The Zero Room

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.

This fortnight, I don't know what I've been doing, besides not reading enough:

• Opinion: How Artists And Fans Stopped Facial Recognition From Invading Music Festivals — Evan Greer and Tom Morello in BuzzFeed: Industry giants like Ticketmaster invested money in companies like Blink Identity, a startup run by ex–defense contractors who helped build the US military’s facial recognition system in Afghanistan. These vendors, and the venture capitalists who backed them, saw the live music industry as a huge potential market for biometric surveillance tech, marketed as a convenient ticketing option to concertgoers. […] Over the last month, artists and fans waged a grassroots war to stop Orwellian surveillance technology from invading live music events. Today we declare victory. Our campaign pushed more than 40 of the world’s largest music festivals — like Coachella, Bonnaroo, and SXSW — to go on the record and state clearly that they have no plans to use facial recognition technology at their events. Facing backlash, Ticketmaster all but threw Blink Identity under the bus, distancing itself from the surveillance startup it boasted about partnering with just a year ago. This victory is the first major blow to the spread of commercial facial recognition in the United States, and its significance cannot be overstated. In a few short weeks, using basic grassroots activism tactics like online petitions, social media pressure, and an economic boycott targeting festival sponsors, artists and fans killed the idea of facial recognition at US music festivals. Now we need to do the same for sporting events, transportation, public housing, schools, law enforcement agencies, and all public places. And there’s no time to lose.
• These ‘job snob’ claims don’t match the evidence — Greg Marston et al. in the Conversation: Between 2015 and 2018, we were part of a team studying the well-being, social networks and job search experiences of unemployed Australians. Our study, funded by the Australian Research Council, involved policy analysis, surveys and in-depth interviews. We talked to the employment service providers and 80 job seekers in regional and urban areas of New South Wales and Queensland. We found no evidence that job-seekers preferred not to work. In fact, based on the considerable “job search activity” required of them to meet Centrelink’s stringent “mutual obligation” conditions, we had to conclude that, whatever the reasons for their joblessness, unwillingness to work was not one of them.
• Bernie Sanders Is the Best on the Minimum Wage and It’s Not Near — Ted Rall:
  
• Why do so many Americans hate the welfare state? — Elizabeth Anderson interviewed by Joe Humphreys for the Irish Times: One way to think about it is this is another bizarre legacy of Calvinist thought. It’s really deep in Protestantism that each individual is responsible for their own salvation. It’s really an anti-Catholic thing, right? The Catholics have this giant institution that’s going to help people; and Protestantism says, no, no, no, it’s totally you and your conscience, or your faith. That individualism – the idea that I’ve got to save myself – got secularised over time. And it is deep, much deeper in America than in Europe – not only because there are way more Catholics in Europe who never bought into this ideology – but also in Europe due to the experience of the two World Wars they realised they are all in the boat together and they better work together or else all is lost. America was never under existential threat. So you didn’t have that same sense of the absolute necessity for individual survival that we come together as a nation. I think those experiences are really profound and helped to propel the welfare state across Europe post World War II.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Neoliberalism: Political Success, Economic Failure — Robert Kuttner in the American Prospect: As the great political historian Karl Polanyi warned, when markets overwhelm society, ordinary people often turn to tyrants. In regimes that border on neofascist, klepto-capitalists get along just fine with dictators, undermining the neoliberal premise of capitalism and democracy as complements. Several authoritarian thugs, playing on tribal nationalism as the antidote to capitalist cosmopolitanism, are surprisingly popular. It's also important to appreciate that neoliberalism is not laissez-faire. Classically, the premise of a “free market” is that government simply gets out of the way. This is nonsensical, since all markets are creatures of rules, most fundamentally rules defining property, but also rules defining credit, debt, and bankruptcy; rules defining patents, trademarks, and copyrights; rules defining terms of labor; and so on. Even deregulation requires rules. In Polanyi's words, “laissez-faire was planned.” The political question is who gets to make the rules, and for whose benefit.
• The Green New Deal must wipe out precarious work and underemployment — Bill Mitchell: I keep reading so-called Green New Deal proposals that put the Job Guarantee at the centre of the employment considerations of the concept. I think that is unfortunate. We must understand that the Job Guarantee is a very specific approach to maintaining loose full employment and price stability. At its heart it is a buffer stock mechanism rather than a job creation structure. Sure enough, it creates jobs on demand by workers who want to work but cannot find work elsewhere. In normal times, it might not create or sustain many jobs at all. And, importantly, it might not be part of a fiscal ‘stimulus’ program. […] As carbon-intensive sectors are closed down by regulation, the affected communities will transit into new activities and new employment opportunities. Underpinning it all will be the Job Guarantee safety net for those workers with a need for a minimum wage job. But the scale of the investment and skill development required will see massive shifts in workers between industries, occupations and sectors (public and private). The Job Guarantee will only be a small part of those shifts and should not be seen as the employment solution to the disruption that the Green New Deal will generate.
• #1067; The Post-Game Interview — Wondermark by David Malki !:
  
• The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons — Matto Mildenberger in Scientific American: Thirty years ago, a different future was available. Gradual climate policies could have slowly steered our economy towards gently declining carbon pollution levels. The costs to most Americans would have been imperceptible. But that future was stolen from us. It was stolen by powerful, carbon-polluting interests who blocked policy reforms at every turn to preserve their short-term profits. They locked each of us into an economy where fossil fuel consumption continues to be a necessity, not a choice. This is what makes attacks on individual behavior so counterproductive. Yes, it’s great to drive an electric vehicle (if you can afford it) and purchase solar panels (if powerful utilities in your state haven’t conspired to make renewable energy more expensive). But the point is that interest groups have structured the choices available to us today. Individuals don’t have the agency to steer our economic ship from the passenger deck. As Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes reminds us, “[abolitionists] wore clothes made of cotton picked by slaves. But that did not make them hypocrites … it just meant that they were also part of the slave economy, and they knew it. That is why they acted to change the system, not just their clothes.”
• Calvin and Hobbes — by Bill Waterson:
  
• Why I Hate Houses — Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism: There are bona fide reasons to have problems with this way of living, namely the environmental cost. Free-standing buildings take more energy to heat and cool than multi-unit structures. Car ownership is pretty much unavoidable, since even in those few suburbs with decent public transport, it’s designed for going in and of the city center (as in for commuting), not for provisioning, transporting kids, or running other errands. And if you decide to fit in, as a recent post pointed out, “Lawns, in general, are pretty much the enemy for healthy insect habitats.” And don’t get me started on leaf blowers. Now I could pretend to not like houses out of reasons of conscience, or a preference for living in high-density areas (which I do have). But my big reason for not liking houses is the inefficiency and time sink of maintaining them.
• The Tragic Story of Jimmy Aldaoud, Deported From the Streets of Detroit to His Death in Iraq — Chris Gelardi, the Intercept: Before he was deported, Jimmy Aldaoud had never stepped foot in Iraq. Born in Greece to Iraqi refugee parents, he immigrated to the United States with his family via a refugee resettlement program 40 years ago, when he was just 15 months old. He considered himself American and knew hardly anything of Iraqi society. Still, on the afternoon of June 4, he found himself wandering the arrivals terminal of Al Najaf International Airport, about 100 miles south of Baghdad, with around $50, some insulin for his diabetes, and the clothes on his back. […] Aldaoud spoke no Arabic, had no known family in Iraq, and nobody knew he was there. Disembarking in Najaf, he was “scared,” “confused,” and acting panicked, according to an Iraqi immigration officer he encountered. And 63 days later — this past Tuesday — he was dead.
• The ideology of postmodernism is to present all existing injustice as an effect of discrimination; Robert Pfaller tells ILNA — Iranian Labour News Agency: The general ideological task of postmodernism is to present all existing injustice as an effect of discrimination. This is, of course, funny again: Since every discrimination presupposes an already established class structure of inequality. If you do not have unequal places, you cannot distribute individuals in a discriminating way, even if you want to do so. Thus progressive neoliberalism massively increases social inequality, while distributing all minority groups in an "equal" way over the unequal places.
• We are approaching a period of fiscal [policy] dominance — Bill Mitchell: The dissonance in mainstream economics and the political debate about policy settings is getting deeper and more public. We now have examples of central bankers ‘throwing their hands up in the air’ and nearly begging governments to abandon their obsession with fiscal surpluses, and, instead, use fiscal policy to stimulate waning economic growth. What I think is happening is that we are entering a period of fiscal dominance, which will represent a categorical rejection of the mainstream macroeconomics consensus that has dominated policy making since the 1980s – the neoliberal era. In turn, this shift will ratify the main precepts of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We are observing paradigm shift occurring as the dominant neoliberal paradigm fails at every turn. There is a long way to go though before the practitioners acknowledge that such a shift has occurred. But there is progress.
• How Richard Vague Discovered Gravity: An Interview + Book Review of A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises — John Siman in Naked Capitalism: Richard Vague: […] A couple of years ago, I was lamenting the fact that the U.S. did not have an industrial policy of the sort China now has and the U.S. itself has had in the past in efforts like the construction of railroads and canals. I was lamenting the lack of significantly stepped up government support for areas like 5G, high tech manufacturing, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence, and expressed fear that China would surpass us in those areas as Japan had in automobiles in the 1980s. A friend quickly corrected me, saying that the U.S. most definitely had an industrial policy, even though it was largely unstated: namely, support for the financial and real estate sectors. That support is manifested in tax laws, regulation, and a host of other ways. A light bulb went off, since his statement was in lockstep with what I had been finding in my research. Bit by bit, by hook and by crook, there has been a disproportionate accumulation of policy support for these two industries—the very two industries I had come to view as the “swing sectors” in the economy, the most frequent source of booms and busts. And they are wed together—it is increased leverage that directly results in increased asset values. And orthodox economics, both by commission and omission, has facilitated this.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Doonesbury — Gary Trudeau:
  
• French city of Dunkirk tests out free transport – and it works — Colin Kinniburgh, France 24: For many, the effect has been nothing short of liberating, says Vanessa Delevoye, editor of Urbis, a magazine of urban politics published by the local government. To get around town, you no longer need to look at the schedules, buy tickets or worry about parking, she says. You just hop on the bus. “It’s become a synonym of freedom,” she says, attracting those who might not otherwise have used public transport. In this largely working-class city, “people of limited means say they’ve rediscovered transport” – a prerequisite to finding a job, maintaining friendships or participating in local arts and culture.
• Feminism explains our (toxic) relationships with our smartphones — Maria Farrell in the Conversationalist: A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk in Austria on smartphones and cybersecurity. “Put up your hand if you like or maybe even love your smartphone,” I asked the audience of policymakers, industrialists and students. Nearly every hand in the room shot up. “Now, please put up your hand if you trust your smartphone.” One young guy at the back put his hand in the air, then faltered as it became obvious he was alone. I thanked him for his honesty and paused before saying,“We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship.”
• Uh-oh: Silicon Valley is building a Chinese-style social credit system — Mike Elgan in Fast Company: Nobody likes antisocial, violent, rude, unhealthy, reckless, selfish, or deadbeat behavior. What’s wrong with using new technology to encourage everyone to behave? The most disturbing attribute of a social credit system is not that it’s invasive, but that it’s extralegal. Crimes are punished outside the legal system, which means no presumption of innocence, no legal representation, no judge, no jury, and often no appeal. In other words, it’s an alternative legal system where the accused have fewer rights. Social credit systems are an end-run around the pesky complications of the legal system. Unlike China’s government policy, the social credit system emerging in the U.S. is enforced by private companies. If the public objects to how these laws are enforced, it can’t elect new rule-makers.
• Humility — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Wienersmith:
  
• Why an “AI Race” Between the U.S. and China Is a Terrible, Terrible Idea — Sam Biddle at the Intercept: Sure, yes, it’s doubtful we could have “marshaled a whole-of-government approach” to space travel without having first “marshaled a whole-of-government approach” to rocket-borne atomic genocide, but to highlight the eventual accomplishments of NASA without acknowledging that it entailed a very close dance with a worldwide apocalypse is ahistoric and absurd. To use this comparison to goad us into another nationalist tech race with a global military power is outright dangerous — if only because the victory remains completely undefined. How would we “beat” China, exactly? Beat them at what, exactly? Which specific problems do we hope to use AI to fix? At a point in history when cities are beginning to scrutinize and outright ban “AI” technologies like facial recognition, are we sure the fixes aren’t even worse than the problems? Nationalists caught in an arms race have no time to answer questions like these or any others; they’ve got a race to win! […] Rarely does anyone explain exactly why we should ever want to beat China in this particular field, one that’s helped the government there build incredibly powerful systems of social control, civil liberty annihilation, and minority oppression — areas where the U.S. is still competitive, sure, but perhaps falling behind.
• U.S. Economic Warfare and Likely Foreign Defenses — Michael Hudson's keynote paper delivered at the 14th Forum of the World Association for Political Economy, July 21, 2019: We are still mired in the Oil War that escalated in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq, which quickly spread to Libya and Syria. American foreign policy has long been based largely on control of oil. This has led the United States to oppose the Paris accords to stem global warming. Its aim is to give U.S. officials the power to impose energy sanctions forcing other countries to “freeze in the dark” if they do not follow U.S. leadership. To expand its oil monopoly, America is pressuring Europe to oppose the Nordstream II gas pipeline from Russia, claiming that this would make Germany and other countries dependent on Russia instead of on U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG). Likewise, American oil diplomacy has imposed unilateral sanctions against Iranian oil exports, until such time as a regime change opens up that country’s oil reserves to U.S., French, British and other allied oil majors. U.S. control of dollarized money and credit is critical to this hegemony. As Congressman Brad Sherman of Los Angeles told a House Financial Services Committee hearing on May 9, 2019: “An awful lot of our international power comes from the fact that the U.S. dollar is the standard unit of international finance and transactions. Clearing through the New York Fed is critical for major oil and other transactions. It is the announced purpose of the supporters of cryptocurrency to take that power away from us, to put us in a position where the most significant sanctions we have against Iran, for example, would become irrelevant.” The U.S. aim is to keep the dollar as the transactions currency for world trade, savings, central bank reserves and international lending. This monopoly status enables the U.S. Treasury and State Department to disrupt the financial payments system and trade for countries with which the United States is at economic or outright military war.