Tuesday, August 6, 2019
U.S. Farmers Exasperated by Latest Trade War Moves: 'Another Nail in the Coffin'
Trade tensions between the U.S. and China are flaring once again, and American farmers continue to bear the brunt of the implications.
In response to President Trump recently announcing 10% tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese goods, China allowed the yuan to weaken and suspended purchases U.S. agricultural products.
“The Chinese market has a large capacity and the prospect of importing high-quality U.S. agricultural products is bright," state-owned media Xinhua said on Monday. "However, we hope the U.S. will conscientiously implement the consensus reached at the [G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan] between the heads of the two countries, and implement the commitments to create the necessary conditions for cooperation in the agricultural fields between the two countries.”
America farmers were dismayed by the developments.
“This is just another nail in the coffin,” Tyler Stafslien, a North Dakota-based soybean farmer, told Yahoo Finance. “To see this thing only seems to be getting worse rather than better is very concerning, and the American taxpayers may have to foot another round of funding if this keeps up — or we could see a ton of farmers’ loss throughout this nation.”
American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said that the pain extended across the country.
“China’s announcement that it will not buy any agricultural products from the United States is a body blow to thousands of farmers and ranchers who are already struggling to get by,” Duvall stated.
‘Tariff policies have been doing financial harm to farmers’
Although farmers have collectively been receiving billions in market facilitation payments from the USDA, Stafslien sees these payments as “band-aids.”
The Trump administration announced in July that it would be providing an additional $16 billion in aid to farmers affected by the trade war.
“It’s certainly proof that the administration recognizes their tariff policies have been doing financial harm to farmers and rural America,” Stafslien said. (...)
Back in May 2019, U.S soybean prices reached its lowest level in a decade, dipping below $8 a bushel for the first time since 2008. But for farmers to make some kind of profit, they have still sold their crops despite the record-low prices.
“At some point, you have to sell, because we need some cash flow and when you’re selling at a loss, it’s just an ugly situation to be in,” Ziesch said. “If the price of soybeans is low because of tariffs, there’s not much I can do about it at some point,” Stafslien said. “You have to have cash flow just like any business. You may be selling at a loss just to rob Peter to pay Paul.”
‘We had developed a market with China’
by Adriana Belmonte, Yahoo News | Read more:
In response to President Trump recently announcing 10% tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese goods, China allowed the yuan to weaken and suspended purchases U.S. agricultural products.
“The Chinese market has a large capacity and the prospect of importing high-quality U.S. agricultural products is bright," state-owned media Xinhua said on Monday. "However, we hope the U.S. will conscientiously implement the consensus reached at the [G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan] between the heads of the two countries, and implement the commitments to create the necessary conditions for cooperation in the agricultural fields between the two countries.”America farmers were dismayed by the developments.
“This is just another nail in the coffin,” Tyler Stafslien, a North Dakota-based soybean farmer, told Yahoo Finance. “To see this thing only seems to be getting worse rather than better is very concerning, and the American taxpayers may have to foot another round of funding if this keeps up — or we could see a ton of farmers’ loss throughout this nation.”
American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said that the pain extended across the country.
“China’s announcement that it will not buy any agricultural products from the United States is a body blow to thousands of farmers and ranchers who are already struggling to get by,” Duvall stated.
‘Tariff policies have been doing financial harm to farmers’
Although farmers have collectively been receiving billions in market facilitation payments from the USDA, Stafslien sees these payments as “band-aids.”
The Trump administration announced in July that it would be providing an additional $16 billion in aid to farmers affected by the trade war.
“It’s certainly proof that the administration recognizes their tariff policies have been doing financial harm to farmers and rural America,” Stafslien said. (...)
Back in May 2019, U.S soybean prices reached its lowest level in a decade, dipping below $8 a bushel for the first time since 2008. But for farmers to make some kind of profit, they have still sold their crops despite the record-low prices.
“At some point, you have to sell, because we need some cash flow and when you’re selling at a loss, it’s just an ugly situation to be in,” Ziesch said. “If the price of soybeans is low because of tariffs, there’s not much I can do about it at some point,” Stafslien said. “You have to have cash flow just like any business. You may be selling at a loss just to rob Peter to pay Paul.”
‘We had developed a market with China’
Over the last year, as a means to finding a new source for soybeans, China has turned to countries like Argentina and Brazil. This has left American soybean farmers in the dust, so to speak. The S&P Global reported that Argentine and Brazilian soybean exports are projected to increase over the next marketing year, while U.S. sales are expected to fall.
Stafslien expressed his frustration at the inability for the two countries to reach a deal, particularly with the Trump administration, and the lost markets. (...)
Bob Kuylen, a wheat farmer, expressed a similar sentiment, recently telling Yahoo Finance: “This trade thing is what’s brought on by the president, and it’s really frustrating because he took away all of our markets.”
“All these countries went to different countries to get their grain,” he added. “How are we going to get the relations back with them to buy our grain again and be our customers?”
Stafslien expressed his frustration at the inability for the two countries to reach a deal, particularly with the Trump administration, and the lost markets. (...)
Bob Kuylen, a wheat farmer, expressed a similar sentiment, recently telling Yahoo Finance: “This trade thing is what’s brought on by the president, and it’s really frustrating because he took away all of our markets.”
“All these countries went to different countries to get their grain,” he added. “How are we going to get the relations back with them to buy our grain again and be our customers?”
Image:Joshua Lott, Reuters
[ed. $28 billion and counting. See also: 'Is this sustainable?’: Farmers say bailouts aren’t enough in Trump’s trade war (Yahoo News) and Trump Hints At Third Farm Bailout (ZeroHedge). But there's more! See also: Trump trade-war bailout flows to richest farmers; poor, black farmers left to struggle (Salon). Of course.]
Venezuela Hyperinflation Hits 10 million Percent. 'Shock Therapy' Next?
Venezuela's crisis has been marked by corruption, hyperinflation, one of the world's highest homicide rates, food and medicine shortages and the largest exodus "in the recent history of Latin America," according to the U.N. Refugee Agency.
Its chances to recover may start with President Nicolas Maduro stepping down or being forcibly removed — either by the opposition or through foreign military intervention. But that would just be the first step to get the ruined economy on the road to recovery. A major course of economic shock therapy will be required.
Venezuela's hyperinflation rate increased from 9,02 percent to 10 million percent since 2018, according to the International Monetary Fund, though it is expected to decline to back below 1 million percent due to recent moves by the country's central bank, according to a recent IMF forecast.
But the economic situation remains dire: The IMF says the cumulative decline of the Venezuelan economy since 2013 will reach 65% this year — for 2019 the annual decline forecast has increased from 25% to 35%. The five-year contraction is one of the worst in the world over the past half century and one of the few that was not caused by armed conflicts or natural disasters, the IMF stated earlier this week.
Some experts believe that in order to regain control over Venezuela's monetary system and zero out hyperinflation, drastic decisions will need to be taken.
"Venezuelans who have been suffering all of this time are going to be faced with a very dramatic, very draconian policy aimed at bringing their monetary system under control," said Dr. Eduardo Gamarra, professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University.
Wasted oil riches
Shock therapy measures, based on recent economic history, can include ending price controls and government subsidies, instituting higher tax rates and lower government spending to reduce budget deficits, devaluing the currency to boost foreign investments and selling state-owned industries to the private sector.
Venezuela will have to transform its current scheme of restricting foreign investment in order to fund the restoration of the energy sector, as well as its infrastructure, including the country's roads and bridges and the power grid. [ed. emphasis added]
Shock therapy supports the implementation of drastic economic policies to combat hyperinflation, shortages, reduce the budget deficit — Venezuela's current budget deficit stands at –29.95% in relation to GDP — and transition from a state-controlled economy to a mixed one.
It was used in post-communist Poland and Russia, and in other countries like Chile and Bolivia, where it successfully ended hyperinflation.
by Valentina Sanchez, CNBC | Read more:
Its chances to recover may start with President Nicolas Maduro stepping down or being forcibly removed — either by the opposition or through foreign military intervention. But that would just be the first step to get the ruined economy on the road to recovery. A major course of economic shock therapy will be required.
Venezuela's hyperinflation rate increased from 9,02 percent to 10 million percent since 2018, according to the International Monetary Fund, though it is expected to decline to back below 1 million percent due to recent moves by the country's central bank, according to a recent IMF forecast.But the economic situation remains dire: The IMF says the cumulative decline of the Venezuelan economy since 2013 will reach 65% this year — for 2019 the annual decline forecast has increased from 25% to 35%. The five-year contraction is one of the worst in the world over the past half century and one of the few that was not caused by armed conflicts or natural disasters, the IMF stated earlier this week.
Some experts believe that in order to regain control over Venezuela's monetary system and zero out hyperinflation, drastic decisions will need to be taken.
"Venezuelans who have been suffering all of this time are going to be faced with a very dramatic, very draconian policy aimed at bringing their monetary system under control," said Dr. Eduardo Gamarra, professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University.
Wasted oil riches
Shock therapy measures, based on recent economic history, can include ending price controls and government subsidies, instituting higher tax rates and lower government spending to reduce budget deficits, devaluing the currency to boost foreign investments and selling state-owned industries to the private sector.
Venezuela will have to transform its current scheme of restricting foreign investment in order to fund the restoration of the energy sector, as well as its infrastructure, including the country's roads and bridges and the power grid. [ed. emphasis added]
Shock therapy supports the implementation of drastic economic policies to combat hyperinflation, shortages, reduce the budget deficit — Venezuela's current budget deficit stands at –29.95% in relation to GDP — and transition from a state-controlled economy to a mixed one.
It was used in post-communist Poland and Russia, and in other countries like Chile and Bolivia, where it successfully ended hyperinflation.
Image: Getty
[ed. Whereby state assets get sold off to private interests, severe austerity measures imposed, crippling economic sanctions implemented, and voilà Venezuela is transformed into another client state of foreign capitalism (with widespread misery as an added bonus). Corporations are licking their chops. I wonder if Maduro is just biding his time to properly loot the treasury and find safe haven for himself and all 'his' money. That would be the normal game plan. See also: The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein). And: Trump’s Despicable Venezuela Embargo (The American Conservative)]
The Military-Industrial Jobs Scam
A Marilyn has once again seduced a president. This time, though, it’s not a movie star; it’s Marillyn Hewson, the head of Lockheed Martin, the nation’s top defense contractor and the largest weapons producer in the world. In the last month, Donald Trump and Hewson have seemed inseparable. They “saved” jobs at a helicopter plant. They took the stage together at a Lockheed subsidiary in Milwaukee. The president vetoed three bills that would have blocked the arms sales of Lockheed (and other companies) to Saudi Arabia. Recently, the president’s daughter Ivanka even toured a Lockheed space facility with Hewson.
On July 15th, the official White House Twitter account tweeted a video of the Lockheed CEO extolling the virtues of the company’s THAAD missile defense system, claiming that it “supports 25,000 American workers.” Not only was Hewson promoting her company’s product, but she was making her pitch — with the weapon in the background — on the White House lawn. Twitter immediately burst with outrage over the White House posting an ad for a private company, with some calling it “unethical” and “likely unlawful.”
None of this, however, was really out of the ordinary as the Trump administration has stopped at nothing to push the argument that job creation is justification enough for supporting weapons manufacturers to the hilt. Even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, he was already insisting that military spending was a great jobs creator. He’s only doubled down on this assertion during his presidency. Recently, overriding congressional objections, he even declared a national “emergency” to force through part of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia that he had once claimedwould create more than a million jobs. While this claim has been thoroughly debunked, the most essential part of his argument — that more money flowing to defense contractors will create significant numbers of new jobs — is considered truth personified by many in the defense industry, especially Marillyn Hewson.
The facts tell a different story.
Lockheed Locks Down Taxpayer Dollars, While Cutting American Jobs
To test Trump’s and Hewson’s argument, we asked a simple question: When contractors receive more taxpayer money, do they generally create more jobs? To answer it, we analyzed the reports of major defense contractors filed annually with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Among other things, these reveal the total number of people employed by a firm and the salary of its chief executive officer. We then compared those figures to the federal tax dollars each company received, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, which measures the “dollars obligated,” or funds, the government awards company by company.
We focused on the top five Pentagon defense contractors, the very heartland of the military-industrial complex, for the years 2012 to 2018. As it happened, 2012 was a pivotal year because the Budget Control Act (BCA) first went into effect then, establishing caps on how much money could be spent by Congress and mandating cuts to defense spending through 2021. Those caps were never fully adhered to. Ultimately, in fact, the Pentagon will receive significantly more money in the BCA decade than in the prior one, a period when the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were at their heights.
In 2012, concerned that those caps on defense spending would cut into their bottom lines, the five top contractors went on the political offensive, making future jobs their weapon of choice. After the Budget Control Act passed, the Aerospace Industries Association — the leading trade group of the weapons-makers — warned that more than one million jobs would be at risk if Pentagon spending were cut significantly. To emphasize the point, Lockheed sent layoff notices to 123,000 employees just before the BCA was implemented and only days before the 2012 election. Those layoffs never actually happened, but the fear of lost jobs would prove real indeed and would last.
Consider it mission accomplished, since Pentagon spending was actually higher in 2018 than in 2012 and Lockheed received a sizeable chunk of that cash infusion. From 2012 to 2018, among government contractors, that company would, in fact, be the top recipient of taxpayer dollars every single year, those funds reaching their zenith in 2017, as it raked in more than $50.6 billion federal dollars. By contrast, in 2012, when Lockheed was threatening its employees with mass layoffs, the firm received nearly $37 billion.
So what did Lockheed do with those additional $13 billion taxpayer dollars? It would be reasonable to assume that it used some of that windfall (like those of previous years) to invest in growing its workforce. If you came to that conclusion, however, you would be sorely mistaken. From 2012 to 2018, overall employment at Lockheed actually fell from 120,000 to 105,000, according to the firm’s filings with the SEC and the company itself reported a slightly larger reduction of 16,350 jobs in the U.S. In other words, in the last six years Lockheed dramatically reduced its U.S. workforce, even as it hired more employees abroad and received more taxpayer dollars.
So where is all that additional taxpayer money actually going, if not job creation? At least part of the answer is contractor profits and soaring CEO salaries. In those six years, Lockheed’s stock price rose from $82 at the beginning of 2012 to $305 at the end of 2018, a nearly four-fold increase. In 2018, the company also reported a 9% ($590 million) rise in its profits, the best in the industry. And in those same years, the salary of its CEO increased by $1.4 million, again according to its SEC filings.
In short, since 2012 the number of taxpayer dollars going to Lockheed has expanded by billions, the value of its stock has nearly quadrupled, and its CEO’s salary went up 32%, even as it cut 14% of its American work force. Yet Lockheed continues to use job creation, as well as its employees’ present jobs, as political pawns to get yet more taxpayer money. The president himself has bought into the ruse in his race to funnel ever more money to the Pentagon and promote arms deals to countries like Saudi Arabia, even over the nearly unified objections of an otherwise incredibly divided Congress.
Lockheed Is the Norm, Not the Exception
Despite being this country’s and the world’s top weapons maker, Lockheed isn’t the exception but the norm. From 2012 to 2018, the unemployment rate in the U.S. plummeted from roughly 8% to 4%, with more than 13 million new jobs added to the economy. Yet, in those same years, three of the five top defense contractors slashed jobs. In 2018, the Pentagon committed approximately $118 billion in federal money to those firms, including Lockheed — nearly half of all the money it spent on contractors. This was almost $12 billion more than they had received in 2012. Yet, cumulatively, those companies lost jobs and now employ a total of 6,900 fewer employees than they did in 2012, according to their SEC filings.
In addition to the reductions at Lockheed, Boeing slashed 21,400 jobs and Raytheon cut 800 employees from its payroll. Only General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman added jobs — 13,400 and 16,900 employees, respectively — making that total figure look modestly better. However, even those “gains” can’t qualify as job creation in the normal sense, since they resulted almost entirely from the fact that each of those companies bought another Pentagon contractor and added its employees to its own payroll. CSRA, which General Dynamics acquired in 2018, had 18,500 employees before the merger, while Orbital ATK, which General Dynamics acquired last year, had 13,900 employees. Subtract these 32,400 jobs from the corporate totals and job losses at the firms become staggering.
by Nia Harris, Cassandra Stimpson, and Ben Freeman, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
On July 15th, the official White House Twitter account tweeted a video of the Lockheed CEO extolling the virtues of the company’s THAAD missile defense system, claiming that it “supports 25,000 American workers.” Not only was Hewson promoting her company’s product, but she was making her pitch — with the weapon in the background — on the White House lawn. Twitter immediately burst with outrage over the White House posting an ad for a private company, with some calling it “unethical” and “likely unlawful.”
None of this, however, was really out of the ordinary as the Trump administration has stopped at nothing to push the argument that job creation is justification enough for supporting weapons manufacturers to the hilt. Even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, he was already insisting that military spending was a great jobs creator. He’s only doubled down on this assertion during his presidency. Recently, overriding congressional objections, he even declared a national “emergency” to force through part of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia that he had once claimedwould create more than a million jobs. While this claim has been thoroughly debunked, the most essential part of his argument — that more money flowing to defense contractors will create significant numbers of new jobs — is considered truth personified by many in the defense industry, especially Marillyn Hewson.The facts tell a different story.
Lockheed Locks Down Taxpayer Dollars, While Cutting American Jobs
To test Trump’s and Hewson’s argument, we asked a simple question: When contractors receive more taxpayer money, do they generally create more jobs? To answer it, we analyzed the reports of major defense contractors filed annually with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Among other things, these reveal the total number of people employed by a firm and the salary of its chief executive officer. We then compared those figures to the federal tax dollars each company received, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, which measures the “dollars obligated,” or funds, the government awards company by company.
We focused on the top five Pentagon defense contractors, the very heartland of the military-industrial complex, for the years 2012 to 2018. As it happened, 2012 was a pivotal year because the Budget Control Act (BCA) first went into effect then, establishing caps on how much money could be spent by Congress and mandating cuts to defense spending through 2021. Those caps were never fully adhered to. Ultimately, in fact, the Pentagon will receive significantly more money in the BCA decade than in the prior one, a period when the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were at their heights.
In 2012, concerned that those caps on defense spending would cut into their bottom lines, the five top contractors went on the political offensive, making future jobs their weapon of choice. After the Budget Control Act passed, the Aerospace Industries Association — the leading trade group of the weapons-makers — warned that more than one million jobs would be at risk if Pentagon spending were cut significantly. To emphasize the point, Lockheed sent layoff notices to 123,000 employees just before the BCA was implemented and only days before the 2012 election. Those layoffs never actually happened, but the fear of lost jobs would prove real indeed and would last.
Consider it mission accomplished, since Pentagon spending was actually higher in 2018 than in 2012 and Lockheed received a sizeable chunk of that cash infusion. From 2012 to 2018, among government contractors, that company would, in fact, be the top recipient of taxpayer dollars every single year, those funds reaching their zenith in 2017, as it raked in more than $50.6 billion federal dollars. By contrast, in 2012, when Lockheed was threatening its employees with mass layoffs, the firm received nearly $37 billion.
So what did Lockheed do with those additional $13 billion taxpayer dollars? It would be reasonable to assume that it used some of that windfall (like those of previous years) to invest in growing its workforce. If you came to that conclusion, however, you would be sorely mistaken. From 2012 to 2018, overall employment at Lockheed actually fell from 120,000 to 105,000, according to the firm’s filings with the SEC and the company itself reported a slightly larger reduction of 16,350 jobs in the U.S. In other words, in the last six years Lockheed dramatically reduced its U.S. workforce, even as it hired more employees abroad and received more taxpayer dollars.
So where is all that additional taxpayer money actually going, if not job creation? At least part of the answer is contractor profits and soaring CEO salaries. In those six years, Lockheed’s stock price rose from $82 at the beginning of 2012 to $305 at the end of 2018, a nearly four-fold increase. In 2018, the company also reported a 9% ($590 million) rise in its profits, the best in the industry. And in those same years, the salary of its CEO increased by $1.4 million, again according to its SEC filings.
In short, since 2012 the number of taxpayer dollars going to Lockheed has expanded by billions, the value of its stock has nearly quadrupled, and its CEO’s salary went up 32%, even as it cut 14% of its American work force. Yet Lockheed continues to use job creation, as well as its employees’ present jobs, as political pawns to get yet more taxpayer money. The president himself has bought into the ruse in his race to funnel ever more money to the Pentagon and promote arms deals to countries like Saudi Arabia, even over the nearly unified objections of an otherwise incredibly divided Congress.
Lockheed Is the Norm, Not the Exception
Despite being this country’s and the world’s top weapons maker, Lockheed isn’t the exception but the norm. From 2012 to 2018, the unemployment rate in the U.S. plummeted from roughly 8% to 4%, with more than 13 million new jobs added to the economy. Yet, in those same years, three of the five top defense contractors slashed jobs. In 2018, the Pentagon committed approximately $118 billion in federal money to those firms, including Lockheed — nearly half of all the money it spent on contractors. This was almost $12 billion more than they had received in 2012. Yet, cumulatively, those companies lost jobs and now employ a total of 6,900 fewer employees than they did in 2012, according to their SEC filings.
In addition to the reductions at Lockheed, Boeing slashed 21,400 jobs and Raytheon cut 800 employees from its payroll. Only General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman added jobs — 13,400 and 16,900 employees, respectively — making that total figure look modestly better. However, even those “gains” can’t qualify as job creation in the normal sense, since they resulted almost entirely from the fact that each of those companies bought another Pentagon contractor and added its employees to its own payroll. CSRA, which General Dynamics acquired in 2018, had 18,500 employees before the merger, while Orbital ATK, which General Dynamics acquired last year, had 13,900 employees. Subtract these 32,400 jobs from the corporate totals and job losses at the firms become staggering.
Monday, August 5, 2019
Life is Tough
The word extremophile didn’t exist until the 1970s. It entered wide circulation only after 1979 when the US Navy’s submersible Alvin revealed ecosystems prospering in deep-ocean hydrothermal vents. The Alvin scientists discovered organisms living in superheated water and largely metabolising hydrogen sulphide, which until then had been thought toxic and incompatible with life. Interest in extremophiles has burgeoned in proportion as scientists have come to appreciate their abundance, as well as their novel physiology. There is a journal devoted to extremophiles, focusing on creatures that survive – even, thrive – in environments that are extremely hot, cold, highly acidic or alkaline, and so forth, circumstances that would be lethal for most living things.
Not surprisingly, extremophiles tend to be relatively simple creatures, notably invertebrates and especially bacteria and archaea, although there is no bright line distinguishing, say, arctic hares, which thrive in very cold habitats, from their rabbit relatives whose habitats are more temperate. But neither compares with those life forms whose existence excites the admiration and wonder of biologists. The concept itself is nonetheless anthropocentric, since denizens of, say, blisteringly hot hydrothermal vents would perish in our ‘moderate’ temperatures and pressures, which for them would doubtless be extreme. (...)
Purists don’t include tardigrades among extremophiles, since they don’t appear to be adapted to extreme environments per se – that is, like us, they do best in comparatively benign conditions, which, in the case of tardigrades includes the moist, temperate miniworld of forest moss and lichens.
Tardigrades might be the toughest creatures on Earth. You can put them in a laboratory freezer at -80 degrees Celsius, leave them for several years, then thaw them out, and just 20 minutes later they’ll be dancing about as though nothing had happened. They can even be cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero, at which atoms virtually stop moving. Once thawed out, they move around just fine. (Admittedly, they aren’t speed demons; the word ‘tardigrade’ means ‘slow walker’.) Exposed to superheated steam – 140 degrees Celsius – they shrug it off and keep on living. Not only are tardigrades remarkably resistant to a wide range of what ecologists term environmental ‘insults’ (heat, cold, pressure, radiation, etc), they also have a special trick up their sleeves: when things get really challenging – especially if dry or cold – they convert into a spore-like form known as a ‘tun’. A tun can live, if you call their unique form of suspended animation ‘living’, for decades, possibly even centuries, and thereby survive pretty much anything that nature might throw at them. In this state, their metabolism slows to less than 0.01 per cent of normal. (...)
Given that tardigrades possess the kind of powers we otherwise associate with comic-book superheroes, it might seem that they are creatures out of science fiction, but maybe it’s the other way around. Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem (2010), a Chinese blockbuster that broke all records for sci-fi literature in its home country, became the first book not originally published in English to win the coveted Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel in 2015. It describes extraterrestrials known as Trisolarans, whose planet is associated with three suns, the real-life interactions of which – as physicists and mathematicians understand – would generate chaotically unstable conditions.
Trisolarans, therefore, are unpredictably subjected to extreme environments depending on the temporary orientation of their planet relative to its chaotically interacting stars: sometimes lethally hot, other times cold, sometimes unbearably dry and bright, other times dark, and so forth. As a result, these imagined extremophiles have evolved the ability to desiccate themselves, rolling up like dried parchment, only to be reconstituted when conditions become more favourable.
I don’t know if Liu was aware of real-life, Earth-inhabiting tardigrades when he invented his fictional Trisolarans, but the convergence is striking. (In the interest of scientific open-mindedness, it should perhaps also be considered that maybe tardigrades are real Trisolarans, refugees from a planet that was chronically exposed to intense environmental perturbations. This would explain the puzzling fact that tardigrades appear hyper-adapted, able to survive extremes that greatly exceed what they experience here on Earth.)
by David P. Barash, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Water bear (Paramacrobiotus craterlaki) in moss. Photo by Eye of Science/Science Photo Library
[ed. Plus, Tardigrades on the Moon! (Ars Technica).]
Image: Water bear (Paramacrobiotus craterlaki) in moss. Photo by Eye of Science/Science Photo Library
[ed. Plus, Tardigrades on the Moon! (Ars Technica).]
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.’
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).]
[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.
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:
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
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
Sunday, August 4, 2019
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
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.
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:
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.]
[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.
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
Saturday, August 3, 2019
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