Category Archives: History

The U.S. Economy Is in Better Shape Than You Might Realize

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It isn’t commonly known, but we have the highest post-pandemic growth among the G7 nations, the group that includes the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom.

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We also have the lowest inflation.

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Could last year’s biggest piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act — which passed with zero Republican support — have helped reduce inflation?

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We also have our lowest unemployment rate since 1970, more than 50 years ago.

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Perhaps more voters will understand how well the economy is doing by next year’s election — unless, of course, they’re locked into the right-wing media/propaganda bubble. For them, the country is in horrible shape and there is no hope for a better tomorrow unless their favorite felon is returned to office.

Truth vs. Fantasy in Today’s Politics, Part 2

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My previous post dealt with false talking points Republican presidential candidates are repeating over and over. It may not be a surprise that these clowns are ignoring reality regarding the economy, immigration and crime. But there are even bigger myths worth noting. Here are two big differences between reality and Republican bullshit.

Republicans have convinced many voters that they’re better at handling the economy than Democrats. Is it because Republicans claim to love capitalism, especially big business, so much? Here’s the job growth under the most recent Democratic and Republican presidents. The difference is rather amazing and certainly not well-known. Under the last three Democrats, the economy added 46.9 million jobs. Under the last three Republican presidents, the ones who supposedly know how to nurture the economy, the increase was a pathetic 1.9 million (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Simon Rosenberg):

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But wait! Does the economy grow under Democrats because they’re the party of “borrow and spend”? Hardly. It’s because Democrats try to spread the wealth, not concentrate it at the top. Since Reagan was president, Republicans have added red ink through reckless, unproductive tax cuts, while Democrats have restored fiscal sanity (from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the Tennessee Holler site):

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Deficits went up under Reagan, the two Bushes and the last guy. They’ve gone down under Clinton, Obama and Biden. It’s no surprise that cutting taxes for the rich and corporations increases the national debt but a healthier economy under Democratic presidents makes deficits go down.

Here’s one last chart. Politicians have been talking about bringing back American manufacturing jobs for as long as I can remember. Now it looks like it’s actually happening. This chart shows spending on factory construction (adjusted for inflation). To the left is the second Bush presidency, showing factory construction increasing until the 2008 financial crisis (the vertical gray line) that started in Bush’s second term. Construction recovered in Obama’s first term, was stagnant or declined during the last president’s single term, and then took off with Biden in the White House.  From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau and Steven Rattner:

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From Yahoo Financial News:

President Obama tried to revitalize American manufacturing, with little to show for it. President Txxxx tried too, with similarly unimpressive results.

Under President Biden, however, a manufacturing boom finally seems to be getting started. Since the beginning of 2022, construction spending on new factories has more than doubled, from an annualized rate of $91 billion in January 2022 to $189 billion in April 2023, the latest data available. That’s the biggest jump, by far, in data going back to 2002….

Private-sector firms are building more US factories to cash in on an unprecedented spate of legislation Biden has signed providing federal funding and incentives for infrastructure development, a massive green-energy buildout, and a revitalized semiconductor industry. Three separate bills passed by the Democratic Congress in 2021 and 2022, and signed by Biden, will provide well over $1 trillion in federal spending, tax breaks, and other incentives meant to build more important products in the United States and reduce reliance on importers, mostly China.

Republicans would have you believe the American economy is in deep trouble and they’d do a better job with it than Democrats. The evidence says otherwise. Republican economic competence is a myth.

A Few Thoughts on the Indictment, and a Disturbing List

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The Mueller investigation implied that our former president was guilty of obstruction of justice. Mueller’s final reported listed 10 times he may have committed that crime. But the Department of Justice doesn’t like to prosecute presidents. Nothing happened. For reasons unknown, in 2021, the new attorney general let the matter drop, even though the former president was now a private citizen.

Now, more than two years later, the Department of Justice has convinced a grand jury that private citizen Donald J. Trump has committed a new set of crimes. The grand jury’s indictment is entitled “United States of America v. Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta, Defendants” (Nauta is one of Trump’s employees).

An important thing to note is that this ex-official isn’t accused of doing anything when he was in office. He could have removed all kinds of sensitive material from the White House when he was still president (like others have done before him) and nothing would have happened except justifiable criticism for being loose with government secrets. But when he was no longer president, he was required to give it all back, like others have done. His crimes boil down to lying to the FBI about which documents he had, hiding them and refusing to give them back.

These are the specific felonies he’s charged with:

  1. Willful Retention of National Defense Information (a section of the Espionage Act)
  2. Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice
  3. Withholding a Document or Record
  4. Corruptly Concealing a Document or Record
  5. Concealing a Document in a Federal Investigation
  6. Scheme to Conceal
  7. False Statements and Representations

They probably could have added another crime to the list, since he shared what he had with other people.

Note: There is absolutely no evidence that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Mike Pence ever committed any of these crimes even though sensitive material was found in their possession at some point. (A major difference being that none of them refused to return anything or lied to the cops.)

Assuming the defendant pleads Not Guilty on Tuesday, it will be months before there’s a trial (assuming he doesn’t drop dead, lose his mind, change his plea, flee the country, etc. etc. in the meantime). In our judicial system, a “speedy trial” is hardly ever a quick one.

Although a biased, incompetent right-wing judge (Aileen “Loose” Cannon) will accept the defendant’s plea next week, it seems impossible that she will handle the rest of the case. Has a judge ever presided over a federal criminal case in which the defendant chose her to be a judge? No. It would be like a kennel club official deciding who’ll be the judge at a dog show and then entering her own dog in the contest.

Finally, the part of the indictment that mainly describes the movement and concealment  of boxes, which goes from page 17 to page 26, is kind of boring, but one of the things after that is very interesting. I don’t think anybody in the government knows if the defendant is still holding on to stuff he shouldn’t have. It’s also possible the prosecutors didn’t list the most sensitive documents he took (it would make the U.S. government’s ability to keep secrets look even worse). But take a look at the documents listed:

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On Some Who Choose to Ignore Reality

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Massive Canadian wildfires and an unfortunate weather pattern have resulted in the worst air quality we’ve ever experienced on the East Coast of the United States. The air quality index for New York City reached 405 yesterday. Anything above 300 is considered “hazardous”, i.e. an environmental emergency that may harm even healthy young people.

Climate scientists have been saying for years that one effect of the climate crisis will be more dangerous wildfires. But pundits at Fox “News” don’t want to admit there is a climate crisis. They also don’t want to admit that wearing masks helped save lives during the pandemic. For these reasons, some have told their viewers, many of whom are over 65, not to worry. No need to stay indoors. No need to wear a mask outside.

The Five co-host Jeanine Pirro took issue with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who issued a call to “adapt our food systems, energy grids, infrastructure, and healthcare” in response to the “climate crisis.” In response, Pirro said: “Other Democrats are pumping up climate hysteria and bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.”

This remarkable right-wing reaction to an undeniable problem brought to mind a couple things I’ve read recently.

An article in The New York Times describes an experience the author Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne had at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in June 1968. Sen. Robert Kennedy had just been assassinated, shortly after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King….

A television had been set up on the Royal Hawaiian’s lanai, a large veranda. When the couple arrived, it was already crowded with viewers, and … a musical variety program was playing…. “Hollywood Palace” was scheduled to air next, but the evening’s programming was pre-empted by the special news program on Kennedy’s assassination. The lanai crowd wasn’t happy. Some stood up to leave.

The ABC news special … opened with a rendition, by the actor Hume Cronyn, of William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” the same poem from which Ms. Didion had drawn the title of her first book of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

As the three-hour special wore on, Ms. Didion looked around the veranda and noticed that everyone who was sitting there earlier in the evening had left. A few guests stopped to ask about the program she was watching, but at the reply — Bobby Kennedy — they continued on their way…. “It was as if they were shutting their minds to it, shutting their eyes,” [Dunne later said]….

For Didion, “it was, in some ways, a very radicalizing experience for me”. These tourists from the mainland, she realized, enjoying their Hawaiian vacation as if nothing had happened, were not going to have any part of a national tragedy — even as, on the hotel’s television, Robert Kennedy’s casket was transported by rail to Washington and along the tracks nearly two million people lined up to pay their respects.

To Ms. Didion, the contrast between these scenes and the Royal Hawaiian’s conspicuously deserted veranda felt appalling. With Kennedy’s assassination, she said, “it was as if all the disturbances of the whole past couple of years came to a head that night. And here was a whole part of America that wasn’t having it … It was like something snapping”…

“It seemed as if these people did not count themselves as part of the community. That they came from another America”….They could watch “The Lawrence Welk Show” but ignore a political assassination. The same economic system that put these specific Americans in the position to take this vacation — the white-collar stability, the inequality sustaining it — was what allowed them, now, to turn their backs. They didn’t really care about any of it; the broader narrative of patriotism and pride was just an excuse for doing what they wanted — for their self-interest — a narrative they could apply and discard from one situation to the next as they saw fit.

The implications weighed heavily on Didion: How could this country continue to exist if the people who’d gained the most from it refused to contribute? How long until the dark pattern she and [her husband] saw in Kennedy’s murder reached its natural conclusion? It’s a sense of catastrophe — of that rough beast in the distance slouching closer — that, to many current Americans, feels strikingly familiar.

Writing for New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait describes the Republican Party’s “authoritarian acceleration”:

For a time in early 2021, Txxxx’s support for the insurrection was a black mark on his record that even many loyalists couldn’t condone. That taboo is fading from memory. Txxxx has said he would “most likely” pardon “many” of his allies arrested on January 6 and has turned Ashli Babbitt, who was shot trying to break into a sealed hallway while storming the Capitol, into a martyr. [Another Republican presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis] has promised to pardon at least some J6-ers….

Most instructive of all are the rationalizations used by Txxxx’s erstwhile skeptics within the party. They have concluded, more in sorrow than in anger, that since the party contains a very large faction of voters who believe Txxxx is entitled to legal impunity, the only choice is to placate them. “Republican voters do not respond well to Republican lawmakers who make the case against [his] legal misconduct in plain terms. I wish they did, but they don’t,” says National Review’s Noah Rothman, defending DeSantis’s position on the insurrectionists…..

[A] Republican strategist recently explained the calculation to Politico’s Jonathan Martin in similar terms: “The conservative media ecosystem has built a giant wall of inoculation around everything Txxxx…. To forcefully condemn Txxxx as a menace to democracy is to echo the other tribe, to put on the blue jersey … Shaming your own voters is not a recipe for victory.”

It is sobering to see such an unblinkered description of the party’s intellectual rot attached to such a fatalistic conclusion. The party’s leader is an authoritarian and a crook, and its media apparatus is rank propaganda, making it impossible to identify or correct even the grossest crimes. This is the definition of an internal culture that is beyond repair. The only possible response for anybody possessing a minimal commitment to democracy is to get out.

Yet the years since Txxxx arrived on the Republican scene have instilled in the party’s elite a learned helplessness. The notion that the party could grow so dangerous that they must abandon it for the sake of the Republic is unimaginable to them. Txxxx is planning a second term that can break down every guardrail that held him back the first time. The Republican “opposition,” as it were, is dedicated to bringing more planning, intraparty support, and ruthlessness to the very same project.

While she was still in Hawaii, Didion had “an attack of vertigo, nausea and a feeling that she was going to pass out,” for which she “underwent an extensive psychiatric evaluation and was prescribed an antidepressant”. She later wrote: “By way of comment, I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968″.

How about to the late spring of 2023?

Former and Current Government Officials Say We Are Not Alone

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This is a very big story if it’s true. The people telling it don’t appear to be cranks or easily misled. Far from it. The Guardian, New York Magazine and other outlets have repeated the story. A reporter asked the White House press secretary about it and was referred to the Defense Department, but they’re not talking.

This is from the original article for The Debrief, a site devoted to “science, tech, and defense news”:

A former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.

The information, he says, has been illegally withheld from Congress, and he filed a complaint alleging that he suffered illegal retaliation for his confidential disclosures, reported here for the first time.

Other intelligence officials, both active and retired, with knowledge of these programs through their work in various agencies, have independently provided similar, corroborating information, both on and off the record.

The whistleblower, David Charles Grusch, 36, a decorated former combat officer …is a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He served as the reconnaissance office’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019-2021. From late 2021 to July 2022, he was the NGA’s co-lead for UAP analysis and its representative to the task force.

The task force was established to investigate what were once called “unidentified flying objects,” or UFOs, and are now officially called “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP….

Grusch said the recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades through the present day by the government, its allies, and defense contractors. Analysis has determined that the objects retrieved are “of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures,” he said.

In filing his complaint, Grusch is represented by a lawyer who served as the original Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG).

“We are not talking about prosaic origins or identities,” Grusch said, referencing information he provided Congress and the current ICIG. “The material includes intact and partially intact vehicles.”

… Karl E.Nell, a recently retired Army colonel and current aerospace executive who was the Army’s liaison for the UAP Task Force from 2021 to 2022 and worked with Grusch there, characterizes Grusch as “beyond reproach”.

[Nell said Grusch’s] “assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence. (In a 2022 performance evaluation, Laura A. Potter, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence,  Department of the Army, described Nell as “an officer with the strongest possible moral compass.”)

Christopher Mellon, who spent nearly twenty years in the U.S. Intelligence Community and served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, has worked with Congress for years on unidentified aerial phenomena. “A number of well-placed current and former officials have shared detailed information with me regarding thisalleged program”, Mellon said.

… Jonathan Grey … currently works for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC), where the analysis of UAP has been his focus….“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon….”

In his statements cleared for publication by the Pentagon in April, Grusch asserted that UFO “legacy programs” have long been concealed within “multiple agencies … without appropriate reporting to various oversight authorities.”

He said he reported to Congress on the existence of a decades-long “publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material – a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetric national defense advantages.”

Beginning in 2022, Grusch provided Congresswith hours of recorded classified information transcribed into hundreds of pages which included specific data about the materials recovery program. Congress has not been provided with any physical materials related to wreckage or other non-human objects.

Grusch’s investigation was centered on extensive interviews with high-level intelligence officials, some of whom are directly involved with the program. He says the operation was illegally shielded from proper Congressional oversightand that he was targeted and harassed because of his investigation.

Grusch said that the craft recovery operations are ongoing at various levels of activity and that he knows the specific individuals, current and former, who are involved.

“Individuals on these UAP programs approached me in my official capacity and disclosed their concerns regarding a multitude of wrongdoings, such as illegal contracting against the Federal Acquisition Regulations …”, he stated.

Associates who vouched for Grusch said his information was highly sensitive, providing evidence that materials from objects of non-human origin are in the possession of highly secret black programs. Although locations, program names, and other specific data remain classified, the Inspector General and intelligence committee staff were provided with these details. Several current members of the recovery program spoke to the Inspector General’s office and corroborated the information Grusch had provided for the classified complaint.

Grusch left the government on April 7, 2023, in order, he said, to advance government accountability through public awareness.

Unquote.

The only reason I have for doubting this story is that it’s hard to believe something like this could have been kept secret (or almost secret) for so long. Members of Congress and other journalists need to pursue this. If it’s true, overly secretive officials may be embarrassed, but most people will handle the information just fine.

PS: It might not be correct to say we aren’t alone. Whoever sent this stuff our way may be long gone by now.