Hong Kong v. Beijing

It has been a hot summer in Hong Kong, in every sense. Massive protest rallies have rocked the city since June; on two occasions they have involved more than a million people – out of a total population of 7.4 million. The protests have taken on a weekly rhythm, as those of the gilets jaunes did in France earlier this year, stirring up every Saturday or Sunday, spreading into the outer reaches of the territory. The face-off between protesters and police has become more and more confrontational as the weeks have passed, and protest events have been planned for every weekend in August and on into September. After that, there will be elections for the district councils, and, next year, for the city’s Legislative Council. If there is to be a showdown between political forces – the protesters, the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), the central government’s liaison office in Hong Kong, and the party bosses in Beijing – what form will it take? Will it resemble the violent confrontation of Tiananmen in 1989, or will it be an electoral battle?

This summer’s protests were triggered by a government-sponsored bill to amend Hong Kong’s extradition law. But when I met some of the leading figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in Taiwan at the end of May, they told me that the bill was just one of several urgent issues. None of them anticipated that a new, spectacular phase of Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy was about to unfold. (...)

The Umbrella Movement emerged during a dispute over arrangements for the election of Hong Kong’s chief executive. As far as Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012, was concerned, this was unfinished business. People in Hong Kong didn’t realise at the time what Xi had in mind for them. They assumed the plan was still to honour the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s constitution, promulgated in 1990, according to which the ‘ultimate aim’ is that the CE will be elected by ‘universal suffrage’, ‘in the light of the actual situation’ in Hong Kong following a period of ‘gradual and orderly progress’. The same language is used about elections to the Legislative Council. In the annexes of the Basic Law concerning methods of election, the year 2007 is mentioned as a possible deadline for procedural changes, marking the end of the transitional phase following the handover of power from Britain to China.

The main political parties, pro-Beijing and pro-democracy, all agreed that universal suffrage should be used in the election of the CE in 2007 and the legislature in 2008, but this didn’t happen. Alarmed by a surge in political protests in 2003, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), supposedly China’s supreme constitutional authority, issued an interpretation of the Basic Law which stipulated that Hong Kong would require Beijing’s approval before it attempted to amend the electoral system. Any proposed amendments must be approved by a two-thirds majority in the legislature. Subsequently, a conservative proposal put forward by the Hong Kong government was defeated in the legislature by pro-democracy members, who demanded the introduction of universal suffrage in 2007 – or, at least, a road map and timetable for achieving it.

No progress was made over the next few years, during which there were splits in the democratic camp. To allay public frustration, both Hu Jintao, China’s president at the time, and Donald Tsang, the CE, promised further reforms. An NPCSC decision reached at the end of 2007 explicitly stated that although there would be only minor modifications for the double election of 2012 – of both CE and legislature – ‘universal suffrage’ would come into force for the 2017 CE election, and would then be extended to the Legislative Council. Accepting this as the road map, the Democratic Party, Hong Kong’s largest political party, decided to negotiate with the Hong Kong government and Beijing over a proposal for reforms to the procedures for the 2012 elections.

But by this point new factors were affecting Hong Kong’s politics. The most significant was the rise of China, which made itself felt more forcefully after 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics and the global financial crisis. In 2009, the sixtieth anniversary of the PRC, Chan Koonchung, a Hong Kong novelist and cultural critic living in Beijing, published a dystopian tale, The Fat Years, about a rising China under ironclad one-party rule. By 2012, Chan was arguing with pro-establishment Chinese intellectuals about their latest theory, according to which ‘one country, two systems’ wasn’t designed merely for Hong Kong but would bring about the wholesale rejuvenation of Chinese civilisation. This thinking connects Beijing’s rule to the concept of tianxia, or ‘all under heaven’, an idea drawn from classical Confucianism, in which the periphery subordinates itself to the authority of the sovereign centre, while the centre assumes responsibility for the periphery’s security and development. In that same year, Xi Jinping came to power. He was impatient with anyone who didn’t want to acknowledge the Communist Party’s absolute authority. The new thinking on Hong Kong, if subsequent developments are any indication, was readily espoused by Beijing. Meanwhile, in the summer of 2012, before Xi’s inauguration, Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong teenager, began a campaign against a proposed ‘moral and national education’ programme, and organised a rally attended by more than a hundred thousand people. The radical activism of Wong and his comrades announced the arrival of the younger generation as a formidable new force in Hong Kong’s politics.

As the dust settled after the 2012 elections, anxiety and frustration grew in Hong Kong over the lack of progress towards real democracy. Would Beijing renege on its promises again? Early in 2013, taking inspiration from the Occupy movement, Benny Tai Yui-ting, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, floated the idea of ‘Occupy Central’ as a way to speed up democratisation. He was joined by Chan Kin-man, a sociology professor, and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming. Since 2005, pro-democracy activists had organised mock referendums to demonstrate that the Hong Kong public was ready for participatory politics. They believed that the ‘gradual and orderly progress’ towards universal suffrage was being delayed on the basis of the phrase in the Basic Law that said amendments would be made ‘in light of the actual situation’ in Hong Kong.

Occupy Central tried similar tactics in June 2014. In previous years, Beijing had attacked such efforts for their lack of credibility or – when the legislators collectively resigned in order to trigger an election – for wasting taxpayers’ money. In 2014, however, Beijing turned up the aggression. The State Council in Beijing issued a white paper explicitly stating that in China’s institutional design for Hong Kong the ‘two systems’ must be subordinated to the ‘one country’, and that the CE must both ‘love the country’ and ‘love Hong Kong’. The method of electing both the CE and the legislature must safeguard ‘the security and interest of the state’ against foreign interference. On the last day of August 2014, the NPCSC published its decision – known as the ‘8.31’ decision – on the election of the 2016 legislature and 2017 CE. Technically, Beijing agreed to allow ‘one person, one vote’ in the CE election. But in reality it had shifted the focus to the issue of who should be allowed to stand. There would be no more than two or three candidates, and the bar for nomination would be very high. Candidates would be chosen by a committee sure to be pro-Beijing and pro-business.

Both the white paper and the 8.31 decision were decisive in the emergence of the Umbrella Movement in late September 2014. Together, the two documents signified, first, that Beijing had once again broken its promise to bring universal suffrage to Hong Kong. Second, that by granting a narrowly defined ‘universal suffrage’ while imposing severe limits on the selection of candidates, Beijing was closing the door to further electoral reforms. And third, that Beijing had surreptitiously changed the criteria for evaluating the ‘actual situation’ in Hong Kong. By emphasising ‘one country’ over ‘two systems’, the two documents interpret Hong Kong’s ‘actual situation’ as a matter not of how ready Hong Kong’s people are to act as politically capable citizens, or how willing they are to participate in public life, but how ready they are to follow Beijing’s orders. From now on, there would be no rules or principles to follow, no process of argument or reason to rely on. Instead, there would be the game of trying to interpret the signs made by Beijing officials. This is the new understanding that is at the root of today’s protests. In 2014, however, many were not yet fully aware of this new normal.

The Umbrella Movement was started by students like Wong. The Occupy Central trio soon joined, and their 79-day action lasted until mid-December 2014, when police removed the last protesters one by one. The occupation cost the protesters dear. One of the leading organisations behind the movement, Hong Kong’s city-wide college student union, was plagued by disputes over tactics and strategy, and saw public support dwindle. Several student union branches withdrew their membership. Young ‘radicals’ started talking of the Umbrella Movement as a ‘failure’. This may be too harsh a verdict. In the face of pressure from Beijing, several new organisations emerged, led by young people advocating self-determination or outright independence for Hong Kong. These groups launched a campaign aimed at ‘reclaiming’ (guangfu) local places. Young people who’d been involved in the Umbrella Movement began to connect social welfare issues and disputes over development projects to overall political reform. (...)

Lessons have been learned from previous protests. The authorities always try to destroy a movement by identifying its leaders. The current protests have no leadership and are highly decentralised. Social media is the main vehicle of mass mobilisation. This time round, there have been no internal splits. Yet the solidarity is not rooted in political discipline: even when brothers climb a mountain together, each has to make his own effort. One action may be followed straightaway by another, or by a few days’ rest. Bruce Lee’s saying becomes a golden rule: ‘Water can flow or it can crush. Be water my friend.’

by Chaohua Wang, LRB | Read more:
[ed. See also: How the state runs business in China (The Guardian).]

The T-Mobile and Sprint Merger Is Blatantly Anticompetitive

There is no saving grace for the federal government approving what is on its face an illegal horizontal merger between T-Mobile and Sprint. The wireless market is already highly concentrated according to the Department of Justice’s own guidelines, and this merger only exacerbates the problem. Mergers that bring extreme levels of concentration are supposed to be blocked. No supposed benefit to consumers is actually waiting on this merger, including any and all claims about 5G. Here's what this merger really means: people will have fewer choices for wireless services, at higher prices, while innovation suffers.

It was not that long ago when the DOJ said that mergers that shrunk a highly concentrated market from four competitors into three competitors “significantly harmed” consumers per their own antitrust guidelines. What could possibly be different about this merger?

Ignoring Its Own Guidelines

To approve this deal, the DOJ had to ignore its own guidelines. The traditional scrutiny applied to these kind of mergers under the guidelines is to measure the market share of the relevant companies and combine them using a formula that indicates concentration levels in a market. That formula, called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), is calculated by squaring the market share percentages of each of the companies in a market and then adding them together. A complete monopoly has an HHI of 1002, or 10,000, while a highly competitive market can have a score close to 1.

For the U.S. wireless broadband market in 2018, the calculation looks like this:

AT&T (34.5)² + Verizon (34.6)² + T-Mobile (17.8)² + Sprint (13.1)² = 2875.86

This is considerably higher than 2500, the level at which the DOJ considers a market to be highly concentrated.

When two companies are merging, especially in already highly concentrated markets, the guidelines say that a merger that raises the total HHI by 100 to 200 points raises “significant competitive concerns,” and mergers that raise the index by more than 200 points “will be presumed to be likely to enhance market power.” The T-Mobile and Sprint merger blasts past the red zone and raises the market concentration numbers by 466 points nationally. By some estimates that number exceeds 1,000 points in some major metropolitan markets. This merger's anti-competitive warnings are effectively off the charts.

5G Hype Does Not Make an Illegal Merger Legal

The Sprint-T-Mobile merger has been the subject of a lot of 5G hype. EFF has called attention to the political leveraging of 5G before, and this merger is the perfect example of how it can be weaponized to blow holes in consumer protection laws. From the outset, Sprint and T-Mobile repeatedly over-represented, claiming the merger would bring 5G wireless services to all Americans. The companies’ argument is that Americans must accept fewer choices at higher prices if they want to see these new services. This is just untrue.

5G services can reach U.S. Internet users without the merger. The means of delivering those services is through government-regulated licenses. Those licenses can be modified with new policies to promote competition and access. In particular, instead of approving anti-competitive mergers, the government could simply change the terms of the licenses it gives companies for their use of spectrum, the radio frequencies used to transmit services.

Spectrum is not the scarce resource we are told it is, so long as there are effective rules for sharing it. We have government management of spectrum primarily to establish a logical structure for who can use the resource and how it can be used. Therefore, it is the government licensing of that resource that creates scarcity. When major wireless carriers are arguing that only a merger would allow them to deliver innovative new uses, they are arguing that scarcity of spectrum requires them to consolidate. This intentionally ignores the government's power to change the terms of their licenses, requiring competitors to share airwaves in order to enable 5G, without those competitors having to merge into a single company.

Innovation Will Suffer

At the end of the day, fewer wireless carriers means fewer risk-takers. And fewer risk-takers means less innovation.

The smartphone is ubiquitous in today’s wireless market, but it owes its success to a single carrier being willing to take a risk and try something different than its competitors. Prior to the iPhone, the wireless carriers dictated the design and functionality of cellular phones and were unwilling to push the envelope. Apple’s effort to build something very different than common handsets was originally rejected by Verizon because the carrier wanted more say over the design than Apple was willing to grant. Even the negotiations with AT&T Wireless (formerly Cingular) were contentious as they debated whether the phone would allow video streaming functionality, tethering, and video calling. But imagine if AT&T also rejected Apple’s idea? Apple would still have had other major national wireless carriers to pitch who might have a different set of values, and more willingness to try something risky to gain market share. That is the essence of how competition promotes innovation. The more entities there are competing with one another, the greater the possibility that one of those entities will try something different to win customers. (...)

Now it is up to the courts to decide if this merger can proceed. Ten state Attorneys General have sued to block this merger and they will make the case that what Sprint and T-Mobile are attempting is illegal. The difference this time is that unlike the last time the federal and state governments blocked a wireless telecom merger (the DoJ’s successful challenge to the proposed AT&T-TMobile merger in 2011), the DOJ and the FCC will be on the side of the monopolists in the courtroom.

But all is not lost. There is a burgeoning sense that many industries—not just Big Tech and telecoms (or even eyewear or professional wrestling)—have grown dangerously overconcentrated. America is losing patience with monopolistic conduct and lawmakers are waking up to public sentiment. Even though the DOJ and the FCC have changed sides in the fight against monopolistic mergers in the telecoms sector, there is a growing movement that is pushing back. This is just a skirmish in a bigger fight, and even if we lose it, the fight is just getting started.

by Ernesto Falcon, EFF |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. After threats to break up Google, Amazon, Facebook, et al., here's what we get. Also: the "eyewear" example is the one that always bugs me. Luxottica has such an obscene monopoly on prescription eyewear and sunglasses (for decades) and... nothing.]

As Mortgage-Interest Deduction Vanishes, Housing Market Shrugs

The mortgage-interest deduction, a beloved tax break bound tightly to the American dream of homeownership, once seemed politically invincible. Then it nearly vanished in middle-class neighborhoods across the country, and it appears that hardly anyone noticed.

In places like Plainfield, a southwestern outpost in the area known locally as Chicagoland, the housing market is humming. The people selling and buying homes do not seem to care much that President Trump’s signature tax overhaul effectively, although indirectly, vaporized a longtime source of government support for homeowners and housing prices.

The 2017 law nearly doubled the standard deduction — to $24,000 for a couple filing jointly — on federal income taxes, giving millions of households an incentive to stop claiming itemized deductions.

As a result, far fewer families — and, in particular, far fewer middle-class families — are claiming the itemized deduction for mortgage interest. In 2018, about one in five taxpayers claimed the deduction, Internal Revenue Service statistics show. This year, that number fell to less than one in 10. For families earning less than $100,000, the decline was even more stark.

The benefit, as it remains, is largely for high earners, and more limited than it once was: The 2017 law capped the maximum value of new mortgage debt eligible for the deduction at $750,000, down from $1 million. There has been no audible public outcry, prompting some people in Washington to propose scrapping the tax break entirely. (...)

For decades, the mortgage-interest deduction has been alternately hailed as a linchpin of support for homeownership (by the real estate industry) and reviled as a symbol of tax policy gone awry (by economists). What pretty much everyone agreed on, though, was that it was politically untouchable.

Nearly 30 million tax filers wrote off a collective $273 billion in mortgage interest in 2018. Repealing the deduction, the conventional wisdom presumed, would effectively mean raising taxes on millions of middle-class families spread across every congressional district. And if anyone were tempted to try, an army of real estate brokers, home builders and developers — and their lobbyists — were ready to rush to the deduction’s defense.

Now, critics of the deduction feel emboldened.

“The rejoinder was always, ‘Oh, but you’d never be able to get rid of the mortgage-interest deduction,’ but I certainly wouldn’t say never now,” said William G. Gale, an economist at the Brookings Institution and a former adviser to President George H.W. Bush. “It used to be that this was a middle-class birthright or something like that, but it’s kind of hard to argue that when only 8 percent of households are taking the deduction.”

Mr. Gale, like most economists on the left and the right, has long argued that the mortgage-interest deduction violated every rule of good policymaking. It was regressive, benefiting wealthy families — who are more likely to own homes, and to have bigger mortgages — more than poorer ones. It distorted the housing market, encouraging Americans to buy the biggest home possible to take maximum advantage of the deduction. Studies repeatedly found that the deduction actually reduced ownership rates by helping to inflate home prices, making homes less affordable to first-time buyers.

by Jim Tankersley and Ben Casselman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alyssa Schukar

Cat Stevens

[ed. Eddie Vedder has a nice version, too.]

The Smiling Cinderella

It would be hard to find a player less likely to win the AIG Women's British Open than Hinako Shibuno. The 20-year-old from Japan is a rookie on the Japanese LPGA Tour, and when she teed it up at Woburn Golf Club, it was her first time playing a tournament outside of her home country. Before she arrived, Shibuno thought Woburn was a links course (it's a parkland course). No one considered her a potential winner, not even herself. She came into the week just hoping to make the cut.

But with a final-round 68 that ended with her holing a 20-foot birdie putt on the 18th, Shibuno became an unlikely major champion. She finished at 18-under-par 270, one shot ahead of Lizette Salas.

There was a hole early on that could have derailed this underdog story. Shibuno, who had made four bogeys in three rounds, four-putted the third hole of the final round to make double bogey. That might have set off a sequence of other mistakes, what one would expect of a young player who had never played in a major before, let alone been in contention. Instead, she birdied the next two holes. She faltered again with a bogey on the eighth hole, turned in one-over 37, then played the back nine in five-under 31. For the week, she played the back nine in 18 under.

What also might have unnerved Shibuno was that Jin Young Ko, No. 1 in the Rolex Rankings and coming off a win in the Evian Championship the week before, was lurking near the lead the entire final round. It didn't.

Meanwhile, Salas, paired in the same twosome as Ko, was having one of the greatest rounds of her career. She even had a five-foot birdie putt on the 18th hole that would then have forced Shibuno to make birdie to get into a playoff. But Salas' birdie attempt lipped out, and she had to settle for a closing 65 and a wait to see if her 17-under total might hold up.

No one would have been surprised had Shibuno not maintained her composure. But she continued to smile after every shot—her nickname on the JLPGA is Smiling Cinderella—and high-fived some of the many fans she gained this week as she walked between holes. Her routine never changed. She spends very little time over the ball, and her pace never changed through to the end.

The winning putt appeared to have too much speed. She lifted the putter and her left leg as the ball sped to the hole, hit the back of the cup and dropped. She had won the Women's British Open.

The win will change her life. She's now only the second Japanese golfer, male or female, to win a major, the first being Chako Higuchi, the 1977 KPMG Women's PGA champion. By winning the Women's British Open, Shibuno has the option to accept status on the LPGA, effective immediately. Or, she can choose to join the tour in the 2020 season. But for Smiling Cinderella, fortunate to have escaped any clocks striking midnight, she probably isn't thinking about all of that in the immediate aftermath of her unlikely victory, the stuff of fairytales. And with that back nine and the birdie putt win, the stuff of champions, too.

by Keely Levins, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image:Jan Kruger/WME IMG

[ed. Wow! Cinderella indeed. One of the best golf tournaments I've watched all year, and what an endearing young lady (and wonderful golfer).]

Embracing Paella Will Blow Up Your Mid-Summer Grilling Game

My culinary instinct for the grand gesture is what got me thinking about paella. The avalanche of traditional methodology should have scared me off. Happily, I'm not built that way.

Ten years ago my wife and I were young parents planning a single-digit birthday party for one of our kids, painfully aware that our breeder peers spend way too much time shuttling between birthdays almost every weekend for the first ten years of their childrens’ lives. We wanted to lay on a spread that would reward parents for showing up. In colloquial Spanish, Ir de paella (literally “to go for a paella”) means to have fun. I suppose that’s what sold me.

Early research buoyed my belief that paella was the proper choice for an afternoon house party in the fall. The three essential elements for paella are the rice, the pan, and fire. Simple enough. I was led to believe everything else involved in the process is relegated to a supporting role. “It’s not possible to define the authentic paella recipe because paella is not a recipe but a method of cooking linked to a particular utensil: the pan,” writes the Spanish chef and author, Alberto Herraz. “Nowadays, it is a culinary moment that warrants reinvention.”

Entertain and reinvent was exactly what I set out to do when I first started inviting folks over for paella. The paellero is the name of the outdoor grill that paella is cooked on. It is a rig that allows the hammered steel pan to be raised and lowered above the flame. The rice and complementary ingredients meld, first at very high heat and eventually raised away from the fire to achieve a busy simmer. In lieu of a paellero, I pressed my banged-up 26” diameter Weber kettle into service. With a standard Weber there’s no method to raise or lower the pan — but, I reasoned, I’d address that challenge when the time came.

In traditional Spanish settings Paellero is also the title of the person who runs the show. This newly-minted Paellero got right to work. Rice (Oryza sativa) is indeed the beating heart of the dish. The storied grain has two subspecies: indica and japonica. Indica (think basmati and jasmine) is a long-grain kernel with a more robust hide and does not readily take on flavors; that is why paella (like risotto in Italy) requires japonica’s absorbant short oval grains.

Bomba is everybody’s favorite variety for paella, because it’s like a Dyson vacuum on flavor. But calaspara is a fine, much more affordable Spanish variety commonly available outside Spain (both are available on Amazon). In a pinch, a fine quality Japanese-style sushi rice does the job — if you are using sushi rice, ignore package instructions to rinse it before use. In fact, don’t rinse any rice for paella. For an easy-going peasant supper, the rules are beginning to pile up.

Sofrito is the foundation on which rice rests. It is typically a combination of flavored oil, onions, garlic, grated fresh tomato and dried peppers, but there are countless varieties — and each of these is defended by a passionate champion as the only legitimate beginning of a true paella.

Ferran Adrià, fabled chef of elBulli in Roses, Catalonia, was known to infuse olive oil with the flavor of the Ibérico ham by soaking scraps of ham in oil for months in the fridge. The same thing can be done for garlic. Heating scraps of fresh sardines in canola or grapeseed oil until the fish heads and bones are crispy, and then discarding the bits and reserving the oil makes a great, smokey fish-inflected oil. Use grapeseed or canola oil when making hot infusions, as olive oil loses its flavor at the relatively low temperature of 176°F (80°C).

Cooking the sofrito until all the liquid has cooked off the tomatoes is key because the rice goes in the pan immediately after and is cooked until it begins to toast in the pan. If there’s any liquid left in the pan from the sofrito, the grains will start absorbing it, adulterating this first important step, say the culinary guardians.

After toasting the rice add stock to the pan to cover plus about an inch. Most of the stock will evaporate from the uncovered grill. The amount of stock you use is entirely dependent on the amount of rice you’re cooking and at what temperature. Do not get caught short. Make more stock than you could possibly use (freeze what remains and save it for later). Be sure to have stock on a monitored burner; you want to keep it energetically boiling so that you can add stock to the rice if the liquid cooks off too fast. (...)

After the rice and the stock have started to meld, the banda, or everything else — the chicken, fish, sausage that is used to flavor the rice — gets turned into the pan. These solid ingredients, often proteins but just as pleasing when they are vegetables, are viewed by purists as a tool for flavoring the rice. Some, insisting that the banda has surrendered all its useful flavor to the rice, go so far as to discard the ingredients before serving the rice by itself.

That seems a little extreme.

by Manny Howard, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Getty/martiapunts
[ed. My son and daughter-in-law are the real paella experts (and even served it at their wedding reception). They use a traditional paellera pan, although from my experience any large sturdy pan or wok will do. The real key is getting the rice cooked to just the right amount of doneness after all the ingredients have been added. It takes some experimentation. I don't know if they use one particular recipe but a Google search turns up a ton of them, like this one. Most seem like slight variations. Have fun, and bon appetit.]  

What Actual Resistance Looks Like

I do not know how brave I am. It’s hard to know until you’re tested. I’d like to think, as I’m sure most of us would, that when the fascists took over, I would be a courageous dissident. The evidence, on the other hand, suggests that most of us aren’t going to be courageous dissidents. We might be morally queasy on the inside, but we won’t actually speak up unless others are speaking up already. And we all know some people who, relatively benign as they may be now, we secretly suspect might “go Nazi” under the right circumstances. Thank God, then, for those rare few people who have defiant enough spirits that they would never shut up about injustice, no matter what happened to them. I don’t know where those people come from, but I’m glad they exist.

Some of my friends don’t care for Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald. And sometimes I see where they are coming from; he can be stubborn and irascible, undiplomatic and difficult to get along with. (To me, however, he has always been unfailingly kind and generous, and has repeatedly used his platform to promote our little left-wing magazine.) The same traits that can make someone a pain in the ass, though, can also make them a damned useful friend to have in the struggle. When the fascists come, you want people against them who will be stubborn and argumentative, and who will never, ever back down.

You may not have noticed the reporting coming out of the Brazilian Intercept recently, because the American press doesn’t give a shit about what happens in other countries, even giant ones whose political decisions affect the entire fate of the planet. But some truly extraordinary work is being done, with revelations that are roiling the entire Brazilian political system.

The potted version is this: “Operation Car Wash” was a giant anti-corruption prosecution that took down many Brazilian politicians, including popular former president Lula. The anti-corruption crusade made heroes out of the prosecutors and the judge, Sérgio Moro, who insisted that they were nonpartisan “good government” types lacking political motivation. Moro even made the TIME 100 in 2016, which noted that “Brazilians call him SuperMoro,” the man who would “change a culture of graft that has long hobbled his country’s progress.” While he might sometimes have little regard for due process, TIME said, many seem to feel “his sharp-elbowed tactics are worth the trade-off for a cleaner country.” The New York Times wrote a flattering profile. The Washington Post said that “If there was a unifying figure in Brazil these past five years, as the economy flailed, violent crime soared and polarization deepened, it was Sérgio Moro.”

The anti-corruption prosecutions affect the entire fate of the country. The left-leaning Lula, who would almost certainly have been returned to office, was barred from running and sent to prison. This made room for a despicable far-right bigot, Jair Bolsonaro, to sweep into office. I don’t use the phrase “despicable far right bigot” lightly. He has been called the “Trump of the Tropics,” but that’s far too cute and mild. Bolsonaro has been openly pro-torture, advocated returning to a military dictatorship, and told women that rape was too good for them. He is violently homophobic, encouraging people to whip their children if they turn out “a little gay,” saying he’d rather his own child die in an accident than be gay, and declaring that “If I see two men kissing in the street, I will beat them.” He has promised to allow the police to murder with impunity. And of course, he’s happily accelerating the wholesale destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

Bolsonaro was understandably pleased with the work that Sérgio Moro and Operation Car Wash did in eliminating his political competition, and upon taking office Bolsonaro quickly appointed Moro to be his top justice minister. Now, enter the Intercept, which published excerpts from leaked documents to show that Moro, as judge, had been collaborating with prosecutors and helping them craft their cases. Greenwald, along with the Intercept team (including journalists Victor Pougy, Andrew Fishman, Rafael Moro Martins, Leandro Demori, Alexandre de Santi, Amanda Audi) showed that the judge “offered strategic advice to prosecutors and passed on tips for new avenues of investigation.” The documents also show internal doubts among prosecutors about the strength of the evidence against Lula, and prosecutors fretting about the possibility of the Brazilian Worker’s Party returning to power (contrary to their outward claims of being politically neutral).

The Intercept’s reporting has colossally undermined the public reputation of a powerful and celebrated figure, and revealed corruption at the highest level of the government. When you remember that that government is run by a person who has threatened to exile or jail his enemies, and has fantasized about restoring a murderous military dictatorship, it’s obvious that this kind of reporting could create a dangerous backlash for the journalists involved.

And that’s exactly what has happened. The far right in Brazil has heaped menacing public abuse upon Glenn Greenwald, and recently Bolsonaro threatened him with jail and announced Greenwald was under investigation. (For what, God only knows. A government can always cook up something.) Asked what crimes Greenwald had committed, Bolsonaro’s spokesman said that the revelations “harm[ed] the government’s image,” which is undoubtedly true but which implies criticism should be criminalized. Rumors have been spread that Greenwald has committed various crimes and is an enemy of the state. He and his family can no longer appear in public without armed guards.

Greenwald’s husband, David Miranda, has also actively been resisting Bolsonaro’s administration. Miranda is the only openly gay congressman in the country. The last one was forced to flee the country after receiving credible death threats, causing Miranda to step into the post. Given the 2018 murder of human rights activist and Rio city councilwoman Marielle Franco, a friend of Greenwald and Miranda’s—a crime linked to the same homophobic far right now enraged at Greenwald and Miranda—the threats they face are serious. Nobody can begrudge Miranda’s predecessor in the post for choosing to get out while he could. (Ordinarily, Greenwald might hope for some extra protection as an American, but he happens to have pissed off the entire American political establishment through Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the national security state, and Donald Trump—of course—loves Bolsonaro.)

Journalists are supposed to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Certainly, Greenwald, Miranda, and the Intercept’s team of young Brazilian journalists are afflicting the comfortable. (The Bolsonaro government is trying to paint Greenwald as solely responsible for the reporting, even though much of it was done in collaboration with major Brazilian publications, because it is trying to create a “foreign villain” figure.) This is what real journalism looks like, what real resistance looks like. It’s very easy for those of us who don’t face actual threats to “resist.” In a place where the far right can literally order the murder of your friends—who hold public office!—with impunity, the situation is different. Then it takes a hell of a lot of courage.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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[ed. Another day, another massacre.]

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Seven Works of Mercy (detail)
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Jackson Pollock, Number 1 (Lavender Mist) (detail), 1950
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Boz Scaggs

SNAP Judgement

Under new changes proposed by the Trump administration, over 3 million struggling parents, children, people living with disabilities, and older American may lose access to food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Children in families who are slated to lose their SNAP benefits will also lose critical school-lunch assistance.

The Trump administration wants to eliminate an eligibility criterion known as broad-based categorical eligibility (BBCE), which enables states to expand access to those in need of food assistance based on other programs they qualify for.

By eliminating it, the administration is effectively creating a benefits cliff, where a parent’s small raise at work — or a modest amount of savings — could end up disqualifying a family from SNAP entirely. That leaves them poorer for getting a raise or saving money, or else puts them at risk of their food aid falling through the bureaucratic cracks.

Failed twice

Trump and the Republicans attempted to get this reduction in the nation’s most effective social safety-net program rammed through Congress last year — and failed. They also failed in their attempt to significantly defund the program. So now Trump is attempting to reduce food access to families in need via executive fiat.

SNAP reduces poverty more simply and directly than nearly any other program. Because it’s responsive to the overall economy, it expands during economic downturns and contracts when poverty levels fall. This enables people to weather temporary economic hardship, stay above the official poverty level, and gets money more quickly into the economy.

It also literally puts food into children’s mouths, while their parents work and save.

Why would the administration want to take critical food assistance away from children and families who need it? The administration has claimed ineligible people are using the program, perhaps fraudulently. But that’s unlikely.

Looking at figures through 2016, Forbes contributor Simon Constable calculated potentially fraudulent SNAP expenditures at under 1% of the cost of the program — a minuscule amount compared to behemoth agencies like the Pentagon, which can’t even pass an audit, and which nonetheless keeps getting budget increases.

Rigorous standards

SNAP, by contrast, “has some of the most rigorous program integrity standards and systems of any federal program,” adds Robert Greenstein of the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities, including for recipients who qualify by their participation in other programs.

According to the center, SNAP is one of the most effective economic stimulators per federal dollar spent of any program. During the economic downturn of 2009, for example, Moody’s Analytics estimated that for every dollar increase in SNAP benefits that year, $1.70 economic activity was generated.

by Karen Dolan, Marketwatch |  Read more:

Image: Getty
[ed. See also: Divided Senate passes 2-year budget deal with military boost (Defense News). Who says Congress can't agree on anything?]

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Real Americans

Jill Lepore’s new “little book” is a historian’s attempt to mobilize her knowledge to political effect. Last year Lepore published These Truths: A History of the United States, a monumental and brilliantly assembled work of political history that “is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic institutions.” The ideological essence of that work has been distilled in This America: The Case for the Nation. In a New York Times Op-Ed that accompanied its publication, Lepore urged Democratic presidential candidates to “speak with clarity and purpose about what’s at stake: the liberal nation-state itself.” Lepore went on:

The hard work isn’t condemning nationalism; it’s making the case for the liberal nation-state.

This is an argument of political necessity and moral urgency. So far, Democrats haven’t made it. Instead, in much the same way that they gave up the word “liberalism” in the 1980s, they’ve gotten skittish about the word “nation,” as if fearing that to use it means descending into nationalism.

Whether it is electorally efficient, in the short term, to revamp our use of the word “nation” is of course debatable. But the argument, as I understand it, is that icebergs of nationalism have been an ever-present, indeed defining feature of American history; and that to avoid them we must resolutely navigate by our best national ideals—“a revolutionary, generous, and deeply moral commitment to human equality and dignity.” (...)

As Lepore acknowledges, the equation of “nationalism” with hate and bigotry is far from universal: in postcolonial countries, the term is benignly connected to the enlightened (if mythic) conception of nationhood as the starting point of self-determination. America was once a colonial place, too, but its sense of itself as a nation, Lepore believes, was developed ex post facto. Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution is the United States described as a nation. (Contrast this with, for example, the Republic of Ireland: the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic and the 1937 Constitution begin with powerful assertions of Irish nationhood.) It took a great effort of politicking to unite states that did not much identify with one another, in spite of having in common the English language, whiteness, and Christianity. The US, Lepore says, is that rare thing: a state-nation. (...)

Lepore is aware of this fact—there’s little she isn’t aware of, one senses—and makes it integral to her argument, which is that the age-old struggle between illiberal and liberal tendencies is constitutive of the nation. Nationalism is currently thriving, she believes, because the discourse of American liberalism is deficient. First, that discourse undervalues the radicality and relevance of the country’s founding ideals; second, the preoccupation with the rights of subgroups is essential, certainly, but politically inadequate; third, and here I put the matter much more crudely than Lepore would, liberals must in some sense do battle for possession of the Stars and Stripes. However gauche or complicit it may seem, they must understand and unapologetically frame their values—which currently have a niche, somewhat subversive emphasis—as our core national values:

This America is a community of belonging and commitment, held together by the strength of our ideas and by the force of our disagreements. A nation founded on universal ideas will never stop fighting over the meaning of its past and the direction of the future…. The nation, as ever, is the fight.

When I moved to the United States in 1998, the nation was fighting with itself. My introduction to the country was framed by the televised impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. It was all very gripping—a kind of crash course in politics and government. Then came the 2000 election. What struck me, in the chaos that followed, was that the Republican Party enjoyed a mystifying presumption of legitimacy. Bush had prematurely positioned himself as the president-elect, and the media had largely deferred to him in this. It made no sense. Gore had won the popular vote by more than half a million; there were strong reasons to believe that the Democratic tally in Florida had been erroneously reduced by a faulty ballot design; black Floridians had experienced outrageous voting problems; and, astonishingly, the Republicans were actually trying to prevent an accurate count of the vote.

Why had Gore so quickly phoned Bush to concede an undecided election (a concession he soon retracted)? Why the curious timidity of Democrats in Florida and the unaccountable self-righteousness of their aggressive Republican counterparts? Were my eyes and ears fooling me, or was everybody somewhat scared of the Republicans? The penny finally dropped when the Republican majority in the Supreme Court incoherently decided, in Bush v. Gore, to halt the vote-counting while their candidate still held a lead. Oh, I thought to myself. It’s a deep-state thing. (...)

The term originates in Turkey. Like the United States, Turkey is a constitutional republic. Its democratic progress has been something of a bumpy ride. There have been three military coups since 1961, each more or less accepted by the Turkish people. They understood (if sometimes disputed) that the armed forces enjoyed an extralegal, almost spiritual authority to safeguard the legacy of Kemal Atatürk and, if necessary, to suspend the constitutional order when that legacy was threatened by civil unrest or dangerous political developments. The military—together with its allies in the state security and legal apparatus—came to be described as constituting, and acting on behalf of, the “deep state.”

The United States has secretive agencies that do legally dubious things, but it doesn’t have a deep state in the Turkish sense. It may be said to have a deep state in another sense, however: America. America preceded, and brought into being, the republic we now live in—the United States of America. Almost everyone still talks about America, not about the United States; about Americans, not USAers. America, in short, was not extinguished by the United States. It persists as a buried, residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve. Primordial America (at least in the popular imagination) was where folks prayed hard, worked hard on the land, and had rightful recourse to violence. In this imaginary place, people were white, Christian, English-speaking. They had God-given dominion over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. All of this inevitably informs the way American nationals apprehend one another and their country. They feel in their bones that some people are Americans and other people are merely citizens of the United States.

Our deep state doesn’t require conspiracies or coups or even self-awareness. It is a permanent ideological feature, like gravity. It reveals itself in our politics. A common trope—“Imagine if a Democrat did that”—refers to a state of affairs in which one party is bound by norms and rules, and the other party less so. One president must constantly generate his legitimacy, even as he excellently complies with the rules; another president benefits from a legitimacy so profound that his rule-breaking has the effect of rule-making. One group is perceived to be synthetic and unpatriotic, another as authentic and patriotic. This guy is a snowflake, that guy is a victim of persecution. And so on.

The unspoken ratio decidendi of Bush v. Gore is that, when it comes to the crunch, America trumps the United States and its papery constitutional affirmations. Democrats get this as much as Republicans do. Consciously or unconsciously, they know the score. They experience this knowledge mostly as fear.

This has implications for Lepore’s argument. She believes that, as a practical matter, liberal political messaging should vigorously equate our founding ideals with our sense of nationality. If anyone has done that, it is Obama. In 2009 (during a trip to Turkey, as it happens), he declared:

One of the great strengths of the United States is—although, as I mentioned, we have a very large Christian population—we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation; we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.

This hasn’t quite panned out—neither the thesis, nor the political messaging. The problem isn’t rhetorical. It’s structural.

The cornerstone assertion of the Declaration of Independence is that government exists in order to secure the equal, inalienable rights of persons. This is the formal raison d’être and official ideology of the United States. It follows that those who fully embrace those rights—liberals—have political and patriotic legitimacy, and those who reject them lack legitimacy. Psychically, liberals often don’t seem to believe this. A deference to “Americans” inheres in their worldview, even if the Americans in question aspire to subvert our democracy. The “heartland” and “Middle America” (concepts that bring to mind the idea of la France profonde) still form a crucial part of the liberal political vocabulary, which continues to attach an emphatically American identity to the country’s white provincial population. If, as Lepore urges, we must think hard, even dangerously, about the nation and its history, the distinction between America and the United States should probably be reckoned with.

by Joseph O’Neill, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The Opioid Crisis Is About More Than Corporate Greed

While there are significant similarities between Big Pharma and Big Tobacco, there is also a key difference that makes today’s story of corporate malfeasance even worse: namely, that the supply chain for tobacco is much simpler than opioids, which are, theoretically, tightly controlled substances that pass through a dizzying array of actors and regulators.

First, a doctor must write a prescription, which must be filled at a pharmacy, and is likely paid for by an insurance company. Depending on the needs of their customers, pharmacies place orders for these drugs (customers, it turns out, need a lot of them). Shipping companies then go between the pharmacy and the drug manufacturers. Overseeing this entire system is the DEA, which sets the quota for how many opioids a company is allowed to manufacture, and tracks where those pills go.

While politicians are making hay out of Big Pharma’s wanton greed and recklessness, far less attention has been paid to the DEA. Attorneys general suing Big Pharma recently unearthed a database that both the corporations and the government—each for their own self-interested reasons—fought to keep sealed, called the Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS). Mammoth in size and granular in detail, ARCOS tracks the shipments of every single controlled substance, from the company that manufactured it, to the company that shipped it, to the pharmacy that received it. It is the world atlas for how the opioid crisis began.

All told, from 2006 to 2012, roughly 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills criss-crossed America, according to a Washington Post analysis. While many of these pills went to legitimate patients, millions more were showered on troubled communities with a voracious thirst for pain relief. While drug manufacturers produced more and more opioids (approved by the DEA), and distributors shipped those pills to pharmacies all over the country (tracked by the DEA), drug companies saw record profits—and America’s overdose death rate soared off the charts.

“I think this [database] brings home what we all knew,” says Corey Davis, an attorney and public health expert at the Network for Public Health Law. “This wasn’t just incompetence on the part of the DEA and the Department of Justice, it was knowing and intentional failure to do what most people think is their jobs.”

What is the DEA’s job, exactly? Its first task, and the one most associated with the agency, is the Sicario-esque disruption of illicit flows of drugs coming into the U.S. from abroad, like intercepting speedboats filled with cocaine. Its other major responsibility is controlling licit pharmaceuticals. “The whole goal of the prescription system is to make sure that patients are getting their medications, and that medications are not going to those who aren’t patients,” which is called “diversion,” says Bryce Pardo, a drug policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. “That’s the whole point of the system, which was invented a hundred years ago. Clearly, the system broke. The system failed.” (...)

In drug policy scholarship, there is a concept called the “balloon hypothesis.” When one end of a balloon gets squeezed, the air inside, rather than disappearing, rushes to fill the other end of the balloon. The balloon hypothesis is used to describe, often critically, America’s drug enforcement strategy. If cocaine production in Colombia is stamped out, production will shift to, say, Peru. If the Dark Web’s Silk Road gets shut down, a new Dark Web market pops up. The air has to go somewhere.

The balloon hypothesis also applies to the ever-shifting demand for drugs. “Over a period of 20 years, the DEA provided the green light to a 39-fold increase in the oxycodone quota and a 12-fold increase in the hydrocodone quota, even as our opioid epidemic unfolded,” Senator Dick Durbin wrote in a letter to the editor to The Washington Post.

In other words, the prescription balloon expanded, under the DEA’s watch, big time. But starting in 2011, the prescription market finally began to shrink after Purdue Pharma reformulated its blockbuster drug OxyContin with so-called abuse deterrent technology, and pill mills serving the black market were shut down. The supply was squeezed. The air still had to go somewhere, and it rushed to deadlier opioids like heroin spiked with illicit fentanyl. With enforcement focused on prescription opioids, the overdose crisis got worse.

Dan Ciccarone, a physician-researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who studies heroin use, says the crisis unfolded in three waves: Prescription painkillers gave way to old-fashioned heroin, which gave way to illicit fentanyl. “Big Pharma has egg on its face,” Ciccarone says. “It obviously could have played a more responsible role here. But at the same time, I don’t want the buck to stop there.”

“The only solution to the puzzle is to focus on demand,” he adds. “And we’ve been avoiding this for years. We need to structurally reduce demand through a healthier society.” (...)

The Big Pharma lawsuits and the ARCOS database show how these pills landed in Mingo County. But they do not answer why. To researchers like Ciccarone, it’s no mystery. “Disenfranchisement, loneliness, lack of purpose, multigenerational job loss, lack of hope, and the lack of future,” he said, listing off the “social determinants of health” that determine why some people get addicted and not others.

by Zachary Siegel, TNR | Read more:
Image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The Big-Box Mirage

Since Amazon has changed the way many Americans buy things, most of the big-box retailers have struggled. Fox Business recently reported that Walmart and its ilk are battling mightily to “fend off retail apocalypse.” But before the zombies come, the superstore giants want you to gas up and bravely drive over to your local strip center⁠—at least once more, dear consumers⁠—as legacy retailers try to create a new paradise in their old parking lots. Walmart executives announced late last year that they were “reimagining” the typical dull parking lots by building “town centers” that could “provide community space,” and “areas for the community to dwell.” And at least one new Walmart “experience” is now open for business in Temple, Texas.

The irony is thick, and not only built up under the numerous layers of asphalt that have paved tens of thousands of acres of formerly verdant pastures; the superstores killed off remaining family hardware stores and groceries on nearby Main Streets. Over the past few decades, Walmart’s easy, free parking and low prices kept many consumers buying there⁠—at least until the e-commerce revolution of Amazon and its imitators challenged the old superstore model of cheap, easy suburban growth.

Now Walmart is trying desperately to think outside its big boxes, yet these attempts at “reimagining” can only lead to more decline for the old paradigm of giant retail. The stagnant model of suburban real-estate development may also be a harbinger of long-term American economic decline⁠—unless government officials and policymakers reorient incentives and make smarter infrastructure choices. It isn’t Walmart alone that is struggling to adapt the old model, but Walmart’s prominent experiment at revitalizing its big boxes is worth following closely.

Today, as the superstores gesture toward creating more human-scaled places, Walmart appears to be finally catching on to New Urbanism, the movement that has promoted the return of traditional neighborhood planning for over a quarter century. Will Walmart, with all its resources and capital, be able to recreate all the benefits of a mixed-use Main Street in an old parking lot?

The renderings provided by architects suggest that existing Walmart parking lots might be rebuilt into retail and restaurant space alongside what in more urban settings are sometimes called “pocket parks,” small patches of grass and foliage that provide some relief from the asphalt. And there may be even more. Dog parks, food trucks, and European-style food halls all abound. (One proposal in the prosperous Kansas City suburb of Lee’s Summit, Missouri even imagines a grand piano atop an outdoor stage, as if a performer will belt out some show tunes or an operetta. So it’s not exactly Nordstrom, but they’re trying.) (...)

Still, for all of Walmart’s creative attempts at “reimagining,” which try to humanize suburban parking lots, they start to look a lot like typical shopping malls. Acres of parking remain, and huge arterial roads act as moats that prevent pedestrians from easily traveling beyond Walmart’s property. (...)

For decades, big-box stores were made possible by pouring billions into new suburban infrastructure, all of it subsidized by taxpayers. The good times of the 1980s and 1990s fueled the building of thousands more big-box stores, including the now-ubiquitous local Walmart. In the short term, jobs were created, and everyone was getting cheaper TVs and any number of other goods.

Of course there was never a free lunch, even at the stunningly cheap cafeterias of Ikea, those ultimate big boxes that outdo Walmart’s typical square footage with five football fields of space. Historians and economists may soon look back at these hubristic years, just prior to and after the new millennium, as the peak of the big-box sprawl experiment.

One landmark moment should not be forgotten from the annals of 1992, when President George H.W. Bush traveled on Air Force One to Arkansas to pay homage to ailing Walmart founder Sam Walton (and present him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom). Increased trade liberalization had begun during the elder-Bush years, and then in 1993, Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for which Walmart had intensely lobbied, hoping to open thousands of stores south of the border.

After NAFTA, the decline of domestic manufacturing only accelerated. At the same time, desperate local municipalities seeking big-box employers gladly provided “tax incentives.” These big breaks, of course ultimately funded by taxpayers, created new roads—including traffic signals, power, water, and policing. Decades later, the deferred maintenance is coming due, and who will foot the bill for all the infrastructure spent to prop up the big-box experiment?

In America’s wealthier metropolitan zip codes, Walmart can “reimagine” a new place, seeking consumers to sip five-dollar lattes and buy artisanal burgers. But in many less prosperous burghs, stagnant wages won’t support such reinventions or fuel economic growth. Hundreds of Walmarts first creatively destroyed local businesses, but the company later shuttered some of its under-performing superstores themselves⁠—sometimes only a decade or two after they were built⁠—leaving many towns that were already struggling even poorer.

by Lewis McCrary, The American Conservative | Read more:
Image:Nicholas Eckhart/Flickr

photo: markk

Sting