With "Platform" Capitalism - Value Creation Depends on Privacy Invasion

opendemocracy |  The current social mobilization against Facebook resembles the actions of activists who, in opposition to neoliberal globalization, smash a McDonald’s window during a demonstration. 

On March 17, The Observer of London and The New York Times announced that Cambridge Analytica, the London-based political and corporate consulting group, had harvested private data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their consent. The data was collected through a Facebook-based quiz app called thisisyourdigitallife, created by Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychologist who had requested and gained access to information from 270,000 Facebook members after they had agreed to use the app to undergo a personality test, for which they were paid through Kogan’s company, Global Science Research.

But as Christopher Wylie, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian coder and data scientist and a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, stated in a video interview, the app could also collect all kinds of personal data from users, such as the content that they consulted, the information that they liked, and even the messages that they posted.

In addition, the app provided access to information on the profiles of the friends of each of those users who agreed to take the test, which enabled the collection of data from more than 50 million.

All this data was then shared by Kogan with Cambridge Analytica, which was working with Donald Trump’s election team and which allegedly used this data to target US voters with personalised political messages during the presidential campaign. As Wylie, told The Observer, “we built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”

These platforms differ significantly in terms of the services that they offer: some, like eBay or Taobao simply allow exchange of products between buyers and sellers; others, like Uber or TaskRabbit, allow independent service providers to find customers; yet others, like Apple or Google allow developers to create and market apps.

However, what is common to all these platforms is the central role played by data, and not just continuous data collection, but its ever more refined analysis in order to create detailed user profiles and rankings in order to better match customers and suppliers or increase efficiency.

All this is done in order to use data to create value in some way another (to monetize it by selling to advertisers or other firms, to increase sales, or to increase productivity). Data has become ‘the new oil’ of global economy, a new commodity to be bought and sold at a massive scale, and with this development, as a former Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff has argued, global capitalism has become ‘surveillance capitalism’.

What this means is that platform economy is a model of value creation which is completely dependant on continuous privacy invasions and, what is alarming is that we are gradually becoming used to this.

Desires of 99% Now Politically/Legally Equal to Statistical Random Noise

alternet |  Historically, indentured servants had their food, health care, housing, and clothing provided to them by their “employers.” Today’s new serfs can hardly afford these basics of life, and when you add in modern necessities like transportation, education and child-care, the American labor landscape is looking more and more like old-fashioned servitude.

Nonetheless, conservatives/corporatists in Congress and state-houses across the nation are working hard to hold down minimum wages. Missouri’s Republican legislature just made it illegal for St. Louis to raise their minimum wage to $10/hour, throwing workers back down to $7.70. More preemption laws like this are on the books or on their way.

At the same time, these conservatives/corporatists are working to roll back health care protections for Americans, roll back environmental protections that keep us and our children from being poisoned, and even roll back simple workplace, food and toy safety standards.

The only way these predators will be stopped is by massive political action leading to the rollback of Reaganism/neoliberalism.

And the conservatives/corporatists who largely own the Republican Party know it, which is why they’re purging voting lists, fighting to keep in place easily hacked voting machines, and throwing billions of dollars into think tanks, right-wing radio, TV, and online media.

If they succeed, America will revert to a very old form of economy and politics: the one described so well in Charles Dickens’ books when Britain had "maximum wage laws" and “Poor Laws” to prevent a strong and politically active middle class from emerging.

Conservatives/corporatists know well that this type of neo-feudalism is actually a very stable political and economic system, and one that’s hard to challenge. China has put it into place in large part, and other countries from Turkey to the Philippines to Brazil and Venezuela are falling under the thrall of the merger of corporate and state power.

So many of our individual rights have been stripped from us, so much of America’s middle-class progress in the last century has been torn from us, while conservatives wage a brutal and oppressive war on dissenters and people of color under the rubrics of “security,” “tough on crime,” and the "war on drugs.”

As a result, America has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, more than any other nation on earth, all while opiate epidemics are ravaging our nation. And what to do about it?

A Call to Clampdown on Ungovernable Internet Companies

nakedcapitalism |  Silicon Valley brings us the worst of two economic systems: the inefficiency of a command economy coupled with the remorselessness of laissez-faire liberalism.

One reason it’s been difficult to organize workers in the tech industry is that people have a hard time separating good intentions from results. But we have to be cold-blooded about this.

Tech companies are run by a feckless leadership accountable to no one, creating a toolkit for authoritarianism while hypnotized by science-fiction fantasy.

There are two things we have to do immediately. The first is to stop the accelerating process of tracking and surveillance before it can do any more harm to our institutions.

The danger facing us is not Orwell, but Huxley. The combo of data collection and machine learning is too good at catering to human nature, seducing us and appealing to our worst instincts. We have to put controls on it. The algorithms are amoral; to make them behave morally will require active intervention.

The second thing we need is accountability. I don’t mean that I want Mark Zuckerberg’s head on a pike, though I certainly wouldn’t throw it out of my hotel room if I found it there. I mean some mechanism for people whose lives are being brought online to have a say in that process, and an honest debate about its tradeoffs.

I’m here today because I believe the best chance to do this is in Europe. The American government is not functional right now, and the process of regulatory capture is too far gone to expect any regulations limiting the tech giants from either party. American tech workers have the power to change things, but not the desire.

Only Europe has the clout and the independence to regulate these companies. You can already point to regulatory successes, like forcing Facebook to implement hard delete on user accounts. That feature was added with a lot of grumbling, but because of the way Facebook organizes its data, they had to make it work the same for all users. So a European regulation led to a victory for privacy worldwide.

We can do this again.

Here are some specific regulations I would like to see the EU impose:

• A strict 30 day time limit on storing behavioral data.
• The right to opt out of data collection while continuing to use services.
• A ban on the sale or transfer of behavioral data, including to third-party ad networks.
• A requirement that advertising be targeted strictly to content, not users.

With these rules in place, we would still have Google and Facebook, and they would still make a little bit of money. But we would gain some breathing room. These reforms would knock the legs out from underground political ad campaigns like we saw in Brexit, and in voter suppression efforts in the US election. They would give publishers relief in an advertising market that is currently siphoning all their earnings to Facebook and Google. And they would remove some of the incentive for consumer surveillance.

The other thing I hope to see in Europe is a unionized workforce at every major tech company. Unionized workers could demand features like ephemeral group messaging at Facebook, a travel mode for social media, a truly secure Android phone, or the re-imposition of the wall between Gmail and DoubleClick data. They could demand human oversight over machine learning algorithms. They could demand non-cooperation with Trump.

And I will say selfishly, if you can unionize here, it will help us unionize over there.

If nothing else, we need your help and we need you to keep the pressure on the tech companies, the Trump Administration, and your own politicians and journalists, so that the disaster that happened in the United States doesn’t repeat itself in Germany.

You have elections coming soon. Please learn from what happened to us. Please stay safe.

And please regulate, regulate, regulate this industry, while you can.

The Defeated Establishment Elites Used Political Correctness to Fragment the Precariat and Unecessariat

oftwominds |  Combine identity politics with political correctness, and the New Nobility/Oligarchy can laugh their way to the bank while their pawn-serfs fight over how many politically correct angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I have long held that our economy is, stripped of propaganda, nothing but an updated version of feudalism, i.e. neofeudal: a vast class of precarious laborers (i.e. precariats--precarious proletariats) who own little to no wealth-producing capital ruled by a New Nobility/Oligarchy that owns the vast majority of wealth-producing capital and control of the political system. 

I explained this structure in America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014), Neofeudalism 101: Strip-Mining the Upper Middle Class (April 8, 2015) and The Class War Has Already Started (November 14, 2015). 

In the Marxist analysis, there are only three classes: those who must sell their labor to earn a livelihood, those who earn their livelihood from owning wealth-generating capital, and the dispossessed/ marginalized who are dependent on the state (bread and circuses) or who scrape out a living on the margins of the lawful economy. 

In this view, there is no meaningful class difference between the well-paid liberal technocrat with the $1 million (mortgaged) house on the Left/Right Coast and the rural conservative "deplorable" wage earner. Both must sell their labor and neither earns a livelihood from wealth-generating capital. 

If we extend this analysis, we find that the entire self-described "middle class" is in fact nothing but the better paid slice of the working class, i.e. the class who must sell their labor to pay their rent/mortgage, buy food, etc. 

Both are precarious, but not equally so. The well-paid technocrat believes his skills will protect him from unemployment, and he is equally confident that the "wealth" in his mortgaged house and stocks/bonds 401K retirement account is secure and permanent.

He feels superior to the "deplorable" wage earner, but this superiority is contingent on 1) asset bubbles never popping (ahem, which they always do, eventually; 2) software that's eating the world will not eat his job or the premium he is currently being paid, and 3) the skills he currently has won't become over-supplied as the global work force expands into the sectors that require high levels of education.

So what inhibits the awareness of shared class membership and interests? Two dynamics come to mind: the liberal/conservative ideological divide, and the politically correct speech acts that differentiate the two.

The urban liberal technocrat feels morally superior to the "deplorable" wage earner because he 1) considers himself a "winner" and the "deplorable" a loser and 2) he has mastered the politically correct speech acts that signify his superior "progressive" status.  

the 2party1ideology system WILL NOT reform anything...,

tanosborn |  America continues living the long perpetuated hoax that our citizenry has a government of the people, by the people, and for the people… and so, come November 8, at the 58^th quadrennial election, we’ll all be taking the ultimate Lesser-Evil or Repugnance Test as we are asked to make a choice between two throne seekers who are long, very long, on selfishness and false pride; and short, very short, on truth and judiciousness.  This 2016 edition, just formalized, brings us the extremely discomforting duo of an insanely lying braggadocio, Donald Trump, and a first-class deceitful elitist, Hillary Clinton. 

Unfortunately for 80+ percent of Americans, no matter how they vote, no matter who turns out to be the victor, their shrinking social (dignity) and economic lots have already been cast, predetermined, before going to the polls.  This Repugnance Test in November will solely determine how the economic spoils are to be distributed between the ruling 1 percent Knights – the millionaires and billionaires who draw Bernie’s ire; and the 19- percent Squires – crumb-gatherers who enforce the edicts of the Knights… in our Haves and Have-nots society.  To see it any other way, again, as Joe Biden would say, is just a bunch of self-deceiving malarkey.

The two ruling political parties that alternate governing America have not addressed the problems that beset the country, not with inspirational authenticity and most definitely not with any required judiciousness.  Problems arising from bigotry and an existing clear racial divide are disturbingly swept under the rug or, even worse, promised to be solved with the law and order magic wand.  Problems of safety and tranquility that have roots overseas, the Daesh boogeyman (Isis to most Americans), are treated as inimical to our democratically pure way of life, instead of the monster we have created and nurtured in our quest for economic, military and political world dominance.  Problems of an abusive economic disparity in our society, created by predatory capitalism deceivingly disguised as free enterprise, are hypocritically acknowledged but insultingly set aside, in-your-face disregarded… the power-elite in both ruling parties well aware that the 80 percent have-nots have no more power than that vassals had during feudal times.

people taking it upon themselves to get rid of nottingham

WBRZ | BATON ROUGE - Police have closed streets between Baton Rouge Police Headquarters and I-12 where law enforcement officers have been shot.

Sources say two Baton Rouge Police officers and one East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office deputy are dead following the shooting. Another officer was critically injured. EBRSO confirmed multiple officers from both BRPD and EBRSO sustained injuries in the shooting and were taken to area hospitals. There is no word yet on the extent of all of the injuries.

A witness told WBRZ News 2, a man was dressed in black with his face covered shooting indiscriminately when he walked out between a convenience store and car wash across from Hammond Air Plaza. Shots were fired around 9 a.m. Sunday. The exact location of the business where the shooting took place has yet to be released.

A very large manhunt began immediately with officers hurrying to contain the scene.

sheriff of nottinghamism at epidemic levels...,

HuffPo |  How are your local courts and jails funded? If your community is like most of America, chances are the criminal justice system itself has become a revenue collection service - with problematic results.

Every state except Alaska, North Dakota, and DC has increased civil and criminal fees since 2010. Many charge for services that are constitutionally required and were once free. As states and local governments have felt the pinch from the 2008 economic crash, they have turned to fines and fees to fill in budget gaps.

The most famous example is in Ferguson, Missouri. The U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department exposed how the department collects fines and fees not for the sake of public safety, but to raise money for city government. The FPD revenue targets in 2015 accounted for 20% of the city’s operating budget.

Or listen to Jared Thornburg, in Westminister, Colorado. He was ticketed for making an illegal left turn. But because he had lost his job after a serious workplace injury, he couldn’t pay the ticket. He found a new job - but the day before he started, he was arrested for not paying the fines, which had escalated from $165 to $306. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail, which cost that city $70 per night. As Jared points out, “It cost the taxpayers more than what my fine was for and it just wasted 10 days of my life.”

It adds up to what Bill Mauer, from the Institute of Justice, calls “taxation by citation.” This reliance on fines and fees to cover fiscal gaps brings along with it four main problems.

25 companies more powerful than most countries

FP |  At first glance, the story of Accenture reads like the archetype of the American dream. One of the world’s biggest consulting companies, which commands tens of billions of dollars in annual revenues, was born in the 1950s as a small division of accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Its first major project was advising General Electric to install a computer at a Kentucky facility in order to automate payment processing. Several decades of growth followed, and by 1989, the division was successful enough to become its own organization: Andersen Consulting. 

Yet a deeper look at the business shows its ascent veering off the American track. This wasn’t because it opened foreign offices in Mexico, Japan, and other countries; international expansion is pro forma for many U.S. companies. Rather, Andersen Consulting saw benefits—fewer taxes, cheaper labor, less onerous regulations — beyond borders and restructured internally to take advantage of them. By 2001, when it went public after adopting the name Accenture, it had morphed into a network of franchises loosely coordinated out of a Swiss holding company. It incorporated in Bermuda and stayed there until 2009, when it redomiciled in Ireland, another low-tax jurisdiction.

Today, Accenture’s roughly 373,000 employees are scattered across more than 200 cities in 55 countries. Consultants parachute into locations for commissioned work but often report to offices in regional hubs, such as Prague and Dubai, with lower tax rates. To avoid pesky residency status, the human resources department ensures that employees don’t spend too much time at their project sites.

Welcome to the age of metanationals: companies that, like Accenture, are effectively stateless. When business and strategy experts Yves Doz, José Santos, and Peter Williamson coined the term in a 2001 book, metanationals were an emerging phenomenon, a divergence from the tradition of corporations taking pride in their national roots. (In the 1950s, General Motors President Charles Wilson famously said, “What was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”) Today, the severing of state lifelines has become business as usual.

ExxonMobil, Unilever, BlackRock, HSBC, DHL, Visa—these companies all choose locations for personnel, factories, executive suites, or bank accounts based on where regulations are friendly, resources abundant, and connectivity seamless. Clever metanationals often have legal domicile in one country, corporate management in another, financial assets in a third, and administrative staff spread over several more. Some of the largest American-born firms — GE, IBM, Microsoft, to name a few — collectively are holding trillions of dollars tax-free offshore by having revenues from overseas markets paid to holding companies incorporated in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, or Singapore. In a nice illustration of the tension this trend creates with policymakers, some observers have dubbed the money “stateless income,” while U.S. President Barack Obama has called the companies hoarding it America’s “corporate deserters.”

