Sunday, 4 November 2018 - 5:02pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Outrage over schoolgirl refusing to stand for anthem shows rise of aggressive nationalism — Gwenda Tavan:
History is also often the victim of nationalist mobilisations. By this I mean the tendency of “patriots” to select those aspects of the national story that “fit” the narrative of a timeless, unified, undifferentiated, organic community to which they are “loyal”. In the process, they edit out the bits that show how contested and contingent our national story really is. The national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, is a case in point. Claims that not singing the anthem “disrespects our country and our veterans” assume the song holds deep historical, moral and sacred meaning. The truth is more prosaic. Advance Australia Fair became our national anthem in 1974, following a competition launched by the Whitlam Labor Government and a public opinion poll by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to identify the relative popularity of three “unofficial” Australian songs: Advance Australia Fair, Waltzing Matilda and Song of Australia. Advance Australia Fair was the clear front-runner, but it is worth remembering that only just over half of respondents (51.4%) nominated it. In other words, nearly 50% of the population did not. So much for collective unity.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- Precarious private balance sheets driven by fiscal austerity is the problem — Bill Mitchell:
We have learned very little. Commentators still construct the crisis as a sovereign debt problem and demand that governments reduce fiscal deficits to give them ‘space’ to defend the economy in the next crisis. They are also noting that the balance sheets of the non-government sector components – households and firms – are looking rather precarious. They also tie that in with flat wages growth and a run down in household saving. But the link between the fiscal data and the non-government borrowing data is never made. So we are moving headlong into the next crisis with very little understanding of the relationship between government and non-government. And we are increasingly relying on private sector debt buildup to fund growth as governments retreat. Everything about that is wrong.
- Honourable Theft — George Monbiot:
Never underestimate the power of one determined person. What Carole Cadwalladr has done to Facebook and Big Data and Edward Snowden has done to the state security complex, the young Kazakhstani scientist Alexandra Elbakyan has done to the multi-billion dollar industry that traps knowledge behind paywalls. Her pirate webscraper service, Sci-hub, has done more than any government to tackle one of the biggest rip-offs of the modern era: the capture of research that should belong to us all. […] After my cancer diagnosis earlier this year, I was offered a choice of treatments. I wanted to make an informed decision. This meant reading scientific papers. Had I not used the stolen material provided by Sci-hub, it would have cost me thousands. Because, like most people, I didn’t have this money, I would have given up before I was properly informed. I have never met Alexandra Elbakyan, and I can only speculate about alternative outcomes, had the research I read not swayed my decision. But it is possible that she has saved my life.
- If Other Nations Mourned Like the U.S. — Ted Rall:
- Mainstream Economics Has Become a Celebration of the Wealthy Rentier Class — Michael Hudson in Evonomics:
The reality is that you don’t have to be smart to make a lot of money. All you need is greed. And that can’t be taught in business schools. In fact, when I went to work as a balance-of-payments analyst at Chase Manhattan in 1964, I was told that the best currency traders came from the Brooklyn or Hong Kong slums. Their entire life was devoted to making money, to rise into the class of the proverbial Babbitts of our time: nouveau riches lacking in real culture or intellectual curiosity. Of course, for bankers who do venture to “stretch the envelope” (the fraudster’s euphemism for breaking the law, as Citigroup did in 1999 when it merged with Travelers’ Insurance prior to the Clinton administration rejecting Glass-Steagall), you do need smart lawyers. But even here, Donald Trump explained the key that he learned from mob lawyer Roy Cohn: what matters is not so much the law, as what judge you have. And the U.S. courts have been privatized by electing judges whose campaign contributors back deregulators and non-prosecutors. So the wealthy escape from being subject to the law.
- The Lehman 10th Anniversary spin as a Teachable Moment — Michael Hudson:
What has been put in place is not a restoration of traditional status quo, but a reversal of over a century of central bank policy. Failed banks have not been taken into the public domain. They have been enriched far beyond their former levels. The perpetrators of the collapse have been rewarded, not penalized for lending more than could possibly be paid by NINJA borrowers and speculators whose mortgage applications were doctored by systemic fraud at Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Bank of America, Citigroup and their cohorts. The $4.3 trillion that could have been used to save debtors was given to the banks and Wall Street firms whose recklessness and outright fraud caused the crisis. The Federal Reserve “cash for trash” swaps with insolvent banks did not restore normalcy or the status quo ante. What occurred was a financial revolution by stealth, reversing the traditional responsibility of creditors to make prudent loans.
- Joan Robinson, philosopher — Alexander Douglas:
The first significant contribution that Robinson made to the philosophy of economics kicked off the famous ‘Cambridge Capital Controversy’. Robinson noted that economists often build models in which rational decisions are made about how much ‘capital’ to employ. ‘Capital’ is often represented by a single variable, k. Robinson found it conceptually impossible to specify a unit of magnitude here: how many broomsticks, she asked, equals one blast furnace? ‘“Capital”’, she wrote with the standard logician’s nod to Lewis Carroll, ‘is not what capital is called, it is what the name is called’.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- Everything he does, he does it for us. Why Bryan Adams is on to something important about copyright — Rebecca Giblin in the Conversation:
Authors, artists and composers often have little bargaining power, and are often pressured to sign away their rights to their publisher for life. Adams appeared before a Canadian House of Commons committee to argue they should be entitled to reclaim ownership of their creations 25 years after they sign them away. […] The copyright term needed to provide an incentive to create something is pretty short. The Productivity Commission has estimated the average commercial life of a piece of music, for example is two to five years. Most pieces of visual art yield commercial income for just two years, with distribution highly skewed toward the small number with a longer life. The average commercial life of a film is three to six years. For books, it is typically 1.4 to five years; 90% of books are out of print after two years. It is well accepted by economists that a term of about 25 years is the maximum needed to incentivise the creation of works.
- Trump rally — Keith Knight in Daily Kos: