The Zero Room

This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Stop saying, ‘We take your privacy and security seriously’ — Zach Whittaker at TechCrunch: In my years covering cybersecurity, there’s one variation of the same lie that floats above the rest. “We take your privacy and security seriously.” You might have heard the phrase here and there. It’s a common trope used by companies in the wake of a data breach — either in a “mea culpa” email to their customers or a statement on their website to tell you that they care about your data, even though in the next sentence they all too often admit to misusing or losing it. The truth is, most companies don’t care about the privacy or security of your data. They care about having to explain to their customers that their data was stolen.
• Progressive Democrats Like Elizabeth Warren Want a Higher Minimum Wage That Is Way Too Low — Ted Rall:
  
• Why a market model is destroying the safeguards of the professions — Lisa Herzog in Aeon: In the grip of nostalgia, it’s easy to overlook the dark sides of this old vocational model. On top of the fact that professional jobs were structured around hierarchies of gender and race, laypeople were expected to obey expert judgment without even asking questions. Deference to authority was the norm, and there were few ways of holding professionals to account. […] Against this backdrop, the call for more autonomy, for more ‘choice’, seems hard to resist. This is precisely what happened with the rise of neoliberalism after the 1970s, when the advocates of ‘New Public Management’ promoted the idea that hard-nosed market thinking should be used to structure healthcare, education and other areas that typically belonged to the slow and complicated world of public red tape. In this way, neoliberalism undermined not only public institutions but the very idea of professionalism.
• Democrats Are Afraid Of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Too. And That’s A Good Thing. — Norman Solomon: In the last few days, both Politico and the New York Times have reported that freshman Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has ruffled the feathers of fellow congressional Democrats. Chief among the reasons for the tension? Ocasio-Cortez’s apparent support for progressive primary challenges against centrist Democrats. It’s one of the most significant ideas the young New York congresswoman has brought with her to Washington. That’s because turning the Democratic Party into a truly progressive force will require turning “primary” into a verb. The corporate Democrats who dominate the party’s power structure in Congress should fear losing their seats because they’re out of step with constituents. And Democratic voters should understand that if they want to change the party, the only path to do so is to change the people who represent them. Otherwise, the leverage of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex will continue to hold sway.
• Bernie Sanders could be US president in 2020 – and this is what it means for Israel and the Middle East — Robert Fisk in the Independent: Take a look through his Israel/Palestine CV, and Sanders is clearly neither an aggressive Zionist nor a liberal patsy. He’s a New Deal Democrat, which is how many would judge him. Younger, leftist voters might consider him as a kind of upwardly mobile intellectual, a Chomsky on wheels – even though the great (Jewish) philosopher, activist and linguist said before the last presidential election that he’d vote for Clinton as a frontrunner rather than Sanders in swing states in a final vote to keep Trump out. Much good did that do him. But let’s remember a few more things about Sanders. He’s always supported the “right of Israel to exist” and its right to self-defence, and he’s always condemned Palestinian attacks on Israelis. But he’s also kept away from pro-Israeli Jewish lobby groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and he didn’t restrain himself when he chose to condemn Israel for its illegal colonial project of building homes for Jews and Jews only in the occupied West Bank, nor when Israel has blatantly interfered in US domestic or electoral politics.
• Many Voters Think Trump’s a Self-Made Man. What Happens When You Tell Them Otherwise? — Jared McDonald, David Karol, and Lilliana Mason: The narrative of Trump as self-made is simply false. Throughout his life, the president has downplayed the role his father, real estate developer Fred Trump, played in his success, claiming it was “limited to a small loan of $1 million.” That isn’t true, of course: A comprehensive New York Times investigation last year estimated that over the course of his lifetime, the younger Trump received more than $413 million in today’s dollars from his father. While this exact figure was not known before the Times’ report, it was a matter of record that by the mid-1980s, Trump had been loaned at least $14 million by his father, was loaned at least $3.5 million more in 1990, had borrowed several more million against his inheritance in the 1990s after many of his ventures failed, and had benefited enormously from his father’s political connections and co-signing on loans early in his career as a builder. Of course, someone born into wealth may have great business acumen, and the question of whether Trump is “a great businessman” is a subjective evaluation. The focus of our work, however, is on whether indisputable facts regarding candidate biographies—which are often invisible to voters over the course of a campaign—affect public opinion. It turns out that they do.
• America has never worried about financing its priorities — Brendan Greeley in FT Alphaville [Registrationwalled]: Modern monetary theory is simply a different way of looking at fiscal policy, a way of describing what the real-world constraints on spending look like. It is in fact very close to how people in Washington, D.C. already approach spending. Again, we're not talking about what they say. Rather, we're talking about what they do. […] Like modern monetary theorists, Congress already appropriates away until it reaches real-world restraints on how much it can spend. It just hasn't reached any for almost the last two decades. When Washington wants something — to fight a war, to cut taxes — it appropriates. And so arguments about balancing budgets aren't actually about constraints. They're about priorities. Important programs get appropriations, full stop. Unimportant programs need to be paid for with taxes. Or, in Washington: "We can't afford that" actually just means "I don't think that's very important."
• Tom Toles:
  
• With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans Finally Have a Politician Who Agrees With Them About Taxes — Jon Schwarz at the Intercept: Two prominent political scientists, Martin Gilens at the University of California, Los Angeles and Benjamin Page at Northwestern University, have carefully studied the U.S. political system and demonstrated with charts and tables what most of us believe intuitively: If you don’t have money, you don’t matter. Or as Gilens and Page put it, “Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all. By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy.” The last 40 years of U.S. tax policy have been the most striking demonstration imaginable of this assertion. Americans have never, in living memory, been averse to higher taxes on the rich. Nonetheless, the top marginal tax rate for the federal income tax plunged during the Reagan administration, from 70 percent to 28 percent, and has since only inched back up to 37 percent.

I don't eat jam. My wife doesn't eat jam. Kitty doesn't eat jam. The dog doesn't eat jam. Despite that there is always a jar of jam in the fridge, but I have never seen jam go mouldy. Tomato paste, my heavens yes, as soon as you take your eyes off it. Jam never.

Eventually somebody decides they're sick of moving that fecking jar of jam whenever they're looking for a jar of something they actually want, and bins it. Yet soon enough somebody thinks they want jam, when actually they crave the sweet release of death, or something, or we're expecting visitors ("Oh! Do we have jam? They'll probably want jam."), and a jar is purchased, opened, quickly closed, and refrigerated as per the label's instructions.

Perhaps Theresa May is just being overly literal about the instructions, and refrigerating after opening without actually reading between the lines and closing it also. Still, aren't we all just yesterday's jam?

As I am pushing, or perhaps being shoved towards, fifty years of age, I find myself becoming compulsively autobiographic because I am starting to properly appreciate the sweep of history in those fifty years, and perhaps more so in the fifty previous years.

By 1971, the year I was born, what started in the 50s as a covert attempt by the #US and allies to prop up a French colonial holding had turned into a purely punitive expedition, on an unimaginable scale, directed against the civilian population of three countries. Half a century later, the failure to establish client dictatorships in Afghanistan and Iraq has normalised a lawless, perpetual free fire zone from Afghan/Pakistan border region to the middle east and northern Africa, and now attention is turning back to Latin America after a period of neglect which, to the dismay of such esteemed humanitarians as John Bolton and Elliott Abrams, allowed the growth of democracy to infect that region "down there", as Reagan so memorably called it. The neocons have a new itch they need to scratch.

The insight of Howard Zinn, a historian who lived history as astutely as he analysed it, is as relevant as ever.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Wondermark #1443; In which All Knowledge is Equal — David Malki !:
  
• Trump Models His War on Bank Regulators on Bill Clinton and W’s Disastrous Wars — Bill Black at New Economic Perspectives: Bill Clinton’s euphemism for his war on effective regulation was “Reinventing Government.” Clinton appointed VP Al Gore to lead the assault. (Clinton and Gore are “New Democrat” leaders – the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.) Gore decided he needed to choose an anti-regulator to conduct the day-to-day leadership. We know from Bob Stone’s memoir the sole substantive advice he gave Gore in their first meeting that caused Gore to appoint him as that leader. “Do not ‘waste one second going after waste, fraud, and abuse.’” Elite insider fraud is, historically, the leading cause of bank losses and failures, so Stone’s advice was sure to lead to devastating financial crises. It is telling that it was the fact that Stone gave obviously idiotic advice to Gore that led him to select Stone as the field commander of Clinton and Gore’s war on effective regulation.
• The US Wants to Bring Back the Shah of Iran — David William Pear at the Greanville Post provides illuminating context for those unfamiliar with the backstory: Since Iran was a developing democracy, an excuse had to be found for a US intervention. Churchill accused Mossadegh of being a communist. There was no evidence that he was. Mossadegh was an anti-colonial nationalist who cared about the welfare of the Iranian people, and that was all the evidence that Eisenhower needed. Mossadegh had to be punished for standing up to the British and demanding Iran’s natural resources for the benefit of the Iranian people. The winners from the coup were the US and the timid Shah who had ran from his own people. The US would teach him how to have a backbone. He turned out to be a good student, and with the support of the US he turned Iran into a totalitarian police state and ruled by terror. The Shah got US protection from his own people and from foreign enemies. The US looked the other way from the Shah’s corruption of conspicuous consumption, stuffing dollars in foreign bank accounts and lining his own pockets, and those of his cronies. The US got a big piece of the Iran oil industry, and Iran gave the US a strategically important location for a military presence. As for the people of Iran, they continued to live in abject poverty and illiteracy.
• Why Trump’s Private Transactions are Terrifying — Robert Reich: After two years of Trump we may have overlooked the essence of his insanity: His brain sees only private interests transacting. It doesn’t comprehend the public interest. Private transactions can’t be wrong or immoral because, by definition, they require that every party to them be satisfied. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a deal. Viewed this way, everything else falls into place. For example, absent a public interest, there can’t be conflicts of interest.
• Beto, We Hardly Knew Ye — Norman Solomon: Beto O’Rourke’s actual political record deserves scrutiny, and it’s not what progressives might expect from the overheated adulation that has sent his presidential balloon aloft. Some pointed reporting and critiques this month may have begun a process of bringing Beto fantasies down to earth.
• Pulling Rabbits Out of Hats — J. W. Mason in Jacobin: Left critics often imagine economics as an effort to understand reality that’s gotten hopelessly confused, or as a systematic effort to uphold capitalist ideology. But both of these claims are, in a way, too kind — they assume that economic theory is “about” the real world in the first place. Better to think of it as a self-contained art form, whose apparent connections to economic phenomena are the results of a confusing overlap in vocabulary. Think about chess and medieval history: the statement that “queens are most effective when supported by strong bishops” might be reasonable in both domains, but its application in the one case will tell you nothing about its application in the other.
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Crusher of Sacred Cows — Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: There’s a reason aides try to keep their bosses away from microphones, particularly when there’s a potential for a question of SAT-or-higher level difficulty in the interview. But the subject elected officials have the most trouble staying away from is each other. We’ve seen this a lot in recent weeks with the ongoing freakout over newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Lest anyone think any of the above applies to “AOC,” who’s also had a lot to say since arriving in Washington, remember: she won in spite of the party and big donors, not because of them. That doesn’t make anything she says inherently more or less correct. But it changes the dynamic a bit. All of AOC’s supporters sent her to Washington precisely to make noise. There isn’t a cabal of key donors standing behind her, cringing every time she talks about the Pentagon budget. She is there to be a pain in the ass, and it’s working. Virtually the entire spectrum of Washington officialdom has responded to her with horror and anguish.
• 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism — John Naughton interviews Shoshana Zuboff for the Guardian: Surveillance capitalism is no more limited to advertising than mass production was limited to the fabrication of the Ford Model T. It quickly became the default model for capital accumulation in Silicon Valley, embraced by nearly every startup and app. And it was a Google executive – Sheryl Sandberg – who played the role of Typhoid Mary, bringing surveillance capitalism from Google to Facebook, when she signed on as Mark Zuckerberg’s number two in 2008. By now it’s no longer restricted to individual companies or even to the internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, birthing whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market-makers, and market players. Nearly every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a surveillance economy.
• Why divine immanence mattered for the Civil Rights struggle — Vaneesa Cook in Aeon: The concept of divine immanence became less theoretical once King learned about the activism of Mahatma Gandhi. Though Gandhi was not a Christian, his method of satyagraha, meaning ‘truth-force’ or, as King put it, ‘soul force’, fascinated King. Gandhi challenged the British empire by forcing them to confront their Indian subjects as fellow humans, deserving fair treatment. He did so without firing a shot. From Gandhi’s example, King saw how humans practising God’s love, particularly through nonviolence and disciplined self-comportment, could unleash the power of God’s love in the world. He acknowledged Gandhi’s method as ‘the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change’ during the Montgomery bus boycott. In Selma, Alabama and in Memphis, Tennessee, and throughout the US South, King continued to utilise Gandhian strategies of direct action throughout his campaign against American racism. For King, in short, divine immanence was a call to action. ‘All humanity is involved in a single process,’ he contended, working in concert with God’s Holy Spirit, the ultimate ‘community creating reality that moves through history.’ God and mankind, in other words, moved together. From the perspective of theological doctrine, King had reconciled immanence and transcendence.
• Trump vs Mattis: Watch out when men of war come to the rescue — Robert Fisk in the Independent: […] the dignified, cold and fastidious de Gaulle would never have lent himself to the rant Mattis embarked upon in San Diego in 2005: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with you, I like brawling.” […] But now he has entered a new pantheon. Suddenly the man of war, the US marine general who found it “a hell of a lot of fun” to shoot Afghan misogynists and liked “brawling”, has become a peacemaker. He was the restraining hand tugging at the sleeve of the insane Trump, the one man who could stop Nero burning Rome. He was “the sanest of Trump’s national security team”, according to Paul Waldman in The Washington Post. He was “an island of security”, announced Amos Harel in Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
• Wondermark #1444; In which Kinship is formed — David Malki !:
  
  I would not normally post two consecutive comics by the same author, for fear of accusations of leeching, but I just had to in this case. To assuage my guilt, the reader — i.e. Jeff, my imaginary friend — is encouraged to go to the Wondermark site to enjoy more of this splendidness, and then go buy some merch which I personally can't afford.