Trump and the Untouchables

The recent raid on former President Trump’s home has renewed doubts about the political impartiality of government agencies. Elements in the news and social media seem threatened by this slant and are countering it by rehearsing Trump’s many flaws and past sins. The implication is that he is so dangerous that he must be stopped at any cost, even if it means breaking the rules (not that such is admitted.)

The cost may be too high, if it entails the general breakdown of public trust and support for the State. This is especially important in a nation historically founded on a deep mistrust of arbitrary executive power, on the even-handed administration of law and the regular revalidation of government by the people’s express will.

The modern state has acquired almost limitless resources and the citizen is correspondingly far weaker and more vulnerable. Even an individual with substantial private means can have difficulty in seeking a legal remedy against official wrongdoing. For years, Trump had to defend himself against what now seem false allegations of conspiracy with Russia, yet his case against certain FBI officials said to be involved in the frameup was thrown out just this 22 July, on the grounds that they were protected from personal liability by the 1988 Westfall Act, which indemnifies Federal employees carrying out duties in their official capacity.

Was it with a similar sense of impunity that those working behind the scenes selected federal magistrate Bruce Reinhart, who recused himself on June 22 from overseeing a Trump lawsuit against Hillary, to issue the warrant for the search of Mar-a-Lago; and included in the search party some FBI agents who are said to have been personally involved in the ‘Russiagate’ affair?

Appearances matter and ‘the optics’ are bad in this case. In suspicious eyes it seems plausible that the justice system has strayed from impartiality, so confident in its invulnerability that it can afford to be careless in its choice of servants. People are beginning to ask themselves, ‘If they can do these things to him, is anybody safe?’

Has the Leviathan become too big?

If the US intelligence community were set up as a separate State of the Union, it would be a sizeable one. Its annual budget is $85.6 billion, which ranks it parallel with the GDP of Idaho and above that of ten other US States; and more than the GDP of two-thirds of the world’s countries.

Leaving aside that part - about a quarter - of the overall Intelligence budget that is allotted to military and foreign intelligence, the FBI consumes some 17% of the (domestic) National Intelligence budget. Its Director, Christopher Wray, lists many serious ‘Key Threats and Challenges’ in his $10.7 billion request for 2023.

Yet, how do we do a cost-benefit analysis?

Say we looked only to save lives (though the FBI seeks to do much more.) A 2003 study set the value of a statistical life (VSL) in the US at a median $7 million, which adjusting for inflation is around $10.5 million today. How many lives does the FBI save each year, but how many more could more be saved per dollar spent, by e.g. national safety regulations, medical interventions, guidance on food and drink?

Tough one. Black SUVs and squads of agents with high-powered firearms are so much more dramatic, visually. But what do they achieve, other than to remind the little man - even a Trump - how small he is? Why go in so mob-handed - or at all?

As to impartiality, why by contrast was Hillary’s off-workingplace storage of classified information glossed over as mere carelessness?

As to timing, why now? Is it because the dust and noise raised by this Eliot Ness-style gangbusting raid may help give Trump’s political opponents some advantage in the runup to this autumn’s mid-term elections?

And what exactly was included in the 15 boxes of documents removed - surely not anything relevant to Trump’s lawsuit against Mrs Clinton, or against government agencies that made false claims about him? Did the FBI indulge itself in what is known as a ‘fishing expedition’ in the hunt for something, anything to help convict him of some felony, or at least serve to charge him pro tempore until the ballots are cast? Is the process the punishment, for a disruptor, a maverick, a challenger to a corrupt status quo (even granting that he himself is a cheating, brass-necked blowhard)?

Optics: so important, yet not so easy to manage. For every one rubbing his hands in glee at Trump’s discomfiture, there is another dreading what the State is becoming.

In the information age, there is already widespread concern over the government’s mass surveillance of its citizens, with all the implications for controlling us collectively and individually. Experience has shown that these cyberspying powers are apt to be misused:

Section 215 [of the PATRIOT Act] at the time authorized the FBI to obtain [telephone] records, but in this case, the FBI obtained nothing: the records instead went to the NSA, which was not mentioned in the statute. The statute said any records obtained had to be handled pursuant to FBI guidelines; they were not, and instead were handled pursuant to NSA guidelines…

The State has powerful civil pals in the Silicon Valley giants (note how Mr Zuckerberg has renamed Facebook’s parent company ‘Meta’, brazenly advertising its use of metadata to discover our connections to everything and everyone we know.) Further, already every social media conversation can be monitored, ‘corrected’ by ‘fact-checkers’, drowned in assertive counter-propaganda or just plain censored. Even talk in the domestic setting can be spied on by ‘smart speakers.’

How do we avoid the world of Franz Kafka (how reluctant they were to release the affidavit that triggered the search warrant!), of ‘Minority Report’, of a Chinese-style social credit system? Is liberty only the freedom to be ‘good’?

Opening up the ex-President’s house has opened a can of worms for us all.

P.S. I can't compete with a pro - read Matt Taibbi on this (subscription required for the full text but as far as I am concerned it's worth £1 a week, I've just signed up):

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/sweeps-week-on-fbi-tv

Fifteen years and whadda you get...

Lessons from history

The Debt Offensive began in 2007: Charlie hit us with everything he had. Cadres of underpriced risk were tunnelling under our lines, popping up when least expected and decimating our defences. We fought back hard, dropping cash from the Hueys, first $700 billion, then trillions, but it was no use. Sure, we beat him back for a while, took down a few banks; but the public couldn't take seeing it all on TV. It was the turning point. We had lost the will to win.

--------

Republished from 2009

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Cheap shots, by JD

For this week's Sunday Colour Supplement a few more 'cheap shots' from cheap cameras as previously featured here four years ago. Not the same photos of course, just another selection which are sitting doing nothing in the archives. I suppose I ought to print these pictures before the inevitable day when the politicians realise we have run out of electricity and all our digital records disappear.

https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2018/02/cheap-cameras-great-results-by-jd.html

WEEKENDER: A tsunami of bad news, by Wiggia

This was taken at Ardingly reservoir in 2011, showing that capacity was inadequate even before the drought we have this year.

It is hard to believe, but every day appears to have another story of doom and gloom, and all fall into that category of problems with no obvious answer.

I wrote a while back about how the failure over decades of this country to build new infrastructure in almost every category was going to come home to roost; that moment has come in spades.

And almost without question you can lay the blame for 90% of it at the door of successive governments who have been totally derelict in putting right the obvious, in exchange for short term advantage.

The very real threat of power cuts this winter, something that has been on the cards for some time pre the gas and oil crisis, was not something the government would be likely to shout about from the rooftops. Nonetheless the likelihood is staring us in the face. What was buried on page 26 of whatever paper you read is that Norway with whom we have an interconnector may not be able to supply us at all this winter as the hot weather Europe-wide has depleted their reservoirs and the hydro plants are being seriously affected. Despite having nuclear they rely on a large hydro scheme and the usual surplus is sold off mainly to us; not this year, as they are looking after their own.

Our hurry to bulldoze all coal fired plants to make the government look as though all was well with our new renewable strategy and the concreting of the fracking test site just show how ridiculous our energy strategy has been for decades and now we are about to find out. A mild winter and we might scrape through and the fact that the cost of energy will dampen demand will also help; the latter can hardly be called a policy and will have consequences for health especially among the elderly, among whom many already cannot afford with inflation to put the heating on. Welcome to the 21st century.

“The National Grid has said that it is worried that we will fall short of power as early as December. This is partly because of our reliance on green power and partly due to gas problems. The grid had put what few remaining coal-fired stations we have on stand by. But these shortages are basically of our own making, we have closed down coal-fired stations and replaced them with intermittent wind turbines and solar panels. We have run down nuclear power stations and not replaced them. We have decided not to frack the huge volumes of gas we have under our feet and import more of it as we have run down our North Sea resources. We have closed down our gas storage facility. We have partially relied on inter-connectors to France, but they have been importing from us as their nuclear stations have problems. So now put what little coal plant we have left on standby, but we have closed down all our mines and will have to import the coal. This whole policy is mad, we need to frack, mine coal and build small modular nuclear power stations today.“

Elsewhere in the Ukraine, a corrupt regime is now wanting to prolong the war and get Crimea back into the fold. Naturally the Ukraine has no money, nor do we, and is banking on the successor to Boris to further impoverish the UK by giving arms money indefinitely, much of which is seemingly disappearing once it crosses the border. I am sure our betters will oblige, under the banner of ‘it is the right thing to do’

Back in Blighty the DM, obsessed with house prices, warns of the hurt that rising interest rates will have on those with mortgages:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11083777/Average-UK-house-prices-FALLEN-month-June-2021-amid-rate-hikes.html

Many of the problems with house buying or to be exact the ability to buy, stem from measures taken over many years to stimulate the market and ‘help’ those who want their own house onto the so-called housing ladder.

Nearly all help has itself fuelled house price rises. Make the money easier to get and the house prices go up; give people deposits and easy start schemes so they never have to save, the house prices go up; increase earnings ratio, house prices go up. 

All and everything has fuelled house prices and kept the financial sector happy and housebuilders too, they of course are major donors to the Conservative party.

It is interesting that through all this the quality and size of new builds has remained largely p*ss poor, both items ensure bigger profits for the builders, yet they still sell to a gullible and malleable public, in a market that is supposedly cooling! 

And it has to be said, how on earth during the last two years has the only thing to make a profit been a house? Apart from pent-up demand, house prices have escalated on such a scale they are in a parallel universe to everything else. In reality we don’t need more houses, the indigenous population remains largely static, so any extra demand is by way of government policy on immigration: every year the failure to curb immigration brings another half a million that need housing, health care, social services etc. that a hard pressed taxpayer has to fork out for, the same taxpayers who mainly want a stop to this unfettered policy on immigration.

And now building societies in an effort to keep the ball rolling are proposing 50 year mortgages that can be passed on to one's children, should they want to live there and if they don’t then the mortgage becomes no more than a rent as the difference will still have to paid by selling the place. With six times and more earnings ratio now the norm this Ponzi scheme is heading for a fall one way or another, but we have said that in the past. Yet miraculously another wheeze to keep it all rolling along seems to appear and save the market.

https://news.sky.com/story/government-considering-50-year-mortgages-that-could-pass-down-generations-to-tackle-housing-crisis-12644368

An extra factor emerged linking the lack of housebuilding with the energy crisis when in west London a major building project has been pulled because the grid could not supply the needed energy in the area and wouldn’t be able to for several years. They all of course blame one another for the fiasco.

This could spread with the lack of energy to other areas where large building projects are planned: no power, no houses.

GPs are now looking for the sympathy vote. Full time GPs are at the lowest level for in five years after doctors complained of being stressed; so few work full time now that stress must be being gauged by a different system from the rest of us - with a few noticeable exceptions GPs have long since stopped putting in a shift like their forebears did. A quarter of all GPs last week did a 37.5 hour week and that would include in many cases extra earnings outside the surgery; stress!

The water companies are starting to impose hose pipe bans. These are the same companies that have milked their customers and totally failed to increase capacity in line with the population. The fact they are leaking 2-3 billion litres of water a day does rather increase the cynicism they bring on themselves when making demands on others.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1653406/water-firms-sold-reservoirs-could-have-eased-drought-latest-news

Selling off reservoirs has been despite a growing population been going on for decades. On many occasions when asked about capacity the answer has been ‘we have over capacity’ and the surplus reservoirs are sold off; no one, who could have done, pointed out the obvious in line with all other infrastructure failings.

A letter in the Times spells out the facts…

“Water leakage rates in the South are about 25 per cent. So of the total water supplied only 75 per cent is available. Commercial and agriculture use 90 per cent of that water. This leaves 10 per cent for domestic customers. A hosepipe ban saves only 10 per cent of that water or 0.75 per cent of the water supplied.

My thanks to Mr Armistead of Hampshire also for pointing out that in 1976, there was talk of building a national water grid to bring water from the North to the South. Naturally, nothing happened.”

The unions are not going to be left behind in all this. Various strikes are planned and some have started in a bid to raise wages in line, some hope, with inflation. Why not? For once I am with them: the MPs got their rise without so much as a sneeze; though the Felixstowe dock one, should it start (Felixstowe handles 50% of container traffic) will have a big impact on already stretched supply lines.

To finish a tale of government profligacy, 12 fig trees gifted by Jeb Bush erstwhile governor of Florida (though there seems some doubt about this as other sources say they are rented and others they were purchased for £150,000) stand outside Portcullis House at the entrance to Parliament. In essence the trees were unsuitable for the position in which they were planted and grow sideways. Efforts to keep them upright have resulted in a two-decade battle to to stop them from falling over. Between 2001 and 2012 the Commons spent £400,000 on maintaining them, it then cut costs and spent a further £137,000 on them. The solution is to remove three trees? No, the solution should be to remove all trees for obvious reasons, as not too far into the future further thousands will be required apart from maintenance costs, to remedy an error of their own making. Nice contract, though...

Just listen and look at the cringing MPs defending this in 2012 at the end of the first contract… they don’t give a fig!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-17755792

FRIDAY MUSIC: Manu Chao, by JD

This week it is the turn of Manu Chao who is Spanish but was born in Paris. His music is a mix of Spanish, French, African, South American with lots of other influences besides. 

And a song for Diego Armando Maradona, they always like to include a clip of his 'hand of God' goal against England!

"Manu Chao helped begin the Latin alternative movement way back in the '80s -- although it had no name then -- and in his later work he cut a cross-cultural swath across styles and geographic boundaries. Chao was born on June 21, 1961, in Paris to Spanish parents -- his father, Ramon Chao, a respected writer, comes from Galicia, his mother Bilbao. Growing up bilingual, he was also influenced by the punk scene across the English Channel that happened while he was still in his teens."

• https://www.allmusic.com/artist/manu-chao-mn0000674161/biography
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manu_Chao

 

Alcohol and the State

From my Substack files:

In 1911, when California held a referendum on the question of women’s suffrage, the writer Jack London surprised his wife Charmian by saying he had voted in favour, because:

"When the women get the ballot, they will vote for prohibition. It is the wives, and sisters, and mothers, and they only, who will drive the nails into the coffin of John Barleycorn.”

In his 1913 book ‘John Barleycorn’ he claimed that few men were born addicts to alcohol; the real driver was its availability:

It is the accessibility of alcohol that has given me my taste for alcohol. I did not care for it. I used to laugh at it. Yet here I am, at the last, possessed with the drinker's desire. It took twenty years to implant that desire.

Sure enough, the Constitutional amendments introducing Prohibition and granting women’s suffrage were passed within six months of each other, in 1920. Women did not vote directly for Prohibition - there was no referendum, though by 1918 fifteen States had already legalised the female franchise - but the two movements ran in parallel. Women have been ‘blamed’ for Prohibition, though perhaps ‘credited’ is a better term, seeing the practical benefits of the experiment.

London’s accessibility argument is borne out by British history. When the Government deregulated sales of gin in order to turn people away from importing brandy from the enemy, France, the result was an epidemic of drunkenness that forced the passing of the 1751 Gin Act to reduce the damage.

In 1830 there was a second deregulation, of beer houses, to draw people away from spirits; the consequence was another spate of intoxication:

A fortnight after the passage of that Act, Sydney Smith, renowned for his idealism, who, previously, had been a strong advocate of it, wrote: “Everybody is drunk. Those who are not sinking are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state.”

Since then there have been various episodes of regulatory tightening and re-loosening of licensed hours and premises, from e.g. Sunday pub closures in Wales (1881) to the nationwide availability of 24-hour licenses (2005.)

Outlets have proliferated: today, I would be hard put to count all the places within a mile of our (suburban) house where I can buy alcohol; not just pubs and off-licenses but supermarkets, post offices, garages and convenience stores.

In our post-industrial country, the home is an increasingly important venue for consumption:

The main change in the structure of capital during this century has been the relative stagnation of industrial capital and the growth of the service sector of the economy. This trend, which has been most marked in the south of England, has had consequences for inner city working class areas: de-industrialisation, mobility of labour, and post-war rehousing policies have combined to dislocate the pattern of community based upon local work and extended families and associated cultural traditions...

Population has been decanted to the New Towns, and more generally, to the suburbs, where social life has focussed upon the nuclear family, and the home is increasingly regarded as a place of leisure, recreation and consumption. It is in this context that off-licence sales have become more important. The 1961 Licensing Act relaxed restrictions on the opening of off-licences, and the 1964 Licensing Act facilitated supermarket sales. By the late 1970s, most beer was still sold in public houses, but one third of all wine and half of spirits were consumed at home.

From ‘Alcohol, Youth, and the State’ by Nicholas Dorn (RKP, 1983)

The State is conflicted on the subject: on the one hand there are the health and other costs of alcohol; but on the other there is the fact that the sales taxes represent something like 2% of total Government revenue (not counting the taxes and National Insurance Contributions provided by all those employed in the drinks industry.)

Whether it is to do with the 1961 and 1964 Acts or the general increase in prosperity, there has been a clear (re-)increase in alcohol consumption since the 1950s:

Males drink more than females, though the latter are catching up. On average, men in 2018 were drinking the equivalent of 17.8 litres of pure alcohol per year - in spirits terms, more than five 70-centilitre bottles a month. Bear in mind that around 20% of the adult population doesn’t drink at all (among the young, there may be a switch to drugs instead, especially when beer is retailing at close to £5 a pint in pubs) and according to this survey:

… the very heaviest drinkers – who make just 4% of the population - consume around 30% of all the alcohol sold in the UK.

Even if the State decided to crack down on alcohol abuse, there are powerful commercial interests involved; strong enough to defy the Government, as they did in 1991 over Sunday trading restrictions.

Those who call for further controls over alcohol, tobacco, gambling and drugs will often be accused of ‘nannying’, though the State Nanny is one that has been making it easy for her charges to get the things that harm them, and who gets backhanders from the suppliers; a Satananny, if you will.

Libertarians dislike having anyone say no to them; the line starts behind me on that one, but let’s have no illusions about our supposed complete rationality and freedom of the will: there’s not that many Buddhas in the world. Jack London ended his 1913 book with a personal commitment to a more measured approach to alcohol:

No, I decided; I shall take my drink on occasion. With all the books on my shelves, with all the thoughts of the thinkers shaded by my particular temperament, I decided coolly and deliberately that I should continue to do what I had been trained to want to do. I would drink—but oh, more skilfully, more discreetly, than ever before.

He didn’t live past 40.

We may not get booze and fags back into Pandora’s box, but maybe we can do more about the plague of gambling - so heavily advertised on TV at the moment - and think twice about liberalising drug laws.

Archie vs the NHS

I republish below a post from my Substack account (June 15.) Tragically the boy, Archie Battersbee, died yesterday after his life support was switched off, against his mother's will. Her request to move him to a hospice was also denied and permission to take the legal case further refused by the Court:

Three judges, sitting at the court of appeal in central London, ruled on Monday that the decision of a high court judge to reject the plea by the parents of Archie Battersbee for him to be allowed to die a “natural” death had been based on the child’s best interests.

What we suspect it's really about: resources, especially money.

Tiger mothers

... or should they just be sensible and listen to experts?

A British boy currently lies comatose in hospital; doctors say there is ‘no brain activity’ and a High Court judge has ruled that he can be taken off life support. Yet his mother says he has gripped her hand; she believes he is ‘still there’ and she will fight on.

Intensive care is very expensive and so there can be a financial element in medical professionals’ judgment that there is no point in continuing. They may or may not be right in this case; yet ‘miracles’ happen.

Lady Anne Glenconner’s autobiography ‘Lady In Waiting’ (chapters 14 & 15) gives reason to hope against hope. In 1987 she learned that her 19-year-old son Christopher had had a motorcycle accident (helmetless) in Belize; after emergency surgery he was flown to Miami in a deep coma. Fortunately she had bought travel insurance for him and he was taken on to London in a private plane, still unconscious and on life support.

After Christopher had been unresponsive for weeks in the Wellington Hospital a doctor with long experience in this field told Lady Anne:

‘Christopher will be a vegetable all his life. There is no hope of recovery for him. If I were you I would forget about him improving and get on with your life.’

There are two kinds of explanation. One is to enable you to understand a phenomenon; the other is to explain it away, preferring it not to be real. I’m no preacher - I doubt everything; but this is what Lady Anne says and I believe she is being truthful:

Already religious, she had begun engaging with God and praying hard. At the point of giving up she heard of a Christian healer in Scotland, a Mrs Black, and got help from her by telephone. Then Mrs Black came down several times to work on Christopher in person. Lady Anne thought she could see tiny improvements, but she told Mrs Black she herself was exhausted. Back in Scotland, Mrs Black told her to prepare for a session next morning:

‘Suddenly, to my amazement, I felt as if champagne was flowing through my veins. I felt invigorated. It’s the only time in my life when anything like that has happened to me.’

With renewed energy and commitment she sought out a doctor whose own son had been in a coma; he stressed the importance of doing things with the patient and engaging all five senses. Christopher would need to be stimulated ‘fifteen minutes in every hour every day for weeks.’

Lady Anne set up a rota with the help of friends, to use the doctor’s ‘coma kit’ - smells, music, singing, talking, reading aloud, brushing Christopher’s skin with different textures and temperatures.

‘We even persuaded the nurses to let us take Christopher out of bed [still wired up to many machines] and nurse him on the floor so I could cradle him: I was sure that if he could feel my heartbeat it would have a positive effect on him.’

The breakthrough came when after Christopher had come off the ventilator a friend arrived with a baby’s bottle. A skeptical nurse let them try and eyes still closed, Christopher started to suck. Eventually, after four months in a coma, he woke up, and began rehabilitation.

If Lady Anne hadn’t accepted Mrs Black’s help, she would very likely have followed the hospital doctor’s advice and given up, sensibly.

There’s the choice.