Week of 06/15/2020

Defund The Police?
They Brought It On Themselves!
– by David Matthews 2

The actions of the past few weeks seem like a strange Bizarro-world version of “Animal House”, where the authorities are the ones that are escalating to all-out criminal activity instead of the rogue gang of misfits and losers.

Lives are lost through abusive police activity.  Protests ensue.  But rather than letting the protests run their course, the police commit even more abusive and even blatant criminal activities.  And then another life is lost.  And then another.  And it just repeats itself.  The most recent incident (as of this article’s posting) is in Atlanta, where a man’s murder is caught on surveillance cameras.  The police chief has resigned.  The officer in question has been fired.  But it wasn’t enough.  Protesters blocked a major interstate highway and burned the Wendy’s restaurant where it happened to the ground!

You would think that the various law enforcement agencies would get the message and knock off the abuse, but they don’t.  Instead, they escalate and attack the protesters and even the reporters covering it, starting the cycle all over again.

So now there is talk about either dismantling the police, disbanding the police, demilitarizing the police, or otherwise defunding the police.  An idea that is pissing off police officers and a certain orange narcissist.

And yet, what in the goddamned hell do you expect the public to do?

First, let’s get the old B.S. out of the way.  Yes, yes, yes, we know “not all cops are bad, not all cops are evil, not all cops are abusive, not all cops are racists, not all cops are fascists”, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah!

Yes, we have seen and will soon see, in increased levels, the incidents of “good” police officers doing good things to the community.  Some will show up to meet with the residents in the neighborhoods they previously drove past in haste.  They’ll pull over drivers and give them coupons or gift cards for following the rules of the road.  You’ll see stories in the media of police officers doing good deeds and good works to reinforce the tired old regurgitated message about “not all cops are monsters, it’s just a few bad apples”.

Here’s the problem: every single public act of kindness and generosity by law enforcement is negated by every case of brutality and cruelty and death at the hands of those supposedly “few bad apples”.  The police can do twenty kind things, fifty kind things, a thousand kind things, and they will all be ruined by one wrongful murder.  And it’s not just the police that it happens to.  We’ve seen that with doctors.  We’ve seen that with lawyers.  We’ve seen that with teachers.  We’ve seen that with social workers.  And we have certainly seen that with politicians!  All good deeds are erased by just one bad one.

And we’ve already done the “weed out the bad apples” bit.  It didn’t work!  We tried reforms.  We tried body cameras.  We tried oversight.  They do not work!  The reforms fail.  Body cameras are ignored or switched off.  Oversight is subverted.  “Weeded out” officers end up going to another community and doing the same things there.  Innocent people are still being singled out, abused, and even killed by law enforcement.

It takes protests, people marching in the street, to fire those “bad apples”, never mind arrest them for criminal activity.  Does that sound like progress to you?  Does that sound like the law enforcement agencies have “learned” anything?

What they are doing during these protests makes it even worse!  An unarmed 75-year old man is shoved to the concrete by police officers, with cameras recording it, and not only did the officers do nothing to help this bleeding elderly man as they marched past him, they restrained those that tried.  Thankfully that elderly man is still alive (as of this article), but he suffered brain damage from the incident.  Even more despicable is the slanderous claim that the incident was “set-up”.  A slanderous claim propped up by a certain orange-skinned narcissistic coward who hid in his bunker just like a certain infamous Iraqi dictator and demanded that others “dominate”.  The same coward who ordered a path brutally cleared from protesters in front of the White House just so he could stage a photo-op.  Using chemical weapons on the protesters, no less!  How very “Saddam” of this coward!

So we have four options.

Option one is to try reforms again.  Try more oversight.  Try more body cameras.  Try “better vetting”.  However, we have seen these fail again and again and again, which have led us to more protests and more rioting.  This not a viable option anymore.  The events of the past few weeks have proven it is not a viable option anymore.

Option two is to capitulate.  Give in and let the abusive thugs egged on by that orange-skinned narcissistic coward just run wild.  Again, not an option.  This is not China.  This is not Iraq under Saddam Hussein.  This is not Libya under Moammar Qadhafi.  This is not Afghanistan under the Taliban.  We actually crossed oceans to go to war against three of those four examples!

Option three is to go the other route and just descend into sheer anarchy and ruin.  Do I even need to say that this is not an option?

The only other option is the fourth one.  Disband.  Dismantle.  Demilitarize.  Defund the police.

Disbanding and dismantling is not outlawing the police!  That orange-skinned coward has been systematically disbanding and dismantling oversight groups and investigators for the past three years, so he is certainly in no position to bitch about smaller governments doing it.

Certainly demilitarizing the police needs to happen.  What sort of small-town department needs a repurposed military mine-sweeper?  What sort of city needs a tank?

It means breaking down the law enforcement agencies and bringing them back to civil servants.  It means putting less money into the police and more into social programs.  It means addressing social problems with something other than body armor and semiautomatic weapons.

I personally find it insulting to hear about teachers having to do bake sales and pay money out of their own pockets for school supplies for their students while law enforcement ride around in military troop carriers and show off their seized-and-repurposed sports cars.  How many school supplies could just one seized Lamborghini buy?  Oh, but then the police wouldn’t look like badasses tooling around in that Lamborghini.

The county of Camden in New Jersey disbanded the police almost a decade ago.  Back then the area was regarded as one of the most violent in the country.  Camden threw out the whole department and started fresh.  Crime was cut almost in half.  Confidence was restored.  It is still a work in progress, but it is working there.

Look, I get it.  My father was a police officer and a state trooper in his lifetime.  I used to blindly support the police, mostly because of my past work with them and because of my father, but I can’t be that blind fool today.  There is something wrong with law enforcement today, whether it is because of racism, authoritarianism, or because of a bunker mentality that has cultivated an extremist combative view of society.  Whatever it is, it needs to end.  Period.  And if it takes firing every single officer and police administrator and starting from scratch like they did in Camden, then so be it.

I know there are plenty of good ol’ boys in the small Podunk communities across the country that will take issue with this.  They will look at these instances with their Podunk eyes and listen with their Podunk ears and think with their Podunk brains that this is all just a bunch of hooey.  Believe me, I have lived in these kinds of communities for most of my life, and I know that they’re also part of the problem.

Let’s get brutally honest here… something needs to be done, and quite frankly, the law enforcement community really have done this to themselves.  They’ve had the opportunity to fix things long before these recent protests started.  They could have purged those “few bad apples” all on their own before it led to a tragedy that they couldn’t sweep under.  If they did it after the Ferguson incident six years ago, then we wouldn’t be in this situation today.  If they did it after Eric Garner, then maybe George Floyd would be alive today.

But they didn’t.  They had every opportunity to do right and to be better and to learn from what happened six years ago, and they did not do it.  They did not learn one single goddamned thing from those incidents.  And now we have protests that literally are going around the world.  So what happens next is on them and their supporters.

We only have two real choices.  We can either make the changes that are needed and piss off a minority of closed-minded people who think that “might makes right”… or we can let the same people make the same mistakes and watch more people die and watch more protests and riots happen all over again.  We are seeing protest happen today in the middle of a global pandemic.  We are seeing acts of war being committed against our own people today.  Do we really want to know just far things will be the next time around if we don’t do something to change it?

Week of 06/08/2020

Recovery Must Put People Over Profits
– by David Matthews 2

There is an old philosophical question that has been asked over the ages…

What came first: the chicken or the egg?

While people were tossing about back and forth over the subject through the years, paleontologists actually came up with the answer.

The egg, of course.

Eggs had to exist before a chicken could come from them.  And eggs did exist long before any winged creature, never mind a warm-blooded feathered foul, could ever come to be. 

A similar question has been perplexing America over the past century.

When helping the economy through a major crisis, what should come first: people or business?

Without people spending currency, there is no business.  You have to have it to spend it.  But, supposedly, without business, currency would be useless.

For far too long, the business community and their acolytes in the media have been imposing the message that as long as the business world is supported, that people will somehow succeed through them.  Businesses create jobs, the workers get paid, money is spent, and as business improves, everyone gains.  They firmly believe that any assistance through an economic crisis such as a recession or depression should go directly to the businesses.

And, for a while, this commentator used to believe that as well.  I drank the capitalist Kool-Aid and believed that businesses would somehow take the added money they get from tax breaks and tax cuts and the added profits and turn those into jobs and raises and bonuses.  It was the propaganda message resonating through conservative media and business media for decades.

Except that it was a lie.

A lie that was proven to be a lie during the Great Recession.

In the recovery following the Recession, all emphasis was placed on corporations.  Banks, Wall Street, Big Business… they all got bailouts and tax breaks and tax cuts, just like all of the other times when things were tough.  They all prospered, and they posted record profits quickly.  And then people waited for those promised raises and bonuses and expansions and the much-needed jobs.  After all, that was the message, right?  Bail out business and business will help out the people.

Except that they didn’t to that.

Instead we heard about the insanity called a “jobless recovery”.  Big Business got their bailout, made up their losses, recovered from the Recession, reaped obscene profits, and then flipped the bird on the people.  You still had a job?  Great.  But you didn’t get any raises or bonuses, did you?  You lost your job?  Sucks to be you because Big Business said “it’s just too unstable for us to think about hiring people.”

But if you really think about it… they couldn’t spend that money to make those promised jobs.  That’s not how businesses work.

What is profit?  Simply put, profit is revenue minus expenses. 

Revenue comes from income streams such as sales or investments.  You have a product, you sell the product, that money is revenue.  Or you get someone to give you money as an investment or a loan.

Expenses are all of the costs in making the product, selling the product, transporting the product, and all of the people involved in the company.  That means paying your employees.  That includes the contractors and temporary employees that you bring in, all of the overhead involved with the building such as utilities, and all of the benefits such as health insurance and retirement.  That also includes all sales taxes and property taxes, so when governments give tax cuts and tax breaks, they are actually cutting expenses.

So as long as you make more revenue than you pay in expenses, that difference is called “profit”.

But that profit doesn’t belong to the business!  When Microsoft or Walmart or Apple or Amazon or State Farm Insurance or McDonald’s announce huge stinking profits, those profits are not held in some piggy bank to spend on later.  No, no, no.  That profit goes to the owners and investors and stockholders.  That is their money.

You see, hiring people and promoting people and giving out raises and bonuses and expanding… those are all expenses.  If businesses are spending money on those things, then that cuts into their profit.  That means less money going to the owners and investors and stockholders.  And, in the world of business, that means failure.

Understand that the sole purpose of a business, especially since the creation of the corporation, is to make a profit.  It’s not about “helping society” or any other kind of philosophical delusion.  It is about making money and turning a profit, period.  If they don’t, then they are considered a failure.

Now let’s go back to the Great Recession.  Banks were going bankrupt.  Businesses were laying people off.  Families were losing their homes through foreclosure.  The ones who still had jobs were getting screwed over even worse by the remaining banks.  Big Business gets big breaks.  Those translate into lower expenses and thus higher profits.  Great for them.

But why should they then spend that money on jobs and promotions?  Because some media personality on radio or TV said so?  Because some self-professed financial guru made that claim in some newspaper column?  *They* never made that promise!  That was just the word of those media personalities!  You know, the ones that claim they are “entertainers” and “comedians”.

So here we are today, in 2020, in the midst of yet another economic collapse, partially due to the COVID-19 global pandemic.  Businesses are having to shut down, some of them permanently, and people are getting laid off because of this pandemic.  Others are shutting down because of all of the people that have been laid off or furloughed so they don’t have the money they need to spend on things.

Yes, there was a bailout.  Bailout for people and for businesses.  But more so for businesses than for the people.

Yes, there are some new and very creative idea implemented such as the Payroll Protection Program, which let banks loan the money to businesses to keep people on payroll instead of having them laid off or furloughed because of the pandemic.  That was a great idea that was implemented.  But it was also badly mismanaged, with preferences again going to Big Corporate instead of those small businesses that people claim to their dying breath are the “backbone” of American business. 

Hey, guys?  If those small businesses are so “essential”, then why are they continually getting short-changed in favor of those big businesses?  You know, asking for a friend.

So now we have businesses trying to start back up, and states trying to “re-open” even though there is still a pandemic going through, and certain people are operating under the delusion that somehow there would be some miraculous supercharged recovery simply because they said so.

Except it won’t.

Sure, Wall Street seems to be going obscenely great as of this column’s posting.  But, as this commentator has repeatedly said, Wall Street is not Main Street, where small businesses reside, and it sure as hell is not your street and mine, where the real hard-working people live.  Wall Street is a financial crack house on overdose right now, and it sure as hell is not reflective of the real world.

First and foremost, we need to forget about Wall Street.  It is not more a measurement of the real world, of the real economy, any more than an alcoholic left alone in a brewery.  It is mostly a bunch of algorithms right now that are being gamed by “rumors” and “hopes”.

Second, any talk about recovery needs to be muzzled while you have a global pandemic running roughshod across America.  All the directives and executive orders in the world will not stop the virus, nor will it magically make the spread go away.  Nor will it also stop a second wave of infections.  If that happens, then all bets are off.  You don’t believe me?  Look at history.  We went through this a century ago.  It’s high time that we learned from our previous screw-ups for once!

Third… let’s get brutally honest here… any talk about helping the economy needs to start with the people first, businesses second.  You want people spending money on businesses?  They have to have money first.  You want them buying 4K televisions and streaming services?  You want them to buy those new cars?  You want them to upgrade their phones and their game consoles?  They can’t do that if they’re worried about whether or not they can keep the mortgage paid and take care of healthcare and whether or not they can afford food.  If the people are worried about whether or not they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads, then they will not spend money on other things that bring in the revenue and bring in the real profits.  There is no amount of delusional thinking that can change that.

It's really simple: just like the egg existing long before the chicken, people existed before business, never mind capitalism.  The whole reason of business is for people to exchange currency for goods and/or services.  And therein lies the problem.  You have to have people able to do that.  And when the expected scope of our economic crisis threatens to cover over one-third of the populace, if not more, then we can’t afford to play the same economic games of the past.  It just doesn’t work like that.