A Historic Tax Heist

With barely a vote to spare early Saturday morning, the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders’ primary goal is to enrich the country’s elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost. The approval of this looting of the public purse by corporations and the wealthy makes it a near certainty that President Trump will sign this or a similar bill into law in the coming days.

The bill is expected to add more than $1.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, a debt that will be paid by the poor and middle class in future tax increases and spending cuts to Medicare, Social Security and other government programs. Its modest tax cuts for the middle class disappear after eight years. And up to 13 million people stand to lose their health insurance because the bill makes a big change to the Affordable Care Act.

Yet Republicans somehow found a way to give a giant and permanent tax cut to corporations like Apple, General Electric and Goldman Sachs, saving those businesses tens of billions of dollars.

Because the Senate was rewriting its bill till the last minute, only the dealmakers themselves knew what the chamber voted on. There will, no doubt, be many unpleasant surprises as both houses work to pass final legislation for President Trump to sign.

The votes for the bill by Susan Collins of Maine and John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona were particularly disheartening. Ms. Collins, who helped sink an effort to effectively repeal the A.C.A. in September, blithely voted for a tax bill that will leave a gaping hole in that law by repealing its requirement that most people have insurance or pay a penalty. She traded away her vote for an inadequate deduction for property taxes and empty promises from Mr. Trump and the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, that they would help shore up the A.C.A., which they have repeatedly tried to sabotage. Mr. McCain, who previously voted against tax cuts in the Bush era because they were heavily tilted in favor of the rich rather than the middle class, seemed unconcerned that this bill was even worse in that regard. Then there is Mr. Flake, who has spoken powerfully against Mr. Trump and who is not seeking re-election. He folded on the basis of vague assurances about protecting the Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.

Republicans offered one fantasy after another to make the case for their budget-busting tax cuts. For example, the White House has said that cutting the corporate tax to 20 percent from 35 percent will lead to a boom in investment and wages — an argument disputed by most credible economists. Almost all of those extra profits will enrich senior executives and shareholders, experts say. This week, The Times reported that despite the repeated claims of the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, his department never produced an analysis that backs up the administration’s assertion that the tax cuts would pay for themselves. It is not hard to see why. The Joint Committee on Taxation, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and other experts say that the bill would not come close to paying for itself.

For his part, Mr. Trump has repeatedly asserted with a straight face that the tax bill would hurt him. In fact, it will give him and his family a windfall. That’s because the Senate bill will provide a generous tax break for income that people earn through limited liability corporations, partnerships and other so-called pass-through businesses that do not pay taxes before passing on profits to owners. Under the Senate bill, the president will be able to claim a 23 percent deduction on profits he earns through his more than 500 pass-through businesses.

You can expect the lies to become even more brazen as Republicans seek to defend this terrible bill. But no amount of prevarication can change the fact that Congress and Mr. Trump are giving a giant gift to their donors and sticking the rest of the country with the tab.

by The Editorial Board, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NY Times

[ed. I'm so pissed I can barely see straight. A massive giveaway to corporations and the rich by the GOP, right after publication of the Paradise Papers. I wonder how businesses (other than Defense contractors) will find enough consumers to buy their products when no one has any money anymore? See also: What will feature in the final version of the Republican tax plan? and After Taxes, G.O.P. May Seek Cuts to Social Safety Nets.  ]

The Dog

The sign on the gate says “Chien méchant,” and the dog is certainly méchant. Every time she passes by he hurls himself against the gate, howling with desire to get at her and tear her to pieces. He is a big dog, a serious dog, some sort of German shepherd or Rottweiler (she knows little about dog breeds). From his yellow eyes she feels hatred of the purest kind shining upon her.

Afterward, when the house with the chien méchant is behind her, she ruminates on that hatred. She knows it is not personal: whoever approaches the gate, whoever walks or cycles past, will be at the receiving end of it. But how deeply is the hatred felt? Is it like an electric current, switched on when an object is sighted and switched off when the object has receded around the corner? Do spasms of hatred continue to shake the dog when he is alone again, or does the rage suddenly abate, and does he return to a state of tranquillity?

She cycles past the house twice every weekday, once on her way to the hospital where she works, once after her shift is over. Because her transits are so regular, the dog knows when to expect her: even before she comes into view he is at the gate, panting with eagerness. Because the house is on an incline, her progress in the mornings, going uphill, is slow; in the evenings, thankfully, she can race past.

She may know nothing about dog breeds, but she has a good idea of the satisfaction the dog gets from his encounters with her. It is the satisfaction of dominating her, the satisfaction of being feared.

The dog is a male, uncut as far as she can see. Whether he knows she is a female, whether in his eyes a human being must belong to one of two genders, corresponding to the two genders of dogs, and therefore whether he feels two kinds of satisfaction at once—the satisfaction of one beast dominating another beast, the satisfaction of a male dominating a female—she has no idea.

How does the dog know that, despite her mask of indifference, she fears him? The answer: because she gives off the smell of fear, because she cannot hide it. Every time the dog comes hurtling toward her, a chill runs down her back and a pulse of odor leaves her skin, an odor that the dog picks up at once. It sends him into ecstasies of rage, this whiff of fear coming off the being on the other side of the gate.

She fears him, and he knows it. Twice a day he can look forward to it: the passage of this being who is in fear of him, who cannot mask her fear, who gives off the smell of fear as a bitch gives off the smell of sex.

She has read Augustine. Augustine says that the clearest evidence that we are fallen creatures lies in the fact that we cannot control the movements of our own bodies. Specifically, a man is unable to control the motions of his virile member. That member behaves as though possessed of a will of its own; perhaps it even behaves as though possessed by an alien will.

She thinks of Augustine as she reaches the foot of the hill on which the house sits, the house with the dog. Will she be able to control herself this time? Will she have the will power necessary to save herself from giving off the humiliating smell of fear? And each time she hears the growl deep in the dog’s throat that might be equally a growl of rage or of lust, each time she feels the thud of his body against the gate, she receives her answer: Not today.

The chien méchant is enclosed in a garden in which nothing grows but weeds. One day she gets off her bicycle, leans it against the wall of the house, knocks at the door, waits and waits, while a few metres from her the dog backs away and then hurls himself at the fence. It is eight in the morning, not a usual time for people to come knocking at one’s door. Nonetheless, at last the door opens a crack. In the dim light she discerns a face, the face of an old woman with gaunt features and slack gray hair. “Good morning,” she says in her not-bad French. “May I speak to you for a moment?”

by J.M. Coetzee, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Thomas Prior

The Great American Single-Family Home Problem

The house at 1310 Haskell Street does not look worthy of a bitter neighborhood war. The roof is rotting, the paint is chipping, and while the lot is long and spacious, the backyard has little beyond overgrown weeds and a garage sprouting moss.

The owner was known for hoarding junk and feeding cats, and when she died three years ago the neighbors assumed that whoever bought the house would be doing a lot of work. But when the buyer turned out to be a developer, and when that developer floated a proposal to raze the building and replace it with a trio of small homes, the neighborhood erupted in protest.

Most of the complaints were what you might hear about any development. People thought the homes would be too tall and fretted that more residents would mean fewer parking spots.

Other objections were particular to Berkeley — like a zoning board member’s complaint that shadows from the homes might hurt the supply of locally grown food.

Whatever the specifics, what is happening in Berkeley may be coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Around the country, many fast-growing metropolitan areas are facing a brutal shortage of affordable places to live, leading to gentrification, homelessness, even disease. As cities struggle to keep up with demand, they have remade their skylines with condominium and apartment towers — but single-family neighborhoods, where low-density living is treated as sacrosanct, have rarely been part of the equation.

If cities are going to tackle their affordable housing problems, economists say, that is going to have to change. But how do you build up when neighbors want down?

“It’s an enormous problem, and it impacts the very course of America’s future,” said Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard who studies cities.

Even though the Haskell Street project required no alterations to Berkeley’s zoning code, it took the developer two years and as many lawsuits to get approval. He plans to start building next year. The odyssey has become a case study in how California dug itself into a vast housing shortage — a downside, in part, of a thriving economy — and why the State Legislature is taking power from local governments to solve it. (...)

From the windows of a San Francisco skyscraper, the Bay Area looks as if it’s having a housing boom. There are cranes around downtown and rising glass and steel condominiums. In the San Francisco metropolitan area, housing megaprojects — buildings with 50 or more units — account for a quarter of the new housing supply, up from roughly half that level in the previous two decades, according to census data compiled by BuildZoom, a San Francisco company that helps homeowners find contractors.

The problem is that smaller and generally more affordable quarters like duplexes and small apartment buildings, where young families get their start, are being built at a slower rate. Such projects hold vast potential to provide lots of housing — and reduce sprawl — by adding density to the rings of neighborhoods that sit close to job centers but remain dominated by larger lots and single-family homes.

Neighborhoods in which single-family homes make up 90 percent of the housing stock account for a little over half the land mass in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, according to Issi Romem, BuildZoom’s chief economist. There are similar or higher percentages in virtually every American city, making these neighborhoods an obvious place to tackle the affordable-housing problem.

“Single-family neighborhoods are where the opportunity is, but building there is taboo,” Mr. Romem said. As long as single-family-homeowners are loath to add more housing on their blocks, he said, the economic logic will always be undone by local politics. (...)
Kurt’s Tomatoes

The 1300 block of Haskell Street sits in a kind of transition zone between the taller buildings in downtown Berkeley and the low-rise homes scattered through the eastern hills. The neighborhood has a number of single-family homes, and the street is quiet and quasi-suburban, but there are also apartment buildings and backyard cottages that nod to the city’s denser core.

A little under three years ago, a contractor named Christian Szilagy bought the property and presented the city with a proposal to demolish the house and replace it with three skinny and rectangular homes that would extend through the lot. Each would have one parking spot, a garden and about 1,500 square feet of living space.

The neighbors hated it. The public discussion began when Matthew Baran, the project architect, convened a meeting with 20 or so neighbors in the home’s backyard. A mediator joined him and later filed a three-sentence report to the city: “The applicant described the project. Not a single neighbor had anything positive to say about it. No further meetings were scheduled.”

On paper, at least, there was nothing wrong with the proposal. The city’s zoning code designates the area as “R2-A,” or a mixed-density area with apartments as well as houses.

Berkeley’s planning staff recommended approval. But as neighbors wrote letters, called the city and showed up at meetings holding signs that said “Protect Our Community” and “Reject 1310 Haskell Permit!,” the project quickly became politicized.

One focal point was Kurt Caudle’s garden. Mr. Caudle is a brewpub manager who lives in a small house on the back side of Ms. Trew’s property (that lot has two homes, or one fewer than was proposed next door). Just outside his back door sits an oasis from the city: a quiet garden where he has a small Buddha statue and grows tomatoes, squash and greens in raised beds that he built.

In letters and at city meetings, Mr. Caudle complained that the homes would obstruct sunlight and imperil the garden “on which I and my neighbors depend for food.” Sophie Hahn, a member of the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board who now sits on the City Council, was sympathetic.

“When you completely shadow all of the open space,” Ms. Hahn said during a hearing, “you really impact the ability for anybody to possibly grow food in this community.”

On paper, at least, there was nothing wrong with the proposal. The city’s zoning code designates the area as “R2-A,” or a mixed-density area with apartments as well as houses.

Berkeley’s planning staff recommended approval. But as neighbors wrote letters, called the city and showed up at meetings holding signs that said “Protect Our Community” and “Reject 1310 Haskell Permit!,” the project quickly became politicized.

One focal point was Kurt Caudle’s garden. Mr. Caudle is a brewpub manager who lives in a small house on the back side of Ms. Trew’s property (that lot has two homes, or one fewer than was proposed next door). Just outside his back door sits an oasis from the city: a quiet garden where he has a small Buddha statue and grows tomatoes, squash and greens in raised beds that he built.

In letters and at city meetings, Mr. Caudle complained that the homes would obstruct sunlight and imperil the garden “on which I and my neighbors depend for food.” Sophie Hahn, a member of the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board who now sits on the City Council, was sympathetic.

“When you completely shadow all of the open space,” Ms. Hahn said during a hearing, “you really impact the ability for anybody to possibly grow food in this community.”

The proposed homes are not that. They are estimated to sell for around $1 million. But this is an illustration of the economist’s argument that more housing will lower prices. The cost of a rehabilitated single-family home in the area — which is what many of the neighbors preferred to see on the lot — runs to $1.4 million or more.

Even so, economics is not politics. The argument that quiet, low-slung neighborhoods have to change to keep everyone from being priced out is never going to be a political winner. When the Haskell Street proposal came up for a vote, Jesse Arreguin, who was then a city councilman but is now the mayor of Berkeley, gave a “no” vote that sounded like a campaign speech.

“This issue is bigger than Haskell Street,” Mr. Arreguin said. “This project sets a precedent for what I believe is out-of-scale development that will compromise the quality of life and character of our neighborhoods throughout the city of Berkeley.”

The city’s denial won applause from the crowd. It also drew a lawsuit.

by Conor Dougherty, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Baran Studio Architecture
[ed. Hawaii approached the problem a little differently by passing a law that allowed Ohana (family) Dwellings to be built on existing residential lots. There were some good results, but many abuses too. Now the program seems to be morphing into something else.]

How Does It Feel to Die in a Tsunami?

Everyone who experienced the tsunami saw, heard, and smelled something subtly different. Much depended upon where you were, and the obstacles that the water had to overcome to reach you. Some described a waterfall, cascading over seawall and embankment. For others, it was a fast-rising flood between houses, deceptively slight at first, tugging trippingly at the feet and ankles, but quickly sucking and battering at legs and chests and shoulders. In color, it was described as brown, gray, black, white. The one thing it did not resemble in the least was a conventional ocean wave, the wave from the famous woodblock print by Hokusai: blue-green and cresting elegantly in tentacles of foam. The tsunami was a thing of a different order, darker, stranger, massively more powerful and violent, without kindness or cruelty, beauty or ugliness, wholly alien. It was the sea coming onto land, the ocean itself picking up its feet and charging at you with a roar in its throat.

It stank of brine, mud, and seaweed. Most disturbing of all were the sounds it generated as it collided with, and digested, the stuff of the human world: the crunch and squeal of wood and concrete, metal and tile. In places, a mysterious dust billowed above it, like the cloud of pulverized matter that floats above a demolished building. It was as if neighborhoods, villages, whole towns were being placed inside the jaws of a giant compressor and crushed.

From the hillside where they had narrowly escaped to safety, Waichi Nagano and his wife, Hideko, could see the whole scene spread out below them, as the water swept in pulsing surges over the embankment and across the village and the fields. “It was a huge black mountain of water that came on all at once and destroyed the houses,” he said. “It was like a solid thing. And there was this strange sound, difficult to describe. It wasn’t like the sound of the sea. It was more like the roaring of the earth, mixed with a kind of crumpling, groaning noise, which was the houses breaking up.”

There was another, fainter noise. “It was the voices of children,” said Hideko. “They were crying out—‘Help! Help!’” On the hill above, where he had half climbed, half floated to safety, Kazuo Takahashi heard them too. “I heard children,” he said. “But the water was swirling around, there was the crunching sound of the wave and the rubble, and their voices became weaker and weaker.”

How does it feel to die in a tsunami? What are the thoughts and sensations of someone in those final moments? Everyone who contemplated the disaster asked themselves these questions; the mind fluttered about them like an insect around a flame. One day I mentioned it, hesitatingly, to a local man. “Do you really want to know the answer to that question?” he asked. “Because I have a friend who can tell you.”

He arranged the meeting for the following evening. His friend’s name was Teruo Konno and, like Toshinobu Oikawa, he worked in the branch office of the Ishinomaki city hall. Oikawa was the model of the local bureaucrat: quiet, patient, dogged. But Konno was an imaginative and restless character. As a boy, he had dreamed of leaving Tohoku and traveling the world. His parents, seeking to quell this impulse, had discouraged him from going to university, and Konno had spent his life in the place where he grew up, and his career in local government. In March 2011, he had been deputy head of the local development section, responsible, among other things, for “disaster countermeasures.” Few people were more knowledgeable about the menace of earthquakes and their particular threat to the Kitakami area. “Our assumption was that there would be another big quake,” Konno said. “There hadn’t been a tsunami since the 1896 and 1933 quakes, so we expected that too.” There was no doubt that the small village where the town office was located, situated at the mouth of the river, two and a half miles downstream of Kamaya, would be in its path. Konno and his colleagues bent their efforts to ensuring that they would ride it out.

The two-story branch office had been built on a rise fifteen feet above sea level, and its ground floor had been elevated a further ten feet above that. Essential utilities, such as electricity and communications, had been installed on the uppermost floor. On the wall was a digital readout that recorded the intensity of tremors as they occurred. As recently as the previous August, the city government had conducted a drill in which police, fire brigade, and local officials acted out their roles in case of an earthquake and tsunami.

When the moment finally arrived, Konno experienced it with the calm detachment of a disaster professional.

“It came in three stages,” he told me. “When the shaking first began it was strong but slow. I looked at the monitor. It showed an intensity of upper five, and I knew that this was it.” Even as the rocking continued, he was calling to his staff to make a public announcement: a tsunami warning, he knew, would soon be issued. “But the shaking went on,” Konno said. “It got stronger and stronger. The PC screens and piles of documents were all falling off the desks. And then in the third stage, it became worse still.” Konno gripped his desk amid a tumult of competing sounds.

Pieces of office furniture were rattling and colliding as they shunted across the room. Filing cabinets were disgorging their files. Now he looked up again at the wall-mounted readout of seismic intensity: it displayed only an error message. Then, gradually, like the slowing of a beating heart, the shaking and the panic eased, and the employees of the Ishinomaki Kitakami General Branch Office sprang to their appointed tasks.

The emergency generator rumbled into life, the toppled television was lifted off the floor and reconnected, and the tsunami warning was relayed through the municipal loudspeakers. Oikawa and his men were dispatched to those communities where the loudspeakers had failed. Just as had been planned, representatives of the police and the fire brigade relocated to the town branch office. “Everything functioned very well,” Konno said. “No one was hurt, everyone was calm, and there was only slight damage to the building. We had drilled for this. Everyone knew who should do what, and what to do next.”

Soon there were fifty-seven people in the branch office. Thirty-one of them were locals who had evacuated from more vulnerable premises to the safety of the strong, modern building. They included six children from a nearby school, the counterpart of Okawa Elementary School on the north side of the river, as well as eight old people from the local day-care center. Three of them were in wheelchairs; four more were carried in on stretchers. Volunteers sprang forward to help them safely and comfortably up to the sanctuary of the second floor.

At 3:14 pm, the estimated height of the imminent tsunami was revised from 20 feet to 33 feet. But at some point the backup electricity generator failed, and Konno and his colleagues never received this information. It would have made no difference anyway.

The building, mounted on its elevation, faced inland, with its back to the river and its front entrance facing the hills over the small village below. From his window, the only water Konno could see was a sluggish brown stream, little more than a drain, which trickled into the Kitakami. “That was the first thing I noticed,” he said. “The water in the creek had become white. It was churning and frothing, and it was flowing the wrong way. Then it was overflowing, and there was more water coming in from the river behind, and it was surrounding the houses. I saw the post-office building, lifting up and turning over in the water. Some of the houses were being crushed, but some of them were lifting up and floating.” The destruction was accompanied by that mysterious noise. “I never heard anything like it,” Konno said. “It was partly the rushing of the water, but also the sound of timber, twisting and tearing.” In the space of five minutes, the entire community of 80 houses had been physically uprooted and thrust, bobbing, against the barrier of the hills.

by Richard Lloyd Parry, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Koichi Sato
via:

Big Money Rules

I grew up in the 1950s, an era when many believed that our society would inevitably progress toward ever greater economic equality. Desperate poverty would recede, it was assumed, as new federal programs addressed the needs of those at the very bottom of the ladder and as economic growth created new jobs. The average CEO at the time earned only twenty times as much as the average worker, and during the Eisenhower administration the marginal tax rate for the highest earners was 91 percent. Today, the goal of equality appears to be receding. The top marginal tax rate is only 39 percent, far below what it was during the Eisenhower years, and most Republicans would like to lower it even more. Employers now make 271 times as much as the average worker, and half the children in American schools are officially classified by the federal government as low-income and eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Union membership peaked in the mid-1950s and has declined ever since; the largest unions today are in the public sector and only about 7 percent of private sector workers belong to a union.

Despite these alarming developments, however, politicians who support the deregulation of business and champion pro-employer legislation—from state legislators to members of Congress—have a firm electoral foothold in most states. During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Trump promised to support basic government services like Medicare and pledged to bring back jobs that had been outsourced to other nations. However, once he was president, Trump endorsed health care bills that would have left millions of low- and lower-middle-income Americans without health insurance, and his insistence on reducing corporate tax rates suggests his determination to act in the interest of wealthy elites.

Two recent books—Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Gordon Lafer’s The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time—seek to explain several puzzling aspects of American politics today. Why do people of modest means who depend on government-funded health care and Social Security or other supplements to their income continue to vote for candidates who promise to privatize or get rid of those very programs? Why do people who are poor vote for politicians who promise to cut corporate taxes? (...)

At the center of Democracy in Chains is the work of the Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan, who died in 2013. Buchanan is associated with the doctrine of economic libertarianism: he is widely credited as one of the founding fathers of the “public choice” model of economics, which argues that bureaucrats and public officials serve their own interests as much as or more than the public interest, and he was the leading figure in the Virginia School of economic thought. He trained many economists who came to share his libertarian views, and his acolytes have protested MacLean’s view that he had “a formative role” in the evolution of an antidemocratic “strand of the radical right.”(...)

In MacLean’s account, Buchanan was responding to the threats that democratic institutions posed to the preservation of wealth in America. Early American democracy had limited this threat by confining the franchise to white male property owners. But as voting rights were extended, the nation’s elites had to reckon with the growing power of formerly disenfranchised voters, who could be expected to support ever more expensive government programs to benefit themselves and ever more extensive ways to redistribute wealth. MacLean asserts that Buchanan supplied his benefactors with arguments to persuade the American public to go along with policies that protect wealth and eschew federal programs reliant on progressive taxation.

If everyone is motivated by self-interest, he argued, government can’t be trusted to do what it promises. Indeed, it cannot be trusted at all. Bureaucrats can be expected to protect their turf, not the public interest. Every politician, Buchanan wrote, “can be viewed as proposing and attempting to enact a combination of expenditure programs and financing schemes that will secure him the support of a majority of the electorate.” For Buchanan, this was reason enough to endorse economic liberty, freedom from taxes, and privatization of public services, such as schools, Social Security, and Medicare. In MacLean’s view, those proposals promised a return to

the kind of political economy that prevailed in America at the opening of the twentieth century, when the mass disenfranchisement of voters and the legal treatment of labor unions as illegitimate enabled large corporations and wealthy individuals to dominate Congress and most state governments alike, and to feel secure that the nation’s courts would not interfere with their reign.

Charles Koch well understood the power of academic experts, and he directed millions of dollars toward developing what are now called “thought leaders” to defend his self-interested political and economic vision. Buchanan was one of those academics. Koch bypassed Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys,” MacLean writes, because “they sought ‘to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.’” Instead, in the early 1970s, he funded the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, designed to advocate for what MacLean summarizes as “the end of public education, Social Security, Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, minimum wage laws, prohibitions against child labor, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, prosecution for drug use or voluntary prostitution—and, in time, the end of taxes and government regulations of any kind.” Koch also funded the libertarian Reason Foundation, which advocated for privatizing all government functions. Another Koch-backed organization, the Liberty Fund, hired Buchanan to run summer conferences for young social scientists.

Buchanan’s challenge was to develop a strategy that would enlist the public’s support for the ideas he shared with Charles Koch. This challenge was especially daunting in the case of Social Security. Overwhelming majorities of Americans supported Social Security because it ensured that they would not be impoverished in their old age. In an influential 1983 paper, Buchanan marveled that there was “no widespread support for basic structural reform” of Social Security “among any membership group” in the American political constituency—“among the old or the young, the black, the brown, or the white, the female or the male, the rich or the poor, the Frost Belt or the Sun Belt.” Pinochet’s Chile—which Buchanan visited for a week in May 1980 to give what MacLean calls “in-person guidance” to the regime’s minister of finance, Sergio de Castro—had privatized its social security system, and libertarians hoped to do the same in the United States. We now know that the privatization of social security in Chile was a disaster for many, but the libertarians were unshakable in their enthusiasm for market solutions and ignored the risks.

Buchanan laid out the strategy needed to divide the political coalition that supported Social Security. The first step was to insist that Social Security was not viable, that it was a “Ponzi scheme.” If “people can be led to think that they personally have no legitimate claim against the system on retirement,” he wrote in a paper for the Cato Institute, it will “make abandonment of the system look more attractive.” Then those currently receiving benefits must be reassured that nothing will change for them. “Their benefits,” as MacLean puts it, “would not be cut.” Taxpayers, in turn, would have to be promised, as Buchanan says, “that the burden of bailing out would not be allowed to fall disproportionately on the particular generation that would pay taxes immediately after the institutional reform takes place.” Cultivating these expectations would not only make taxpayers more ready to abandon the system; it would also build resentment among those who expect never to get payments comparable to those receiving the initial bailout.

After they announce the insolvency of Social Security, Buchanan argued, the system’s critics should “propose increases in the retirement age and increases in payroll taxes,” which would, MacLean writes, “irritate recipients at all income levels, but particularly those who are just on the wrong side of the cutoff and now would have to pay more and work longer.” Calls for protecting Social Security with progressive taxation formulas would emphasize the redistributive character of the program and isolate progressives. “To the extent that participants come to perceive the system as a complex transfer scheme between current income classes instead of strictly between generations,” Buchanan predicted, “the ‘insurance contract’ image will become tarnished” and its public support will be compromised.

Critics of MacLean claim she overstates her case because Buchanan was merely presenting both sides of the issue. But it is indisputable that Cato and other Koch-funded policy centers favor privatization of government programs like Social Security and public education. The genius of their strategy was in describing their efforts to change government programs as “reforms,” when in fact they were intended from the outset to result in their destruction. This rebranding depended on think tanks amply funded by Charles Koch, his like-minded brother David, and other ideologically friendly sponsors. Charles Koch funded the James Buchanan Center at GMU with a gift of $10 million. The libertarian philosophy funded by Koch and developed by Buchanan has close affinities with the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus of the Republican Party, which oppose federal spending on almost anything other than the military and has placed its members at the highest levels of the Trump administration, including Vice President Mike Pence and Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

MacLean’s argument that Buchanan knowingly engineered a strategy for the wealthy to preserve their hold on American democracy has prompted intense resistance. She has been repeatedly attacked on libertarian blogs, historical websites, and even in The Washington Post. The attacks are sometimes personal: Steve Horwitz, a libertarian economist who called MacLean’s book “a travesty of historical scholarship,” earned his degrees at GMU, where Buchanan was one of his professors. Most of her prominent critics—Michael Munger, David Bernstein, Steven Hayward, David Boaz—are libertarians; some receive funding from the Koch brothers. They accuse her of unjustly berating a legitimate area of economic inquiry and overstating the evidence against Buchanan in support of her position. Other critics have come from the political center. The political scientists Henry Farrell and Steven Teles, for instance, have argued that MacLean overstates the extent to which Buchanan and his supporters were “implementing a single master plan with fiendish efficiency.” MacLean has replied to her critics that her book demonstrates that Buchanan was part of a much larger movement.

MacLean’s reputation will no doubt survive. She has written a carefully documented book about issues that matter to the future of our democracy and established the close and sympathetic connections between Buchanan and his far-right financial patrons. However fierce they might be, her critics have been unable to refute the central message of her important book: that the ongoing abandonment of progressive taxation and the social benefits it gives most people is undergirded by a libertarian economic movement funded by wealthy corporate benefactors. The dismantling of basic government functions by the Trump administration, such as Betsy DeVos’s efforts to privatize public education, shows the continuing influence of Buchanan’s libertarian ideas.

by Diane Ravitch, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Jill Freedman/Steven Kasher Gallery

Who’s Afraid of the DNC?

It took all of five minutes for Tom Perez to quote Hamilton. The DNC honcho was dispensing his stump speech—he had done about twenty of these events in the last couple weeks—to a gaggle of millennials at the DNC’s Young Professional Leadership Council Launch. The event’s aim was to tap into the organizing mojo (and cash reserves) of younger voters to rectify at least one enthusiasm gap afflicting the doddering 2016 campaign. The crowd of 250 tilted male, business casual, and was packed into the basement of Stout, a Manhattan chain bar of vaguely Irish sensibility. To the assembled faithful, Perez, his voice customarily hoarse, drew from his Hamiltonian reserves and shouted: “History has its eyes on us!”

Here in this bar? Probably not. But the audience members dutifully whooped back, their autonomic response having been triggered by the mention of the sacred text of latter day liberalism. These people had all paid at least $100 (and some, much more) to be here, so they might as well simulate excitement. Perez would be done with his speech soon, and then it would be back to the bar and the complimentary appetizers.

Some politics, some booze, some free apps—it wasn’t a bad scene at Stout last Monday night, but it was hardly the stuff of political revolution, much less any coherent political movement. Many of the attendees I talked to seemed as concerned with networking as with rejuvenating our beleaguered body politic. There was a lot of what Baffler contributor Scott Beauchamp calls “teeth checking”—those appraising looks of “Should I know you? Do you matter?” as someone studies your face and name tag, while none too subtly scouting the room for someone more important to talk to.

Still, a palpable impatience could be detected among many attendees, a familiar post-2016 sense that we should do something. Why not this?

For Perez, it was a moment for “optimism,” he explained, citing the recent election wins by progressive candidates in Virginia, New Jersey, Montana, and elsewhere. “When we’re united, we’re at our best,” he said.

Indeed, a recurring point among the DNC speakers was the importance of fielding candidates in every election. It seems that the Democratic leadership has discovered the value of showing up. As Grace Meng, a Congresswoman from Queens who spoke before Perez, said, “Sure, some people keep asking what our message is, but in some places we didn’t even have a messenger.” Now the party plans to have messengers everywhere. “The new DNC is from the school board to the Oval Office,” Perez intoned.

But what is the new DNC’s message? What does it stand for? You could be forgiven for coming away from Monday night without the foggiest idea. TV screens around the room proclaimed, in a riot of clashing graphics, “Rebuild, Modernize, Organize, Win.” For which policies or on whose behalf, it wasn’t quite clear. Perez invoked some issues of leftish concern—climate change, women’s reproductive rights, public schools—without speaking in any depth.

There were other signs that this was the same bloated corpse of a political racket that had stumbled through the 2016 election amid a steady stream of embarrassing revelations about its top-down, self-dealing managerial ethos. One corner of the bar had been cordoned off with velvet rope, behind which Perez, before he ascended the stage, schmoozed and took selfies with donors of a certain tier. Once he did take the mic, Perez praised his DNC colleague Meng and then for some reason saw fit to tell the room, “She knows that the most important title she’ll have in her life is ‘mom.’” (Again, Meng is a member of Congress.)

Beyond diminishing the achievements of his female colleagues and quoting blandly from a Broadway musical, Perez was an enthusiastic if not very inspiring speaker. (Another one of the lead-in acts, Michael Blake, a state legislator from the Bronx, served up far more charisma.) Perez offered vague bromides about liberal issues, but his language had the plastic feel of PR-speak. He spoke of “constitutional policing,” not Black Lives Matter. He didn’t rail against the odiousness of Trump; he cited a “culture of corruption.” There was no mention of any foreign policy, nor of the forever wars that have been the collective background music to these young professionals’ lives.

A central portion of Perez’s speech revolved around an elaborate anecdote—culled, he said, from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein—of a “gyroscope” that affects all society. The telling was muddled, hopelessly so, but apparently this gyroscope acts as a healing or progressive force. For instance, “it was that gyroscope that ended our country’s original sin, slavery.” The gyroscope is responsible for all kinds of other positive developments. But what is the gyroscope? The “gyroscope is we,” Perez said—Democrats, the good guys.

If none of this adds up for you, if denatured TED talks served alongside $8 beers and bad pico de gallo don’t excite your political sensibilities, fear not. This is the new Democratic Party, the one whose congressional representatives recently voted to loosen regulations on payday lenders. They’re still figuring it out. “We’ve got a heckuva lot of work to do,” Perez admitted, a comment that could have applied as much to his fumbling remarks as to his party’s waning electoral power. But of this he was certain: “The Democratic Party is back, folks.”

by Jacob Silverman, The Baffler |  Read more:
Image: DonkeyHotey

Pets or Livestock?

Say you're an overprivileged Tech Bro looking for a challenge. Sure, you could take another crack at vanquishing the Grim Reaper, or some variation of a seasteading Utopia. Or you could hack a bit further at the privatized space travel obsessions that put such a spring in Jeff Bezos’s step, or join up with Elon Musk’s transparently phallic quest for a continent-straddling super train. But honestly, doesn’t the whole moonshot shtick feel a little played out? How many times can you plausibly disrupt the basic fabric of our shared being, after all? And really, why bother engineering a pluperfect human future when it looks like the cryptocurrency fad alone will plunge the global climate into irremediable squalor? At some point, the fever dream of a quantum software-enabled cosmic upgrade simply becomes a sick cosmic joke.

Ah, but fear not, energetic code-happy millionaires: the dream is not yet dead. Anthony Levandowski, an engineering wizard behind the driverless car, has stepped forward to bring the ethos of innovation-at-all-costs to its logical culmination, by marshalling it into the basis of a bona fide religion. Behold, O weary pilgrim, the church of the Way of the Future; bow down before the burning bush of artificial intelligence, and proclaim the glory of the One True God!

Oh, scoffers and cynics will note that Levandowski’s startup carries with it a strong whiff of desperate opportunism. Yes, the prophet of the Future’s Way began just as his own personal future was beclouded with a gigantic lawsuit alleging that Levandowksi had purloined Google’s intellectual property when he brought his driverless-car portfolio over to Uber from Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Indeed, as Wired scribe Mark Harris notes, Levandowski drew up the bylaws for the fledgling church the day after Uber wrote him a letter last May informing him that he’d be fired if he failed to cooperate with the company’s investigation of Alphabet’s complaint.(As he was, two weeks later.) And yes, while he was at Google, Levandowski created a suite of shell companies to serve as repositories for his tech—and in a suitably daring twist, even got Google to pay out handsome subcontracting fees to the paper entities. (In the run-up to next week’s scheduled trial for the Google-Uber suit, both Levandowski and Uber deny any wrongdoing.) It takes no great stretch of the imagination to suppose that the Way of the Future might be little more than a way for Levandowski, already a multi-millionaire, to park his riches in a tax-free structure, in the great tradition of other Golden State visionaries.

But as any ardent Roy Moore supporter in Birmingham will tell you, God selects imperfect vessels to work out his will on the stage of global history. The least we could do, in fairness to the prophet, is to examine the basic catechism of the brave new cyberfaith. It first bears noting that Levandowski abjures the mantel of prophecy; his formal role in the Way of the Future church, according to its IRS filings, is “dean.” And that seems entirely fitting, since the church, like Silicon Valley at large, is devoted to the mystic worship of intelligence as the great motive force of Creation. The simple, syllogistic brunt of the WOTF gospel is that the development of serious, reality-bending artificial intelligence—“strong AI” in the argot of cybernetics adepts—is an already settled historical inevitability. And since the moment of Skynet-like sentience is already all but embedded in the coding protocols of the digital world, savvy humans had best start preparing for the millennial reign of the AI godhead now. Here’s how he explains the case to bow down before our AI overlords:

Humans are in charge of the planet because we are smarter than other animals and are able to build tools and apply rules. In the future, if something is much, much smarter, there’s going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge. What we want is the peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet from humans to whatever. And to ensure that the “whatever” knows who helped it get along.

The “whatever” in question will clearly possess the great primal reasoning powers of a God, Levandowski goes on to explain—which means that we, its human charges, will serve as a great body of nodal, just-in-time knowledge sherpas, dispensing an invaluable crowdsourced OS to the Universe’s new ruler. Small wonder that the church’s Scripture-in-the-making is termed “the Manual,” and that the quest for meaningful human experience in this scheme of things is downgraded into glorified concierge work:

Part of it being smarter than us means it will decide how it evolves, but at least we can decide how we act around it. I would love for the machine to see us as its beloved elders that it respects and takes care of. We would want this intelligence to say, “Humans should still have rights, even though I’m in charge.’’

In short order, though, the uplifting, exoticized talk of humans docenting the AI through its sovereign domain as respected tribal elders takes a darker turn, as Levandowski ponders the human prospect in this Matrix-like version of the singularity: “Do you want to be a pet or livestock?” he abruptly asks Harris. “We give pets medical attention, food, grooming, and entertainment. But an animal that’s biting you, attacking you, barking at you, and being annoying? I don’t want to go there.” (...)

This may strike more conventional believers as a bizarre prescription for worship, but neither it nor Levandowski’s broader account of AI’s likely cognitive dominion over the human future is remotely fringe, when viewed against the backdrop of the deeply gnostic cultural dispensation of the digital age. After all, it is by now a taken-for-granted precept of all things tech that the forward march of human history is a sustained study in quantum cognitive improvement. It only stands to reason that for us, as for the first-century Gnostics, this process should issue in a theology of self-created divinity.

It bears reminding in this context that, pace Levandowski and his many likeminded gnostic peers in Silicon Valley, neither humans nor gods in our tradition have commanded ostensible cosmic sovereignty on the basis of their intelligence. No, what in fact has inspired religious awe across the last few Western millennia was precisely the profound unknowability of divine aims and the grander cosmic divine. This is, famously, the lesson of the anti-Manichean spiritual tribulations recorded in the Book of Job. It’s also why, for instance, one of the great mystic texts in medieval Catholicism is called The Cloud of Unknowing—and why even a firebreathing colonial evangelical preacher like Jonathan Edwards ultimately set aside his lurid pulpit visions of eternal perdition in favor of a chastened acceptance of human limits that he called “Consent to Being in general.”

by Chris Lehmann, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: TheDigitalArtist

Luxury Socialized Medicine

The standard case for a single-payer health insurance system is pretty well known. Anyone can get care without courting financial ruin. Monumental personal decisions, like when to have a child or whether to leave or take a job, no longer hinge on the whims of an employer or the dysfunctions of the private insurance market. Surprise hospital bills, endless phone calls with insurance companies, juggling premiums, copays, and deductibles — all will be things of the past.

The case against single-payer often boils down to a single word: rationing. When critics peddle scare stories about Canadian or British “waiting lists,” they’re trying to conjure images of scarcity and austerity — the social-democratic equivalent of Soviet bread lines.

The truth, of course, is that you only have to look around to see that health care in America is already rationed. Try finding an in-demand specialist willing to take your “bronze-tier” insurance plan, or paying for high-priced specialty prescriptions out of pocket. Health care rationing is a fact of life in this country.

But there’s another important point to be made about single-payer and “rationing”: in many places around the world, national health insurance not only isn’t austere — it’s downright luxurious.

A Card up Their Sleeve

Americans, with our predatory health care system, can be easy to impress. The simple fact that the French can visit any health facility in the entire country, for example, seems astonishing. No provider is out of network, because there’s no such thing as a network. Instead, there’s a universal public insurance system that can’t turn applicants down, can’t terminate insurance, and almost never denies claims.

In France there’s no such thing as a deductible: insurance kicks in from the first euro billed. Since there’s no need to hire people to rifle through reams of paperwork and make judgment calls about denying claims and refusing coverage — and because the system has no stockholders to pay dividends to — the French insurance system spends next to nothing on paperwork.

Prices for treatments are fixed, and cost the patient next to nothing. For Americans accustomed to the need to change doctors every time they change plans, change plans every time they change jobs, and navigate things like claims denials, unpredictable charges, and endless paperwork, it seems extravagant.

But the conveniences don’t stop there. Since French providers aren’t carved up into networks, the government is able to issue what’s called a carte vitale, or “life card,” to all legal residents over the age of 15. With the patient’s permission, the card contains centralized information on the patient’s every medical visit, treatment, prescription, surgery and so on, going back to 1998. (Children’s records are stored on a parent’s card).

The physician inserts the carte vitale into a card-reader and the patient’s medical records pop up on a screen. Not only does it help doctors offer informed care, but it makes billing simple and eliminates much of the nightmare of transferring medical records. The physician logs the treatments, hits a button, and then waits roughly three days to be paid.

When doctors go on house calls, they take a portable card-reader with them. That’s right — in France they make house calls. Patients can request one anytime by calling a round-the-clock national hotline. The visit costs just thirty-one euros. (...)

Will You Still Feed Me?

Long-term care is another area where universal health care systems deliver the goods. Eight million Americans require long-term care services, most of them elderly. As many as two-thirds can’t afford to buy long-term care insurance, and Medicare doesn’t cover extended stays in nursing homes. Without coverage, the price of assisted living is comparable to private college tuition. As a result, many middle-class Americans’ best hope of affording long-term care is becoming eligible for Medicaid, which requires selling off assets and then draining nearly all personal savings to meet means-tested criteria. (...)

Japan implemented its long-term care insurance system when policymakers realized that changing family structures and rapid aging meant that relying on informal care would inevitably lead to a crisis like the one currently facing the United States. They made the choice to socialize care to avoid the dystopian scenario of millions of neglected, impoverished elderly moldering in underfunded institutions — preciselythe scenario that American conservatives equate with public care systems.

In a study of long-term care insurance recipients, one regular at a Japanese senior community center said, “Since I’m injured and can’t move as well, I used to just lay there, stare at the ceiling and listen to the radio, and feel the changing of the seasons. Then someone from the Hana House recommended to me if I would like to go to the day services.” He described becoming active in crafting workshops at the center, which he claims increased his mobility. “Because of this place I’ve become a lot healthier.”

“First and foremost,” said another survey respondent, “I feel a sense of safety.”

by Meagan Day, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Jan Steen, circa 1660

Walter Molino in La domenica del corriere - May 1958
via:
[ed. Veterinarians, or psycho sushi chefs.]

DRM's Dead Canary: How We Just Lost the Web, What We Learned from It, and What We Need to Do Next

EFF has been fighting against DRM and the laws behind it for a decade and a half, intervening in the US Broadcast Flag, the UN Broadcasting Treaty, the European DVB CPCM standard, the W3C EME standard and many other skirmishes, battles and even wars over the years. With that long history behind us, there are two things we want you to know about DRM:

1. Everybody on the inside secretly knows that DRM technology is irrelevant, but DRM law is everything; and
2. The reason companies want DRM has nothing to do with copyright.

These two points have just been demonstrated in a messy, drawn-out fight over the standardization of DRM in browsers, and since we threw a lot of blood and treasure at that fight, one thing we hope to salvage is an object lesson that will drive these two points home and provide a roadmap for the future of DRM fighting.

DRM IS TECHNOLOGICALLY BANKRUPT; DRM LAW IS DEADLY

Here's how DRM works, at a high level: a company wants to provide a customer (you) with digital asset (like a movie, a book, a song, a video game or an app), but they want to control what you do with that file after you get it.

So they encrypt the file. We love encryption. Encryption works. With relatively little effort, anyone can scramble a file so well that no one will ever be able to decrypt it unless they're provided with the key.

Let's say this is Netflix. They send you a movie that's been scrambled and they want to be sure you can't save it and watch it later from your hard-drive. But they also need to give you a way to view the movie, too. At some point, that means unscrambling the movie. And there's only one way to unscramble a file that's been competently encrypted: you have to use the key.

So Netflix also gives you the unscrambling key.

But if you have the key, you can just unscramble the Netflix movies and save them to your hard drive. How can Netflix give you the key but control how you use it?

Netflix has to hide the key, somewhere on your computer, like in a browser extension or an app. This is where the technological bankruptcy comes in. Hiding something well is hard. Hiding something well in a piece of equipment that you give to your adversary to take away with them and do anything they want with is impossible.

Maybe you can't find the keys that Netflix hid in your browser. But someone can: a bored grad student with a free weekend, a self-taught genius decapping a chip in their basement, a competitor with a full-service lab. One tiny flaw in any part of the fragile wrapping around these keys, and they're free.

And once that flaw is exposed, anyone can write an app or a browser plugin that does have a save button. It's game over for the DRM technology. (The keys escape pretty regularly, just as fast as they can be revoked by the DRM companies.)

DRM gets made over the course of years, by skilled engineers, at a cost of millions of dollars. It gets broken in days, by teenagers, with hobbyist equipment. That's not because the DRM-makers are stupid, it's because they're doing something stupid.

Which is where the law comes in. DRM law gives rightsholders more forceful, far-ranging legal powers than laws governing any other kind of technology. In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 provides for felony liability for anyone commercially engaged in bypassing a DRM system: 5 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for a first offense. Even noncommercial bypass of DRM is subject to liability. It also makes it legally risky to even talk about how to bypass a DRM system.

So the law shores up DRM systems with a broad range of threats. If Netflix designs a video player that won't save a video unless you break some DRM, they now have the right to sue -- or sic the police -- on any rival that rolls out an improved alternative streaming client, or a video-recorder that works with Netflix. Such tools wouldn't violate copyright law any more than a VCR or a Tivo does, but because that recorder would have to break Netflix DRM, they could use DRM law to crush it.

DRM law goes beyond mere bans on tampering with DRM. Companies also use Section 1201 of the DMCA to threaten security researchers who discover flaws in their products. The law becomes a weapon they can aim at anyone who wants to warn their customers (still you) that the products you're relying on aren't fit for use. That includes warning people about flaws in DRM that expose them to being hacked.

It's not just the USA and not just the DMCA, either. The US Trade Representative has "convinced" countries around the world to adopt a version of this rule.

DRM HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH COPYRIGHT

DRM law has the power to do untold harm. Because it affords corporations the power to control the use of their products after sale, the power to decide who can compete with them and under what circumstances, and even who gets to warn people about defective products, DRM laws represent a powerful temptation.

Some things that aren't copyright infringement: buying a DVD while you're on holiday and playing it when you get home. It is obviously not a copyright infringement to go into a store in (say) New Delhi and buy a DVD and bring it home to (say) Topeka. The rightsholder made their movie, sold it to the retailer, and you paid the retailer the asking price. This is the opposite of copyright infringement. That's paying for works on the terms set by the rightsholder. But because DRM stops you from playing out-of-region discs on your home player, the studios can invoke copyright law to decide where you can consume the copyrighted works you've bought, fair and square.

Other not-infringements: fixing your car (GM uses DRM to control who can diagnose an engine, and to force mechanics to spend tens of thousands of dollars for diagnostic information they could otherwise determine themselves or obtain from third parties); refilling an ink cartridge (HP pushed out a fake security update that added DRM to millions of inkjet printers so that they'd refuse remanufactured or third-party cartridges), or toasting home-made bread (though this hasn't happened yet, there's no reason that a company couldn't put DRM in its toasters to control whose bread you can use). (...)

WHICH BRINGS US TO THE W3C

The W3C is the world's foremost open web standards body, a consortium whose members (companies, universities, government agencies, civil society groups and others) engage in protracted wrangles over the best way for everyone to deliver web content. They produce "recommendations" (W3C-speak for "standards") that form the invisible struts that hold up the web. These agreements, produced through patient negotiation and compromise, represent an agreement by major stakeholders about the best (or least-worst) way to solve thorny technological problems.

In 2013, Netflix and a few other media companies convinced the W3C to start work on a DRM system for the web. This DRM system, Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), represented a sharp departure from the W3C's normal business. First, EME would not be a complete standard: the organization would specify an API through which publishers and browser vendors would make DRM work, but the actual "content decryption module" (CDM) wouldn't be defined by the standard. That means that EME was a standard in name only: if you started a browser company and followed all the W3C's recommendations, you still wouldn't be able to play back a Netflix video. For that, you'd need Netflix's permission.

It's hard to overstate how weird this is. Web standards are about "permissionless interoperability." The standards for formatting text mean that anyone can make a tool that can show you pages from the New York Times' website; images from Getty; or interactive charts on Bloomberg. The companies can still decide who can see which pages on their websites (by deciding who gets a password and which parts of the website each password unlocks), but they don't get to decide who can make the web browsing program you type the password into in order to access the website.

A web in which every publisher gets to pick and choose which browsers you can use to visit their sites is a very different one from the historical web. Historically, anyone could make a new browser by making sure it adhered to W3C recommendations, and then start to compete. And while the web has always been dominated by a few browsers, which browsers dominate have changed every decade or so, as new companies and even nonprofits like Mozilla (who make Firefox) overthrew the old order. Technologies that have stood in the way of this permissionless interoperabilty -- for instance, patent-encumbered video -- have been seen as impediments to the idea of the open web, not standardization opportunities.

When the W3C starts making technologies that only work when they're blessed by a handful of entertainment companies, they're putting their thumbs -- their fists -- on the scales in favor of ensuring that the current browser giants get to enjoy a permanent reign.

But that's the least of it. Until EME, W3C standards were designed to give the users of the web (e.g. you) more control over what your computer did while you were accessing other peoples' websites. With EME -- and for the first time ever -- the W3C is designing technology that takes away your control. EME is designed to allow Netflix -- and other big companies -- to decide what your browser does, even (especially) when you disagree about what that should be.

Since the earliest days of computing, there's been a simmering debate about whether computers exist to control their users, or vice versa (as the visionary computer scientist and education specialist Seymour Papert put it, "children should be programming the computer rather than being programmed by it" -- that applies equally well to adults). Every W3C standard until 2017 was on the side of people controlling computers. EME breaks with that. It is a subtle, but profound shift.

WHY WOULD THE W3C DO THIS?

Ay yi yi. That is the three billion user question.

by Cory Doctorow, EFF |  Read more:

Image: EFF

via:

A Survivor's Defense of Al Franken

I feel exploited. And I feel sick.

I’m sick of pedophiles. I’m sick of rapists. I’m sick of sexual violence and sexual predators. I am sick of being reminded moment after moment of the times — yes plural — that I have been shocked out of my body, stripped of my power and deprived of the right to defend my own body by a man sexually forcing himself onto me. More than that, I’m sick of my traumas and the traumas of other survivors being exploited for political gain and emotional satisfaction on both the left and the right. Physically. Sick.

I am sick to know that I cannot protect myself or my daughter from the pussy grabbing woman hater that controls every single law and policy that guides this nation. I am sick to know that Roy Moore exists on this planet and that there are millions of people supportive of a known pedophile holding power over millions upon millions of women and girls in the state of Alabama and the United States. I am sick that a member of the Trump campaign and former state Senator in Oklahoma plead guilty to child trafficking.

And I am sick that people like Leeanne Tweeden feel comfortable enough to take the traumas of the women and children that have been the true victims of sexual violence and used them for her own personal gains and the political goals of the Republican Party.

Leeanne Tweeden is the woman that recently accused Al Franken of sexually violating her at a rehearsal for a USO comedy show in 2006. Her decision to take her story public after 10 years of “silence” has been framed by both the left and the right as a survivor’s act of bravery that demands immediate attention and strict consequences.

I see Leeanne Tweeden’s actions quite differently.

What Leeanne Tweeden has done is stolen the very real traumas of very real survivors — people like me — and mocked them. What she has done is taken our pain and our bravery and our strength and exploited it on behalf of a network of people that actively prey on the women and children she is pretending to show solidarity with. What she is doing is vile and it is disgusting and it is dangerous on every personal and political level associated with sexual assault in the United States.

Perhaps if she was, in fact, a survivor of sexual assault she would understand the damage that is being caused by her actions. But she is not a survivor. And she is definitely not a victim of Al Franken.

Leeanne was never raped. She was never assaulted. And she was never the victim of sexual violence or harassment. She was a willing and active participant in a comedy show that involved sexualized behaviors. She consented to participating. She actively engaged in and invited similar behaviors with other performers other than Al Franken at the event.

As recently and clearly described by journalist S. Novi:

“Both SNL and USO stage skits are well-known to be over the top when it comes to topics such as sex, but the USO performances are even more so due to the audience of mostly military males. Since the days of Bob Hope, there have always been beautiful bombshell women showing up in scanty outfits and sexual dialogue running from innuendos to outright blatant views. If you are either a male or female performing in these shows you are expected to play along.

…. there are a number of images as well as videos appearing that show that Tweeden didn’t seem to have a problem with sexual performances on stage including that of her grabbing the butt of a Country and Western performer and rubbing her behind up against him and the singer grabbing at her butt. Additional videos of the tour have included a very sexual performance with the comedian Robin Williams as well as the real on-stage ‘kiss’ with Franken.

In this case, we have a woman that signed up for known sexually oriented skits and performances that she approved of, and rehearsed, and then performed many of them onstage in both a preplanned and ad hoc way.”

Leanne Tweeden was a consenting and contracted performer for the USO then, just as she is a contracted performer for the right wing now. She was not then and is not now a survivor. She was not then and is not now a victim of Al Franken.

Leanne Tweeden was a consenting and contracted performer for the USO then, just as she is a contracted performer for the right wing now. She was not then and is not now a survivor. She was not then and is not now a victim of Al Franken.

Al Franken’s tasteless joke didn’t make her fear for her life. It didn’t make her burn the clothes she was wearing that night. It didn’t make her scrub herself clean in the shower until her skin tore off. This joke didn’t keep her up shaking and puking and sobbing on the floor of a shower as she bled down a drainpipe. It didn’t send her to the clinic for STD tests.

Al Franken’s joke didn’t crush her notion of who she was or how she could walk in this world. This joke didn’t give her PTSD or depression or any of the lasting forms of struggle that true rape and assault victims must face minute by minute. It hasn’t informed every relationship she’s had since. And it wasn’t in any way what so ever a form of rape, assault or even harassment.

Leeanne Tweeden was not then and is not now a victim. A very large part of me wishes she had been, though. (...)

What Tweeden is, is a willing participant in a new skit in which the Republican Party uses her completely normal interaction with Al Franken as an excuse to accuse a Democratic Senator of sexual assault, deflect from the charges of rape and pedophilia in the highest ranks of their own party, and test drive a strategy by which they can gain increasing amounts of power by exploiting the sexual traumas of women and children.

And their plan is working. Almost inexplicably. (...)

That’s because one of the most common rhetorical strategies employed by the Republican Party is to deflect an accusation by turning the charges on them around to the accuser. And as common and predictable as this strategy is — the Democrats still haven’t come up with a consistent method to counter it.

Just as in any game of competition, and especially political competition, one side can only succeed if the other side fails to stop them. And fail is exactly what the Democrats are doing. Failing.

Rather than taking a stand against the exploitation of sexual assault survivors, they are allowing the Republican Party to use our trauma as a cover to advance their own political agendas. Worse, they have taken the political bait hook, line, and sinker and rather than launching a full-scale counterattack on the GOP, they have turned on themselves and started calling for the resignation of a member of their own party.

Rather than focusing on accusations against Donald Trump, Roy Moore or Ralph Shortey — the attention is turned onto Minnesota Senator Al Franken. Not only do the Republicans succeed in turning the attention away from themselves, but they succeed in turning the Democrats against each other. And the final narrative becomes:

It’s not the Republican Party supporting pussy grabbers and pedophilia. It’s the Democrats!

The Democratic Party is practically handing the nation’s women and children over to pedophiles and rapists simply because they asked them to. And if we let Senators like Al Franken — representatives that have voting records filled with support for women’s rights — fall to pedophiles like Roy Moore, then we are allowing the real traumas of exploited women be used as an excuse to put more women and girls in harm’s way.

This is what terrifies me most.

by Anonymous, SIIP |  Read more:

[ed. There's even a term for this strategy: DARVO.]

How to Customize Your Android Phone

You can live a perfectly delightful mobile existence using an Android phone without tweaking a single setting. But where's the fun in that? Especially when a handful of downloads and a few minutes of tinkering can turn, say, your Galaxy S8 from a TouchWiz minefield into a digital zen garden.

This has always been true. And if you're an Android power user, if you've installed a custom ROM (or even know what that means), this guide is not for you. But there are two billion active monthly Android devices in the world now. Lots of those devices are smartphones. One of them might be yours. And if there's anything about that Pixel or Moto or Galaxy or LG that bothers you even a little—the keyboard, the gestures, the app icons—know that you can make it better. Here's how.

Ready For Launch

Let's start big with the piece of software called the launcher, which dictates not just how your smartphone looks but how you interact with it. Your phone came with a launcher, although you likely just think of it as "the way my phone works."

A lot of the time, your out-of-the-box experience works just fine, especially if it hews close to the stock Android you'll find in a Pixel or Nexus phone. But sometimes manufacturers marry terrific hardware with clunky software, or include embellishments that feel more like bloat. Sometimes you want more tinkering choices; sometimes you want fewer. Sometimes you just want to try something new. For all of those times, you can simply install a launcher.

An extreme example might help contextualize this a little better. One Launcher transforms your Android phone into something that very much resembles iOS. A gimmick? Sure! But at the very least it gives you a small taste of how the other UI lives.

Even Microsoft, despite largely tapping out of its own mobile operating system aspirations, offered a darn good Android launcher called Arrow for two years; it freshens up your wallpaper every morning, and promises quick access to your most frequently used apps and contacts. It recently overhauled that into Microsoft Launcher, now in beta, which among other features lets you pick up where you left off on your PC. It's like the macOS Handoff feature, except between a Windows computer and an Android device. Neat!

And so on. The main knock against launchers is that they can slow your system down. It depends on how heavy a coat it puts on, but generally you either won't notice or, if you pick the right one, won't mind the trade-off.

But which one is best? Apologies for the copout, but it really depends on what you're looking for. And if you don't even know that, go ahead and download Nova Launcher, which leads practically every "best launcher" roundup you'll find. Nova's a delightful chameleon, giving you as many customization options as you could ever possibly want. Just clear out a little time on your calendar before you start; from gestures to themes to subgrids to notifications, you've got a lot of potential choices to make.

Personally, I had used the Google Now launcher to try to get as close to stock Android as I could on my Galaxy S7. But when Google pulled support earlier this year—and since it only makes its Pixel Launcher available to Pixel devices—I hopped over to Action Launcher, which prides itself on keeping pace with Pixel and Android Oreo features—even if you're still on Android Jellybean—with some extra customization built in and an emphasis on shortcuts for quick results. You know, action. Case in point? When Google relocated the search bar to the bottom of the display on the Pixel, Action alerted me that it offered that option within a few days.

That works for me! It might not for you. The good news is, most Android launchers come free, so you can experiment until you find one that suits you. Also, Google offers an Android "taste test" that recommends various set-ups you might like.

To the Window, To the Wallpapers

It's been so long since I've looked at the stock Android wallpaper, I don't even remember what it looks like. I'm sure it's ... fine? But you can do better! And it takes no time at all.

All you need to do to rotate in a new display background is tap and hold a blank spot on your homescreen. From there, a bottom row of options will appear: Wallpapers, Widgets, and Settings. Tap on Wallpapers, and from there you'll have the option to sift through My photos, or choose from your apps that provide "live wallpapers," animated backgrounds that liven up your screen time. (MLB At Bat, for instance, offers team-based wallpapers, while Shadow Galaxy puts your apps in front of a swirling nebula.) Be careful with live wallpapers, though; they can be hell on your battery.

In fact, be careful with wallpapers generally. There are countless apps to choose from, but not all of them are entirely reputable. In some cases, developers have even used wallpaper apps to sneak malware past Google Play's defenses. That's not to scare you off of wallpapers altogether; just try to stick to reputable vendors as best you can. Unfortunately, you mostly have to go by downloads and reviews, which obviously aren't foolproof.

At the very least, Google offers a separate Wallpapers app with a diverse array of images from Google Earth and beyond, and gives you the option of waking up each day with a freshly image. If that's not often enough, Wallpapers HD can cough up a new high-resolution wallpaper every hour, from a collection of over 80,000 images, tailored specifically to your screen size.

Icon Believe It

The look of your Android smartphone goes way beyond your wallpaper, or even your launcher. In fact, unless you're some sort of home-screen swiping maximalist, app icons cover the bulk of your display. Why tend to the other facets of your Android aesthetic but leave that real estate up to each app developer's whims?

Icon packs serve a dual purpose in that respect. First, they prettify ugly or boring standard app icons. Maybe more importantly, though, they give your home screen a unified look. I use Rugos Premium, which gives my apps a sort of retro rumpled paper look. Why not! There's also the Cornie Oldie pack, which is also vintage but flattened out and with less muted colors. There's the Revolution icon pack, for the minimalist in your life. Lines just straight-up uses a bunch of white-lined silhouettes. And on and on. You won't have to look long to find one that fits your mood.

There are a few important things to note before you venture into icon customization. First, not every pack has an icon for every app. If you have less popular downloads installed and on your home screen, you may be stuck using the default icon. It's a little jarring. You can always either just hide those outliers in the app drawer, or collect them on their own screen so that they at least have common company. Better still, some icon packs slap an icon mask on top of every single app, regardless of if it specifically designed a replacement, giving everything at least a somewhat similar vibe.

Along those same lines, after you download your icon pack of choice, you'll need to install it through your launcher, which may not be fully compatible. Brace yourself for some funky results if you opt for less fully developed versions of either. Which brings us to the last point: A lot of developers in the icon/wallpaper world are part-timers and hobbyists. You may not get the level of fit and polish you'd expect from, say, a Netflix or a Robinhood. And the same security cautions mentioned for wallpapers apply here as well.

by Brian Barrett, Wired |  Read more:

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