Sunday, 15 March 2020 - 11:30am
This month, I have been mostly not reading, except for things like this:
- Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do? — Molly Young in Vulture:
Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of “free” snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired instantly for complaining on Slack about it. When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.
- The Making of Joe Biden’s Conservative Democratic Politics — Branko Marcetic in Jacobin:
It is no small irony that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was born in the cradle of the New Deal order he would later help dismantle. Neither Biden nor the United States is unique in this respect. Look at just about any developed country’s generous postwar welfare state, and among its rich and powerful foes, you’ll find many who benefited most from its generosity, only to turn against the system that created them, convinced they had done it all on their own.
- How to Transition From a Democracy to an Autocracy — Devorah Blachor in McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
Stop, breathe, and look around. What’s happening? Has your faith in democratic institutions been pulverized underneath the crushing weight of a sham trial that called zero witnesses? Was an already unhinged president just given carte blanche to do whatever he wants because he knows there won’t be any consequences? Perhaps a cadre of lawyers embroiled in various sexual assault scandals of their own have made a series of ludicrous claims to justify incontrovertibly corrupt behavior without a hint of shame or irony? Take stock of your surroundings, meet yourself wherever you are, and remember to reach out and say howdy to others who have recently made the transition from democracy to autocracy.
Sunday, 16 February 2020 - 5:12pm
This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- Banks Are Handing Out Beefed-Up Credit Lines No One Asked For — Michelle Davis in Bloomberg Businessweek:
Proactive credit line increases, known in the industry as PCLIs, emerged in the 1990s but virtually disappeared after regulators clamped down on the practice following the 2008 financial crisis. But as banks struggled to ramp up lending, PCLIs made a comeback with executives finding more aggressive ways to work within the consumer-protection laws. U.S. issuers boosted credit lines for about 4% of cards in each quarter of 2018, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s most recent data. That’s double the rate in 2012. Subprime and near-prime customers got increases at a higher-than-average pace, according to the agency. That means many of the people getting boosts have blemished or limited histories of paying bills. […] Other countries have rules governing PCLIs. U.K. banks agreed not to offer increases to customers in persistent debt. Canada requires borrower consent. Australia bans unsolicited increases altogether.
[Bunch of nervous Nellies! What could possibly go wrong?] - Libertarians Can’t Save the Planet — John Quiggin in Jacobin:
Propertarian thought relies heavily upon the Lockean fiction that property rights arise naturally, before the emergence of a state (defined broadly to include any kind of authority within a group, tribe, or nation). Obviously, no such rights could have existed when it came to the atmosphere, so emissions permits would have to be the creation of national governments working through global agreements. Admitting that states define and enforce property rights was too big a pill for many propertarians to swallow. But the cultural barriers standing in the way of free-market environmentalism were even greater. Affluent white men who don’t like being told what to do are by far the most important constituency for libertarianism. Such men would consider it a dreadful imposition to have to pay, whether directly or indirectly, for the right to drive a car or use air conditioning. Environmentalists who insist that untrammeled individualism of all kinds has malign consequences lie at the opposite cultural pole. However, this created a dilemma for propertarians. Having rejected both state- and market-led solutions to climate change, their only remaining option was to deny that the problem existed at all.
- Hard of Herding — Bizarro by Dan Piraro:
- Why Cover Letters Are Such an Important Part of Building a Miniature Town Made of Paper — Andrew Cushing at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:
As the lead recruiter for a large corporation, I have hundreds of cover letters cross my desk daily. People often ask, “Are cover letters still really that important?” Well, the answer is a resounding “YES.” Because, while utterly useless as a job application tool, cover letters are an incredibly important part of building a miniature town made of paper. And that’s really what this has all been about. I joined this field with a few simple goals: I wanted to help grow the staff of companies by attracting top industry talent. I wanted to foster a working atmosphere that was pleasant and professional. And, like everyone who chooses this line of work, I’m a small-scale hobbyist who wants to build the coolest miniature town made of cover letters anyone has ever seen. Today, I am pleased to announce that one of these goals is finally within reach.
- Why you need to know about modern monetary theory — James Weir in the Australian Financial Review:
When conventional thinking can’t explain something, it makes sense to think unconventionally. In many ways MMT sounds like stepping through the looking glass, but that’s because for almost 50 years we’ve become conditioned to think of our government as facing the same budget constraints we do. MMT not only provides a logical explanation of what’s happening in the world, but with Australian households up to their necks in debt, it offers a sobering perspective on the Morrison government’s insistence on balancing the budget.
- Transporter — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
- Whatever He Wants — Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books:
The reason why evidence is irrelevant to Trump’s trial is not just that the evidence itself is inconveniently damning. It is that this doctrine of the president’s will as the source of all authority must not be undermined by the manner of the trial. At the heart of Trump’s defense is the justification that underlies all authoritarian rule. The leader is special. He is not like us because he has unique instincts. His gut (or divine inspiration or mystical ability to discern the true will of the people) leads him to make the right call. And the gut cannot be questioned: the job of everyone else in government is to accept what the leader does first and find the reasons for it later.
Sunday, 2 February 2020 - 4:33pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Precarity: a political problem — Vadim Kvachev in openDemocracy:
French philosopher Jacques Rancière in his work “On the Shores of Politics” wrote that depoliticization is the oldest political art. Perhaps this notion of depoliticization is one of the most accurate descriptions of what is going on today in the social sciences. Economics imperialism – applying principles of economics to non-economics fields of knowledge – has become mainstream common sense. Economics pretends to be a universal method, the Social Science, which can solve problems in any other social field: law, culture, education, social care etc. Once the best method – a free market – is found, other issues are no longer considered to be a matter of politics, therefore they are no longer subject to democratic choice. The decisions made at this level are technocratic and seem to be not a matter of voluntary acts of power, but a ‘forced’ solution, based on the impersonal necessity of the global free market. This is what famous political theorist Wendy Brown called neoliberal rationality. The problem is not that some kind of evil capitalists or neoliberals have usurped the platforms of public discussion to impose on us this kind of propaganda, but rather that the neoliberal way of thinking has become a fundamental intellectual software, ultimate common sense.
- Autism and Behaviorism — Alfie Kohn:
In 2018, I reviewed two decades of recent research for the 25th-anniversary edition of my book Punished by Rewards. These studies strongly confirm the original findings: Carrots, like sticks, are not merely ineffective over the long haul but often actively counterproductive — at work, at school, and at home — and these negative effects are found across ages, genders, and cultural settings. As a rule, the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. And they often end up being less successful at a task they’re completing than are people who weren’t offered any reward for doing it. (Even more damaging, according to the research, is an arrangement where people are offered a reward for doing something well.) In the face of such evidence, which has been accumulating for about half a century, the last refuge of behaviorists has been to claim that rewards must be used on people with special needs and challenges. Heavy-handed controlling tactics, and rewards in particular, are most pervasively applied to children who carry a label that sets them apart. They are often subjected to a relentless regimen of Skinnerian manipulation, complete with elaborate charts, point systems, and reinforcement schedules. Even teachers and clinicians who would hesitate to treat other children that way assume it’s justified, or even necessary, to do so with, well, you know, those kids.
- Corporate Crap That Doesn’t Kill Bernie Just Makes Him Stronger — Ted Rall:
Many on the left, me included, have held doubts about Bernie Sanders. We worry that he isn’t far left enough, especially on foreign policy. After all, he’s OK with drone assassinations, was pretty much silent about the Israeli invasion of Gaza, praised the illegal assassination of Osama bin Laden that denied justice to 9/11 victims, and has not proposed specific numbers by which he would cut the Pentagon budget. Even on domestic issues, Sanders’ forte, he is weaker than we would like. The $15-an-hour minimum wage he is pushing for now would have been OK when he started working on it years ago, but due to inflation $20 or $25 an hour would make more sense now. By global standards, Sanders is no radical. He’s a garden-variety liberal—the Democratic Party under FDR. Fortunately for him, reactionary goons like the New York Times remind us that whatever his shortcomings Sanders is still the best game in this very right-wing town, the farthest left Democrat to have presented himself for our consideration in the last 40 years. If Hillary Clinton and CNN and MSNBC hate Bernie so much, maybe he’s all right.
- This Bird is Probably a Sinner — Phil Are Go!:
- FAQ: Your Visit to Flow State — Caitlin Kunkel and Erica Lies in McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
For generations, creators of all stripes have searched for a location where they can be fully immersed in their creative process: a place known as Flow State. If you’re planning a visit, here’s what you need to know.
- Given how little effect you can have, is it rational to vote? — Julia Maskivker in Aeon:
For far too long, the accepted wisdom among scholars of politics has been that the interests of the individual and the interests of society are not in harmony when it comes to voting. The American economist Anthony Downs, in his foundational book An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), argued that a truly rational individual, who knows that her vote is highly unlikely to tip the outcome in favour of her preferred candidate, should not bother to cast a ballot. On this view of human rationality, an independent action that carries no instrumental value for the person who acts is essentially foolish, justifiable only by the sense of pride or communion with others that it creates in her. This is fine, perhaps even compelling, as an esoteric argument. But taken to its logical extreme, this classical account of rationality would imply that nobody should ever vote. This outcome would gut democratic governance of its central regulating mechanism. Society would be left worse off, even if each citizen were spared the apparently pointless expense of time and energy involved in a trip to the ballot box.
- Technology, Patents, and Inequality: An Explanation that Even Economists Can Understand — Dean Baker:
It is popular for people, especially economist-type people, to claim that technology has been a major driver of the increase in inequality over the last four decades. This view is very convenient for those on the winning side of the inequality divide, since it implies that the growth in inequality was largely an organic process independent of government policy. Inequality might be an unfortunate outcome, but who would be opposed to the advance of technology? However convenient the technology driving inequality story might be, it falls down on even the most simple examination of its logic. To take an example that has often been used, there is a concern that displacing workers with robots will lead to a transfer of income from workers to the people who own the robots. [… However] the income from owning a robot is not the result of owning the physical robot. Robots will generally be relatively cheap to manufacture. So people will not be deriving large incomes from owning the steel and other components of the robot. The reason some people might get very rich from owning robots is because they own patents and copyrights that are needed for the making of the robots. Without these patent and copyright monopolies, robots would be cheap, like washing machines, and there would be no large-scale upward redistribution associated with them. If it is not already obvious, patent and copyright monopolies are instruments of public policy, not acts of god. We can make them stronger and longer if we want, or shorter and weaker, or not have them at all.
- Trump Is Growing Concerned About Bernie Sanders, While His Advisers Think the Vermont Senator Will Be Easy to Beat — Ryan Grim at the Intercept:
Last week, the New York Times reported that some of Trump’s advisers believe that Sanders is a beatable general election candidate and have worked to elevate him, a report that former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign seized on to argue that Sanders is a risky nominee. But the same article suggested that Trump himself disagrees and has been working to undermine Sanders with his public comments. “The president, his advisers say, has been in need of a clear target for months, and he believes he is actually hurting Mr. Sanders. Mr. Trump’s advisers do not necessarily share that view,” the Times reported. The divergent views among Trump and his aides lead to an amusing strategic synchronicity: Trump believes that he is hurting Sanders by attacking him, while the president’s advisers believe that he is helping Sanders with those same attacks — and so Trump attacking Sanders serves the interests (as they understand them) of both Trump and his advisers.
- Trump and Netanyahu Dictate Terms of Palestinian Surrender to Israel and Call It Peace — Robert Mackey at the Intercept:
Saeb Erekat, the chief negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, described the plan delivered by Kushner to Trump as “100 percent the ideas I personally heard many times from Netanyahu and his negotiators. I can assure you that the American so-called peace team have only copied and pasted Netanyahu’s and the settlers’ councils plan.” Amid accusations that his plan was largely based on concepts and details dictated by Netanyahu, Kushner cast himself as an independent expert on the conflict in an interview with Sky News Arabia on Tuesday. “I’ve been studying this now for three years,” he told Sky News Arabia, “I’ve read 25 books on the subject.” At least one of those books appears to have been written by Netanyahu, however. As Dylan Williams of the liberal, pro-Israel group J Street pointed out, Kushner’s plan appeared at one point to borrow language from one of the Israeli prime minister’s books.
Sunday, 26 January 2020 - 2:02pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Matt Wuerker:
- The west is still buying into nonsense claims about Iran’s regional influence — Patrick Cockburn, the Independent:
The Shia had risen up against Saddam in the final days of his defeat in Kuwait by the US-led coalition. While they were not expecting full-scale foreign support, they did believe that the coalition would stop Saddam using his remaining tanks and helicopters against them. But the US conflated the Iraqi Shia with Iran, where the Shia are the overwhelming majority, and had decided that it was not in American interests to see the rebellion succeed. Coalition forces stood aside as Saddam’s tanks, with helicopters overhead, smashed their way into Shia cities like Karbala, Najaf and Basra, and then began their mass executions. Three decades later, the US and its allies are still making the same mistake, treating the millions of Shia in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and Afghanistan as if they were Iranian agents.
- A “Jeopardy!” Contestant Asked, “What Is Palestine?” The Game Show Gave the Wrong Answer. — Robert Mackey in the Intercept:
The producers of the game show “Jeopardy” broadcast a rare, uncorrected error on Friday, when a contestant mistakenly said that the Church of the Nativity, the site in Bethlehem believed by Christians to be the birthplace of Jesus, was in Israel, but was awarded $200 for what millions of viewers were told was the right answer. Another contestant, Katie Needle, looked puzzled as the show then went to a commercial break. That’s because, moments earlier, Needle had offered the correct answer, “What is Palestine?” — putting her response in the form of a question in keeping with the show’s rules — only to be told that she was wrong, and had $200 deducted from her score.
- Matt Bors:
- A degree of studying – Students who treat education as a commodity perform worse than their intrinsically motivated peers — Louise Bunce in the LSE Impact Blog:
I surveyed over 600 students across several disciplines and universities to systematically explore the impact of consuming education on academic achievement. This was the first study of students studying in England for which they personally, and not the state, were fully responsible for the cost of their tuition (at the time of data collection this was £9,000 annually, equivalent to $11,700 or €10,500). Students completed an online questionnaire to measure their consumer orientation towards their education, adapted from a US study by Saunders (2015). They had to rate the extent to which they agreed with statements such as ‘I think of myself primarily as a paying customer of the university’ and ‘I think of my university degree as a product I am purchasing’. We also asked them to provide their most recent mark for an assessed piece of work as a measure of academic performance. We found a negative correlation between consumer orientation and academic performance whereby the higher their consumer orientation, the lower their level of academic performance. This was after controlling for relevant demographic factors, such as age and gender, as well as situational factors such as year of study and grade goal. Furthermore, we found that consumer orientation mediated the traditional relation between identifying as a learner (e.g. by agreeing with items such as ‘I want to expand my intellectual ability’ and ‘I enjoy studying’) and academic performance: a lower learner identity was associated with a higher consumer orientation, which, in turn was associated with lower academic performance.
- How climate change influenced Australia's unprecedented fires — Dana Nuccitelli at Yale Climate Connections:
California’s drought was made worse by a persistent high-pressure system off the coast known as the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.” That high-pressure ridge diverted storm systems to California’s north, leading to years of low precipitation. Researchers have suggested that climate change may cause such blocking systems to form more frequently. A 2018 study led by UCLA’s Daniel Swain found that as temperatures continue to rise, California will see a shift to less precipitation in the spring and fall and more in the winter, lengthening the wildfire season. The situation in Australia is again strikingly similar to that in California. Researchers have shown that global warming is expanding an atmospheric circulation pattern known as the Hadley cell. This circulation is caused by hot air at the equator rising and spreading toward the poles, where it begins to cool and descend, forming high pressure ridges. In Australia, this process creates what’s known as the subtropical ridge, which as CSIRO notes, has become more intense as a result of global warming expanding the Hadley cell circulation. A 2014 study, CSIRO’s David Post and colleagues reported that stronger high-pressure ridges have been decreasing rainfall in southeastern Australia in the autumn and winter. The significance? The lack of rainfall creates more dry fuel for fires and lengthens the bushfire season.
- Bizarro — By Wayno and Piraro:
- How the Health Insurance Industry (and I) Invented the ‘Choice’ Talking Point — Wendell Potter:
Those of us in the insurance industry constantly hustled to prevent significant reforms because changes threatened to eat into our companies’ enormous profits. We were told by our opinion research firms and messaging consultants that when we promoted the purported benefits of the status quo that we should talk about the concept of “choice”: It polled well in focus groups of average Americans (and was encouraged by the work of Frank Luntz, the P.R. guru who literally wrote the book on how the Republican Party should communicate with Americans). As instructed, I used the word “choice” frequently when drafting talking points. But those of us who held senior positions for the big insurers knew that one of the huge vulnerabilities of the system is its lack of choice. In the current system, Americans cannot, in fact, pick their own doctors, specialists or hospitals — at least, not without incurring huge “out of network” bills. […] Recently, the industry launched a campaign called “My Care, My Choice” aimed in part at convincing Americans that they have choice now — and that government reform would restrict their freedom. That group has been spending large sums on advertising in Iowa during this presidential race.
- Bots Are Destroying Political Discourse As We Know It — Bruce Schneier in the Atlantic:
In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission had an online public-commenting period for its plans to repeal net neutrality. A staggering 22 million comments were received. Many of them—maybe half—were fake, using stolen identities. These comments were also crude; 1.3 million were generated from the same template, with some words altered to make them appear unique. They didn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. These efforts will only get more sophisticated. In a recent experiment, the Harvard senior Max Weiss used a text-generation program to create 1,000 comments in response to a government call on a Medicaid issue. These comments were all unique, and sounded like real people advocating for a specific policy position. They fooled the Medicaid.gov administrators, who accepted them as genuine concerns from actual human beings. This being research, Weiss subsequently identified the comments and asked for them to be removed, so that no actual policy debate would be unfairly biased. The next group to try this won’t be so honorable.
- Off the Mark — by Mark Parisi:
- Debunking the ‘Productivity-Pay Gap’ — Blair Fix:
In this post, I debunk the ‘productivity-pay gap’ by showing that it has nothing to do with productivity. The reason is simple. Although economists claim to measure ‘productivity’, their measure is actually income relabelled. As a result, the ‘productivity-pay gap’ isn’t what it appears. It claims to be a gap between productivity and wages. But it’s not. It’s really a gap between two types of income — (1) the wages of workers and (2) the average hourly income of all Americans. This gap is an important measure of inequality. But it has nothing to do with ‘productivity’.
- A New Book Takes on the Problematic Academic Discipline of “Jihadism” — Murtaza Hussain at the Intercept:
“The heart of the problem is the refusal to recognize the participants in these conflicts as political actors,” Li said. “We just suck all the politics out, latch on a word like ‘jihadism,’ and then place it into a category of evil existing outside of space and time.” The study of jihadism generally takes for granted that organizations like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Islamic State, al-Shabab, the Afghan Taliban, and various Iraqi Shia militias should be grouped under one category. This grand category also happens to include solitary individuals engaged in acts of violence not directed by any organization. Huge disparities of geography, language, sect, and politics are more or less ignored in favor of a narrative understandable through the single term of “jihadism.” “Consider for a moment three different things: the Irish Republican Army, the Republican Party in the United States, and Plato’s Republic,” Li told me, by way of analogy. “All of these employ the term ‘republic,’ and all of them somehow have a connection with violence. If you lumped them together and claimed they represent an ideology called ‘republicanism,’ that obviously wouldn’t make any sense. Yet that’s what the category of ‘jihadism’ essentially does.”
Sunday, 19 January 2020 - 4:19pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
- Lies, the Bethlehem Doctrine, and the Illegal Murder of Soleimani — Craig Murray:
Developed by Daniel Bethlehem when Legal Adviser to first Netanyahu’s government and then Blair’s, the Bethlehem Doctrine is that states have a right of “pre-emptive self-defence” against “imminent” attack. That is something most people, and most international law experts and judges, would accept. Including me. What very few people, and almost no international lawyers, accept is the key to the Bethlehem Doctrine – that here “Imminent” – the word used so carefully by Pompeo – does not need to have its normal meanings of either “soon” or “about to happen”. An attack may be deemed “imminent”, according to the Bethlehem Doctrine, even if you know no details of it or when it might occur. So you may be assassinated by a drone or bomb strike – and the doctrine was specifically developed to justify such strikes – because of “intelligence” you are engaged in a plot, when that intelligence neither says what the plot is nor when it might occur. Or even more tenuous, because there is intelligence you have engaged in a plot before, so it is reasonable to kill you in case you do so again. […] So when Pompeo says attacks by Soleimani were “imminent” he is not using the word in the normal sense in the English language. It is no use asking him what, where or when these “imminent” attacks were planned to be. He is referencing the Bethlehem Doctrine under which you can kill people on the basis of a feeling that they may have been about to do something.
- Iran Is Not What You Think — Ted Rall:
You can get an idea of how unusual our plan was from the incredulous reaction of the Afghan border policeman who greeted us after we crossed the border from Tajikistan. “Point of exit?” he asked. When we told him Iran, he laughed. “You are American! There is no way,” he replied. When he showed our Iranian visas to his colleagues, they couldn’t believe their eyes. “How did you get these?” they wanted to know. Several weeks later, we walked across the border between northwestern Afghanistan and northeastern Iran. It seemed incredibly simple. We were already stamped in and on the curb outside the customs office waiting for a taxi when three bemused agents of Iran’s feared Ettela intelligence service tapped us on our shoulders and invited us into separate interrogation rooms. They grilled us for hours. Before they released us my agent asked me: “Do you know why we questioned you so diligently?” I didn’t. “You three,” he replied, “are the first Americans to cross this border since 1979.” I don’t know if that’s true. Clearly we were rare birds.
- In Love — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
- America Escalates its “Democratic” Oil War in the Near East — Michael Hudson:
The mainstream media are carefully sidestepping the method behind America’s seeming madness in assassinating Islamic Revolutionary Guard general Qassim Suleimani to start the New Year. The logic behind the assassination was a long-standing application of U.S. global policy, not just a personality quirk of Donald Trump’s impulsive action. His assassination of Iranian military leader Suleimani was indeed a unilateral act of war in violation of international law, but it was a logical step in a long-standing U.S. strategy. It was explicitly authorized by the Senate in the funding bill for the Pentagon that it passed last year. The assassination was intended to escalate America’s presence in Iraq to keep control of the region’s oil reserves, and to back Saudi Arabia’s Wahabi troops (Isis, Al Quaeda in Iraq, Al Nusra and other divisions of what are actually America’s foreign legion), to support U.S. control of Near Eastern oil as a buttress of the U.S. dollar. That remains the key to understanding this policy, and why it is in the process of escalating, not dying down.
- That old familiar melody — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
- The productivity of bullshit jobs — Blair Fix in the Real-World Economics Review Blog:
Economists’ main theory for explaining individual income is called human capital theory. According to this theory, human capital makes you more productive. This productivity then makes you earn more income. The problem […] is that economists don’t have a way of measuring productivity that is independent of income. What they do instead is resort to circular logic. They define productivity in terms of income. So when you read about labor productivity in the national accounts, this actually has nothing to do with the output of workers. It has to do with their income. Productivity is measured in terms of value added, which is effectively a form of income.
- Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
Sunday, 12 January 2020 - 4:53pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Progressives Need a United Front for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — Norman Solomon:
The approach taken so far by Sanders and Warren on the campaign trail suggests how their supporters ought to proceed in relation to each other -- illuminating real and important differences without rancor, while teaming up to fend off policy attacks from corporate-backed opponents. What continues to be in effect between Sanders and Warren -- and what is needed among their supporters on the ground -- is the equivalent of a nonaggression pact. At the same time, we should be willing to draw clear distinctions between the policy positions of those two candidates. The need is for supporters to openly explain reasons for preferring Warren or Sanders while avoiding the start of a mutual demolition derby. In the process of strengthening progressive forces, it’s vital to defeat corporate Democrats, before proceeding to defeat Donald Trump.
- Parents' Jazz Answer Book - Parents' guidance — Phil Are Go!:
- Why We Should Abandon Real GDP As A Measure of Economic Activity — Blair Fix:
The use of ‘real’ GDP to measure economic progress is based on ideas from neoclassical economics. According to some of the dominant interpretations of neoclassical theory, the price of a commodity reveals the utility (i.e. pleasure) that a consumer derives from it. When we aggregate the value of all commodities, neoclassical theory posits that we are aggregating the utility of the entire society. When ‘real’ GDP goes up, in other words, so does aggregate utility. Everyone becomes better off! Except they don’t. We’ve already shown that the instability of prices means the growth of ‘real’ GDP is ill-defined. We simply can’t say for sure how much aggregate utility is increasing. Second, we know that the growth of ‘real’ GDP correlates poorly with other measures of human well-being. Many ecological economists posit that this is because GDP treats everything with a price as contributing positively to society. Again, this comes down to the assumption that all prices reveal utility. If machine guns sell for the same price as MRI machines, neoclassical theory tells us that both contribute the same utility to society.
- Matt Bors:
- Corbyn’s Biggest Failure — Ian Welsh:
If Corbyn fails his movement and his principles, it will not be because he lost a couple elections. It will be because he had the chance to change the Labour party, and he really didn’t, because he blinked when it came to dealing with other MPs.
- This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
- For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity — Adam Belz at the Minneapolis Start Tribune:
The other big draw of the older tractors is their lack of complex technology. Farmers prefer to fix what they can on the spot, or take it to their mechanic and not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars. “The newer machines, any time something breaks, you’ve got to have a computer to fix it,” Stock said. There are some good things about the software in newer machines, said Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if something is about to break and can contact the farmer ahead of time to nip the problem in the bud. But if something does break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting for a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm and charge up to $150 per hour for labor. “That goes against the pride of ownership, plus your lifetime of skills you’ve built up being able to fix things,” Peterson said.
- What Is Joe Biden Thinking When He Uses Words like Malarkey? — Ted Rall:
- Our Neophobic, Conservative AI Overlords Want Everything to Stay the Same — Cory Doctorow in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
This conservativeness permeates every system of algorithmic inference: search for a refrigerator or a pair of shoes and they will follow you around the web as machine learning systems “re-target” you while you move from place to place, even after you’ve bought the fridge or the shoes. Spend some time researching white nationalism or flat earth conspiracies and all your YouTube recommendations will try to reinforce your “interest.” Follow a person on Twitter and you will be inundated with similar people to follow. Machine learning can produce very good accounts of correlation (“this person has that person’s address in their address-book and most of the time that means these people are friends”) but not causation (which is why Facebook constantly suggests that survivors of stalking follow their tormentors who, naturally, have their targets’ addresses in their address books). […] If you ask an ML system to predict who the police should arrest, it will suggest that they go and arrest people similar to the ones they’ve been arresting all along. As the Human Rights Data Analysis Group’s Patrick Ball puts it, “A predictive policing system doesn’t predict crime, it predicts policing.”
- #1504; The Confidence of One’s Convictions — Wondermark by David Malki !:
Sunday, 5 January 2020 - 12:30pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Trump Needs Conspiracy Theories — Peter Nicholas at the Atlantic:
A product of tabloid culture, Trump has long trafficked in conspiracy theories. But as chief executive, he’s used the machinery of government to give the ones especially useful to him the stamp of official validation. (That’s the main reason he now faces impeachment in the House.) These baseless theories are a way for Trump to explain away his problems and undercut opponents. Beyond that, though, they seem to serve distinct emotional needs, feeding a narcissistic ego that cold reality won’t satisfy. His efforts to persuade the public to go along with these self-protective myths have already corroded democratic institutions. The wreckage from that destructive legacy won’t be easily repaired after he leaves the stage.
- Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
- News is the Propaganda of the Oligarch — George Monbiot:
Last summer, seven of us published a report to the Labour Party, called Land for the Many. It took many months of work, drawing on a vast range of sources and expertise, to produce radical but realistic ideas for changing the way we use our most important resource. We worked hard to make our arguments as watertight as possible. We needn’t have bothered, because our opponents scarcely addressed them. The storm of lies about our report in the billionaire press gave me an idea of what it must be like to be a Labour politician. Pushing back against them all would be a full time job for several people. But we decided to confront one of them, in the hope that it might illuminate the others. The Mail on Sunday turned our independent report to the Labour Party into “bombshell plans being drawn up by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn”, then told an outright lie about what it contained. We proposed, it said, “to scrap the Capital Gains Tax exemption on main homes”. At the moment, if you sell the house or flat in which you live, you don’t pay capital gains tax on the profit you might make. We examined the case for changing this, explained the arguments for and against, then clearly and specifically rejected the idea. But who cares, if you can terrify the living daylights out of your readership, convincing them that Corbyn is the spawn of Satan? As if to suggest that such lies are organised with the Conservative Party, the article quoted Boris Johnson, who claimed “this mad ‘tax on all your houses’ would cripple every Brit who owns or wants to own their own home”. The lie was picked up on social media by other senior Conservatives, and has been used repeatedly in Conservative campaign materials, websites and Facebook pages. It was reproduced by most of the other billionaire papers, and continues to be circulated. Just last week, an article by Tom Newton Dunn in The Sun claimed that Labour was considering a “movers tax”, “scrapping the Capital Gains Exemption on main homes”. The false claim has now been deeply implanted in people’s minds: Labour is coming for your home.
- Election Posters of the 1970s — Scarfolk Council:
- Climate change is a health hazard—Stop work action over toxic smoke shows how to fight — Solidarity Online:
Air pollution and smoke has blanketed Sydney for days, as bushfires continue to burn across the state. Up to 100 workers, members of the MUA, at Port Botany refused to work as smoke reached hazardous levels last Thursday. “The workers who aren’t in air-conditioned areas [were] stood down and sought to work through safety issues with the company and the regulator,” MUA Deputy Branch Secretary Paul Keating told the ABC. The MUA convened a port safety committee which called on the port operators to re-schedule all outdoor work when smoke pollution reached levels on the official NSW government Air Quality Index (AQI) described as “very poor” or “hazardous”. Work also stopped on the NorthConnex and M1 Pacific Highway road projects due to air quality and visibility problems. “At sites where there is a clear threat to well-being we are stopping work,” the AWU’s Daniel Walton told Nine Media. In the ACT around 90 per cent of construction sites were shut down on Monday due to similar safety issues.
- Resolution — Craig Murray:
The disillusionment will be on the same scale as Johnson’s bombastic promises. The Establishment are not stupid and realise there will be an anti-Tory reaction. Their major effort will therefore be to change Labour back into a party supporting neo-liberal economic policy and neo-conservative foreign (or rather war) policy. They will want to be quite certain that, having seen off the Labour Party’s popular European style social democratic programme with Brexit anti-immigrant fervour, the electorate have no effective non-right wing choice at the next election, just like in the Blair years. To that end, every Blairite horror has been resurrected already by the BBC to tell us that the Labour Party must now move right – McNicol, McTernan, Campbell, Hazarayika and many more, not to mention the platforms given to Caroline Flint, Ruth Smeeth and John Mann. The most important immediate fight for radicals in England is to maintain Labour as a mainstream European social democratic party and resist its reversion to a Clinton style right wing ultra capitalist party. Whether that is possible depends how many of the Momentum generation lose heart and quit.
- Johnson is the luckiest politician alive – reading about worse historical crises has been my solace in recent weeks — Patrick Cockburn:
Alex Snowden, a radical activist in Newcastle, told me that people’s core sense of identity had become more wrapped up in their position for or against the EU since 2019. He said that Brexit “isn’t just about views on the EU anymore, but a wider sense of alienation and dislocation.” A canvasser in the Canterbury constituency made the same point to me this week, saying that she had just talked to some Leave voters and “it is as if supporting Brexit is part of their identity. They don’t want to discuss it.” For many, Brexit and English national identity have united and submerged traditional loyalty to the Labour Party. This will be difficult to reverse. The triumph of nationalism was always a likely outcome of the election. The three parties that had most to celebrate after the poll, primarily appeal to a single national community: Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, the SNP in Scotland and the Conservatives in England and – exceptionally – to some small degree in Wales.
Sunday, 29 December 2019 - 2:38pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Microfinance as Poverty-Shame Debt — Susan Engel in Progress in Political Economy (PPE):
Microfinance started as a development intervention in the 1970s and by the 1990s it was the next big thing in development. Dramatic claims about its benefits continue to be made, summed up by Irish rock star Bono’s parable: ‘Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Give a woman microcredit, she, her husband, her children, and her extended family will eat for a lifetime” (quoted in Bateman, 2014). There’s a lot of great political economy research demonstrating the problems of microfinance, including that of Milford Bateman, so what can we add? We argue that the relationship between microfinance and people’s psychosocial well-being needs far more attention and that the deliberate or otherwise use of shame here and in other development interventions needs to end.
- Warren’s cagey health plan — Doug Henwood:
Warren’s defenders say the scheme, to start with a “moderate” Dem plan and wait three years to push for the full program, is politically realistic, given Congressional and other political constraints on ambitious social programs. That argument never made sense to me. If the success of the right over the last few decades has taught us anything it’s that going for maximalist demands gets results. You might have to make some concessions along the way, but you get some wins and also push the political center of gravity in your direction. If you start out already compromised, you won’t get anywhere. So that whole phase-in approach looked to me like a signal that she wasn’t serious about the M4A part—that it was just for show. […] The only question is how conscious Warren is of this. Since she’s quite smart, it’s hard to believe she isn’t.
- New report shows the world is awash with fossil fuels. It’s time to cut off supply — Peter Christoff:
A new United Nations report shows the world’s major fossil fuel producing countries, including Australia, plan to dig up far more coal, oil and gas than can be burned if the world is to prevent serious harm from climate change. The report found fossil fuel production in 2030 is on track to be 50% more than is consistent with the 2℃ warming limit agreed under the Paris climate agreement. Production is set to be 120% more than is consistent with holding warming to 1.5℃ – the ambitious end of the Paris goals. […] The production gap is largest for coal, of which Australia is the world’s biggest exporter. By 2030, countries plan to produce 150% more coal than is consistent with a 2℃ pathway, and 280% more than is consistent with a 1.5℃ pathway.
- On the Battle of Seattle’s 20th anniversary, let’s remember the Aussie coders who created live sharing — Tom Sear in the Conversation:
Just days before the events in Seattle, two software programmers, Matthew Arnison in Sydney and Manse Jacobi in Colorado, posted a message on indymedia.org, a new website they had developed. It read: "The resistance is global… a trans-pacific collaboration has brought this web site into existence. The web dramatically alters the balance between multinational and activist media." The Seattle Independent Media Centre (Indymedia) website coordinated the protest and allowed reporters to share events to the world, live. The site received 1.5 million hits that week. Arnison had created a movement.
[I knew Matt somewhat, and had sudo access on cat.org.au. Not that I actually ever helped with anything at all, IIRC.] - Ed-Tech Agitprop — Audrey Watters:
We should want a future of human dignity and thriving and justice and security and care -- for everyone. Education is a core part of that. But dignity, thriving, justice, and care are rarely the focus of how we frame "the future of learning" or "the future of work." Robots will never care for us. Unbridled techno-solution will never offer justice. Lifelong learning isn't thriving when it is a symptom of economic precarity, of instability, of a disinvestment in the public good.
Sunday, 22 December 2019 - 1:40pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Open Letter: Rethinking the Role of Banks in Economics Education — Rethinking Economics:
As research from the Bank of England, Bundesbank and numerous academics has shown, banks are not intermediaries channelling pre-existing funds from savers to borrowers. Commercial banks create the vast majority of money in circulation. Unlike other financial institutions, they create money when they extend loans to borrowers. In the process of extending a loan, banks do not move pre-existing funds from any other account but newly ‘invent’ the money by crediting the borrower’s account. Therefore, banks’ lending is constrained by borrowers’ demand, profitability considerations and financial regulations, not by pre-existing funds (i.e people’s savings) nor by central bank reserves. This reality is in line with the credit creation or endogenous money theory, which is absent from most current economics textbooks and teaching. Commercial banks also determine where money is directed in the economy. Around 80% of new money created in countries like the US and UK currently goes towards existing property and financial markets, rather than the ‘real’ or productive economy, leading to soaring house and land prices, and housing crises. In the Global South, 33 major global banks poured $1.9 trillion into fossil fuels since the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, directly influencing the trajectory of economies that will be hit first and hardest by climate change. The power of banks to create money therefore has enormous implications for the shape and stability of our economy. Yet, in an overwhelming number of cases, economics textbooks and courses do not teach this to the economists of tomorrow.
- False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump — Alex Morris in Rolling Stone:
By creating a narrative of an evil “deep state” and casting himself — a powerful white man of immense generational wealth — as a victim in his own right, Trump not only tapped into the religious right’s familiar feeling of persecution, but he also cast himself as its savior, a man of flesh who would fight the holy war on its behalf. “There’s been a real determined effort by the left to try to separate Trump from his evangelical base by shaming them into, ‘How can you support a guy like this?’ ” Jeffress tells me. “Nobody’s confused. People don’t care really about the personality of a warrior; they want him to win the fight.” And Trump’s coming to that fight with a firebrand’s feeling, turning the political stage into an ecstatic experience — a conversion moment of sorts — and the average white evangelical into an acolyte, someone who would attend rallies with the fever of revivals, listen to speeches as if they were sermons, display their faithfulness with MAGA hats, send in money as if tithing, and metaphorically bow down, again and again, at the altar of Donald Trump, who delivers the nation from its transgressions.
- I Personally Don’t Believe Solutions Are the Answer to Our Problems — in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Chas Gillespie manages to wring the last little bit of satire out of the new normal:
On a whole range of issues — from racism to anti-Semitism to gun violence to global warming — there is a strange and quite frankly dangerous tendency among certain people to think that solutions are the answer to our problems. And sure, maybe in a place like California or Massachusetts, solutions might fly as solutions to problems. But for the rest of the country? I don’t think so.
- All of America’s 607 Billionaires Must Run for President — Jon Schwarz at the Intercept:
With Michael Bloomberg, the ninth richest man on earth, apparently running for president, Americans are asking themselves some tough questions. Like, why did we ever allow nonbillionaires to run for the highest office in the land? And why aren’t all the other billionaires jumping into the race? After all, for all intents and purposes, the United States is already run by its billionaires. They should care about us enough to make things official. If you like America, you should put a ring on it! There’s no possible downside here. We already have a guy who calls himself a billionaire as president, and that’s going great. Things could only get better with more of this billionaire magic.
- Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro:
- The evidence from the sociologists against economic thinking is compelling
— Bill Mitchell:
When I was an economics student we were taught that unemployment, which in the real world is a major cause of poverty, was, in fact, a choice made by individuals who preferred ‘leisure’ to ‘work’ because the real wage they could access was not large enough to offset the utility they would gain from enjoying the leisure that arose from not working. There were elaborate technical analyses presented as I went through the years of study to show that if the government dared to introduce an income support payment for unemployment it would further distort the choice for leisure – the so-called ‘corner solution’ of the work-leisure model. We were also told that the real wage they faced was low because they had chosen not to invest in themselves to enhance their productivity through human capital accumulation (education and training). And the more insidious claims were that a class of impoverished people deliberately positioned themselves in this way (as a ‘utility maximising’ choice) because of categorical biases in the welfare systems.
- The Unlearning — George Monbiot:
There are two stark facts about British politics. The first is that they are controlled, to a degree unparalleled in any other Western European nation, by a tiny, unrepresentative elite. Like almost every aspect of public life here, government is dominated by people educated first at private schools, then at either Oxford or Cambridge. The second is that many of these people possess a disastrous set of traits: dishonesty, class loyalty and an absence of principle. The current Prime Minister exemplifies them. What drives him? What enables such people to dominate us? We urgently need to understand a system that has poisoned the life of this nation for over a century. I think I understand it better than most, because there is a strong similarity between what might have been the defining event of Boris Johnson’s childhood and mine. Both of us endured a peculiarly British form of abuse, that is intimately associated with the nature of power in this country. We were sent to boarding school when we were very young.
- Classics for the people — Edith Hall in Aeon:
Classical topics were included on the curricula of Mutual Improvement Societies, adult schools, Mechanics’ Institutes, university extension schemes, the Workers’ Educational Association, trade unions and the early Labour Colleges. These initiatives did much to counter the sluggish legislative response to workers’ demands for education: it was not until the Elementary Education Acts of 1870 and 1880 that even rudimentary instruction in literacy and numeracy, let alone access to classical culture, became universally and freely available to children under 13. But there had long been other ways to learn about the Greeks and Romans. Museums in Britain were visited by a far wider class cross-section than their Continental equivalents, where the admission of visitors to the princely galleries was closely monitored. There was a sense that art and archaeology somehow belonged to the nation rather than exclusively to wealthy individuals; free admission was customary. A Prussian traveller in London was disturbed to find in 1782 that the visitors to the British Museum were ‘various … some I believe, of the very lowest classes of the people, of both sexes, for as it is the property of the nation, everyone has the same right … to see it, that another has’. And classical sculptures such as the Parthenon frieze and the Venus de Milo were endlessly reproduced in forms accessible even to the poorest Briton: plaster reproductions in municipal museums across the nation, cheap self-education magazines such as Cassell’s Popular Educator, and volumes published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, available in libraries of Mechanics’ Institutes. Lower-class visitors’ memoirs often imply that what they saw in museums nurtured an impulse towards self-education.
- Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Multinational Firm's Lithium Deal — Eoin Higgins at Common Dreams:
The Sunday military coup in Bolivia has put in place a government which appears likely to reverse a decision by just-resigned President Evo Morales to cancel an agreement with a German company for developing lithium deposits in the Latin American country for batteries like those in electric cars. […] The Morales move on Nov. 4 to cancel the December 2018 agreement with Germany's ACI Systems Alemania (ACISA) came after weeks of protests from residents of the Potosí area. The region has 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves in the Salar de Uyuni salt flats. Among other clients, ACISA provides batteries to Tesla; Tesla's stock rose Monday after the weekend. […] ACISA told German broadcaster DW last week that the company was "confident that our lithium project will be resumed after a phase of political calmness and clarification."
- Machine Learning Captcha — xkcd by Randal Monroe:
Sunday, 15 December 2019 - 2:12pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Emulation — xkcd by Randal Monroe:
- Harvesting the Blood of America’s Poor: The Latest Stage of Capitalism — Alan Macleod in MintPress News:
For much of the world, donating blood is purely an act of solidarity; a civic duty that the healthy perform to aid others in need. The idea of being paid for such an action would be considered bizarre. But in the United States, it is big business. Indeed, in today’s wretched economy, where around 130 million Americans admit an inability to pay for basic needs like food, housing or healthcare, buying and selling blood is of the few booming industries America has left. The number of collection centers in the United States has more than doubled since 2005 and blood now makes up well over 2 percent of total U.S. exports by value. To put that in perspective, Americans’ blood is now worth more than all exported corn or soy products that cover vast areas of the country’s heartland. The U.S. supplies fully 70 percent of the world’s plasma, mainly because most other countries have banned the practice on ethical and medical grounds. Exports increased by over 13 percent, to $28.6 billion, between 2016 and 2017, and the plasma market is projected to “grow radiantly,” according to one industry report. The majority goes to wealthy European countries; Germany, for example, buys 15 percent of all U.S. blood exports. China and Japan are also key customers.
- Placing and Spacing the Dead in Colonial Accra — Sarah Balakrishnan in the Metropole:
Cemeteries were undoubtedly a part of British colonists’ bid to reorganize African societies according to Christian schematics of “civilization”—what has been called the “civilizing mission.” But they also had another, more insidious, ambition. Creating private property in Accra required cemeteries. Graveyards relocated ancestors to the public domain, making it possible for Gold Coasters to sell their property to interested buyers. British colonists had long understood that communities in Accra would never sell their land if it contained the remains of their elders. Public cemeteries thus transferred rituals of social reproduction—celebrating, mourning, and remembering the dead—into the domain of the state, so that private houses could be made fungible and sellable. Like elsewhere in the world, commemorations of death shaped the devolution of property. In colonial Accra, British colonists used cemeteries to enforce private property in land.
- Hoax — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
- Leopards do not change their spots — Bill Mitchell:
Keating became Treasurer in 1983 and inherited the emerging neoliberalism about deregulation, privatisation and the obsession with the pursuit of fiscal surpluses. He inherited a weak economy but set about pursuing surpluses as soon as he could and by 1987-88 fiscal year recorded the first of three consecutive surpluses – 0.4 per cent of GDP, 1.5 per cent of GDP and again, 1.5 per cent in 1989-90. The data shows that he only recorded three surpluses during his period as Treasurer. Further, his praise for the Costello surpluses (he became Treasurer when the Conservatives took power in 1996) and was only able to achieve those surpluses because the financial market deregulation mania that both Keating and Costello implemented reduced regulations on banks and oversight by the authorities and led to the credit binge that saw the household saving ratio move into negative figures and household debt rise from about 60 per cent of disposable income to 180 odd per cent. Without that unsustainable credit binge, the economy would have tanked under the strain of Costello’s fiscal drag (the surpluses) and he would have been back in deficit quick smart. Just as Keating experienced after his obsessive pursuit of surpluses. In 1990-91, Australia had its worst recession since the 1930s.
- Household Debt: A Tale of Three Countries — Steven Hail for Renegade Inc:
The beneficial role of the deficit, and the irrelevance of its impact on the stock of Japanese government debt, is not generally understood, even in Japan. Debt and deficit in Japan are not a sign of economic failure – they are the hallmark of a largely successful attempt to maintain living standards and close to full employment labour market, in an economy where private saving (and especially corporate saving) has outstripped private investment spending. It is very important to understand this. Many economists, commentators and credit ratings agencies still don’t understand this. They have been vaguely forecasting doom, or at least some kind of financial crisis, for Japan for a couple of decades now. It wasn’t in Japan that the Global Financial Crisis developed. It wasn’t in Japan that the problems of the euro emerged. It isn’t Japan that is faced with dangerous household debt now. These various commentators still don’t understand the fiscal space enjoyed by monetary sovereigns like the Japanese government. They don’t understand the appropriate role for the government’s budget in such countries. They look for crises where none will occur. They miss the financial fragilities which drive those crises that do happen. They are very slow to learn. The only thing to do is to ignore them and their advice.
- Manufacturing Fear and Loathing, Maximizing Corporate Profits! A Review of Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another — by John Siman in Naked Capitalism:
Because of the tweaking of the Herman/Chomsky propaganda model necessitated by the disappearance of the USSR in 1991 (“The Russians escaped while we weren’t watching them, / As Russians do…,” Jackson Browne presciently prophesied on MTV way back in 1983), one might now want to speak of a Propaganda Model 2.0. For, as Taibbi notes, “…the biggest change to Chomsky’s model is the discovery of a far superior ‘common enemy’ in modern media: each other. So long as we remain a bitterly-divided two-party state, we’ll never want for TV villains”.
- Impeachment Talk — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow: