The "Noble Lie" on Public Spending and Inflation
[I suck at organising information. I've tried all sorts of fixes for this, both off-the-shelf and DIY. So now I'm going to just use tagged blog posts to organise things, so I can suck at this in public. No need to thank me.]
Introduction
Paul Samuelson, 1995
I think there is an element of truth in the view that the superstition that the budget must be balanced at all times [is necessary]. Once it is debunked [that] takes away one of the bulwarks that every society must have against expenditure out of control. There must be discipline in the allocation of resources or you will have anarchistic chaos and inefficiency. And one of the functions of old fashioned religion was to scare people by sometimes what might be regarded as myths into behaving in a way that the long-run civilized life requires. We have taken away a belief in the intrinsic necessity of balancing the budget if not in every year, [then] in every short period of time. If Prime Minister Gladstone came back to life he would say “uh, oh what you have done” and James Buchanan argues in those terms. I have to say that I see merit in that view.
Martin Wolf, 2020
In my view, [MMT] is right and wrong. It is right, because there is no simple budget constraint. It is wrong, because it will prove impossible to manage an economy sensibly once politicians believe there is no budget constraint.
Ross Gittins, 2020
But once demand was growing faster than the supply of real resources, any further money you created would simply cause inflation. This is what’s really worrying the opponents of MMT (and me). If you let the politicians off the leash to spend as much as they liked up to a point, how would you ever get them to stop once that point was reached?
We're edging towards a big change in how the economy is managed — Ross Gittins
Sunday, 13 September 2020 - 9:33am
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Kansas Should Go F--- Itself — Matt Taibbi review's Thomas Frank's latest book:
The average blue-state media consumer by 2020 has ingested so much propaganda about Trump (and Sanders, for that matter) that he or she will be almost immune to the damning narratives in this book. Protesting, “But Trump is a racist,” they won’t see the real point – that these furious propaganda campaigns that have been repeated almost word for word dating back to the 1890s are aimed at voters, not politicians. In the eighties and nineties, TV producers and newspaper editors established the ironclad rule of never showing audiences pictures of urban poverty, unless it was being chased by cops. In the 2010s the press began to cartoonize the “white working class” in a distantly similar way. This began before Trump. As Bernie Sanders told Rolling Stone after the 2016 election, when the small-town American saw himself or herself on TV, it was always “a caricature. Some idiot. Or maybe some criminal, some white working-class guy who has just stabbed three people.” These caricatures drove a lot of voters toward Trump, especially when he began telling enormous crowds that the lying media was full of liars who lied about everything.
- Via Bruce Sterling:
- Starbucks, monetary superpower — JP Koning:
I don't go to Starbucks very often, so I only recently learnt that the company has succeeded in getting many of its customers to stop using cash and debit/credit cards to buy coffee. Instead, they are using Starbucks's own payments option. […] Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer's wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Starbucks Mobile App. It amounts to ~6% of all of the company's liabilities. This is a pretty incredible number. Stored value card liabilities are the money that you, oh loyal Starbucks customer, use to buy coffee. What you might not realize is that these balances simultaneously function as a loan to Starbucks. Starbucks doesn't pay any interest on balances held in the Starbucks app or gift cards. You, the loyal customer, are providing the company with free debt.
- Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
- The Crowding-Out Myth — Robert Skidelsky at Project Syndicate:
But the crowding-out argument is wrong both theoretically and empirically. First, it assumes that all resources in an economy are fully employed. In fact, most market economies normally have underemployment or spare capacity, meaning that public investment can “crowd in” resources that otherwise would be idle. This was John Maynard Keynes’s key argument, and it cannot be stressed often enough. And the superior efficiency of a boom-and-bust private investment system dominated by financial oligarchs is far from obvious. Second, the state has in practice always played a leading role in allocating capital, either through direct investments of its own (including most nineteenth-century railway-building), or by deliberately encouraging certain types of private investment. For example, Toyota, which started out as a textile-machinery manufacturer, became a leading global automobile producer from the early 1960s onward with the help of tariff protection and state subsidies. Nor did Silicon Valley succeed because the state got out of the way of risk-taking venture capitalists and garage investors.
- Tom the Dancing Bug— by Ruben Bolling:
- The big Apple — John Quiggin in Inside Story:
The protocols and languages that make the internet possible are a public good, created by collaborative effort and made freely available. The information on the internet is generated by households, businesses and governments using these protocols. Without these public goods, Google would be worthless. But because advertising can be attached to search results, ownership of a search engine is immensely profitable. Similarly, Facebook’s value is derived entirely from the contributions of its users. Apple and Amazon are more like traditional businesses, but increasingly rely on internet services for their profits. Thus, a network created in the public sector has become the underlying infrastructure for private monopolies.
- Dependency — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
- Corporate Dems Want You To Shut Up While They Get Loud — David Sirota:
The demand to shut up is only being aimed at the progressive base of the party, while the corporate wing floods the zone with rhetoric that could demobilize voters. Indeed, at the very moment many good progressives are blunting their criticism and making clear that defeating Trump is of utmost importance, Corporate Democrats aren’t being asked to wait or hold their tongues. In fact, they are doing the opposite: Rahm Emanuel — who has been advising Biden — just went on television to show that the corporate wing of the party is intent on using the stretch run of the Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime™ not to doggedly focus on actually winning the election, but to instead try to predetermine post-election policy outcomes. […] “Two things I would say if I was advising an administration,” said Emanuel, who left the Chicago mayoralty in disgrace after his city officials suppressed a video of the police murder of a teenager. “One is no there’s no new Green Deal, there’s no Medicare For All, probably the single two topics that were discussed the most. That’s not even in the platform.”
- #1215; One in Hole — Wondermark by David Malki !:
Sunday, 6 September 2020 - 5:44pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Amazon Drivers Are Hanging Smartphones in Trees to Get More Work — Spencer Soper in Bloomberg:
A strange phenomenon has emerged near Amazon.com Inc. delivery stations and Whole Foods stores in the Chicago suburbs: smartphones dangling from trees. Contract delivery drivers are putting them there to get a jump on rivals seeking orders, according to people familiar with the matter. Someone places several devices in a tree located close to the station where deliveries originate. Drivers in on the plot then sync their own phones with the ones in the tree and wait nearby for an order pickup. The reason for the odd placement, according to experts and people with direct knowledge of Amazon’s operations, is to take advantage of the handsets’ proximity to the station, combined with software that constantly monitors Amazon’s dispatch network, to get a split-second jump on competing drivers. That drivers resort to such extreme methods is emblematic of the ferocious competition for work in a pandemic-ravaged U.S. economy suffering from double-digit unemployment. Much the way milliseconds can mean millions to hedge funds using robotraders, a smartphone perched in a tree can be the key to getting a $15 delivery route before someone else.
- How an “Act of God” Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The U.S. Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy — Michael Hudson in Naked Capitalism:
Western civilization distinguishes itself from its Near Eastern predecessors in the way it has responded to “acts of God” that disrupt the means of support and leave debts in their wake. The United States has taken the lead in rejecting the path by which China, and even social democratic European nations have prevented the coronavirus from causing widespread insolvency and polarizing their economies. The U.S. coronavirus lockdown is turning rent and debt arrears into an opportunity to impoverish the indebted economy and transfer mortgaged property and its income to creditors. There is no inherent material need for this fate to occur. But it seems so natural and even inevitable that, as Margaret Thatcher would say, There Is No Alternative. But of course there is, and always has been. However, resilience in the face of economic disruption always has required a central authority to override “market forces” to restore economic balance from “above.”
- Which Political Animal Are You? — Ted Rall:
- Gender Is What You Make of It — Charles King in Nautilus:
The world [Margaret] Mead knew best—the United States in the interwar years—had selected a thing it called sex to be the container in which an individual’s essential self resided. Biological women and men were said to have basic qualities that everyone in the culture could describe fluently. Boldness, aggressiveness, and dominance got catalogued as male. Gentleness, motherliness, and creativity got catalogued as female. But no one in Mead’s society associated being big-eared or green-eyed with inherent traits of character. Claiming that people with protruding ears were naturally weak-willed, for example, would seem plain silly. Her culture had evolved in such a way that being female or male was a basic, binary, and deeply meaningful way of classifying reality. Having prominent ears or green eyes wasn’t.
- The case against American truck bloat — Ryan Cooper in the Week:
This behemoth design trend — particularly the very tall, square front end seen in so many SUVs and trucks today — is both pointless and dangerous. Manufacturers have known for years that this style of vehicle is much more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, yet they keep making them bigger, taller, and heavier. Trucks and SUVs now make up fully 70 percent of all new cars sold in the U.S. Their bloated design is killing people, especially pedestrians. When I made this observation on Twitter (in somewhat hyperbolic fashion), conservatives got steamed. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) accused me of being "afraid" of pickups. For the rest of the day, I got to enjoy good old conservative facts and reasoned debate: sexist and homophobic slurs, lurid fantasies about vehicular homicide, and repeated assertions that I drive a Prius — which appears to be the automotive equivalent of soy in the conservative mind palace.
- Schools Beat Earlier Plagues With Outdoor Classes. We Should, Too. — Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times:
In the early years of the 20th century, tuberculosis ravaged American cities, taking a particular and often fatal toll on the poor and the young. In 1907, two Rhode Island doctors, Mary Packard and Ellen Stone, had an idea for mitigating transmission among children. Following education trends in Germany, they proposed the creation of an open-air schoolroom. Within a matter of months, the floor of an empty brick building in Providence was converted into a space with ceiling-height windows on every side, kept open at nearly all times. The subsequent New England winter was especially unforgiving, but children stayed warm in wearable blankets known as “Eskimo sitting bags” and with heated soapstones placed at their feet. The experiment was a success by nearly every measure — none of the children got sick. Within two years there were 65 open-air schools around the country either set up along the lines of the Providence model or simply held outside. In New York, the private school Horace Mann conducted classes on the roof; another school in the city took shape on an abandoned ferry.
- You are the box. — Phil Are Go!:
- Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’ — Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic:
On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.
- The Trump Era Sucks and Needs to Be Over — Matt Taibbi:
Donald Trump is so unlike most people, and so especially unlike anyone raised under a conventional moral framework, that he’s perpetually misdiagnosed. The words we see slapped on him most often, like “fascist” and “authoritarian,” nowhere near describe what he really is, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s been proven across four years that Trump lacks the attention span or ambition required to implement a true dictatorial regime. He might not have a moral problem with the idea, but two minutes into the plan he’d leave the room, phone in hand, to throw on a robe and watch himself on Fox and Friends over a cheeseburger. The elite misread of Trump is egregious because he’s an easily familiar type to the rest of America. We’re a sales culture and Trump is a salesman. Moreover he’s not just any salesman; he might be the greatest salesman ever, considering the quality of the product, i.e. himself. He’s up to his eyes in balls, and the parts of the brain that hold most people back from selling schlock online degrees or tchotchkes door-to-door are absent. He has no shame, will say anything, and experiences morality the way the rest of us deal with indigestion.
Sunday, 30 August 2020 - 2:21pm
This week, I have been mostly reading these comics:
- Via Bruce Sterling:
- Green ban saves heritage and Sydney Powerhouse — Emily Thompson at Solidarity Online:
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has backflipped over the move of the Ultimo Powerhouse Museum to Parramatta, announcing plans for a museum on both sites. After ongoing community opposition, the last straw was a NSW CFMEU construction union green ban against the demolition of heritage buildings in Parramatta to make way for the Powerhouse. This means the historic Willow Grove, a former maternity hospital, and St Georges Terrace, a row of housing terraces, will be protected. Darren Greenfield, the union’s secretary, said, “This is the first Green Ban the CFMEU has put in place since the recent passing of Jack Mundey who inspired a generation of unionists and community activists to fight for our shared built, cultural, and environmental heritage.” In recent years union green bans have helped save the Bondi Beach Pavilion, and boosted the fight to preserve The Rocks’ iconic brutalist Sirius building.
- Dinosaur Comics — by Ryan North:
- Murdoch’s Long Shadow — Sara Badawi in Tribbune:
This week Hacked Off, the campaign for a free and accountable press, has published research sourced from the government’s own data, that shows a disturbing closeness between Murdoch’s press empire and Boris Johnson. Among the findings is the extraordinary revelation that Rupert Murdoch personally met with the government at least three times in Johnson’s first six months. The last of those meetings was only 72 hours after the general election result was announced. But it goes further. Between 2018 and 2019, staff at Rupert Murdoch’s News UK met with government ministers and advisors a total of 206 times. Parliament sat for roughly 73 weeks across this period – which means News UK employees were getting an average of 2.8 meetings per week. The cabinet, by contrast, usually meets only once per week.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
- Setting things straight about the Job Guarantee — Bill Mitchell:
The fact is that once you go down the UBI route you are diluting the inflation anchor provided by the Job Guarantee – which is a central proposition within MMT, and, is one of the features, that sets it apart from mainstream macroeconomics. And once you dilute the inflation anchor, then you are effectively back in a NAIRU world where unemployment is used as a policy tool to discipline any inflationary processes. You cannot have it both ways as an MMTer. If you support a UBI then you should not hold yourself out as a proponent of MMT. Simple as that.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- 'Luddite Sensibilities' and the Future of Education — Audrey Watters:
I remain steadfast in my criticism of education technologies in almost all their forms and functions. Indeed, the problems that we've long identified with ed-tech — privacy violations, security concerns, racist algorithms, accessibility and access issues, all-male leadership teams, outsourcing, disruptive bullshittery, and so on — are still here. And I fear we are at a particularly dangerous crossroads for education because of ed-tech. The danger is not simply because of the entrepreneurial and the venture capitalist sharks circling our institutions, but also because the narratives, long foisted upon us, about the necessity of ed-tech are becoming more and more entrenched, more and more pervasive. These narratives have always tended to repress the trauma and anxiety associated with the adoption of new technologies and more broadly with the conditions, the precarity, of everyday life. These narratives want us to forget that ed-tech is, first and foremost, beholden to the ideologies of machines, efficiencies, and capitalism. But this is ed-tech's big moment, or so we're told. And all those folks who predicted a decade or so ago that schools would all be online by 2020, that universities would all be bankrupt may just be right.
- Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro:
Sunday, 23 August 2020 - 5:36pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Intangibles = Monopoly — John Quiggin at Crooked Timber:
The value of companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft is made up primarily of “intangibles”. That term can cover all sorts of things, and is often taken to refer to some special aspect of the firm in question, such as accumulated R&D, tacit knowledge or ‘goodwill’ associated with brands. R&D is at most a small part of the story. The leading tech companies spend $10 – 20 billion a year each on R&D https://spendmenot.com/top-rd-spenders/, a tiny fraction of market valuations of $1 trillion or more. And feelings towards most of these companies are the opposite of goodwill – more like resentful dependence in most cases. A simpler explanation is that the main intangible asset held by these companies is monopoly power, arising from network effects, intellectual property, control over natural resources and good old-fashioned predatory conduct. In this context, the crucial point about intangibles isn’t that they aren’t physical, it’s that they can’t be reproduced by anyone else.
- It’s Going to Be a Long and Harsh Recession: NYT Warns of Skills Gap — Dean Baker at CEPR:
When the unemployment rate goes up, a standard theme in the media is that workers don’t have the right skills. We saw that yesterday in the New York Times when an article told us “The Pandemic Has Accelerated Demands for a More Skilled Workforce.” It tells us how the growth of telecommuting in response to the pandemic has led to more demand for skilled labor and less demand for less-skilled workers. The key point in this sort of argument is that the problem is the workers, who don’t have the right skills, not an economy that doesn’t create enough demand for labor. Of course, we get this skills shortage argument every time the unemployment rate soars. In the summer of 2010, when the Great Recession was still near its trough, the NYT ran a piece telling us about the skills shortage in manufacturing. Over the next nine and a half years the sector added almost 1.3 million jobs (11.3 percent), without any notable improvement in the skills of the U.S. workforce. The overall unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, again without any major gains in skills in the U.S. workforce.
- Becky's First Swear — Phil Are Go!:
- On Facebook Banning Pages Associated with Anarchism — CrimethInc. and It’s Going Down:
The defining of violence is not neutral. The way Facebook currently defines violence, it is legitimate for police to kill a thousand people per year while evicting, kidnapping, and imprisoning millions—it is legitimate to drop bombs on civilians, so long as the aggressor represents an official government—but it is “violence” to prevent a white supremacist from assaulting a crowd or return a smoking tear gas canister to the police who shot it. Suppressing the voices of those who seek to protect their communities from institutional and white supremacist violence is an intentional decision to normalize violence as long as the ones employing it hold institutional power. Lumping anarchists and anti-fascists together with far-right militias who explicitly support the current administration is a strategic move to muddy the issue.
- On Facebook, health-misinformation 'superspreaders' rack up billions of views: report — Elizabeth Culliford at Reuters:
Misleading health content has racked up an estimated 3.8 billion views on Facebook Inc (FB.O) over the past year, peaking during the COVID-19 pandemic, advocacy group Avaaz said in a new report here on Wednesday. The report found that content from 10 “superspreader” sites sharing health misinformation had almost four times as many Facebook views in April 2020 as equivalent content from the sites of 10 leading health institutions, such as the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. […] “Facebook’s algorithm is a major threat to public health. Mark Zuckerberg promised to provide reliable information during the pandemic, but his algorithm is sabotaging those efforts by driving many of Facebook’s 2.7 billion users to health misinformation-spreading networks,” said Fadi Quran, campaign director at Avaaz.
Sunday, 16 August 2020 - 5:17pm
This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
- It’s the healthcare system, stupid — Thomas Frank in
Le Monde diplomatique:
Donald Trump’s prodigious stupidity is not the sole cause of our crushing national failure to beat the coronavirus. Plenty of blame must also go to our screwed-up healthcare system, which scorns the very idea of public health and treats access to medical care as a private luxury that is rightfully available only to some. It is the healthcare system, not Trump, that routinely denies people treatment if they lack insurance; that bankrupts people for ordinary therapies; that strips people of their coverage when they lose their jobs — and millions of people are losing their jobs in this pandemic. It is the healthcare system that, when a Covid treatment finally arrives, will almost certainly charge Americans a hefty price to receive it. And that system is the way it is because organised medicine has for almost a century used the prestige of expertise to keep it that way. Populism, meanwhile, was the reform impulse that tried (and failed) to change the system so that it served ordinary people. Which is to say that the pundits and the scholars and the thinktankers in their grave solemnity have got it entirely backward. Bowing down before expertise is precisely what has made public health an impossible dream. And the populism that our pundits so hate and fear is, in fact, the cure for what ails us.
- What the heroin industry can teach us about solar power — Justin Rowlatt:
"It's just how opium poppy is farmed now," Mr Brittan tells me. "They drill down 100m (325ft) or so to the ground water, put in an electric pump and wire it up to a few panels and bingo, the water starts flowing." Take-up of this new technology was very rapid. The first report of an Afghan farmer using solar power came back in 2013. The following year traders were stocking a few solar panels in Lashkar Gah, the Helmandi capital. Since then growth has been exponential. The number of solar panels installed on farms has doubled every year. By 2019 Mr Brittan's team had counted 67,000 solar arrays just in the Helmand valley. In Lashkar Gah market, solar panels are now stacked in great piles three storeys high.
- Private Equity Captures Rather Than Creates Value — Oren Cass in Newsweek:
Suppose a private equity fund pays $100 million to acquire a closely-held family business that treats its workers with generosity while earning the owners a healthy annual profit of $10 million. The fund managers slash compensation, renegotiate supplier contracts and move production offshore. These "operating improvements" save $5 million annually, boosting profit and delivering an "exit" price after five years of $150 million. The fund takes $20 million in "management and advisory fees" and returns the rest to investors, yielding them roughly what they would have earned had they placed their money in an index fund over the same period. What wealth has been created? What value? Investors are no better off than had the whole process never begun. Customers continue to pay the same price for the same product. The eventual acquirer has a more "valuable" company for which it had to pay a commensurately higher price. Suppliers and workers are worse off and receiving less income than in the past, while the fund managers now have $20 million more. No wealth or value has been created. There is no new capital to be invested. Resources that previously flowed to local businesses and families were rerouted to private equity partners and their lawyers and bankers in New York.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- Why did England have Europe's worst Covid figures? The answer starts with austerity — Michael Marmot in the Guardian:
The political mood of the decade from 2010 was one of the rolling back of the state, and a continuation of an apparent consensus that things were best left to the market. At times, this aversion to government action was made worse by a suspicion of expertise. This rolling back of the state was seen clearly in a reduction in public spending from 42% of GDP in 2009-10 to 35% in 2018-19. The fiscal retrenchment was done in a regressive way. If we look at spending per person by local authority, we find that the poorer the area concerned, the bigger the reduction. In the least deprived 20% of areas, local government spending went down by 16%; in the most deprived it went down by 32%. This is remarkable – the greater the need was, the more spending was reduced. Changes made to the tax and benefit system introduced in 2015 went on in a similar vein: the lower the family income, the bigger the loss as a result of the chancellor’s policies. I sat with a former minister in the Conservative government, showed him these figures and said: “Your government’s policy was ‘make the poor poorer’.” He looked uncomfortable and said that perhaps it was not their explicit policy. But there are smart people in the Treasury and they must have known that this would be the effect.
- Warren Buffett: America's Folksiest Predator — Matt Stoller interviews Dave Dayen about his book "Monopolized":
The right to manage .COM and .NET domains is a government contract. It’s done through a a quasi-government entity, technically a nonprofit, called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Most recently in 2018, ICANN gave Verisign the right to increase the prices for that registry. Now these are small prices for each website, but every time you increase them, it's essentially billions and billions of dollars in free money that Verisign is allowed to grab. And Warren Buffett has nearly 13 million shares of this stock. This is not a well-known stock, not a high trading stock necessarily, but he recognized many years ago that they have a moat around their business. They're the only ones that get to assign .COM names and take 10 bucks a year for each domain name, which is a small amount in of itself. But if you take it from 150 million people, all of a sudden, you're talking about real money. He’s one of our nation's greatest monopoly spotters.
- To Head Off Regulators, Google Makes Certain Words Taboo — Adrianne Jeffries at the Markup:
As Google faces at least four major antitrust investigations on two continents, internal documents obtained by The Markup show its parent company, Alphabet, has been preparing for this moment for years, telling employees across the massive enterprise that certain language is off limits in all written communications, no matter how casual. The taboo words include “market,” “barriers to entry,” and “network effects,” which is when products such as social networks become more valuable as more people use them.
- Why America Feels Like a Post-Soviet State — Masha Gessen in the New Yorker:
The U.S. and Russia have vastly different cultures, incomparable histories, disparate ideological influences, and divergent economies. One similarity that unites them, however, is radical inequality. In the Soviet Union, members of the Party élite lived in a different universe than the rest of the country. They had their own neighborhoods, schools, roads, resorts, stores, and, of course, their own health-care system. This is still true. A wealthy and well-connected Russian can receive world-class medical care, while ordinary people are reduced, much like in Soviet days, to having to buy their own disposable syringes and pay cash for nursing care in the hospital. Wealthy Americans also live in a different universe, and when they get sick they land in different hospitals than middle- and lower-class Americans—which, as the coronavirus has shown, makes it much more likely that they will survive.
- This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
- 10 Reasons I Won’t Vote for Biden — Ted Rall:
1. My vote is a personal endorsement. It says, “I, citizen Ted Rall, approve of Joe Biden’s career in public office.” I do not. Voting for Biden would be a retroactive endorsement of his vote to invade Iraq, which killed over 1 million innocent people. Voting for Biden would be a retroactive endorsement of his long history of racism, beginning with his disgusting opposition to court-ordered busing. 2. Biden has never apologized for his numerous right-wing policy positions, such as writing the fascist USA-Patriot Act and the 1994 crime bill that expanded mass incarceration of Black men. Biden’s refusal to apologize indicates that he still believes he did the right thing, and that he would do them again in the future. Why should I forgive him? He has never asked for forgiveness. 3. Joe Biden lies a lot. He falsely claimed to hold three bachelor’s degrees and to have graduated at the top of his law school class with a full scholarship. He falsely claimed to have come from a family of coal miners in Northeastern Pennsylvania. He plagiarized in law school and when he wrote his speeches. He said he was arrested with Nelson Mandela; it didn’t happen. During his recent debate against Bernie Sanders, he looked Sanders and the American people in the eye and falsely claimed not to have repeatedly supported the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding of abortion. One of the biggest reasons to despise Trump is that he lies so often. What’s the point of replacing one liar with another? […]
- Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
Marketing is Hard
This is cruel and unfair on the poor people who have to manage the picturesque suburban sprawl drainage ditch Bogan Bay, but as a lesson in how not to do things on the cheap, I must draw your attention to their "Things To Do At Boambee Creek Reserve - Image Gallery".
I stress, this is their context. "Things to do". I'm adding nothing to this; this is all their framing.
- Here's a bridge:
Great. Now what? - Bark chips! A king's ransom!
You've never seen anything like it. Except, well, everywhere. - You can cultivate a splendid beer belly!
- Admire some rust.
Cook on it, if you dare! - Use a stick.
- Think about all the friends you used to have.
- Drop your car keys. Damn.
- Watch the sad dog.
- Oh look, there's that bridge again. Amidst all the grief and loss, I'd forgotten all about it.
- Who is that lady? Is she following me? Is it because of… No! It can't be! That was years ago! I'm all better now!
- Fecking bridge.
- Leaving the car behind for a long, relaxing walk home.
No boy, keep away from the black dog. We both have to keep away from the black dog of Bogan Bay.
Sunday, 26 July 2020 - 4:07pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
- ‘No mask, no entry. Is that clear enough? That seems pretty clear, right?’ — as told to Eli Saslow of the Washington Post:
Some of them would see our signs, open the front door, and just yell: “F--- masks. F--- you.” Or they would walk in, refuse to wear a mask and then dump their merchandise all over the counter. I had a guy come in with no mask and a pistol on his hip and stare me down. I had a guy who took his T-shirt off and put it over his mouth so I could see his whole stomach. “There. A mask. Are you happy?” I had a lady who tried to tape a pamphlet on the front window about the ADA mask exemption, which is a totally fake thing. It’s a conspiracy theory, but it’s become popular here. She kept saying we were discriminating against people with disabilities. What? Why? How? None of what they say sounds logical. I can’t make sense of half the names they call me. They say I’m uneducated — uh, that’s kind of ironic. They say I’m a sheep. I’ve been brainwashed. I’m pushing government propaganda. I’m suffocating them. I’m a part of the deep state. I’m an agent for the World Health Organization. “How do you like your muzzle?” “Is this going to become sharia law?” “Are you prepping us to wear burqas?” “What’s next? Mind control?”
- Dems' Sternly Worded Letter Won't Stop Fascism — David Sirota:
Two weeks ago, the Associated Press reported that President Trump deployed unidentified agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to Portland, Ore., where they were filmed getting out of unmarked vehicles and abducting protesters off the street. A few days later, House Democrats responded by obediently advancing an appropriations bill that funds the department -- with no apparent restrictions on such deployments. “This bill as a whole will strengthen our security and keep Americans safe while upholding our American values of fairness and respect,” said Democratic House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, amid growing outrage at the situation in Oregon. With congressional Democrats on their way to approving $50 billion for DHS, Trump administration officials are now boasting about their plans to replicate the Portland invasion in other cities. Those officials seem emboldened to ignore local Democratic opposition to the federal deployments.
- Sleeping — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
- Hack of 251 Law Enforcement Websites Exposes Personal Data of 700,000 Cops — Micah Lee at the Intercept:
A week after Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes while he lay handcuffed in the street until he died, triggering massive nationwide protests, a young political science major in Oregon was contacting lawyers. “I am a long time activist and ally of the Black Lives Matter movement,” she wrote to a Bay Area law firm. “Is there anyway[sic] that I could add your firm, or consenting lawyers under your firm, to a list of resources who will represent protesters pro bono if they were/are to be arrested? Thank you very much for your time.” A lawyer who read this message was infuriated and anonymously reported the student to the authorities. “PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHED SOLICITATION I RECEIVED FROM AN ANTIFA TERRORIST WANTING MY HELP TO BAIL HER AND HER FRIENDS OUT OF JAIL, IF ARRESTED FOR RIOTING,” he typed into an unhinged letter, in all-caps, that he mailed to the Marin County District Attorney’s office, just north of San Francisco. […] An investigator in the Marin County DA’s office considered this useful intelligence. She logged into the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center’s CMS and created a new Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, under the category “Radicalization/Extremism” and typed the student’s name as the subject. “The attached letter was received via US Postal Service this morning,” she wrote in the summary field. The student “appears to be a member of the Antifa group and is assisting in planning protesting efforts in the Bay Area despite living in Oregon.”
- Don’t Sell Your Mind — Janet Capron in Public Seminar:
After a reading at Shakespeare & Company, I heard my favorite question, which came from an Upper East Side matron and sounded more accusatory than curious: “Don’t you ever regret having been a prostitute?” I paused for a second or two. “No. I’ve searched my soul, and the answer is still no.” Then, with a little gleam in my eye (I like to think), I said, “What I really regret are the more than two decades I spent working in pharmaceutical advertising.”
Sunday, 12 July 2020 - 4:23pm
This week fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- Beer Mats of the 1970s — Scarfolk Council:
More… - 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace': Care and the Cybernetic University — Audrey Watters:
If there is one message that I want to get across to you today, it is that we must ground our efforts to plan for the fall — hell, for the future — in humanity, compassion, and care. And we cannot confuse the need to do the hard work to set institutions on a new course of greater humanity with the push for an expanded educational machinery. We have to refuse and refute those who argue that more surveillance and more automation is how we tackle this crisis, that more surveillance and AI is how we care. We can trace the histories of our schools, our beliefs and practices about teaching and learning, our disinvestment in public institutions, our investments in technological solutions to discover how and why we got here — to this moment where everything is falling apart and the solution (from certain quarters) is software that sounds like "panopticon."
- Strange Bedfellows Undermining Liberalism: Trump And Academia — Bo Rothstein in Social Europe:
It is obvious that, according to Trump, there is nothing that can be seen as a fact. Instead, everything is a matter of interpretation and perspective. However, this approach has also had a strong impact in large parts of academic research, mainly within the humanities, but also within parts of social sciences. Under the heading “postmodernism”, this approach has as its starting point that there can be no true or scientifically established facts due to impartial investigation. Instead, following the much-admired French philosopher Michel Foucault, what is considered true by the scientific community in an area of research is in reality determined by their connection to established power relations in society. According to postmodernist theory, there is no real difference between the knowledge produced by scientific methods and perceptions coming from our ideological orientations or personal experiences. Thus, when Trump and his supporters claim that they base their positions on “alternative facts”, this has a clear connection to the postmodernist approach in academia.
- Ward Sutton:
- How to Use the Past Exonerative Tense to Uphold White Supremacy — Devorah Blachor:
The term “past exonerative tense” was first coined by political analyst William Schneider to describe a construction used by political leaders, which enabled them to acknowledge wrongdoing while absolving themselves of responsibility. Ronald Reagan is thought to be the first American president to employ the past exonerative tense during the Iran-Contra scandal, using a variation of the “mistakes were made” non-apology. […] The past exonerative tense transforms acts of police brutality against Black people into neutral events in which Black people have been accidentally harmed or killed as part of a vague incident where police were present-ish.
- via Bruce Sterling:
- American Passports Are Worthless Now (Map) — Indi Samarajiva on Medium:
It’s not that other nations don’t want to welcome Americans, they just can’t. The point of a passport is that a sovereign power vouches for its bearer, but America can’t vouch for the health of their citizens at all. America’s public health regime is far less trustworthy than Liberia’s (which is actually quite good). Its sovereign is mad. At the same time, you can’t trust Americans. Americans have poor hygiene (low masking rate) and at least 40% of the population can’t be trusted to even believe that COVID-19 exists, let alone to take it seriously. They’re likely to refuse testing, not report symptoms, break quarantine, and generally NOT follow rules. Americans have a toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance that makes them unwelcome travelers. They have a lot of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. Some of them, I assume, are good people, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a plague passport. Return to sender.
- Full Employment — Cory Doctorow in Locus Online:
I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t. I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ”machine learning” field that leads to a general AI any more than I can see a path from continuous improvements in horse-breeding that leads to an internal combustion engine. Not only am I an AI skeptic, I’m an automation-employment-crisis skeptic. That is, I believe that even if we were – by some impossible-to-imagine means – to produce a general AI tomorrow, we would still have 200-300 years of full employment for every human who wanted a job ahead of us. I’m talking about climate change, of course.
- Tom Toles:
- What Is It Like to Be a Man? — Phil Christman in the Hedgehog Review:
“What is it like to be a cis-gendered, heterosexual man?” a friend, a trans man, asks on Facebook. “What is it like to feel at home in your body?” The only answer I can come up with is that I never feel at home in my body. I live out my masculinity most often as a perverse avoidance of comfort: the refusal of good clothes, moisturizer, painkillers; hard physical training, pursued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of physical pain or self-imposed discipline that I owe the universe. […] Manhood resists straightforward discussion even as men stand accused—correctly, insofar as any accusation directed at such a broad target cannot fail to hit—of sucking the air from every other conversation. We do have plenty of talk about masculinity, but talk is all it is, aimless and nonconsecutive, never the sense of anything developing. Sophisticated opinion rarely gets beyond the elementary observation that masculinity is a social construct, or a set of many such constructs. As for unsophisticated opinion, it is a dank cellar most impressively represented by the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson, who bangs the table for logic and reason while basing much of his thought on the ideas of a discredited occultist. Peterson’s reliance on the work of Carl Jung is revealing: If you want to defend traditional masculinity as a kind of slaying-dragons-for-its-own-sake, but you can’t offer a rational analysis of why this behavior is necessary, or why it is good, or why you need a penis to do it, the archetype theory offers you a pretentious and grandiose way of saying “It is what it is.” It dignifies tautology. Beneath Peterson, deeper in the cellar, are the vitamin-hawking conspiracy theorists, rape apologists, and Nazis of YouTube, whose pronouncements on masculinity eerily combine the commonsensical with the obscene: one video to tell you how to tie a Windsor knot, another to tell you how to beat a restraining order. But they finally impugn themselves. If you need a YouTube video to help you be a man, then in some essential sense simply being one is already off the table.
- I Have Cancer. Now My Facebook Feed Is Full of ‘Alternative Care’ Ads. — Anne Borden King in the New York Times:
When I saw the ads, I knew that Facebook had probably tagged me to receive them. Interestingly, I haven’t seen any legitimate cancer care ads in my newsfeed, just pseudoscience. This may be because pseudoscience companies rely on social media in a way that other forms of health care don’t. Pseudoscience companies leverage Facebook’s social and supportive environment to connect their products with identities and to build communities around their products. They use influencers and patient testimonials. Some companies also recruit members through Facebook “support groups” to sell their products in pyramid schemes. Through all this social media, patients begin to feel a sense of belonging, which makes it harder for them to question a product. Cancer patients are especially vulnerable to this stealth marketing. It’s hard to accept the loss of control that comes with a cancer diagnosis. As cancer patients, we are told where to go, how to sit and what to take. It can be painful and scary and tiring — and then all our hair falls out. During the pandemic, many of us are also isolated. Our loved ones can’t come to our appointments or even visit us in the hospital. Now, more than ever, who is there to hold our hand?
- Life During COVID-19 — Ted Rall:
- MMT — Keynesianism with an expansionary twist — Lars Pålsson Syll:
[Lance] Taylor may be right on the question of how much — as a macroeconomic theory — MMT really has added to the Keynes-Lerner-Godley-Minsky framework. But there is undoubtedly at least one positive contribution of MMT — especially from a European point of view — and that is that it has made it transparently clear why the euro-experiment has been such a monumental disaster. The neoliberal dream of having over-national currencies just doesn’t fit well with reality. When an economy is in a crisis, it must be possible for the state to manage and spend its own money to stabilize the economy. When the euro was created twenty years ago, it was celebrated with fireworks at the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt. Today we know better. There are no reasons to celebrate the 20-year anniversary. On the contrary.
- After Barr Ordered FBI to “Identify Criminal Organizers,” Activists Were Intimidated at Home and at Work — Chris Brooks:
“I’ve never had any run-ins with the cops before. I’ve never been to jail and have no criminal record, so when the FBI showed up to my workplace, it scared the piss out of me,” says Katy, a 22-year-old who works for a custodial services company in Cookeville, a small college town in middle Tennessee. “I really thought I was going to lose my job. The whole experience was terrifying.”
- Unpresidented — Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books:
Nixon was forced out because Republican-appointed judges and Republican members of Congress joined with Democrats to reassert constitutional checks on the abuse of presidential power. Now the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc. Trump’s wild response to the coronavirus disaster and to the Black Lives Matter protests must be seen in connection with the refusal of the Republican-controlled Senate even to go through the motions of a trial after his impeachment by the House. “Unshackled,” like he wished the cops to be, from any notion of accountability, Trump has also become unmoored from any relationship to reality. The Senate Republicans told him, in effect, that he can exercise power arbitrarily. Absolute power deranges absolutely. During the 2016 election campaign, Trump was asked about whom he consulted on foreign policy: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain. My primary consultant is myself.” Freed from any need to pretend that there is anyone else he might possibly need to talk to, Trump is now openly talking to himself in public. He is, often on live TV, communing with the voices in his head that tell him that he is a combination of Lincoln and Churchill, that coronavirus will suddenly vanish, that it can be cured by ingesting disinfectant, that Joe Scarborough is a murderer, that George Floyd is looking down on him and rejoicing.
Sunday, 5 July 2020 - 4:24pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Out of Control — Alfie Kohn in Psychology Today:
Autonomous people experience their actions as authentic, integrated, willingly enacted. But that doesn't mean they see themselves as separate from others or in opposition to the larger culture. This critical but often-overlooked distinction helps us to make sense of the finding that a need for autonomy is experienced even by people in collectivist societies. Selfish individualism, by contrast, is not an ineluctable feature of "human nature." Rather, it represents a corruption of our need to have some say over what happens to us. In fact, when people are raised without support for their autonomy—overcontrolled by parents and teachers—two things may happen. They may, upon growing up and finding themselves in positions of authority, try to deny others their autonomy. And they may insist on a warped version of self-determination that looks more like selfishness. If they have grown up feeling powerless, they might come to rage against any person who tells them no. They might see any restriction on their personal freedom, even to benefit a larger community, as tantamount to "tyranny." They might insist that their convenience takes precedence over other people with immune-compromised vulnerability.
- #1516; In which a Visitor proves a Nuisance — Wondermark, by David Malki !:
- It's Time for an End-of-Life Discussion About Nursing Homes — Rose Eveleth in Wired:
Even before the pandemic hit, nursing homes seemed like an odd, collective compromise. Most American adults, in a survey from two years ago, said they wouldn’t want to leave their homes or communities as they aged—and most also didn’t envision that they’d ever end up doing so. In 2016, 1.3 million Americans were residents of nursing facilities. “It's considered completely normal that we would take an individual and force them to give up their home, their family, and their life and place them in this institution. We just take that as a given,” says Bruce Darling, an organizer with Rochester Adapt, a disability rights organization. He and other advocates are wondering if now, finally, in the face of coronavirus, people might reconsider these spaces altogether. The present chaos and horror in nursing homes should come as no surprise. In 2018, 11 children died in a nursing facility in New Jersey from an adenovirus outbreak. A contagious fungus has meanwhile infected over 800 nursing home residents over the past few years, killing half of them. Tom Chiller, a fungal expert at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called nursing facilities “the dark underbelly of drug-resistant infection.” In 2014, a New Mexico nursing home was struck by an outbreak of Clostridium difficile that killed eight residents. These outbreaks happen to be among the ones we know about. As a Reuters investigation showed, many such events in nursing homes never get reported.
- Forget UBI, says an economist: It’s time for universal basic jobs — Pavlina Tcherneva interviewed by Cory Doctorow for the LA Times:
Governments guarantee all sorts of things: loans, contracts. It’s not novel for the public sector to provide guarantees. We don’t rely on the market to solve poverty or education. So, if we’re going to manage unemployment by creating jobs on demand, how should we do it? Not necessarily with big federal projects. Rather, the government could fund jobs proposed by agencies, states and localities, but also folks who are doing social work on the ground, through nonreligious, nonpolitical, nonprofit organizations struggling to fill gaps left by the market. We’d solicit projects: concrete things for the communities where we live. Environmental rehabilitation, renewal and monitoring, the invisible green work that has to be done. On top of that, all our care needs! Being a companion for elderly people, helping with housework and errands. We need to reassess what we class as productive jobs. Community theater is enormously productive. […] I want to stress, this is not punitive. We are providing jobs, not requiring them. The progressive answer to structural unemployment is a jobs guarantee. The reactionary version is workfare. If we leave this to right-wing authoritarian governments, they’ll have punitive public works programs. They’ll make unemployed people build border walls. Unless progressives wake up to something bolder and bigger than just solving this crisis, I fear that the future is bleak.
And, in related but sad news about somebody who took up a government invitation into community theatre: - Carl Reiner, Multifaceted Master of Comedy, Is Dead at 98 — Robert Berkvist and Peter Keepnews do the obit for the NYT:
Carl Reiner was born in the Bronx on March 20, 1922, to Irving Reiner, a watchmaker, and Bessie (Mathias) Reiner. After graduating from Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, he went to work as a machinist’s helper and seemed headed for a career repairing sewing machines. Then one day his older brother, Charlie, mentioned seeing a newspaper article about a free acting class being given by the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal jobs agency. Carl tried his hand at acting, found he was good at it, hung up his machinist’s apron and joined a theater troupe.
- 'Deplorable Act in Face of Global Crisis': Trump Condemned as US Buys Up Nearly Entire Supply of Covid-19 Drug — Jake Johnson at Common Dreams:
The Trump administration's decision to purchase almost all of California-based Gilead Sciences' projected stock of remdesivir through September was also viewed by observers as a glaring example of the "dysfunctional character" of a patent system that gives pharmaceutical giants decades of monopoly control over a drug that could save lives in the near-term. "This is what happens when the world relies on a broken system driven by greed and profit during a pandemic," tweeted U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now, which is urging governments to override Gilead's patent through compulsory licensing. "Governments have a right to override this ludicrous patent system under international law, and they should take the opportunity to do that now, saving the [National Health Service] and patients around the world from the profiteering of these dysfunctional corporations," Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said in a statement.
- Joan Robinson On Public Sector Deficits And Debt — V. Ramanan in The Case For Concerted Action:
The National Government which was formed in 1931 went in for a great economy campaign. Local authorities were compelled to cease work on building schemes, roads, fen drainage, and so forth. An emergency budget was introduced, increasing taxation, cutting unemployment allowances and reducing the pay of public servants, such as teachers and the armed forces. Private citizens felt it was patriotic to spend less. Some Cambridge Colleges gave up their traditional feasts as a recognition of the crisis. All this helped to increase unemployment and make the economic situation of the country still more depressed. Nowadays there is considerably more understanding of how things work and it is unlikely that such a completely idiotic policy will be tried again.
- I have a hard time taking compliments — James Miller and The Oatmeal:
