Sunday, 5 May 2019 - 6:50pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Guantánamo Bay “Forever” Prisoner Speaks Out — to Praise Congress, Lindsey Graham, and Thomas Friedman — Murtaza Hussain:
“My faith in many US politicians and media outlets has recently risen dramatically, because of their courageous stand against the Saudi royals,” al-Sharbi conveyed in letters and communications submitted through normal processes at the prison, and provided exclusively to The Intercept. “The Saudi royal family overtly fights terrorism to please the West, while covertly supporting it to please the clerics and others. They also do this so that they are always desperately needed by the United States and the West.” […] “I’m not blindly optimistic that the change of position by the likes of Senator Lindsay Graham and Thomas Friedman regarding the Saudi royals is not merely pragmatic flip-flopping. I hope that it is a truly ethical correction on their parts,” al-Sharbi stated.
- Death By 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong — Fred Schulte and Erika Fry, Kaiser Health News and Fortune:
Electronic health records were supposed to do a lot: make medicine safer, bring higher-quality care, empower patients, and yes, even save money. Boosters heralded an age when researchers could harness the big data within to reveal the most effective treatments for disease and sharply reduce medical errors. Patients, in turn, would have truly portable health records, being able to share their medical histories in a flash with doctors and hospitals anywhere in the country — essential when life-and-death decisions are being made in the ER. But 10 years after President Barack Obama signed a law to accelerate the digitization of medical records — with the federal government, so far, sinking $36 billion into the effort — America has little to show for its investment. KHN and Fortune spoke with more than 100 physicians, patients, IT experts and administrators, health policy leaders, attorneys, top government officials and representatives at more than a half-dozen EHR vendors, including the CEOs of two of the companies. The interviews reveal a tragic missed opportunity: Rather than an electronic ecosystem of information, the nation’s thousands of EHRs largely remain a sprawling, disconnected patchwork. Moreover, the effort has handcuffed health providers to technology they mostly can’t stand and has enriched and empowered the $13-billion-a-year industry that sells it.
- Google is eating our mail — Tomaž Šolc:
Unfortunately, email is starting to become synonymous with Google's mail, and Google's machines have decided that mail from my server is simply not worth receiving. Being a good administrator and a well-behaved player on the network is no longer enough. […] Since mid-December last year, I'm regularly seeing SMTP errors like these. Sometimes the same message re-sent right away will not bounce again. Sometimes rephrasing the subject will fix it. Sometimes all mail from all accounts gets blocked for weeks on end until some lucky bit flips somewhere and mail mysteriously gets through again. Since many organizations use Gmail for mail hosting this doesn't happen just for ...@gmail.com addresses. Now every time I write a mail I wonder whether Google's AI will let it through or not. Only when something like this happens you realize just how impossible it is to talk to someone on the modern internet without having Google somewhere in the middle.
Sunday, 28 April 2019 - 3:12pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- MMT Responds to Brad DeLong’s Challenge — Randy Wray at New Economic Perspectives:
As I said it is hard to think of a general pump-priming; except perhaps sending a $5000 check to every resident. But even this wouldn’t affect all sectors equally. Most Americans, suffering under huge debt loads, would probably pay down some debt. The comfortably well-off would splurge on fancy restaurants and expensive spas that already have long waiting lists. Or add a gold-plated toilet bowl to their third yacht. I’ve long argued that rising tides raise all yachts—not the little dinghies. here and here As Pavlina Tcherneva’s empirical work has proven here , that turns out to be true. More than all the gains from growth now go to the tippy top of the income distribution. No wonder the Neoliberals hate the JG approach and love the pump-priming approach. As Tom Palley complains, the JG would give income directly to the poor and they’d want food. Neoliberals love unemployment—it keeps the “help” hungry and cheap. They are our inflation-fighting force to keep the comfortable classes comfortable.
- MMT Takes Center Stage – and Orthodox Economists Freak — Bill Black at New Economic Perspectives:
If neoliberals want to define as “socialism” an effective government that produces markets in which honest people prosper and we imprison or at least drive from the markets the elite cheaters, then we are all socialists. An economic system without an effective rule of law and with massive negative externalities such as global climate change is a suicidal kleptocracy. If neoliberals want to define that as “capitalism,” they should get used to the public rejecting it as an ideology that is as economically illiterate as it is inhumane and unethical. Kleptocracy and plutocracy invariably corrupt and ruin democracy. The truth is that honest markets and governments are complements and that the most effective economies are ‘mixed-economies.’ Using ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ as swear words is a pointless waste.
- The Truth About Dentistry — Ferris Jabr confirms what we've all long suspected in the Atlantic:
Studies that explicitly focus on overtreatment in dentistry are rare, but a recent field experiment provides some clues about its pervasiveness. A team of researchers at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, asked a volunteer patient with three tiny, shallow cavities to visit 180 randomly selected dentists in Zurich. The Swiss Dental Guidelines state that such minor cavities do not require fillings; rather, the dentist should monitor the decay and encourage the patient to brush regularly, which can reverse the damage. Despite this, 50 of the 180 dentists suggested unnecessary treatment. Their recommendations were incongruous: Collectively, the overzealous dentists singled out 13 different teeth for drilling; each advised one to six fillings. Similarly, in an investigation for Reader’s Digest, the writer William Ecenbarger visited 50 dentists in 28 states in the U.S. and received prescriptions ranging from a single crown to a full-mouth reconstruction, with the price tag starting at about $500 and going up to nearly $30,000.
- The Reality Behind Trump’s Coalition for Regime Change in Venezuela — Mark Weisbrot at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR):
Even if the Trump team had a global majority—which it doesn’t, with only 50 out of 195 countries worldwide backing Venezuelan regime change—their deadly economic sanctions, theft of assets, military threats, and other actions to topple Venezuela’s government would be no more legal or legitimate than George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or the many U.S.-led regime change efforts that have taken place in this hemisphere. That’s unsurprising, given who’s at the wheel: perennial regime-change advocate John Bolton, for example, or special envoy Elliott Abrams, who supported what the UN later found to be genocide in Guatemala, as well as the US-sponsored atrocities in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s. The cast of characters supporting this regime-change effort, whether in Washington or among some of its closest allies, should underline what is already obvious: The United States’ attempt to oust Maduro has nothing to do with democracy or human rights.
- Let people look out of the window — Richard Murphy:
There is an article in the FT this morning that asks how workplaces can foster creative people. […] The whole piece reminds me of the most paradoxical adverts I read. They ask for applicants from ‘original and innovative thinkers’ who are ‘team players’. I am not saying there is no overlap between the Venn diagrams for these two groups. I am saying they are small. […] A few years ago I was given an award for effective campaigning. In the minute or two I was given to note my thanks I gave praise to the Jospeh Rowntree Charitable Trust. They had the courage to fund me for five years to, as I put it, look out of the window. Which is what I did, and still do, quite often. Because inspiration comes from watching the world and wondering why it behaves as it does.
- “Speaking Truth to Power” Is No Substitute for Taking Power — Norman Solomon in Truthout:
While noting that “power without love is reckless and abusive,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that “love without power is sentimental and anemic.” All too often, progressive activists don’t realize their own potential power when they rely on ethical arguments to persuade authorities. Appealing to the hearts of people who run a heartless system is rarely effective. Humane principles are low priorities in the profit-driven scheme of things, as the devastating impacts of economic inequality and militarism attest. By and large, rapacious power already knows what it’s doing — from Wall Street and the boardrooms of mega-corporations to the Pentagon and the top echelons of the “national security” state.
Obligatory Trump/Mueller Psychopathologising
The sense I get, at second to twenty-third hand inclusive, of the Mueller report is that although Trump didn't conspire with Russian authorities to sway the 2016 US election, he sincerely believes that he did. For that matter, he's always sincerely believed that he's a business genius. Trump consistently thinks that he's playing 11-dimensional chess when he's not even playing chess.
Some commentators are claiming that Trump's focus on "collusion" has been a strategic masterstroke, as it has distracted the media and the Democrats from all his other outrages. On the contrary, I think that Trump simply lacks the wit required to see anything outrageous in anything that he's actually done in the real world, and that all along he has been genuinely worried that what will bring him undone is his unscrupulous but sublimely skillful, and utterly imaginary, playing of global power politics.
It's fascinating to watch the long tradition of imperial presidency stretching from the Monroe Doctrine (recently reaffirmed in the context of Venezuela by the loathsome John Bolton, who has taken advantage of the Trump moment to crawl out from under the rock beneath Henry Kissinger's rock, and once more vomit upon the world stage), through Richard "when the President does it, that means it is not illegal" Nixon, to a bigoted con artist who burned though his inherited real estate wealth and was reduced to playing his own noxious character on reality TV. For Trump's predecessors though, their belief was that although the presidency should in principle guarantee unimpeachable omnipotence, they nonetheless had the good sense to carry out their worst offenses with either a decorative gloss of moral and (quasi-)legal justification, or with considerable discretion and (semi-)plausible deniability. Trump on the other hand, hasn't an inkling that this autocratic dream isn't the law of the land.
Consequently, any criticism of President Trump can only be motivated by the petty personal vendettas of sore losers who failed to win the ultimate prize of untrammelled authority, and is moreover treasonous. Or in the presidential vocabulary: A total witch hunt! Very, very, very unfair. So bad.
It is not merely that Trump has, like so many presidents before him, acted criminally — and has easily cleared the lower bar of "high crimes and misdemeaners" required for impeachment. It is the fact that he is utterly oblivious to the very idea that he might have done anything wrong, or that there is anything he can do wrong in his position, which uniquely disqualifies him from office. The sadistic executive orders, the extraordinary cavalcade of grifters he's appointed for a duration of weeks or months (has anybody, apart from close relatives and Mike Pence, yet lasted a year?), the breathtaking gullibility which has seen him cheerfully execute, without even slightly comprehending, the wildest dreams of the "normal" crazies like Paul Ryan and John Bolton, are all unprecedented.
To permit this halfwitted psychopath to be merely voted out of office in 2020, with no further accountability for himself, his cronies, or his opportunistic political beneficiaries, is to make a precedent of the unprecedented. I don't think the world can afford this.
Sunday, 14 April 2019 - 7:03pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Vital Signs: Australia’s sudden ultra-low economic growth ought not to have come as surprise — Richard Holden of UNSW in the Conversation:
Australia’s big little economic lie was laid bare on Wednesday. National accounts figures show that the Australian economy grew by just 0.2% in the last quarter of 2018. This disappointing result was below market expectations and official forecasts of 0.6%. It put annual growth for the year at just 2.3%. But the shocking revelation was that Gross Domestic Product per person (a more relevant measure of living standards) actually slipped in the December quarter by 0.2%, on the back of a fall of 0.1% in the September quarter. These are the first back-to-back quarters of negative GDP per capita growth in 13 years - since 2006.
[Here's Bill Mitchell's less polished but more insightful review of the figures.] - Future budgets are going to have to spend more on welfare, which is fine. It’s spending on us — ANU's Peter Whiteford in the Conversation:
The social services minister has used point-in-time administrative data to show that in 2018 the share of working-age Australians on welfare fell to 15.1%, “the lowest rate of welfare dependency in over 25 years”. But the longitudinal Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey finds that over the course of an entire year (2016) about one-third of working-age households contained someone who received an income support payment for some of it. The longer the time period, the more common becomes the receipt of payments. Between 2001 and 2015 around 70% of working-age households included someone who received an income support payment at some point (not including the age pension or family payments). It is one of the most important lessons of longitudinal surveys like HILDA – we, our family or friends are in this together.
- Michigan Conservatives Don’t Want to Teach Students That America Is a Democracy — Matt Stieb at New York Magazine on what really the right is really scared by in the term "democratic socialism":
The proposed curriculum update in Michigan also falls in line with another type of push by conservative education advocates: cutting references to America’s status as a democracy. The first draft of the proposed changes in Michigan attempted to nix the word “democratic” from the phrase “core democratic values,” a slogan that defined virtues like equality, liberty, and diversity. Similar efforts were enacted in Texas and Georgia in 2010 and 2016, when state education boards removed “democracy” as a description of American government, or promoted the unwieldy phrase “representative democracy/republic” instead. […] In a compromise, the proposed standards now use the term “American government” as the most-frequent phrase for the nation’s electoral system, but will also include the phrase “constitutional government,” and occasional uses of “democracy.” Patrick Colbeck, the leading conservative voice in the argument, said that the term “democracy” was not “politically neutral and accurate.”
- Pete Buttigieg argues against free college. This is why progressives can’t agree about subsidizing tuition. — Elizabeth Popp Berman in the Washington Post:
The Buttigieg argument goes like this: College increases the incomes of those who complete it. But the people who go to college are typically already better off. By charging them less than the actual cost of their education, we’re using the tax dollars of poorer non-college-goers to pay for the education of their richer counterparts — whose earning potential will only increase with their shiny new bachelor's degree. However standard this position seems today, historically speaking, it’s relatively novel. Making it requires two intellectual moves that didn’t take place until the 1960s. First, you have to think of college in human capital terms: as an investment that produces future earnings. Second, you need a cost-benefit approach to evaluating policy: spending the least possible money to achieve the maximum desired benefit — in this case, education. […] Not all progressives, of course, buy the “free-college-is-regressive” claim. One common counterargument is that this undermines the case for all sorts of public services. As economist J.W. Mason asks, “Suppose users of Central Park are higher-income on average; is progressive policy then to fence it off and charge admission?” Similar arguments could be made about fire stations, if you notice that they particularly benefit well-off homeowners.
- Donald Trump’s use of humiliation could have catastrophic consequences – a psychologist explains why — Simon McCarthy-Jones of Trinity College Dublin in the Conversation on the bullies we have to endure:
Some individuals who are shamed will explode with humiliated fury. This is more likely if the person has high levels of narcissism. Such people have grandiose views of themselves, a strong sense of entitlement, and seek to exploit others. They are strongly motivated to maintain their self-esteem and deflect shame by placing blame on others, whom they rage against. […] Trump’s use of humiliation has the potential […] to trigger an extreme and unpredictable reaction, including on the global stage. It also risks setting a social norm in which humiliating people is acceptable. All this undermines the concept of inherent human dignity and risks a conflict in which people are accorded no inherent value.
- Off the Mark — by Mark Parisi:
Sunday, 7 April 2019 - 3:03pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- .NORM Normal File Format — xkcd:
- Response to Doug Henwood’s Trolling in Jacobin — Randy Wray in New Economic Perspectives:
For far too long left-leaning Democrats have had a close symbiotic relationship with the rich. They’ve needed the “good” rich folk, like George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Bob Rubin, to fund their think tanks and political campaigns. The centrist Clinton wing, has repaid the generosity of Wall Street’s neoliberals with deregulation that allowed the CEOs to shovel money to themselves, vastly increasing inequality and their own power. And they in turn rewarded Hillary—who by her own account accepted whatever money they would throw in her direction. Today’s progressives won’t fall into that trap. “How ya gonna pay for it?” Through a budget authorization. Uncle Sam can afford it without the help of the rich. And, by the way, they’re going to tax you anyway, because you’ve got too much—too much income, too much wealth, too much power. What will we do with the tax revenue? Burn it. Uncle Sam doesn’t need your money.
- AOC, Sanders, and Warren Are the Real Centrists Because They Speak for Most Americans — Mehdi Hasan at the Intercept:
Take Ocasio-Cortez’s signature issue: the Green New Deal. Former George W. Bush speechwriter — and torture advocate — Marc Thiessen claims that the Green New Deal will “make the Democrats unelectable in 2020.” The Economist agrees: “The bold plan could make the party unelectable in conservative-leaning states.” The Green New Deal “will not pass the Senate, and you can take that back to whoever sent you here and tell them,” a testy Diane Feinstein, the senior and supposedly “moderate” Democratic senator from California, told a bunch of kids in a viral video. But here is the reality: The Green New Deal is extremely popular and has massive bipartisan support. A recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University found that a whopping 81 percent of voters said they either “strongly support” (40 percent) or “somewhat support” (41 percent) the Green New Deal, including 64 percent of Republicans (and even 57 percent of conservative Republicans).
- Matt Wuerker:
- The Reserve Bank Governor is completely wrong about the budget and it matters — Steven Hail:
The Australian Commonwealth Government has no purely financial constraint on its spending and it is ridiculous to suppose it can somehow “save” its own money. It can create money by spending and it can destroy money by taxing. It cannot save its own currency. That is a nonsensical concept. It cannot even borrow its own currency, in the conventional sense of the word “borrowing”. Government issuance of debt securities simply gives those of us who hold Australian dollars the option to swap them for safe, interest-bearing transferable savings accounts at the Reserve Bank. That is all that government bonds are. The Government doesn’t even need to issue them at all to cover its deficits. It chooses to issue them and they play a useful role in our financial system. Their issuance does nothing to pay for government spending today and does nothing to limit the ability of the Government to spend in the future.
- Anti-social economics — Peter Radford at the Real-World Economics Review Blog:
Just how anti-social is economics? I don’t think the question is difficult to answer: economics in its modern mainstream form is, at its heart, designed to undermine democratic government. It is, therefore, profoundly anti-social.
Sunday, 31 March 2019 - 8:50pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Meritocracy doesn’t exist, and believing it does is bad for you — Clifton Mark in Fast Company:
Meritocracy is a false and not very salutary belief. As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just. However, in addition to legitimation, meritocracy also offers flattery. Where success is determined by merit, each win can be viewed as a reflection of one’s own virtue and worth. Meritocracy is the most self-congratulatory of distribution principles. Its ideological alchemy transmutes property into praise, material inequality into personal superiority. It licenses the rich and powerful to view themselves as productive geniuses. While this effect is most spectacular among the elite, nearly any accomplishment can be viewed through meritocratic eyes. Graduating from high school, artistic success, or simply having money can all be seen as evidence of talent and effort. By the same token, worldly failures becomes signs of personal defects, providing a reason why those at the bottom of the social hierarchy deserve to remain there.
- No, Wikipedia didn’t get Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman’s birthdate wrong — Alexandre Hocquet in the Conversation:
What is then the explanation for this fuss? It is not impossible that Olivia Colman confused Wikipedia and another site. For example, in 2011 the actress Joan Collins tweeted that Wikipedia had mistakenly stated that she had an affair with a certain Arthur Lowe. After checking the facts, Wikipedians found that Collins was in fact referring to an obscure site that had nothing to do with Wikipedia (and information she denied is still there eight years later, by the way). Is there a biographic fact mentioned on the web that’s incorrect? Then surely it’s Wikipedia!
- We Need a Wall to Protect the Troops We Need Because There’s Not a Wall — Ted Rall:
- How to sell a massacre: NRA's playbook revealed — Peter Charley, Al Jazeera:
[Rodger] Muller, Al Jazeera's undercover reporter who posed as a gun-rights campaigner, introduced One Nation's Chief of Staff, James Ashby, and the leader of its Queensland branch, Steve Dickson, to the NRA, and travelled with the pair to Washington, DC last year. Ashby and Dickson were hoping to secure up to $20m in political donations from supporters of the US gun lobby. In meetings at the NRA's Virginia headquarters, officials provided Ashby and Dickson tips to galvanise public support to change Australia's gun laws and coached the pair on how to respond to a mass shooting.
- Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control) — Charlotte Lieberman pads out the NY Times with some Interesting Facts from psychology:
Procrastination isn’t a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt and beyond. “Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem,” said Dr. Tim Pychyl, professor of psychology and member of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa. In a 2013 study, Dr. Pychyl and Dr. Sirois found that procrastination can be understood as “the primacy of short-term mood repair … over the longer-term pursuit of intended actions.” Put simply, procrastination is about being more focused on “the immediate urgency of managing negative moods” than getting on with the task, Dr. Sirois said.
- The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub: How does a new generation of researchers perceive Sci-Hub? — David Nicholas in LSE Impact blog:
Much of the growth of Sci-Hub is […] ideological, no more so than in France, where nearly all our [Early Career Researchers] were Sci-Hub users. For French ECRs Sci-Hub was considered to be merely a way of providing open access to the scientific literature: part and parcel of the OA movement, which is to be supported by whatever means necessary. From this perspective, publishers are seen as the enemy, whose greediness erects unnecessary barriers, thereby obstructing the advancement of science. National infrastructures, such as HAL and ISTEX, have been created to break the publishers’ monopoly, but ECRs are wondering whether Sci-Hub (and ResearchGate) can accomplish the task more cheaply and effectively? In fact, Sci-Hub is seen as a ‘Robin Hood’ figure. There then is an element of defiance about the French use of Sci-Hub and they certainly do not view it as being wrong, because they are breaking the rules for good reason, to increase access to scientific knowledge.
- Modern Monetary Theory is On the March — Bill Black at the New Economic Perspectives blog:
One of the proofs of MMT’s advances is a nearly respectable treatment by the Wall Street Journal as the feature of a news article. The other major proof is the pathetic efforts of MMT critics quoted in the article to attack MMT. The article, implicitly, admits that MMT scholars have repeatedly proved correct in their predictions that the existing and projected U.S. fiscal budget deficits would not trigger damaging shortages of real resources that will cause damaging levels of inflation. The article, implicitly, admits that nations with fully sovereign currencies are vastly less vulnerable to economic injury from budget deficits. The article implicitly admits that MMT opponents’ predictions have failed and that reality has repeatedly falsified their archaic monetary theories that described nations living under the gold standard and therefore lacked a fully sovereign currency.
- Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
- What the Bernie Sanders 2020 Campaign Means for Progressives — Norman Solomon:
In the obvious contrasts with Harris and in the less obvious yet significant contrasts with Warren on matters of economic justice as well as on foreign policy, Bernie Sanders represents a different approach to the root causes of -- and possible solutions to -- extreme economic inequality, systemic injustice and a dire shortage of democracy. It’s not mere happenstance that Bernie is willing to use the word “oligarchy” to describe the current social order in the United States. What’s more, he pointedly ties his candid analysis of reality to more far-reaching -- and potentially effective -- solutions.
- THE WAR ON VENEZUELA IS BUILT ON LIES — John Pilger:
Although identity politics are all the rage in the pages of liberal newspapers in the West, race and class are two words almost never uttered in the mendacious "coverage" of Washington's latest, most naked attempt to grab the world's greatest source of oil and reclaim its "backyard". For all the chavistas' faults - such as allowing the Venezuelan economy to become hostage to the fortunes of oil and never seriously challenging big capital and corruption - they brought social justice and pride to millions of people and they did it with unprecedented democracy. "Of the 92 elections that we've monitored," said former President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Centre is a respected monitor of elections around the world, "I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world." By way of contrast, said Carter, the US election system, with its emphasis on campaign money, "is one of the worst".
Sunday, 17 March 2019 - 1:51pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Top Nancy Pelosi Aide Privately Tells Insurance Executives Not to Worry About Democrats Pushing “Medicare for All” — Ryan Grim in the Intercept:
Less than a month after Democrats — many of them running on “Medicare for All” — won back control of the House of Representatives in November, the top health policy aide to then-prospective House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Blue Cross Blue Shield executives and assured them that party leadership had strong reservations about single-payer health care and was more focused on lowering drug prices, according to sources familiar with the meeting. Pelosi adviser Wendell Primus detailed five objections to Medicare for All and said that Democrats would be allies to the insurance industry in the fight against single-payer health care.
- You Should Never Have Trusted Flickr to Protect Your Cherished Photos — April Glaser at Slate:
While no one can question the convenience of pulling up an old photo on demand, Flickr’s ultimatum—pay up or go—serves as a useful reminder that the free platforms we’ve entrusted to save our memories aren’t made for us. They’re made for the people who profit off our usage. These platforms can be sold. They can erase what we’ve saved. They can charge us later for access to our own photos, or to store more of them. They can change their terms of service and hand all of our precious memories to the police, use facial recognition to map our relationships, or use the photos for ads—as Instagram opened up its terms of service to be able to do in 2012, ditto Yahoo in 2014. Yahoo actually sold users’ Creative Commons–licensed photos as wall art without giving the photographers any of the profits.
- In Venezuela, White Supremacy is a Key to Trump’s Coup — Greg Palast:
In my interviews with Chavez for BBC beginning in 2002, he talked with humor about the fury of a white ruling class finding itself displaced by dark-skinned man who was so visibly “Negro e Indio,” a label he wore loudly and proudly. Why did the poor love Chavez? (And love is not too strong a word.) As even the US CIA’s surprisingly honest Fact Book states: “Social investment in Venezuela during the Chavez administration reduced poverty from nearly 50% in 1999 to about 27% in 2011, increased school enrollment, substantially decreased infant and child mortality, and improved access to potable water and sanitation through social investment.”
- Venezuela as the pivot for New Internationalism? — an interview with Michael Hudson:
By imposing sanctions that prevent Venezuela from gaining access to its U.S. bank deposits and the assets of its state-owned Citco, the United States is making it impossible for Venezuela to pay its foreign debt. This is forcing it into default, which U.S. diplomats hope to use as an excuse to foreclose on Venezuela’s oil resources and seize its foreign assets much as Paul Singer’s hedge fund sought to do with Argentina’s foreign assets. Just as U.S. policy under Kissinger was to make Chile’s “economy scream,” so the U.S. is following the same path against Venezuela. It is using that country as a “demonstration effect” to warn other countries not to act in their self-interest in any way that prevents their economic surplus from being siphoned off by U.S. investors.
- They were... Socialist Invaders from the Future! — Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling:
- Bernie 2020 Campaign Has Corporate Democrats Running Scared — Norman Solomon:
With a launch of the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign on the near horizon, efforts to block his trajectory to the Democratic presidential nomination are intensifying. The lines of attack are already aggressive -- and often contradictory. One media meme says that Bernie has made so much headway in moving the Democratic Party leftward that he’s no longer anything special. We’re supposed to believe that candidates who’ve adjusted their sails to the latest political wind are just as good as the candidate who generated the wind in the first place.
- Bernie’s Likely 2020 Bid Could Transform the Political Landscape — Norman Solomon again, this time in Truthout:
We are now at a decisive fork in the road that Justice Louis Brandeis identified long ago: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” The two hands with the most wealth concentrated in them now belong to Amazon owner Jeff Bezos. Not coincidentally, his newspaper, The Washington Post, has been among the influential media outlets most antagonistic toward Sanders. In early March 2016, at a pivotal moment during the primary campaign, FAIR analyst Adam Johnson pointed out that The Post “ran 16 negative stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours … a window that includes the crucial Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, and the next morning’s spin.” The day after that onslaught ended, Sanders stunned the elite media by winning the Michigan primary.
- Why the Differences Between Sanders and Warren Matter — Zaid Jilani in Jacobin:
Since her departure from the Republican Party, Warren has busied herself promoting a “level playing field” and a fairer system for workers and consumers. Her ideals, while not out of step with those of a mid-century liberal Republican, would represent a marked shift away from the economic status quo if implemented. […] Yet Sanders has always existed outside the traditional party system. He has more in common with non-American socialists like Evo Morales and Jeremy Corbyn than party figures like John Kennedy, to whom Warren has subtly linked herself. He would be the most progressive president the United States has ever seen. The two senators also have distinct theories of change. Sanders has long believed in bottom-up, movement-based politics. Since his days as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he has tried to energize citizens to take part in government. He generally distrusts elites and decision-making that does not include the public. Warren, on the other hand, generally accepts political reality and works to push elite decision-makers towards her point of view.
- Pro-Israel Lobby Caught on Tape Boasting That Its Money Influences Washington — Ryan Grim in the Intercept:
David Ochs, founder of HaLev, which helps send young people to American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference, described for the reporter how AIPAC and its donors organize fundraisers outside the official umbrella of the organization, so that the money doesn’t show up on disclosures as coming specifically from AIPAC. He describes one group that organizes fundraisers in both Washington and New York. “This is the biggest ad hoc political group, definitely the wealthiest, in D.C.,” Ochs says, adding that it has no official name, but is clearly tied to AIPAC. “It’s the AIPAC group. It makes a difference; it really, really does. It’s the best bang for your buck, and the networking is phenomenal.” […] Without spending money, Ochs argues, the pro-Israel lobby isn’t able to enact its agenda. “Congressmen and senators don’t do anything unless you pressure them. They kick the can down the road, unless you pressure them, and the only way to do that is with money,” he explains.
And, for context: - There Is a Taboo Against Criticizing AIPAC — and Ilhan Omar Just Destroyed It — Mehdi Hasan:
In 2005, Steven Rosen, then a senior official with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, sat down for dinner with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, then of the New Yorker. “You see this napkin?” Rosen asked Goldberg. “In twenty-four hours, [AIPAC] could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.” I couldn’t help but be reminded of this anecdote after Rep. Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, was slammed by Democrats and Republicans alike over her suggestion, in a pair of tweets, that U.S. politicians back the state of Israel because of financial pressure from AIPAC (“It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” she declaimed). Was the flippant way in which she phrased her tweets a problem? Did it offend a significant chunk of liberal U.S. Jewish opinion? Did it perhaps unwittingly play into anti-Semitic tropes about rich Jews controlling the world? Yes, yes, and yes — as she herself has since admitted and “unequivocally” apologized for. But was she wrong to note the power of the pro-Israel lobby, to point a finger at AIPAC, to highlight — in her apology — “the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be AIPAC, the NRA or the fossil fuel industry”? No, no, and no.
- Maybe We’ll Invade Another Oil-Rich Politically Dysfunctional Sort of Socialist Country. What Could Go Wrong? — Ted Rall:
Sunday, 10 March 2019 - 5:45pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Terra Nullius — Cory Doctorow in Locus Online:
The labor theory of property always begins with an act of erasure: “All the people who created, used, and improved this thing before me were doing something banal and unimportant – but my contribution is the step that moved this thing from a useless, unregarded commons to a special, proprietary, finished good.” Criticism of this delusion of personal exceptionalism is buttressed by a kind of affronted perplexity: “Can’t you see how much of my really top-notch labor I have blended with this natural resource to improve it? Who will willingly give their own labor to future projects if, every time they do, loafers and takers come and freeride on their new property?”
- A Clinton-era centrist Democrat explains why it’s time to give democratic socialists a chance — Zack Beauchamp interviews self-identified "Rubin Democrat" Brad Delong in Vox:
[Brad] DeLong believes that the time of people like him running the Democratic Party has passed. “The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left,” DeLong wrote. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.” […] The core reason, DeLong argues, is political. The policies he supports depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They’re premised on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were. “Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”
- Trump’s Brilliant Strategy to Dismember U.S. Dollar Hegemony — Michael Hudson:
The end of America’s unchallenged global economic dominance has arrived sooner than expected, thanks to the very same Neocons who gave the world the Iraq, Syria and the dirty wars in Latin America. Just as the Vietnam War drove the United States off gold by 1971, its sponsorship and funding of violent regime change wars against Venezuela and Syria – and threatening other countries with sanctions if they do not join this crusade – is now driving European and other nations to create their alternative financial institutions. This break has been building for quite some time, and was bound to occur. But who would have thought that Donald Trump would become the catalytic agent? No left-wing party, no socialist, anarchist or foreign nationalist leader anywhere in the world could have achieved what he is doing to break up the American Empire. The Deep State is reacting with shock at how this right-wing real estate grifter has been able to drive other countries to defend themselves by dismantling the U.S.-centered world order. To rub it in, he is using Bush and Reagan-era Neocon arsonists, John Bolton and now Elliott Abrams, to fan the flames in Venezuela. It is almost like a black political comedy. The world of international diplomacy is being turned inside-out. A world where there is no longer even a pretense that we might adhere to international norms, let alone laws or treaties.
- Why the left and Labour really do need to adopt the core ideas of modern monetary theory — Richard Murphy:
I read Jonathan Portes’ attack on modern monetary theory in Prospect with some bemusement. Firstly that is because many in the UK modern monetary theory community will be quite surprised to know that I am, as Portes suggests, its main proponent. I have in fact for some time been quite critical of some of its leading exponents. Second, I was surprised that if Portes did not understand any of my comments, as he suggested, that he had not get in touch to check them. I am not hard to find. And third, the article did in fact seem rather more a defence of Jonathan Portes than it was an attack on MMT. But nonetheless, I would like to set the record straight.
- How Fox News Pushes Trump to Make Every Bad Decision — Matthew Gertz at the Daily Beast:
President Donald Trump’s announcement last Friday that he would end the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history without securing funding from congressional Democrats for his long-promised border wall came after weeks of brutal headlines and sagging poll numbers. But when Trump arose the following morning, he did not devote his time to convening his White House advisers to figure out what went wrong or reaching out to Republican congressional leaders to plot their next move. Instead, he did the same thing he’s done on countless days of his administration: He turned on his television, tuned in to his favorite program, Fox & Friends, and started tweeting about what he saw.
Sunday, 3 March 2019 - 9:30pm
This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- Stop saying, ‘We take your privacy and security seriously’ — Zach Whittaker at TechCrunch:
In my years covering cybersecurity, there’s one variation of the same lie that floats above the rest. “We take your privacy and security seriously.” You might have heard the phrase here and there. It’s a common trope used by companies in the wake of a data breach — either in a “mea culpa” email to their customers or a statement on their website to tell you that they care about your data, even though in the next sentence they all too often admit to misusing or losing it. The truth is, most companies don’t care about the privacy or security of your data. They care about having to explain to their customers that their data was stolen.
- Progressive Democrats Like Elizabeth Warren Want a Higher Minimum Wage That Is Way Too Low — Ted Rall:
- Why a market model is destroying the safeguards of the professions — Lisa Herzog in Aeon:
In the grip of nostalgia, it’s easy to overlook the dark sides of this old vocational model. On top of the fact that professional jobs were structured around hierarchies of gender and race, laypeople were expected to obey expert judgment without even asking questions. Deference to authority was the norm, and there were few ways of holding professionals to account. […] Against this backdrop, the call for more autonomy, for more ‘choice’, seems hard to resist. This is precisely what happened with the rise of neoliberalism after the 1970s, when the advocates of ‘New Public Management’ promoted the idea that hard-nosed market thinking should be used to structure healthcare, education and other areas that typically belonged to the slow and complicated world of public red tape. In this way, neoliberalism undermined not only public institutions but the very idea of professionalism.
- Democrats Are Afraid Of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Too. And That’s A Good Thing. — Norman Solomon:
In the last few days, both Politico and the New York Times have reported that freshman Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has ruffled the feathers of fellow congressional Democrats. Chief among the reasons for the tension? Ocasio-Cortez’s apparent support for progressive primary challenges against centrist Democrats. It’s one of the most significant ideas the young New York congresswoman has brought with her to Washington. That’s because turning the Democratic Party into a truly progressive force will require turning “primary” into a verb. The corporate Democrats who dominate the party’s power structure in Congress should fear losing their seats because they’re out of step with constituents. And Democratic voters should understand that if they want to change the party, the only path to do so is to change the people who represent them. Otherwise, the leverage of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex will continue to hold sway.
- Bernie Sanders could be US president in 2020 – and this is what it means for Israel and the Middle East — Robert Fisk in the Independent:
Take a look through his Israel/Palestine CV, and Sanders is clearly neither an aggressive Zionist nor a liberal patsy. He’s a New Deal Democrat, which is how many would judge him. Younger, leftist voters might consider him as a kind of upwardly mobile intellectual, a Chomsky on wheels – even though the great (Jewish) philosopher, activist and linguist said before the last presidential election that he’d vote for Clinton as a frontrunner rather than Sanders in swing states in a final vote to keep Trump out. Much good did that do him. But let’s remember a few more things about Sanders. He’s always supported the “right of Israel to exist” and its right to self-defence, and he’s always condemned Palestinian attacks on Israelis. But he’s also kept away from pro-Israeli Jewish lobby groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and he didn’t restrain himself when he chose to condemn Israel for its illegal colonial project of building homes for Jews and Jews only in the occupied West Bank, nor when Israel has blatantly interfered in US domestic or electoral politics.
- Many Voters Think Trump’s a Self-Made Man. What Happens When You Tell Them Otherwise? — Jared McDonald, David Karol, and Lilliana Mason:
The narrative of Trump as self-made is simply false. Throughout his life, the president has downplayed the role his father, real estate developer Fred Trump, played in his success, claiming it was “limited to a small loan of $1 million.” That isn’t true, of course: A comprehensive New York Times investigation last year estimated that over the course of his lifetime, the younger Trump received more than $413 million in today’s dollars from his father. While this exact figure was not known before the Times’ report, it was a matter of record that by the mid-1980s, Trump had been loaned at least $14 million by his father, was loaned at least $3.5 million more in 1990, had borrowed several more million against his inheritance in the 1990s after many of his ventures failed, and had benefited enormously from his father’s political connections and co-signing on loans early in his career as a builder. Of course, someone born into wealth may have great business acumen, and the question of whether Trump is “a great businessman” is a subjective evaluation. The focus of our work, however, is on whether indisputable facts regarding candidate biographies—which are often invisible to voters over the course of a campaign—affect public opinion. It turns out that they do.
- America has never worried about financing its priorities — Brendan Greeley in FT Alphaville [Registrationwalled]:
Modern monetary theory is simply a different way of looking at fiscal policy, a way of describing what the real-world constraints on spending look like. It is in fact very close to how people in Washington, D.C. already approach spending. Again, we're not talking about what they say. Rather, we're talking about what they do. […] Like modern monetary theorists, Congress already appropriates away until it reaches real-world restraints on how much it can spend. It just hasn't reached any for almost the last two decades. When Washington wants something — to fight a war, to cut taxes — it appropriates. And so arguments about balancing budgets aren't actually about constraints. They're about priorities. Important programs get appropriations, full stop. Unimportant programs need to be paid for with taxes. Or, in Washington: "We can't afford that" actually just means "I don't think that's very important."
- Tom Toles:
- With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans Finally Have a Politician Who Agrees With Them About Taxes — Jon Schwarz at the Intercept:
Two prominent political scientists, Martin Gilens at the University of California, Los Angeles and Benjamin Page at Northwestern University, have carefully studied the U.S. political system and demonstrated with charts and tables what most of us believe intuitively: If you don’t have money, you don’t matter. Or as Gilens and Page put it, “Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all. By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy.” The last 40 years of U.S. tax policy have been the most striking demonstration imaginable of this assertion. Americans have never, in living memory, been averse to higher taxes on the rich. Nonetheless, the top marginal tax rate for the federal income tax plunged during the Reagan administration, from 70 percent to 28 percent, and has since only inched back up to 37 percent.
Bill Gates Implicitly Endorses "Crazy Talk" MMT
On the one hand, I'm delighted that eminent self-made man William Henry Gates III has dismissed Modern Monetary Theory as "some crazy talk".
Gates worked his way up from practically nothing at Yale University (you've probably not heard of it) as the scion of a merely very wealthy family, to become an insanely wealthy entrepreneur. He did this upon realising that if you could copyright software (something legally uncertain at the time), you could then make an awful lot of money — from government-granted monopolies — over the wide use of the product of not an awful lot of work. His breakthrough insight was that one didn't have to wait for the establishment of legal precedent in order to begin exploiting it. Rather, you could do the two simultaneously. This proved to be his first and last history-changing innovation.
Since then Gates has been an unerring detector of, and proponent of, extraordinarily naff ideas destined for oblivion. The paradigmatic Gates bad idea came in 1995. The media famously dubbed 1995 "the Year of the Internet". In that year, Gates wrote a prophetic book full of naff ideas, and in passing he mused about the historical curiosity (nothing more than that) known as the Internet. It was, he thought, merely a signpost to the really significant online environment emerging, called the MicroSoft Network (MSN). Just as people were leaving proprietary, centralised online services like Compuserve and America OnLine in droves for the decentralised Internet, Gates was busily constructing his own new proprietary, centralised online service, because he knew a winning idea when he saw one.
So "crazy talk" is in effect a considerable endorsement of MMT by a man who will only begin to dimly perceive an undeniable truth after practically everybody else in the world has accepted it. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then Bill Gates ignores you and laughs at you, then you win.
On the other hand, the framing of MMT in this piece in the Verge is completely erroneous. It is misleading to say that MMT says (currency issuing) governments "need not worry about deficits because they can simply print their own currency" (emphasis mine). The scare word "print" here simply means "spend". A government spends its own money by issuing loose-leaf accounting records ("cash" to you and I), or by creating accounting entries on computers in the banking system. A currency issuing government must spend its own currency into the private sector before it can collect any of it back as taxes, fees, or fines. This "currency printing" is not novel, exceptional, radical, or crazy. It's a logical precondition of any sovereign monetary system.
Currency issuing governments cannot be said to spend any of the tax revenue they collect. Not one cent. When money is created, it is a financial liability for the government (an IOU, in effect), and a financial asset for the private sector. When the government collects money owing to it, it is merely cancelling out the liability against the asset (redeeming the IOU). Both the asset and the liability disappear in a puff of accounting. The government always spends newly created money. To claim that a currency issuing government normally uses "taxpayers' money", but in periods of wild abandon will resort to "printing money", is just flat-out wrong. Or worse, it is deliberate accounting fraud deployed for political purposes.
It is not that currency issuing governments can "print" money in order to spend; they cannot spend their own money any other way. As Warren Mosler says, the government neither has, nor does not have, any money. Or to put it another way, money isn't something a government has, it is something it does.
A further misrepresentation in the article is the claim that MMT proposes that governments should "manage inflation with interest rates". Not only do I not know of any major MMT scholar arguing any such thing, it would be hard to find any honest, knowledgable mainstream central banker who would endorse this position — and using interest rates to manage inflation is technically a major part of their job description!
Apologies for technobabble, but this is the short version: central banks (which implement monetary policy) can influence interest rates in the overnight market for funds required to settle the day's financial transactions between banks, and between banks and the government. This has a very, very weak, indirect, and unpredictable effect on private sector economic activity, and hence price stability. Much more direct and effective is the use of spending and taxation (fiscal policy) to ensure that there is neither too much money (inflationary) nor too little money (deflationary) for the goods available for sale in the economy as a whole, or in particular sectors of it.
The government uses money to achieve its (hopefully democratically determined) policy objectives. There is no alien thing out there called "the economy" which constrains how much money a government can create/spend or extinguish/tax. The limits on what we can achieve are the limits of our non-financial resources: raw materials, human beings, jam, etc.
As Modern Monetary Theory has hit so many radars that now even Bill Gates has heard of it, we can expect much more misrepresentation in future.
