The Zero Room

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.

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:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Chemistry Nobel — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
  
• After Avoiding Safety Upgrades, PG&E Hired Lobbyists and Public Relations Instead — Lee Fang at the Intercept: Power shutoffs affecting more than 1 million residents, scheduled by PG&E this week throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California, have sparked a massive backlash, with many community members telling reporters that they are shocked that the company has not done more to upgrade its transmission lines. The decision to shut off the electricity services, a precaution over concerns about high winds, raises the question of precisely how PG&E has been spending its rate-payers’ money. And the answer isn’t pretty: While neglecting safety upgrades and investments in its aging infrastructure, PG&E has instead been lavishly rewarding shareholders and buying political influence. Over the last year, reporters have highlighted the large lobby spending and billions of dollars in dividend payments to investors by PG&E, while the company avoided necessary investments in its aging transmission towers — some of which are among the oldest in the world and were known to the company to be a potential fire hazard. The aging transmission lines caused the Camp Fire wildfires last November, the most destructive in California history, that left 86 dead, over a dozen injured, and caused at least $16 billion in damages.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Australia’s “Fair Go” Is a Lie — Jeremy Poxon from the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union in Jacobin: According to a recent survey conducted by the Australian Council of Social Service, 84 percent of Newstart recipients skip meals in order to survive on the entitlement. Colloquially, low-income Australians refer to this as “the Newstart diet.” Unsurprisingly, this level of deprivation is psychologically debilitating. Being unemployed in Australia means experiencing depression, stress, anxiety, and loneliness on a daily basis. In a recent survey, the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union (AUWU) found that 98 percent of its members experienced significant social isolation. Increasingly, Australia’s unemployed cannot afford to put fuel in their cars, pay for public transport, or meaningfully engage with their friends and communities.
• Where’s Your Football, Lucy? — Ted Rall:
  
• Assange in Court — Craig Murray: Until yesterday I had always been quietly sceptical of those who claimed that Julian’s treatment amounted to torture – even of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture – and sceptical of those who suggested he may be subject to debilitating drug treatments. But having attended the trials in Uzbekistan of several victims of extreme torture, and having worked with survivors from Sierra Leone and elsewhere, I can tell you that yesterday changed my mind entirely and Julian exhibited exactly the symptoms of a torture victim brought blinking into the light, particularly in terms of disorientation, confusion, and the real struggle to assert free will through the fog of learned helplessness. I had been even more sceptical of those who claimed, as a senior member of his legal team did to me on Sunday night, that they were worried that Julian might not live to the end of the extradition process. I now find myself not only believing it, but haunted by the thought. Everybody in that court yesterday saw that one of the greatest journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to death by the state, before our eyes. To see my friend, the most articulate man, the fastest thinker, I have ever known, reduced to that shambling and incoherent wreck, was unbearable. Yet the agents of the state, particularly the callous magistrate Vanessa Baraitser, were not just prepared but eager to be a part of this bloodsport.

About a year ago I crossed back over the line between obese and merely overweight, and a month or two back I tried on some old clothes that I had been hanging on to for over a quarter of a century. There's a waistcoat which I bought when I was 20 years old, when I had decided that I was going to be that kind of eccentric person (spoiler: quickly grew out of that aspiration, and the waistcoat). Also some t-shirts of NME-approved bands which I had abandoned hope of ever fitting into again - and in any case they were too tattered and moth-eaten to wear - but I couldn't bear to throw out and had a vague idea that I would repurpose into retro cusion covers or something.

Anyway, they're taking up space in my tiny flat and need to pay their way, so here's your unrequested sample of what the marginally fashionable were wearing in 1989:

You're twisting my melon, man. This probably unlicensed shirt repurposed an NME cover photo with a none too subtle hidden message. I'm from up North! E by gum!

This is the tour shirt I bought when, on January 25th 1990 (the date is on the back), I dragged my friend PaulVC along to the Hordern Pavillion to see the Pogues. Thanks to ABC TV's Rage, Paul was vaguely familiar with the hits (Dirty Old Town, Sally MacLennane, etc.), but I suspect was mainly drawn by Paul Kelly as the support act. The Hordern Pavillion was still then a part of the Royal Agricultural Showgrounds, and we watched Paul Kelly from the back stalls, where every Easter there would be elaborate displays of pumpkins, cabbages, etc. displaying regional pride in the bounteous produce of stolen land.

I'd queued for my first ever plastic beaker of Guiness, declaring it unfit for human consumption (as indeed it is when served under those conditions), but fortunately I'd also been drinking all day (as was my custom at the time), and had a backup hip flask of Southern Comfort. (Technically not a drink, but a kind of liquid confectionary which I could not stomach these days, and which the security guard searching my bag at the gate assumed was a sandwich, as it was in a brown paper bag - oh, to be so innocent!)

When Kelly, who is a folk-rock national treasure and whom I do not mean to belittle in any way by comparison to the best band ever, finished his set I insisted that we go down to the mosh pit for the headline performers. In the Hordern Pavillion, the mosh pit is the majority of the audience space, as the terraced seating area is, as I say, designed for pumpkins, cabbages, etc. artfully arranged for the people of Sydney to dutifully file past and appreciate over Easter when everything else is shut.

The band played a blinder. Shane was brilliant, which was not always the case in those days (forgivably, for reasons I'll reserve for another post). It was glorious.

Take me back to dear old blighty… Well, the less said the better. Do you remember the days before "Bengali in Platforms" and "National Front Disco"? Honestly, he used to seem so witty and compassionate. Trick of the light, I suppose.

That Freaky Dancing, just doing me in.

Second album: hmm, yeah but that's how second albums go. Third album: forgivable. Fourth album: only fit for playing in an elevator. Still, I'm always available as a spare pair for the eight-legged groove machine.