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.