This week, I have been mostly reading… not cartoons, for a change:

• The Charitable-Industrial Complex & the perpetual poverty machine — Daniel Margrain at Renegade Inc.: The Royal British Legion whose philanthropic poppy appeals ostensibly raise money for men and women who ‘serve the country’ in conflict zones, is sponsored by both Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms’ company, and BAE Systems, the UKs biggest arms dealer. This is largely hidden from the public in much the same way that there is a lack of transparency and public accountability in the activities of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who help administer the Conflict, Security and Stability Fund and the Jo Cox Fund. Independent journalist, Aaron Bastani, was widely lambasted by the establishment media for simply pointing out the fact that the current model of charity does not help Britain’s veterans, at least 13,000 of whom are homeless. Bastani pointed to the clear correlation between the worship of the poppy, the commercial and financial success of the Royal British Legion (income £150m+) and the plight of homeless UK veterans.
• Apple’s “Capital Return Program”: Where Are the Patient Capitalists? — William Lazonick at INET: From the last quarter of calendar year 2012 through September 29, 2018, under its inaptly-named “Capital Return Program,” Apple spent $239.0 billion buying back its own stock. […] Apple’s “Capital Return Program” is an ideologically laden name for these distributions of corporate cash to shareholders that has nothing to do with returning capital. First, you can’t “return” something to a party that never gave you anything. The only time in its history that Apple actually raised funds from public shareholders was its initial public offering in 1980, which yielded $97 million for the company. Second, in distributing cash to shareholders, Apple is not giving them “capital.” It’s just transferring cash that may be used for a multitude of purposes, ranging from household consumption to building the war chests of hedge-fund activists, augmenting their power to engage in predatory value extraction.
• The ‘Pelosi Problem’ Runs Deep — Norman Soloman in Truthdig: Increasingly, such leadership is isolated from the party it claims to lead. Yet the progressive base is having more and more impact. As a Vox headline proclaimed, more than a year ago, “The stunning Democratic shift on single-payer: In 2008, no leading Democratic presidential candidate backed single-payer. In 2020, all of them might.” The Medicare for All Caucus now lists 76 House members. Any progressive should emphatically reject Pelosi’s current embrace of a “pay-go” rule that would straitjacket spending for new social programs by requiring offset tax hikes or budget cuts. Her position is even more outrageous in view of her fervent support for astronomical military spending. Like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (who was just re-elected to his post), Pelosi went out of her way last winter to proclaim avid support for President Trump’s major increase in the already-bloated Pentagon budget, boasting: “In our negotiations, congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense.”
• Everything You Thought You Knew About Western Civilization Is Wrong: A Review of Michael Hudson’s New Book, And Forgive Them Their Debts — John Siman in Naked Capitalism: In ancient Mesopotamian societies it was understood that freedom was preserved by protecting debtors. In what we call Western Civilization, that is, in the plethora of societies that have followed the flowering of the Greek poleis beginning in the eighth century B.C., just the opposite, with only one major exception (Hudson describes the tenth-century A.D. Byzantine Empire of Romanos Lecapenus), has been the case: For us freedom has been understood to sanction the ability of creditors to demand payment from debtors without restraint or oversight. This is the freedom to cannibalize society. This is the freedom to enslave. This is, in the end, the freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School and the mainstream of American economists. And so Hudson emphasizes that our Western notion of freedom has been, for some twenty-eight centuries now, Orwellian in the most literal sense of the word: War is Peace • Freedom is Slavery • Ignorance is Strength. He writes: “A constant dynamic of history has been the drive by financial elites to centralize control in their own hands and manage the economy in predatory, extractive ways. Their ostensible freedom is at the expense of the governing authority and the economy at large. As such, it is the opposite of liberty as conceived in Sumerian times” (p. 266).
• Where to for Sydney property in 2019? Experts expect further price falls — Ingrid Fuary-Wagner at the Australian Financial Review: Property prices have now fallen 7.2 per cent over the year to date, according to CoreLogic – and 9.5 per cent since they peaked in July 2017 – with industry experts anticipating more pain to come for homeowners in the new year. AMP Capital's Shane Oliver expects prices in Sydney to drop by another 10 per cent over the 2019 calendar year.
• Chuck Schumer Caved to Facebook and Donald Trump. He Shouldn’t Lead Senate Democrats. — Mehdi Hasan at the Intercept: It wasn’t Mike Pompeo who said, “It’s easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you’re in the foxhole, it’s a very different deal.” It wasn’t Stephen Miller who responded to the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris by suggesting “a pause may be necessary” in the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States. It wasn’t Betsy DeVos who joined a group of finance industry executives for breakfast only a few weeks after the 2008 financial crash and told them, “We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals.” Forget the hawks, blowhards, and kakistocrats of the Trump administration. You know who made all these statements? It was Chuck Schumer. Yes, the fourth-term Democratic senator from New York has a long history of making really right-wing and rancid remarks. Yet on Wednesday morning, Schumer was re-elected as minority leader by acclamation in a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats. They didn’t even bother to vote on it.
• “Moral Hazard” vs Mutual Aid – How the Bronze Age Saved Itself from Debt Serfdom — Michael Hudson in Naked Capitalism: The Naked Capitalism discussion of John Siman’s review of my new book “and forgive them their debts”: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Years quickly slipped into a discourse about modern economies and whether it was moral to cancel the debts of people who are in arrears, when some people have struggled to keep current on their payments. Bankers and bondholders love this argument, because it says, “Don’t cancel debts. Make everyone pay, or someone will get a free ride.” Suppose Solon would have thought this in Athens in 594 BC. No banning of debt bondage. No Greek takeoff. More oligarchy Draco-style. Suppose Hammurabi, the Sumerians and other Near Eastern rulers would have thought this. Most of the population would have fallen into bondage and remained there instead of being liberated and had their self-support land restored. The Dark Age would have come two thousand years earlier.
• “Economically illiterate and morally fraudulent”: Lord Skidelsky on the Chancellor’s narrative — Robert Skidelsky's post-budget speech in the House of Lords, Progressive Economy Forum: First, let me say I welcome the general thrust of the Budget. As the OBR says it represents the “largest fiscal loosening” since 2010. But we are not here to discuss the Budget, over which we have no control in this House, but “the state of the economy in light of the Budget statement” – that is, how will the Budget affect the economy? The answer is: very little. The “loosening” of which the OBR speaks is much too small to repair the damage caused by the eight years of austerity policy since 2010. An adequate loosening would have required an admission of error beyond the economic understanding or moral compass of this government.
• What Einstein meant by ‘God does not play dice’ — Jim Baggott in Aeon: Einstein’s was a God of philosophy, not religion. When asked many years later whether he believed in God, he replied: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’ Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, had conceived of God as identical with nature. For this, he was considered a dangerous heretic, and was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam. Einstein’s God is infinitely superior but impersonal and intangible, subtle but not malicious. He is also firmly determinist. As far as Einstein was concerned, God’s ‘lawful harmony’ is established throughout the cosmos by strict adherence to the physical principles of cause and effect. Thus, there is no room in Einstein’s philosophy for free will: ‘Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control … we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.’