There is No Average
Your home is shelter.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Ernest Hemingway, “The Sun Also Rises”
Gary Webb
“I had a grand total of one story spiked during my entire reporting career. That's it. One. (And in retrospect it wasn't a very important story either.) Moreover, I had complete freedom to pick my own shots, a freedom my editors wholeheartedly encouraged since it relieved them of the burden of coming up with story ideas. I wrote my stories the way I wanted to write them, without anyone looking over my shoulder or steering me in a certain direction. After the lawyers and editors went over them and satisfied themselves that we had enough facts behind us to stay out of trouble, they printed them, usually on the front page of the Sunday edition, when we had our widest readership.
In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never fired or threatened with dismissal if I kept looking under rocks. I didn't get any death threats that worried me. I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as far as I could tell. It encouraged enterprise. It rewarded muckraking.
And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it.
The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough suppress.”
- Gary Webb, Into The Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press
Then, in 1996, Webb wrote a series of stories for The Mercury News, entitled Dark Alliance, that began this way:
For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.
This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America-and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons.
It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modem history: the union of a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the Uzi-toting "gangstas" of Compton and South Central Los Angeles.
In "Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA," [Terry] Reed writes that he was an intimate of [Barry] Seal's, and says they were both at the center of an extensive, Arkansas-based CIA effort to train pilots for the Nicaraguan contra forces, manufacture and ship thousands of illegal weapons and parts to the contras, and help launder hundreds of millions of dollars in agency funds…
Then-Gov. Bill Clinton even has a cameo role or two, as do many of the people in his circle, including the Rose firm and former associate attorney general Webster Hubbell. In one memorable scene in the book, the future president pops into a meeting in an abandoned Army ammunition bunker to complain to North and future U.S. attorney general William P. Barr that he had taken great risks to accommodate the CIA's covert trade and didn't want it to end.
According to the book, the state collected a 10 percent "commission" on all of the CIA's "black money," some of which allegedly was laundered through close Clinton ally and once prominent bond broker Daniel Lasater.
"Like you, I grew up in this business thinking our job really was to tell the public the truth. Maybe that was the mission at one time. Maybe there was that Awakening in the 1970s with Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the CIA scandals, etc.
But something very bad happened to the news media in the 1980s. Part of it was the 'public diplomacy' pressures from the outside. But part of it was the smug, snotty, sophomoric crowd that came to dominate the national media from the inside. These characters fell in love with their power to define reality, not their responsibility to uncover the facts. By the 1990s, the media had become the monster.
I wish it weren't so. All I ever wanted to do was report and write interesting stories—while getting paid for it. But that really isn't possible anymore and there's no use crying over it.
Hang in there. You're not alone."
- Bob Parry, AP reporter who first broke the Contra drug story in 1985, in a note to Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
This woman is Katherine Roberts Maher, the chief executive officer and president of the National Public Radio since March 2024. She’s not fit to tie Gary Webb’s shoes:
"One of the questions I have been asked many times since this story broke is this: Now that the facts are out there, what can we do? My answer, depressing and cynical as it may be, is always the same. Not much." - Gary Webb, Dark Alliance
The Fiscal Impulse on Speed
“…how stimulative these deficits are! Once Trump started talking about his tax proposal, I said to myself, "This is game over. That's it. The economy is going to light up." I mean, we're talking - you know…this was by no stretch a reduction of the fiscal impulse. In fact, it was the fiscal impulse on speed!”
David Cervantes, Pinebrook Capital (on Twitter)
The term ‘Uniparty’ is right, at least on fiscal probity.
Everyone says they pay too much in taxes. I have paid enough taxes that I used to joke that they should name an aircraft carrier after me.
Nobody likes taxes.
But everybody sure loves to spend!
If more government debt is a good thing, why not just spend $100 trillion? I’m sure someday we will.
As Lacy Hunt reminded us last year,
“For every 1% increase in government size, you lose about one-tenth of 1% of your growth in the standard of living.”
Does Fiscal Stimulus Stimulate?
Here is Rob Arnott’s downloadable research paper: Does Fiscal Stimulus Stimulate?
“Excessive public spending’s unintended consequence is slower economic growth.”
The use of words like “stimulus,” “fiscal impulse,” “monetary stimulus,” and “government investment” in relation to government policy implies an incurious acceptance of government spending as a source of economic revival and even long-term growth. But according to our analysis, when government spending exceeds approximately 20% of GDP, it tends to hinder rather than help economic growth.
What’s more, increasing public debt can also stifle growth. Since the GFC in 2008, in particular, public debt accumulation has shifted into ever higher gears. This trend is likely to persist in the years ahead as developed countries spend more to support their aging populations.
This study can help reframe the discussion around government spending and debt. Excessive public spending’s unintended consequence—slower economic growth—must be part of the dialogue. Most of us would love government to do more for us. But if doing more for us means slower economic growth and less prosperity for our children, we might very well change our view. Let’s have that conversation.
An overview of everything that went wrong with economics:
Nice trick how economists like Fischer, Krugman, Bernanke, Yellen & Summers have been able to turn providing intellectual cover for a Cantillon Effect-on-steroids system - that created the greatest wealth divide in U.S. history - into their own generational wealth, provided by the super-rich!
“I have the nausea in my gut just like ‘08.”
I’ve had a nice influx of new paid subscribers lately. Thank you, it’s appreciated. As you can see above, the free people still get a lot of content - whether they want it or not - but all the good stuff is below the fold: more Rob Arnott, Mike Green, CRE with Sean Kelly-Rand, Melody Wright, Harley Bassman, Bens Bernanke and Hunt, and Waldo the Ostrich.
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