You just gotta call on me

Santa Games online Advent Calendar. You can start from December first.

"Why America's Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave: For months, the world's largest economy has been teetering on the brink of collapse because America's latter-day robber barons can't comprehend that workers sometimes get sick. Or so the behavior of major U.S. rail companies seems to suggest. [...] Unlike nearly 80 percent of U.S. laborers, railroad employees are not currently guaranteed a single paid sick day. Rather, if such workers wish to recuperate from an illness or make time to see a doctor about a nagging complaint, they need to use vacation time, which must be requested days in advance. In other words, if a worker wants to take time off to recover from the flu, they need to notify their employer of this days before actually catching the virus. Given that workers' contracts do not include paid psychic benefits, this is a tall order. [...] All of which invites the question: Why do these rail barons hate paid leave so much? Why would a company have no problem handing out 24 percent raises, $1,000 bonuses, and caps on health-care premiums but draw the line on providing a benefit as standard and ubiquitous throughout modern industry as paid sick days? The answer, in short, is 'P.S.R.' — or precision-scheduled railroading." More on that subject from Reich, "The one thing you need to know about the railroads: It's not that a rail strike would be bad for the economy."

Warnock beats Walker in Georgia, 51.4-48.6, giving Dems a real 51st vote. For whatever that's worth.

Oh, wait! "Sinema switches to independent, shaking up the Senate [...] In a 45-minute interview, the first-term senator told POLITICO that she will not caucus with Republicans and suggested that she intends to vote the same way she has for four years in the Senate. 'Nothing will change about my values or my behavior,' she said."

"Five power substations attacked in Pacific northwest similar to strike that caused outages in North Carolina: The FBI is investigating at least five attacks on electricity substations in the Pacific northwest similar to one that caused widespread power outages in North Carolina. Representatives from Puget Sound Energy, the Cowlitz County Public Utility District and Bonneville Power Administration confirmed the attacks took place in November, although the FBI declined to confirm the investigations and it's not clear whether any of the damage resulted in service disruptions, reported the Seattle Times."

From The Toledo Blade, "Debt program a model: Toledo and Lucas County have combined to turn $1.6 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds into as much as $200 million of medical debt relief. In the process, our community has created a best practice that other cities and counties will be able to emulate for their own citizens. Toledo City Council voted Wednesday 7-5 to approve $800,000 in ARPA funds for the program with RIP Medical Debt, creators of the charity that buys bad debt from hospitals and discharges the liability."

This could be good news: "D.C. Council Wants To Make Metrobus Fares Free In The District, Expand Service Overnight: The D.C. Council wants to make WMATA bus service fare-free in the District next year. If approved, D.C. would become one of the largest and most prominent cities in the country to make the bus free at the fare box."

Helaine Olen in the WaPo, "Medicare Advantage? More like Medicare Disadvantage: When the annual enrollment period for Medicare ends on Dec. 7, analysts expect that, for the first time, more seniors will receive their 2023 health-care coverage from Medicare Advantage than the traditional program. That's not a good thing for either elderly Americans or federal coffers. And while seniors are well advised to approach these plans with caution, we should all be paying attention to what's going on. Medicare Advantage plans, which are private insurance plans for seniors paid for with federal dollars, originated as a government savings strategy, on the theory that the private sector could improve on government performance at a lower cost. But over the past two decades, it has become clear that Medicare Advantage does not result in improved care for less money. Instead, it will come as no surprise to Americans familiar with the health insurance industry that insurers found a way to turn it into yet another profit center, while putting bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of patients."

RIP: "Stax Records Founder Jim Stewart Dead At 92 [...] The early Satellite Records were not successful, but Stewart eventually borrowed money from his sister Estelle Axton, who mortgaged her home so that Stewart could buy an Ampex tape recorder. (The name Stax is a combination of Stewart and Axton's last names.) Stax Records moved into the former Capitol Theater in a Black neighborhood in South Memphis, and the label had its first success in 1960, when Memphis entertainer Rufus Thomas recorded 'Cause I Love You,' a duet with his teenage daughter Carla. [...] After Chips Moman left Stax, the interracial instrumental group Booker T. & The MGs became the Stax house band, and the label had huge success with Southern soul artists like Otis Redding, the Bar-Kays, and Sam & Dave."

RIP: "Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie dies at age 79." All I have to say is that I saw them on the Rumors tour and they were spectacular.

I meant to post this when it came out in October but I got distracted, but I still want to have the link for every idiot who tries to tell me a six week pregnancy has it's own heartbeat. No, it doesn't, there's no heart that early. "What a pregnancy actually looks like before 10 weeks – in pictures [...] Sometimes, patients want to see the tissue after an abortion. 'They are stunned by what it actually looks like,' says Fleischman. 'That's when I realized how much the imagery on the internet and on placards – showing human-like qualities at this early stage of development – has really permeated the culture. People almost don't believe this is what comes out.'" Pass it on.

"Distracting People from the Material Conditions of Our Society: A New York Times Specialty [...] It's almost as if the epidemic of homelessness in the U.S. appeared out of nowhere for no reason. Houseless people must be taken as a given—we must manage their thefts of bicycles with handcuffs, armed bureaucrats, and cages, but we certainly can't ask why they do not have a place to live. Reporting like this carries water for the people in our society who own things, and it confuses multitudes of low-information readers who never develop a strong sense of the root causes of the solvable problems they keep reading about in the news every day. It also depoliticizes people by obfuscating the political and economic battles that actually determine the course of people's lives."

Long read: "The Contest on Corporate Purpose: Why Lynn Stout was Right and Milton Friedman was Wrong: It is now 50 years since Milton Friedman set out his doctrine that 'The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.' This paper seeks to add fresh and compelling new evidence of why Lynn Stout was correct in her resolute critique of the thesis of shareholder primacy at the heart of the Friedman doctrine, and how this doctrine remains profoundly damaging to the corporations that continue to uphold this belief."

So, I'm not sure who this is, but they've done pilot programs of the four-day work week, and say that, "63% of businesses found it easier to attract and retain talent with a 4 day week." And that, "78% of employees with 4 day weeks are happier and less stressed."

Dean Baker, "OMG, a Right-Wing Jerk Can Buy Twitter! Media Concentration Matters: It's more than a bit bizarre that until Elon Musk bought Twitter, most policy types apparently did not see a risk that huge platforms like Facebook and Twitter could be controlled by people with a clear political agenda. While just about everyone had some complaints about the moderation of these and other commonly used platforms, they clearly were not pushing Fox News-style nonsense. With Elon Musk in charge, that may no longer be true. Musk has indicated his fondness for racists and anti-Semites, and made it clear that they are welcome on his new toy. He also is apparently good with right-wing kooks making up stories about everything from Paul Pelosi to Covid vaccines. (Remember, with Section 230 protection, Musk cannot be sued for defaming individuals and companies by mass-marketing lies, only the originators face any legal liability.)" Shortly after posting this, Baker's Twitter account was "permanently" shut down — only to be reopened a couple of hours later. I blame the bots.

"Another Hyped 'Hunter Biden Laptop' Reveal Flops: Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi said the 'Twitter Files' would show a political scandal, but the information itself did the opposite." I thought this was a fair assessment except that I have no idea how the word "hacked" is being used.

From Diane Ravitch's education blog, "William Phillis: Charters Are a Step Backward in Ohio: William Phillis, former deputy state superintendent of education in Ohio, is appalled by the waste and corruption in the charter sector. The state constitution requires a common school system, and charter schools and vouchers violate the state constitution. Ohio has had some of the biggest financial scandals in charter world (think ECOT), yet the Republican legislature continues to demand more funding for charters and vouchers. In this post, he likens charters to the one-room schools that were closed down long ago. He also notes that half of the 600 charters authorized in Ohio have closed."

Handy chart: "Historical Highest Marginal Income Tax Rates"

A nice piece of writing from Richard J. Eskow last year, "American Ozymandias: Part 1, The Obama Center in Chicago [...] In Chicago, something that resembles a glass-and-stone temple is about to displace much of the local community, at an expected price tag of $1.6 billion. But the Obama Presidential Center isn't a temple. It's more like a tomb – not for the ex-president, but for the dreams and hopes of the millions who voted for him. The main building's vaguely sarcophagus-like shape is reminiscent of pharaonic burial sites, which were also built by their rulers as a tribute to their own greatness."

From 2012 and still green: "Pope Paul VI's Error on Birth Control: After conservative U.S. Catholic Bishops sued the Obama administration over its health-insurance requirement for contraceptives, many assumed the Bishops were upholding settled doctrine. But Catholic theologian Paul Surlis says Pope Paul VI incorrectly removed the issue from the Second Vatican Council in 1965."

What caused the New York City bankruptcy crisis? Right-wingers say it was too much spending, but that doesn't explain a thing. "A Crisis Without Keynes: the 1975 New York City Fiscal Crisis Revisited [...] As we can see, city debt to revenue ratios were twice as high in the 1960s as they were in the 1970s. In 1966 when the city faced a much-overlooked fiscal crisis, deficits were on the order of $6 billion, when incoming revenue was about $3 billion. These numbers reveal not only the importance of deficits through much of the Keynesian period of the 1960s, but they also raise questions about the scale and significance of the 1975 fiscal crisis and the need for austerity." The short answer is that Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand caused the crisis.

"China Mieville on Why Capitalism Deserves Our Burning Hatred: If you feel a burning hatred toward our unjust social order, writes China Mieville, don't run from it. Such hate for a system that immiserates vast swaths of humanity is just and necessary."

Atrios (following a useful quote), "Endless Demands For Sister Souljah Moments [...] Your favorite centrists are always demanding that Democrats address the supposed "legitimate concerns" of voters. In this latest cycle it was "suburban moms concerned about trans athletes" or similar nonsense. And as is always the case, they go silent when you press them for details: what should they say, what policy should they support? Are you really asking them to demonize 15-year-old kids who want to play field hockey? Advocate for a national ban? Just some "feel your pain" speeches? WHAT????? Every cycle has an "other," and every cycle has the same group of centrists demanding Democrats somehow join in with the bashing, without specifying how, because that's what they "the voters" want."

"This Artist Is Giving Lesbian Couples The Retro, Pinup Treatment: Jenifer Prince's dreamy illustrations put queer women front in center in comics and pulp illustrations."

2022 Hayao Miyazaki Comics Advent Calendar -- The One With 24 Little Doors
Cider Advent Calendar
Guardians of the Galaxy Advent Calendar 2022 LEGO Marvel 76231
Crystal Ore Advent Calendar

The Beatles, "All I've Got To Do" — Man, that guy's drumming!

There's too much confusion

Yes, Advent has come, and time for Avedon's war against the right-wing War on Christmas. We sure can use some serious warmth and light and peace on Earth right now. Start with "Carol of the Bells"!

No Christmas for workers. Because this is just a great big FU to all workers, not just rail workers. Yes, the rail unions are under a different law than all other unions, but the message is clear. "Biden blasted for 'siding with billionaires' over workers on rail strike: Biden warned that enforcing a deal rejected by rail unions could "reignite distrust" of Democrats among workers. Advocacy groups joined rail workers and progressives in Congress on Tuesday in calling out President Joe Biden for encouraging legislative action that would avert a December strike and force through a contract with no paid sick leave."

This comes infuriatingly late — if they'd sounded this way all along it might have made a real difference. "Because 'Publishing Is Not a Crime,' Major Newspapers Push US to Drop Assange Charges: 'This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America's First Amendment and the freedom of the press,' The Guardian, The New York Times, and other media outlets warned. The five major media outlets that collaborated with WikiLeaks in 2010 to publish explosive stories based on confidential diplomatic cables from the U.S. State Department sent a letter Monday calling on the Biden administration to drop all charges against Julian Assange, who has been languishing in a high-security London prison for more than three years in connection with his publication of classified documents."

I have known her for nine years, and the whole time she's had leukemia, a disease with a five-year life-expectancy. I feel very lucky that she still seems to be maintaining — as long as she gets her drugs. She lives in Canada; she would almost certainly have died if she lived in the US. Today she told me about an article she'd written, and like me, she didn't know much about Mark Cuban, but she knew more than I did. "Cutting out the Middleman: I'm not a big follower of The National Basketball Association, but when Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, told Forbes last year that the pricing for generic drugs was 'ridiculous' I stood up and took notice. You may remember Mark Cuban from the ABC reality series, Shark Tank. He also co-owns 2929 Entertainment, but his interests lie beyond basketball and reality shows. In an interview with Forbes Magazine, January 20, 2022, Cuban said that he wanted to 'show that capitalism can be compassionate' and he added Cost Plus Drugs to his line of investments." My friend's medication retails at $9,657 a month, but without the middle men it's $47 from Cost Plus. Other people have tried to do things like this but they get bought out by the big firms. Cuban, apparently, doesn't care about the money, he can afford to do this and he's doing it. If you or someone you know is despairing of paying for meds, see if Cost Plus has been able to get the generic yet at their site.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky and Wendell Potter, "How Medicare Advantage Scams Seniors: Where billions of dollars flow, deceptive actors follow. And nowhere does deception run deeper than how health insurers lure seniors into Medicare Advantage plans—only to leave many retirees struggling to cover their out-of-pocket requirements when their incomes are their lowest."

"Why Is AARP Boosting Medicare Privatization? The advocacy organization is welcoming the for-profit takeover of its members' national health insurance program — because it earns hundreds of millions as part of the deal. Despite massive and systemic problems with for-profit Medicare plans denying care to seniors while costing the government more than $7 billion annually in excess fees, the leading advocacy group tasked with protecting older Americans is welcoming the privatization of the national health insurance program — while earning as much as $814 million annually from insurers advertising the plans. The state of affairs lays bare a conflict inside AARP, the major advocacy organization for Americans 50 and older, over how to approach the regulation of Medicare Advantage, the for-profit version of Medicare."

"Do You Know What Dreck Is? The House Democrats Are About To Elect A Pile Of It To Lead Them When asked, progressive Democrats in Congress have complained that there is no democratic process for electing the party's new leaders. No one admits they think that Hakeem Jeffries and Pete Aguilar are terrible or corrupt— which they are— but some have cautiously expressed a certain degree of discomfort about what kind of characters these two men essentially are. I did find one or two members who defended Hakeem, but not one— not even one member— who would defend Aguilar. Even the ones unaware of his coke addiction could find a single positive thing to say about him. (Ditto for the two criminal schlemiels running for DCCC chair, Tony Cardenas and Ami Bera.)" Jeffries is so extreme right that he takes donations from Fox News' PAC, News Corp.

Ryan Grim says an anonymous email about five years ago led to "one of the most bizarre stories I've ever reported on," and given recent events, he calls it back to our attention. "Leaked Documents Expose Stunning Plan To Wage Financial War On Qatar — And Steal The World Cup: A document marked 'strictly private and confidential' lays out a plan to manipulate markets and short Qatar."

RIP: "Carol Leigh, activist who coined the term 'sex work', dies at 71: Carol Leigh, a San Francisco activist credited with coining the term sex work and who sought for decades to improve conditions for prostitutes and others in the adult entertainment business, has died at the age of 71. She died from cancer on Wednesday, Kate Marquez, the executor of her state said, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. A former prostitute, Ms Leigh devoted herself to campaigning on behalf of those in the 'sex work industry', a term she coined as the title for a panel discussion she attended at a feminist anti-pornography conference in 1978, according to an essay she wrote. 'Carol defined sex work as a labour issue, not a crime, not a sin,' Ms Marquez said. 'It is a job done by a million people in this country who are stigmatised and criminalised by working to support their families.'"

RIP: Erik Arthur, who opened Fantasy Centre in 1971 and kept it going for the best part of 40 years. It used to amuse us that he'd let an American paint the sign out front so for many of those years it was misspelled as "Fantasy Center" — but then I was surprised to come by one day to discover that after all that time, he'd finally replaced the sign with one that was spelled in British. I never went there much because it was a bit out of the way for us, but I ran into him a lot at conventions and pub meets and parties and always found him delightful. Click the link for pictures and a brief "interview" of the man himself.

RIP: Greg Bear 1951-2022: "We are deeply saddened to report that award-winning author Greg Bear died this weekend at the age of 71. The author of more than 50 books and winner of five Nebula Awards, Bear was also a co-founder of San Diego Comic Con, an artist, and a person beloved in SFF circles for his warmth and kindness."

Hm, I wonder if this will turn up on any crime shows, or whether crime writers who hear about it will just go, "No, that's too far-fetched even for us." "How Jessica Logan's Call for Help Became Evidence Against Her" is the horrifying story about how a cop decided a woman had murdered her baby because her 911 call didn't fit his programmed idea of what a mother should say when she finds her child cold in his bed. And he decided that because someone made up the idea that repeating something or not spelling things out in exactly the right way is evidence of guilt and gives training courses on it, although there is absolutely no science to back it up and the real science can't find any evidence that it's true.

"The Imperial Supreme Court: The past few years have marked the emergence of the imperial Supreme Court. Armed with a new, nearly bulletproof majority, conservative Justices on the Court have embarked on a radical restructuring of American law across a range of fields and disciplines. Unlike previous shifts in the Court, this one isn't marked by debates over federal versus state power, or congressional versus judicial power, or judicial activism versus restraint. Nor is it marked by the triumph of one form of constitutional interpretation over another. On each of those axes, the Court's recent opinions point in radically different directions. The Court has taken significant, simultaneous steps to restrict the power of Congress, the administrative state, the states, and the lower federal courts. And it has done so using a variety of (often contradictory) interpretative methodologies. The common denominator across multiple opinions in the last two years is that they concentrate power in one place: the Supreme Court.

When Street Art Meets Nature

The Literature Clock

Neil Young, live, "All Along the Watchtower"

But will it seem the same?

The Mill Lane footpath seen in South Downs National Park, Halnaker near Chichester.

Here's the Electoral-Vote.com map and details of the Senate races from Wednesday morning. We were back to the Dems needing Warnock to win a runoff. Against Herschel Walker, which, seriously, is just embarrassing. But then we won another one in Nevada, so the map looks like this. Still waiting for the Warnock runoff for a true majority, but it makes less difference now that the Republicans managed to take the House, so nothing good is likely to come to the floor in the next Congress for the Dem Senate to fail to pass. (Not that I believe the Dems couldn't have come up with a third and fourth right-wing vote if we'd had two new Senators and kept the House....)

Meanwhile, remember Sean Patrick Maloney, the head of the DCCC who screwed up the Democratic primaries by inserting himself into a district where another Democrat was already popular because he thought he wouldn't be as safe in some other seat? Well, he wasn't safe in that one, either. Alex Sammon has the details, "The Inside Story of Sean Patrick Maloney's Face Plant in New York." That nasty little jackass managed to lose two seats in New York with his clever little plan.

"The House Democratic Leadership Race: Do Democrats really want their next leader to be compromised and corporate? Final results are still coming in; but if current patterns hold, it appears that Republicans could narrowly win control of the House by around five to ten seats. That is far from the red wave predicted by most pundits, who got caught in their own echo chamber. More on that in a moment." This means Pelosi will likely step down from leadership [Update: She did], which means we are in danger of Hakeem Jeffries, corporate lackey, winning the leadership seat. This is the guy who teamed up with Josh Gottheimer to try to defeat progressive Dems. And in honor of that, Ryan Grim has posted an excerpt from his book, We've Got People, "The real story of the making of Nancy Pelosi" — which just happens to contain the full section of the quote I typed up last time.

James Kwak's morning-after musings, "Democracy Takes Another Hit: This morning, Democrats are feeling pretty good. We shouldn't be. With many races still too close to call, it appears that this year's elections were not quite the cataclysm for Democrats that they could have been. We have a decent chance of preserving a 50–50 tie in the Senate and will probably only lose about ten seats (and the majority) in the House. That, combined with weeks of lowering expectations, will help the party put a positive spin on what was really … a disturbing defeat. [...] The truth is that the Democratic Party has failed — failed to stand for anything that ordinary people care about and failed to deliver basic economic security. We are pretty good at arming Ukraine to fight against a brutal Russian invasion, pretty bad at helping the working- and middle-class people who were once the bedrock of our party." Face it, the only thing that saved us is that Republicans didn't offer any better.

"Eight Key Midterm Election Takeaways: The Progressive Electorate Has Spoken [...] While voters this year declined to offer a stiff rebuke of the party in power, they indicated via ballot measures, exit polls, and large pre-election surveys that on key issues such as abortion rights, health care, higher minimum wages, workers' right to collectively bargain, and legalized cannabis, the electorate is more progressive than elected officials and corporate media pundits care to admit."

Establishment Dems were all ready to blame the left for heavy losses in the mid-terms (and Jim Clyburn even got an early start), but since that didn't work out, "NEWS ANALYSIS: Who Can Be Blamed for Not Blowing the Midterms?: Democrats' recrimination plans go up in smoke. The second-noblest midterm tradition is the widespread scapegoating after a sweeping and overdetermined loss. This year, sadly, slated right next to Doctor Oz in the Loser Category, are the would-be scapegoaters of the Democratic Party, forced to confront a night that was neither a full vindication of their preferred strategy nor a defeat humiliating enough to justify a full purge of their enemies. If the Democratic Party as a political entity averted a catastrophe this week, its scolds and gatekeepers really couldn't have drawn up a worse result. How do you trash 'activists' for a loss that didn't quite materialize after a solid year of preemptively blaming them for it? I imagine we'll soon see."

"Reconciliation Is Available to End Debt Limit Hostage-Taking: With the GOP likely to take over the House, Democrats can use the lame duck to effectively eliminate the debt limit and the leverage Republicans would wield." They won't, though.

A corrupt sheriff is after our Zelda! "Inside L.A. County sheriff's dubious corruption probe of Sheila Kuehl, another watchdog: Long before detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department showed up at Sheila Kuehl's house with a search warrant, it was clear this was no ordinary corruption investigation. The department had spent three years looking into an allegation that Kuehl, a county supervisor and one of Sheriff Alex Villanueva's harshest critics, had taken bribes from a friend in return for Metropolitan Transportation Authority contracts. The investigation fit a pattern. Since his election in 2018, Villanueva has fiercely resisted oversight by Kuehl, her colleagues on the Board of Supervisors, and other watchdogs monitoring alleged wrongdoing in his department. Prosecutors had declined to file charges in the Kuehl case, telling sheriff's investigators last year that they lacked the evidence they would need at trial. Had the investigation ended there it might have been just a footnote in Villanueva's tumultuous tenure. But in the closing weeks of his run for a second term, deputies with guns and battering rams were dispatched to rummage through Kuehl's home in Santa Monica, her friend's house in Del Rey and four offices around downtown L.A."

Oh, just what we needed, another "study" confirming the worst copaganda, which no amount of debunking will ever put to rest. "A Warning to Journalists About Elite Academia: Two Harvard professors propose the greatest expansion of the police bureaucracy in Western history. Two Harvard professors recently published an article called 'The Injustice of Under-Policing in America' in the American Journal of Law and Equality. The Harvard professors call for 500,000 more armed cops, who will arrest 7.8 million more people per year." These guys claimed that the US has fewer cops per population than any other country, but their data "appears to exclude all federal policing agencies (e.g., border patrol, ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, capitol police, Park Police, military police, etc...), potentially many non-local state agencies, and ALL private police forces. One of the professors responded that they chose to use the number 697,195 from the UCR (an FBI reporting survey) even though they knew many local agencies weren't included. So, he admitted that the number may be much higher, like 900,000. (Note: Wikipedia, for example, says 900k based on a major police non-profit source). The professor then admitted privately over email that the U.S. census count is actually 1,227,788 police. That's 76% higher than the number they chose to use in their public article. What's the significance of this? Using this number, they admitted to me, would mean the U.S. truthfully has '1.1 times the median rate in rich countries.' [...] The most alarming aspect of the article is it repeatedly ignores the costs of more police. I was dumbfounded reading it. The article presents the main cost of their proposal as 7.8 million more arrests. They call it the 'main downside,' and it is the only one they even mention. The professors then dismiss the costs of 7.8 million more people arrested as far outweighed by all the amazing benefits of police. Virtually every subpoint they make is flawed (including their failure to count millions of unrecorded police assaults or even mention that they are excluding them as a 'cost' of policing), but I want to highlight the big one: more arrests are not the only social cost of 500,000 more armed cops!"

"Wall Street Strikes Back: While the financial industry once kept a low profile in elections, it's no secret which races it's banking on winning this election cycle. That's because big banks aren't shy about the fact that they're using multiple political groups to run misleading ads and donate millions on behalf of key Republican and Democratic candidates they believe will help them slash regulations and preserve predatory practices. The fact that buttoned-up bankers are intervening so shamelessly on behalf of election deniers and other right-wing demagogues might seem surprising — but the in-your-face approach is exactly the point."

Here's a story I would have thought was everywhere as soon as it happened. You all know how, during the Bush administration, Congress passed an appalling requirement for the US Postal Service to pre-fund pensions 75 years in advance, thus creating the illusion that the USPS was a money-losing proposition so they could pretend it would do better in the hands of private entities. Of course, this was a lie, since the Post Office has always made a profit and could cover the real costs of operations and existing pension pay-outs easily. So people have spent 15 years trying to get rid of this stupid requirement, and when Congress passed a new law in March and Biden signed it in April, I would have thought a victory like that would have made more noise. But I just heard about it. I guess the only thing that's important is the clown show.

RIP: "Robert Clary, Corporal LeBeau on 'Hogan's Heroes,' Dies at 96: The French actor and singer spent 31 months in a concentration camp but said he had no reservations about starring in a TV comedy about the Nazis. [...] Clary was the last surviving member of the show's original principal cast." LeBeau was one of my favorites.

"Disinformation policing, lab safety, public health – we're getting it all wrong: Can we please not make this partisan? The Intercept this week published two major investigations that seem at first blush unrelated, but a closer look shows the link between the two in a profoundly important way. One is a deep look at safety inside the labs that work with extremely dangerous pathogens. What our reporter Mara Hvistendahl has uncovered is disturbing [...] The second story is an investigation by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein into a sprawling new mandate that the Department of Homeland Security has adopted for itself: to police the spread of 'misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation' on the interwebs. The main targets of the truth police are, according to a draft version of a leaked DHS quadrennial report, 'the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.' The director of a DHS advisory committee, worried about how all this might look, reported Fang and Klippenstein, 'recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a 'clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.'' And here we find the overlap. For some reasons that I vaguely understand, and for some others that I still can't fully comprehend, the conversation around the origin of the pandemic and the efficacy of the vaccines have both become coded along a left-right axis."

"Republicans Have a Symbiotic Relationship With Crime: You can't whip up a hysterical meltdown about crime without lots of crime happening. In the final stretch of the midterm campaign, right-wing media has turned to one of its most reliable propaganda tactics: crime panic. Ads where I live in Pennsylvania are putting the infamous Willie Horton strategy to shame; at the bar this week, I caught one that all but accused Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman of being an accomplice to murder. [...] The striking thing about this messaging strategy is not just the undeniable opportunism—like the supposedly fearsome migrant caravan back in October 2018, it's a safe bet that Fox's crime focus will evaporate once the election is over—but also the perverse incentive thus created. Republicans have an objective political interest in increased crime because it allows them to incite a febrile backlash, and many of them are not at all subtle about it. By the same token, their favored policies of total legal impunity for police and making it ever-easier to buy guns will undoubtedly make crime worse, all else equal. In short, if you want more crime, vote Republican." In fact, conservative policies have always increased crime, which may be why the states where crime is worst are Republican-run states.

Truth Cops: Leaked Documents Outline DHS's Plans to Police Disinformation THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms."

I don't hold out much hope for a third party's success, especially in the current system, but is it possible to take over the Democratic Party? I don't feel optimistic about that, either. Here's one position on that: "The Politicians Who Destroyed Our Democracy Want Us to Vote for Them to Save It: We should have walked out on the Democratic Party and mounted a serious opposition movement while we still had a chance. The bipartisan project of dismantling our democracy, which took place over the last few decades on behalf of corporations and the rich, has left only the outward shell of democracy. The courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch and the media, including public broadcasting, are captive to corporate power. There is no institution left that can be considered authentically democratic. The corporate coup d'état is over. They won. We lost." It's hard to argue with any of that, but if we ever had a chance to simply walk away, that hasn't been helped by changes in law that make third parties even more difficult to field. And unlike most Americans, I've had the experience of living in a country with multiple parties and I can't honestly say they fare any better. The UK has multiple parties, and yet, Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives went on and on and on with only 40% of the vote. We even ended up with Boris Johnson, and then the bizarre autumn antics that led to today. European countries are all watching inroads, if not outright successes, by the right wing breaking through whatever sort of liberalism (social democracy or democratic socialism, however you like to define it) used to create stable governments. Neoliberalism opened the door wide, and the far right has been wriggling through or even marching right in. Today's so-called "centrist" governments seem more willing to sympathize with avowed fascists than with any kind of social democracy, let alone "the left".

Kuttner, "Sam Bankman-Fried: A Common Crook: Today on TAP: With luck, his fall will take the whole crypto sector with him. What has almost gotten lost in the Sam Bankman-Fried saga is that the former billionaire's scam was a fundamental violation of the securities laws—using customer funds to place his own bets. His personal control of both the exchange FTX, and his investment company, Alameda, and the comingling of their funds, puts Bankman-Fried right up there with Ponzi and Madoff as common crooks and outright felons." But it's always been obvious that crypto is a scam and we're just waiting to see if members of Congress will stop pretending it should be taken as anything more than a crooked game.

Jeez, even ten years ago Second Life avatars looked better than what the Metaverse has to offer.

Jeff Beck - "Shapes of Things"

What the hell am I doin' here?

OK, the cat finally managed to get Boris out of No.10. The Tories had a contest between two people nobody wanted — well, there was a difference of opinion between the general party membership and the parliamentary party (the Tory MPs), and the general membership voted for Liz Truss — but her government instantly produced a budget that sent the markets into a tailspin and since even the financiers didn't want her, she's already resigned after 44 days. And Boris Johnson pretended he had the votes to get the job back, but it turned out he was not telling the truth (as seems usual). So Rishi Sunak gets No. 10 on a vote from the Parliamentary Conservative Party. No one has mentioned this out loud, but that makes him the first Hindu PM of the UK. And all the Tory pundits are pretending that has nothing to do with why Truss won with the membership over Sunak in the first place.

Back in the USA, there was hope that Biden's various 11th-hour Hail Mary attempts to do what he should have done in the first week of his presidency, coupled with the Republicans' attacks on reproductive rights, Social Security, and Medicare, would save the House and Senate, but as the mid-terms are breathing down our necks, it's looking like the GOP (with the media's help) are managing to overwhelm the public discourse with loads of copaganda and false stories that the largely peaceful protests after the murder of George Floyd were riots and mayhem in every major city. Yes, there are actually people who believe that all those cities are burned-out shells and that an entity called "ANTIFA" did it. In addition, the high gas prices, according to GOP media, are all caused by Biden having "canceled the Keystone Pipeline" in his first week in office. Well, no, the Keystone Pipeline itself has been up and running all along, but Keystone XL, a planned shortcut which was under construction then and would still have been under construction for another eight years, was shut down. Which wouldn't have mattered anyway, since the pipeline carries tar sands (which you can't put in your tank) out of Canada for international sale and doesn't serve the US anyway. And the inflation, of course, is supposedly caused by the tiny amount of government spending that sent $1,400 checks to Americans two years ago. Amazingly, the obvious fact that consumer spending didn't go up before the inflation hit, and that corporations are obviously raising prices far in excess of what their costs can account for, just don't figure into the right-wing narrative and thus the mutterings of crackpots like Larry Summers make far more headway than the facts. So Democrats caused inflation and caused crime. And Democrats, true to form, have entirely failed to make the case that conservative policies for 50 years are what really made this mess. So we went from, "It's gonna be a bloodbath for Democrats," to maybe it won't, to a thin but probable loss of both Houses. I don't even want to know what happens after that.

Looks like Atrios shares my feeling that the cops are secretly on strike. They just hang around for the benefits— overtime, lording it over people, and playing 007.

"Who's really to blame for inflation: Big corporations are taking advantage of the expectation of higher prices to rack up huge profits. By now, you've probably heard the good news. After more than a year of surging inflation, gas prices are down, pandemic supply chain snarls are starting to ease, and shipping costs for companies are coming down. But instead of passing on the savings to customers, companies are making a different choice. Big corporations are choosing to keep prices high for consumers, even as their own expenses, for things like materials and transportation, go down. While the Biden administration and its economic response to the pandemic have become easy scapegoats for those who wish to assign blame for stubbornly high prices, especially as midterm elections draw closer, the facts tell a different story. And ignoring the ways in which corporate price hikes are contributing to higher prices will only prolong the crisis."

"Wall Street Is Behind Jackson's Water Crisis: A major credit rating agency jacked up interest rates in Jackson, Mississippi, curtailing infrastructure investments in the years leading up to the city's recent disaster. In August, clean water stopped flowing from residents' taps in Jackson, Mississippi. The crisis lasted more than six weeks, leaving 150,000 people without a consistent source of safe water. The catastrophe can be traced back to a decision by a credit ratings agency four years ago that massively inflated the city's borrowing costs for infrastructure improvements, most notably for its water and sewer system. In 2018, ratings analysts at Moody's Investor Service — a credit rating agency with a legacy of misconduct — downgraded Jackson's bond rating to a junk status, citing in part the 'low wealth and income indicators of residents.' The decision happened even though Jackson has never defaulted on its debt. Moody's move jacked up the price of borrowing for Jackson, costing the cash-strapped city between $2 and $4 million per year in additional debt service costs — a massive financial roadblock to officials' plans to fix the municipality's aging water system. And since the state of Mississippi and the federal government refused to use their powers to address the city's infrastructure problems, that meant Jackson was essentially powerless to stop the impending catastrophe."

"'A Brazil of Hope' as Leftist Lula Defeats Far-Right Bolsonaro in Presidential Runoff: The Workers' Party candidate, who completed a remarkable political comeback less than three years removed from a prison cell, tweeted one word following his win: 'Democracy.' 'A huge blow against fascistic politics and a huge victory for decency and sanity.' That's how RootsAction director Norman Solomon described Brazilian President-Elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's Sunday presidential runoff victory against far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, the culmination of a most remarkable political comeback for a man who was languishing behind bars just three years ago. With 99% of votes counted via an electronic system that tallies final results in a matter of hours—and which was repeatedly aspersed by Bolsonaro in an effort to cast doubt on the election's veracity—da Silva led the incumbent by more than two million ballots, or nearly two percentage points."

"Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years: Despite the discovery, the work, titled New York City I, will continue to be displayed the wrong way up to avoid damaging it"

RIP: "Robbie Coltrane, star of Cracker and Harry Potter, dies aged 72: Scottish actor who graduated from the alternative comedy scene to become a major performer known for taking on complex and difficult roles. Born Anthony Robert McMillan in the prosperous Glaswegian suburb of Rutherglen, Coltrane was educated at Glenalmond College, an independent boarding school whose corporal punishment he described as 'legalised violence', before going to the Glasgow School of Art. He had second thoughts about his ability as a painter, and switched to live performance, acting in radical theatre companies (including a troupe from San Quentin State prison) and doing standup, taking the pseudonym Coltrane as homage to celebrated jazz musician John Coltrane." He won my heart for good when he played Charles Bronson playing Ken Livingstone (with Peter Richardson playing Lee Van Cleef playing Tony Benn, Dawn French playing Cher Playing Joan Ruddock, and Jennifer Saunders as The Ice Princess, Margaret Thatcher), in The Comic Strip's "movie" about Thatcher's destruction of the elective government of Britain's capital city, the Greater London Council, aka the GLC. Go ahead and watch, it's only half an hour and you'll see some other familiar faces.

"James Bennet and the rewriting of 2020: Sometimes, history changes unexpectedly toward the good. And then, powerful people with something to lose try to change it back. Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple contributed to the latter yesterday when he published a column titled “James Bennet was right.” The piece was an apologia for Bennet's actions in the summer of 2020, when, as editor of the New York Times' opinion section, he published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton calling for the U.S. military to crush the nationwide protests that erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd. Bennet was forced to resign. Wemple's column, in turn, was prompted by comments Bennet made in former Times media columnist Ben Smith's new $25 million media venture Semafor. The former Times editor (who more than landed on his feet with a regular column in the Economist), told his former colleague that the Times “set me on fire and threw me in the garbage” in order to curry the “applause and the welcome of the left.”

From 2020: "The killing of Jeremy Corbyn: The former Labour leader was the victim of a carefully planned and brutally executed political assassination [...] We don't hold a candle for Corbyn. Neither of us are Labour Party members, and indeed one of us has worked as a political correspondent and commentator for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail, three stalwarts of Tory opinion-making. Both of us care greatly about accurate, truthful journalism. Both of us, as British citizens, cherish the tradition of fair play and decency. That is why we believe everyone should be concerned about the picture painted of Corbyn by the British media for the four years he was leader. Corbyn was never the monstrous figure presented to the British people. He was never a Marxist. He was not hell-bent on the destruction of Western capitalism. He was a socialist. Nor was he an antisemite, and there is no serious evidence which suggests that he was, though we certainly do not absolve him of poor judgement, for instance in joining various internet forums in his years on the backbenches. And he was not a divisive figure - the claim made against him by so many of his right-wing opponents. [...] He was never given a chance. Not by the bulk of Labour's parliamentary party and many officials, some of whom (we are now learning) campaigned harder against their elected leader than they did against the Tory government. Not by senior figures connected to the British state, including former spy chiefs, military officers and civil servants, all of whom should have known much better."

"Liberalism Is Not the Opposite of Conservatism [...] By a roundabout route — starting with a very good piece from The Lever on the next abortion battle, to Cory Doctorow's reflections on the latest poisonous modern aristocrat (Barre Seid), to a reflection on modern liberalism at Crooked Timber — I landed in my reading on a brilliant comment by composer Frank Wilhoit. This piece is about his comment." How Wilhoit defined conservative philosophy: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

Before they did Ghosts, the same ensemble had a show called Horrible Histories, which I guess you could say was an unflattering but accurate look at the grisly past. I was delighted by their "Four King Georges" song, so that's where I've linked this video, but if you like that sort of thing you might want to watch the whole thing.

Before Star Trek, he still sounded like that.

Postmodern Jukebox, "Creep"

We promise you a smashing good time!

Ursel Mathilde posted this image* to the FB Steam Punk group.

At last, Biden has exceeded my expectations by announcing a move to reschedule marijuana and pardon people who have been convicted of simple possession under federal laws. "Much more remains to be done, but the presidential cannabis pardon is one of the most significant drug policy developments since the 1970s. [...] But certain expectations about the proclamation's reach should be tempered. About 6,500 people stand to benefit. (There are no people currently serving sentences in federal prisons for simple possession.) A 'certificate of pardon' would mean, for example, that a person with a simple cannabis possession offense would no longer have to check a 'criminal record' box on applications for employment or college financial aid. A presidential proclamation also has no force of law in the states and localities where the vast majority of convictions have been handed down, which means that people will continue to face consequences of previous possession convictions depending on the state where they live. These jurisdictions will have to take their own steps—and the president encouraged governors to take them—to eliminate simple possession convictions from a person's record. How far a pardon actually goes depends on the language a state or locality uses. Expungement, for example, delivers more of a 'clean slate' approach that permanently removes convictions from a person's record." But I'm not cheering until he actually gets cannabis re-scheduled. No more DEA money to catch pot-smokers.

It is worth remembering that the Saudis and the oil barons in general are rooting for the Republicans, and oil prices are being manipulated to make their whims a reality. David Dayen on "The Political Impacts of Rising Gas Prices: Today on TAP: Unexplained refinery shutdowns and snap decisions by oil-producing nations can reverberate in the midterm elections."

"House Democratic Leadership Designed Stock Trade Ban To Fail, Negotiators Say: Nancy Pelosi is a controversial figure, but one thing her supporters and detractors agree on is her tactical skill as a legislator and power broker. Somehow, those legendary skills failed her this week. DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP IN the House of Representatives tanked an opportunity to pass a key ethics reform Thursday, according to several Democratic and Republican staffers involved in bipartisan efforts to ban stock trading by members of Congress. Those staffers say leadership's move appears crafted to head off broad bipartisan support for reform. [...] While some conservative Democrats — most notably retiring Blue Dog and perennial corporate-friendly obstructionist Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla. — have tried to claim reforms are a tough sell for front-liners, that argument is hard to square with the considerable amount of data indicating any ban would be overwhelmingly popular. With further action delayed until after the midterms, Democrats have deprived members in tough races of the benefits the popular legislation might confer." Naturally, this has proved to be a gift to Republicans who now have something legitimate to campaign on.

"The Police Are Defunding Minneapolis: Two years since George Floyd was murdered, the Minneapolis Police Department is a fiscal disaster. [...] Simply put, Minneapolis did not defund the police. It's the opposite. The police are defunding Minneapolis."

"The Supreme Court's Public Legitimacy Crisis Has Arrived: Americans' antipathy toward the high court is deepening—and for the first time, a slim majority favors expansion. [...] Marquette Law School's most recent survey about the high court, which was published this week, again revealed a sharp decline in public support for the justices. It found that the court went from a 66 percent/33 percent approval/disapproval rating among all Americans two years ago to just 40 percent/60 percent today. The causal factor was again obvious, as Marquette found that roughly two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the Dobbs ruling. But the real humdinger was buried in the crosstabs: 51 percent of Americans said that they either strongly or somewhat supported expanding the Supreme Court, including a bare majority of self-described independents. To my knowledge, this is the first reputable Supreme Court pollster to find majority support for that proposal, even if it is a bare majority at that."

I probably don't have to tell long-time readers of The Sideshow how infuriating I found it that Trump turned a serious problem into just another right-wing conspiracy theory. (Well, he didn't have far to go since even when it was not a concern of Republicans the Democratic Party leadership didn't want to hear about it.) 'What Donald Trump Got Right About Voting Machines [...] We know all about that at WhoWhatWhy. Long before Trump hijacked this legitimate issue for illegitimate purposes with the 'Stop the Steal' fantasy, we were one of the first news outlets to sound the alarm over the chain of custody of ballots and the vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems. So-called hybrid voting machines, used to both create and mark and then scan and count barcoded paper ballots, can be manipulated in various ways that are difficult to detect. Hand-marked ballots, with the security of the chain of custody preserved and well documented, are probably the only way to ensure an election wasn't hijacked. Election integrity is a real concern. But once Trump commandeered the concept, many reasonable people saw any question of voting machine reliability as dangerous territory, the exclusive realm of MAGA and QAnon kooks. "

"How Ron DeSantis Blew Up Black-Held Congressional Districts and May Have Broken Florida Law: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was incensed. Late last year, the state's Republican legislature had drawn congressional maps that largely kept districts intact, leaving the GOP with only a modest electoral advantage. DeSantis threw out the legislature's work and redrew Florida's congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through. DeSantis' office has publicly stressed that partisan considerations played no role and that partisan operatives were not involved in the new map." Because that would have been illegal. But the evidence is that DeSantis worked with a Republican operative whose job it is to impose gerrymandering on electoral maps.

"Hill TV Censors Segment On Rashida Tlaib's Description Of Israel As 'Apartheid Government,' Bars Reporter: Host Katie Halper recorded a segment defending Tlaib's accurate portrayal of Israel's government, but Hill TV's owners refused to run it."

"International Finance Capital Rebels Against British … Tax Cuts for the Rich?: Today on TAP: Bankers shoot down the Conservative Party budget plan. U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss might have suffered the worst political faceplant in British history. Elected by the Conservative majority not even a month ago, she has already suffered a massive political defeat and made her party so unpopular that if an election were to be held today, it would likely lose all but a handful of its seats in Parliament. Here's what happened. After Truss won the fight to replace Boris Johnson, she and her new Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng proposed a new budget package centered around modest energy price controls and enormous tax cuts for the rich. The size was stupendous—something like 12.6 percent of GDP over five years. Nearly half the tax cut benefits would go to the top 5 percent of households. This caused a huge popular backlash, and turmoil in the London financial markets. The yield on British government debt spiked so high that the central bank had to step in to stave off a currency crisis. Truss and Kwarteng abruptly reversed course on the high-end tax cuts Monday—amusingly after recording several interviews in which they promised they would not back down."

"The Washington Post Dabbles in Orwell: In scrubbed piece about Edward Snowden, the Bezos Post offers a preview of how history will be re-written." We've gotten used to the fact that the Snowden story has turned from a revelation that the US government is committing crimes against the entire citizenry to a story of a leaker, but The Washington Post published an article so egregious that they responded to complaints by adding a few corrections to the story - and then later uncorrecting them. They also stressed the point that Snowden's acceptance of Putin's "offer" of Russian citizenship somehow retroactively proved that his purposes in exposing the crimes of the NSA could not possibly have been done for the public's right to know.

Modern economists use it to justify horrible policies even though it has been proven a false predictor. Ed Walker on "The Rise and Fall of the Phillips Curve: The Phillips Curve says that there is an inverse relation between unemployment and inflation. Low unemployment is correlated with a rise in inflation. It's an article of faith to economists of all stripes. It's listed in the popular introductory economics textbook by N. Gregory Mankiw as one of the Ten Things All Economists agree on. It's especially loved by the Fed, which raises or lowers interest rates depending in part on its predictions. Its critics point out that its predictions are poor. In this post, I discuss the derivation of the Phillips Curve, its adaption by Samuleson and Solow to manage the economy, its breakdown in the 1970s, exploitation by neoliberals of that breakdown to replace Keynesian demand-based economics with monetarism and supply-side economics, its rejuvenation, and the evidence that it doesn't make accurate predictions. I conclude with some observations based on an important paper by Simcha Barkai that challenges the core beliefs of neoliberalism. It suggests we can raise wages substantially without causing inflation by lowering corporate profits."

Here are Dean Baker and Joseph Stiglitz last month saying "The Fed Should Wait and See" before raising rates, especially since the inflation it's supposed to solve has already slowed and consumer spending has slumped. Again, the Fed is reacting as if the inflation was demand-driven when it simply was not — it's a supply-side problem and the only real solutions are to rein in the suppliers and make them behave in less anti-social ways.

"Budget Cuts = Eating The Seed Corn: Government budget cuts are not what they seem. Understanding history could also be called 'wisdom.' Wisdom told stories about 'eating the seed corn.' If you eat the seed corn you can't plant your crops the following year and everyone eventually starves. In the early 80s Reaganism/Thatcherism (neoliberalism) convinced the country to drastically cut taxes on the rich and 'pay for' it by cutting spending. The US stopped spending on maintaining and modernizing infrastructure – especially transportation infrastructure, on education, on science … on so many things. So we lived off of prior investment for so long. But the infrastructure deteriorated and we certain never modernized it. (Just look at our rail and transportation systems, compared to the rest of the world.)"

"Republicans Are Lying About Fentanyl to Scare Voters [...] In a recent appeal to voters that was panned by critics as 'substance-free' in terms of concrete policy ideas, House Republicans decried an 'out of control border' and claimed every state is now a 'border state' under assault by fentanyl. Ahead of an expected reelection bid, former President Donald Trump is once again railing about an 'invasion' of 'drug dealers' claiming 'innocent victims,' a redux of the racist messaging on immigration that defined his first campaign. Never mind that drug overdose deaths actually began rising under the Trump administration's policies before shattering records once COVID hit, or that medical experts and nonpartisan fact-checkers routinely debunk GOP narratives portraying an increase in fentanyl seizures by law enforcement as evidence of an 'open border.' [...] In reality, most migrants attempting to cross border are seeking asylum after fleeing violence and poverty, and certainly aren't smuggling fentanyl in their backpacks. Plenty of statements and data from federal law enforcement show that fentanyl most commonly enters the U.S. in trucks and passenger vehicles at legal ports of entry, and a majority of those transporting fentanyl are U.S. citizens, who are less likely to draw the attention of border police. By scapegoating migrants as a source of drugs, demagogues obscure the facts with a cloud of xenophobia."

RIP: "World Mourns Professor Martin Barker's Unexpected Death at 76." Barker was well-known for his anti-racist work but most notable for defending "video nasties". He was a friend of Feminists Against Censorship back in the day and much of his work examined genre fiction.

RIP: Bob Madle (1920-2022): "Bob Madle was the last surviving original member of First Fandom, having begun his activity in science fiction fandom in 1933. He was present at one of the earliest club meetings in Philadelphia in 1936, attended the first Worldcon in New York in 1939, and was a long time presence at science fiction conventions around the country. He was an accomplished collector and one of the most important science fiction book and pulp magazine dealers in the world. Few worthwhile collections anywhere haven't benefited from Bob's expertise in the field. Bob published David H. Keller's Solitary Hunters And The Abyss through his New Era Publishers in 1948. He was the TAFF (Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund) delegate in 1957 and attended the first London World SF Convention through TAFF in 1957. He wrote a long running series about science fiction published in the various professional magazines published by his long time friend Robert A. W. Lowndes. He served honorably in the United States Army during World War II." Madle had a long run, and it's no shock that he has finally left us, but I still remember him laughing at WSFA meetings all those years ago.

RIP: "Angela Lansbury, star of TV, film and theatre, dies aged 96: Lansbury won an Oscar nomination for her first role in the 1944 film Gaslight, and gained international acclaim as Murder, She Wrote's Jessica Fletcher" Another one who died just before her next birthday. It's unusual enough that it bugs me when I see it. I'll skip the jokes about the murder rate in Cabot Cove.

"What Is the Point of Economics? [...] And this brings me to the point of economics, which has taken me a long time to understand. There are many economists who focus on trying to uncover important truths about the world, and there are many economists who seek to serve concentrated capital. There are smart ones, and dumb ones. But truth or falsehood, or empirical rigor, is besides the point. The point of economics as a discipline is to create a language and methodology for governing that hides political assumptions from the public. Truly successful economists, like Summers, spend their time winning bureaucratic turf wars and placing checks on elected officials. [...] CBO seems to get things wrong in ways that privilege concentrated capital and a certain form of austerity-driven politics. Here are two simple examples. First, CBO for most of the post-2009 era assumed, based on opaque and reactionary economic modeling, that interest rates would soon snap back to 5%, which effectively meant that spending more money through tax cuts or spending increases, as many legislators wanted to do to help their constituents would be quite costly. Turns out interest rates didn't come back to 5%, and the assumptions behind those interest rate models had hidden political biases favorable to concentrated capital. [...] It hasn't really improved. A few months ago, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, with his complex matrix of data points and his legions of economists, got into a highly publicized argument with Donald Trump, over interest rates. Trump criticized Powell for potentially tightening at a moment when the economy was slowing, saying you have look beyond data and 'feel' the market. Powell reversed himself after data finally came out showing Trump, with his gut feel, was right."

Verbal karate; read the stats. "Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman: Black Lives Matter protesters were overwhelmingly peaceful, our research finds: When the Department of Homeland Security released its Homeland Threat Assessment earlier this month, it emphasized that self-proclaimed white supremacist groups are the most dangerous threat to U.S. security. But the report misleadingly added that there had been 'over 100 days of violence and destruction in our cities,' referring to the anti-racism uprisings of this past summer. In fact, the Black Lives Matter uprisings were remarkably nonviolent. When there was violence, very often police or counterprotesters were reportedly directing it at the protesters."

Even I was surprised at the chart showing that the US has a remarkably low number of doctors per capita. Barry Ritholtz on "Framing, Context, Asking (not answering) Questions: It was one of those minor stories that seemed to have taken on a life of its own: The New York Times1 reported last week about an adjunct Organic Chemistry professor at NYU who was fired after students complained his tests were too hard. I would have missed it, but for J.V Last discussing it at The Bulwark.2 Both discussions touched on what a gut course org chem is; how many aspiring doctors see their career hopes dashed by the class. The debate veered into whether colleges are credential factories, or public utilities, or just businesses selling a product trying to satisfy their consumers. JVL wrote, 'The course exists for only two purposes: (1) to cull the number of attractive medical school applicants, and (2) to prepare a handful of students for a future in biochemical research.' [...] In 1960, the United States had more doctors per capita than any other country. What happened since then?"

"On John Lennon's Birthday, a Few Words About War: Why "pacifists" aren't "fascifists" [...] The 'bed-in' led half a century ago by Lennon and wife Yoko Ono was denounced as a dumb stunt by a tone-deaf celebrity couple, using terms like 'clueless,' 'illegible,' 'naive,' and 'ineffective.' The pair's peace patter and naked photo shoots are still ridiculed as representative of antiwar activism that supposedly assumes the world runs on flowers, free love, and finger paints. Even the dumbest pacifist, however, never did anything as stupid and destructive as the bombing of North Vietnam, the invasion of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, or the 'liberation' of Libya (or the invasions of Chechnya and Ukraine, for that matter). [...] Yes, this time it really could be 1938. It could also be 1914, when a chain-reaction of lunatic escalations spun a localized conflict into a global conflagration costing millions of senseless deaths. Worrying about the latter isn't treason, it's what Orwell called 'elementary common sense.' It all comes down to a miserable calculation about how vital you think stopping Putin in Ukraine is or isn't to global stability. Anyone who says this is an easy call has not thought this through, especially given our atrocious record when it comes to trying to decrease international tension through the use of force. By any measure, we suck at it, and unlike previous wars, we can't afford to screw this one up."

Robert Reich, again, stating the obvious, "The US ultra-rich justify their low tax rates with three myths – all of them rubbish: A record share of the nation's wealth is in the hands of billionaires, who pay a lower tax rate than the average American. This is indefensible [...] Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke. The so-called free market has been distorted by huge campaign contributions from the ultra-rich. Don't lionize the ultra-rich as superior 'self-made' human beings who deserve their billions. They were lucky and had connections."

At The Nation, the podcast, where Bhaskar still likes Bernie in 2024, and Chris Lehman talks about the Brooks Brothers Riot.

"Larry Summers And Jason Furman Aren't Really Democrats [...] This week, we're taking a look at how media deference to a certain group of economic pundits can lead to serious misrepresentation of important political and policy nuances. We'll be looking at two articles: this one from The Washington Post and this one from The New York Times. Each publication sets the tone for the debate that is continued on from cable news to econ twitter to the Halls of Actual Power. The Post piece is actually quite a good article overall, documenting a shift in where (and from whom) the Biden administration gets its economic policy advice. On the other hand, what we get from the Times article is absolutely unhinged economic coverage that is ridiculously one-sided commentary from the right about a budget run amok. The common feature? They both enshrine a specific type of moderate economic stance as the stance of economists. Let's start with the Post. [...] The role that major, ostensibly center left publications play in setting the discussions we have around major economic issues is important. They often tend to misrepresent expert opinions as a form of consensus that they simply aren't. Jason Furman and Larry Summers do not reflect a consensus of Democratic economists. The fact that they are so often treated as the overriding authorities on what the entire field of economics has to say on the issue is concerning. Sometimes, as with the Post, otherwise good reporting can be marred by verbiage that buys into this assumption. Other times, as with the Times, reporting will be purposefully obtuse about who they cite to protect their conservative talking points from real scrutiny. "

It's worth subscribing to The Lever just to hear those guys ragging on Larry Summers, one of the worst villains in the world.

Here's James K. Galbraith with a quick summing up of how our economy went from good to bad and some great suggestions for amelioration that won't happen. "The broken US economy breeds inequality and insecurity. Here's how to fix it: On one side, oceans of wealth and power. On the other, precarity and powerlessness. But we have the tools for reform [...] From the 1930s to the 1970s America had a middle-class economy centered in the heartland, feeding and supplying the world with machinery and goods while drawing labor from the impoverished south to the thriving midwest – an economy of powerful trade unions and world-dominant corporations. This has become a bicoastal economy dominated by globalized finance, insurance and high-end services on one coast, and by information technology, aerospace and entertainment on the other. [...] Perhaps the toughest, most necessary reform is to reduce debts including student debts, to shrink the banks, to restore effective regulation, to prosecute frauds, and to discipline finance to serve the public good. This will take the glamour out of being a banker – and the intoxicating power out of running the Federal Reserve. Is this program realistic? Perhaps not. But consider the path we're on. What I propose is an alternative – to pitchforks, anarchy and civil war."

Miners' strike: Valley community and gay activists' enduring friendships"—The legacy of Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners, depicted in the 2014 film Pride, lives on.

For a long time I've checked YouTube periodically to see if anyone's posted Harvard Lampoon's The Surprising Sheep album, a thing that is very much of its time — and finally, someone did! I think "Welcome to the Club" is my favorite, but you might like to give the rest of the mix a listen, too.

If it's square we ain't there

I found this photo of a house in Michigan here.

Ugh, we are a plague house again. It's different this time, but still means having to isolate at a time when there was actually someone I wanted to meet up with.

Back in the early blogging days I actually had to touch-type newspaper articles or quotes from books while I read them from print, because they weren't just easy links all over the net. That was a pain in the ass but still easier than having to copy from photographs posted on the net, which means having to rotate from my text editor to the photo between every phrase. So, curse you, Ryan Grim, for only giving us a photo of this page from your book instead of the text: "When the highest income tax rate was first introduced in the early 20th Century, it applied to just a few families. It's often said that, yes, sure, marginal tax rates were in the 90s and even as high as the 70s up through the 1970s and into the 1980s, but that's largely irrelevant because almost nobody paid that high rate. But that misunderstands the purpose of those high rates as raising revenue. The real upside was that it discouraged earning stratospheric amounts of income." Now go read at the link because it's just too much to type this way, even though it's short.

"How Bill Gates and partners used their clout to control the global Covid response — with little oversight: Four health organizations, working closely together, spent almost $10 billion on responding to Covid across the world. But they lacked the scrutiny of governments, and fell short of their own goals, a POLITICO and WELT investigation found. [...] The four organizations had worked together in the past, and three of them shared a common history. The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017." This guy wrecked the public response to Covid. And the trouble with these rich philanthropists is that there is no way to vote them out.

Eskow, "The United States is Now an 'Un-Developing' Country: Is progress obsolete? Are we an empire waiting to fall?? The United Nations' latest annual ranking of nations by 'sustainable development goals' will come as a shock for many Americans. Not only aren't we 'Number One,' we're not even close. The top four countries are Scandinavian democracies. The United States ranks forty-first, just below Cuba (that's right, below our Communist neighbor). Countries that outrank us include Estonia, Croatia, the Slovak Republic, Romania, and Serbia."

"'Reverse Freedom Rides': An echo of Martha's Vineyard migrant flights 60 years ago: Tricked by segregationists with promises of work and housing, Black families were dropped in Cape Cod with nothing. Sound familiar? Eliza Davis was bewildered the day she arrived in a wealthy tourist town on Cape Cod. An agricultural worker, she had been promised work and housing if she took a free trip to another state. Days later, disembarking with her eight children, she had little idea where she was, that a president had a family compound down the road, or that she was a 'pawn,' as locals told the New York Times, in a political stunt. Davis, 36, was not among the migrants who arrived Wednesday in Martha's Vineyard — a resort island off Cape Cod where former president Barack Obama has a home — courtesy of a flight arranged by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). She was a Black woman from Alabama, bused to and abandoned in Hyannis, Mass., in 1962, not far from the holiday home of President John F. Kennedy." The Arkansas Democat-Gazette picked up the story and put a a gallery of photos from the time on their online edition.

The wingers are apparently really proud of having sent these asylum-seekers to a "sanctuary city" — except Martha's Vineyard isn't a sanctuary city, nor is Massachusetts a sanctuary state. (And, needless to say, the victims were not in the country illegally, and the full-time residents of the island looked after them until transportation could be arranged to someplace that had better facilities for them, many of which were not available on the small island.) They think they really put one over on the elites, who, of course, were not there in their summer resort town, what with summer being over and all.

