Same As It Ever Was: Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, Minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.”

― from Network, screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky

And thus spoke “Arthur Jensen”, CEO of fictional media conglomerate “CCA” in what is for me the most defining scene in director Sidney Lumet’s prescient 1976 satire. Jensen (wonderfully played by Ned Beatty) is calling “mad prophet of the airwaves” Howard Beale (Peter Finch) on the carpet for publicly exposing a potential buyout of CCA by shadowy Arab investors. Cognizant that Beale is crazy as a loon, yet a cash cow for the network, Jensen hands him a new set of stone tablets from which he is to preach (the corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen). It is screenwriter Chayefsky’s finest monologue.

Recently, we’ve witnessed a President of the United States who is Tweeting and making public statements in TV interviews and press conferences (in a very “mad prophet of the airwaves” manner) that suggest he feels it’s more important right now in the midst of a still-raging pandemic to get everyone back to work than to save their lives. Because the economy. And per usual, Wall Street watches, waits and yawns while it gets a manicure.

You would almost think “someone” has handed the President a set of stone tablets from which he is to preach (akin to the corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen). Or, at the very least-he opines from the perspective of someone borne of privilege and inherited wealth?

So how did the world become “…a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business”? And come hell, high water, or killer virus, why is it that “Thou shalt rally the unwashed masses to selflessly do their part to protect the interests of the Too Big to Fail” (whether it’s corporations, the dynastic heirs of the 1% or the wealth management industry that feeds off of them) remains the most “immutable bylaw” of all?

It’s not like “the people” haven’t tried through history to level the playing field between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. Take, for example the French Revolution, which ultimately did not change the status quo, despite the initial “victory” of the citizenry over the power-hoarding aristocracy. As pointed out in Justin Pemberton’s documentary Capital in the Twenty-First Century, while there was initial optimism in the wake of the revolution that French society would default to an egalitarian model, it never really took.

Why? Because the architects of the revolution overlooked what is really needed to establish and maintain true equality: strong political institutions, an education system, health care (*sigh*), a transport system, and a tax system that targets the highest incomes.

Same as it ever was. (...)

As the film was produced before Covid-19 shut down much of the world’s economy, it does not delve into the possibilities of a post-pandemic restructuring. As luck would have it though, a fitting postscript for my review presented itself the day after I screened the film when Thomas Piketty popped up as a guest on The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah. Curiously, he was not there to promote the documentary, but did share some interesting thoughts on possible post-pandemic shifts in current economic models:

[Piketty] I think this is one of these crises we see that can really change people’s views about the world and how we should organize the economy. What we see at this stage is a big increase in inequality. […]

With this crisis right now, I think people are going to be asking for proof that we can also use this power of money creation and the Federal Reserve in order to invest in people; investing in hospitals, in public infrastructure, increasing wages for unskilled workers…all the low-wage and middle-wage people which we see today are necessary for our existence and our society.

In the longer run, of course we cannot just pay for everything with public debt and money creation…so we have to re-balance our tax system. […]

In the past three decades in America, we’ve seen a lot more billionaires; but we’ve seen a lot less growth. So in the end, the idea that you get prosperity out of inequality just didn’t work out. […]

[Noah] What do you think about the “worst case scenario”, then…if you live in a world where the inequality just keeps growing; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, what do we inevitably get to?

[Piketty] Well to me the worst scenario is that some skilled politicians like Donald Trump, or [President of the National Front Party] Marie Le Pen in my country in France will use the frustration coming from wage and income stagnation and rising inequality in order to point out some foreign workers or “some people” [are] to blame. […] And this is what really worries me-that if we don’t change our discourses, if we don’t come up with another economic model that is more equitable, more sustainable…then, in effect we re-open the door for all this nationalist discourse.

by Dennis Hartley, Den of Cinema |  Read more:
Image: Network/YouTube

Gil Scott-Heron, Nina Simone, Buffalo Springfield

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The Girl From the Red River Shore

Some of us turn off the lights and we live
In the moonlight shooting by
Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark
To be where the angels fly
Pretty maids all in a row lined up
Outside my cabin door
I’ve never wanted any of them wanting me
‘Cept the girl from the Red River shore

Well, I sat by her side and for a while I tried
To make that girl my wife
She gave me her best advice and she said
“Go home and lead a quiet life.”
Well, I’ve been to the east and I’ve been to the west
And I’ve been out where the black winds roar
Somehow, though, I never did get that far
With the girl from the Red River shore

Well, I knew when I first laid eyes on her
I could never be free
One look at her and I knew right away
She should always be with me
Well, the dream dried up a long time ago
Don’t know where it is anymore
True to life, true to me
Was the girl from the Red River shore

Now I’m wearing the cloak of misery
And I’ve tasted jilted love
And the frozen smile upon my face
Fits me like a glove
But I can’t escape from the memory
Of the one that I’ll always adore
All those nights when I lay in the arms
Of the girl from the Red River shore

Well, we’re living in the shadows of a fading past
Trapped in the fires of time
I’ve tried not to ever hurt anybody
And to stay out of a life of crime
And when it’s all been said and done
I never did know the score
One more day is another day away
From the girl from the Red River shore

Well, I’m a stranger here in a strange land
But I know this is where I belong
I’ll ramble and gamble for the one I love
And the hills will give me a song
Though nothing looks familiar to me
I know I’ve stayed here before
Once, a thousand nights ago
With the girl from the Red River shore

Well, I went back to see about it once
Went back to straighten it out
Everybody that I talked to had seen us there
Said they didn’t know who I was talking about
Well, the sun went down on me a long time ago
I’ve had to fall back from the door
I wish I could have spent every hour of my life
With the girl from the Red River shore

Now, I’ve heard of a guy who lived a long time ago
A man full of sorrow and strife
Whenever someone around him died and was dead
He knew how to bring ’em on back to life
Well, I don’t know what kind of language he used
Or if they do that kind of thing anymore
Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all
‘Cept the girl from the Red River shore

The Girl From the Red River Shore ~ Bob Dylan (YouTube)

Too Close For Comfort: Russia's Communal Apartments

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Through the thin wall separating her from her neighbors, Dr. Anzhela Kirilova began to hear the rasping cough associated with Covid-19 sometime in May. That was hardly a surprise, as a few weeks earlier her neighbors had heard the same cough coming from her room.

Dr. Kirilova, who works in a Covid-19 ward at a hospital, said she had tried to warn the single man and the young family with whom she shares the four-room apartment, suggesting they wear masks in the kitchen.

“They said, ‘We don’t care, and we’ll do what we want,’” she said with a shrug.

For residents of Russia’s communal apartments — a relic of the Soviet Union but still home to hundreds of thousands of people, most of them in St. Petersburg — self-isolation to fend off the coronavirus is hardly an option.

From a half-dozen to more than 20 people live in separate rooms within a single apartment, typically one to a family, while sharing a kitchen and bathroom in one large, usually unhappy, household. In St. Petersburg, about 500,000 people live in communal apartments, constituting 10 percent of the city’s population.

Life in communal apartments has always bordered on intolerable. The rules for close-quarters living among people who may despise one another are delicate. Feuds are common.

“Because of a lack of privacy, people become very suspicious,” said Ilya Utekhin, a professor of anthropology at the European University of St. Petersburg and author of “Essays on Communal Life.”

Even in the best of times, which, to be honest, there have not been many for the communal apartment residents of this city, “they believe their neighbors want to inflict all kinds of damage,” he said. “They become afraid. They are sure that in their absence, their neighbors are looking at or touching their things.”

Some families keep their own toilet seat, usually hanging on a nail in the bathroom, which they swap out for the common seat. In another arrangement, several families that get along share a seat among themselves, but not with others. This is called a “toilet seat circle.”

The tensions have been compounded by the threat of the new coronavirus. Russia, with more than 500,000 reported cases, has the third-highest number of infected people after the United States and Brazil. (...)

The idea of communal apartments sprang up right after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In a process they called “creating density,” the Communists divided up the palaces and apartments of the rich, the noblemen and various lords and vassals of the czarist court and moved in thousands of poor families.

The resulting communal apartments, of which about 69,000 remain today, accounting for as much as 40 percent of the residential real estate in central St. Petersburg, became a blend of architectural opulence and everyday penury.

Millions of people in the Soviet Union lived in communal apartments. Most are now gone outside of St. Petersburg, where they remain because of the vast number of historic buildings that had been converted to communal apartments. On floors once walked by Russian aristocrats, residents argue over noise, unwashed dishes, demented or alcoholic neighbors, guests and germs.

by Andrew E. Kramer, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sergey Ponomarev

The Limits of Celebrity Activism

Hollywood is perhaps one of the last places to look for inspiration—practical, emotional, or otherwise—in times of crisis. Still, our gilded class’s response to the societal shitstorm that has dominated our minds and screens for the last four months has felt notably unfastened. In April, the comedian and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres made headlines when she joked that life while quarantined in her ten-thousand-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion felt like “being in jail.” The same week, the Times reported on the four hundred inmates being held at Rikers Island for minor parole violations, despite a worsening pandemic. The inmates included Raymond Rivera, a fifty-five-year-old man who, after having his case delayed several months, contracted covid-19 in jail and died the day after state officials lifted the warrant against him. As public sentiment has turned from coronavirus-induced fear to sadness and anger following the tragic killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the celebrity response has ranged from milquetoast to head-scratching.

In a video shared to Instagram on June 2nd, the movie heartthrob turned Silicon Valley financier Ashton Kutcher choked back tears as he recounted a pre-bedtime conversation that he had with his two young children. He explained how his son wanted to be read to first, but Kutcher told him that his sister would go first because “for some boys, girls don’t get to go at all.” The story was meant to serve as a poignant and instructive allegory for the score of Instagram users who had commented “All Lives Matter” under a recent post of his where he had opined “BLM.” Around the same time, Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of menswear for Louis Vuitton and the founder and C.E.O. of Off-White, was being memed into a fine dust after posting a screenshot of his paltry fifty-dollar donation to a bail fund started by the Miami art collective (F)empower. And, on Thursday, a two-minute video for an initiative bluntly titled “I Take Responsibility” joined the ever-growing canon of the unsought celebrity P.S.A. The video features a coalition of white actors and entertainers asserting their culpability in perpetuating anti-black racism. Filmed in a sombre black-and-white and scored with saccharine piano, the spot shows Sarah Paulson, Stanley Tucci, Kesha, and others vowing no longer to “turn a blind eye” or “allow racist, hurtful words . . . to be uttered in my presence” and “to stand against hate.” The Web site for the initiative allows visitors to decide which vice they feel most guilty of (“Saying racism doesn’t exist,” “not being inclusive,” etc.) and to “make it better today” by pledging to do things like “donate to families affected [by racism]” before directing them to various organizations and petitions. Elsewhere, many celebrities simply invoked proverbial, and often literal, “prayer hands” emoji (🙏)—a de-facto “get well soon” to society and all its ills.

The missed notes have been particularly grating in the pop-music world, where many stars have built careers and amassed huge profits working within black musical traditions and selling their work to black audiences. As black communities are being disproportionately decimated by the coronavirus and black people continue to die at the hands of law enforcement, there are some who feel that figures like Drake should use their massive platforms to do more than, say, offer a fan the chance to fly on his private jet (On June 1st, Drake was challenged by fellow Toronto artist Mustafah the Poet to match a four-hundred-dollar donation to a black bail-fund network. The rapper reportedly replied, “Say less brother,” and posted a donation receipt for a hundred thousand dollars.) (...)

The current cultural moment is one whose urgency feels particularly ill-suited to the sort of vapid pageantry that typically constitutes the “socially conscious” arm of a celebrity’s public-relations repertoire. Given all the vested corporate interests that celebrities have, and the timeworn tradition of rewarding famous people for the appearance of political integrity more than its actual presence, it’s wishful to expect every musician with more than a million followers to be schooled in the perils of systemic racial inequality, much less to be equipped to speak publicly about it. In fact, it would probably be in our collective best interest that not all of them did. Still, one hopes that, among the faction of the highly followed and highly influential who were jumping to post black squares and vague sentence fragments, there are some who could use their visibility to do more. The increased pressure on artists to monetize their personal brands and the subsequent professionalization of social media have turned these solipsistic Internet spaces into de-facto storefronts for mini corporations. Sadly, it seems that many of the famous names behind these accounts have also adopted the sort of risk-averse, politically opaque rhetoric favored by Fortune 500 companies—opting for tepid platitudes and lazy hashtag activism in lieu of more resolute (and potentially alienating) public displays. (...)

What shouldn’t be overlooked is the work that plain old non-celebrity people have been doing. Within the last few weeks, funds for, among other causes, pretrial bail for trans people being held in New York City jails, George Floyd’s young daughter Gianna, and Ramsey Orta—the man who filmed the murder of his friend Eric Garner in 2014 and was released from prison this year—have been flooded with contributions. Bail-fund organizers in particular have seen an unprecedented spike in support in recent weeks. Many people have been posting receipts of their donations and challenging friends in their network to match them.

What these examples show is not that every single celebrity has to commit to leading the revolution but what can happen if these platforms were treated less like public-relations buildouts and more like the powerful communication channels and resource vectors that they are. Ideological fluffiness on the part of people with huge online followings can be at its best a wasted opportunity and at its worst deleterious to more substantive activism happening on social media. A #blacklivesmatter post on Jennifer Lopez’s Instagram page reaches an audience larger than those of most regional television stations. And although reposting an aerial video of a street mural is nice, it lacks the efficacy of a bail-fund link to free those arrested while marching across it.

by Jordan Coley, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Confluential Films / YouTube
[ed. Not to mention all the generic corporate bs we've been subjected to lately. See also: What Do We Want From White Celebrities Right Now? (The Cut).]

The Virus Will Win

The Virus Will Win (The Atlantic)
Image: Timothy Mulcare
[ed. Of course it will. Human nature. See also: Coronavirus 2nd Wave? Nope, The U.S. Is Still Stuck In The 1st One (NPR).]

Cops

In 1989, a new show came on TV that felt like nothing that had come before it. For 30 minutes, viewers got to ride along with real police officers and watch – in verité style – as they broke up drunken fistfights, chased speeding motorcycles across highways, and went undercover for drug busts. It was thrilling. It was visceral. And it was a hit. (...)

This week, after more than 1,000 episodes on air and just a day after its 33rd season was scheduled to premiere, Cops was cancelled by the Paramount network. It happened amid protests across the world responding to racist and violent policing in America, and reflects the work of many people, including concerted efforts by civil rights group Color of Change. While cancelling Cops is barely a starting point when it comes to creating a more fair and equitable criminal justice system, this small step is more meaningful than you might think.

I know this because I spent 18 months investigating the show, as part of a six-part documentary podcast that came out last year called Running From Cops, hosted by Dan Taberski. We learned that Cops (and other reality policing shows like it) has a huge impact on how Americans view policing, and how police officers view themselves. Just ask any of the dozens of officers on the show who profess that watching Cops is what made them want to become a cop in the first place.

We watched and analyzed 846 episodes of the show, collecting over 68,000 data points. We catalogued the types of crimes (violent, narcotics, sex work, traffic stops, chases, etc); whether the segment ended in arrest; whether the suspect was on drugs or alcohol at the time; and the race and gender of all officers, suspects and victims. We then compared this data to data available from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.

What we discovered was that, contrary to early press reactions, the world portrayed on Cops is not like the real world. There are about four times more violent crimes in Cops than in reality. And three times more drug arrests. And about 10 times more arrests for sex work. The cops on the show are also, statistically speaking, extremely good at their jobs. Segments on the show end in arrest 84.4% of the time. (That number reflects a change over time, from 61% back in 1990 to 95% in the most recent season.) In Cops world, law enforcement officers are so effective, it’s basically a given that a crime will end in an arrest.

The tactics the show’s producers use to get this footage are also questionable at best, and disturbing at worst. We were told that they never air a segment without a signed consent form from the suspect in question. In the course of our reporting, we spoke to 11 suspects who had appeared on the show. All but one said that they had not given their consent, or they were too inebriated at the time to legally give consent. Others told us they were confused by the relationship between the show’s producers and the law enforcement agents with whom they were working side-by-side. We even found a case in Gwinnett county, Georgia, where a young woman was denied a bail bond until she signed the form giving Cops permission to air her arrest for possession of cocaine. Subsequent testing showed that the substance was not cocaine at all, though this was never aired on the show. Instead, the producers aired her arrest, and continued to air it in reruns.

Perhaps the most insidious takeaway we had from watching hundreds of hours of the show was not quantitative, but qualitative. Over and over, Cops shows officers acting in violent, abusive, racist and potentially unconstitutional ways. This can include anything from repeatedly tasing suspects who are in custody, to prying open a suspect’s mouth with a flashlight in search of drugs. Rather than critiquing this sort of behavior, or even presenting it neutrally, Cops portrays it as good policing.

The police departments featured on the show have no problem with this portrayal. In fact, in exchange for access, the producers would give every department they work with “final cut” – the right to edit out any actions caught on camera that might portray them in a bad light. Those departments chose to leave all of those incidents in.

Until a few days ago, Cops was on TV almost constantly. In a single week, it could air as many as 69 times in syndication. It also led to Live PD, which we investigated for Running From Cops as well. In 2016, this new reality policing show arrived and became even more popular than the show that inspired it. It was the live version of Cops, cutting back and forth between active crime scenes being filmed across the country as they happen, while a team of law enforcement vets act as commentators in the show’s New York studio. Picture the NFL’s Red Zone, but with police. Unsurprisingly, it contained many of the same ethical problems as Cops, many of which were exacerbated by the fact that it was broadcast live. In our reporting, we heard from multiple people that police officers would show up to their homes at all hours of the day and night, production crew in tow, hoping to catch them doing something illegal and camera-worthy. LivePD, which aired on A&E, quickly became the most popular cable program in its time slot. It ran in long, multi-day marathon blocks, taking up a significant portion of the network’s weekly schedule. There were six spinoffs. (...)

Does the violence we’ve seen committed by police officers over the last two weeks – and the protests in the face of that violence – have any connection to these show’s long run? I can’t say for sure. Or rather, I can’t say how much. I can say that for 31 years Cops and more recently Live PD depicted a world full of violence and crime, in which the bad and often demonstrably illegal behavior of the cops on camera was held up as good policing. The shows helped to normalize injustice. And we know that in the real world, that type of injustice is disproportionately inflicted upon black people. We also know that dozens of officers who appear in the later seasons of the show profess that watching Cops was the reason they themselves became cops.

This show shaped them, and it has shaped the way millions of Americans, for more than three decades, perceived the supposed “reality” of policing.

by Henry Molofsky, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. I've never seen a single episode (not being a fan of cops or crime shows), but my god...it's been on since 1989?]

On the Future, Americans Can Agree: It Doesn’t Look Good

On the Future, Americans Can Agree: It Doesn’t Look Good (NY Times)

[ed. Beyond depressing. Enjoy.] Here are a couple of comments:

I'm still an optimist. Things are not fabulous now but I think our future holds great promise. Not tomorrow or anytime soon but, in a few years, I believe, we will begin to see significant change. I am greatly encouraged by the strength and size of the protest that's taking place. The involvement of multiple generations in calling for fundamental societal change and the likelihood that they will vote in November could be the first indication of real and hopefully sustained progress toward the ideal set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. 

There will be institutional resistance. It has happened before, it is happening now and it will continue grow to meet the ground swell for societal justice of all forms.

We older folks who took part in the protests of the 1960's had hoped that the changes that occurred due to all our organizing and protestations would lead to continued progress. This was naïve. I don't think that most of us understood or perhaps even saw the sophistication that the institutional establishment could muster to resist changes to the way of life in which they had become so comfortable. 

Many of us got so distracted by and caught up in our own little day to day struggles battling for a place for ourselves that we didn't realize that the forces we were battling were man made with the intention of keeping us compliant.

~Byron, CT

Historians and many who have studied the Trump phenomenon are pretty unanimous in their conclusion in that he is just not a quirk of fate, but actually forty years in the making when Ronald Reagan decided in the early 1980's that government was an impediment rather than an asset to the country and proceeded to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations which started the ball rolling on the path to the worst inequality in over a 100 yrs. Of course during this period those that suffered the worst were working people consisting of all races including minorities and immigrants and every time a crisis of confidence occurred the "corporate masters' stated they were going to do something about it, yet, at the same time were spending tens of millions of dollars lobbying government against minimum wage increases, improved healthcare for all citizens and more affordable education. 

All along Bernie Sanders has stated that the system was "rigged" in favor of those at the top and in order to start seriously dealing with theses issues, significant structural changes had to occur in the system for it to happen. Of course, the establishment and MSM did not want to hear about any of it and here we are. 

My concern is, as happened in 2016 and now, by dismissing Sanders again, America has missed its final opportunity to really deal with the issues and have a President, unencumbered by lobbyists pressure, who was actually focused on doing something about it.

~Deus, Toronto

Tamotsu Onaga — Iso (Rocky Shore), 1960s

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Peter Uka - Refill, 2019
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What Will it Take to Save the Airlines?

Coronavirus has created the greatest challenge the airline industry has ever faced. For the large legacy carriers serving intercontinental markets, the threat is comparable to the meteor that caused massive climate change and drove dinosaurs into extinction. While the industry was clearly viable prior to coronavirus, it faced a number of serious competitive and financial issues that will impede efforts to deal with the impact of the coronavirus meteor.

The industry requires major, painful restructuring. Baring staggering increases in taxpayer subsidies (beyond the $60 billion already pledged in the US), it is unclear how most (perhaps any) of these carriers survive under current ownership in anything like their current form. None of the changes needed to ensure the long-term efficiency and competitiveness of the airline industry are even being discussed at this point, and the processes needed to manage the needed restructuring do not currently exist.

The Financial Devastation Directly Caused by Coronavirus

Airline economics depend critically on extremely high capacity utilization. Small changes have huge profit leverage. US airlines filled 85% of their seats in 2019 (up from 58% when the industry was deregulated and 70% 20 years ago). Once an airline has committed to the costs of operating a given schedule, almost all of the lost revenue from a shortfall of passengers directly reduces the bottom line.

Coronavirus-driven traffic losses have been vastly larger than anyone could have ever imagined. Traffic through TSA checkpoints in US airports was down 96% versus the year before in mid April and 88% in mid-May. While the industry had faced demand shocks in the past (9/11 in the US, various wars, the original SARS outbreak in Asia), none were global in scope, and none were seen as driving permanent declines in demand. Never before has flying on an airplane required accepting serious medical risk. In a recent poll only 23% of US travelers thought flying on an airplane was safe. [FN1]

While no one knows what will happen, this analysis assumes that there is no widely available vaccine and no reliable way to prove individual immunity during 2020. Perhaps infection rates decline gradually and economic activity gradually increases. Perhaps there are new outbreaks and efforts to reopen the economy are put on hold. Perhaps economic activity declines seriously as companies realize that recent losses are unsustainable, and major new waves of layoffs and bankruptcies occur. But the idea of a rapid, “V-shaped” recovery to the January status quo seems wildly improbable.

The revenue losses have been even worse than the drop in passenger counts. Airline profits depend heavily on business travelers paying higher fares. But the gradual increase in domestic traffic appears to be almost exclusively leisure demand, such as pent up desire to visit family members. Corporate travel remains close to zero, [FN2] and the massive short-term substitution of videoconferencing may reduce business travel for years to come.

The profitability of the large US legacy carriers (Delta, United, American) also depends heavily on intercontinental traffic, which has fallen even further than domestic traffic. Cross-border travel bans have been key to slowing the spread of the virus, and the point where the mass market is no longer concerned with the health risks is somewhere in the distant future.

Profitability requires very tightly aligning an airlines’ cost structure with its revenue base. Airlines lock-in to most of their costs (e.g. fleet, airport facilities, IT infrastructure, corporate debt) on lower-cost long-term arrangements because historically they have had very high certainty about future demand. Contracts with labor and suppliers are similarly inflexible, with major penalties if they are suddenly terminated.

In the short-term (3-9 months) airlines might be able to readily shed 10-20% of their costs. Over two years, cost reductions of 30-40% might be possible, depending on the timing of contracts. But revenue can vanish overnight, while cost efficiency plummets and cost per passenger skyrockets. The much smaller demand shocks of the past (the post-dotcom and 2008 financial collapses, fuel prices suddenly exceeding $100/bbl) were highly traumatic, leading to years of major losses. The cost per passenger impact of the coronavirus “meteor striking Earth” magnitude shock is far worse, and (unlike previous crises) there is major risk that it may be many years before demand fully recovers. (...)

This industry financial crisis extends across the entire airline ecosystem. Airports, distribution providers (Expedia, Booking.com, Sabre, etc) and service contractors have all had revenues largely disappear, without having comparable access to multi-billion dollar taxpayer subsidies. Those contractors employ staff paid much less than airline employees. Since most have no access to payroll protection subsidies. they have implemented major layoffs. Current obligations to aircraft/engine manufacturers and lessors remain in place but are not sustainable.

by Hubert Horan, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. See also: The Chilling Things Delta Said about the Airline Business, the 90% Collapse in Q2 Revenues, and Why Some Demand Destruction May Be “Permanent” (Wolf Street).]

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Qualified Immunity Explained

The death of George Floyd put police violence and accountability in the national spotlight once again. One issue is “qualified immunity,” a legal doctrine developed by the Supreme Court that’s employed by law enforcement to stop civil suits alleging violations of federal law. Since prosecutors have historically been hesitant to bring criminal charges against police officers, the protection from civil suits that qualified immunity confers has left many victims and their families with no means of legal redress.

1. What’s the point of qualified immunity?

It was meant to shield government officials from civil lawsuits that could hobble them in performing their duties. A federal law known as Section 1983, enacted after the Civil War, gave people the right to sue state officials for violating their rights. But in a 1967 decision arising from the arrest of clergy members who staged a sit-in at a segregated bus terminal in Jackson, Mississippi, the Supreme Court said the officers involved might be immune from a false-arrest suit if they had acted in “good faith,” or with the intention of following the law. The justices sent the case back to the lower court to make that determination. Qualified immunity was off on its long, winding road to the present, with opponents calling for it to be narrowed or abolished.

2. How does qualified immunity work?

The doctrine isn’t just a shield against liability -- it protects police and other officials from having to go to trial in the first place. Since 1967, the Supreme Court has gone on to say that plaintiffs can’t advance their claims unless they show that officials violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” In practice, they have to find a prior case similar enough to theirs that the officials should have known their conduct was illegal. The high court has even held that trial courts can skip over the question of whether officials violated the law and instead simply find that no previous decision shows that they did.

3. Is it difficult to find such a prior case?

Very. Because the details of the past case often don’t quite match those of the case at hand, officials have gained immunity from allegations that they provided inadequate medical care, stole valuable property during a search or violated a person’s First Amendment rights. One petition to the Supreme Court that bills itself as an “archetypal example” of the doctrine’s excesses involves a plaintiff who had a police dog set on him and was bitten while sitting on the ground with his hands up. The police won immunity because, in the prior case of unlawful police action, the plaintiff had been lying down. Those calling for reform say qualified immunity makes a case against the police almost impossible to pursue.

4. What about in cases involving shootings?

The high court is also considering whether to review a Texas ruling denying qualified immunity to police officers alleged to have shot a 17-year-old without warning and then lied about it.

5. Is qualified immunity ever denied?

Sometimes. In 2017, a federal court in California denied immunity to a sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot a 13-year-old boy and said he mistook a toy gun for an AK-47 assault weapon. The Supreme Court declined to review the case.

by Jordan Rubin, Kimberly Robinson, and Porter Wells, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: David Ryder/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Why police can violate your constitutional rights and suffer no consequences in court (Vox).]

Campaign Zero

The advocacy group Campaign Zero has been pushing a series of proposals to police departments that it says can be implemented at little or no cost and will drive down police violence by 72 percent.

But the campaign has been criticized by other activists who say its proposals are not enough and that it’s distracting from more radical reforms. And now Campaign Zero’s founders are apologizing, saying that they acknowledge their “#8cantwait” reform package has “detracted” from the larger conversation about police violence.

“Unfortunately, the rollout of the campaign and the messaging around it were flawed and detracted from the broader, transformative conversation happening at this moment,” wrote Campaign Zero co-founder Samuel Sinyangwe in a statement posted to Twitter Tuesday evening.

“The initiative was rushed, and despite calls from myself and [co-founder] Brittany Packnett Cunningham to slow things down, it went out anyway. It was built, framed, released and managed through processes and by people that I have not worked with before and that did not reflect the way I have done this work to date."

And in a statement posted to Medium on Tuesday, Cunningham said that she left the group last week.

“Fair questions have now been raised about the analysis underlying the #8cantwait initiative,” wrote Cunningham.

“I have listened to the frustrations regarding the rollout generally and the questions raised about the data analysis specifically. My experience is not in data science and these concerns were new to me — but given what I have now become aware of, I chose to resign and to focus on other important work, for and with our most marginalized communities.”

A similar statement posted was to the group’s website: “While we are proud of the impact we were able to make, we at Campaign Zero acknowledge that, even with the best of intentions, the #8CANTWAIT campaign unintentionally detracted from efforts of fellow organizers invested in paradigmatic shifts that are newly possible in this moment. For this we apologize wholeheartedly, and without reservation.”

Campaign Zero had said the #8cantwait proposals are based on science, but the data behind them has drawn criticism.

Jennifer Doleac, an economics professor at Texas A&M University and director of its Justice Tech Lab, wrote, “#8cantwait is not evidence-based. Their recs might be good steps, but please don’t pretend that the ‘data proves’ they work. We do not know if they work yet. Brilliant marketing strategy though, I’ll give them that.”

by Christopher Wilson, Yahoo News | Read more:
Image: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
[ed. Campaign Zero is an apt name for people using this moment as a marketing experiment.]

Woodrow White
via:
[ed. See also: Police Attacks on Protesters are Rooted in a Violent Ideology of Reactionary Grievance (The Intercept).]

Police abuse of minority communities in the United States is a story stretching back decades and centuries. The militarization of American policing is a much more recent phenomenon though the two phenomena have overlapped and compounded each other. Much of this debate over militarization has focused on the Pentagon’s 1033 Program which charges the Secretary of Defense with donating surplus military hardware to the nation’s thousands of police departments. (The photo above is of an MRAP, a vehicle designed to withstand IEDs and guerrilla ambushes. Numerous US police departments have them.) But there is another dimension of the story that has only partly made its way into the national conversation about policing and violence. The United States has been in a constant state of war since the end of 2001 and in many ways since the Gulf Crisis of 1990. Through numerous channels this has led to a broad militarization of life in the United States. Policing and military hardware is only the most obvious manifestation.

~ Josh Marshall via TPM (paywalled)

Minnesota Cops Slash Tires at Protest

After long nights of tear gas and rubber bullets, some protesters, news crews, and medics in Minneapolis last weekend found themselves stranded: The tires of their cars had been slashed.

In a city upended by protests about police brutality after the death of George Floyd, many assumed protesters were to blame. But videos reveal a different culprit: the police.

In the videos, officers puncture tires in a K-Mart parking lot on May 30 and a highway overpass on May 31. Both areas briefly turned into police staging grounds near protest hot spots. (...)

The gray car in the video above was the rental car of Luke Mogelson, a New Yorker writer who typically covers war zones and is now stationed in Minneapolis to write about the protests. As the protest on Sunday evening turned hairy, with law enforcement tear-gassing peaceful groups soon after curfew, Mogelson went to check on his car, showing his press pass to officers along the way. (Media were exempt from the curfew.) One officer took a picture of his press pass and said he would “radio it up the chain so everyone knew that car belonged to the press,” said Mogelson. When he came back later that evening to retrieve his car, officers informed him that the tires were punctured. “They were laughing,” Mogelson recalled. “They had grins on their faces.”

Update, 6/8/20: The Star Tribune has identified the officers puncturing tires as state troopers and deputies from the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office. The officers strategically deflated the tires to “stop behaviors such as vehicles driving dangerously and at high speeds in and around protesters and law enforcement,” said Minnesota Department of Public Safety spokesperson Bruce Gordon. The troopers reportedly targeted cars that “contained items used to cause harm during violent protests” such as rocks and concrete. The Anoka County Sheriff’s Lt. Andy Knotz said deputies were following directions from the state-led Multiagency Command Center.

by Julia Lurie, Mother Jones |  Read more:

Image: YouTube
[ed. See also: Coronavirus fuels black America’s sense of injustice (FT).]

It’s Time to Archive the Internet Archive

Five of the world's largest publishers sued the Internet Archive, claiming its open-access digital library is a mass infringement on their copyright. The move puts the internet’s most important archive in danger, and has at least got some data hoarders talking about archiving the Internet Archive, and what that would even look like.

Last week, Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and Penguin Random House LLC filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive and five ‘Doe’ defendants, claiming that the Internet Archive is a piracy site.

In March, the Internet Archive set up a new service for people displaced from library and educational access due to COVID-19, called the "National Emergency Library." Nearly 1.4 million books are available in full for anyone to download and read, without a waitlist, until the end of June or the end of the coronavirus pandemic crisis in the US, according to an announcement on their site.

While damages haven't been set, the publishers could claim up to $150,000 in statutory damages per infringement, for each of the 1.4 million copyright works in the emergency library. They're also demanding a preliminary and permanent injunction of the Internet Archive, and anyone involved with it, from reproducing and distributing more works, and that all current copyrighted copies on the site be destroyed—effectively shutting down the entire library. (...)

The move puts one of the internet’s largest repositories of knowledge in peril. Over on the DataHoarder subreddit, threads have been started about what it would take to archive the archive, which holds dozens of petabytes of data and is constantly growing (there have been attempts to simply understand the sheer amount of data the archive holds). Academics have been saying for years that the Internet Archive must be made more resilient by creating backups of the backups and storing them in other locations. When Donald Trump was elected president, the Internet Archive announced it was making a backup in Canada. Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina once had a backup of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but it has not been updated in years.

by Samantha Cole and Jason Koebler, Motherboard | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
[ed. For background, see also: You Can Now Access 1.4 Million Books for Free Thanks to the Internet Archive (Motherboard).]

Bruce Kaphan

'A reconsideration of the white male cowboy': the rise of ambient country (The Guardian)

Whiplash: The Coronavirus Narrative Changes Overnight

When I reflect back on the extraordinary year of 2020 – from, I hope, some safer, saner vantage – one of the two defining images in my mind will be the surreal figure of the Grim Reaper stalking the blazing Florida shoreline, scythe in hand, warning the sunbathing masses of imminent death and granting interviews to reporters. The other will be a prostrate George Floyd, whose excruciating Memorial Day execution sparked a global protest movement against racism and police violence.

Less than two weeks after Floyd’s killing, the American death toll from the novel coronavirus has surpassed 100,000. Rates of infection, domestically and worldwide, are rising. But one of the few things it seems possible to say without qualification is that the country has indeed reopened. For 13 days straight, in cities across the nation, tens of thousands of men and women have massed in tight-knit proximity, with and without personal protective equipment, often clashing with armed forces, chanting, singing and inevitably increasing the chances of the spread of contagion.

Scenes of outright pandemonium unfold daily. Anyone claiming to have a precise understanding of what is happening, and what the likely risks and consequences may be, should be regarded with the utmost skepticism. We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges’s Aleph. Yet we know very little about what it is we are watching. (...)

After two and a half months of death, confinement, and unemployment figures dwarfing even the Great Depression, we have now entered the stage of competing urgencies where there are zero perfect options. Police brutality is a different if metaphorical epidemic in an America slouching toward authoritarianism. Catalyzed by the spectacle of Floyd’s reprehensible death, it is clear that the emergency in Minneapolis passes my own and many people’s threshold for justifying the risk of contagion. (...)

This feels like gaslighting. Less than two weeks ago, the enlightened position in both Europe and America was to exercise nothing less than extreme caution. Many of us went much further, taking to social media to castigate others for insufficient social distancing or neglecting to wear masks or daring to believe they could maintain some semblance of a normal life during coronavirus. At the end of April, when the state of Georgia moved to end its lockdown, the Atlantic ran an article with the headline “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”. Two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.

As a result of lockdowns and quarantines, many millions of people around the world have lost their jobs, depleted their savings, missed funerals of loved ones, postponed cancer screenings and generally put their lives on hold for the indefinite future. They accepted these sacrifices as awful but necessary when confronted by an otherwise unstoppable virus. Was this or wasn’t this all an exercise in futility?

“The risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn’t keep people from protesting racism,” NPR suddenly tells us, citing a letter signed by dozens of American public health and disease experts. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to Covid-19,” the letter said. One epidemiologist has gone even further, arguing that the public health risks of not protesting for an end to systemic racism “greatly exceed the harms of the virus”.

The climate-change-denying right is often ridiculed, correctly, for politicizing science. Yet the way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like … politicizing science.

by Thomas Chatterton Williams, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Devon Ravine/AP

Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times

Every morning that I’m not hungover, I wake up around 8am, because that is when my two cats start howling for breakfast. I feed them, make coffee, and walk barefoot and unwashed (mug in hand) through my apartment building’s common hallway to the front door, where I pick up my New York Times and my Financial Times.

I then walk back to my apartment, look at the front page of the New York Times for approximately five to eight seconds, and throw the whole thing in the garbage with contempt. I drink my coffee and proceed to read the entirety of the Financial Times, excluding the particularly dense bits of the Companies & Markets section. If it’s the weekend edition, I even read most of House & Home, whose editors seem to have an incredibly generous definition of “real estate,” making room for topics like homelessness and wildlife conservation. I take care to read the kidding-not-kidding op-eds from wealthy people demanding that children be banned from restaurants and art museums.

As a “big S” Socialist, my reading habits often surprise liberals. I’m a writer, though my biggest audience comes from the listenership of Chapo Trap House, a popular leftist comedy podcast. This makes me something of a curiosity among my colleagues at traditional media institutions—staffed largely by liberals—so I often find myself explaining my preference for the pink paper of liberal capitalism over the Gray Lady of cultural liberalism. The answer is simple: by literally any measure, the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.

Compared to the Times, the reporting is usually more in-depth; the reporters generally have more expertise; the coverage is more comprehensive both geographically and substantively; even the op-eds are better (likely because they are far fewer, and they’re not used to pad the paper with “content”—confessionals, puff pieces, listicles—rather than reporting). Most refreshing, the FT does not lose itself in the mire of myopic American culture wars, which very rarely breach the surface of material politics and/or economics. When it does run soft news, it’s higher quality (Rana Foroohar’s “Lunch with the FT” with Rebecca Solnit, for example, transcends the genre of fawning celebrity profile into an understated but scathing critique).

Conversely, the New York Times is the flagship publication for liberal triumphalism; it holds the line of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”—the notion that all serious ideological conflict crashed to a halt with the suspension of the Cold War, with very little at stake in future political disputes beyond regional trade accords and fine-tuning of currency regimes.

Recently, however, Fukuyamism has taken a serious blow. The past presidential election was a shock to nearly everyone whose job it was to predict its outcome, and both the Bernie and Trump upsets prove that we have not, as Fukuyama predicted, reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” The idea of the “End of History” lost credibility with anyone paying attention to skyrocketing wealth inequality and political unrest, and it’s pretty clear that the world remains a raging battle between the haves and have-nots. Karl Marx knew it, your average Detroit autoworker certainly knows it, and Edward Luce of FT knows it. Even Fukuyama himself acknowledges the instability of the American liberal political trajectory, proclaiming, “Socialism ought to come back.” David Brooks, on the other hand. . .

Adding insult to injury, the Gray Lady is suddenly the object of constant scorn from the nation’s highest office. Having spent eight years in the comfortable favor of Barack Obama, a position so secure that they faced zero consequences for such glaring moral and journalistic failings as the endorsement of the Iraq War, the “Failing New York Times” and its fellows now thrash in fury at their sudden irrelevance to these crude new political elites. The Times is unable to conceive of a world in which it was so very wrong, and unable to cope with a political administration that speaks of it with utter contempt. Not only has it lost the king’s ear, it is finding itself entirely incapable of appealing to the peasants; the cynical and transparent hit pieces on Bernie Sanders betray the paper’s general contempt for mass politics.

Were the American media machine accountable to the public, a more self-reflective, penitent assembly of institutions, or at least capable of shame, the Times might have spent a little effort reconsidering its “house style” ideology. And yet it stays the course. But why?

There are psychological factors at play: denial, certainly, which we see in the constant reassurance of the Times’s #resistance readership that this was all a big mistake and that Daddy is coming to save them any day now. But as a good Marxist, I must point out that ideology and its attendant publishing philosophies are largely the product of market forces. Public broadcasting institutions like the BBC can remain dull and informative. FT’s reportage serves a readership that gambles on world events. The New York Times compulsively analyzes and scrutinizes everything Trump ad nauseam because it pays the bills by cultivating an audience, flattering them, and keeping them stimulated. Just look at the “Trump Bump,” the 66 percent increase in profits the paper enjoyed from exhausting every possible iteration of commentary, speculation, or tirade about The Donald.

Looking further back, the decline of newspaper publishing as an industry has left much of “flyover country” nearly totally ignored by the coastal elites (yes, it’s a fair descriptor) for years now. Smaller papers have far smaller budgets for travel and long-term investigative reporting, and many local papers have been gutted or scrapped for parts entirely. Local coverage has its own weaknesses, of course, and national news is essential to avoid the parochial politics of a highly provincial federalist United States, but if we still had good local papers, might the Times have seen more of the misery and disaffection that paved the way for Donald Trump? Might serious local coverage of the immiserating results of NAFTA and welfare reform—both enacted by Bill Clinton—have made it obvious that Hillary would be less than inspiring for the majority of working-class Americans?

The slight increase in news employment at “digital native” outlets (about 6,000 jobs between 2008 and 2017) has not only failed to replace the lost jobs at news desks, it has also produced less substantive writing. With the rise of internet “content,” major news outlets have now expanded their op-ed and opinion sections into a stupefying ne plus ultra of BuzzFeed-style clickbait. The result is a vast pool of pseudopolitical content, wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle. (Not only is the Times bloated with opinion pieces and op-eds, you will notice they are positioned very prominently, at the very top of the website. Meanwhile, FT sticks them at the bottom.)

Just for example, last spring I noticed not one but two pieces in the Times dedicated to a Twitter tempest in a teapot about whether it was “cultural appropriation” for a white Utah high school student to wear a cheongsam, a dress of Chinese origin, to prom. This is not journalism, cultural commentary, or even, really, a trend piece—it’s an attempt to appear relevant. (But I suppose if you want your small town to get some ink in the Times, you should do something that would infuriate Sarah Lawrence students.) In an effort to survive the internet age, the Times has stooped to tracking tweets, chasing the sound and fury of never-ending online spectacles that rarely mean anything to anyone, save for an online microculture dedicated to “the discourse.”

Some fluff could almost be confused for reportage, such as the bizarre amount of space the paper of record devoted to Alan Dershowitz’s alleged travails as a social pariah on Martha’s Vineyard for his support of Trump, but if I wanted gossip I’d read the society pages. The paper’s collective decision to dedicate space—even in the infinite arena of Web content—and resources to such utterly meaningless and unnewsworthy trivialities indicates an editorial commitment not to journalism, but to educated-middle-class dinner party talking points.

The greatest factor in the decline of liberal journalism, however, is the decline of the Left itself. In the absence of labor desks at local papers and a vibrant trade union movement to fund working-class publications, the labor beat goes largely unreported, or merely reported within the confines of an egregiously bourgeois myopia. Take #MeToo, a “movement” to combat the scourge of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace. The media obsessively focused on wealthy movie stars and high-profile women in (you guessed it) the media. If readers had zero knowledge of the US and they picked up the Times, they might assume these rich, famous women are the most vulnerable women in the world, and not, as it is, the exact opposite.

by Amber A’Lee Frost, Columbia Journalism Review | Read more:
Image: Sara Wong