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: