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:
Sunday, 19 April 2020 - 7:51pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Michael de Adder (via Digby):
- The government is going to beat coronavirus using modern monetary theory — Richard Murphy:
Last night Gary Gibbon of Channel 4 News reported that the Coronavirus Emergency Bill included an increase in the UK government contingency fund for unexpected expenditure from just over £10 billion a year to more than £260 billion in the coming year. This morning I admit that I can find no reference to this in the media, or in the draft Bill itself, but I have a very strong suspicion that the figure was reported with good reason. Whether precisely correct or not, what this additional provision demonstrates is three things. The first is that additional government expenditure happens because the government decrees that it should. Second, the government can decree this without first having raised tax revenue to ensure that the expenditure is funded. And, third, the government can also do this without the prior consent of bond markets: there was no guarantee or underwriting from them for this action.
- What Trump's coronavirus briefings are really about — Windsor Mann in the Week:
He prefers to discuss things that have nothing to do with the pandemic, such as his "very popular" wife and "Sleepy Joe Biden." While he has not called for the coronavirus to be locked up, he said, "We're building a wall." His logorrhea occasionally takes him into the unchartered territories of pseudo-empathy and complete sentences, as when he said, "Life is fragile" and "The whole concept of death is terrible." Also terrible is the credit Trump isn't getting. More than anything, he wants to be commended. On Sunday, he complained that "nobody said thank you" after he donated part of his presidential salary to fighting the coronavirus. He donated $100,000, which is $30,000 less than what he spent on silencing a porn star.
- As Bad As the COVID-19 Crisis Is Now, Life Will Eventually Go Back to Being Normal-Bad Again — Matthew Brian Cohen at McSweeny's Internet Tendency:
While we might make coronavirus testing, and possibly even treatment, free of charge, rest assured, once this blows over, you will continue to go into debt for any other health issue. Nothing can stop the American way of life, not even a pandemic. We will not let this virus prevent our insurance companies from gouging us for basic services the way our Founding Fathers intended. We will not let COVID-19 change who we are — cruel, capitalist, and dog eat dog. Look, Americans are some of the toughest people in the world. We’ve been through a hell of a lot as a country – slavery, civil and world wars, recession after recession after recession, and we courageously ignored the lessons of all of them. I’m confident we can get through this epidemic without losing sight of the systemic problems that got us into this mess in the first place.
- Matt Wuerker:
- Supply chains: a neoliberal crisis — Alistair Cartwright in Counterfire:
The Atlantic magazine has highlighted how today’s ‘just-in-time’ distribution methods, which only keep 15-30 days worth of products in stock, have exacerbated the problem. The supplies manager at The Medical University of South Carolina put it like this: “I guess we’ve done a good enough job within the health-care supply chain of getting pricing down to the point that the vendors don’t have a lot of extra margin or slack to play with.” […] The more health is treated as a commodity, the more the production and distribution of essential medical equipment become keyed to the fluctuations of the market. One of neoliberalism’s favourite catchphrases even finds its way into an official NHS emergency response framework: ‘just in time’ contracts with suppliers will be activated in the event of a pandemic.
- Anti-Corbyn Labour officials worked to lose general election to oust leader, leaked dossier finds — Jon Stone at the Independent:
Tactics by anti-Corbyn staff evidenced in the report include channelling resources to candidates associated with the right wing of the party, refusing to share information with the leader’s office, and “coming into the office and doing nothing for a few months” during the election campaign. The report says hostile staff created a chat so they could pretend to work while actually speaking to each other, with one participant stating that “tap tap tapping away will make us look v busy”. An election night chat log shows that 45 minutes after the exit poll revealed that Labour had overturned the Conservative majority, one senior official said the result was the “opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years”, describing themselves and their allies as “silent and grey-faced” and in need of counselling.
- Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic and U.S. Response — Ryan Goodman and Danielle Schulkin at Just Security:
In our view, the timeline is clear: Like previous administrations, the Trump administration knew for years that a pandemic of this gravity was possible and imminently plausible. Several Trump administration officials raised strong concerns prior to the emergence of COVID-19 and raised alarms once the virus appeared within the United States. While some measures were put in place to prepare the United States for pandemic readiness, many more were dismantled since 2017. In response to COVID-19, the United States was slow to act at a time when each day of inaction mattered most–in terms of both the eventual public health harms as well as the severe economic costs. The President and some of his closest senior officials also disseminated misinformation that left the public less safe and more vulnerable to discounting the severity of the pandemic.
- Joe Biden says he ‘doesn’t have enough information’ on Iran to have a view. How odd – he negotiated the nuclear deal — Robert Fisk in the Independent:
A few days ago, Bernie Sanders announced that US sanctions should not be contributing to Iran’s “humanitarian disaster” and that its economic war against Tehran should, at least temporarily, during the coronavirus crisis, be lifted. So what did Joe think about that? Well, the wordsmith frontrunner responded with this imperishable statement: “I don’t have enough information about the situation in Iran right now.” Now this was very odd. Was not Biden the vice president under the Obama administration that actually negotiated the Iran nuclear accord – and which Donald Trump tore up in 2018? Even weirder was Biden’s continuing blather on the subject. “There’s a lot of speculation from my foreign policy team that they’re [sic] in real trouble and they’re [sic] lying. But I would need more information to make that judgement. I don’t have the national security [sic] information available.” Well, he could have fooled me. Clearly Biden isn’t planning to help the Iranians, although – like a lot of voters – I’m not quite clear whom he’s accusing of lying. Does he think the Iranians are telling fibs? Or the Trump administration? Since the Iranians initially kept quiet about shooting down a Ukrainian airliner and may well have dissembled about the start of the coronavirus – and then Trump originally denied that the coronavirus even existed – we can safely conclude that both Iran and Trump lie through their teeth. So I guess it doesn’t matter what Biden meant. Which is one of his problems.
- Provenance unknown, via Bruce Sterling:
- The coronavirus response calls into question the future of super — Warwick Smith in the Conversation:
The trouble with money is most people are so busy looking at it they are blind to what’s going on in the real economy - by which I mean the production and distribution of goods and services. […] If Australia as a whole consumes fewer goods and services in one year, it is likely to reduce rather than increase its future wealth because it is fully utilised labour and capital that drives investment and productivity. That’s what lies at the core of misunderstandings about the superannuation system. Foreign investment aside, it can’t allow an entire society to save for the future to support itself in retirement.
- What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage — Will Oremus in Medium:
In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports. […] If you’re looking for where all the toilet paper went, forget about people’s attics or hall closets. Think instead of all the toilet paper that normally goes to the commercial market — those office buildings, college campuses, Starbucks, and airports that are now either mostly empty or closed. That’s the toilet paper that’s suddenly going unused. […] Because toilet paper is high volume but low value, the industry runs on extreme efficiency, with mills built to work at full capacity around the clock even in normal times. That works only because demand is typically so steady. If toilet paper manufacturers spend a bunch of money now to refocus on the retail channel, they’ll face the same problem in reverse once people head back to work again.
Sunday, 12 April 2020 - 1:33pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- A last, desperate pivot: Trump and his allies go full racist on coronavirus — Amanda Marcotte in Salon:
All this racism primarily serves the purpose of deflecting blame from Trump onto Asian people. It also serves an important secondary purpose: Giving conservatives an imaginary narrative where they're the victims, instead of the people who created this problem in the first place by electing an incompetent, sociopathic game-show host to the presidency. The troll game goes like this: Say something wildly racist. When called out for the racism, immediately declare yourself a victim of "political correctness run amok" and start making bad-faith arguments about why your obvious racism wasn't racism. Ta-dah! Now you're debating "political correctness" instead of the wisdom of empowering a lazy, lying wannabe fascist dictator, which is a debate that you, the conservative, will lose.
- What the Government Needs to Do Next — Jamie Galbraith via INET:
The first big need is medical supplies, facilities and personnel. That is why we need to finance immediate domestic production of masks, oxygen tanks, ventilators, and the construction and staffing of field hospitals, including the conversion of existing structures such as hotels, dormitories and stadiums, and the hiring and upgrading of staff.
- Coronavirus Exposes the Virulence of American Conservatism — Eric Levitz in New York Magazine:
Last week, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party unveiled a plan to keep British workers paid and employed for the duration of the coronavirus crisis. The Tory proposal would effectively cover 80 percent of sidelined workers’ salaries, while forbidding employers who accept the government’s help from laying off staff. The policy closely resembles one implemented by Denmark’s Social Democrats, except that Boris Johnson’s wage-replacement rate is slightly more generous than the Danish left’s. Although the Conservatives have a well-earned reputation for sacrificing Britain’s vulnerable on the altar of deficit reduction, even they recognize that social welfare must take precedence over budgetary concerns in the context of a historically sudden and deep economic crisis. On Friday, Tory chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that there would be no limit on the funding available for covering workers’ wages. “We are starting a great national effort to protect jobs,” Sunak said. “We want to look back on this time and remember how in the face of a generation-defining moment we undertook a collective national effort and we stood together.” America’s conservatives see things differently.
- Matt Wuerker:
- Medicare for All is a Great Automatic Fiscal Stabilizer — Nathan Tankus:
Last summer I tweeted some things about how Medicare for All would make U.S. fiscal policy substantially more countercyclical than it is now. It turns out those tweets were far more prescient than I could have realized. The basic problem which has gotten far too little attention is that our healthcare system not only costs far more than any other system, we fund it in such a way that we’re vulnerable to large falls in employment and income. We are seeing this starkly now as employment collapses just when people need healthcare more than ever.
- 'The impossible has already happened': what coronavirus can teach us about hope — Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian:
The idea that everything is connected is an affront to conservatives who cherish a macho every-man-for-himself frontier fantasy. Climate change has been a huge insult to them – this science that says what comes out of our cars and chimneys shapes the fate of the world in the long run and affects crops, sea level, forest fires and so much more. If everything is connected, then the consequences of every choice and act and word have to be examined, which we see as love in action and they see as impingement upon absolute freedom, freedom being another word for absolutely no limits on the pursuit of self-interest. Ultimately, a significant portion of conservatives and corporate leaders regard science as an annoyance that they can refuse to recognise. Some insist they can choose whatever rules and facts they want, as though these too are just free-market commodities to pick and choose from or remake according to one’s whims. […] Although staying put is hard, maybe we will be reluctant to resume our rushing about, and something of the stillness now upon us will stay with us. We may rethink the wisdom of having much of our most vital stuff – medicine, medical equipment – made on other continents. We may also rethink the precarious just-in-time supply chains. I have often thought that the wave of privatisation that has characterised our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds. It is to be hoped that this shared experience of catastrophe will reverse the process. A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that sudden and profound change is possible after all.
- Welcome to the Trumpocalypse — Bob Moser at Rolling Stone:
For End Timers, the key scriptures are not the Gospels at all, but a collection of Old Testament prophecies, the Bible-ending Book of Revelation, and (purporting to explain it all in contemporary terms) the best-selling fictional series Left Behind, supplemented by various visions of self-proclaimed prophets. You know, like the ones who, around the time that Trump sewed up the Republican nomination in 2016, began to hear from God that he was anointing the reality-show star as a 21st-century version of an Old Testament “pagan king,” placed in the White house to help speed events along toward the Apocalypse. (Pompeo himself endorsed this idea of Trump as a god-sent “king” in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network.) Now, their pagan king is leading us through an actual Biblical-sized plague — with the guidance of End-Time Christians. And while evangelical leaders have echoed Trump’s messaging — don’t worry, a strongman (or God) will save you — he’s also borrowed from theirs, promising of the virus early on, “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” Trump-vangelicals’ talk about red states being “exempt” from the virus, while demon-possessed “blue cities” suffered the wrath of God, crept briefly into his talking points. And he crept into theirs: The virus “will come and it will go,” wrote Landon Stradlin, an evangelical music minister who’d been tweeting about how the virus was being used as a tool against Trump—right up until he became one of the first Virginians to die of COVID-19, last month.
Sunday, 5 April 2020 - 4:05pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
- Coronavirus may precipitate a crash but it won’t be its cause, which will be the overstressed state of the world economy — Richard Murphy:
Coronavirus would not be the issue it is in economic terms if we did not have such an interconnected world, where supply lines are stretched to their limits so that many companies are at risk from the slightest disruption to their systems, which coronavirus is already creating, and which could get much worse. And nor would coronavirus be such a threat if households in many parts of the world were not already over-stretched with debt, meaning any disruption will tip many over financial limits and into serious financial risk of bankruptcy.
- Animal on the Street - Flat-Earther dies trying to prove the Earth is flat. — Phil Are Go!:
More… - Joe Biden Would Be Donald Trump's Dream Opponent — Conor Lynch in Truthdig:
Biden is a lot like Clinton, but worse in almost every measurable way. On issue after issue, Biden has consistently been to the right of Clinton throughout his fifty-year political career. He has a record of advocating cuts to Social Security and Medicare; he helped write the 1994 Crime Bill that led to an explosion in mass incarceration; he played a critical role in passing the 2005 bankruptcy bill that stripped bankruptcy protection from some of the most vulnerable people. Biden also supported and championed the Iraq War. This list goes on and on. Beyond his extremely problematic record, which will make it hard for Democrats to go after Trump about, say, cutting Social Security (which Biden himself supported not too long ago), Biden has his own personal scandals that will make it very difficult for him to cast Trump as corrupt.
- Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro:
- The infinite scroll — David Roth at the Columbia Journalism Review:
Even on the websites of august institutions ads interrupt the text every two paragraphs; ads follow you down the sides of the page like store security; ads pop up in boxes that resist being closed, the elusive little x evading your cursor. There have always been websites like this, usually the kind that we save for private browsing: places to stream out-of-market sporting events, or download bittorrents of hard-to-find films, or browse other things that no reasonable person would admit to. Now, a great many websites are at least a little bit like this. Not all of these sites are as hard up as they appear, but all of them—the authentically desperate and the merely thirsty, the ones trying heroically to sell their way out of a downward spiral and those blithely steering into it—have made the same choice. Which is to look and feel and be more friendly to advertisers than readers.
- Sshh! He's TRYING to SLEEP! — Phil Are Go!:
- Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In — interviewed by Halimah Marcus in Electric Literature:
While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.
- Life in the stupidverse, part elventy-million — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
- Solar Panels Could Be the Best Fad Ever — Clive Thompson in Wired:
In a 2014 study, Yale economist Kenneth Gillingham and a colleague looked at the adoption of residential solar installations in Connecticut and found that it spread through neighborhoods in a “wave-like centrifugal pattern.” A subsequent study, by economist Stefano Carattini, then at Yale, and two colleagues, documented the same phenomenon in Switzerland. And when I dropped by the offices of Brooklyn Solarworks, the folks there showed me a map of where they'd installed panels. Sure enough, it was all epidemiological hot spots—you see empty streets with no solar at all, then blocks that are simply crammed with it, neighbors next to neighbors with arrays. […] Even language matters. In Switzerland, there are regions that speak Italian, German, French. If solar is spreading, it stops when it hits a language border. Solar virality is a matter of, quite literally, word of mouth. This points to an obvious corollary: If we want to encourage climate-saving behaviors, people need to talk more.
- Scientific Briefing — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
- Joe Biden Obviously Has Dementia and Should Withdraw — Ted Rall:
I spent the last few years watching my mother’s decline due to dementia caused by Alzheimer’s. She had been brilliant. Years before her death, however, she was having a tough time keeping it together. I would have voted for her as president in 2012 but not 2016. It would have been wrong. No one who has been close to someone deteriorating from that disease could fail to see the same signs in Joe Biden. In online discussions Biden apologists sometimes say that a senile Biden is better than an evil Trump. Is this really where we are? Consider the 20 or so contenders for the Democratic nomination as of late last year. All of them except for one—Biden—were mentally competent. Marianne Williamson came off as loopy and Tom Steyer was painfully awkward but both were in full command of their faculties. Congratulations, Democrats, you literally picked the worst of the bunch.
- Sutton Impact — by Ward Sutton:
- When it comes to sick leave, we’re not much better prepared for coronavirus than the US — Peter Whiteford and Bruce Bradbury in the Conversation:
In Hobart on Sunday health authorities said a man infected with coronavirus ignored instructions to self-isolate while he waited for his test results because he didn’t want to miss his casual shifts at Hobart’s Grand Chancellor Hotel. The Bureau of Statistics Characteristics of Employment Survey shows that in 2019, 24.4% of Australian employees were casuals without any access to paid leave. Adding in the self-employed, the proportion of all Australian workers without paid sick leave would be 37%. As the chart shows, Australians without paid sick leave are over-represented in some of the sectors with the greatest degree of personal contact with members of the public. 63% of people working in the accommodation and food services sector have no paid sick leave, and 45% of sales workers and 42% of community and personal service workers.
- 2010 and 2020 — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
- What the Coronavirus Emergency Has to Do with Biden vs. Sanders — Norman Solomon:
“It is time to ask how we got to where we are, not only our lack of preparation for the virus, but how we end up with an economy where so many people are hurting at a time of massive income and wealth inequality,” Sanders said at the close of his recent debate with Biden. “It is time to ask the question of where the power is in America. Who owns the media? Who owns the economy? Who owns the legislative process? Why do we give tax breaks to billionaires and not raise the minimum wage?” While so-called “moderate” Democrats like Biden don’t want to answer -- or even hear -- such questions, Sanders insists on continuing to ask them. Such perseverance has never been more needed than at this pivotal moment, with so many lives in the balance. “Where the power is in America” has everything to do with why the U.S. government’s response to the unfolding coronavirus catastrophe has continued to be so anemic, foreshadowing so many more deaths and so much more grief.
Sunday, 29 March 2020 - 4:44pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- How the Pandemic Will End — Ed Yong in the Atlantic:
Aspects of America’s identity may need rethinking after COVID-19. Many of the country’s values have seemed to work against it during the pandemic. Its individualism, exceptionalism, and tendency to equate doing whatever you want with an act of resistance meant that when it came time to save lives and stay indoors, some people flocked to bars and clubs. Having internalized years of anti-terrorism messaging following 9/11, Americans resolved to not live in fear. But SARS-CoV-2 has no interest in their terror, only their cells. Years of isolationist rhetoric had consequences too. Citizens who saw China as a distant, different place, where bats are edible and authoritarianism is acceptable, failed to consider that they would be next or that they wouldn’t be ready. (China’s response to this crisis had its own problems, but that’s for another time.) “People believed the rhetoric that containment would work,” says Wendy Parmet, who studies law and public health at Northeastern University. “We keep them out, and we’ll be okay. When you have a body politic that buys into these ideas of isolationism and ethnonationalism, you’re especially vulnerable when a pandemic hits.”
- Trump’s words, bullied kids, scarred schools — Hannah Natanson, John Woodrow Cox and Perry Stein in the Washington Post:
Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered "Ban Muslims" at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle-schoolers linked arms, imitating the president's proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: "This is Trump country." Since Trump's rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.
- Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
- The Monetarist Fantasy Is Over — Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate:
A less skeptical observer than [Kenneth] Rogoff would have looked more closely at proposals to strengthen automatic fiscal stabilizers, rather than dismissing them on the grounds that they will have (bad) “incentive effects” and that policymakers will override them on occasion. For example, a fair observer would at least be open to the idea of a public-sector job guarantee of the sort envisaged by the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act in the US, which authorized the federal government to create “reservoirs of public employment” to balance fluctuations in private spending. Those reservoirs would automatically be depleted and refilled as the economy waned and waxed, thus creating an automatic stabilizer. The Humphrey-Hawkins Act, had it been implemented, would have greatly reduced politicians’ discretion over counter-cyclical policy, while creating a much more powerful stabilizer than the social-security systems on which governments now rely.
- Tom Toles: