A Unique Investment Opportunity

A guy brought a prospectus the other day. The administration is going public. If we invest now, we get a share in the profits.

“I didn’t know there were profits,” I said. “The U.S. government is in hock already, with Congressfolk screaming about the debt.

“Yeah, but only suckers pay taxes. We find ways to help rich folks and oil companies avoid taxes and regulations, and they pay well. Remember Trump’s campaign meeting with the oil companies, explaining all the ways he could help them and saying they should contribute billions to his campaign?”

“Yeah, but look how incompetent all his appointees are! Pete Hegseth?

“The beauty is, incompetence is irrelevant. The people paying us the money tell us what they need. His two biggest inauguration contributors were JBS, the Brazilian company that owns Pilgrim’s Pride chicken processor and Ripple, those cryptocurrency guys, $5 million each. JBS, a Brazilian company, had been trying for years to procure governmental approval for a U.S. stock listing. A few months in, JBS finally gets government approval for its stock listing, and the SEC settles its long-running lawsuit against Ripple, which included personal liability for its top managers, and their coins soar.”

“I’d heard that the inaugural fundraising game brought in a quarter of a billion dollars – about equal to the sum of the last four inaugurations.”

“Pardons are great, too.”

“Yeah, Mr. Trump must be really merciful and caring. He’s issued an incredible number of pardons.”

“Not just the patriots he conned into invading the Capitol four years ago, beating up Capitol police and scaring Congress and Pence half to death. It’s real people with real bank accounts. He released that nursing home big shot who stole more than $10 million, including $7 million in withheld payroll taxes, as a “million dollar favor” to the prisoner’s mother after she attended a $1 million-a-plate Trump fundraiser and raised other money. Or the reality TV couple convicted on $36 million in bank fraud and tax evasion, but their daughter spoke at the Convention.

“Aren’t people supposed to show some remorse?”

“Dumb-ass! That’s for parole hearings. Pardon means you’re good to go. There’s no law requiring a reason.”

“What if Trump supporters ask questions?”

“They don’t. First of all, they’re so excited that he doesn’t take a salary?”

“What is the salary?”

“$400K.”

“Chump change!” I agreed.

“There are so many ways to monetize the presidency! Not just Bibles, commemorative coins and medals, and such, but foreign entities dropped $750,000 a his hotels last term, and political groups and government agencies spent $160 million at his businesses. He’s made billions of dollars from Trump Truth Social. Smith Social would have gone bankrupt. And the United Arab Emirates invested $2 billion into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company just before Trump sent the UAE a huge shipment of AI Chips.”

“Wow!”

“Hell, we’ve got folks paying $5 million for a few minutes alone with him. Or $2mill for a seat at a candlelight dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Find a few more of those folks, you could pick up a commission, not just your shareholder profit! Or a few more rich folks who need someone out of jail.”

“It sounds great! But one last question. So many Trump schemes went bankrupt. Should that worry me?”

“Hell, no! He was younger then – and casinos are a gamble, but this Presidency deal is solid!”

                                                          – 30 --

 [A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station archives.]

 

Faint Hopes for the Supreme Court?

Is Amy Coney Barrett reminding us that, with Supreme Court justices, what you see is not always what you get, because some appointees are more than they seem, or grow in the job?

We progressives dismissed Barrett as a rabid anti-abortion advocate. At least she had adopted children, two from Haiti. She is definitely conservative, but her “conservative” votes have decreased from near 80% of cases to below 60%. Trump’s attacks on the courts and constitution push her away. She and Chief Justice Roberts seem the slim hopes that the Court might check Trump’s dictatorial behavior.

Critics called California Governor Earl Warren “a politician, not a jurist.” He’d been a judge for a year at some point. But he became one of the most effective and impactful chief justices in history, perhaps ranking behind only John Marshall. The Warren Court issued Brown v. Board of Education, (integrating schools), Reynolds v. Sims (one person, one vote), and criminal procedure classics such as Miranda and Gideon.

Hugo Black transcended his youth, which included Ku Klux Klan membership (de riguer for a young Alabama lawyer, he claimed) and zero judicial experience to become a steadfast guardian of civil liberties for decades. Folks belittled New Hampshire’s David Souter as “the stealth judge,” guessing he was a nobody who would at least prove reliably conservative; but his commitment to precedent and careful jurisprudence eventually made him a centrist to liberal justice, respected for his integrity and clear thinking.

Many disrespected Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female justice, for being a woman and a westerner, with just state court judicial experience. (O’Connor grew up on a ranch just across the Arizona line, and her mentor was lively young lawyer E. Forrest Sanders, later a crusty old district judge here and a great friend of mine.) She became a fine justice.

Even the great Chief Justice John Marshall (1801-1835), could qualify. He’s revered, partly for establishing more clearly federal supremacy and the Court’s power to invalidate Presidential or Congressional actions that violate the Constitution. But Marshall, when appointed, was a political operative and mostly self-taught lawyer. (Few realize that the Court was initially viewed as so trivial that justices often took months getting to New York to serve. The first chief justice, John Jay, cared more about diplomatic work and governing New York than about his judicial sideline.

I’m not nominating Barrett for some judicial hall of fame. She was complicit in such embarrassments as the Trump “presidential immunity” idiocy. (Her self-proclaimed “originalism” - the backward view that the Constitution is less a living document than a historical one to be interpreted as its authors would have – must have been in Tahiti, because the writers of the Constitution feared above all any king, and rejected any idea of such immunity.) Trump appointed her to overturn Roe v Wade. Although she voted to axe Roe, in the initial secret vote on whether or not to hear the case, she voted no.

She has shown some judicial independence, as well as the kind of diligence and careful legal thinking to write concurrences. Concurrences say, “I agree with this result, but for these different reasons.” Concurrences matter, when lawyers and lower-court judges try to discern how a 5-4 Supreme Court precedent applies to the somewhat different facts of other cases. They also express enhanced respect for law.

Too, beggars can’t be choosers – and we civil libertarians are beggars just now.

                                                    – 30 –

   

[The above column appeared Sunday, 22 June, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper's website on the newspaper’s website and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station archives.]

         

Understanding Why Folks Kill Each Other

 I’ve long believed that increasing the sentence for homicide can’t cut the murder rate because 90% of people who kill do so when they’re too damned angry, jealous, scared, drunk, or high to think straight. Acting under irresistible impulse, they ain’t stopping to think. Or can’t.

The book, Unforgiving Places, by Jens Ludwig, makes this point vividly. Our legislators and those who yammer at them about crime should read it, or at least Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on it, as should law enforcement officials.

The book recounts as an example a 2023 murder. A woman, leaving her teen aged son in the car, goes into a cheap fast-food place and places her order. This big guy behinds her keeps telling her to hurry up. He warns that if she says another word he’ll punch her. She says something to her son, who’s now in the doorway behind the guy. The guy slugs her. Twice. Her shocked 14-year-old son shoots the man, then chases him outside and kills him.

The big guy knew (and assumed she knew) that, in order to move fast, that place didn’t take special orders. Hers was one. So he thought she was selfishly holding everyone up, and then disrespecting him for calling her on it. She thought he was just a jerk. Her son, seeing Mom get punched, wasn’t calculating the penalty for murder.

We each have two ways of thinking.

Criminologists distinguish between instrumental violence (shooting a bank guard to facilitate a robbery) and expressive violence (expressing my rage or jealousy with fists or pistol). Almost all murders are expressive, so laws designed to minimize instrumental murders won’t much change the overall murder rate.

Cops must know this; but criminal laws are written as if that guy in the fast-food joint is as rational as Warren Buffett analyzing all the facts and deciding rationally whether or not to buy a failing business. No. Mostly, people do things on impulses, out of anger or jealousy or because a sudden unexpected opportunity arises to steal some stuff or break things. Consider the recent fatal shootings in Young Park. No one was laying for anyone. No one gained anything. Just happened.

A Chicago program called Becoming a Man teaches teenagers how to handle potentially volatile encounters. In a large randomized trial, Ludwig found that at-risk students who had participated in BAM got arrested for violent crimes 50% less than their peers who hadn’t taken the course. San Francisco’s RSVP program similarly reduced recidivism in violence-prone prisoners, and Boston’s “Operation Ceasefire” (aka the Boston Miracle) achieved a 63% reduction in youth homicides within two years.

Our governor and legislators should contemplate that. It makes perfect sense, too. Sudden moments of anger or fear are tough. Some folks’ lives make those way tougher. If you can get their ears, and enhance both their ability and their motivation to forego violence, some of them will succeed in that when pushed.

Here’s another fact: in dangerous Philadelphia neighborhoods, a group beautifies vacant lots, clearing weeds, planting a lawn, removing trash. Where nothing else has changed, gun violence crime is down 29%.

Our city is actually doing some good things; but there likely are more good ideas in play out there. It’d help for lawmakers to recognize that most of the “criminals” aren’t our “enemies.” They’re us: fellow humans whose road to a calm adulthood was blocked or twisted more than ours was.

                                           – 30 –

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 8 June, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper’s webiste and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station archives.]

[ The most-recent New Yorker issue has Malcolm Gladwell’s discussion of these matters and Ludwig’s book. I’m a long-time admirer of Gladwell, since reading the New Yorker piece he later expanded to the really interesting book, Blink. I still recommend it. ]

[ One BAM exercise divides young men into pairs. In each, one holds a big ball. The other is told he has 30 seconds to get the ball from the other. Each man struggles to hit the ball or pry the other man’s fingers loose. Afterward, the host asks why no one tried just asking if he could have the ball. The general answer was, “well, he’d think I was a [wimp].” The guy holding the ball, asked what he’d do if asked for the ball, said, “I’d give it to him. It’s just a stupid ball.” ]

This Big, Ugly Bill Has Both Obvious and Hidden Dangers for the U.S.

I’m no financial guy.

But isn’t this insane?

Mr. Trump and his cult are determined to pass a bill that will cost us $3.8 trillion plus interest over the next decade, per the Joint Committee on Taxation.) Moody’s Ratings just downgraded our credit. That’ll likely increase the interest rates we pay. We already pay $1.13 trillion per year interest on that national debt – compared with $997 billion on military (plus $304 billion for veterans), $70 billion on highways, and $ 1.72 trillion on people’s health.

The bill will also cut into most every non-military thing our government does: imprison criminals; help folks get necessary medical treatments; help improve the quality of education; foster scientific research that could help treat cancer, improve our air and water, develop innovations that will help us financially in the foreseeable future, help local governments with disaster relief and law enforcement; inspect food and drugs for purity and safety; and enforce antitrust, consumer fairness, white-collar crime, and other laws.

You’d figure that weakening an already pathetic national financial condition AND endangering people’s health at the same time would be done for some high priority, such as responding to Pearl Harbor, fighting the Climate Crisis, or containining a pandemic. Nope.

We must do it to decrease taxes for our richest people – who, by the way, got incredibly richer during the past year. The biggest owners of the large companies that keep poisoning us and our air, causing a lot of those health problems. (The big, ugly bill will also cut our income from oil leases.)

I’d oppose that budget. Ten million U.S. humans will lose medical coverage.

I was a kid during some of our best financial times, the 1950s. Our tax structure was different, more like other nations have: the top brackets had tax rates of 91% and 88%. Not the 37.5% to which Trump lowered it from 39% in 2017. And we were thriving!

That earlier time reflected some different views. It reflected the fact that folks making exorbitant amounts of money do so using infrastructure we all pay for; and the quaint idea that we were all, including the very rich, part of a common nation.

The Bill is huge. Hidden in it, garnering no headlines as they rush it through, the bill also forbids courts from charging government officials with contempt of court for disobeying court orders. Along with the Supreme Court’s gift to Trump of a presidential immunity our founders would have fought duels to prevent, this paves the way for Mr. Trump to become our first dictator. Our first emperor, if he likes.

Of course, the “patriots” who support this don’t realize it would give equal power to B Sanders or A Occasion-Cortez, if one got elected. Or they are pretty confident that we’ll never again have an election real enough to put in a non-Republican?

Fortunately, the courts will likely point out that our Constitution forbids such chicanery. The Constitution’s words, court precedents, and logic say so. Has Jon Roberts figured out what we should do when Trump and cult say, “Sorry, but we’ll do as we please?”

We will keep having hard times to avoid inconveniencing the billionaires. What’s a few extra dead folks and a few extra hours for each worker, when those folks need better Bentleys and have islands to buy.

Still, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley swears he’ll block folks losing healthcare. I hope so.

                                                                    – 30 --

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 1 June, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper's website and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station archives.]