The word literally means “no place,” so maybe it shouldn’t be surprising when a purported utopia—especially one built on an ideology that views selfishness as a virtue—turns out not to be one at all.
The atheist libertarian lie: Ayn Rand, income inequality and the fantasy of the “free market”, CJ Werleman, Salon, September 14, 2014
Robert Reich says that one of the most deceptive ideas embraced by the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian movement is that the free market is natural, and exists outside and beyond government. In other words, the “free market” is a constructed supernatural myth.
There is much to cover here, but a jumping-off point is the fact that corporations are a government construct, and that fact alone refutes any case for economic libertarianism. Corporations, which are designed to protect shareholders insofar as mitigating risk beyond the amount of their investment, are created and maintained only via government action. “Statutes, passed by the government, allow for the creation of corporations, and anyone wishing to form one must fill out the necessary government paperwork and utilize the apparatus of the state in numerous ways. Thus, the corporate entity is by definition a government-created obstruction to the free marketplace, so the entire concept should be appalling to libertarians,” says David Niose, an atheist and legal director of the American Humanist Association.
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Reich says rules that define the playing field of today’s capitalism don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don’t “intrude” on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t “free” of rules; the rules define them. “In reality, the ‘free market’ is a bunch of rules about 1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); 2) on what terms (equal access to the Internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections?); 3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?); 4) what’s private and what’s public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); 5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on.”
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That awkward pause that inevitably follows asking a libertarian how it is that unrestricted corporate power, particularly for Big Oil, helps solve our existential crisis, climate change, is always enjoyable. “Corporations will harm you, or even kill you, if it is profitable to do so and they can get away with it … recall the infamous case of the Ford Pinto, where in the 1970s the automaker did a cost-benefit analysis and decided not to remedy a defective gas tank design because doing so would be more expensive than simply allowing the inevitable deaths and injuries to occur and then paying the anticipated settlements,” warns Niose.
Spanking is a euphemism. For assault. Chocolate, Pomp, and Circumstance, Medium, September 17, 2014 Continue reading
The “death of adulthood” is really just capitalism at work, Andrew O’Hehir, Salon, September 12, 2014 (h/t Kjerstin Johnson)
It’s all very well to discuss feminism as a force of cultural liberation expressed by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Lena Dunham, but for millions of women in the Western world it has also been an economic imperative, one that set them free from some (but not all) traditional expectations and thrust them into a job marketplace where they are often underpaid relative to their male counterparts. This is too complicated an argument to develop here, but I suspect that the “death of adulthood” is so much more evident among men than women because women are still called upon to perform productive labor – the bearing and nurturing of children – that cannot be or generally is not performed by men. In that sense the death of adulthood is just another name for the fabled “crisis of masculinity” we’ve been hearing about for 30 years or longer, in which men often feel that their power has been undermined by ball-busting feminists when what’s really happening is that their economic role has changed and they don’t know what the hell to do about it.
Fox News Correspondent Tries to Slam Obama, Instead Proves Trickle-Down Economics is a Scam, Allen Clifton, Forward Progressives, August 16, 2014 Continue reading
The “Six Californias” initiative will not be on the ballot in 2016, after the California Secretary of State disqualified the petition for having too few legitimate signatures. I see two lessons here:
1. As karoli at Crooks and Liars says, “professional petition gatherers [are] terrible at what they do,” charging “Six Californias” mastermind Tim Draper around $1.5 million for signatures rejected by the state.
2. Trying to carve your own personal fiefdom out of the nation’s most-populous state never seems to work: Continue reading
The existential question of the week:
If the MBAs in charge of Darden Restaurants, parent company of Olive Garden, allowed the pasta water to be salted again, thus forfeiting the extended warranty on Olive Garden’s pots, would Olive Garden’s pasta still be terrible?
!["olive garden penne" by Krista [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)], via Flickr](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/4943393950_c4fa1fbc09_z-2.jpg "\"olive garden penne\" by Krista [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)], via Flickr")
Photo credit: “olive garden penne” by Krista [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr.
Sometimes, “wealth” simply means the ability to afford the unexpected expenses, without having them derail your life (h/t Aaron Carroll):
On a recent San Francisco afternoon, I returned to where I’d parked my car, but it was gone. A “No Parking” sign indicated that parking was prohibited after 3:00 PM on weekends. It was 3:15. I called the telephone number on the sign and a clerk affirmed that my car had been towed to an impound lot.
I took a cab and entered a single-story brick building where a few dozen people were crowded together in a scene that evoked Kafka; weariness, frustration and anger were palpable. Some stood in line, some paced and some sat hunched on the floor. A family huddled in a corner, an infant asleep on the father’s shoulder. A woman on a pay phone wept as she begged whomever was on the line to find money so she could get her car back–she said she needed $875. “I’m gonna lose my job if I’m not there at 5.”
Clerks sat on stools behind Plexiglas. At a window, a man pleaded with an agent, “I have to pick up my kids in less than an hour. What am I supposed to do?” At the next window, another man railed loudly and furiously, yelling, “How the hell am I supposed to get my goddam money if I can’t get to goddam work?” The clerk said, “If you can’t get cash, you can pay by credit card or cashier’s check.” The man shouted, “And if I had a goddam limousine, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
What may seem like little expenses to some of us can be ruinous to others, and there’s no amount of hindsight in the world that will make it okay: Continue reading
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has claimed that it has the authority to nullify state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that would prevent municipalities from creating their own broadband services if they “restrict competition.”
At issue are laws that are preventing the cities of Chattanooga, TN and Wilson, NC from building broadband networks that would compete with networks operated by private-sector companies. You can probably guess who supports these laws and opposes the FCC. Companies like Netflix are calling on the FCC to exercise its power:
The cities of Chattanooga, Tenn., and Wilson, N.C. — which have asked the FCC to invalidate state laws preventing their government-run Web services from expanding — “should not be hamstrung by state laws enacted at the urging of incumbent broadband providers seeking to maintain market dominance,” Netflix added.
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Public interest groups have urged the agency to go ahead, but Web providers, the National Governors Association and some Republicans in Congress have warned it to back off.
Interfering with state laws would be a federal overreach, critics say, and regulators ought to respect the will of the states.
Let me get this straight: it would be “federal overreach” for the FCC to nullify state laws, but it’s okay for state laws to nullify municipal actions? Once again, business interests define “federal overreach” solely as things they don’t like.
What exactly is the problem with the two cities’ plans, anyway? They don’t appear to be placing any additional regulatory restrictions on the private broadband players. They’re just trying to enter the market—the free market, as I recall it being called. If government is so incompetent at everything it does, this should not be a threat to the private companies. Which is why the fact that they are obviously so terrified of a “public option” (see what I did there?) is so interesting.
You can submit comments to the FCC here and here.
Why Uber must be stopped, Andrew Leonard, Salon, August 31, 2014
The real question we should be asking ourselves is this: What happens when a company with the DNA of Uber ends up winning it all? What happens when the local taxi companies are destroyed and Lyft is crushed? When Uber has dominant market position in every major city on the globe? “UberEverywhere” isn’t a joke. It’s a mantra, a call to arms, a holy ideology.
What happens when Uber’s priorities turn to generating cash rather than spending it? What happens to labor — the Uber drivers — when they have no alternative but Uber? What happens when it rains and the surge-pricing spikes and there’s nowhere else to go? A company with the street-fighting ethos of Uber isn’t going to let drivers unionize, and it certainly isn’t going to pay them more than it is required to by the harsh laws of competition. It will also dump them entirely in a nanosecond when self-driving cars prove that they are cheaper and safer. Making the case that drivers are benefitting from the current recruitment wars starts to look like a pretty short-term play. The more powerful Uber gets, the more leverage it will have over labor.
So here’s what’s going to happen. Society is going to realize that power as great as Uber’s needs to be checked. Uber, by virtue of its own success, will demonstrate where the lines need to be drawn for the general good. When Uber is the only game in town, the necessity for comprehensive requirements for commercial insurance and background checks will be obvious. When Uber starts using its logistics clout and unlimited investment capital to go after UPS and Hertz and FedEx, regulators will start wondering about antitrust issues.
Michelle Rhee’s Real Legacy: Here’s What’s Most Shameful About Her Reign, Matt Bruenig, AlterNet, August 30, 2014 Continue reading
At GOP luncheon, the hack is back, Gilbert Garcia, San Antonio Express-News, August 28, 2014 (h/t Marley)
After Wednesday’s meeting, a silver-haired woman with the Christian Coalition of Bexar County (an organization devoted to electing “God-fearing” leaders) approached me and asked if I would attend one of her group’s upcoming gatherings.
Almost immediately, she started peppering me with personal questions: What is my position on abortion? What church do I attend? Do I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior?
I stumbled around for answers, so she insisted that I repeat after her a lengthy pledge to turn my life over to Christ. When I suggested that I didn’t feel comfortable making major spiritual declarations in the Fiesta Room at Luby’s, she looked at me like I was from Mars.
How Higher Education in the US Was Destroyed in 5 Basic Steps, Debra Leigh Scott, AlterNet, October 16, 2012 Continue reading
I’ve never been to Burning Man, and I don’t intend to ever go. (One word: porta-potties.) That said, I can’t shake the feeling that certain Silicon Valley doucheonaires are not exactly getting the spirit of the event.
If you have never been to Burning Man, your perception is likely this: a white-hot desert filled with 50,000 stoned, half-naked hippies doing sun salutations while techno music thumps through the air.
A few years ago, this assumption would have been mostly correct. But now things are a little different. Over the last two years, Burning Man, which this year runs from Aug. 25 to Sept. 1, has been the annual getaway for a new crop of millionaire and billionaire technology moguls, many of whom are one-upping one another in a secret game of I-can-spend-more-money-than-you-can and, some say, ruining it for everyone else.
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Before I explain just how ridiculous the spending habits of these baby billionaires have become, let’s go over the rules of Burning Man: You bring your own place to sleep (often a tent), food to eat (often ramen noodles) and the strangest clothing possible for the week (often not much). There is no Internet or cell reception. While drugs are technically illegal, they are easier to find than candy on Halloween. And as for money, with the exception of coffee and ice, you cannot buy anything at the festival. Selling things to people is also a strict no-no. Instead, Burners (as they are called) simply give things away. What’s yours is mine. And that often means everything from a meal to saliva.
In recent years, the competition for who in the tech world could outdo who evolved from a need for more luxurious sleeping quarters. People went from spending the night in tents, to renting R.V.s, to building actual structures.
“We used to have R.V.s and precooked meals,” said a man who attends Burning Man with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. (He asked not to be named so as not to jeopardize those relationships.) “Now, we have the craziest chefs in the world and people who build yurts for us that have beds and air-conditioning.” He added with a sense of amazement, “Yes, air-conditioning in the middle of the desert!”
I bet some of those camps have nicer facilities than your standard porta-potty, but the $25,000 dues for the big fancy camps might be a bit beyond my means. I’ll stay here where there’s a fridge, air conditioning, and running water.
