Friday, December 8, 2017
The Problem with Muzak - Spotify’s Bid to Remodel an Industry
“Anything you want.
Anyone you want.
Anywhere you want.
Anyway! Anyway!”
—Priests, “Pink White House” (2017)
Imagine you are in an airport, and you have forgotten to eat lunch. It’s a mistake you will pay for with a dull, expensive dinner. Hungry, meandering, you happen upon one of those iPads that line every other table, a machine that allows you to order without talking to other humans—a circumstance provided by capitalism’s boundless quest to cash in on convenience. Of course, this doesn’t make your experience any easier: within minutes, an employee scrambles over to assist you with the device, which keeps freezing when you choose the “bowls” tab. “Can I just tell you my order?” you ask, half-laughing, thoroughly hoping for a moment of commiserating solidarity over this disruptor™ fail. Instead she grabs the thing and helps you finalize your purchase. This person hates her job, but she’s lucky that, for the moment, she still has it.
This worker is teaching people to use the iPads that will one day replace her. It’s an awkward phenomenon that now pervades a growing cross-section of industries, a type of techno-solutionism that’s unbearable because it insistently capitalizes on quick fixes for problems that didn’t exist to begin with. It’s also a disadvantageous mutation of principles that marketers have historically leveraged to make us feel bad about ourselves so that we’ll buy more shit we don’t need. It is all of these things, and it is also becoming the operating motive of the music industry.
The music world continues to be exceedingly vulnerable, and there are looming questions that desperately need to be addressed. Most important: How can artists distribute and sell their work in a digital economy beholden to ruthlessly commercial and centralized interests?
Enter Spotify, a platform that is definitely not the answer. In fact, it only exacerbates such conundrums. Yet for now it has manipulated the vast majority of music industry “players” into regarding it as a saving grace. As the world’s largest streaming music company, its network of paying subscribers has risen sharply in recent years, from five million paid subscribers in 2012 to more than sixty million in 2017. Indeed, the platform has now convinced a critical mass that paying $9.99 per month for access to thirty million songs is a solid, even virtuous idea. Every song in the world for less than your shitty airport meal. What could go wrong?
Billionaires have thrown a lot of money at Spotify. As of September 2017, the platform has been valued at $16 billion by venture capitalists who see it as the next Netflix, and who have perhaps fooled themselves into trusting that this exploitative model will “save the music industry.” Spotify’s endgame, for now, is to go public. The company could be worth $20 billion by next year, when it will likely be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. According to Reuters, Spotify plans to file its intention of a public offering with U.S. regulators before the end of this calendar year and to go public in the first or second quarter of 2018. Bloomberg reports that it recently hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, and Allen & Co. to “assess its options.”
Yet, despite its conventional market viability, there are key differences between Spotify and its rivals, Apple Music and Amazon Music, which both have the luxury of capitalizing on overpriced, fun-sized plastic and metal surveillance machines. For Apple Music, the bottom line is selling iPhones, laptops, iPads, and other hardware. Streaming music makes those products more valuable. For Amazon Music, the motive is similar; they aim to sell Alexa devices and Amazon Prime subscriptions.
But Spotify’s worth is more ephemeral. Its value—what makes it addictive for listeners, a necessity for artists, and a worthwhile investment for venture capitalists—lies in its algorithmic music discovery “products” and its ability to make the entire music industry conform to the new standards it sets. This means one thing: playlists are king, and particularly the ones curated by Spotify itself. An unprecedented amount of data (“skip rates” and “completion rates” determine whether a song survives) and “human-machine technology” are deployed to quantify your tastes. This is what lies behind the “magic” of Spotify.
Spotify and Chill
To understand the danger Spotify poses to the music industry—and to music itself—you first have to dig beneath the “user experience” and examine its algorithmic schemes. Spotify’s front page “Browse” screen presents a classic illusion of choice, a stream of genre and mood playlists, charts, new releases, and now podcasts and video. It all appears limitless, a function of the platform’s infinite supply, but in reality it is tightly controlled by Spotify’s staff and dictated by the interests of major labels, brands, and other cash-rich businesses who have gamed the system. On Monday, you’ll find “Discover Weekly,” an algorithmically created playlist of recommendations based on your listening habits. On Friday, there’s “New Music Friday,” a highly coveted and well trafficked playlist of mostly Top-40 content, thoroughly inaccessible to anyone but major labels. The rest of the front page arrangement depends on the date and time, but you’ll likely see one of its most prized brands—like the popular and also major label-saturated “RapCaviar”—or else music that somehow opportunistically rides the news cycle: Which celebrity musician died today? Otherwise, you’ll find songs tied to moods or activities, like “Good Vibes” or “Wild + Free.” And you will most certainly see something along the lines of “Chilled Folk,” “Chill Hits,” “Evening Chill,” “Chilled R&B,” “Indie Chillout,” or “Chill Tracks.”
Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper. They’re also tied to what its algorithm manipulates best: mood and affect. Note how the generically designed, nearly stock photo images attached to these playlists rely on the selfsame clickbait-y tactics of content farms, which are famous for attacking a reader’s basest human moods and instincts. Only here the goal is to fit music snugly into an emotional regulation capsule optimized for maximum clicks: “chill.out.brain,” “Ambient Chill,” “Chill Covers.” “Piano in the Background” is one of the most aptly titled; “in the background” could be added to the majority of Spotify playlists.
As an industry insider once explained to me, digital strategists have identified “lean back listening” as an ever more popular Spotify-induced phenomenon. It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll: “Chillin’ On a Dirt Road,” “License to Chill,” “Cinematic Chill Out.” They’re all there.
These algorithmically designed playlists, in other words, have seized on an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists. One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”
Indeed, Spotify’s obsession with mood and activity-based playlists has contributed to all music becoming more like Muzak, a brand that created, programmed, and licensed songs for retail stores throughout the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the company prioritized workplace soundtracks that were meant to heighten productivity, using research to evaluate what listeners responded to most. In many ways, this is not unlike the playlist category called “Focus” that we see now on Spotify. In March 2011, Muzak was purchased by Mood Media, a company that provides in-store music, signs, scents, and video content. The similarity between the objectives of companies like Muzak and Mood Media, and the proliferation of mood-based playlists on Spotify, is more than just a linguistic coincidence; Spotify playlists work to attract brands and advertisers of all types to the platform.
The Automation of Selling Out
Advertising and branding products are used all over Spotify: videos, audio, commercial breaks, clickable image pop-ups, overlays, the sponsoring of (extremely popular) Spotify-owned playlists, the sponsoring of live session videos, home page takeovers, and standalone advertisements. Some are banner advertisements, others are advertorial, and still others blur the line. And this is part of a grander confusion: the very idea of what it means to be an “independent artist” in 2017 has been eroded as more and more artists find themselves beholden to corporate platforms of all types.
Spotify also presents a new and complicated extension of hyper-commercial webspace, and it’s a development that could prove to be particularly harmful for musicians: the corporate-branded playlists. This “feature” could be explained as the platform’s interpretation of corporate personhood, where paid-for brand accounts can create their own profiles and make playlists in the manner of the platform’s regular users. This has led to a proliferation of playlists made by brands. For example: the “Coffeehouse Pop” made by the official Starbucks page, or the “Running Tempo Mix” created by Nike Women. So long as corporations have at least twenty songs on their playlists and don’t include an artist more than once, they’re good. In the past, such an arrangement would require a given artist to sign a licensing or advertising deal, and it often appeared transactional, hence the traditional notion of “selling out.” Today on Spotify, artists often have no idea they’ve been added to these playlists. I only managed to discover this phenomenon upon plugging a friend’s band name into a tool called “Spot On Track,” which uses Spotify’s public API to present the different playlists where specific artists and their tracks appear. My friend’s band was completely unaware of its inclusion on the Nike and Starbucks playlists, and the band receives no additional compensation beyond the usual streaming royalties sent to labels and rights-holders.
We should call this what it is: the automation of selling out. Only it subtracts the part where artists get paid.
by Liz Pelly, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: via
Anyone you want.
Anywhere you want.
Anyway! Anyway!”
—Priests, “Pink White House” (2017)
Imagine you are in an airport, and you have forgotten to eat lunch. It’s a mistake you will pay for with a dull, expensive dinner. Hungry, meandering, you happen upon one of those iPads that line every other table, a machine that allows you to order without talking to other humans—a circumstance provided by capitalism’s boundless quest to cash in on convenience. Of course, this doesn’t make your experience any easier: within minutes, an employee scrambles over to assist you with the device, which keeps freezing when you choose the “bowls” tab. “Can I just tell you my order?” you ask, half-laughing, thoroughly hoping for a moment of commiserating solidarity over this disruptor™ fail. Instead she grabs the thing and helps you finalize your purchase. This person hates her job, but she’s lucky that, for the moment, she still has it.
This worker is teaching people to use the iPads that will one day replace her. It’s an awkward phenomenon that now pervades a growing cross-section of industries, a type of techno-solutionism that’s unbearable because it insistently capitalizes on quick fixes for problems that didn’t exist to begin with. It’s also a disadvantageous mutation of principles that marketers have historically leveraged to make us feel bad about ourselves so that we’ll buy more shit we don’t need. It is all of these things, and it is also becoming the operating motive of the music industry.The music world continues to be exceedingly vulnerable, and there are looming questions that desperately need to be addressed. Most important: How can artists distribute and sell their work in a digital economy beholden to ruthlessly commercial and centralized interests?
Enter Spotify, a platform that is definitely not the answer. In fact, it only exacerbates such conundrums. Yet for now it has manipulated the vast majority of music industry “players” into regarding it as a saving grace. As the world’s largest streaming music company, its network of paying subscribers has risen sharply in recent years, from five million paid subscribers in 2012 to more than sixty million in 2017. Indeed, the platform has now convinced a critical mass that paying $9.99 per month for access to thirty million songs is a solid, even virtuous idea. Every song in the world for less than your shitty airport meal. What could go wrong?
Billionaires have thrown a lot of money at Spotify. As of September 2017, the platform has been valued at $16 billion by venture capitalists who see it as the next Netflix, and who have perhaps fooled themselves into trusting that this exploitative model will “save the music industry.” Spotify’s endgame, for now, is to go public. The company could be worth $20 billion by next year, when it will likely be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. According to Reuters, Spotify plans to file its intention of a public offering with U.S. regulators before the end of this calendar year and to go public in the first or second quarter of 2018. Bloomberg reports that it recently hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, and Allen & Co. to “assess its options.”
Yet, despite its conventional market viability, there are key differences between Spotify and its rivals, Apple Music and Amazon Music, which both have the luxury of capitalizing on overpriced, fun-sized plastic and metal surveillance machines. For Apple Music, the bottom line is selling iPhones, laptops, iPads, and other hardware. Streaming music makes those products more valuable. For Amazon Music, the motive is similar; they aim to sell Alexa devices and Amazon Prime subscriptions.
But Spotify’s worth is more ephemeral. Its value—what makes it addictive for listeners, a necessity for artists, and a worthwhile investment for venture capitalists—lies in its algorithmic music discovery “products” and its ability to make the entire music industry conform to the new standards it sets. This means one thing: playlists are king, and particularly the ones curated by Spotify itself. An unprecedented amount of data (“skip rates” and “completion rates” determine whether a song survives) and “human-machine technology” are deployed to quantify your tastes. This is what lies behind the “magic” of Spotify.
Spotify and Chill
To understand the danger Spotify poses to the music industry—and to music itself—you first have to dig beneath the “user experience” and examine its algorithmic schemes. Spotify’s front page “Browse” screen presents a classic illusion of choice, a stream of genre and mood playlists, charts, new releases, and now podcasts and video. It all appears limitless, a function of the platform’s infinite supply, but in reality it is tightly controlled by Spotify’s staff and dictated by the interests of major labels, brands, and other cash-rich businesses who have gamed the system. On Monday, you’ll find “Discover Weekly,” an algorithmically created playlist of recommendations based on your listening habits. On Friday, there’s “New Music Friday,” a highly coveted and well trafficked playlist of mostly Top-40 content, thoroughly inaccessible to anyone but major labels. The rest of the front page arrangement depends on the date and time, but you’ll likely see one of its most prized brands—like the popular and also major label-saturated “RapCaviar”—or else music that somehow opportunistically rides the news cycle: Which celebrity musician died today? Otherwise, you’ll find songs tied to moods or activities, like “Good Vibes” or “Wild + Free.” And you will most certainly see something along the lines of “Chilled Folk,” “Chill Hits,” “Evening Chill,” “Chilled R&B,” “Indie Chillout,” or “Chill Tracks.”
Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper. They’re also tied to what its algorithm manipulates best: mood and affect. Note how the generically designed, nearly stock photo images attached to these playlists rely on the selfsame clickbait-y tactics of content farms, which are famous for attacking a reader’s basest human moods and instincts. Only here the goal is to fit music snugly into an emotional regulation capsule optimized for maximum clicks: “chill.out.brain,” “Ambient Chill,” “Chill Covers.” “Piano in the Background” is one of the most aptly titled; “in the background” could be added to the majority of Spotify playlists.
As an industry insider once explained to me, digital strategists have identified “lean back listening” as an ever more popular Spotify-induced phenomenon. It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll: “Chillin’ On a Dirt Road,” “License to Chill,” “Cinematic Chill Out.” They’re all there.
These algorithmically designed playlists, in other words, have seized on an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists. One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”
Indeed, Spotify’s obsession with mood and activity-based playlists has contributed to all music becoming more like Muzak, a brand that created, programmed, and licensed songs for retail stores throughout the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the company prioritized workplace soundtracks that were meant to heighten productivity, using research to evaluate what listeners responded to most. In many ways, this is not unlike the playlist category called “Focus” that we see now on Spotify. In March 2011, Muzak was purchased by Mood Media, a company that provides in-store music, signs, scents, and video content. The similarity between the objectives of companies like Muzak and Mood Media, and the proliferation of mood-based playlists on Spotify, is more than just a linguistic coincidence; Spotify playlists work to attract brands and advertisers of all types to the platform.
The Automation of Selling Out
Advertising and branding products are used all over Spotify: videos, audio, commercial breaks, clickable image pop-ups, overlays, the sponsoring of (extremely popular) Spotify-owned playlists, the sponsoring of live session videos, home page takeovers, and standalone advertisements. Some are banner advertisements, others are advertorial, and still others blur the line. And this is part of a grander confusion: the very idea of what it means to be an “independent artist” in 2017 has been eroded as more and more artists find themselves beholden to corporate platforms of all types.
Spotify also presents a new and complicated extension of hyper-commercial webspace, and it’s a development that could prove to be particularly harmful for musicians: the corporate-branded playlists. This “feature” could be explained as the platform’s interpretation of corporate personhood, where paid-for brand accounts can create their own profiles and make playlists in the manner of the platform’s regular users. This has led to a proliferation of playlists made by brands. For example: the “Coffeehouse Pop” made by the official Starbucks page, or the “Running Tempo Mix” created by Nike Women. So long as corporations have at least twenty songs on their playlists and don’t include an artist more than once, they’re good. In the past, such an arrangement would require a given artist to sign a licensing or advertising deal, and it often appeared transactional, hence the traditional notion of “selling out.” Today on Spotify, artists often have no idea they’ve been added to these playlists. I only managed to discover this phenomenon upon plugging a friend’s band name into a tool called “Spot On Track,” which uses Spotify’s public API to present the different playlists where specific artists and their tracks appear. My friend’s band was completely unaware of its inclusion on the Nike and Starbucks playlists, and the band receives no additional compensation beyond the usual streaming royalties sent to labels and rights-holders.
We should call this what it is: the automation of selling out. Only it subtracts the part where artists get paid.
by Liz Pelly, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: via
Politics 101
The Uneven Playing Field
A Weekend with Bernie
A Weekend with Bernie
The G.O.P. Is Rotting
The Next Step in the Radical Trump-G.O.P. Agenda: Gut the Welfare State
The Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken (links galore)
Inside Trump's Hour-by-Hour Battle For Self-Preservation (must read)
Roy Moore and the Invisible Religious Right
How Republicans Are Immunizing Their Voters Against Whatever Mueller Uncovers
The Next Step in the Radical Trump-G.O.P. Agenda: Gut the Welfare State
The Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken (links galore)
Inside Trump's Hour-by-Hour Battle For Self-Preservation (must read)
Roy Moore and the Invisible Religious Right
How Republicans Are Immunizing Their Voters Against Whatever Mueller Uncovers
[ed. Check back for updates]
Don’t Blame the Election on Fake News. Blame It on the Media.
As troubling as the spread of fake news on social media may be, it was unlikely to have had much impact either on the election outcome or on the more general state of politics in 2016. A potentially more serious threat is what a team of Harvard and MIT researchers refer to as “a network of mutually reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world.” Unlike the fake news numbers highlighted in much of the post-election coverage, engagement with sites like Breitbart News, InfoWars, and The Daily Caller are substantial—especially in the realm of social media.
Nevertheless, a longer and more detailed report by the same researchers shows that by any reasonable metric—including Facebook or Twitter shares, but also referrals from other media sites, number of published stories, etc.—the media ecosystem remains dominated by conventional (and mostly left-of-center) sources such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, HuffPost, CNN, and Politico.
Given the attention these very same news outlets have lavished, post-election, on fake news shared via social media, it may come as a surprise that they themselves dominated social media traffic. While it may have been the case that the 20 most-shared fake news stories narrowly outperformed the 20 most-shared “real news” stories, the overall volume of stories produced by major newsrooms vastly outnumbers fake news. According to the same report, “The Washington Post produced more than 50,000 stories over the 18-month period, while The New York Times, CNN, and Huffington Post each published more than 30,000 stories.” Presumably not all of these stories were about the election, but each such story was also likely reported by many news outlets simultaneously. A rough estimate of thousands of election-related stories published by the mainstream media is therefore not unreasonable.
What did all these stories talk about? The research team investigated this question, counting sentences that appeared in mainstream media sources and classifying each as detailing one of several Clinton- or Trump-related issues. In particular, they classified each sentence as describing either a scandal (e.g., Clinton’s emails, Trump’s taxes) or a policy issue (Clinton and jobs, Trump and immigration). They found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.
To reiterate, these 65,000 sentences were written not by Russian hackers, but overwhelmingly by professional journalists employed at mainstream news organizations, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. To the extent that voters mistrusted Hillary Clinton, or considered her conduct as secretary of state to have been negligent or even potentially criminal, or were generally unaware of what her policies contained or how they may have differed from Donald Trump’s, these numbers suggest their views were influenced more by mainstream news sources than by fake news. (...)
The problem is this: As has become clear since the election, there were profound differences between the two candidates’ policies, and these differences are already proving enormously consequential to the American people. Under President Trump, the Affordable Care Act is being actively dismantled, environmental and consumer protections are being rolled back, international alliances and treaties are being threatened, and immigration policy has been thrown into turmoil, among other dramatic changes. In light of the stark policy choices facing voters in the 2016 election, it seems incredible that only five out of 150 front-page articles that The New York Times ran over the last, most critical months of the election, attempted to compare the candidate’s policies, while only 10 described the policies of either candidate in any detail.
In this context, 10 is an interesting figure because it is also the number of front-page stories the Times ran on the Hillary Clinton email scandal in just six days, from October 29 (the day after FBI Director James Comey announced his decision to reopen his investigation of possible wrongdoing by Clinton) through November 3, just five days before the election. When compared with the Times’s overall coverage of the campaign, the intensity of focus on this one issue is extraordinary. To reiterate, in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta). This intense focus on the email scandal cannot be written off as inconsequential: The Comey incident and its subsequent impact on Clinton’s approval rating among undecided voters could very well have tipped the election. (...)
Consistent with other studies of media coverage of the election, our analysis finds that The New York Times focused much more on “dramatic” issues like the horserace or personal scandals than on substantive policy issues. Moreover, when the paper did write about policy issues, it failed to mention important details, in some cases giving readers a misleading impression of the true state of affairs. If voters had wanted to educate themselves on issues such as healthcare, immigration, taxes, and economic policy—or how these issues would likely be affected by the election of either candidate as president—they would not have learned much from reading the Times. What they would have learned was that both candidates were plagued by scandal: Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server for government business while secretary of state, as well as allegations of possible conflicts of interest in the Clinton Foundation; and Trump over his failure to release his tax returns; his past business dealings; Trump University; the Trump Foundation; accusations of sexual harassment and assault; and numerous misogynistic, racist, and otherwise offensive remarks. What they would also have learned about was the ever-fluctuating state of the horse race: who was up and who was down; who might turn out and who might not; and who was happy or unhappy with whom about what.
To be clear, we do not believe the the Times’s coverage was worse than other mainstream news organizations, so much as it was typical of a broader failure of mainstream journalism to inform audiences of the very real and consequential issues at stake. In retrospect, it seems clear that the press in general made the mistake of assuming a Clinton victory was inevitable, and were setting themselves as credible critics of the next administration. Possibly this mistake arose from the failure of journalists to get out of their “hermetic bubble.” Possibly it was their misinterpretation of available polling data, which showed all along that a Trump victory, albeit unlikely, was far from inconceivable. These were understandable mistakes, but they were still mistakes. Yet, rather than acknowledging the possible impact their collective failure of imagination could have had on the election outcome, the mainstream news community has instead focused its critical attention everywhere but on themselves: fake news, Russian hackers, technology companies, algorithmic ranking, the alt-right, even on the American public.
To be fair, journalists were not the only community to be surprised by the outcome of the 2016 election—a great many informed observers, possibly including the candidate himself, failed to take the prospect of a Trump victory seriously. Also to be fair, the difficulty of adequately covering a campaign in which the “rules of the game” were repeatedly upended must surely have been formidable. But one could equally argue that Facebook could not have been expected to anticipate the misuse of its advertising platform to seed fake news stories. And one could just as easily argue that the difficulties facing tech companies in trading off between complicity in spreading intentional misinformation on the one hand, and censorship on the other hand, are every bit as formidable as those facing journalists trying to cover Trump. For journalists to excoriate the tech companies for their missteps while barely acknowledging their own reveals an important blind spot in the journalistic profession’s conception of itself.
by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild, Columbia Journalism Review | Read more:
Nevertheless, a longer and more detailed report by the same researchers shows that by any reasonable metric—including Facebook or Twitter shares, but also referrals from other media sites, number of published stories, etc.—the media ecosystem remains dominated by conventional (and mostly left-of-center) sources such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, HuffPost, CNN, and Politico.Given the attention these very same news outlets have lavished, post-election, on fake news shared via social media, it may come as a surprise that they themselves dominated social media traffic. While it may have been the case that the 20 most-shared fake news stories narrowly outperformed the 20 most-shared “real news” stories, the overall volume of stories produced by major newsrooms vastly outnumbers fake news. According to the same report, “The Washington Post produced more than 50,000 stories over the 18-month period, while The New York Times, CNN, and Huffington Post each published more than 30,000 stories.” Presumably not all of these stories were about the election, but each such story was also likely reported by many news outlets simultaneously. A rough estimate of thousands of election-related stories published by the mainstream media is therefore not unreasonable.
What did all these stories talk about? The research team investigated this question, counting sentences that appeared in mainstream media sources and classifying each as detailing one of several Clinton- or Trump-related issues. In particular, they classified each sentence as describing either a scandal (e.g., Clinton’s emails, Trump’s taxes) or a policy issue (Clinton and jobs, Trump and immigration). They found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.
To reiterate, these 65,000 sentences were written not by Russian hackers, but overwhelmingly by professional journalists employed at mainstream news organizations, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. To the extent that voters mistrusted Hillary Clinton, or considered her conduct as secretary of state to have been negligent or even potentially criminal, or were generally unaware of what her policies contained or how they may have differed from Donald Trump’s, these numbers suggest their views were influenced more by mainstream news sources than by fake news. (...)
The problem is this: As has become clear since the election, there were profound differences between the two candidates’ policies, and these differences are already proving enormously consequential to the American people. Under President Trump, the Affordable Care Act is being actively dismantled, environmental and consumer protections are being rolled back, international alliances and treaties are being threatened, and immigration policy has been thrown into turmoil, among other dramatic changes. In light of the stark policy choices facing voters in the 2016 election, it seems incredible that only five out of 150 front-page articles that The New York Times ran over the last, most critical months of the election, attempted to compare the candidate’s policies, while only 10 described the policies of either candidate in any detail.
In this context, 10 is an interesting figure because it is also the number of front-page stories the Times ran on the Hillary Clinton email scandal in just six days, from October 29 (the day after FBI Director James Comey announced his decision to reopen his investigation of possible wrongdoing by Clinton) through November 3, just five days before the election. When compared with the Times’s overall coverage of the campaign, the intensity of focus on this one issue is extraordinary. To reiterate, in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta). This intense focus on the email scandal cannot be written off as inconsequential: The Comey incident and its subsequent impact on Clinton’s approval rating among undecided voters could very well have tipped the election. (...)
Consistent with other studies of media coverage of the election, our analysis finds that The New York Times focused much more on “dramatic” issues like the horserace or personal scandals than on substantive policy issues. Moreover, when the paper did write about policy issues, it failed to mention important details, in some cases giving readers a misleading impression of the true state of affairs. If voters had wanted to educate themselves on issues such as healthcare, immigration, taxes, and economic policy—or how these issues would likely be affected by the election of either candidate as president—they would not have learned much from reading the Times. What they would have learned was that both candidates were plagued by scandal: Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server for government business while secretary of state, as well as allegations of possible conflicts of interest in the Clinton Foundation; and Trump over his failure to release his tax returns; his past business dealings; Trump University; the Trump Foundation; accusations of sexual harassment and assault; and numerous misogynistic, racist, and otherwise offensive remarks. What they would also have learned about was the ever-fluctuating state of the horse race: who was up and who was down; who might turn out and who might not; and who was happy or unhappy with whom about what.
To be clear, we do not believe the the Times’s coverage was worse than other mainstream news organizations, so much as it was typical of a broader failure of mainstream journalism to inform audiences of the very real and consequential issues at stake. In retrospect, it seems clear that the press in general made the mistake of assuming a Clinton victory was inevitable, and were setting themselves as credible critics of the next administration. Possibly this mistake arose from the failure of journalists to get out of their “hermetic bubble.” Possibly it was their misinterpretation of available polling data, which showed all along that a Trump victory, albeit unlikely, was far from inconceivable. These were understandable mistakes, but they were still mistakes. Yet, rather than acknowledging the possible impact their collective failure of imagination could have had on the election outcome, the mainstream news community has instead focused its critical attention everywhere but on themselves: fake news, Russian hackers, technology companies, algorithmic ranking, the alt-right, even on the American public.
To be fair, journalists were not the only community to be surprised by the outcome of the 2016 election—a great many informed observers, possibly including the candidate himself, failed to take the prospect of a Trump victory seriously. Also to be fair, the difficulty of adequately covering a campaign in which the “rules of the game” were repeatedly upended must surely have been formidable. But one could equally argue that Facebook could not have been expected to anticipate the misuse of its advertising platform to seed fake news stories. And one could just as easily argue that the difficulties facing tech companies in trading off between complicity in spreading intentional misinformation on the one hand, and censorship on the other hand, are every bit as formidable as those facing journalists trying to cover Trump. For journalists to excoriate the tech companies for their missteps while barely acknowledging their own reveals an important blind spot in the journalistic profession’s conception of itself.
by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild, Columbia Journalism Review | Read more:
Image: CJR
Thursday, December 7, 2017
Emergency Rooms Are Monopolies
Around 1 am on August 20, Ismael Saifan woke up with a terrible pain in his lower back, likely the result of moving furniture earlier that day.
“It was a very sharp muscle pain,” Saifan, a 39-year-old engineer, remembers. “I couldn’t move or sleep in any position. I was trying laying down, sitting down, nothing worked.”
Saifan went online to figure out where he could see a doctor. The only place open at that hour was Overland Park Regional Medical Center in his hometown of Overland Park, Kansas.
The doctor checked his blood pressure, asked about the pain, and gave him a muscle relaxant. The visit was quick and easy, lasting about 20 minutes.
But Saifan was shocked when he received bills totaling $2,429.84.
The bill included a $3.50 charge for the muscle relaxant. The rest — $2,426.34 — was from “facility fees” charged by the hospital and doctor for walking into the emergency room and seeking care.
Because Saifan’s health spending is still within his plan’s deductible, he is responsible for the entire amount.
“I called the insurance company to make sure the bill was real,” he says. “They said it was a reasonable price, and gave me a breakdown.”
There are 141 million visits to the emergency room each year, and nearly all of them (including Saifan’s) have a charge for something called a facility fee. This is the price of walking through the door and seeking service. It does not include any care provided.
Emergency rooms argue that these fees are necessary to keep their doors open, so they can be ready 24/7 to treat anything from a sore back to a gunshot wound. But there is also wide variation in how much hospitals charge for these fees, raising questions about how they are set and how closely they are tethered to overhead costs.
Most hospitals do not make these fees public. Patients typically learn what their emergency room facility fee is when they receive a bill weeks later. The fees can be hundreds or thousands of dollars. That’s why Vox has launched a year-long investigation into emergency room facility fees, to better understand how much they cost and how they affect patients.
Saifan’s bill was so expensive, it turns out, because the hospital used the facility fee typically reserved for complex, intensive emergency room visits.
Emergency room facility fees are usually coded on a 1 to 5 scale, to reflect the complexity of care delivered to the patient. Saifan’s visit where he received a muscle relaxant was coded by the doctor as a level 4 visit — the second highest — and came with hefty fees as a result.
The hospital billed a separate facility fee and chose level 3, typically reserved for moderately complex visits.
Saifan’s experience isn’t an anomaly: A new Vox analysis reveals that emergency rooms all across the country are increasingly using these higher-intensity codes, and that the price of these codes has increased sharply since 2009.
Vox worked with the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) to analyze 70 million insurance bills for emergency room visits from between 2009 and 2015. We focused on the prices that health plans paid hospitals for facility fees, not the hospital charges (which can often be inflated well above what patients actually pay).
We found that the price of these fees rose 89 percent between 2009 and 2015 — rising twice as fast as the price of outpatient health care, and four times as fast as overall health care spending.
Overall spending on emergency room fees rose by more than $3 billion between 2009 and 2015, despite the fact the HCCI database shows a slight (2 percent) decline in the number of emergency room fees billed in the same time period.
“It is having a dramatic effect on what people spend in a hospital setting,” says Niall Brennan, executive director of the Health Care Cost Institute. “And as we know, that has a trickle-down effect on premiums and benefits.”
“It was a very sharp muscle pain,” Saifan, a 39-year-old engineer, remembers. “I couldn’t move or sleep in any position. I was trying laying down, sitting down, nothing worked.”
Saifan went online to figure out where he could see a doctor. The only place open at that hour was Overland Park Regional Medical Center in his hometown of Overland Park, Kansas.
The doctor checked his blood pressure, asked about the pain, and gave him a muscle relaxant. The visit was quick and easy, lasting about 20 minutes.
But Saifan was shocked when he received bills totaling $2,429.84.The bill included a $3.50 charge for the muscle relaxant. The rest — $2,426.34 — was from “facility fees” charged by the hospital and doctor for walking into the emergency room and seeking care.
Because Saifan’s health spending is still within his plan’s deductible, he is responsible for the entire amount.
“I called the insurance company to make sure the bill was real,” he says. “They said it was a reasonable price, and gave me a breakdown.”
There are 141 million visits to the emergency room each year, and nearly all of them (including Saifan’s) have a charge for something called a facility fee. This is the price of walking through the door and seeking service. It does not include any care provided.
Emergency rooms argue that these fees are necessary to keep their doors open, so they can be ready 24/7 to treat anything from a sore back to a gunshot wound. But there is also wide variation in how much hospitals charge for these fees, raising questions about how they are set and how closely they are tethered to overhead costs.
Most hospitals do not make these fees public. Patients typically learn what their emergency room facility fee is when they receive a bill weeks later. The fees can be hundreds or thousands of dollars. That’s why Vox has launched a year-long investigation into emergency room facility fees, to better understand how much they cost and how they affect patients.
Saifan’s bill was so expensive, it turns out, because the hospital used the facility fee typically reserved for complex, intensive emergency room visits.
Emergency room facility fees are usually coded on a 1 to 5 scale, to reflect the complexity of care delivered to the patient. Saifan’s visit where he received a muscle relaxant was coded by the doctor as a level 4 visit — the second highest — and came with hefty fees as a result.
The hospital billed a separate facility fee and chose level 3, typically reserved for moderately complex visits.
Saifan’s experience isn’t an anomaly: A new Vox analysis reveals that emergency rooms all across the country are increasingly using these higher-intensity codes, and that the price of these codes has increased sharply since 2009.
Vox worked with the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) to analyze 70 million insurance bills for emergency room visits from between 2009 and 2015. We focused on the prices that health plans paid hospitals for facility fees, not the hospital charges (which can often be inflated well above what patients actually pay).
We found that the price of these fees rose 89 percent between 2009 and 2015 — rising twice as fast as the price of outpatient health care, and four times as fast as overall health care spending.
Overall spending on emergency room fees rose by more than $3 billion between 2009 and 2015, despite the fact the HCCI database shows a slight (2 percent) decline in the number of emergency room fees billed in the same time period.
“It is having a dramatic effect on what people spend in a hospital setting,” says Niall Brennan, executive director of the Health Care Cost Institute. “And as we know, that has a trickle-down effect on premiums and benefits.”
by Sarah Kliff, Vox | Read more:
Image: Amanda Northrop/Vox
Motel Living and Slowly Dying
By trade and self-identity, I am a novelist. But to keep the groceries coming, I am also an oil pipeline worker. They call me a “pig tracker,” which means I monitor the location of cleaning and diagnostic tools traveling through pipelines, and when I’m not in the field, I’m in a hotel somewhere along the line, sleeping my way toward my next shift.
The particular rhythms of what I do — track the pig in its journey beneath the prairies, hand off the job to my counterpart on the other shift, find a hotel near where I’ll rejoin the line, sleep, lather, rinse, repeat — have made me something of an unintentional expert on hotel living and on the America nobody dreams about seeing on vacation.
I travel by secondary and tertiary roads, skulking around the pipeline on 12-hour shifts, either midnight to noon or noon to midnight. I work alone, mostly. And when the shift is done, I catch my rest in places like Harrisonville, Missouri, and Iola, Kansas. Lapeer, Michigan, and Amherst, New York. Toledo, Ohio, and Thief River Falls, Minnesota. I’ve learned that Super 8s are not always super, and Comfort Inns sometimes afflict the comfortable. I rack up IHG points and Wyndham Rewards and Choice Privileges. I may never have to pay for a personal car rental again, so fulsome are my Enterprise points.
Sometimes I lose track of what day it is, or when, exactly, I’m going home again. But the places where I set my head stand ready to reorient me with a comfortable sameness. There’s the antiseptic smell of a well-cleaned lobby, the paper coffee cups in my room wrapped in plastic, the rattle and hum of the air-conditioning unit. When I arrive in the wee hours, the lonely night auditor is often all too happy to talk. When I leave at 11 p.m. for my next night shift, I often have to talk the clerk through my reasons for arriving and departing in the same 12-hour period. Twenty-four hours a day, there’s coffee of varying age and quality.
I’ve come to value the simple things: a clean room, reliable hot water, and a staff that respects a do-not-disturb sign. And learned the sublime wisdom of a song called “My Favourite Chords” by a Canadian band called the Weakerthans.
My father was an exploratory well digger, and I traveled with him every summer through the American West, far off the interstates, in a nomadic way that was worlds different from my life at home with my mother in Fort Worth, Texas.
In the summer of 1981, when I was 11 years old, I lived with him and my then-stepmother in a bottom-floor room at the Park Plaza Motel in Sidney, Montana. Dad was working near Watford City, North Dakota, about 50 miles east, but he used Montana and its lack of a sales tax as a home base. I’d ride out to the fields with him during the day, peeling around on my motorcycle, then return with him and his crew to Sidney in the evening, reuniting with my stepmother. The three of us would have dinner, watch some TV — it was the summer of Fernando Valenzuela’s miracle stint with the Log Angeles Dodgers — and then start the cycle again. (...)
My life in motels doesn’t bear much resemblance to what I’ve read or seen; it’s too ordinary, too predictable. I’m not Humbert Humbert, dragging his Lolita through the West, a step ahead of Clare Quilty. I’ve never met someone like Juan Chicoy, the impromptu innkeeper from John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus, or the precocious little girl Moonee and her crazy mom from the recent movie about permanent motel existence, The Florida Project. My stays are straight credit-card transactions, reimbursed by my employer, and generally last just a few hours before I move along again. My intimacy with these places runs no deeper than: “Welcome back, Mr. Lancaster.”
There is, of course, a darker, seemingly hopeless side to these homes away from home. In left-behind precincts of cities and towns — indeed, on the main drag that connects my comfortable suburban neighborhood in Billings, Montana, with downtown — you can find bedraggled motels where single-room occupancy often means a family of five sharing a sink, a shower, and maybe a kitchenette. These are the working destitute, or the pensioned-off. These folks are able to scrape together several hundred dollars for rent, but not the first and last months and a water deposit and a credit score required for a less expensive apartment, let alone the three-percent down on an FHA mortgage.
We tend to think of homelessness in terms of cardboard boxes on street grates and cars that double as living spaces, but that’s a small aperture of the overall problem. These past-their-glory motels house people who work hard — and who face crushing odds of ever getting ahead of their circumstances. And as we run the average rents in places like Seattle and San Francisco to the stratosphere, without an attendant increase in affordable housing, we’re falling deeper into crisis.
In Billings, where I live when I’m not in a motel, we have 110,000 people, and 621 of them are homeless kids in the public school system. That’s the total from the most recent full school year. Of those 600-plus, 104 live the peculiar form of it at motels with names like the Lazy K-T. By any measure, it’s a shameful number. Teachers and administrators at the schools write grant proposals for supplemental breakfast programs. My friends who oversee classrooms have mastered the subtle art of pulling a kid aside and, without shaming him, learning whether he has a winter coat. When the answer is no, they find a way to get him one.
Elizabeth Lloyd Fladung, who has photographed American families on the margins for the past two decades, told The Nation in 2015: “The sight of these iconic structures now serving as home to scores of destitute people who don’t seem to have any chance at the American Dream really shows just how little infrastructure there is to help poor people in need, and how much damage decades of wage stagnation has done.”
by Craig Lancaster, LARB | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The particular rhythms of what I do — track the pig in its journey beneath the prairies, hand off the job to my counterpart on the other shift, find a hotel near where I’ll rejoin the line, sleep, lather, rinse, repeat — have made me something of an unintentional expert on hotel living and on the America nobody dreams about seeing on vacation.
I travel by secondary and tertiary roads, skulking around the pipeline on 12-hour shifts, either midnight to noon or noon to midnight. I work alone, mostly. And when the shift is done, I catch my rest in places like Harrisonville, Missouri, and Iola, Kansas. Lapeer, Michigan, and Amherst, New York. Toledo, Ohio, and Thief River Falls, Minnesota. I’ve learned that Super 8s are not always super, and Comfort Inns sometimes afflict the comfortable. I rack up IHG points and Wyndham Rewards and Choice Privileges. I may never have to pay for a personal car rental again, so fulsome are my Enterprise points.Sometimes I lose track of what day it is, or when, exactly, I’m going home again. But the places where I set my head stand ready to reorient me with a comfortable sameness. There’s the antiseptic smell of a well-cleaned lobby, the paper coffee cups in my room wrapped in plastic, the rattle and hum of the air-conditioning unit. When I arrive in the wee hours, the lonely night auditor is often all too happy to talk. When I leave at 11 p.m. for my next night shift, I often have to talk the clerk through my reasons for arriving and departing in the same 12-hour period. Twenty-four hours a day, there’s coffee of varying age and quality.
I’ve come to value the simple things: a clean room, reliable hot water, and a staff that respects a do-not-disturb sign. And learned the sublime wisdom of a song called “My Favourite Chords” by a Canadian band called the Weakerthans.
I want to fall asleep / to the beat of you breathing / in a room near a truck stop / on a highway somewhere …The words are a concise demonstration of language’s power to inspire cinema in our heads. They also form a picture of my life. Because the truth is, I’ve been living in motels since I was a child.
¤
My father was an exploratory well digger, and I traveled with him every summer through the American West, far off the interstates, in a nomadic way that was worlds different from my life at home with my mother in Fort Worth, Texas.
In the summer of 1981, when I was 11 years old, I lived with him and my then-stepmother in a bottom-floor room at the Park Plaza Motel in Sidney, Montana. Dad was working near Watford City, North Dakota, about 50 miles east, but he used Montana and its lack of a sales tax as a home base. I’d ride out to the fields with him during the day, peeling around on my motorcycle, then return with him and his crew to Sidney in the evening, reuniting with my stepmother. The three of us would have dinner, watch some TV — it was the summer of Fernando Valenzuela’s miracle stint with the Log Angeles Dodgers — and then start the cycle again. (...)
My life in motels doesn’t bear much resemblance to what I’ve read or seen; it’s too ordinary, too predictable. I’m not Humbert Humbert, dragging his Lolita through the West, a step ahead of Clare Quilty. I’ve never met someone like Juan Chicoy, the impromptu innkeeper from John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus, or the precocious little girl Moonee and her crazy mom from the recent movie about permanent motel existence, The Florida Project. My stays are straight credit-card transactions, reimbursed by my employer, and generally last just a few hours before I move along again. My intimacy with these places runs no deeper than: “Welcome back, Mr. Lancaster.”
There is, of course, a darker, seemingly hopeless side to these homes away from home. In left-behind precincts of cities and towns — indeed, on the main drag that connects my comfortable suburban neighborhood in Billings, Montana, with downtown — you can find bedraggled motels where single-room occupancy often means a family of five sharing a sink, a shower, and maybe a kitchenette. These are the working destitute, or the pensioned-off. These folks are able to scrape together several hundred dollars for rent, but not the first and last months and a water deposit and a credit score required for a less expensive apartment, let alone the three-percent down on an FHA mortgage.
We tend to think of homelessness in terms of cardboard boxes on street grates and cars that double as living spaces, but that’s a small aperture of the overall problem. These past-their-glory motels house people who work hard — and who face crushing odds of ever getting ahead of their circumstances. And as we run the average rents in places like Seattle and San Francisco to the stratosphere, without an attendant increase in affordable housing, we’re falling deeper into crisis.
In Billings, where I live when I’m not in a motel, we have 110,000 people, and 621 of them are homeless kids in the public school system. That’s the total from the most recent full school year. Of those 600-plus, 104 live the peculiar form of it at motels with names like the Lazy K-T. By any measure, it’s a shameful number. Teachers and administrators at the schools write grant proposals for supplemental breakfast programs. My friends who oversee classrooms have mastered the subtle art of pulling a kid aside and, without shaming him, learning whether he has a winter coat. When the answer is no, they find a way to get him one.
Elizabeth Lloyd Fladung, who has photographed American families on the margins for the past two decades, told The Nation in 2015: “The sight of these iconic structures now serving as home to scores of destitute people who don’t seem to have any chance at the American Dream really shows just how little infrastructure there is to help poor people in need, and how much damage decades of wage stagnation has done.”
by Craig Lancaster, LARB | Read more:
Image: uncredited
This Poisonous Cult of Personality
Donald Trump’s election last year exposed an insidious politics of celebrity, one in which a redemptive personality is projected high above the slow toil of political parties and movements. As his latest tweets about Muslims confirm, this post-political figure seeks, above all, to commune with his entranced white nationalist supporters. Periodically offering them emotional catharsis, a powerful medium of self-expression at the White House these days, Trump makes sure that his fan base survives his multiple political and economic failures. This may be hard to admit but the path to such a presidency of spectacle and vicarious participation was paved by the previous occupant of the White House.
Barack Obama was the first “celebrity president” of the twenty-first century—“that is,” as Perry Anderson recently pointed out, “a politician whose very appearance was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and mellifluous, sufficed for that,” and for whom “personal popularity” mattered more than the fate of own party and policies.
Public life routinely features such sensations, figures in whom people invest great expectations based on nothing more than a captivation with their radiant personas. Youthful good looks, an unconventional marriage, and some intellectual showmanship helped turn Emmanuel Macron, virtually overnight, into the savior not just of France, but of Europe, too. Until the approval ratings of this dynamic millionaire collapsed, a glamour-struck media largely waived close scrutiny of his neoliberal faith in tax breaks for rich compatriots, and contempt for “slackers.”
Another example is Aung San Suu Kyi who, as a freedom fighter and prisoner of conscience, precluded any real examination of her politics, which have turned out to be abysmally sectarian, in tune with her electoral base among Myanmar’s Buddhist ethnic majority. Her personal sacrifices remained for too long the basis for assessing her political outlook, though the record of Robert Mugabe, among many other postcolonial leaders, had already proved that suffering for the cause of freedom is no guarantee of wise governance, and that today’s victims are likely to be tomorrow’s persecutors. (...)
The liberal Obama, however, was the greatest beneficiary of an age of rampant depoliticization, when public figures turned into blank receptacles and the urge to project private desires and frustrations onto them overrode the need to make sober political judgements. This craving for emotional communion was not confined to marginalized and voiceless citizens. Many writers and journalists closely identified with the literary intellectual they saw in Obama; they were thrilled to watch, I wrote in 2008, “one of their kind ascend to the West Wing,” and were seemingly unconcerned that “the overall decline in national fortunes” was likely to push their country “to the rancorous right.”
Obama continued to dazzle the literati even as he stepped up deportations of illegal immigrants and drone attacks, ruthlessly pursued whistle-blowers, and inaugurated the extrajudicial executions of American citizens. He exhorted African Americans to assume personal responsibility for their plight while absolving bankers of all responsibility for ruining the lives of millions of people. Yet, as with Trump and his loyal and captive audience today, support for Obama remained steadfast among African Americans and white liberals.
Obama’s supporters remain as defensive about their president as Trump’s fans are about theirs, even though Obama, kite-surfing with Richard Branson in the wake of Trump’s victory, and reassuring Wall Street with handsomely remunerated speeches, has affirmed his dedication to the one percent. But we should not be surprised and dismayed that Obama’s audacity of hope dwindled into some humdrum self-cherishing, or that Macron is now derided as “president of the rich.” The actual record of personality cults reveals the mendacity of hope. Real change always comes through the sustained struggles of countless people who often wish to remain unsung.
by Pankaj Mishra, NYRB | Read more:
Image:Jack Gruber/Pool/Reuters
[ed. Kennedy and Reagan would also be good examples.]
Barack Obama was the first “celebrity president” of the twenty-first century—“that is,” as Perry Anderson recently pointed out, “a politician whose very appearance was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and mellifluous, sufficed for that,” and for whom “personal popularity” mattered more than the fate of own party and policies.Public life routinely features such sensations, figures in whom people invest great expectations based on nothing more than a captivation with their radiant personas. Youthful good looks, an unconventional marriage, and some intellectual showmanship helped turn Emmanuel Macron, virtually overnight, into the savior not just of France, but of Europe, too. Until the approval ratings of this dynamic millionaire collapsed, a glamour-struck media largely waived close scrutiny of his neoliberal faith in tax breaks for rich compatriots, and contempt for “slackers.”
Another example is Aung San Suu Kyi who, as a freedom fighter and prisoner of conscience, precluded any real examination of her politics, which have turned out to be abysmally sectarian, in tune with her electoral base among Myanmar’s Buddhist ethnic majority. Her personal sacrifices remained for too long the basis for assessing her political outlook, though the record of Robert Mugabe, among many other postcolonial leaders, had already proved that suffering for the cause of freedom is no guarantee of wise governance, and that today’s victims are likely to be tomorrow’s persecutors. (...)
The liberal Obama, however, was the greatest beneficiary of an age of rampant depoliticization, when public figures turned into blank receptacles and the urge to project private desires and frustrations onto them overrode the need to make sober political judgements. This craving for emotional communion was not confined to marginalized and voiceless citizens. Many writers and journalists closely identified with the literary intellectual they saw in Obama; they were thrilled to watch, I wrote in 2008, “one of their kind ascend to the West Wing,” and were seemingly unconcerned that “the overall decline in national fortunes” was likely to push their country “to the rancorous right.”
Obama continued to dazzle the literati even as he stepped up deportations of illegal immigrants and drone attacks, ruthlessly pursued whistle-blowers, and inaugurated the extrajudicial executions of American citizens. He exhorted African Americans to assume personal responsibility for their plight while absolving bankers of all responsibility for ruining the lives of millions of people. Yet, as with Trump and his loyal and captive audience today, support for Obama remained steadfast among African Americans and white liberals.
Obama’s supporters remain as defensive about their president as Trump’s fans are about theirs, even though Obama, kite-surfing with Richard Branson in the wake of Trump’s victory, and reassuring Wall Street with handsomely remunerated speeches, has affirmed his dedication to the one percent. But we should not be surprised and dismayed that Obama’s audacity of hope dwindled into some humdrum self-cherishing, or that Macron is now derided as “president of the rich.” The actual record of personality cults reveals the mendacity of hope. Real change always comes through the sustained struggles of countless people who often wish to remain unsung.
by Pankaj Mishra, NYRB | Read more:
Image:Jack Gruber/Pool/Reuters
[ed. Kennedy and Reagan would also be good examples.]
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
How About a Military Tax?
One of the military’s biggest problems of the past five years is the political shell game Washington has played with defense spending and the Pentagon budget.
So, as Congress is now trying to rewrite the federal tax law for the first time in more than a decade, here’s an idea: A dedicated military tax.
Lawmakers could set a military tax to a specific rate. It would be clearly labeled on everyone’s pay stub. And the money would go directly to the Defense Department.
It’s not that bizarre of an idea. Your pay stub today has a line labeled “FICA” that is a dedicated tax earmarked by law to fund the Social Security trust fund that pays retirement checks to elderly citizens. And many states have dedicated taxes earmarked for schools and other specific government operations.
Why can’t Congress write a tax code that is clear and transparent about what the military gets? One that ensures the military gets a reliable funding stream? One that would be naturally adjusted for inflation every year?
That’s not the way it works right now.
Ultimately, about a quarter of all federal tax dollars goes to the Defense Department. But that money must first be collected through a general income tax, then put into some theoretical pool of all federal tax dollars so Congress can argue about it every year.
It becomes an endless cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The Defense Department gets whatever comes out of that annual, unpredictable circus.
At the crux of the disaster known as “sequestration” was lawmakers’ inability to agree on precisely how much money would go to the Defense Department and how much would go to everything else.
Lawmakers should just declare a military tax, and set it as a percentage of income. Rich people would pay more, as they always have. So, for example, instead of having millions of Americans in a 25 percent tax bracket and requiring them to pay a general purpose 25 percent tax, the tax law could instead have those same Americans pay 15 percent in general purpose, non-military taxes and 10 percent in military taxes. By law, that money would go straight to the Defense Department. No debate about it.
So, as Congress is now trying to rewrite the federal tax law for the first time in more than a decade, here’s an idea: A dedicated military tax.
Lawmakers could set a military tax to a specific rate. It would be clearly labeled on everyone’s pay stub. And the money would go directly to the Defense Department.It’s not that bizarre of an idea. Your pay stub today has a line labeled “FICA” that is a dedicated tax earmarked by law to fund the Social Security trust fund that pays retirement checks to elderly citizens. And many states have dedicated taxes earmarked for schools and other specific government operations.
Why can’t Congress write a tax code that is clear and transparent about what the military gets? One that ensures the military gets a reliable funding stream? One that would be naturally adjusted for inflation every year?
That’s not the way it works right now.
Ultimately, about a quarter of all federal tax dollars goes to the Defense Department. But that money must first be collected through a general income tax, then put into some theoretical pool of all federal tax dollars so Congress can argue about it every year.
It becomes an endless cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The Defense Department gets whatever comes out of that annual, unpredictable circus.
At the crux of the disaster known as “sequestration” was lawmakers’ inability to agree on precisely how much money would go to the Defense Department and how much would go to everything else.
Lawmakers should just declare a military tax, and set it as a percentage of income. Rich people would pay more, as they always have. So, for example, instead of having millions of Americans in a 25 percent tax bracket and requiring them to pay a general purpose 25 percent tax, the tax law could instead have those same Americans pay 15 percent in general purpose, non-military taxes and 10 percent in military taxes. By law, that money would go straight to the Defense Department. No debate about it.
by The Editors, Military Times | Read more:
Image: via
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Downward Spiral
We are talking about the NFL, which is to say that we are talking about a league that increasingly sees itself as presenting not only the most popular American sport—which football demonstrably is, at least going by television ratings and profits—but the most American American sport.
The sport’s elephantine self-regard plays out in ways big and small—and in ways that transcend the obvious patriotic signifiers that the NFL grafts to every available surface of its exhaustively branded viewing experience. It’s not just the booming fighter jet flyovers or the deployment of American flags visible from space when it’s time for the national anthem, although there is all that. It’s the bombastic anthem rituals—and the sidelong glances cast during that anthem to make sure that everyone around is revering the anthem appropriately. Some of that is the result of Colin Kaepernick’s quiet and quite probably career-ending anthem-based act of protest, but the NFL’s dedication to its specific and strange vision of conformity predated Kaepernick’s political awakening. The NFL is selective and self-serving and alternately priggish and thuggish in how it goes about maintaining its strange brand, but it is always singular. Every mania of our broader moment, from those grandiose delusions to the million points of cheesy graft, is reflected in the NFL itself. In retrospect, it was inevitable that the NFL would come into conflict with President Trump—when it comes to honking overdetermined proxies for Maximum America, there can be only one.
So there are the flyovers and the performative patriotism, but there is also the fact that the NFL was, for years, secretly billing the Pentagon for all those color guards and Hometown Hero promotions. And it’s maybe especially the fact that the commissioner’s office expressed shocked dismay upon the exposure last year of all of this and contritely returned a small percentage of the money the teams had received.
To a culture that’s addicted to spectacle and inured to dishonesty, the NFL delivers bulk loads of both: the pyrotechnically performative God-and-country stuff and the greasy profit-seeking, the stilted recitation of the Declaration of Independence before a football game and then the batshit branded hijinks that follow at the commercial breaks. There isn’t much distance, in broadcast time or pure blank weirdness, between those patriotic fife-and-drum montages and the ads in which a lone Budweiser Clydesdale convinces a small businessman not to commit suicide or a man eating Doritos is comically rocked in the nuts by a snack-minded Corgi or whatever. America, as the poet said, is hard to see. But in watching the NFL, at the baroque phase on what appears to be the back end of its zenith, we can see a reflection of the nation at something like the same point.
The NFL is financially healthy and also pretty luridly out of its mind, increasingly given to grandiose delusion and stubborn denial and spasms of executive sadism. And lately, it’s declining—in ways that are obvious for even casual viewers and evident during an average Sunday’s slate of games and in ways that the league might not fully feel for generations.
It’s America’s game all right, and if the NFL is sick, if it is even perhaps dying, it is for the most American of reasons—because it is increasingly ragged and rotten with corruption, and because it can’t quite come up with any other way that it would rather be.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Impunity
The sport’s elephantine self-regard plays out in ways big and small—and in ways that transcend the obvious patriotic signifiers that the NFL grafts to every available surface of its exhaustively branded viewing experience. It’s not just the booming fighter jet flyovers or the deployment of American flags visible from space when it’s time for the national anthem, although there is all that. It’s the bombastic anthem rituals—and the sidelong glances cast during that anthem to make sure that everyone around is revering the anthem appropriately. Some of that is the result of Colin Kaepernick’s quiet and quite probably career-ending anthem-based act of protest, but the NFL’s dedication to its specific and strange vision of conformity predated Kaepernick’s political awakening. The NFL is selective and self-serving and alternately priggish and thuggish in how it goes about maintaining its strange brand, but it is always singular. Every mania of our broader moment, from those grandiose delusions to the million points of cheesy graft, is reflected in the NFL itself. In retrospect, it was inevitable that the NFL would come into conflict with President Trump—when it comes to honking overdetermined proxies for Maximum America, there can be only one.
So there are the flyovers and the performative patriotism, but there is also the fact that the NFL was, for years, secretly billing the Pentagon for all those color guards and Hometown Hero promotions. And it’s maybe especially the fact that the commissioner’s office expressed shocked dismay upon the exposure last year of all of this and contritely returned a small percentage of the money the teams had received.To a culture that’s addicted to spectacle and inured to dishonesty, the NFL delivers bulk loads of both: the pyrotechnically performative God-and-country stuff and the greasy profit-seeking, the stilted recitation of the Declaration of Independence before a football game and then the batshit branded hijinks that follow at the commercial breaks. There isn’t much distance, in broadcast time or pure blank weirdness, between those patriotic fife-and-drum montages and the ads in which a lone Budweiser Clydesdale convinces a small businessman not to commit suicide or a man eating Doritos is comically rocked in the nuts by a snack-minded Corgi or whatever. America, as the poet said, is hard to see. But in watching the NFL, at the baroque phase on what appears to be the back end of its zenith, we can see a reflection of the nation at something like the same point.
The NFL is financially healthy and also pretty luridly out of its mind, increasingly given to grandiose delusion and stubborn denial and spasms of executive sadism. And lately, it’s declining—in ways that are obvious for even casual viewers and evident during an average Sunday’s slate of games and in ways that the league might not fully feel for generations.
It’s America’s game all right, and if the NFL is sick, if it is even perhaps dying, it is for the most American of reasons—because it is increasingly ragged and rotten with corruption, and because it can’t quite come up with any other way that it would rather be.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Impunity
There is a door that opens while watching a bad NFL game on TV, a gateway into something very much like an out-of-body experience. It’s not an especially desirable out-of-body experience, to be sure, but there’s something about being subjected to a NFL game at its worst that grants even the most devout fans the opportunity to see how football looks to people who absolutely hate football. Witness enough off-tackle plunges for one-yard gains, then watch as they are negated by offsetting penalties, and something reveals itself, even to those of us who enjoy the game.
It is not pretty. The grunting, juddering, anti-flow of the broader game, the rote brutality and steak-headed backwardness of the action at the play-by-play level, the sudden blundering intrusion of all those honking commercials—for achingly sincere domestic macro-pilsners, for strapping trucks and their loud and swaggering drive-train warranties, for extremely emotional insurance companies and also weirdly ironic insurance companies—at every stoppage of play. In the most basic sense this is just what the average NFL game is, but more worrying for the lords of the league, it is also a description of what is an objectively not-great television show—one with the queasy pacing of rush-hour traffic, the jarring violence of a car accident, and the fuddy legalism of traffic court, and that somehow manages to be three hours long.
For people who don’t like watching the NFL, every excruciating moment of every game looks like this. For those of us who enjoy it, against or despite our better political and aesthetic judgment, that description only fits the worst shitshow jackpot: muddy punt-offs in Cleveland, for example, or the groggy Sunday morning games that the NFL has lately played in front of rustling, uninterested crowds at London’s Wembley Stadium as part of its stalled attempt to open international markets.
In recent years, though, the games resembling out-of-body experiences have become worryingly common. The sudden glut of ultra-shitty games probably isn’t the greatest long-term problem facing the sport, but it’s also the most obvious and inescapable challenge to all the solemn covenant-pageantry of the NFL; it’s hard to civically sanctify the experience of being bored.
Not every game can be a classic, of course, or even competitive. But the palpable decline in game quality, week by week and 12-9 game by 12-9 game, is neither incidental nor accidental but happening seemingly by design—the natural result of teams taking cheap-out shortcuts in constructing their rosters, and a high-volume and highly conservative coaching style that emphasizes an empty efficiency over any of the unpredictabilities that make games worth watching.
Put another way, the specific nature of the league’s declining ratings is a reflection of the limited appeal of spending three hours watching quarterbacks rack up four-yard completions. As The Ringer’s Kevin Clark points out, the absolute number of people watching NFL games hasn’t declined, but those viewers are watching for increasingly brief periods of time. “Fans are tuning in and then tuning out,” Clark writes. “If that doesn’t scare the league, then nothing will.”
Gladiators on the Make
Here’s the thing, though: the NFL not only doesn’t seem scared, it doesn’t seem to care at all. It’s broadly understood that NFL football is not terribly good at the moment. If you credit the lamentations of the anonymous front-office-types who tend to pop up in stories complaining, always complaining, about how unprepared today’s college players are for the pro game or the dearth of NFL-ready quarterbacks available through the NFL draft, the near future does not look great, either. Factor in a steady decline in youth football participation that extends back to the first stories about the link between football and brain injuries (such as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) more than a decade ago and it’s tough to feel great about the long-term outlook.
Rich television deals ensure that profitability is locked in for the foreseeable future, and ratings are only slightly off their old Olympian standard. But the NFL currently feels very much like a league in decline—the league seems in a real way to have lost interest in football, or in trying to stop the league’s broader skid. There are and will always be bad teams, but the NFL in 2017 is remarkable for the number of teams that appear not even to be trying to compete. This includes not just teams embarking on variously forward-thinking tank schemes to gain advantageous position in upcoming drafts, or the roughly equal number of teams that are plainly institutionally incompetent. The ones that stand out most dramatically are those that are plainly not trying to do anything but bump along the bottoms of their divisions and collect their share of the $39.6 billion in television revenues that the league’s thirty-two teams will divide between 2014 and 2022. (...)
It’s not quite sufficient to say that the NFL is an owners’ league. It absolutely is, in the sense that every decision the league makes is made to advance the financial interests and flatter the various vanities of the owners. But, on a more mundane level, the league’s current deemphasizing of the game of football in favor of oafish executive theater—the protean expansion of the league’s metastatic rulebook, the endless rounds of stern but vague disciplinary action that issue from the commissioner’s office—is more than the owners dictating the way that their sport is overseen and organized. It is the owners making the league more explicitly about them: not just what they want, but what they do.
From a fan’s perspective, this is a bad choice for a bunch of reasons, starting with the fact that the people playing football in today’s NFL are stronger and faster than any people who have ever played the game before and that the owners are interchangeable soft pink guys whiffing on high-fives in their luxury boxes. Those are the bosses, though, and so the league’s appeal to fans is increasingly less about strength than power—less about the physical geniuses tossing or catching forty-yard lasers than the proper management and, where necessary, punishment of those players. The fantasy the league sells is less about the vicarious experience of a superhuman specimen like Odell Beckham Jr. than the vicarious experience of controlling such a specimen—whether on a fantasy team or through taking a hard line in real-world salary negotiations.
It’s possible to see this collective will-to-power as part of a slick and subtle bit of anti-labor propagandizing on the part of a caste whose most deeply held ideal has always been paying players as little as possible. But it’s just as easy to see it as a simple failure of imagination by rich men who have come to believe that they are more important and more interesting than the strange, violent, astonishing game on which this is all leveraged.
It is not pretty. The grunting, juddering, anti-flow of the broader game, the rote brutality and steak-headed backwardness of the action at the play-by-play level, the sudden blundering intrusion of all those honking commercials—for achingly sincere domestic macro-pilsners, for strapping trucks and their loud and swaggering drive-train warranties, for extremely emotional insurance companies and also weirdly ironic insurance companies—at every stoppage of play. In the most basic sense this is just what the average NFL game is, but more worrying for the lords of the league, it is also a description of what is an objectively not-great television show—one with the queasy pacing of rush-hour traffic, the jarring violence of a car accident, and the fuddy legalism of traffic court, and that somehow manages to be three hours long.
For people who don’t like watching the NFL, every excruciating moment of every game looks like this. For those of us who enjoy it, against or despite our better political and aesthetic judgment, that description only fits the worst shitshow jackpot: muddy punt-offs in Cleveland, for example, or the groggy Sunday morning games that the NFL has lately played in front of rustling, uninterested crowds at London’s Wembley Stadium as part of its stalled attempt to open international markets.
In recent years, though, the games resembling out-of-body experiences have become worryingly common. The sudden glut of ultra-shitty games probably isn’t the greatest long-term problem facing the sport, but it’s also the most obvious and inescapable challenge to all the solemn covenant-pageantry of the NFL; it’s hard to civically sanctify the experience of being bored.
Not every game can be a classic, of course, or even competitive. But the palpable decline in game quality, week by week and 12-9 game by 12-9 game, is neither incidental nor accidental but happening seemingly by design—the natural result of teams taking cheap-out shortcuts in constructing their rosters, and a high-volume and highly conservative coaching style that emphasizes an empty efficiency over any of the unpredictabilities that make games worth watching.
Put another way, the specific nature of the league’s declining ratings is a reflection of the limited appeal of spending three hours watching quarterbacks rack up four-yard completions. As The Ringer’s Kevin Clark points out, the absolute number of people watching NFL games hasn’t declined, but those viewers are watching for increasingly brief periods of time. “Fans are tuning in and then tuning out,” Clark writes. “If that doesn’t scare the league, then nothing will.”
Gladiators on the Make
Here’s the thing, though: the NFL not only doesn’t seem scared, it doesn’t seem to care at all. It’s broadly understood that NFL football is not terribly good at the moment. If you credit the lamentations of the anonymous front-office-types who tend to pop up in stories complaining, always complaining, about how unprepared today’s college players are for the pro game or the dearth of NFL-ready quarterbacks available through the NFL draft, the near future does not look great, either. Factor in a steady decline in youth football participation that extends back to the first stories about the link between football and brain injuries (such as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) more than a decade ago and it’s tough to feel great about the long-term outlook.
Rich television deals ensure that profitability is locked in for the foreseeable future, and ratings are only slightly off their old Olympian standard. But the NFL currently feels very much like a league in decline—the league seems in a real way to have lost interest in football, or in trying to stop the league’s broader skid. There are and will always be bad teams, but the NFL in 2017 is remarkable for the number of teams that appear not even to be trying to compete. This includes not just teams embarking on variously forward-thinking tank schemes to gain advantageous position in upcoming drafts, or the roughly equal number of teams that are plainly institutionally incompetent. The ones that stand out most dramatically are those that are plainly not trying to do anything but bump along the bottoms of their divisions and collect their share of the $39.6 billion in television revenues that the league’s thirty-two teams will divide between 2014 and 2022. (...)
It’s not quite sufficient to say that the NFL is an owners’ league. It absolutely is, in the sense that every decision the league makes is made to advance the financial interests and flatter the various vanities of the owners. But, on a more mundane level, the league’s current deemphasizing of the game of football in favor of oafish executive theater—the protean expansion of the league’s metastatic rulebook, the endless rounds of stern but vague disciplinary action that issue from the commissioner’s office—is more than the owners dictating the way that their sport is overseen and organized. It is the owners making the league more explicitly about them: not just what they want, but what they do.
From a fan’s perspective, this is a bad choice for a bunch of reasons, starting with the fact that the people playing football in today’s NFL are stronger and faster than any people who have ever played the game before and that the owners are interchangeable soft pink guys whiffing on high-fives in their luxury boxes. Those are the bosses, though, and so the league’s appeal to fans is increasingly less about strength than power—less about the physical geniuses tossing or catching forty-yard lasers than the proper management and, where necessary, punishment of those players. The fantasy the league sells is less about the vicarious experience of a superhuman specimen like Odell Beckham Jr. than the vicarious experience of controlling such a specimen—whether on a fantasy team or through taking a hard line in real-world salary negotiations.
It’s possible to see this collective will-to-power as part of a slick and subtle bit of anti-labor propagandizing on the part of a caste whose most deeply held ideal has always been paying players as little as possible. But it’s just as easy to see it as a simple failure of imagination by rich men who have come to believe that they are more important and more interesting than the strange, violent, astonishing game on which this is all leveraged.
by David Roth, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Scott Boehm/AP Photo
[ed. See also: Is This the End of the NFL?]
Monday, December 4, 2017
At Least They’re Not Even Pretending Anymore
I’m not much for conspiracy theories, but I’m almost convinced that every Senate Republican is secretly working for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign. They certainly seem to be doing everything possible to reinforce the image of the Republican Party as a gang of plutocrats committed to destroying what’s left of the social safety net and handing out tax cuts to the already-extremely-rich. By passing a massive corporate tax cut in the middle of the night, they’ve basically written Sanders’ presidential campaign speech for him: “The Republican Party says they stand for ordinary Americans, but the only significant piece of legislation they have passed has been a massive tax giveaway to large corporations. They don’t care about you, they care about CEOs, billionaires, and billionaire CEOs.”
What’s refreshing about the tax bill is that Republicans are now barely even pretending that they care about anything beyond making rich people richer. Usually, they make at least some effort to convince the public that their policies come from a Very Serious Concern About Deficits or are Just Basic Economics. No longer: politicians who have spent a lifetime crowing about how government spending is out of control and the deficit is too high have just voted overnight to add a trillion dollars to it. The nice thing about this is that nobody ever again needs to listen to the Republicans when they insist that they oppose social spending because of Principles of Fiscal Responsibility. (Except Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, the only Republicanto actually consistently uphold his anti-deficit principles by voting no on the tax bill. Bob Corker still gets to talk about Fiscal Responsibility without being instantly laughed out of the room. But none of the others.)
