WaPo | Thiel’s secret financing
of multiple suits against Gawker was legal. But that shouldn’t erase
the squeamishness brought on by a billionaire leveraging his wealth to
obliterate a media outlet, all as part of a personal vendetta. (Thiel
did not respond to request for comment.)
That vendetta is complicated. Thiel claims that Gawker outed him as gay. The author of the “outing” article claims
Thiel was out already, but that those who knew assumed the information
should remain restricted to certain circles. That attitude was
“retrograde and homophobic,” the author argues, and it merited an
exposé.
But more about Gawker’s coverage may have rankled Thiel
than, as he put it, the website’s “creepy obsession with outing closeted
men.” Gawker’s tech-focused website Valleywag trained a skeptical and
often searing eye on Silicon Valley culture. It reported on what tech
titans said they were about and what they actually did.
Thiel was
a titan, so he was also a target. Thanks to the lawsuits he funded,
Gawker had to stop bothering him. If he gets his way again, any trace of
that troublesome writing may be erased. This starts to look an awful
lot like book-burning.
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The good news is that ALL institutions are currently in play. Been
taking a deep dive with the youngest into questions about dopamine
hegemony and the science and engineering of money. Cryptocurrency and
cryptocurrency-speculation being all the rage at the moment among the
young, dumb, and “want something for nothing” set.
Am absolutely loving the open warfare erupting in the Impyrian
heights among the oligarchs and then licking down like lightning to
destroy errant peasants who attempt to fly too high. Ahhhh.., the petty
satisfactions of pedestrian schadenfreude.
Anyway, what we can all know and see for certain at this moment, is
that the NYC-DC establishment is going into a strong second-half push in
this destroy Trump game. Now that russiagate has failed, it’s down to
adultery and faux racism. All just window-dressing over the real game in
play – that game being control of the money pump. The Koch/Thiel/Mercer
block is not going to easily surrender to the status quo whigs, and the
whigs are fresh out of new tricks against their invigorated asymmetrical
elite political adversaries.
One of the theoretical forerunners and bases of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is chartalism, an economic theory which argues that money is a creature of the state designed to direct economic activity. The theory has recently been popularized by David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a wide-ranging work that touches upon issues ranging from gift economies, the linkage between quantification and violence, and the relationship between debt and conceptions of sin. In charting out the history of money, Graeber notes that, despite anthropological evidence to the contrary, economists have long clung to the myth of barter.
However, money does not emerge from barter-based economic activities, but rather from the sovereign’s desire to organize economic activity. The state issues currency and then imposes taxes. Because citizens are forced to use the state’s currency to pay their taxes, they can trust that the currency will carry value in day-to-day economic activities. Governments with their own currency and a floating exchange rate (sovereign currency issuers like the United States) do not have to borrow from “bond vigilantes” to spend. They themselves first spend the money into existence and then collect it through taxation to enforce its usage. The state can spend unlimited amounts of money. It is only constrained by biophysical resources, and if the state spends beyond the availability of resources, the result is inflation, which can be mitigated by taxation.
These simple facts carry radical policy implications. Taxes are not being used to fund spending, but rather to control inflation and redistribute income. Thus, we can make the case for progressive taxation from a moral standpoint concerned with social justice:
Meanwhile, smart black folk recognizing the game of musical chairs on the deck of the Titanic - FULLY REALIZE the ruthless screwing handed down to us by the DC-NYC establishment over the past 50 years, with the replacement negroe program, mass incarceration, and systematic demonization
