John Atkinson Grimshaw's famous The Old Hall Under Moonlight is just one of innumerable atmospheric oils by this master of moonlight, and I was just in that kind of mood.
I need to post this so I can post some more, I have so many tabs open I can't find anything anymore. There's just so much going on!
It's pretty clear that what Musk and DOGE are really about is that Musk wants to defund the police that police Musk's businesses, and do the same for the other grifters who are using the government for themselves at our expense. Trump's appointments are absolutely a case of putting the foxes to guard the hen houses. David Dayen, of course, has a a pretty good run-down with "We Found the $2 Trillion: [...] 'Our budget wouldn't be justified if the DOD did pass this year's audit,' said Julia Gledhill, research associate for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center. 'Contractors continue to be rewarded for not doing their jobs terribly well.'" Or you can get the shorter version from Cory Doctorow, "It's pretty easy to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, actually: If Elon Musk wants to cut $2t from the US federal budget, there's a pretty straightforward way to get there – just eliminate all the beltway bandits who overcharge Uncle Sucker for everything from pharmaceuticals to roadworks to (of course) rockets, and then make the rich pay their taxes. There is a ton of federal bloat, but it's not coming from useless programs or overpaid federal employees. As David Dayen writes in a long, fact-filled feature in The American Prospect, the bloat comes from the private sector's greedy suckling at the government teat"
I meant to post this story earlier in January but I lost track of all the open tabs. "How Big Companies and the Courts Killed Net Neutrality: The powerful telecom industry did what they always do when the FCC does anything good or important on behalf of consumer: They sued to overturn the rules. [...] I'll spare you the rest. This court's warped decision scraps the common-sense rules the FCC restored in April. The result is that throughout most of the country, the most essential communications service of this century will be operating without any real government oversight, with no one to step in when companies rip you off or slow down your service."
It's usually Consortium News that sounds this alarm, but this is Rob Urie On Being Censored for the Last Four Years at Naked Capitalism, and tells an important story. While it's true that Republicans have generally supported government propaganda and censorship with far more intensity and cohesion than the Democrats, the Biden administration went absolutely overboard in actively suppressing what it termed "disnformation", even when it clearly was nothing of the kind. And it should never, ever be acceptable to argue that the government should be allowed to mandate what the truth is. But, of course, since Google started refusing to list articles that didn't serve the government, you might never have been able to find stories about what was being labeled as "disinfo" among those events where you knew it was the truth. And the right-wing is much better at screaming far and wide when their own material is being suppressed — so much so that a lot of them think they're the only ones it's happening to. "Yves here. This important post fills out the picture of how extensive censorship became under the Biden Administration. I hope you'll circulate his piece widely, since it demonstrates the campaign went well beyond social media and included disappearing disfavored content from Internet searches. What is remarkable is Urie's evidence of a dramatic shift in search results after the dissolution of the Biden State Department censorship program. This indirectly confirms that Google's change in its algos to prefer mainstream sites and the quick reversal was the result of government intervention, and not Google acting out of its own profit motives." But we need to dip further into the past to get to the start of this story, when Donald Trump's executive order created this whole government-in-your-social-media ball rolling.
Paul Krugman explains why he left The New York Times: "Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless. One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, 'You've already written about that,' as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject. If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, 'we are being lied into war.' I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer mine. So I left."
At Pro Publica, "The Militia and the Mole," a story from someone who spent two years of his life undercover with the right-wing militias to uncover what they were really up to, and sent it to the media, only to have the story ignored until he sent it to Joshua Kaplan, who took the time to check it out.
"It's Simple! Concentrated Wealth and Inequality Crushes Economic Growth: More billionaire dollars, slower growth. Full stop. Like it or not, if countries want to join the 'rich-country club,' they need to redistribute wealth. What has not been studied much — at least partially because the data is hard to come by — is the distribution of wealth within countries, and how that relates to economic growth. Is wealth concentration a symptom of what Peter Turchin has called 'elite overproduction'? My devoted readers will undoubtedly remember my 2008 research into rich countries' wealth inequality and economic growth. (In case you haven't heard, wealth inequality utterly dwarfs income inequality.)" The trouble is it's easier (though certainly not easy) to prevent this overabundance in fewer hands than it is to deal with it once it occurs. You could say that the 91% top marginal rate we enjoyed back in the 1950s was a Prevention of Excessive Wealth tax, and it worked marvelously, until it got lowered to 70% in the '60s, which started the avalanche because it made it easier to build dynastic wealth and start doing the things that lead to capturing government, which ultimately led to the 1980s when the TMR went as low as 28% under Reagan. And that led to a whole lot of other evils, of which Citizens United is only one. That Elon Musk can personally threaten every member of Congress with heavily funded primary challenges as well as heavily-funded election campaigns against them is a just plain disaster. Absolutely no one should have that kind of wealth. But go ahead and convince members of Congress to vote for a 91% top marginal rate, let alone a significant wealth tax that actually removes those millions and billions from them, when those billionaires could easily retaliate by making sure you can never work again, or, if you do what they want, conceivably reward you with your very own millions of dollars.
A video worth watching: "Why Oligarchy Falls (And How to Speed It Up)" — 18 minutes of what Aristotle observed about how oligarchic tyrannies crack, if the right people get their timing right.
Cory Doctorow, "The first days of Boss Politics Antitrust: 'Boss politics' are a feature of corrupt societies. When a society is dominated by self-dealing, corrupt institutions, strongman leaders can seize control by appealing to the public's fury and desperation. Then, the boss can selectively punish corrupt entities that oppose him, and since everyone is corrupt, these will be valid prosecutions. In other words, it's possible to corruptly enforce the law against the guilty. This is just a matter of enforcement priorities: in a legitimate state, enforcers prioritize the wrongdoers who are harming the public the most. Under boss politics, priority is given to the corrupt entities that challenge the boss's power, without regard to whether these lawbreakers are the worst offenders. Meanwhile, worse wrongdoers walk free, provided that they line up behind the boss. [...] Trump is a classic boss politician – that's what people mean when they call him 'transactional': he doesn't act out of principle, he acts out of self interest. The people who give him the most get the most back from him. This means that Biden's brightest legacy – militant antitrust enforcement of a type not seen in generations – is now going to become 'boss antitrust,' where genuine monopolists are attacked under antitrust law, but only if they oppose Trump" On the bright side, Rohit Chopra, head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), is still in place, at least for a while, because no one else seems to want the job.
I am in awe of Hamilton Nolan. "On Having a Maximum Wealth: The single most ridiculous aspect of human history is how much of it has been driven by the goal of allowing a tiny portion of a large population to live in luxury. This is a theme found, to varying degrees, in society after society across the world: A lot of people with a low standard of living working in service of the goal of raising the standard of living for some sort of ruler or supreme leader and his family and allies. I understand that this is not some sort of revelation. 'You've discovered class,' you are now saying in a mocking tone. Beyond the social and political and economic dynamics underlying this process, though—things that make up magisterial fields of inquiry—I think that every once in a while it is well worth taking a moment to gape at the basic ludicrousness of this fact. As societal goals go, an honest reading tells us that we are often not aiming for 'better technology' or 'philosophical progress.' No, the reality is that, thousands of years and around the globe, the primary purpose of all the work that everyone is doing is 'allowing a few jerks and their unbearable kids to live lavishly.' Countless millions through millennia have suffered, dragging stones to build pyramids and losing fingers in dirty factories and getting black lung so that Some Guy Somewhere can sit on a soft pillow and enjoy delicacies. What an absurd, idiotic goal to organize human society around. Wow!"
The Beatles, on the BBC, "I'll Get You"
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