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.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Just You Wait, History Proves That Someday Liberals Will Love Donald Trump — Ted Rall:
  
• The unwelcome revival of ‘race science’ — Gavin Evans in the Guardian: Although race science has been repeatedly debunked by scholarly research, in recent years it has made a comeback. Many of the keenest promoters of race science today are stars of the “alt-right”, who like to use pseudoscience to lend intellectual justification to ethno-nationalist politics. If you believe that poor people are poor because they are inherently less intelligent, then it is easy to leap to the conclusion that liberal remedies, such as affirmative action or foreign aid, are doomed to fail.
• Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Scam — Douglas Rushkoff in Medium: The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them. […] Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords.
• The Rise and Demise of RSS — Sinclair Target in Motherboard: About a decade ago, the average internet user might well have heard of RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary—what the acronym stands for depends on who you ask—is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology. The story of how this happened is really two stories. The first is a story about a broad vision for the web’s future that never quite came to fruition. The second is a story about how a collaborative effort to improve a popular standard devolved into one of the most contentious forks in the history of open-source software development.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Tom Toles:
  
• From brothels to independence: the neoliberalisation of (sex) work — the psuedonymous Ava Caradonna in openDemocracy: To understand how sex work has changed requires thinking through how both our labour conditions and the political economy of the industry has been transformed. We are no longer forced to hand over hefty house fees to a boss, but our overheads are now much higher. The economic risk of investment has been shifted onto the worker. At the same time, we are now required to invest nearly infinite amounts of unpaid labour into our ‘businesses’. Working hours now stretch into every waking moment and working spaces become everywhere and nowhere.
• Apple Has an Early Case of GE’s Disease — Marshall Auerback in Naked Capitalism: “Financialization”—which denotes “the increasing importance of financial markets, institutions and motives in the world economy”—manifests itself clearly in the case of Apple. It is becoming another example of an American company that is increasingly valuing financial engineering over real engineering, as its core businesses get hollowed out amid product saturation and declining global sales. Like General Electric some 25 years under Jack Welch, Apple under current CEO Tim Cook increasingly represents a microcosm of the changing role of U.S. markets as they have become less a vehicle for capital provision, more akin to a wealth recycling machine in which cash piles are used less for investment/research and development, more for share buybacks (which are tied to executive compensation, elevating the incentive for, at a minimum, quarterly short-termism and, at worst, fraud and corporate looting). All in the interests of that flawed concept of “maximizing shareholder value,” in which the company’s stock price, rather than its product line, drives corporate decisions, determines senior management compensation, and becomes the ultimate measuring stick of success. Usually, when this trend becomes ascendant, it doesn’t end well. Perhaps the adverse reaction to Apple’s recently reported earnings is the first warning of what could follow.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — By Zach Weinersmith:
  
• An algorithm a day will keep the doctor at bay — David Mitchell being charming in That Utterly Charming Newspaper: "In the UK, we are spending £97bn of public money on treating disease and only £8bn preventing it,” the health secretary Matt Hancock said last week. “You don’t have to be an economist to see those numbers don’t stack up.” But Matt Hancock actually is an economist, so how does he know? […] And obviously they do stack up. As in, you could stack them up – you could add them together. They probably are stacked up in various summaries of government spending: stacked up under the heading “Health”. You don’t have to be an economist to see that if you stacked them up, that would make £105bn. I don’t think he means that, though. I think maybe he means that £97bn is much more than £8bn. His point may simply be that you don’t have to be an economist to see that 97 is a larger number than eight. If so, I heartily agree and my only quibble is why, even with Britain’s rising life expectancy, for which Matt Hancock is doubtless keen to take credit, he considered that assertion worth the time it took to express. To be fair, I think what he’s getting at is that, if we spent more than £8bn on preventing illness, maybe we wouldn’t need to spend as much as £97bn treating it. Unfortunately, though, you don’t have to be an economist to know whether that contention stacks up. In fact, you have to be something else. You need a completely different type of expertise.
• End intellectual property — Samir Chopra in Aeon: The phrase ‘intellectual property’ was first used in a legal decision in 1845 and acquired formal heft in 1967 with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialised agency of the United Nations that represents and protects the commercial interests of holders of copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets. The ubiquitous use of ‘intellectual property’ began in the digital era of production, reproduction and distribution of cultural and technical artifacts. As a new political economy appeared, so did a new commercial and legal rhetoric. ‘Intellectual property’, a central term in that new discourse, is a culturally damaging and easily weaponised notion. Its use should be resisted.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• A Brief History of Everything That Happened Because of George H.W. Bush’s Insecurity — Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone includes this thing I did not know, or am too senile to recall: Bush once sent a poor black kid to a real prison for real years for the crime of being a political prop. In the summer of 1989, while vacationing avec speedboat in his Kennebunkport, Maine, estate, Bush came up with the brilliant idea, or at least acceded to one dreamed up by aides. He would do a live address to the country while holding up a bag of crack that had been sold just outside the White House. The idea was to show that crack could “be bought anywhere.” The problem was, nobody sold crack in Lafayette Square near the White House, which is where Bush aides wanted the crack found. There is a long backstory here that involves administration officials tasking the DEA with securing a bust near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They ended up having an undercover agent contact an 18-year-old named Keith Jackson from a poor neighborhood in southeast Washington. He was asked to bring his wares to the White House. […] The federal judge in the case, Stanley Sporkin, wanted desperately to not impose a stiff sentence on Jackson, but — in a problem none of the Bush aides who cooked up this dumb scheme thought of — mandatory sentencing laws handcuffed Sporkin. So the kid was sentenced to 10 years (he was later paroled). Sporkin, a former CIA general counsel appointed by Reagan, suggested Jackson ask Bush for a pardon: “He used you, in the sense of making a big drug speech… But he’s a decent man, a man of great compassion. Maybe he can find a way to reduce at least some of that sentence.” Bush blew that off and instead issued pardons to six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Day in 1992.
• Progressives to Conservatives: You Hate Liberals For All The Wrong Reasons — Ted Rall:
  
• The French Protests Do Not Fit a Tidy Narrative — Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: [Max] Boot wrote a sad column about the yellow vests. He wondered why people on the left, right and in between were mocking a piece he wrote 18 months ago, in which he said, “America needs its own Macron — a charismatic leader who can make centrism cool.” Macron has a 23 percent approval rating, Paris seems to be on fire, and people are even spray-painting the Arc de Triomphe. How, Boot asked, could all this be happening to such a cool politician? When an online commenter suggested “centrism” was just another word for “elitism,” Boot was again puzzled. What’s wrong with elitism? Don’t we all want the best at the helm? You wouldn’t want an un-elite airline pilot, would you? This was the Spinal Tap version of neoliberalism: what’s wrong with being elite? The inability of pundits to make sense of the plummeting popularity of “centrism” is a long-developing story in the West. Over and over, a daft political class paternalistically implements changes more to the benefit of donors than voters, then repeatedly is baffled when they prove unpopular.
• ‘Eat The Rich’: Still a Popular Idea in French Uprisings, Especially With the Yellow Vests — Christopher Dickey in the Daily Beast: The leaderless demonstrators trashing French cities or standing by watching while anarchist and fascist and for-the-hell-of-it casseurs do the job for them, have put forth long lists of inchoate demands about which there’s no consensus. But one big issue does remain that has resonance with the wider masses. They want Macron to reimpose a wealth tax on top of France’s already very high income taxes. Although the revenues from the “solidarity tax on fortunes,” known as the ISF, might go to good social causes, that’s not the reason for its political importance. It’s a popular idea because it’s punitive. French society was traditionally, famously jealous of wealth, and angered by it, long before the current problems of inequality created by global financial markets. As Dana Kennedy pointed out in The Daily Beast last week, for centuries the vast peasant population of France lived in horrible conditions. There was a long history of pitchfork-wielding popular uprisings against an indolent aristocracy, and by the time of the Enlightenment, that popular anger was turning against bourgeois merchants as well.
• The Paris ‘Yellow Vest’ Protests Show the Flaws of Capitalism — Caroline Haskins, Motherboard: This is a problem with climate negotiations generally: the policies that are supposed to mitigate damage in the present and future and protect the world’s most vulnerable are negotiated by people who are largely immune to the short-term material concerns of living paycheck-to-paycheck, and the long-term material concerns of climate change are purely theoretical to them, given their economic status. That’s why the policies that end up coming into practice don’t consider the urgency and immediacy of the material, life-and-death concerns of the working class. The working class is asked to sacrifice now, and upper classes, meanwhile, are rarely asked to make many material sacrifices at all.
• Constant anxiety of benefit sanctions is toxic for mental health of disabled people — Danny Taggart, Ewen Speed, and Jaimini Mehta in the Conversation precis their new report for Inclusion London: One man, Charlie, who participated in our study, described how a sanction left him with no food or electricity on Christmas day, leading to a suicide attempt and mental breakdown […] The sanction actually pushed him further away from work. He said that he now has a problem going into the Job Centre: “Because of the damage that the benefit sanction did to me.” Part of the rationale is based on a psychological theory known as behavioural economics, which uses a range of nudges to encourage people to make more rational choices. So-called “nudge theory” has been used to encourage behaviour change in areas such as paying tax on time and organ donation. But in the context of welfare support, the use of incentives take the form of perverse and punitive incentives. Perverse, because they can require disabled people to understate their qualifications to obtain any form of employment. The same man told us the Job Centre staff told him to remove his degree from his CV so that he wouldn’t appear overqualified for the jobs they told him to apply for. He said it had a real impact on his feeling of self-worth. […] The incentives are punitive because they leave disabled people in a state of constant dread, feeling worried all of the time, whether they are sanctioned or not.
• Corporate-Funded Judicial Boot Camp Made Sitting Federal Judges More Conservative — David Dayen at the Intercept: In 1976, the Law and Economics Center, a corporate-funded academic organization now housed at George Mason University, began holding an intensive, all-expenses-paid, two- to three-week economics seminar for federal judges in Plantation Island, Florida. Organized by conservative economist Henry Manne, the Economics Institute for Federal Judges featured some of America’s most renowned professors teaching classical economic theories that could be applied to the courtroom. Though controversial in its day, the seminar recurred until 1999, and at its peak, over 40 percent of all federal judges had attended. According to a new working paper by three researchers, this indoctrination into law and economics — which emphasized cost-benefit analysis and economic efficiency; warned of the downsides of union protections and environmental regulations; and found benefits to deterrence — had a quantifiable effect on future rulings. Judges who attended Manne’s seminars rendered more conservative verdicts in economics cases. They were more likely to rule against the National Labor Relations Board or the Environmental Protection Agency. They employed more economics language in their rulings, according to a linguistic analysis. And they imposed harsher prison sentences, particularly after receiving more discretion to set terms in 2005.