And speaking of things the wingers believe, there's the "'Deeply Dangerous Nonsense': Treasury Dept. Debunks GOP Lies About 87,000 Armed IRS Agents: The intensity with which Republicans 'are coming at this is really a testament to how important these resources are going to be—because there are many wealthy tax evaders that stand to lose a lot,' said one official. [...] An official from the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed Friday that, contrary to the unrelenting barrage of lies repeated by GOP operatives for over a week, the Internal Revenue Service is not going to hire 87,000 new agents to harass working people at their homes. [...] Despite analysts' predictions that the 98.2% of U.S. households with annual incomes of $400,000 or less will receive the same tax bill or a slight cut as a result of the IRA, far-right lawmakers have sown disinformation about how the law's provision of roughly $80 billion in new IRS funding over 10 years—money intended to help the agency crack down on rich tax cheats—poses a threat to every American. [...] Where does this oft-repeated number of IRS agents come from? 'The 87,000 figure does exist, buried within a May 2021 Treasury Department report when the Biden administration was pushing a bigger spending bill with the same $80 billion IRS funding,' Reuters noted Friday. 'The report estimated the money could fund 86,852 full-time hires through 2031.' But the actual net increase in staff would be much lower, as the IRS expects more than 50,000 aging Baby Boomer employees to retire over the next half-decade."

"The story of the praying Bremerton coach keeps getting more surreal: When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that Bremerton assistant football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to pray on the field, it wasn't widely understood then that the court had also ordered the school district to give him his job back. [...] So the school district has been flummoxed about what's happened since. They complied by offering to reinstate him, they say, and now the football season is in full swing. But Kennedy is nowhere near the sidelines. 'He's had the paperwork for his reinstatement since August 8th, and we haven't gotten so much as a phone call,' says Karen Bevers, spokesperson for Bremerton schools. [...] It's an increasingly surreal situation for the Bremerton schools. They were ordered to 'reinstate Coach Kennedy to a football coaching position,' according to court documents. But the now-famous coach is out on the conservative celebrity circuit, continuing to tell a story about 'the prayer that got me fired' — even though Bremerton never actually fired him. [...] This did not stop Kennedy's lawyers from telling the Supreme Court repeatedly that he was fired. 'The record is clear that Coach Kennedy was fired for that midfield prayer,' lawyer Paul Clement told the nine justices in the first 15 seconds of the oral arguments of the case in April. The words 'fired,' 'fire' or 'firing' were used 16 times in the hour and a half session. It wasn't true though. The district's lawyers tried to correct the record, to no avail. 'You can't sue them for failing to rehire you if you didn't apply,' one lawyer, Mercer Island's Michael Tierney, argued during a lower court session. 'The District didn't get an application from him, had four positions to fill and filled them with people who had applied. It didn't fail to rehire him.' The Supreme Court simply ignored this inconvenient fact — along with a host of others. At one point during oral arguments, as a different school district attorney was saying the narrative that had been spun didn't fit with the facts — that the coach's prayers were neither silent nor solitary, nor was he fired — Justice Samuel Alito interrupted him, saying 'I know that you want to make this very complicated.' Alito persisted in asking about the coach being fired — six times he said it, to the point that the lawyer finally corrected him. Which is a touchy thing to do with a Supreme Court justice.

"Poll: One year after SB 8, Texans express strong support for abortion rights: One year after Texas implemented what was then the most restrictive abortion law in the country, a majority of Texas voters are expressing strong support for abortion rights. In a new survey, six in 10 voters said they support abortion being "available in all or most cases," and many say abortion will be a motivating issue at the ballot box in November. Meanwhile, 11% say they favor a total ban on abortion."

"The Antitrust Shooting War Has Started: In a series of stinging losses, the DOJ and FTC are running up against Trump judges and pro-monopoly government bureaucrats. What happens now? [...] Since the beginning of the Biden administration, we've had something of a Phony War around antitrust. Lots of chatter, bureaucratic shuffling, procedural motions, document demands, Congressional testimony and campaign ads. Calls to break up Google and Facebook and Amazon, do something about consolidation in health care and groceries, private equity and so forth. But limited shooting. Over the past month, the antitrust Phony War has ended. What looked like little action was bureaucratic ramp-up. Lina Khan was hired to run the Federal Trade Commission and finally given a working majority five months ago, Jonathan Kanter was put in place at the Antitrust Division, and the Biden administration laid out a whole-of-government competition policy framework. Now it's time for the shooting war, with the ebb and flow between the anti-monopoly movement and the bureaucratic and institutional obstacles in government and the judiciary."

"The Most Stinging Resignation Letter Ever Written: When Iraq's finance minister stepped down last month, he didn't go quietly. On August 16, as the leading members of Iraq's government gathered for their weekly cabinet meeting in a high-ceilinged hall of the Republican Palace in Baghdad, one of them made an unusual request. Ali Allawi, the finance minister since 2020, was stepping down, and he wanted to read the full text of his resignation letter aloud. Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi gave his assent. [...] The letter detailed a series of outrageous scams that had been approved or promoted by some of the men around him, who, he said, had helped create a 'vast octopus of corruption and deceit' that was poisoning the entire country. The letter built gradually toward a conclusion that was almost apocalyptic in scale. Iraq, Allawi said, was on the point of collapse, facing 'a crisis of state, society, and even the individual.' The problem was not just dishonest leaders, but the entire system put in place by the Americans two decades earlier. 'I believe,' he said, 'we are facing one of the most serious challenges that any country has faced in the past century.'"

RIP: "Renowned jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis dies aged 87 [...] Lewis is revered in jazz circles for 1960s hits like The In Crowd, Hang on Sloopy and Wade in the Water. He earned three Grammy awards and seven gold records. The trio's first record in 1956 was Ramsey Lewis and the Gentlemen of Swing."

RIP: "Louise Fletcher, from Star Trek and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest: Fletcher won an Oscar for her iconic portrayal of Nurse Ratched in the 1975 film.Louise Fletcher has died. A veteran actor with more than 100 credits to her name, Fletcher was best known for her Oscar-wining performance as the calmly monstrous Nurse Ratched in 1975's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, giving a turn as one of cinema's great unlikely villains. In addition to that star-making performance, Fletcher appeared in a vast number of film and TV projects, including staking out a place for herself as one of the best antagonists in the entire Star Trek franchise as the manipulative and conniving Kai Winn in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Per Variety, Fletcher died at her home in France earlier today. She was 88." I hadn't known she was raised by two deaf parents and had to be taught to speak by an aunt.

Rot in Perdition: "Ken Starr, Who Turned a Blind Eye to Rape and Defended a Sex Trafficker, Dead at 76: KENNETH STARR, THE lawyer known for investigating Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, mishandling sexual assault cases as president of Baylor University, and helping Jeffrey Epstein secure a sweetheart deal, died Tuesday, Sept. 13. He was 76." And no matter how awful he got, The Washington Post loved him because he'd saved them from a libel charge.

A lot of people got excited when billionaire Yvon Chouinard gave away his company, Patagonia. This was a guy who never wanted to be a boss and never wanted to be a billionaire but he definitely didn't want to take the company public, sell it to some vulture capitalist concern, or otherwise let it slip from its long-time environmental concerns. "Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization. They were created to preserve the company's independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe." I think Yvon is a good guy as billionaires go, but trusts mean rich people can control things from beyond the grave so I don't automatically think they are a great thing.

"How Much Can the U.S. Congress Resist Political Money? A Quantitative Assessment: Abstract: The extent to which governments can resist pressures from organized interest groups, and especially from finance, is a perennial source of controversy. This paper tackles this classic question by analyzing votes in the U.S. House of Representatives on measures to weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in the years following its passage. To control as many factors as possible that could influence floor voting by individual legislators, the analysis focuses on representatives who originally cast votes in favor of the bill but then subsequently voted to dismantle key provisions of it. This design rules out from the start most factors normally advanced by skeptics to explain vote shifts, since these are the same representatives, belonging to the same political party, representing substantially the same districts. Our panel analysis, which also controls for spatial influences, highlights the importance of time-varying factors, especially political money, in moving representatives to shift their positions on amendments such as the “swaps push out” provision. Our results suggest that the links between campaign contributions from the financial sector and switches to a pro-bank vote were direct and substantial: For every $100,000 that Democratic representatives received from finance, the odds they would break with their party's majority support for the Dodd-Frank legislation increased by 13.9 percent. Democratic representatives who voted in favor of finance often received $200,000–$300,000 from that sector, which raised the odds of switching by 25–40 percent."

"The super-rich 'preppers' planning to save themselves from the apocalypse: Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences [...] Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down." Now, if only we can convince them that the collapse has happened and make them go hide in their bunkers and cut themselves off completely from the rest of civilization so we can take over.

Bernie Sanders requests report from CBO, and it says that the bottom 50% has only 2% of the nation's wealth.

Hallowieners

Ramsey Lewis Trio, "The In Crowd"