Sunday, 5 July 2020 - 4:24pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Out of Control — Alfie Kohn in Psychology Today:
Autonomous people experience their actions as authentic, integrated, willingly enacted. But that doesn't mean they see themselves as separate from others or in opposition to the larger culture. This critical but often-overlooked distinction helps us to make sense of the finding that a need for autonomy is experienced even by people in collectivist societies. Selfish individualism, by contrast, is not an ineluctable feature of "human nature." Rather, it represents a corruption of our need to have some say over what happens to us. In fact, when people are raised without support for their autonomy—overcontrolled by parents and teachers—two things may happen. They may, upon growing up and finding themselves in positions of authority, try to deny others their autonomy. And they may insist on a warped version of self-determination that looks more like selfishness. If they have grown up feeling powerless, they might come to rage against any person who tells them no. They might see any restriction on their personal freedom, even to benefit a larger community, as tantamount to "tyranny." They might insist that their convenience takes precedence over other people with immune-compromised vulnerability.
- #1516; In which a Visitor proves a Nuisance — Wondermark, by David Malki !:
- It's Time for an End-of-Life Discussion About Nursing Homes — Rose Eveleth in Wired:
Even before the pandemic hit, nursing homes seemed like an odd, collective compromise. Most American adults, in a survey from two years ago, said they wouldn’t want to leave their homes or communities as they aged—and most also didn’t envision that they’d ever end up doing so. In 2016, 1.3 million Americans were residents of nursing facilities. “It's considered completely normal that we would take an individual and force them to give up their home, their family, and their life and place them in this institution. We just take that as a given,” says Bruce Darling, an organizer with Rochester Adapt, a disability rights organization. He and other advocates are wondering if now, finally, in the face of coronavirus, people might reconsider these spaces altogether. The present chaos and horror in nursing homes should come as no surprise. In 2018, 11 children died in a nursing facility in New Jersey from an adenovirus outbreak. A contagious fungus has meanwhile infected over 800 nursing home residents over the past few years, killing half of them. Tom Chiller, a fungal expert at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called nursing facilities “the dark underbelly of drug-resistant infection.” In 2014, a New Mexico nursing home was struck by an outbreak of Clostridium difficile that killed eight residents. These outbreaks happen to be among the ones we know about. As a Reuters investigation showed, many such events in nursing homes never get reported.
- Forget UBI, says an economist: It’s time for universal basic jobs — Pavlina Tcherneva interviewed by Cory Doctorow for the LA Times:
Governments guarantee all sorts of things: loans, contracts. It’s not novel for the public sector to provide guarantees. We don’t rely on the market to solve poverty or education. So, if we’re going to manage unemployment by creating jobs on demand, how should we do it? Not necessarily with big federal projects. Rather, the government could fund jobs proposed by agencies, states and localities, but also folks who are doing social work on the ground, through nonreligious, nonpolitical, nonprofit organizations struggling to fill gaps left by the market. We’d solicit projects: concrete things for the communities where we live. Environmental rehabilitation, renewal and monitoring, the invisible green work that has to be done. On top of that, all our care needs! Being a companion for elderly people, helping with housework and errands. We need to reassess what we class as productive jobs. Community theater is enormously productive. […] I want to stress, this is not punitive. We are providing jobs, not requiring them. The progressive answer to structural unemployment is a jobs guarantee. The reactionary version is workfare. If we leave this to right-wing authoritarian governments, they’ll have punitive public works programs. They’ll make unemployed people build border walls. Unless progressives wake up to something bolder and bigger than just solving this crisis, I fear that the future is bleak.
And, in related but sad news about somebody who took up a government invitation into community theatre: - Carl Reiner, Multifaceted Master of Comedy, Is Dead at 98 — Robert Berkvist and Peter Keepnews do the obit for the NYT:
Carl Reiner was born in the Bronx on March 20, 1922, to Irving Reiner, a watchmaker, and Bessie (Mathias) Reiner. After graduating from Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, he went to work as a machinist’s helper and seemed headed for a career repairing sewing machines. Then one day his older brother, Charlie, mentioned seeing a newspaper article about a free acting class being given by the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal jobs agency. Carl tried his hand at acting, found he was good at it, hung up his machinist’s apron and joined a theater troupe.
- 'Deplorable Act in Face of Global Crisis': Trump Condemned as US Buys Up Nearly Entire Supply of Covid-19 Drug — Jake Johnson at Common Dreams:
The Trump administration's decision to purchase almost all of California-based Gilead Sciences' projected stock of remdesivir through September was also viewed by observers as a glaring example of the "dysfunctional character" of a patent system that gives pharmaceutical giants decades of monopoly control over a drug that could save lives in the near-term. "This is what happens when the world relies on a broken system driven by greed and profit during a pandemic," tweeted U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now, which is urging governments to override Gilead's patent through compulsory licensing. "Governments have a right to override this ludicrous patent system under international law, and they should take the opportunity to do that now, saving the [National Health Service] and patients around the world from the profiteering of these dysfunctional corporations," Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said in a statement.
- Joan Robinson On Public Sector Deficits And Debt — V. Ramanan in The Case For Concerted Action:
The National Government which was formed in 1931 went in for a great economy campaign. Local authorities were compelled to cease work on building schemes, roads, fen drainage, and so forth. An emergency budget was introduced, increasing taxation, cutting unemployment allowances and reducing the pay of public servants, such as teachers and the armed forces. Private citizens felt it was patriotic to spend less. Some Cambridge Colleges gave up their traditional feasts as a recognition of the crisis. All this helped to increase unemployment and make the economic situation of the country still more depressed. Nowadays there is considerably more understanding of how things work and it is unlikely that such a completely idiotic policy will be tried again.
- I have a hard time taking compliments — James Miller and The Oatmeal:
Sunday, 28 June 2020 - 1:43pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- We need a radically different model to tackle the COVID-19 crisis — James K. Galbraith in DefendDemocracy.Press:
To move forward, first of all, debts incurred before and during the pandemic will have to be written down. The energy sector and transport sectors will have to be rebuilt, based far more on renewables and sources other than oil. A large share of basic industries – especially in the health sector – will have to be repatriated so that basic sufficiency exists in this country. Millions of people will be needed to monitor and support public health; jobs for them must be organized and funded by the government. State and local governments will have to be federally-funded, in substantial part, to provide basic public services. New and sustainable housing must be built, in new community structures. High speed broadband must be provided to all. A new financing model – cooperative, with public support – will be required to re-establish small businesses. Local, decentralized cultural and sporting venues will have to replace mass-based experiences; these too will require cooperative structures and public support. In short, the only way out, remotely acceptable to the population at large, will require a comprehensive restructuring of the economy on a cooperative foundation, with the government stepping up to guaranteed funding, employment, and public investments.
- I Like My Cops Like I Like My Surgeons: Cautious, and Not Looking to Kill Me — Pardis Parker in McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
Just by having someone who waits outside of the home with a photograph of the suspect, for example, and who’s responsible for comparing the person in the home to the person in the photo, and who, if the two don’t match with 100% certainty, would be responsible for saying something on the order of, “The person who lives here is 7-feet tall with three arms, but the person in the photo is 2-feet tall with four legs. Weird. It’s almost as if they’re entirely different people. Perhaps we should take a beat to double-check everything before proceeding.” Or maybe they could have someone responsible for cross-referencing the address of the raid with the address of the suspect? “Is this 123 Drug Dealer Lane, where the suspect lives? It’s not? It’s 456 Paramedic Avenue, where we believe the suspect might be receiving mail? So we’re here for reasons that are… postal? In plain clothes instead of uniforms? At 1 AM? With a no-knock warrant? And, like, a ton of guns? Seems weird, doesn’t it? I mean, at the very least it doesn’t seem not weird. Maybe we should double-check everything before proceeding.”
- So Your Landlord Is Trying to Evict You — Ted Rall:
- Donald Trump’s Presidency Is a Saturday Night Massacre That Never Ends — Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone:
David Greenberg, a Rutgers University professor and historian, says SDNY prosecutor Geoffrey Berman’s removal — first announced on a Friday night, with no warning to Berman — reminded him of one of the Justice Department’s darkest days during Richard Nixon’s presidency. On the night of October 20, 1973, President Nixon fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General Bill Ruckelshaus in what was dubbed the Saturday Night Massacre. To this day, Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre remains one of the most searing examples of political interference at the Justice Department. Greenberg, author of the book Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image, says he traces the pattern of worrying decisions inside the Trump-era Justice Department back to the firing of former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director James Comey in early 2017. The pattern of firings and suspicious interference by the Trump-era DOJ, he says, is “clearly in line with Nixonian behavior and then some.” “In a normal political environment, a week’s worth of Saturday Night Massacres would lead to [Trump’s] impeachment and probably removal,” Greenberg says. “But we have such dysfunctional polarization, primarily the unwillingness of Republicans to step up and see Trump for what he is, that we’re not in a normal political environment anymore.”
- New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Lied” — Mickey McCauley at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:
“The president once again found himself galloping ahead of reality’s leisurely pace.” “The president dabbled anew in the shallow pond of misrepresentation, filling his beak with succulent morsels hidden among the reeds.” “The president’s most recent encounter with the specter of honesty caught him wrong-footed.”
- In the interests of the health of its customers, McDonald’s has announced it will close all of its stores permanently — The Shovel:
In recent weeks McDonalds has implemented a range of new processes to improve hygiene, such as the crew member placing the bag of food on the counter for the customer to pick up, rather than directly handing it over. But analysis has shown that removing the bag of food from the process altogether improved the health outcome for the customer even further.
- Ben Smith’s NYT Critique of Ronan Farrow Describes a Toxic, Corrosive, and Still-Vibrant Trump-Era Pathology: “Resistance Journalism” — Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept:
In March of last year, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi — writing under the headline “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD” — compared the prevailing media climate since 2016 to that which prevailed in 2002 and 2003 regarding the invasion of Iraq and the so-called war on terror: little to no dissent permitted, skeptics of media-endorsed orthodoxies shunned and excluded, and worst of all, the very journalists who were most wrong in peddling false conspiracy theories were exactly those who ended up most rewarded on the ground that even though they spread falsehoods, they did so for the right cause. Under that warped rubric — in which spreading falsehoods is commendable as long as it was done to harm the evildoers — the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the most damaging endorsers of false conspiracy theories about Iraq, rose to become editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, while two of the most deceitful Bush-era neocons, Bush/Cheney speechwriter David Frum and supreme propagandist Bill Kristol, have reprised their role as leading propagandists and conspiracy theorists — only this time aimed against the GOP president instead of on his behalf — and thus have become beloved liberal media icons. The communications director for both the Bush/Cheney campaign and its White House, Nicole Wallace, is one of the most popular liberal cable hosts from her MSNBC perch.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
Sunday, 21 June 2020 - 4:49pm
This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- Matt Wuerker:
- Will he go? — Lawrence Douglas interviewed by Sean Illing in Vox:
When I was researching the book, I was asking myself, well, what does the Constitution and the federal law do in order to secure the peaceful transition of power? And one of the things that I realized is they don’t secure the peaceful succession of power. They presuppose it. They assume that it’s going to happen. So if it doesn’t happen, well, no one knows ...
- “Totally predictable”: State reopenings have backfired — Brian Resnick in Vox:
Many states opened up in early May, hoping the economy would recover while a winning battle against Covid-19 continued apace. Unfortunately, it’s now clear that in the areas where the virus has come roaring back, few gains against it were made in the last month. “We managed to disrupt our economy [and] skyrocket unemployment, and we didn’t control the damn virus,” said Jeff Shaman, an infectious disease modeler at Columbia University.
- Preprint — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
- The man who wrote the most perfect sentences ever written — Nicholas Barber on P.G. Wodehouse for the BBC:
Maybe you can spot some deeper themes in his books if you look hard enough. At times I can persuade myself that there is something subversive in Bertie’s lack of interest in the conventional status markers of a career and a marriage, and something instructive in his insistence on helping his lovestruck friends, however ungrateful they may be. I can even argue that Wodehouse was revolutionary because his characters didn’t defeat villains in fist fights or shootouts (although they sometimes stole policemen’s helmets on Boat Race night). Perhaps he was teaching us that we can’t all be high achievers, let alone rugged action heroes, but that we can all be kind and generous. In other words, we can live according to the code of the Woosters. But I admit that this is a stretch. As Stephen Fry put it, “You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection: you just bask in its warmth and splendour.”
- How JK Rowling Betrayed the World
She Created — Gabrielle Bellot in Literary Hub:
That this is the issue she has chosen to focus on in the wake of international protests against anti-Blackness and police brutality—most protests of which contain many LGBTQ people—is all the more absurdly tone-deaf, suggesting her fanatical obsession with trans people. People who deeply despise one group or another—homophobes, racists, transphobes—so often seem unable to let go of those groups, orbiting them like angry moons, scarcely able to function unless we are there for them to denigrate.
- Via Dave Barry:
Sunday, 7 June 2020 - 2:23pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Zoom Last Supper — Unsourced via Boing Boing:
- 'I Took the Helmet Off and Laid the Batons Down': Michigan Sheriff and Police Didn't Disperse Their Town's Protest—They Joined It — Common Dreams:
What transpired was documented in a powerful photo essay by Leni Kei Williams, a local photographer, who posted the experience to Facebook. "We weren't sure what to expect. With everything we have been seeing on the news, it wasn't clear what would happen but as we were walking, it was beautiful to see people of every race, age, demographic come together and unite," Williams wrote. "When we reached the police station, the officers were lined up and everyone immediately took a knee. The Sheriff asked one question... 'We are mad too! What can we do?' and the crowd responded, 'Join us.'"
- Vote Out Hate — Meidas Touch:
- Where did policing go wrong? — Matt Taibbi:
Basically we have two systems of enforcement in America, a minimalist one for people with political clout, and an intrusive one for everyone else. In the same way our army in Vietnam got in trouble when it started searching for ways to quantify the success of its occupation, choosing sociopathic metrics like “body counts” and “truck kills,” modern big-city policing has been corrupted by its lust for summonses, stops, and arrests. It’s made monsters where none needed to exist. Because they’re constantly throwing those people against walls, writing them nuisance tickets, and violating their space with humiliating searches (New York in 2010 paid $33 million to a staggering 100,000 people strip-searched after misdemeanor charges), modern cops correctly perceive that they’re hated. As a result, many embrace a “warrior” ethos that teaches them to view themselves as under constant threat. This is why you see so many knees on heads and necks, guns drawn on unarmed motorists, chokeholds by the thousand, and patterns of massive overkill everywhere – 41 shots fired at Amadou Diallo, 50 at Sean Bell, 137 at Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in Cleveland, and homicides over twenty bucks or a loose cigarette.
- Joe Biden’s Campaign Strategy — TedRall:
- A 2 a.m. Talk With Rahul Dubey, the 'Absolute Legend' Sheltering Black Lives Matter Protesters — As told to Justin Kirkland of Esquire:
I have a 13-year-old son, and luckily he’s with friends and family up in Delaware; he’s coming back tomorrow. He’s not there, but at the same time, I wish he was because he could see these amazing souls that are in my house are safe and they had every right to be doing what they were doing, and the police didn’t have a right to just beat them down on the street. For now, at least for the next four hours or so, we’re going to be safe here. I’ve never been so excited to get a Ducinni’s pizza in my life. I couldn’t leave it to chance. I called the owner and was like, “Brother, I’ve been ordering from you forever. I need you to do me a favor. We are held hostage,” and he was like, “We got you man.” It’s like a covert mission to get Duccini’s pizza! I’m delirious, but it’s beautiful. It’s absurd that I had to get some stranger to hand me pizza over my back fence through police brigade, but it also shows the human spirit, too, and that’s what this is all about. There’s about 75 people in my house. Some have got couch space. There’s a family, a mother and daughter here, that I gave my son’s room to so they get some peace and quiet. Yeah, even the ledges of the bathtub, and no one’s bitching. They’re happy—no, they’re not happy. They’re safe. They’re cheering. They’re backing each other.
- How to Develop a COVID-19 Vaccine for All — Mariana Mazzucato and Els Torreele in Project Syndicate:
[…] to maximize the impact on public health, the innovation ecosystem must be steered to use collective intelligence to accelerate advances. Science and medical innovation thrives and progresses when researchers exchange and share knowledge openly, enabling them to build upon one another’s successes and failures in real time. But today’s proprietary science does not follow that model. Instead, it promotes secretive competition, prioritizes regulatory approval in wealthy countries over wide availability and global public-health impact, and erects barriers to technological diffusion.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- We're knee-deep in shit and drinking cups of tea — Frankie Boyle in the Overtake:
Labour MPs are great in a pandemic (able to maintain a strict social distance from someone simply by imagining that they’re a party member) but the party’s response has been insipid. I’ve seen more statements from Aldi than I have from Labour. Keir Starmer, a sliding doors Tony Hadley with a head so rectangular he uses a bread bin for a cycling helmet, and a voice which, a hundred years ago, would be doing patter over a ukulele. A man so lacking in charisma each time he greets his wife she experiences nothing more than an unnerving sense of deja vu. Sir Kier is wondering about an exit strategy. He must know the way it goes by now — he’ll be undermined like a cottage with Japanese knotweed, then fuck up an election. In the States, Trump is at war with the virus for attention. The way things are going there, next years Oscar obituary segment is going to make The Irishman look like a gif. He likes to refer to the “Chinese virus”, and you almost have to admire the dedication it takes to be racist about a pandemic, which is not that far away from being transphobic about earthquakes. Not that Biden would be any better: he exhibits a terrifying cognitive decline and was recently the subject of a grim sexual assault allegation. Surely if anything could add to the horror of sexual assault, it would be the perpetrator entering you and then forgetting what he’d come in for.
- When I die — The Oatmeal by Matthew Inman:
Sunday, 31 May 2020 - 2:21pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- New Low for a Bad Patent: Patent Troll Sues Ventilator Company — Joe Mullin at the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
You might think that, during the Coronavirus outbreak and concurrent economic downturn, meritless patent threats might ease up a bit. After all, a lot of companies—particularly smaller ones—are having a hard time making ends meet. And about 32% of patent troll lawsuits do target small and medium-sized businesses. But that’s not what’s happening. In fact, lawsuits by patent trolls are up this year—20% higher than in last year, and 30% higher than 2018. By the count of one company that tracks them, patent trolls have filed 470 lawsuits in the first 4 months of 2020. […] Not only are we seeing a rise in overall litigation, but we can see specific cases that are likely to impact companies involved in direct medical response. Last month, we noted the case of Labrador Diagnostics LLC, a patent troll that sued a company that makes and distributes COVID-19 tests, using patents that it acquired from Theranos, the fraudulent blood-testing company. Now, a shell company called Swirlate IP has acquired a patent that describes generic data transmission, and has used it to sue five different companies—including ResMed [PDF], a company that makes ventilators.
- On the Spotify-Joe Rogan Deal and the Coming Death of Independent Podcasting — Matt Stoller:
So what is Spotify trying to do? First, Spotify is gaining power over podcast distribution by forcing customers to use its app to listen to must-have content, by either buying production directly or striking exclusive deals, as it did with Rogan. This is a tying or bundling strategy. Once Spotify has a gatekeeping power over distribution, it can eliminate the open standard rival RSS, and control which podcasts get access to listeners. The final stage is monetization through data collection and ad targeting. Once Spotify has gatekeeping power over distribution and a large ad targeting business, it will also be able to control who can monetize podcasts, because advertisers will increasingly just want to hit specific audience members, as opposed to advertise on specific shows.
- Trump Hails “Good Bloodlines” of Henry Ford, Whose Anti-Semitism Inspired Hitler — Robert Mackey at the Intercept:
“The company founded by a man named Henry Ford,” Trump’s prepared text appeared to say, “teamed up with the company founded by Thomas Edison — that’s General Electric.” But when Trump came to Ford’s name, he looked up from the text and observed: “good bloodlines, good bloodlines — if you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.” Trump has made no secret of his own belief that he inherited everything from intelligence to an ability to withstand pressure through the “great genes” passed on to him by his parents and grandparents. He has also frequently compared the importance of “good bloodlines” in humans to the breeding of champion racehorses, a view that overlaps in uncomfortable ways with those of eugenicists and racists like Ford.
- Enjoy your climate crisis — via Bruce Sterling:
Thursday, 28 May 2020 - 12:25pm
[Have Domino's Pizza] discovered that people actually don't like that much choice and really don't want to wade through multitudinous, and often quite similar, choices? If I was Domino's I would be giving serious thought to this.
As a mover and shaker in retail (i.e. I push a trolley and suffer from essential tremor) for two and a half years now, I can say that expanding and contracting menus are probably tactical.
That is, in competitive conditions, one should pull out the shiny things to attract customers from your competitors. In [near-]monopoly conditions, the shiny things are just cannibalising the sales of your own core lines, so get rid of them.
Sunday, 24 May 2020 - 1:39pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Why Your Christian Friends and Family Members Are So Easily Fooled by Conspiracy Theories — Joe Forrest in Medium:
No one is immune from conspiratorial thinking, but Christians have a bit more to lose from falling for conspiracy theories than the average person. And I think there a few additional reasons Christians may be susceptible to unhealthy paranoid skepticism. Maybe it’s because, from a young age, many of us were taught the “scientific establishment” was out to destroy our belief in the Bible. Or maybe so many of us were convinced by the Left Behind books that a satanic one-world government was on the horizon, it just makes sense we need to be as vigilant as possible right now. Or maybe because we’ve already been conditioned by our own belief system that there exists a hidden spiritual reality that making the leap to a hidden “shadow government” isn’t all that big of a deal. […] Conspiracy theories speak to our desire to be a part of a story bigger than ourselves. And what blows my mind is that Christians should already believe that to be true. Christians shouldn’t need to buy into conspiracy theories to feel special, or to make sense of the world, or to make their lives feel more exciting. But we’re so enraptured with conspiracy theories, I question if we believe serving the Creator God of the Universe is really enough.
- Modern monetary theory, the economy and the virus — Steven Hail in the Economic Reform Australia Blog:
Recently the Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia claimed – apparently seriously – that the fact the Government had been on the brink of balancing its budget, and that Australia consequently has a relatively low government debt to GDP ratio, placed him in a better posit- ion to finance what most people are wrongly calling a stimulus package. He is wrong. Countries like Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States have levels of government debt far in excess of our own. This in no sense constrains their budgetary response to the crisis. In the United States, the constraint, as ever, is Congress. The United Kingdom, despite its high government debt and its trade deficit, has been able without any problem, to ‘pay for’ a support package much larger than our own. What should be clear to everyone now is that federal or central governments like those of Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the UK and Japan face no purely financial constraints at all. Never mind a ‘money tree’. They just have a money computer. They can create limitless amounts of their currencies when they need to do so. They are not dependent on the goodwill of the bond market, or of credit ratings agencies.
- The Moral and Strategic Calculus of Voting for Joe Biden to Defeat Trump — or Not — Jeremy Scahill at the Intercept:
Among the wild cards of a Biden administration will be the issue of whether he has the actual mental stamina to govern, or if he is going to be frequently disoriented and infrequently seen or heard. Setting aside the protestations of people who pretend they don’t see exactly what everyone else does when Biden speaks in public, we are not actually being asked to vote for Biden as the candidate, because the Biden we see is a shell of his former self. We are being asked to vote for a spin-off of the Obama show, a cast of familiar characters and a few exciting new additions who would take charge of the executive branch, without the popular star of the original show among the visible cast. The fact that the Democrats have forced through a candidate that many people don’t believe is fully functional and will rely on the strength of “the team” assembled around him is a pretty grim statement about the state of democracy in the U.S. If Biden is the best the Democrats have to offer in the face of Trump, the system is rotten.
- The Myth of “Helicopter Money” — Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray in Project Sydndicate:
What MMT actually prescribes has nothing to do with sending “cash” to people or banks. Nor is the Fed “doing MMT” when it engages in QE or lends hundreds of billions to financial institutions. MMT merely underscores the fact that the Fed faces no financial constraints on its ability to buy assets or lend; it does not prescribe any particular action in this direction – and indeed is skeptical of such policies. If there is any MMT feature to the US rescue package, it is the fact that it is not “paid for.” Proponents of MMT have always insisted that we must stop attaching such strings – increased taxes or spending cuts elsewhere (the “PAYGO offset”) – to spending bills. Abolishing such conditions may or may not increase the budget deficit. But, regardless of the budgetary outcome, the spending will always take the form of payments made by the Fed on behalf of the Treasury. No printing press or tax receipts are required.
- Bernie Sanders: The Foundations of American Society Are Failing Us — Bernie Sanders:
Should we really continue along the path of greed and unfettered capitalism, in which three people own more wealth than the bottom half of the nation, and tens of millions live in economic desperation — struggling to put food on the table, pay for housing and education and put a few dollars aside for retirement? Or should we go forward in a very new direction? In the course of my presidential campaign, I sought to follow in the footsteps of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, in the 1930s and 40s, understood that in a truly free society, economic rights must be considered human rights. That was true 80 years ago and it remains true today. […] Simply opposing Mr. Trump will not be enough — we will need to articulate a new direction for America.
[Meanwhile, Joe Biden has come up with a nickname for Trump. Keep up the good work, Joe!] - Matt Wuerker:
- Why the Neoliberals Won’t Let This Crisis Go to Waste — Alex Doherty interviews Phil Mirowsky in Jacobin:
Over and above various national and cultural differences, I think there’s one shared point. Neoliberals really believe that people are inherently bad cognizers — they can’t work their way out of their problems just by thinking. Of course, that sounds like a very negative doctrine: i.e., telling us that people are incapable of understanding the nature of their problems and pursuing their own democratic ends. But for the neoliberals, there’s an upbeat answer: the market. And they have changed the meaning of what a market is from earlier economic thought which tended to treat it as an allocation of scarce resources. They tend to think of it more as an epistemic problem — that the market is the greatest information processor known to mankind. This starts with Hayek but then feeds through the other main thinkers. This is important, because it means that people have to be brought to understand politically that they have to, in a sense, concede that the market knows more than they do. So, they have to adjust their hopes, their fears, to what the market tells them is necessary.
- Coronavirus and the prospect of mass involuntary euthanasia — Hamid Dabashi in Al Jazeera:
As journalist Chauncey DeVega explained in a blunt piece for Salon, "Donald Trump and the Republican Party are now openly willing to sacrifice those Americans they consider to be useless eaters" in an effort to "save capitalism". What was merely presumed or suspected before is now in full disclosure. In the now nearly half a century I have lived in the US I had never witnessed such a bold, vicious, cruel demonstration of the laws of the jungle ruling this country. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, one could now see in broad daylight the cruelty that was at work in the mass murder of Native Americans and the business of transatlantic slavery. In good old liberal fashion, the Washington Post and the New York Times opened forums to discuss "the morals" of the choice between sacrificing older people and getting "the economy" back on track, the "pros and cons" of the issue, as they say. Scarcely anyone in such mainstream outlets would question the very foundation of this economics of barbarism.
- Gaping at the Vapid — Wondermark by David Malki !:
Sunday, 17 May 2020 - 5:48pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Tribal Scrum — by Dan Pirarro w/ Wayno:
- People and jobs? Or wealth? The government has to decide which to prioritise, and there is only one right answer — a sobering reality check from Richard Murphy:
The choice appears to be between seeking to preserve the appearance of value and wealth that is implicit in our overinflated property values at present, which also underpin all UK banking, or seeking to preserve the ability of this country to make a living. But, and I cannot stress the point enough, the choice is illusory. In reality, the value implicit in land has already disappeared. It is folly to pretend otherwise. The only reason no one has yet begun to realise this is that we have a completely frozen property market at present. When that reopens prices will, as a matter of fact, tumble. And so too will new rents. All I am saying is that old ones have to follow suit: if we want an economy that generates income in the future then the blunt fact is that we now have to trash our balance sheet. Or rather, we have to accept that it has already been trashed and now deal with the consequences.
- We Don’t Need Progressives but We Really Do — Ted Rall:
- Socialist Feminism: What Is It and How Can It Replace Corporate ‘Girl Boss’ Feminism? — Sarah Leonard in Teen Vogue:
Corporate feminism doesn’t mean much when your generation is more likely to have freelance work and haphazard gigs than an office. Many young workers are actually downwardly mobile […], doing delivery work for apps and gig-ified versions of white-collar work. Many are still in debt. And being your own girl boss is no answer — plenty of startups fail. Most young women face college debt, bad health care, and a worse job market. In response, socialist feminism is on the rise, mirroring the popularity of socialism in general. A socialist won huge support from young women in the last two presidential primaries. Democratic Socialists of America suddenly has flourishing feminist working groups all over the country. Feminist heroes increasingly include labor leaders like Sara Nelson, president of the flight attendants’ union. And one of the most popular politicians of our era, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is a proud democratic socialist feminist. This generation of feminists is less interested in helping to paint a veneer of equality on capitalism than scrapping that system for good.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- Why does ‘yellow filter’ keep popping up in American movies? — Elisabeth Sherman at Matador Network:
There’s a phrase for this distinct color palette: It’s called yellow filter, and it’s almost always used in movies that take place in India, Mexico, or Southeast Asia. Oversaturated yellow tones are supposed to depict warm, tropical, dry climates. But it makes the landscape in question look jaundiced and unhealthy, adding an almost dirty or grimy sheen to the scene. Yellow filter seems to intentionally make places the West has deemed dangerous or even primitive uglier than is necessary or even appropriate, especially when all these countries are filled with natural wonders that don’t make it to our screens quite as often as depictions of violence and poverty. “It’s upsetting. It goes hand in hand with how racist Westerners perceive these places and people, especially when you think about how vibrant and colorful these countries’ cultures actually are. Applying these filters plays into stereotypes about these places and the people who live there,” Sulymon, a business analyst from California, whose family is from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, tells me.
- Oh, the Places You Won’t Go! Jim Malloy Remixes Dr. Seuss and Dr. Fauci — in Print Magazine:
- The Prophecies of Q — Adrienne LaFrance in the Atlantic:
Welch began to move through the restaurant, at one point attempting to use a butter knife to pry open a locked door, before giving up and firing several rounds from his rifle into the lock. Behind the door was a small computer-storage closet. This was not what he was expecting. Welch had traveled to Washington because of a conspiracy theory known, now famously, as Pizzagate, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong. […] Shortly after Trump’s election, as Pizzagate roared across the internet, Welch started binge-watching conspiracy-theory videos on YouTube. He tried to recruit help from at least two people to carry out a vigilante raid, texting them about his desire to sacrifice “the lives of a few for the lives of many” and to fight “a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard.” When Welch finally found himself inside the restaurant and understood that Comet Ping Pong was just a pizza shop, he set down his firearms, walked out the door, and surrendered to police, who had by then secured the perimeter. “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” Welch told The New York Times after his arrest.
- Also from Bizarro — by Wayno and Pirraro:
- We Don’t Need Progressives but We Really Do — Ted Rall:
Sunday, 10 May 2020 - 11:11am
This fortnight, I have been mostly working like a navvy, but also reading:
- Neither Elizabeth Warren Nor Other Congressmen Have a Plan for the COVID-19 Depression — Ted Rall:
Kicking the can down the road with suspended debt collection and eviction moratoriums and putting off utilities shut-offs is a guaranteed ineffective, massively counterproductive wallop of magical thinking that pretends not only that everything is about to be fine, but that everyone is going to win the lottery and be able to use their newfound winnings to pay off their coronavirus debts. It’s ridiculous and stupid and unworthy of discussion by serious people.
- I Am Using My Free Time to Not Write a Novel — Scott Bolohan in McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
They say the best way to not write a novel is to not write every day. When you first wake up is a particularly good time to not write. But as I join billions of others around the world in quarantine, I worry my newfound free time is going to get in the way of not writing a novel.
- The Financial Literacy Delusion — Agata Soroko in Public Seminar:
An analysis I conducted of curriculum documents across the United States and Canada showed that financial literacy standards frame economic well-being primarily as a personal practice, overlooking the various mechanisms that generate inequalities. They ignore the role of Wall Street, the lack of government financial regulation, and a financial system in which crises are par for the course. Financial literacy standards extol the virtues of attaining personal wealth but in forty-one of the forty-three curriculum frameworks I examined, the word “capitalism” does not appear. Financial literacy is silent about the need for decent working conditions, unemployment insurance, paid leave, a living wage. It also leaves unmentioned the subject of rising economic inequality marked by income volatility and unaffordable housing. Mounting student loan bills are presented as a problem of financial smarts, not skyrocketing college tuition. Instead, a financial literacy narrative endures which maintains that people are in debt because they spend their money on luxuries like lattes and avocado toast.
- Scenes from a Multiverse — Jon Rosenberg:
- Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty? — Claire Kelloway in the Washington Monthly:
Farmers increasingly raise foods on contract for one dominant buyer that can dictate what they grow and how (Heinz, for instance, has their tomato farmers use Heinz crafted seeds). Large swaths of foods may be raised for one specific plant that serves just one purpose, such as bottling milk for grocery stories or processing cheese for restaurants. While highly specialized products and plants create consistency, these rigid supply chains cannot easily redirect their products to different uses if things go awry. Take the case of eggs. Farmers such as Kerry Mergen in Minnesota raise laying hens on contract. Mergen’s 61,000-bird operation was specifically designed to supply eggs for pre-cracked fluid-egg mixes, used almost exclusively in food service. Most of what they produced went to one Cargill plant that temporarily shut down this week due to lost restaurant and food-service customers. Even though grocery stores report egg shortages, grading eggs for retail requires special equipment and likely new contracts with a different large buyer. Instead, the corporation that Mergen raised hens for, Daybreak Foods, decided to euthanize his flock and sell the birds to a rendering plant to become pet food.
- Did you ever wonder what you'd be doing during an apocalypse? — Frankie Boyle in the Overtake:
2020 began with Australia on fire and a billion animals dead. It’s sobering to think that will be the feel-good story of the year. Remember at the beginning of the year when Rod Stewart lamped a security guard and Justin Bieber announced that he had Lyme disease? Dizzying times: it genuinely felt like the world was a wonderful place to be. For many of you, it will have been surprising to learn what was expected of you during an apocalypse. You always wondered whether you would be fleeing; fortifying a bunker; or camping on a motorway roundabout. Turns out you’re working from home. Trying to get a spreadsheet about bodybags finished before the provisional deadline of your own death. Mistakes have been made in the handling of the crisis. Like flying the Buckingham Palace flag at half mast when the Queen’s not in, which is just an advert for burglars. In my local park, someone has tried to cheer people up by chalking “You Got This!” on the ground. Literally the last thing you want to hear in a pandemic.
- To our brothers and sisters of popular movements and organizations — Pope Francis:
My hope is that governments understand that technocratic paradigms (whether state-centred or market-driven) are not enough to address this crisis or the other great problems affecting humankind. Now more than ever, persons, communities and peoples must be put at the centre, united to heal, to care and to share. […] Moreover, I urge you to reflect on “life after the pandemic,” for while this storm shall pass, its grave consequences are already being felt. You are not helpless. You have the culture, the method, and most of all, the wisdom that are kneaded with the leaven of feeling the suffering of others as your own. I want all of us to think about the project of integral human development that we long for and that is based on the central role and initiative of the people in all their diversity, as well as on universal access to those three Ts that you defend: Trabajo (work), Techo (housing), and Tierra (land and food) . I hope that this time of danger will free us from operating on automatic pilot, shake our sleepy consciences and allow a humanist and ecological conversion that puts an end to the idolatry of money and places human life and dignity at the centre.
- Tom Toles:
- Home Alone at the White House: A Sour President, With TV His Constant Companion — Katie Rogers and Annie Karni in the New York Times:
Aides said the president’s low point was in mid-March, when Mr. Trump, who had dismissed the virus as “one person coming in from China” and no worse than the flu, saw deaths and infections from Covid-19 rising daily. Mike Lindell, a Trump donor campaign surrogate and the chief executive of MyPillow, visited the White House later that month and said the president seemed so glum that Mr. Lindell pulled out his phone to show him a text message from a Democratic-voting friend of his who thought Mr. Trump was doing a good job. Mr. Lindell said Mr. Trump perked up after hearing the praise. “I just wanted to give him a little confidence,” Mr. Lindell said.
- Bye, Amazon — Tim Bray:
May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
- Why CO2 Isn’t Falling More during a Global Lockdown — Benjamin Storrow in E&E News, via SciAm:
The numbers illustrate just how intertwined oil is with the global economy. Cars and planes can be parked en masse, and yet widespread oil consumption continues. “The crisis shows how challenging decarbonizing the economy purely through behavioral adjustment would be,” Houser said, noting that individual decisions about not driving or flying deliver only limited emissions reductions. “What we need are technological solutions that allow our economy to operate at 100% with 5%-8% annual reductions going forward,” he said.
- The “marshmallow test” said patience was a key to success. A new replication tells us s’more. — Brian Resnick in Vox:
It was the follow-up work, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, that found a stunning correlation: The longer kids were able to hold off on eating a marshmallow, the more likely they were to have higher SAT scores and fewer behavioral problems, the researchers said. The results were taken to mean that if only we could teach kids to be more patient, to have greater self-control, perhaps they’d achieve these benefits as well. But the studies from the ’90s were small, and the subjects were the kids of educated, wealthy parents. In fairness to Mischel and his colleagues, their findings, as written in 1990, were not so sweeping. In the study linking delay of gratification to SAT scores, the researchers acknowledged the possibility that with a bigger sample size, the magnitude of their correlation could decrease. They also mentioned that the stability of the home environment may play a more important role than their test was designed to reveal. It also wasn’t an experiment. The results also didn’t necessarily mean that teaching kids to delay their gratification would cause these benefits later on. “The findings of that study were never intended to be prescriptions for an application,” Yuichi Shoda, a co-author on the 1990 paper linking delay of gratification to SAT scores, says in an email. “Our paper does not mention anything about interventions or policies.” […] Yet their findings have been interpreted to be a prescription by school districts and policy wonks. “If you’re a policy maker and you are not talking about core psychological traits like delayed gratification skills, then you’re just dancing around with proxy issues,” the New York Times’s David Brooks wrote in 2006. It’s not hard to find studies on interventions to increase delaying gratification in schools or examples of schools adopting these lessons into their curricula. Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster has even been used to teach the lesson.
- 30 million Americans are unemployed. Here’s how to employ them. — David Roberts interviews Pavlina Tcherneva in Vox:
One big confusion is that people think the job guarantee is going to replace some must-do, ongoing, critical programs. But we are not replacing EPA inspectors or FDA inspectors, who have to be there at all times. If you have a care project — environmental care, community care — you could add a lot more hands, a lot more people to shadow teachers or nurses to do on-the-job training. These programs can be a buffer that absorbs unemployed people, and then, as they are ready to move on to better jobs, they leave. In recessions, social needs become more acute. We need extra helping hands for the food kitchens or the homeless shelters. It is the nature of the job guarantee that whenever there are more needs, there are more people to do them. Essentially it is a coordinating mechanism.
Sunday, 26 April 2020 - 10:26am
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Wall Street Titans Finance Democratic Primary Challenger to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — Lee Fang at the Intercept:
Wall Street titans are financing a direct challenge to firebrand progressive lawmaker Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the New York primary on June 23. Disclosures show that over four dozen finance industry professionals, including several prominent private equity executives and investment bankers, made early donations to Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a former CNBC contributor who is challenging Ocasio-Cortez. Caruso-Cabrera was a registered Republican until a few years ago and authored a 2010 book advocating for several conservative positions, including an end to Medicare and Social Security, which she called “pyramid schemes.”
- Trump’s Lost Months Are Killing Us. Here’s How to Make Them Politically Fatal for Him. — Jonathan Alter in the Daily Beast:
What might affect the outcome is a short, tight, resonant meme, a dramatic phrase that crystallizes and immortalizes the historic moment—the way John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World did after the Russian Revolution. The phrase must somehow capture all the squandered time and missed opportunities without frontally attacking Trump in ways that just push people back into their partisan corners. The headline on a superb Boston Globe editorial—“Trump Has Blood on His Hands”—is plenty true, but too blunt an instrument to win an election. Instead we must tar Trump with his lack of preparedness the way “the emails” were stuck to Hillary Clinton in 2016, “the hostages” to Jimmy Carter in 1980, “the pardon” to Gerald Ford in 1976, and “Hoovervilles” to Herbert Hoover in 1932.
- Vector in Chief — Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books:
In May 1998 he discussed with the radio host Howard Stern the threat of sexually transmitted diseases to promiscuous heterosexual men. Trump implied that he did not use condoms, but gloried in the consequent risks: “They say that more people were killed by women in this act than killed in Vietnam, OK?” As he saw it, he showed reckless valor in bed, winning, he said, “the Congressional Medal of Honor, in actuality.” In this exchange, both Trump and Stern managed to avoid any mention of the real threat, the last great viral epidemic to sweep through the US—HIV/ AIDS. Neither seemed even to imagine the possibility that they themselves might be carriers of disease who could infect the women they slept with. (In this misogynistic discourse, men are “killed by women,” not vice versa.) But what makes this dialogue worth revisiting in the light of Covid-19 is Trump’s valorization of biological risk. Superior men flaunt it. They award themselves imaginary medals for doing so. Why? Because they enjoy the invulnerability bestowed by nature and heredity on life’s winners. Condoms, like social distancing and restaurant closures, are restrictions on freedom that might keep others (women, gay men) alive—but to obey such restrictions would be to accept that one is on the same level as these losers. The embrace of risk is as much the badge of heterosexual alpha maleness as it is of American free market capitalism.
- Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
- Could Covid-19 vanquish neoliberalism? — Thomas Fazi in UnHerd:
As Lord Turner, the former head of the UK’s Financial Services Authority, recently said: “I do think the time is right for monetary finance. There would be a clarity of assuring people that there is no limit on the money available.” And there you have it, the austerity lie exposed: there has never been a lack of money for education, healthcare, infrastructure, welfare and other public services. All the pain, suffering and misery imposed on millions of people as a result of austerity was entirely a political choice. All the cries of “How are you going to pay for that?” were simply a way to maintain the deeply unequal relations of power in our societies. To dramatically restrict our ability to imagine economic and political alternatives.
- The only outcome of this crisis is going to be recession – and the government has to begin talking about that fact and how it will manage it very soon — Richard Murphy:
Once we have survived the initial onslaught of a crisis, which the end of lockdown will represent to many people, we then, quite rationally move to a position of trying to protect ourselves from the next attack. Economically this means that we save. Many of those who found themselves exposed to considerable financial risk as a consequence of what has happened, and have a continuing income, will not suddenly begin to spend again: instead they will build reserves to ensure that their chance of surviving another downturn is improved. I am not in any way condemning anybody who saves in this way: it is an entirely personally logical thing to do. But, as Keynes pointed out, whatever might be logical individually does not necessarily represent the best course of action for society as a whole. And savings always withdraw money from the economy. The consequence is that the money in question is not used to purchase new goods and services. This, then, exacerbates any downtown that we will suffer as a result of unemployment and the loss of capacity within the economy, and produce an increasing downward spiral potential economic difficulty. Keynes great contribution to economics was to suggest that the only way in which such a downward spiral can be broken is by government intervention. By necessity, government has to spend to stimulate demand in such a situation. Nothing else can begin to reflate the economy when this happens, excepting war.
- Lazy Cosplay Dads — Phil Are Go!:
- Progressives Decide: Dignity and Freedom, or Voting for Biden — Ted Rall:
Given the history of the last four or five decades, it’s hard to describe the relationship between progressive voters and the corporate leadership of the Democratic Party as anything better than abusive. From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, progressives have been expected to donate money and cast votes for candidates who repeatedly broke their promises to fight for the poor and working class and, as time passed, felt so confident that they could get away with acting like jerks that they didn’t even have to bother to promise anything at all beyond not being Republicans—even though often they voted along with the GOP and signed their ideas into law. 2016 marked the first time that progressives stood up for themselves and demanded a place at the table, in the form of Bernie Sanders. Like any typical abuser, the DNC got angry at their victims, blaming progressives when their decision to cheat Sanders out of the nomination in favor of Hillary Clinton caused a catastrophic defeat to Donald Trump. Now it has happened again.
- Brendan Loper:
