This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Death to the D.I.Y. Society — Ted Rall: Since the 1970s corporate efficiency experts have burdened American consumers with a constantly expanding galaxy of tasks that businesses used to perform for them. Craig Lambert calls it “shadow work”—labor imposed on you that you’re not conscious of. The Do It Yourself (because companies won’t hire workers to do it anymore) movement faced little resistance in a culture that elevates personal responsibility and rugged individualism. Which is how, in less than half a century, we have become accustomed to pumping our own gas and planning our own vacations and scanning our own groceries and running our own cable TV diagnostic tests, forgetting how much easier life was with service station attendants and travel agents and cashiers and technicians who came to your actual house. Not only do we work harder, we earn less due to the disappearance of service personnel jobs from the labor market.
• Economic Growth and Climate Change: Mistaking an Output Variable for an Instrument — Peter Dorman at Angry Bear: Economic growth is not, not, not a policy variable. There is no magic button available to society that delivers a given rate of economic growth, or degrowth for that matter. It’s an outcome of a host of factors, some of which are controllable, others not. Indeed, as we wait for quarterly GDP numbers to be revised several quarters later, we still don’t know what economic growth or contraction we’ve experienced. It is true that politicians often speak of the need to adopt some policy or other for sake of economic growth, but at best they are proposing to push on one of the many factors that influences it. There is no growth dial, and even if there were, twisting it a few notches would have almost no impact on carbon emissions, which need to fall by nearly 100% within two generations.
• Tome the Dancing Bug — by Ruben Bolling:
  
• 20th anniversary for the euro — no reason for celebration — Lars P. Syll: When the euro was created twenty years ago, it was celebrated with fireworks at the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt. Today we know better. There are no reasons to celebrate the 20-year anniversary. On the contrary. Already since its start, the euro has been in crisis. And the crisis is far from over. The tough austerity measures imposed in the eurozone has made economy after economy contract. And it has not only made things worse in the periphery countries, but also in countries like France and Germany. Alarming facts that should be taken seriously.
• The Democrats Are Climate Deniers — Branko Marcetic in Jacobin: Elizabeth Warren is instructive in this respect. She is considered one of the most progressive candidates in the race in 2020, but Warren has never really shown any leadership on the issue, as numerous environmental activists attest to. The leading piece of legislation she authored (“I’ve got a plan to fight back,” she said at the time) only came in September of last year, and it’s a bill that — drum roll — would force public companies to disclose climate risks, so that “investors would have the information they need . . . [to] make smart decisions with their money.” If that sounds like what might generously be described as a quarter-measure that relies on market solutions to a problem actively being driven by the market, that’s because it is. [Ignore the misguided "pay-for" bits in the article. And, on the subject of pay-fors:]
• We Can Pay For A Green New Deal — Stephanie Kelton, Andres Bernal, and Greg Carlock in the Huffington Post: Are taxes an important part of an aggressive climate plan? Sure. Taxes can shape incentives and help change behaviors within the private sector. Taxes should be raised to break up concentrations of wealth and income, and to punish polluters for the cost and consequences of their actions. In a period without federal leadership on the climate crisis, this is how many state and local governments are considering carbon pricing. That’s useful ― not because we “need to pay for it” but to end polluters’ harmful behavior. The federal government can spend money on public priorities without raising revenue, and it won’t wreck the nation’s economy to do so. That may sound radical, but it’s not. It’s how the U.S. economy has been functioning for nearly half a century. That’s the power of the public purse.
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 70 Percent Tax on the Rich Isn't About Revenue, It's About Decreasing Inequality — Vanessa Williamson in Common Dreams: Progressive taxation should work as a corrective tax, like tobacco taxes or a carbon tax. Sure, tobacco taxes raise some revenue for the states. But their primary purpose is to curb smoking. While a carbon tax could produce a lot of government revenue, the real point is to limit global warming pollution. In essence, corrective taxes try to put themselves out of business; if tobacco tax revenues decline because people quit smoking, or if carbon taxes stop rolling in because the economy becomes fossil-free, that is victory, not defeat.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Wondermark — by David Malki !:
  
• The DNA Industry and the Disappearing Indian: DNA, Race, and Native Rights — Aviva Chomsky for TomDispatch: In reality, such testing does not tell us much about our ancestors. That’s partly because of the way DNA is passed down through the generations and partly because there exists no database of ancestral DNA. Instead, the companies compare your DNA to that of other contemporary humans who have paid them to take the test. Then they compare your particular variations to patterns of geographical and ethnic distribution of such variations in today’s world -- and use secret algorithms to assign purportedly precise ancestral percentages to them. So is there really a Sardinian or East Asian gene or genetic variation? Of course not. If there is one fact that we know about human history, it’s that ours is a history of migrations. We all originated in East Africa and populated the planet through ongoing migrations and interactions. None of this has ended (and, in fact, thanks to climate change, it will only increase). Cultures, ethnicities, and settlements can’t be frozen in time. The only thing that is constant is change. The peoples who reside in today’s Sardinia or East Asia are a snapshot that captures only a moment in a history of motion. The DNA industry’s claims about ancestry award that moment a false sense of permanence.
• Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers. It Hurts Students. — Nancy Bunge in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Some students understand the implications of all this. When I first told a class that one of the students would have to collect and submit the evaluations so that I couldn’t tamper with them, one of them asked, "Doesn’t that make you feel demeaned?" Another student wrote on an evaluation, "Why don’t you get off your ass and see for yourself what a great job she is doing?" And, indeed, the administration, not the students, should undertake the difficult task of appraising how well a class works. A colleague once remarked, "When we agitated for student evaluations in the ’60s, we never guessed we were handing the administration a club."
• Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
  
• Education…education…education — The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies: Instead of higher education being about learning, exploration and creativity, it is increasingly becoming commodified; serving the interests of capital rather than the development of the individual for life and the benefit of society. Already, as Steve Watson notes, there is the potential for subjects that do not have a direct link to the world of work to disappear or be reconfigured for employability. And while universities struggle for funding and try to cut costs, students face the prospect of a lifetime of education debt without even the certainty of finding a good, well paying job at the end of it.
• Tom Toles for December 02, 2018:
  
• Why language might be the optimal self-regulating system — Lane Greene in Aeon: It is a delight to be able to use a good literally: when my son fell off a horse on a recent holiday, I was able to reassure my mother that ‘He literally got right back in the saddle,’ and this pleased me no end. So when people use literally to say, for example, We literally walked a million miles, I sigh a little sigh. I know that James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and many others used a figurative literally, but as a mere intensifier it’s not particularly useful or lovely, and it is particularly useful and lovely in the traditional sense, where it has no good substitute. So I do believe that when change happens in a language it can do harm. Not the end of the world, but harm.
• Evil Mansion — Phil Are Go:
  
• Urban planning is failing children and breaching their human rights – here’s what needs to be done — Jenny Wood in the Conversation: When children are asked about their favourite places to play, the playground is rarely their first choice. And most adults will often agree that they also favoured places other than the playground when they were children: parks, woods, riverbanks, fields and beaches were the places that captured imagination, not a few swings in an enclosed tarmacked space. Similarly, skateparks offer only limited recreation potential and tend to be favoured more by boys than by girls. Playgrounds often lack a range of equipment to suit children of different ages and abilities and are not always well maintained. Children also have to be able to reach the playground safely on their own, otherwise they have to be accompanied. This can limit the time children have to play outdoors and contributes further demands on the time of already pressured parents and carers. These exclusions and misunderstandings of what children really need contribute to environments that favour adults over children, and can leave children feeling disempowered, discouraged, inactive and dependent on the adults around them.
• Off the Mark — by Mark Parisi:
  

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.’

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Bloom County — Berkeley Breathed is making an old man very nostalgic for simpler times when comics weren't free, but beer was very, very cheap and pubs weren't reading-unfriendly raucous mini casinos - I'm a Boinger!:
  
• Why be nonbinary? — Robin Dembroff in Aeon: For all the huffing about how gender is just body parts, no one in practice holds the identity view of gender. If gender is just reproductive features and nothing more, it makes no more sense to insist that people must look, love or act in particular ways on the basis of gender than it would to demand that people modify their behaviour on the basis of eye colour or height.
• Peter Mares on why falling house prices are a good thing — for the utterly unGoogleable folk at .id: When home-owners make a capital gain, or pass on that gain to their children, the windfall goes completely untaxed. What is more, the value of a private residence has almost zero impact on the owner’s entitlement to government benefits, like the aged pension. This encourages us to treat housing as a financial asset above its primary function in providing a home. It encourages us to over-invest in housing and, as a nation, take on dangerously high levels of household debt. It encourages us to use housing inefficiently. There are around 1.5 million more homes in Australia’s capital cities that have two spare bedrooms and 560,000 homes with three or more. Shifting from stamp duty to a broad-based property tax—as well as reforming negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount—could help ameliorate some of these problems. It could also help make housing fairer.
• The One Thing I Dislike About My Introversion — Sophia Dembling in Psychology Today: I often feel like I have nothing to say. Introverts are well-known for eschewing small talk. I am no different, but it’s not just that I dislike it. It’s that after about three exchanges, I’ve exhausted my capacity for it. Then, as the conversation awkwardly trails off, I feel foolish and inept. I'm not sure what to think about this. In deep discussions, I have plenty to say — I have to cut myself off sometimes for fear of dominating the conversation. But for whatever reason, I run out of small talk quickly, and the resulting silence is neither warm nor welcoming. It's just weird.