The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Kansas Should Go F--- Itself — Matt Taibbi review's Thomas Frank's latest book: The average blue-state media consumer by 2020 has ingested so much propaganda about Trump (and Sanders, for that matter) that he or she will be almost immune to the damning narratives in this book. Protesting, “But Trump is a racist,” they won’t see the real point – that these furious propaganda campaigns that have been repeated almost word for word dating back to the 1890s are aimed at voters, not politicians. In the eighties and nineties, TV producers and newspaper editors established the ironclad rule of never showing audiences pictures of urban poverty, unless it was being chased by cops. In the 2010s the press began to cartoonize the “white working class” in a distantly similar way. This began before Trump. As Bernie Sanders told Rolling Stone after the 2016 election, when the small-town American saw himself or herself on TV, it was always “a caricature. Some idiot. Or maybe some criminal, some white working-class guy who has just stabbed three people.” These caricatures drove a lot of voters toward Trump, especially when he began telling enormous crowds that the lying media was full of liars who lied about everything.
• Via Bruce Sterling:
  
• Starbucks, monetary superpower — JP Koning: I don't go to Starbucks very often, so I only recently learnt that the company has succeeded in getting many of its customers to stop using cash and debit/credit cards to buy coffee. Instead, they are using Starbucks's own payments option. […] Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer's wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Starbucks Mobile App. It amounts to ~6% of all of the company's liabilities. This is a pretty incredible number. Stored value card liabilities are the money that you, oh loyal Starbucks customer, use to buy coffee. What you might not realize is that these balances simultaneously function as a loan to Starbucks. Starbucks doesn't pay any interest on balances held in the Starbucks app or gift cards. You, the loyal customer, are providing the company with free debt.
• Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
  
• The Crowding-Out Myth — Robert Skidelsky at Project Syndicate: But the crowding-out argument is wrong both theoretically and empirically. First, it assumes that all resources in an economy are fully employed. In fact, most market economies normally have underemployment or spare capacity, meaning that public investment can “crowd in” resources that otherwise would be idle. This was John Maynard Keynes’s key argument, and it cannot be stressed often enough. And the superior efficiency of a boom-and-bust private investment system dominated by financial oligarchs is far from obvious. Second, the state has in practice always played a leading role in allocating capital, either through direct investments of its own (including most nineteenth-century railway-building), or by deliberately encouraging certain types of private investment. For example, Toyota, which started out as a textile-machinery manufacturer, became a leading global automobile producer from the early 1960s onward with the help of tariff protection and state subsidies. Nor did Silicon Valley succeed because the state got out of the way of risk-taking venture capitalists and garage investors.
• Tom the Dancing Bug— by Ruben Bolling:
  
• The big Apple — John Quiggin in Inside Story: The protocols and languages that make the internet possible are a public good, created by collaborative effort and made freely available. The information on the internet is generated by households, businesses and governments using these protocols. Without these public goods, Google would be worthless. But because advertising can be attached to search results, ownership of a search engine is immensely profitable. Similarly, Facebook’s value is derived entirely from the contributions of its users. Apple and Amazon are more like traditional businesses, but increasingly rely on internet services for their profits. Thus, a network created in the public sector has become the underlying infrastructure for private monopolies.
• Dependency — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
• Corporate Dems Want You To Shut Up While They Get Loud — David Sirota: The demand to shut up is only being aimed at the progressive base of the party, while the corporate wing floods the zone with rhetoric that could demobilize voters. Indeed, at the very moment many good progressives are blunting their criticism and making clear that defeating Trump is of utmost importance, Corporate Democrats aren’t being asked to wait or hold their tongues. In fact, they are doing the opposite: Rahm Emanuel — who has been advising Biden — just went on television to show that the corporate wing of the party is intent on using the stretch run of the Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime™ not to doggedly focus on actually winning the election, but to instead try to predetermine post-election policy outcomes. […] “Two things I would say if I was advising an administration,” said Emanuel, who left the Chicago mayoralty in disgrace after his city officials suppressed a video of the police murder of a teenager. “One is no there’s no new Green Deal, there’s no Medicare For All, probably the single two topics that were discussed the most. That’s not even in the platform.”
• #1215; One in Hole — Wondermark by David Malki !:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading these comics:

• Via Bruce Sterling:
  
• Green ban saves heritage and Sydney Powerhouse — Emily Thompson at Solidarity Online: NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has backflipped over the move of the Ultimo Powerhouse Museum to Parramatta, announcing plans for a museum on both sites. After ongoing community opposition, the last straw was a NSW CFMEU construction union green ban against the demolition of heritage buildings in Parramatta to make way for the Powerhouse. This means the historic Willow Grove, a former maternity hospital, and St Georges Terrace, a row of housing terraces, will be protected. Darren Greenfield, the union’s secretary, said, “This is the first Green Ban the CFMEU has put in place since the recent passing of Jack Mundey who inspired a generation of unionists and community activists to fight for our shared built, cultural, and environmental heritage.” In recent years union green bans have helped save the Bondi Beach Pavilion, and boosted the fight to preserve The Rocks’ iconic brutalist Sirius building.
• Dinosaur Comics — by Ryan North:
  
• Murdoch’s Long Shadow — Sara Badawi in Tribbune: This week Hacked Off, the campaign for a free and accountable press, has published research sourced from the government’s own data, that shows a disturbing closeness between Murdoch’s press empire and Boris Johnson. Among the findings is the extraordinary revelation that Rupert Murdoch personally met with the government at least three times in Johnson’s first six months. The last of those meetings was only 72 hours after the general election result was announced. But it goes further. Between 2018 and 2019, staff at Rupert Murdoch’s News UK met with government ministers and advisors a total of 206 times. Parliament sat for roughly 73 weeks across this period – which means News UK employees were getting an average of 2.8 meetings per week. The cabinet, by contrast, usually meets only once per week.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Setting things straight about the Job Guarantee — Bill Mitchell: The fact is that once you go down the UBI route you are diluting the inflation anchor provided by the Job Guarantee – which is a central proposition within MMT, and, is one of the features, that sets it apart from mainstream macroeconomics. And once you dilute the inflation anchor, then you are effectively back in a NAIRU world where unemployment is used as a policy tool to discipline any inflationary processes. You cannot have it both ways as an MMTer. If you support a UBI then you should not hold yourself out as a proponent of MMT. Simple as that.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  
• 'Luddite Sensibilities' and the Future of Education — Audrey Watters: I remain steadfast in my criticism of education technologies in almost all their forms and functions. Indeed, the problems that we've long identified with ed-tech — privacy violations, security concerns, racist algorithms, accessibility and access issues, all-male leadership teams, outsourcing, disruptive bullshittery, and so on — are still here. And I fear we are at a particularly dangerous crossroads for education because of ed-tech. The danger is not simply because of the entrepreneurial and the venture capitalist sharks circling our institutions, but also because the narratives, long foisted upon us, about the necessity of ed-tech are becoming more and more entrenched, more and more pervasive. These narratives have always tended to repress the trauma and anxiety associated with the adoption of new technologies and more broadly with the conditions, the precarity, of everyday life. These narratives want us to forget that ed-tech is, first and foremost, beholden to the ideologies of machines, efficiencies, and capitalism. But this is ed-tech's big moment, or so we're told. And all those folks who predicted a decade or so ago that schools would all be online by 2020, that universities would all be bankrupt may just be right.
• Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro:
  

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:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
  
• ‘No mask, no entry. Is that clear enough? That seems pretty clear, right?’ — as told to Eli Saslow of the Washington Post: Some of them would see our signs, open the front door, and just yell: “F--- masks. F--- you.” Or they would walk in, refuse to wear a mask and then dump their merchandise all over the counter. I had a guy come in with no mask and a pistol on his hip and stare me down. I had a guy who took his T-shirt off and put it over his mouth so I could see his whole stomach. “There. A mask. Are you happy?” I had a lady who tried to tape a pamphlet on the front window about the ADA mask exemption, which is a totally fake thing. It’s a conspiracy theory, but it’s become popular here. She kept saying we were discriminating against people with disabilities. What? Why? How? None of what they say sounds logical. I can’t make sense of half the names they call me. They say I’m uneducated — uh, that’s kind of ironic. They say I’m a sheep. I’ve been brainwashed. I’m pushing government propaganda. I’m suffocating them. I’m a part of the deep state. I’m an agent for the World Health Organization. “How do you like your muzzle?” “Is this going to become sharia law?” “Are you prepping us to wear burqas?” “What’s next? Mind control?”
• Dems' Sternly Worded Letter Won't Stop Fascism — David Sirota: Two weeks ago, the Associated Press reported that President Trump deployed unidentified agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to Portland, Ore., where they were filmed getting out of unmarked vehicles and abducting protesters off the street. A few days later, House Democrats responded by obediently advancing an appropriations bill that funds the department -- with no apparent restrictions on such deployments. “This bill as a whole will strengthen our security and keep Americans safe while upholding our American values of fairness and respect,” said Democratic House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, amid growing outrage at the situation in Oregon. With congressional Democrats on their way to approving $50 billion for DHS, Trump administration officials are now boasting about their plans to replicate the Portland invasion in other cities. Those officials seem emboldened to ignore local Democratic opposition to the federal deployments.
• Sleeping — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Hack of 251 Law Enforcement Websites Exposes Personal Data of 700,000 Cops — Micah Lee at the Intercept: A week after Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes while he lay handcuffed in the street until he died, triggering massive nationwide protests, a young political science major in Oregon was contacting lawyers. “I am a long time activist and ally of the Black Lives Matter movement,” she wrote to a Bay Area law firm. “Is there anyway[sic] that I could add your firm, or consenting lawyers under your firm, to a list of resources who will represent protesters pro bono if they were/are to be arrested? Thank you very much for your time.” A lawyer who read this message was infuriated and anonymously reported the student to the authorities. “PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHED SOLICITATION I RECEIVED FROM AN ANTIFA TERRORIST WANTING MY HELP TO BAIL HER AND HER FRIENDS OUT OF JAIL, IF ARRESTED FOR RIOTING,” he typed into an unhinged letter, in all-caps, that he mailed to the Marin County District Attorney’s office, just north of San Francisco. […] An investigator in the Marin County DA’s office considered this useful intelligence. She logged into the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center’s CMS and created a new Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, under the category “Radicalization/Extremism” and typed the student’s name as the subject. “The attached letter was received via US Postal Service this morning,” she wrote in the summary field. The student “appears to be a member of the Antifa group and is assisting in planning protesting efforts in the Bay Area despite living in Oregon.”
• Don’t Sell Your Mind — Janet Capron in Public Seminar: After a reading at Shakespeare & Company, I heard my favorite question, which came from an Upper East Side matron and sounded more accusatory than curious: “Don’t you ever regret having been a prostitute?” I paused for a second or two. “No. I’ve searched my soul, and the answer is still no.” Then, with a little gleam in my eye (I like to think), I said, “What I really regret are the more than two decades I spent working in pharmaceutical advertising.”