instead a problem with policing in the United States under neoliberalism. I know that because the author stated that a particular instance of policing in Texas, an incident involving Sandra Bland, inspired him to pick up his pen and write Talking to Strangers. You may wonder what has happened to policing in the United States, and I’ll tell you about that in a few more paragraphs. But first, some background.

Neoliberals have wanted to change the United States in so many ways. Their ambition seems boundless. How police do their jobs is only one example of something they have been changing.

After all, we’ve seen changes in our schools, in financial deregulation, communications deregulation, transportation deregulation, energy deregulation. More recently, in our ailing economy, we’ve now seen a seizure of power in our job markets by officials who have blown covid-19 fears out of all reasonable proportion. First, trillions of dollars bailed out banks again when they couldn’t get paid in the repo market. But this bad response to pay banks for making bad loans wasn’t enough. Local economies were also misdirected. At first, taking their cue from health officials and the President, local governments comandeered a health emergency and responded to it by pretending that isolating healthy people has been a proper response when it isn’t. They shut down large parts of the economy. Private businesses were harmed the most when they were sorted into a category the government called “non-essential.” The closure of independent places of work has been wrong. This has become a terrible economic storm. It has swept millions of people’s livelihoods away. Rent and other debts are due and some can’t pay who could have paid before the covid-19 panic.

Fines have been levied against some businesses for opening outside government guidelines. These fines have also been wrong even though the courts have supported the closures and the fines. Our courts supported the business closures based on the theory that a real epidemic that constitues a health emergency requires a government response. The courts have ignored the fact that covid-19 isn’t a healthcare emergency (because it doesn’t have an unusually high death rate as compared with the seasonal flu). They have ignored the inappropriateness of business closures over the whole span of time since March until June, well after covid-19 has proven to be a non-emergency.

Courts are behaving as though they exist in a land of judicial argument rather than this real world that we all live in. The real world has arguments that are reality based and arguments that are fantasy based. Courts are supposed to be able to tell the difference. By now it’s obvious that the covid-19 emergency is a fantasy. Why isn’t it acknowledged by our courts and politicians? Covid-19 has certainly enabled a power grab and a money grab. The covid-19 power grab and money grab seems to have found it’s own new purpose in power-seizure and money-seizure.

I heard that stacks of bricks have been brought to downtown city-centers. Riot instigators were active in the 2016 election and now I hear that they are back. Bricks are brought in order to provide ammunition to rioters so that they can damage property. With cameras on every corner, why haven’t riot instigators been identified? After all, isn’t that what all those cameras were installed to do? It looks like a group of trouble-makers want to vie for power with all the other power grabbers. It’s enough to make you wonder. Are the riots a further excuse for a power and money grab? Aren’t riots a great excuse for even more policing? Is this social destabilization just the outcome of a larger political and economic failure?

If one of the things you’re wondering about is what happened to policing in the United States, I can now explain what Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book. Gladwell said that a new book encouraged police to take a more agressive stance whenever they stopped someone for a traffic violation or any other problem that grabbed the police’s attention. This book was published in 1995. It was titled Tactics for Criminal Patrol, and it was written by Charles Remsberg.

Many ordinary people in police and government responded to this book in a way that supported their interests from a certain point of view. That is the logic of neoliberalism: self interest from a narrow perspective.

Police reformers wanted to improve crime control. They wanted to use the book’s methods to patrol areas that are more crime-ridden and to reduce the crime there. If you could only get more agressive policing in those areas, it would reduce crime, they believed. This was a spirit of focusing policing where it would do the most good.

But that’s not what city officials wanted. City officials wanted more revenue. They used the new strengthened policing to get more revenue by encouraging officers to ticket as many offenses as they could discover after any stop. The ordinary person would get multiple citations for any infraction of any law that the officer could cite at the time of the stop.

Police officers wanted something different than what reformers or politicians wanted. Police officers faced enough trouble that couldn’t be avoided and they responded to the new agressive guidelines and higher ticketing requirements by seeking out more docile citizens in more peaceful settings. Police officers wanted to face fewer agressive and problem causing criminals. They wanted to apply more agressive policing to people who would comply. And if those people didn’t comply, police would respond with stronger force, sometimes deadly force.

The Sandra Bland arrest happened in 2015. It was an instance of aggressive policing that ended with the patrol officer’s firing and her suicide. Sandra Bland wasn’t a criminal-type. She was a law student. Her experience of having ten previous police encounters, and 5 tickets that left her $8000 in debt due to fines, made her feel like her life wasn’t hers and she was found hanged in her cell after being arrested for failing to signal after she yielded to a police officer. Her death was determined to have been a suicide. The more recent death of George Floyd was a death by strangulation during a police arrest. It has led to the firing of four police officers and criminal charges laid against the arresting officer who has been accused of killing George Floyd by choking him to death. George Floyd and Sandra Bland were both black Americans. Their deaths resonate strongly with people from the Black Lives Matter group. Prejudiced policing is only part of the problem.

As more people have become jobless in a shrinking economy, there are more opportunities to police. Police agression has grown. Even now, there are lots of power grabbers who want even more power, even more trouble, even more strife, even more violence. What will you do? Can we all demand a different approach to policing–one that is less agressive in stops, arrests and ticketing? It’s time to end this crazy neoliberal power grab. It’s also time for wider economic and political reforms in the United States.

If you want to understand more about our nation in these times of uncertainty, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com. I will explain all the details that the news agencies aren’t explaining about how we got to our political and economic here and now.

The press corps doesn’t want you to believe that hydroxychloroquine can help a person who has contracted covid-19. I don’t believe the press corps. I suggest that they are just making this move according to political strategies and goals that might have something to do with game theory.

I have therefore added a book about game theory to my summer reading list. I will continue ignoring their claims against hydroxychloroquine as I go about sussing out some sort of reason why our press corps would make them. I am sorry to see this massive push to ignore a treatment that can save lives. Balderdash.

I have already read reports published by doctors and seen videos of doctors who have worked on the front lines who have been treating covid-sick people and they have said that hydroxychloroquine is safe and effective in careful doses to treat people who have tested positive for covid-19. I believe the doctors. Hydroxychloroquine is by a large margin, their drug of choice for better treatment outcomes.

We have all heard the press corps make up lies to help some political candidates and destroy others. This current launch of a disinformation campaign against hydroxychloroquine fits in well with previous ones like the Russia Hoax. I no longer give such claims against reality any credence.

The American press corps is owned by five or so mega-corporations that have monopoly power in the news world.  You and I don’t have a reason to trust these mega-news-monopolists after the 2016 election and the subsequent news distortions that have become all-too-familiar. A great resource to learn about monopoly press in the United States is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, published by Pantheon Books, New York in 1988 and renewed in 2002. From the copyright date, you can see that monopoly press gained influence decades ago.

To continue, I disagree with politicians who want to continue suggesting that covid-19 is more deadly and dangerous than it is in reality. Deaths by covid-19 are being exaggerated.

The notion that people across America were compelled to wear masks is not true either. They did it out of courtesy to help their neighbors.

The idea that conditions still exist that justify an expansion of government power is also not true. There was never a need to quarantine anyone who was not sick. Continued fines against people who open their businesses against a government mandate after covid-19 has proved to be a lesser threat are unjust and un-American.

If you want to learn more about why your government has become so wrongheaded about so much of what it is doing, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com., where I will take you through the steps of change that have perverted our nation’s operations and produced the mess that surrounds us all.