And as for Basic Economics, turns out Republicans don’t care about that either. The economic arguments for the tax giveaway are so thin that it barely even seems as if the party is trying to persuade anyone. Larry Kudlow at the National Review wrote about 600 words, declaring without citing any actual economic research that the bill would benefit everyone, “will generate way more growth and investment than mainstream forecasters suggest,” and that everyone who said it wouldn’t was delusional. (Side note: I had always assumed because he is a prominent economics commentator that Kudlow was an actual academic economist, but it turns out he dropped out of his master’s program and doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree in the subject.)
There was only the barest effort to suggest that professional economists thought this was a good idea; a Republican list of “economists” who endorsed the plan included an ex-felon, an office assistant, and person who may not even actually exist. Actual economist Brad DeLong—certainly no socialist—was so appalled at the self-contradictory misrepresentations of the few mainstream economists willing to sign onto the plan that he believed the entire profession’s integrity was threatened. A selection of several dozen of the world’s top economists, surveyed by the University of Chicago, were almost unanimous in their conclusion that Republicans’ claims about how the tax cuts would affect both deficits and economic growth were either unproven or false.
Republicans haven’t even tried to explain the mechanism by which the economic growth they promise would be dispersed to workers. Corporations are, to their credit, not saying they’re going to pass on the benefits to their lowest-paid employees, but are just openly salivating at the windfall profits they’ll enjoy. Every aspect of the Republican tax giveaway (which for some reason even staunch critics annoyingly continue to call “reform”), from its being rammed through with indecipherable handwritten changes in the middle of the night to its screwing over of graduate students, makes it look more like an open act of class warfare by the rich. Republicans have the votes in Congress to do as they please, so there is no longer any need to provide justifications for their actions. Nobody can stop them, so they can be as openly sinister and greedy as they please, punishing low-income people and rewarding the rich. (That “refreshing honesty” is kind of the paradox of Donald Trump himself: though he’s obviously an extremely dishonest person, he doesn’t really try to disguise the fact that he’s a selfish narcissistic plutocrat who cares solely about other plutocrats. It’s helpful to the left to have Republican economic policy represented by loathsome French monarch types like Steve Mnuchin and Louise Linton.)
Unfortunately, since Democrats have almost no political power, there’s nothing they can actually do to stop this. And since they don’t really have effective grassroots organizations, they can’t really mobilize popular protest either. The only good news is that by choosing to spend their time and energy doing nothing more than handing money to the upper middle class and rich, and thereby worsening the government’s financial situation in ways that will provide a ready excuse for cutting social services down the road, Republicans are making it easier and easier for Democrats to mount successful challenges to them in 2018 and 2020. When people see their insurance premiums balloon, and see America’s catastrophic inequality get even worse, the tax bill will make it quite easy to point to a culprit. The nice thing about Republicans controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency, to the extent that “nice” can ever be the right word, is that everything that happens now is on one party’s shoulders.
The only question is whether Democrats will successfully be able to take advantage of this opportunity. Past experience suggests that they’ll stumble: they’re not very good at formulating successful economic messages, because of the uncomfortable fact that they, too, are ultimately a party of the rich. It’s somewhat frustrating that party leaders didn’t do more to mobilize the public around the tax bill, the way they did on ObamaCare. Perhaps they reason that if it passes, the Republicans will seal their own electoral fate. But “allowing others to make things worse so that you can make them better” often doesn’t work out the way you expect it to (see, e.g., the Democrats who encouraged Republicans to nominate Trump). In a class war, you need to be fighting at every moment. (And make no mistake, this is a war by the rich against the poor.)
What’s refreshing about the tax bill is that Republicans are now barely even pretending that they care about anything beyond making rich people richer. Usually, they make at least some effort to convince the public that their policies come from a Very Serious Concern About Deficits or are Just Basic Economics. No longer: politicians who have spent a lifetime crowing about how government spending is out of control and the deficit is too high have just voted overnight to add a trillion dollars to it. The nice thing about this is that nobody ever again needs to listen to the Republicans when they insist that they oppose social spending because of Principles of Fiscal Responsibility. (Except Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, the only Republicanto actually consistently uphold his anti-deficit principles by voting no on the tax bill. Bob Corker still gets to talk about Fiscal Responsibility without being instantly laughed out of the room. But none of the others.)
And as for Basic Economics, turns out Republicans don’t care about that either. The economic arguments for the tax giveaway are so thin that it barely even seems as if the party is trying to persuade anyone. Larry Kudlow at the National Review wrote about 600 words, declaring without citing any actual economic research that the bill would benefit everyone, “will generate way more growth and investment than mainstream forecasters suggest,” and that everyone who said it wouldn’t was delusional. (Side note: I had always assumed because he is a prominent economics commentator that Kudlow was an actual academic economist, but it turns out he dropped out of his master’s program and doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree in the subject.)There was only the barest effort to suggest that professional economists thought this was a good idea; a Republican list of “economists” who endorsed the plan included an ex-felon, an office assistant, and person who may not even actually exist. Actual economist Brad DeLong—certainly no socialist—was so appalled at the self-contradictory misrepresentations of the few mainstream economists willing to sign onto the plan that he believed the entire profession’s integrity was threatened. A selection of several dozen of the world’s top economists, surveyed by the University of Chicago, were almost unanimous in their conclusion that Republicans’ claims about how the tax cuts would affect both deficits and economic growth were either unproven or false.
Republicans haven’t even tried to explain the mechanism by which the economic growth they promise would be dispersed to workers. Corporations are, to their credit, not saying they’re going to pass on the benefits to their lowest-paid employees, but are just openly salivating at the windfall profits they’ll enjoy. Every aspect of the Republican tax giveaway (which for some reason even staunch critics annoyingly continue to call “reform”), from its being rammed through with indecipherable handwritten changes in the middle of the night to its screwing over of graduate students, makes it look more like an open act of class warfare by the rich. Republicans have the votes in Congress to do as they please, so there is no longer any need to provide justifications for their actions. Nobody can stop them, so they can be as openly sinister and greedy as they please, punishing low-income people and rewarding the rich. (That “refreshing honesty” is kind of the paradox of Donald Trump himself: though he’s obviously an extremely dishonest person, he doesn’t really try to disguise the fact that he’s a selfish narcissistic plutocrat who cares solely about other plutocrats. It’s helpful to the left to have Republican economic policy represented by loathsome French monarch types like Steve Mnuchin and Louise Linton.)
Unfortunately, since Democrats have almost no political power, there’s nothing they can actually do to stop this. And since they don’t really have effective grassroots organizations, they can’t really mobilize popular protest either. The only good news is that by choosing to spend their time and energy doing nothing more than handing money to the upper middle class and rich, and thereby worsening the government’s financial situation in ways that will provide a ready excuse for cutting social services down the road, Republicans are making it easier and easier for Democrats to mount successful challenges to them in 2018 and 2020. When people see their insurance premiums balloon, and see America’s catastrophic inequality get even worse, the tax bill will make it quite easy to point to a culprit. The nice thing about Republicans controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency, to the extent that “nice” can ever be the right word, is that everything that happens now is on one party’s shoulders.
The only question is whether Democrats will successfully be able to take advantage of this opportunity. Past experience suggests that they’ll stumble: they’re not very good at formulating successful economic messages, because of the uncomfortable fact that they, too, are ultimately a party of the rich. It’s somewhat frustrating that party leaders didn’t do more to mobilize the public around the tax bill, the way they did on ObamaCare. Perhaps they reason that if it passes, the Republicans will seal their own electoral fate. But “allowing others to make things worse so that you can make them better” often doesn’t work out the way you expect it to (see, e.g., the Democrats who encouraged Republicans to nominate Trump). In a class war, you need to be fighting at every moment. (And make no mistake, this is a war by the rich against the poor.)
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The End of the Social Era Can't Come Soon Enough
Many people imagine 19th-century antebellum America as a frontier fantasia: men with handlebar mustaches sitting in dusty saloons, kicking back moonshine whiskey, as a piano player picks out tunes in the background. In reality, though, life was a little more sordid: Americans spent their time after work in fully legal heroin dens; in 1885, opium and cocaine were even given to children to help with teething. “Cocaine Toothache Drops,” which were marketed as presenting an “instantaneous cure” were sold for 15 cents a box. Today, in the midst of our opioid crisis, we hear about this past and wonder unequivocally, what the hell were they thinking?
I often wonder the same thing when I think about social media and its current domination of our society. Will a future generation look back in 10, 20, or maybe 100 years from now and wonder, mystifyingly, why a generation of humans believed in these platforms despite mounting evidence that they were tearing society apart—being used as terrorist recruitment tools, facilitating bullying, driving up anxiety, and undermining our elections—despite the obvious benefits and facilitations they provide? Indeed, some of the people who gave us these platforms are already beginning to wonder if this is the case. Last month, I wrote a piece detailing how some early Facebook employees now feel about the monster they have created. As one early Facebook employee told me, “I lay awake at night thinking about all the things we built in the early days and what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way.”
After the piece published, I expected to receive angry e-mails and text messages from current or former Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram employees. Instead, my inbox was flooded with former (and even current!) employees of these social networks, who confided that they felt the same way. Some even mentioned they had abandoned the platforms themselves. The people who reached out ranged in pay grade from engineers to C-suite executives. Some venture capitalists who once funded the companies, or their competitors, have told me that they no longer use them—or do so sparingly. After witnessing Trump’s use of social networks, Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures wrote last month that he had deleted Facebook and Twitter from his phone. “This has really had a massive improvement on every day of my life in ways I can’t describe unless you try it yourself,” he wrote. This squares with the countless journalists who have told me they have deleted their accounts, removed the apps from their phone, or simply walked away from the world of social media.
When I noticed one religiously Twitter-loving V.C. had become dormant on the platform, I e-mailed him to ask if he was O.K. His response: “Having a hard time imagining why I would come back [to Twitter]. Feels like an addictive, inflammatory disease that I have kicked, much to my immune system’s pleasure.” As my colleague Maya Kosoff wrote this week, the social-media boom, powered by the growth of mobile computing, is over. “Whether the tech industry can move beyond mining our social anxieties to sell ads, or feeding our anger to increase engagement, may require renegotiating a new relationship between the Bay Area and the rest of the country,” she aptly pointed out. It is a feeling that, ironically, coexists in certain quadrants of the Bay Area and the rest of the country.
I for one, am part of that group now (and have been for months). I deleted Instagram, Facebook, and Snap from my phone. I now log onto Facebook once a month, if that (and it’s more for a drive-by look to make sure no one has messaged me on there, rather than to like a post or comment on a picture). I haven’t logged into Snap in a year or more. I went from sharing a picture on Instagram three times a day, to now doing so three times a year. While I still use Twitter sparingly for professional purposes, I delete the app from my phone on weekends because looking at it either makes me sad, angry, or anxious. (I can’t recall the last time I looked at social media and felt happy afterwards, or even enriched by the experience.) This might not seem like much on the surface, but this is coming from someone who loved Twitter so much that I chose to write a book about it.
Yes, it’s true that we’ve heard this all before—that people are abandoning social media, that the platforms are doomed. The New York Times has written variations on that story so many times over, it could have been a standing column in the business section of the paper. But I do believe that this time is different, the beginning of a massive shift, and I believe it’s the fault of these social networks.
I often wonder the same thing when I think about social media and its current domination of our society. Will a future generation look back in 10, 20, or maybe 100 years from now and wonder, mystifyingly, why a generation of humans believed in these platforms despite mounting evidence that they were tearing society apart—being used as terrorist recruitment tools, facilitating bullying, driving up anxiety, and undermining our elections—despite the obvious benefits and facilitations they provide? Indeed, some of the people who gave us these platforms are already beginning to wonder if this is the case. Last month, I wrote a piece detailing how some early Facebook employees now feel about the monster they have created. As one early Facebook employee told me, “I lay awake at night thinking about all the things we built in the early days and what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way.”After the piece published, I expected to receive angry e-mails and text messages from current or former Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram employees. Instead, my inbox was flooded with former (and even current!) employees of these social networks, who confided that they felt the same way. Some even mentioned they had abandoned the platforms themselves. The people who reached out ranged in pay grade from engineers to C-suite executives. Some venture capitalists who once funded the companies, or their competitors, have told me that they no longer use them—or do so sparingly. After witnessing Trump’s use of social networks, Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures wrote last month that he had deleted Facebook and Twitter from his phone. “This has really had a massive improvement on every day of my life in ways I can’t describe unless you try it yourself,” he wrote. This squares with the countless journalists who have told me they have deleted their accounts, removed the apps from their phone, or simply walked away from the world of social media.
When I noticed one religiously Twitter-loving V.C. had become dormant on the platform, I e-mailed him to ask if he was O.K. His response: “Having a hard time imagining why I would come back [to Twitter]. Feels like an addictive, inflammatory disease that I have kicked, much to my immune system’s pleasure.” As my colleague Maya Kosoff wrote this week, the social-media boom, powered by the growth of mobile computing, is over. “Whether the tech industry can move beyond mining our social anxieties to sell ads, or feeding our anger to increase engagement, may require renegotiating a new relationship between the Bay Area and the rest of the country,” she aptly pointed out. It is a feeling that, ironically, coexists in certain quadrants of the Bay Area and the rest of the country.
I for one, am part of that group now (and have been for months). I deleted Instagram, Facebook, and Snap from my phone. I now log onto Facebook once a month, if that (and it’s more for a drive-by look to make sure no one has messaged me on there, rather than to like a post or comment on a picture). I haven’t logged into Snap in a year or more. I went from sharing a picture on Instagram three times a day, to now doing so three times a year. While I still use Twitter sparingly for professional purposes, I delete the app from my phone on weekends because looking at it either makes me sad, angry, or anxious. (I can’t recall the last time I looked at social media and felt happy afterwards, or even enriched by the experience.) This might not seem like much on the surface, but this is coming from someone who loved Twitter so much that I chose to write a book about it.
Yes, it’s true that we’ve heard this all before—that people are abandoning social media, that the platforms are doomed. The New York Times has written variations on that story so many times over, it could have been a standing column in the business section of the paper. But I do believe that this time is different, the beginning of a massive shift, and I believe it’s the fault of these social networks.
by Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: via
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Is It Too Late for Robert Mueller to Save Us?
We talk a lot these days about how the United States has sorted itself into two distinct media bubbles, and all the ways in which those bubbles become self-reinforcing and reality-denying. But there is another way in which the perfect epistemic closure that characterizes this moment continues to play out. On Friday, former national security adviser Michael Flynn agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. This moment will prove to be incredibly important, or not important at all. The importance or nonimportance of Flynn’s plea will depend on whether the law and legal conclusions continue to matter going forward, or whether they matter not at all. This is the question all of us are asking all day every day: Is the rule of law an escape hatch or a relic?
Like most people on the left, I have spent the past year putting great faith in the courts and legal institutions to act as a check on Donald Trump, maintaining this faith even as Trump fired career lawyers like James Comey and Sally Yates and replaced them with ideologues and thugs. And like most people on the left, I placed an enormous amount of confidence in Robert Mueller as the embodiment of the principle that Trump could not escape the oncoming steamroller of justice and legal liability. Even as we remained uncertain whether our political leaders were up to the task of sidelining the Trump train of destruction, we took solace in the fact that the last grown-ups in America were hard at work in the special counsel’s office. And no, they don’t spend their weekends on the golf course.
In recent weeks, and most especially in this past week, I’d begun to suspect that the forces of chaos and nihilism that stand against Mueller’s project might swallow whatever outcomes he produced. The shocking norm-and-truth defiance of the GOP tax bill, the refusal of the GOP leadership to criticize or even comprehend the enormous violence done by Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets, the president’s staggering support for the candidacy of Roy Moore, the silent Republican collusion to the seating of demonstrably unfit judges, and the virulence of the White House’s attacks on the press all contributed to a general sense that absolutely everything was broken and that Democrats had lost whatever momentum they had to halt this chaos.
In our ongoing national nightmare of creeping authoritarianism, we talk a good amount about normalization and the numbing effects of a barrage of shocking daily news. But I have also tried to be vigilant about all the ways in which magical thinking about law and lawyers—this is a nation of laws, not men, we’re told—can also numb us, and lead to a declining sense of agency or ownership.
Democrats don’t like giving up on their institutions easily, and the Mueller investigation has served as both the best and the worst manifestation of that alluring Democratic reasonableness. So long as he is working away, filing documents and convening grand juries, nobody needs to take to the streets. But as the year has progressed, it’s become clear that absolutely nothing will persuade Trump supporters and Republicans in Congress that it’s time to disavow the president—not lying, not spilling state secrets, not abject failure in crisis management, and not openly performed corruption. Given that reality, it often feels like it wouldn’t be enough for Mueller to hand us a smoking gun and an indictment. What if they threw a conviction and nobody came?
It seems as though truth and law are forever losing ground in the footrace against open looting and overt totalitarianism. The more abjectly deranged Trump’s behavior and the more Republicans in Congress cover for him, the less likely it is that anything Mueller can magic up in his underground hall of justice will matter. Trump’s legal antagonists like to think that the next legal “tick, tick, tick, boom” will be the one that ends all this chaos. But with every passing day, as Trump escapes consequences and attacks the courts and the press, the chances that a “tick, tick, tick, boom” will be played off as #fakenews also increase.
I’ve been thinking that America is operating along two parallel legal tracks. On one track is the chug-chug of law and order, as embodied in the Mueller investigation. On the other is the daily mayhem and denialism and circus-performing of the present White House. I tend to worry that with every passing day, the circus is training us to ignore, discredit, devalue, or disbelieve what’s happening on the other track. By the time the Mueller train gets to its final station, the norms that would ordinarily lead to impeachment proceedingsmight be tiny piles of yellow legal pad–shaped cinders. And then it really would be time to take to the streets.
For the past year I’ve been trying to understand what exactly the Trump era has been training us to become. Passive, certainly. Overwhelmed and anxious and unable to focus, without a doubt. But I also wonder whether we’re being trained to abandon our steadfast belief that the rule of law will save us, or if we’re being taught to cling to the illusory protections of the law as it becomes just another on a long list of anachronisms.
In weeks like this one, when it seems the Mueller investigation is quite literally the only authority and sanity we can look to, it’s hard to tell whether the net losses outweigh the wins, or whether the massive national game of deconstruction and deflection and deception is even the littlest bit disrupted by news that the special counsel is closing in on a legal conclusion. Maybe it’s really too late in the slide toward authoritarianism for any major legal outcome to change the game. We crave nonpartisan and serious authority figures like Mueller because we believe they can guide us through. But having seen this White House shatter norms around the free press, civility, international diplomacy, and truth-telling, it almost defies belief that the line in the sand, the stopping point, is Mueller.
Like most people on the left, I have spent the past year putting great faith in the courts and legal institutions to act as a check on Donald Trump, maintaining this faith even as Trump fired career lawyers like James Comey and Sally Yates and replaced them with ideologues and thugs. And like most people on the left, I placed an enormous amount of confidence in Robert Mueller as the embodiment of the principle that Trump could not escape the oncoming steamroller of justice and legal liability. Even as we remained uncertain whether our political leaders were up to the task of sidelining the Trump train of destruction, we took solace in the fact that the last grown-ups in America were hard at work in the special counsel’s office. And no, they don’t spend their weekends on the golf course.In recent weeks, and most especially in this past week, I’d begun to suspect that the forces of chaos and nihilism that stand against Mueller’s project might swallow whatever outcomes he produced. The shocking norm-and-truth defiance of the GOP tax bill, the refusal of the GOP leadership to criticize or even comprehend the enormous violence done by Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets, the president’s staggering support for the candidacy of Roy Moore, the silent Republican collusion to the seating of demonstrably unfit judges, and the virulence of the White House’s attacks on the press all contributed to a general sense that absolutely everything was broken and that Democrats had lost whatever momentum they had to halt this chaos.
In our ongoing national nightmare of creeping authoritarianism, we talk a good amount about normalization and the numbing effects of a barrage of shocking daily news. But I have also tried to be vigilant about all the ways in which magical thinking about law and lawyers—this is a nation of laws, not men, we’re told—can also numb us, and lead to a declining sense of agency or ownership.
Democrats don’t like giving up on their institutions easily, and the Mueller investigation has served as both the best and the worst manifestation of that alluring Democratic reasonableness. So long as he is working away, filing documents and convening grand juries, nobody needs to take to the streets. But as the year has progressed, it’s become clear that absolutely nothing will persuade Trump supporters and Republicans in Congress that it’s time to disavow the president—not lying, not spilling state secrets, not abject failure in crisis management, and not openly performed corruption. Given that reality, it often feels like it wouldn’t be enough for Mueller to hand us a smoking gun and an indictment. What if they threw a conviction and nobody came?
It seems as though truth and law are forever losing ground in the footrace against open looting and overt totalitarianism. The more abjectly deranged Trump’s behavior and the more Republicans in Congress cover for him, the less likely it is that anything Mueller can magic up in his underground hall of justice will matter. Trump’s legal antagonists like to think that the next legal “tick, tick, tick, boom” will be the one that ends all this chaos. But with every passing day, as Trump escapes consequences and attacks the courts and the press, the chances that a “tick, tick, tick, boom” will be played off as #fakenews also increase.
I’ve been thinking that America is operating along two parallel legal tracks. On one track is the chug-chug of law and order, as embodied in the Mueller investigation. On the other is the daily mayhem and denialism and circus-performing of the present White House. I tend to worry that with every passing day, the circus is training us to ignore, discredit, devalue, or disbelieve what’s happening on the other track. By the time the Mueller train gets to its final station, the norms that would ordinarily lead to impeachment proceedingsmight be tiny piles of yellow legal pad–shaped cinders. And then it really would be time to take to the streets.
For the past year I’ve been trying to understand what exactly the Trump era has been training us to become. Passive, certainly. Overwhelmed and anxious and unable to focus, without a doubt. But I also wonder whether we’re being trained to abandon our steadfast belief that the rule of law will save us, or if we’re being taught to cling to the illusory protections of the law as it becomes just another on a long list of anachronisms.
In weeks like this one, when it seems the Mueller investigation is quite literally the only authority and sanity we can look to, it’s hard to tell whether the net losses outweigh the wins, or whether the massive national game of deconstruction and deflection and deception is even the littlest bit disrupted by news that the special counsel is closing in on a legal conclusion. Maybe it’s really too late in the slide toward authoritarianism for any major legal outcome to change the game. We crave nonpartisan and serious authority figures like Mueller because we believe they can guide us through. But having seen this White House shatter norms around the free press, civility, international diplomacy, and truth-telling, it almost defies belief that the line in the sand, the stopping point, is Mueller.
by Dahlia Lithwick, Slate | Read more:
Image: AP
Saturday, December 2, 2017
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.
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. ]
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