For the Record: Critical Press Theory

Press room of the Chicago Criminal Courts Building as depicted in the original Broadway staging (by George S. Kaufman) of Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page, 1928, via Wikipedia.

Studies show that about 35% of people really do prefer, even long for, authoritarian style rule. How do we grapple with that?

— Rebecca Fachner (@rebecca_fachner) September 26, 2022

"pastors", maybe, or "vicars", something like that. And they wouldn't cost the community anything, members of the "congregation" could pay for it out of their own pockets. As long as they left the other 65% alone, this couldn't do any harm.

— Überwoke Sweepstakes (@Yastreblyansky) September 27, 2022

Meanwhile, the stupid argument about Ms. Haberman (now being roasted for failing to report in The Times that Trump had told her he had some presidential documents at Mar-a-Lago and saving it for her book instead) finally ended up going someplace interesting:

For the Record: What Is Capitalism

Class Strugle--The board game. Via Wikipedia.

Covering some ground I'm afraid we may have covered before—

employees while the CEO keeps getting richer and takes rides into outer space in a flying penis rocket. But it also applies to Linda making a decent living by selling homemade cupcakes at the flea market. If she's selling something she produced and pricing it at...

— Ghost of Gene Rayburn of House Moderna🍸 (@ghostofgener) February 8, 2022

That is literally not capitalism. Linda is not an alienated wage slave selling her labor for the benefit of an owner sucking the surplus value out of it. She's an independent artisan who controls her own means of production, in a pattern from long before capitalism was invented.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2022

Joe Did What? A Matter of Trust

Modification by Epic Games of a scene from the Peter Jackson movie, via The Verge.

From National Review tax expert Daniel J. Pilla ("Biden Gets More Aggressive With the Confiscation of Capital"), the most poetic description you'll ever see of a tax dodge: 

Trusts are used in estate planning as a means of putting the assets into the hands of a holder who is, so to speak, immortal. Families often put investment assets into trust to avoid probate, thus allowing the assets to continue to work and grow without the need to liquidate them upon the death of the owner.

Because trusts don’t “die” (or, to put it more technically, enjoy perpetuity of life, like a corporation), future generations can realize the benefits of income generated by trust assets but without the heavy hand of estate and gift taxes carving their way through the assets themselves.

Far from being a tax dodge, a beneficiary trust is a kind of beautiful alchemy, that gives your money eternal life! Protecting its integrity from the unseemly violence of probate! You may die, but your money lives forever, industrious and expanding, bringing happiness wherever it turns, not maimed and scarred by—well, yes, taxes, but not just because they're taxes. It's because they're heavy-handed taxes, kicking and slashing their way onto your deck like a pirate crew carrying cutlasses.

Capitalists Gonna

 

Red Herring via Black Label Logic.

But he's a philanthropist! https://t.co/ANU9c5sjoA

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) April 26, 2021

This is pretty disquieting, as reported by Jon Queally for Common Dreams (via Salon):

Asked to explain why not, Gates — whose massive fortune as founder of Microsoft relies largely on intellectual property laws that turned his software innovations into tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth — said: "Well, there's only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done — moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India — it's novel — it's only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all."

For the Record: Why the Affordable Care Act Will Survive

Photo by CQ Roll Call via Forbes.

 

 A heavy Twitter day, sorry. Some more arguments with friends:

There's too much Grassley in it. We need to get it rewritten by a committee with fewer Republicans.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 24, 2020

That I have never believed. Huge financialized corporations--hospitals, insurers--have a very big stake in preserving it, and finding for Texas would cause serious chaos https://t.co/kdHUAkVLFi. The Court cares more about them than it does about Trump.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 24, 2020

Cure, maybe, but not proof that capitalism will solve all your problems

Image via Freedom From Religion Foundation.

This week's news of a remarkably successful early trial at the University of Chicago for a possible Covid-19 drug, Gilead's Remdesivir, is really good, let me say that, but I'm not so sure about Mr. Bret Stephens and his panegyric to pharmaceutical profit (The Story of Remdesivir")—

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there should be no big-pharma haters in pandemics. Last year, Elizabeth Warren wrote that “giant drug companies only care about one thing: raking in profits on the backs of patients.” I wonder if the Massachusetts senator would have the nerve to say that to [Gilead clinical research head Diana] Brainard and every other private-sector scientist laboring to find cures under the intense strain of this global emergency.

—and their beneficent employers,

profit-seeking companies operating in fiercely competitive and well-regulated marketplaces. Whatever the fate of remdesivir or any other drug, one lesson from this pandemic is how dependent we are for our survival on an innovative and robust pharmaceutical industry. Maybe we should do more as a country to cultivate it than tear it down.

As a matter of fact, Gilead has had plenty of cultivation from our federal government, in particular with respect to Remdesivir, starting with the CDC in 2014 pulling it out of a "library" of some 1000 possible antiviral compounds the company had been patenting over some decades, as a possible treatment for Ebola, refined with the full collaboration and financial support of the the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) whose scientists did the actual testing of the drug's effectiveness in cell cultures and 100 rhesus monkeys who all survived the disease.

For the Record: What's Wrong With Journalism?

Via Santa Clara Univiersity.

Had an interesting back and forth with the artist formerly known as Thornton over a thing about journalism, whether we can manage to agree about it or not—where we do agree that "objectivity" and "impartiality" are bad ideas, but I insist it's not a bad thing for a newspaper to make an effort to be truthful, and he says look at the great old days when journalism knew what kind of business it was in and pleased its partisan readers and I say yeah and competed to help the imperalist swine start the Spanish-American war ("You supply the pictures, Mr. Pulitzer...") and so on:

The normative “should” as applied to for-profit ad platforms remains mysterious. https://t.co/aBhIGkC7VU

— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) April 6, 2020

When it profits them to do so, sure.

— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) April 6, 2020

Just Deserts

A kind of poignant thing about this college admissions scandal is the way the kids themselves were protected, in many or most cases, from knowing that they were involved in a fraud:

Sitting very still and wearing a dark suit, [master criminal William Singer] described how he arranged for students’ SAT and ACT results to be falsified by sending them to take the exams in Houston or Los Angeles, where he had bribed test administrators. He described the students as believing they were taking the tests legitimately, but said that his test proctor would correct their answers afterward. Mr. Singer said he would tell the proctor the score he wanted the student to get, and he would achieve that score exactly....

Mr. McGlashan’s son was unaware of the scheme, according to court documents....

Mr. Singer told Mr. Caplan that his daughter would not know that her standardized test scores had been faked.

“Nobody knows what happens,” Mr. Singer said, according to the transcript of the call. “She feels great about herself.”

Some students may have been directly slipped test answers, but more of them just were given to understand that they'd succeeded in the test on their own, whether a confederate was changing their answers or simply retaking the test to replace their original scores; some participated in photo sessions where they were posed as star athletes, but they didn't necessarily know what the purpose of it was, and others were just entirely in the dark while their parents photoshopped their faces onto stock pictures of high school sports, but neither they nor the college administrations were aware that they were supposed to be star athletes, and nobody questioned why they didn't sign up for the soccer team or crew.

To Kill a Theater

Darryl Maximilian Robinson as Reverend Sykes in the 2011 staging of Christopher Sergel's To Kill a Mockingbird by the Glendale Centre Theatre of Glendale, California, via.

Heard a note on this on NPR this morning, found a more thorough treatment from Mark Kennedy/AP Entertainment at the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer:

Dozens of community and nonprofit theaters across the U.S. have been forced to abandon productions of "To Kill a Mockingbird" under legal threat by Broadway and Hollywood producer Scott Rudin. The combative move has prompted calls for a boycott of Rudin's work

Rudin is arguing that author Harper Lee signed over to him exclusive worldwide rights to the title of the novel and that Rudin's current adaptation on Broadway — written by Aaron Sorkin — is the only version allowed to be performed.

That means different adaptations have had to be scuttled in such small venues as the Grand Theatre in Salt Lake City; Mugford Street Players in Marblehead, Massachusetts; and the Kavinoky Theatre in Buffalo, New York, as well as a planned United Kingdom and Ireland tour. They had licensed the rights for a different version, written by Christopher Sergel and licensed by The Dramatic Publishing Company or DPC.

"Rudin's work", as if he'd created the thing, as opposed to scrounging the money from his social circle whose demands for profit are responsible for Broadway prices that make it impossible for most people ever to see a show. That's annoying in itself. And they're not saying Sergel's adaptation (written in 1970 and a staple of high school and college and community theaters all over the US ever since—Sergel himself died in 1993) can't ever be performed again, just that they get to decide whether a particular production can take place or not, since they plan to take Sorkin's play on the road, and the staging by the Mugford Street Players could cut into Rudin's take; if he wants to put it on in the Marblehead neighborhood local audience might think "Oh, we've already seen that" and stay home, I guess.

Breakup

Image by Justin Metz via The Economist.

Silliest response to the Amazon decision to give up on their Long Island City project was, I'm sorry to say, from Senator Professor Warren:

.@Amazon – one of the wealthiest companies on the planet – just walked away from billions in taxpayer bribes, all because some elected officials in New York aren't sucking up to them enough. How long will we allow giant corporations to hold our democracy hostage? https://t.co/O9pz7en43B

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) February 14, 2019

So now you're going to complain about corporations not taking bribes? There's just no satisfying you!

That said, it looks like the decision was for all the right reasons, and speaking as a New Yorker I'm feeling more and more not sorry it's ended this way:

The Demoralization of the Market

Via DiasporaBR.

Brooks's headline last Friday ("The Remoralization of the Market") was so hilarious I found myself feeling the column couldn't possibly live up to it. With the appeal to some good old days from, I don't know, 1750 to 1970, when the Market was Moral, virtuous, kind, diligent, and generous, feeding the sick and clothing the hungry, and then came the Me Decade, and selfish individualistic investors suddenly deciding they were just in it for the money.

He really did kind of write it:

A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct. We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules. We made the market its own priest and confessor.

And that's how the Market got Demoralized. I guess the "left" is to blame for constantly telling grasping shareholders, "Hey man, if greed is your thing, hey, whatever feels good, as long as you don't hurt anybody." We should have found some kind of leftist language for telling capitalists they were doing the wrong thing, I wonder what that would look like.

I Dreamed I Saw Steve Moore

Joe Hill ashes envelope, November 1916, via The Labor Martyrs Project.

Our friend Boswood aka Bethesda 1971 has produced a parody of "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill"* on the subject of Stephen Moore, who is sort of to Trump and economics what Andrey Zhdanov was to Stalin and arts criticism, and to whom Trump dedicated a recent tweet:

2018 is being called “THE YEAR OF THE WORKER” by Steve Moore, co-author of “Trumponomics.” It was indeed a great year for the American Worker with the “best job market in 50 years, and the lowest unemployment rate ever for blacks and Hispanics and all workers. Big wage gains.”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2018

I admired it after he posted it at Kos yesterday (if you like it go rec him there!), and he kindly invited me to reproduce it here, so here goes:

The Ballad of Steve Moore

by Bethesda 1971

I dreamed I saw Steve Moore last night
On MSNBC
But Steve you are a right wing hack
“Oh that I am said he
Oh that I am said he.”

You hate the workers don’t you Steve
Their wages are too high
Says Steve “I have a goal in life.
The unions all must die.
The unions all must die.”

And sitting there on my TV
And looking like a jerk
He says “my way to kill them
Is by passing right to work.
By passing right to work.”

From strategists to lobbyists
Through every open door
Where Plutocrats rake in their cash,
It’s there you find Steve Moore.
It’s there you find Steve Moore.

I dreamed I saw Steve Moore last night
On MSNBC
But Steve you are a right wing hack
“Oh that I am said he
Oh that I am said he.”

* I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night is a song by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson. Joe Hill was a union organizer for the IWW (Wobblies) [and poet—ed.]. He was framed for a murder in Utah and executed by firing squad in 1915. “His body was sent to Chicago where up to 30,000 people attended the funeral. Joe was cremated and his ashes divided into 600 envelopes that were sent to IWW branches across the globe.” Joan Baez sang  I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night” at Woodstock. Here it is:

New York note: In defense of Bill de Blasio, don't @ me

Photo by Yeong-Ung Yang/New York Times.

My distinguished tweep Nathan Newman lays out a reasonable schema for how we should feel about the deal making Long Island City, Queens, one of Amazon's new HQ2s:

Two things can be true. (1) Allowing cities to bid for jobs should be illegal since lets companies retain large chunk of value they create in those communities, (2) There is still significant value left over in communities in many cases, so bidding for those jobs is rational.

— Nathan Newman 🧭🌹 (@nathansnewman) November 14, 2018

That is, it's a horrible feature of late capitalism that giant companies should be playing off localities against each other in a race to the bottom in which they award the prize to the one that allows them to exploit it the most, but given that that's the way it is, and the feds won't do anything to stop it, local authorities would be irresponsible not to see if they can get something out of it for their citizens.

I've been listening to Mayor de Blasio on WNYC radio explaining the Amazon deal under questioning from Brian Lehrer and a couple of callers-in, and he's obviously kind of defensive, under intensive criticism from everybody from Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez and Jumaane Williams to Rod Dreher and the National Review, as Roy points out at the subscription site, but I'm inclined, on the whole, to think he may have done this thing right, or at the least that he's not just kidding when he presents himself as a kind of Mitterand figure:

Annals of Culture Change: Kaepernick to Bannon

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

I think the Kaepernick news, if true, that the Nike company is using the otherwise unemployed quarterback and effective protester against police brutality against the black community as an ad model, is very cool.

It looks like former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick is starring in a new ad campaign for Nike. He shared an image on his Twitter Monday of a close-up of his face with the words: "Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything." Nike's Twitter account later retweeted his post. Nike has represented Kaepernick since 2011, but hasn't featured him in ads for two years...

Not, I mean, that it's going to convince me that Nike is the corporation that will save the world from not having nice corporations, though for all I know the long struggle to get them to provide decent working conditions for the people in developing countries who make their products may well have paid off to some extent—Wikipedia's bibliography on the subject pretty much comes to an end in 2011, but includes an article from 2018 reporting (on the basis of research published in 2009) that

Scaramouche the Douche. I

Stewart Granger as Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche in the 1952 film by George Sidney.

Full transparency: I'm deleting old tweets. Past views evolved & shouldn't be a distraction. I serve @POTUS agenda & that's all that matters

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 22, 2017

Full transparency: I'm going to turn myself into cellophane, so you can look through me and see the real whatever there is back there. https://t.co/dcYTklWJuf

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 23, 2017

So this is about the Twitter evidence that Trump's new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, used to hold some un-Trumpish views, like favoring marriage equality or opposing global warming, or thinking Trump lacks judgment, and

“Walls don’t work,” the Wall Streeter tweeted in late 2015. “Never have never will. The Berlin Wall 1961-1989 don’t fall for it.”

Where he showed the same peculiar misunderstanding as Fox's Monica Crowley, of thinking the Mauer was somehow analogous to Trump's wall, as if the East Germans had built it to keep out job-stealing West Berliner migrants. Walls do work if the object is to keep people in, see under "Prison", and he's even wronger than Crowley, in that the Berlin one worked pretty effectively, for 28 years.

I'd like to say, on the other hand, people are really being unfair to Scaramucci with all this accusing him of having "beliefs". They should be considered more along the lines of fashion accessories.

Ferociously fragmented, frenetic chaos

Buster Keaton in The Navigator (1924).

Well, Brooks has been looking at problems that are several different kinds of problem at once, like house-hunting, which is emotionally, psychologically, cognitively, and even morally difficult, or Trump advisor Stephen Bannon's neo-fascist (Brooks coyly calls the philosophy "populist ethno-nationalist") critique of the post–World War II order, which is simultaneously moral, religious, economic, political and racial.

Now he's looking at the problem of devising a Republican replacement for the Affordable Care Act, and specifically the question whether market incentives "work" in health care, which is both economic and psychological:

This is really two questions. The economic one: Would market mechanisms improve quality and reduce costs? The psychological one: Do people want the extra cognitive burden of shopping for health care, or would they rather offload those decisions to someone else?

Really, it isn't two questions, in the sense that the incentives will only function if the consumers are incentivized: improvements in quality and cost won't happen unless shoppers are willing to shop.

I think the weak point here is the implication that the Affordable Care Act doesn't use market incentives, which shows that he still, six years after its passage, hasn't found out what's in it. The ACA is an overhaul of the health care system that is entirely based on market incentives!

Singularity Watch: National Review fail of the week

Corporate overlord: The Colossus of Rhodes as visualized in the 1911 Grolier Encyclopedia, via Wikipedia.

National Review's human exceptionalism troll (I'm not kidding, that's really a thing, situating anti-abortion arguments in a frame of hysterical H. sapiens species patriotism) Wesley J. Smith has found something new to panic about:

In order to receive a patent, the subject of the protection must be a human invention.

Some want to change that and allow computers programmed to “artificial intelligence” sophistication to receive patents. From the Science Daily story:

New research published by the University of Surrey in Boston College Law Review is calling for inventions by computers to be legally granted patents.
The research states that the rapid increase in computer power is posing new challenges when it comes to patenting an invention. Artificial intelligence is playing an ever larger role in innovation — with major players such as IBM, Pfizer and Google investing heavily in creative computing — but current patent law does not recognise computers as inventors.
Without a change in the law, the findings warn that there will be less innovation, caused by uncertainty, which would prevent industry from capitalising on the huge potential of creative computers. We are also likely to see disputes over inventorship, with individuals taking credit for inventions that are not genuinely theirs.

Rough! Rough!

Mini–chicken parms from the GourmandMom.

Shorter David Brooks, "Two Cheers for Capitalism", July 30 2015:

Turns out capitalism isn't working right! But bad as it may be, people getting involved would probably make it worse yet, so I say don't mess with it.

OK, so now we know what snooty-ass luxury hotel Brooks was staying at when he wrote Tuesday's column about how much he prefers the budget motel and the self-serve waffle machine, or if not exactly which hotel, what town it was in, namely Aspen, for the Aspen Action Forum, a select event

Cuomo agua para chocolate

Corporate States of America. Via Rocky Mountain Media.

Way down toward the end of last week's Times overview of the South Carolina Confederate flag epic, a telling passage on the state's business community, which has long had problems with the cult of the Lost Cause:

After the killings in Charleston, the business leaders saw their chance. The chairman of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, an old friend of Ms. Haley’s named Mikee Johnson, polled his 56 board members about the future of the flag. Everyone who responded was of the same opinion. He called Ms. Haley and told her: If she was ready to bring down the Confederate banner, they were behind her.

So was the South Carolina Manufacturers Alliance, the muscular association that represents giant international companies like BMW and Bridgestone Tire. Over the weekend after the shootings, its president, Mr. Gossett, urged members to draw up a strategy for finally ridding the State House of the flag.

It's not, note, that they're especially anti-slavery, not that they favor it either, or have any special beef with the confederal states' rights ideology; it's that the flag has been bad for business.

Freedom of specie

Sean Connery and Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger (1964).

A Dissent interview with Wendy Brown, author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, run across somewhere on Twitter last night—using "neoliberalism" to mean, or entail, what I might call "economism", the rude reduction of humanity to Homo œconomicus, and of human culture to so many overlapping markets, and human history to a kind of vulgar social-Darwinism of the longue durée, the endlessly repetitive story of how some people have managed to be marginally wealthier than others, and therefore winning, before they died.

So she said something wonderfully insightful about what's really wrong with Citizens United: