Category: Politics

New York State to Revolutionize Antitrust

The Amazon H2Q fight in 2019 woke up the anti-monopolists in New York. Now they are moving forward with a new stronger trust-busting law.

“Too Much Power in Too Few Hands” – An Interview with Senator Michael Gianaris:

Senator, first of all, thanks for talking to me. I’ll start with a simple question. Do we have a monopoly problem? And if so, can you frame the issue in terms that anybody could understand?

Sen. Gianaris: The best way I can put it is that there is too much power in too few hands. This concentration of power creates the opportunity for corruption, and not just corruption in the traditional sense, although it creates that opportunity as well. But it just corrupts the way the marketplace is supposed to work. It diminishes competition, and it squashes small and medium sized players, who can’t compete with not just the size of the biggest players, but the tactics that they’re using and their reach into multiple aspects of economic life.

For goodness sake, they are reaching into multiple aspects of governmental life, and they’re trying to dictate to governments how we should be making our decisions. And we saw it, of course, with Amazon’s second headquarters situation. They created a bidding war amongst local governments! And you saw it again, with Amazon trying to change the makeup of Seattle City Council because they weren’t happy with a proposal to help homeless people.

This power is changing the very nature of our democracy and our economic democracy, to have so few people making all the decisions.

Source: New York State to Revolutionize Antitrust (emphasis mine)

This is the key to the issue. As a theme, in my writing, I’ve complained that government regulatory power has been “captured” by corporations through campaign contributions. But here’s a guy who’s campaign doesn’t need the kind of money that Amazon can give him through a PAC. He’s a state senator, with a very comfortable seat. He can speak up. And he’s asking the right question: who’s in control?

People who seek office presumably have a mind to, you know, govern. And the money that Amazon throws around is routinely taking that power out of their hands. We need more people like Senator Gianaris who stop this bribery for control, and tell the people running Amazon, “No.” No, you can’t have this, if it means that we have to set aside ethical concerns. No, you can’t have this, if you intend to abandon your implied social responsibility to the people you employ or the city in which you run your business.

If we are going to avoid the currently-predictable, grim meathook cyberpunk future of a world of corporate states, this and this alone is the motivation that can put a stop to the trend: elected representatives with a long-term view who act like adults, and tell whining, spoiled toddlers no.

The State of Social Media

Caught this today on an image sharing site, with the title “Failed the History Class.” Really? Let’s look at it.

We get one sentence which casts the situation hard to one side. Then another statement that casts the situation hard to the other side. Except that the truth lies somewhere in between. Libya was part of Italy at the time. Morocco was part of France (and part of Spain). The Philippines were part of the US. Vietnam was France. Burma was the UK. Ethiopia was Italy. Most of the other “2nd-world” countries still had such close ties with one of the legacy empires of England, France, and Spain that it’s probably unfair to call them independent.

Every country was involved in World War II to some degree, so it’s appropriate to say that the thing was independent of “whiteness.” But Germany started it, and they’re about as white as it gets. Italy joined in right away, and I guess Italians fit the description of “white” as the Left intends it. But then Japan jumped in, and they’re anything but Anglo or Christian or anything that even hints at “whiteness,” so it’s a strong counterpoint.

Almost immediately after the war was settled, the Cold War began, and America and the Soviet Union — both “white” for the purposes of this discussion — battled over global supremacy. And you could certainly admit that the OP saying that it was a fight to see who could “fuck up the world the most” wasn’t far off the mark. Both countries spent the next 60 years fighting for dominance in strange places, setting up and knocking down regimes in the so-called 3rd world, and engaging in espionage all around the planet. The result has been a lot of money spent, and a lot of lives lost, without much change in the global order. All of this effort could be considered “white,” if we’re fair about it.

Really, World War II was about getting Germany, Italy, and Japan to settle down, but the real war over control of this planets resources has continued to this day. Now that Russia and the United States have backed off the Middle East a little, China is ramping up efforts to take over everything in the South Pacific and the Chinese peninsula. Definitely not “white.” There will be another World War. If left to run its natural course, you can easily predict that whoever is left on the planet will fight for decades over control of what’s left standing.

Anyway, my point is that #SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety. All day long, on every social media site, these kinds of exchanges are happening. Both sides feel they are right. Everyone involved pats themselves on the back for making such a good point. No one in the middle cares. No one is swayed. No one learns anything. No one is educated. Which side here “failed history class?” Both, if you ask me.

Any actual, global or societal problem or situation is far too complicated to wrap up in 140, or even 280, characters, and I’m really tired that Twitter and Facebook have managed to hypnotize society into thinking that this sort of discussion matters to anything other than their advertising revenue. It just forces everyone to grow up thinking that you gain identity by simplifying your thinking to 280 characters, and identifying with the hardest of takes, and these are both ingredients in the recipe for the doom of society.

How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, a New Book by Cory Doctorow | OneZero

But Zuboff also claims that surveillance literally robs us of our free will — that when our personal data is mixed with machine learning, it creates a system of persuasion so devastating that we are helpless before it. That is, Facebook uses an algorithm to analyze the data it nonconsensually extracts from your daily life and uses it to customize your feed in ways that get you to buy stuff. It is a mind-control ray out of a 1950s comic book, wielded by mad scientists whose supercomputers guarantee them perp

Source: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, a New Book by Cory Doctorow | OneZero

Like Andrew, Cory Doctorow attempts to demystify a complex situation, and succeeds with a precision that only other liberal intellectuals can sympathize with. He mocks the idea that Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Twitter, et. al., can cause us to change our behavior. And, sure, no one from those companies are holding a gun to our heads to get us to press buttons. But these companies are enormously successful in provoking people to commit to decisions they were already considering. So successful, in fact, that — en masse — there is no practical difference between this persuasion and literal mind control. Like Eric Raymond arguing against calling Jeffrey Epstein a “monster,” Cory has lost sight of the forest for the trees. At scale, it is mind control.

This has been critical to the rapid crystallization of recent political movements including Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street as well as less savory players like the far-right white nationalist movements that marched in Charlottesville.

But not “less savory players” like all the Antifa Marxists which destroyed and looted local businesses, and burned down car lots. Noted.

Cory references LBGT stories to support his argument that Big Tech can’t convince you against your personal interest, but you can easily cherry-pick this anecdata. I’ve read several accounts that tell an inverse version of the story: that people came out because peer pressure enticed them, and they later became confused with their lifestyle because it didn’t actually fit who they were. I’m not saying that these cases are the majority. Rather, I bring it up to point out that Cory’s example is incomplete and one-sided, and it actually makes an unintended case against his stated position.

Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a “rogue capitalism” whose data-hoarding and machine-learning techniques rob us of our free will. … Controlling the results to the world’s search queries means controlling access both to arguments and their rebuttals and, thus, control over much of the world’s beliefs. If our concern is how corporations are foreclosing on our ability to make up our own minds and determine our own futures, the impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be central to our analysis and any remedies we seek.

Again, Cory references Zuboff’s position, and tries to show that it’s wrong, but, at the end, the net result of the situation is the same. Zuboff says surveillance capitalism robs me of my free will, but if Google black-holes the information I need to chose a non-endorsed answer, how is that any different? Google has robbed me of my ability to choose an alternative as surely as the mocked idea of a “mind control ray.”

It can make it easier to find people who share your sexual identity. And again, it can help you to understand that what you thought was a shameful secret that affected only you was really a widely shared trait, giving you both comfort and the courage to come out to the people in your life.

This is another example of eliding the point which makes me wonder about the entire intent of the article. It would seem to me to be hard to argue that non-binary, non-heterosexual lifestyles are a “widely shared” trait, given that, even by most optimistic estimates, the combined percentage of the population is something like 5%. More likely, I suspect the fact that the number is 10% in San Francisco, pulling the number up from the rest of the country sitting at 1-2%, which gives people steeped in the counter culture a false sense of the numbers.

But monopolies are incompatible with that notion. When you only have one app store, the owner of the store — not the consumer — decides on the range of choices. As Boss Tweed once said, “I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.” A monopolized market is an election whose candidates are chosen by the monopolist.

Fantastic point! Now, let’s talk about the duopoly of the RNC and the DNC on American politics…

But it’s not mind control.

But it’s not brainwashing.

But it’s not an existential threat.

Cory argues these things, and then expends 100 pages of writing showing that Facebook and Google are, in fact, all three.

The Two Middle Classes – Quillette

The struggle between the two middle classes is not just a matter of wealth and power, but also of retaining the social basis for democracy itself. Without a strong, independent middle class operating outside the control of large institutions, be they tech giants or governments, we may be heading towards a technocratic future, that as one Silicon Valley wag put it, resembles  “feudalism with better marketing.”

Source: The Two Middle Classes – Quillette

I’ve been calling our corporatocracy a modern form of fuedalism for awhile now, which is where this article ends up. However, along the way, it explains the ascendancy of the “clerisy” — a liberal middle class made up of people like college professors and government bureaucrats — which does a good job at explaining the historically-different battle lines of the cultural war we witnessed in the last election. Expanding the thesis: It’s no longer about race, because race is no longer the determinant factor in which sector you work. I think this nails the current political climate, and current social evolutionary stage, much better than my small pull quote and comment would suggest.

Burning Down Companies for Fun and Profit

The entire premise that capitalism is founded on is that if you are willing to risk your future on a business venture, and you win bigly, then you get to reap the rewards. The flip side of that coin is that if the business tanks, then you get to deal with the loss. If a big company fails, our system can deal with it. It goes into bankruptcy court, creditors are paid, balance sheets are updated, and vultures can swoop in to pick the carcass clean. That’s the system. That’s the deal.

Scott Galloway, a professor, writer, and podcaster, who I think is doing some of the best work out there right now, wrote an article showing how CEO’s are extracting literal fortunes from the companies they run, while at the same time essentially burning down the business, and ruining the futures of the companies they are supposedly leading. The current gold-medal-winning example is, of course, Adam Nueman, of WeWork fame, who caused the company to over leverage, setting fire to NINE BILLION dollars of VC money, and then got paid another ONE BILLION dollars to bugger off.

Adam Neumann founded WeWork in 2010, but he didn’t start burning Benjamins at epic scale until Softbank began shoveling billions into the WeWork furnace in August 2017. By the time Neumann was fired in September 2019, Softbank had invested $10.3 billion; a few months later it wrote off $9.2 billion of that. That’s a $13.1 million (daily burn rate) on Softbank’s money alone, or like flying a decade-old Gulfstream G450… into a mountain … every day. Impressive, but only half the story. Neumann’s compensation for this value destruction was complicated by his ouster and a subsequent lawsuit, but we estimate he made off with around $1.02 billion, most of it coming out of Softbank’s deep pockets. That’s $1.5 million per day during those two years…

Company after company, spending tens of billions of dollars on failed acquisitions, while their CEO’s get paid hundreds of millions, and pretty soon, you find that you’re talking about real money. Money that’s being set on fire, and flushed down the drain. Money that could have, oh, I don’t know, allowed the company to pay a living wage to all of its employees. Money that could have allowed employees to take more than a trivial number of vacation days.

I watched this happen to my own company, Arvin when it got bought by Meritor. I understand how this happens. The purchase was sold to the shareholders and the media as a “merger of equals,” and everyone was told that the CEO of Arvin would become the CEO of ArvinMeritor in 2 years. The executives all split $50M as a collective pat on the back for being so great. The CEO of Arvin got $15M of that. However, Meritor started selling off portions of Arvin before the ink was dry, and used that money to float their heavy trucking business, which was hemorrhaging money. One year into the “merger,” they pulled the ripcord on Arvin’s CEO’s golden parachute, and paid him another $19M to bugger off. In 3 years, they sold off the only thing left to a private equity firm, who flipped it to Faurecia. They wrote checks to the executives equalling three years of Arvin’s profits over the course of a year.

This was all standard corporate raiding. I get it. It’s all perfectly legal, and it happens every day in America. But it was obscene, and it still stinks. Arvin was a great company to work for. I didn’t realize how great it was at the time, because I didn’t have any perspective. After seeing how Meritor worked, and working for other companies, I see now just how great it was, and it makes what happened sting all the more.

I finally got around to looking at who held stock in Arvin and Meritor, and found that investment banks owned 70-80% of the stock involved, so this was something that they all colluded with each other about to make happen, and they didn’t need a shareholders meeting or press releases at all. It was all for show.

A lot of this sort of thing involves stock transfers, and a lot of people use the excuse that it’s all “paper” money, but stock is a functional store of value, just like fiat currency, or gold, or digital money, or property. Saying that these things don’t count because they are financed by stock is a cop out. Further, when the executives get paid in money, that’s a real check that the company writes. It’s a real line item on the ledger, and not some accounting trickery. It’s money that could have helped a real person with a real problem, instead of going into someone’s account who can only ever use it as bragging rights.

Twitter Decries India Intimidation, Will Press for Changes – Bloomberg

The social network reiterated its commitment to India as a vital market, but signaled its growing concern about the government’s recent actions and potential threats to freedom of expression that may result. The company also joined other international businesses and organizations in criticizing new IT rules and regulations that it said “inhibit free, open public conversation.”

Source: Twitter Decries India Intimidation, Will Press for Changes – Bloomberg

It is, perhaps, a little rich for Twitter to be complaining about inhibition of “free, open public conversation” after throwing conservatives off their platform after the last election, in fact, as part of a larger move, along with Facebook and Amazon, to simply cancel them from them from the internet entirely. You may or may not agree with the decision to do so, but you have to admit that the hypocrisy of complaining about pressure to do the same thing by a foreign government is a little too on-the-nose. The Indian government just wants some of the same social engineering and control that the political Left in America literally just demonstrated.

Either social media companies are common carriers, and free of any censorship (where affected parties can always sue for any and all illegal speech), or they are, by default, a platform in support and service of censorship, and fair game to be manipulated by anyone with the legal or financial pressure to do so on their behalf. You cannot have it both ways.

In Apple Antitrust Trial, Judge Signals Interest in Railroad, Credit-Card Monopoly Cases

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will decide if Apple has operated an illegal monopoly, and she’s already made it clear that she is thinking about how previous precedent-setting cases involving AmEx and a St. Louis railroad apply to the new digital economy.

The question of how to define a market in the case is a central issue. Is the market confined to distributing apps on the iPhone as “Fortnite” videogame creator Epic argues? Or, as Apple contends, is the market just devices on which videogames can be played?

Source: In Apple Antitrust Trial, Judge Signals Interest in Railroad, Credit-Card Monopoly Cases

No, the real central issue is that we’ve now left one of the biggest decisions about how the world economy should work in this modern day in the hands of one poor judge. It should be Congress that is writing laws to govern how this should work, but they no longer do that. The only thing Congress does any more is play with the tax code at the behest of their biggest campaign donors, and then spend that money on those donors’ interests.

The US had a great run. The post-war boom was unprecedented in world history. Except for the continued disgrace of post-Civil-War race relations, the US established an economy and power the world had never seen before. And then we threw it all in the trash, first by the invisible hands of the military-industrial complex and the deep state, and then by very visible hands of modern-day billionaire robber barons.

The party is over now. There’s nothing special about our government anymore. It’s all been captured by the oligarchs, just like every other government. There’s nothing to distinguish the actual result of our form of governance from any other on the face of the earth. The people running the show do whatever they want, whenever they want, and to whomever they want. Whereas big-J journalism used to hold them accountable, and public pressure forced reforms, now big companies in traditional media (and disinfo efforts in social media) smooth everything over and make it all go away.

Did Covid Come From the Lab? Mike Pompeo says Yes. – Common Sense with Bari Weiss

Did the Covid-19 virus come from a lab in Wuhan, China? To ask that question in public was, until recently, to out yourself as a person wearing a tinfoil hat. It was nothing more than a far-right crackpot conspiracy theory, “disinformation” that could get you banned from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook all at once, the kind of thing you only dared discuss in private. Yesterday I asked that question of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. His answer: Yes.

Source: Did Covid Come From the Lab? Mike Pompeo says Yes. – Common Sense with Bari Weiss

To his credit, Eric Raymond said all the signs were there within weeks of the virus escaping China, and becoming international news. Lots of people immediately started countering this insinuation in the news, but given what we know about China’s enormous political machine, this was obviously a State-level effort to stifle this fact.

… Mr. Pompeo explains why he thinks China — which seeks nothing less than to “build an empire”— is by far the gravest threat facing the United States and the West. He explains how the CCP is exercising serious influence over higher education, Hollywood, agriculture, the NBA and even local elections. “The Chinese Communist Party is attending city council meetings all across America,” he says.

To my knowledge, ESR never said anything about it again. He has since gotten embroiled in other divisive political correctness (about the FSF and Richard Stallman), and hasn’t commented much about news lately, unfortunately. I’d love for him to provide more insight now this is recognized as true.

It’s crazy to think that the New York Times wouldn’t publish something possibly critical of China because they don’t want to offend their political apparatchiks, and/or that it might confirm something — anything — that Trump said, but this is the world we’re living in, and the reason why so many on the political Right have so little respect and trust in traditional media today. Leadership at companies like the NYT have only themselves to blame.

This whole thing is also being reported at the WSJ:

Three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a U.S. intelligence report, fueling debate over Covid-19’s origin.

China has repeatedly denied that the virus escaped from one of its labs. On Sunday, China’s foreign ministry cited a WHO-led team’s conclusion, after a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in February, that a lab leak was extremely unlikely. “The U.S. continues to hype the lab leak theory,” the foreign ministry said in response to a request for comment by The Wall Street Journal. “Is it actually concerned about tracing the source or trying to divert attention?”

Beijing has also asserted that the virus could have originated outside China, including at a lab at the Fort Detrick military base in Maryland, and called for the WHO to investigate early Covid outbreaks in other countries. (EDITOR: Screw you, “Beijing.”)

Source: WSJ News Exclusive | Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate on Covid-19 Origin

At this point, it should be obvious to everyone that the WHO is a puppet of the PRC. What’s disconcerting is that so many reputable news organizations in the US have carried their China-absolving water for over a year now.

Epstein guards to skirt jail time in deal with prosecutors

Both officers who were guarding Epstein were working overtime because of staffing shortages. One of the guards, who did not primarily work as a correctional officer, was working a fifth straight day of overtime. The other guard was working mandatory overtime, meaning a second eight-hour shift of the day.

Source: Epstein guards to skirt jail time in deal with prosecutors

The conspiracists said that Epstein’s death, under constant supervision, in a high-security wing of a prison, was orchestrated by the CIA to silence one of their most-valuable intelligence gathering assets. And I have been sympathetic to the notion. I mean, how could two guards, on round-the-clock suicide watch, right outside of his cell, have let this go unnoticed? Surely, they had to be in on the conspiracy, right?

No, the answer to at least this part of the tragedy of letting Epstein wiggle away from justice comes quite neatly back to our privatized prisons, and their colossal misalignment between society’s goals for a penal system, and squeezing as much profit out of the capital investment as possible. In retrospect, this is, of course, the perfectly-predicted answer: terribly overworked “guards,” and a lackadaisical accountability that had to have pervaded the workplace so that people could actually “work” in a place that could demand 16-hour shifts for 5 days straight.

The moral of the story is that, if the CIA actually sent someone in to kill Epstein, they didn’t even need to fool with the guards. Our privatized prison system made them a perfect asset for the plot without even needing to get them on-board, and leave the conspiracy vulnerable to the lowest ranks talking. I’m sure Congress will be holding hearings on our prison system, and demanding strong reforms any day now.

Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China – DNyuz

Apple still appears to provide far more data to U.S. law enforcement. Over that same period, from 2013 through June 2020, Apple said it turned over the contents of iCloud accounts to U.S. authorities in 10,781 separate cases.

Source: Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China – DNyuz

That’s an average of over 1,500 cases a year.

The documents also show that Apple is using different encryption technology in China than elsewhere in the world, contradicting what Mr. Cook suggested in a 2018 interview.

The digital keys that can decrypt iCloud data are usually stored on specialized devices, called hardware security modules, that are made by Thales, a French technology company. But China would not approve the use of the Thales devices, according to two employees. So Apple created new devices to store the keys in China.

Makes sense.

Apple has tried to isolate the Chinese servers from the rest of its iCloud network, according to the documents. The Chinese network would be “established, managed, and monitored separately from all other networks, with no means of traversing to other networks out of country.” Two Apple engineers said the measure was to prevent security breaches in China from spreading to the rest of Apple’s data centers.

Apple said that it sequestered the Chinese data centers because they are, in effect, owned by the Chinese government, and Apple keeps all third parties disconnected from its internal network.

They darn well better. I’m quite certain that China’s Ministry of State Security desires personal data on Americans on a level that rivals even that of the NSA.

China has been stealing intellectual property from all across the globe for decades, and now they don’t even have to fool with it any more. Anyone wanting to do business in China has to hand over all the keys to the kingdom, literally and figuratively. No muss; no fuss! You want allowed into their vast, growing, and under-fleeced market? You give China anything it wants, in the form of information and control. That’s the deal; take it or leave it.

And, as it turns out, basically every company on the planet is taking that deal, for the sake of their sales, their share price, and the personal wealth of their officers and board members. What a bargain!

In return, we peasants get labor-subsidized iPhones. They’re already $1,000 computers. Who knows how much they would cost if they weren’t being assembled by people making $5/day. What a deal!

So everyone is getting something from this situation, and there’s no one left to complain. Ergo, it will not change for the foreseeable future.