It isn’t surprising, of course, when companies find new ways to act in their own interest; it’s surprising when they don’t. The rise of metanationals, however, isn’t just about new ways of making money. It also unsettles the definition of “global superpower.”

the new middle ages...,

sunweber |  The Middle Ages have been given somewhat of a bad rap. Yes, there was little buffer from year to year for the bulk of humanity against hunger and famine. Medicine was primitive and poorly conceived. Hygiene was not understood. And yes, there were the rich that controlled and took from the poor. Most of humanity worked very hard to make daily living work. 

However, let me suggest that this future without fossil fuels may not be significantly different from present once we work through the inevitable losses and grieving. In an Excel spread sheet I created in 2000 looking at the per capita use by country of petroleum, natural gas and electricity, some 75 to 80 per cent of the population had very little use of fossil fuels. Many people today work hand to mouth and lived on the edge with hunger, low energy accessibility, poor water resources and fragile shelter.

What is in process is the great leveling of globalization. Many of us will be joining the peasant class.

Through history there seems to be a distribution of wealth and privilege that looks something like:

1. 0.1% Dynastic Oligarchs
2. 1% Administrators (in today’s world - CEOs, Presidents, Fed chairman, etc.)
3. 10 to 15% Functionary Workers (this would be most who are reading this now)
4. 80 to 90% Peasants (Wage Slaves in debt-bondage)

Today is no different. As I indicated globalization is the new leveling and pathway to peasanthood given the peaking and ultimate depletion of fossil fuels and other resources.

the 158 families funding the 2016 presidential election

NYTimes |  They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy.

Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.

These donors’ fortunes reflect the shifting composition of the country’s economic elite. Relatively few work in the traditional ranks of corporate America, or hail from dynasties of inherited wealth. Most built their own businesses, parlaying talent and an appetite for risk into huge wealth: They founded hedge funds in New York, bought up undervalued oil leases in Texas, made blockbusters in Hollywood. More than a dozen of the elite donors were born outside the United States, immigrating from countries like Cuba, the old Soviet Union, Pakistan, India and Israel.

But regardless of industry, the families investing the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations; cut taxes on income, capital gains and inheritances; and shrink entitlement programs. While such measures would help protect their own wealth, the donors describe their embrace of them more broadly, as the surest means of promoting economic growth and preserving a system that would allow others to prosper, too.

reconquista been underway for a minute...,

jpfo |  Apparently, multi-cultural, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic democracies don't last very long, if they even get started in the first place. The minute a single race, religion or ethnic group loses a large majority in a nation, that nation begins to undergo internal fracture. Chittum points out that the fall of the Soviet Union had as much to do with an incredible growth of Islamic forces in the various conglomerates of the Soviet Empire as did the arms race with the West. In the case of America, we shouldn't "celebrate diversity," we should fear it.

Civil War II will start in the American Southwest. Actually, it has already begun. It is called the "Reconquista," or in English, the Reconquest. An estimated two million illegal aliens, mostly Mexicans, have now infiltrated and occupied a huge swath of American soil that stretches from Los Angeles to New Orleans and up into New Mexico. Mexican and Latino radicals have already given this nation-to-be a name: "Aztlan." A beachhead has been established. Mexico will erupt into a revolution within the next 20 years. This revolution will either be brutally put down, as in the recent Chiapas uprising, or it will succeed and a new, likely Marxist, government will take over. In either case, further millions of Mexicans, attempting to escape the bloodshed and even more depressing poverty, will flee north across the American border and into the Southwest. The conflict between the whites and the Hispanics will be exacerbated by the fact that one group speaks English and the other Spanish. One group is brown and the other is white. The inevitable "them vs. us" division will occur because the opposing forces can be immediately identified by skin color and/or language.

much inequality has been caused by politically-induced decisions

paecon |  This article analyses causes of high and persistent income inequality in the U.S.2 The analysis provides an explanation of the interconnected factors behind rising income inequality and the upward redistribution of national income from labour to capital. Followed by a series of reports about rising inequalities from various International Organisations (IO) (ILO 2011; UNCTAD 2012; OECD 2011b), the interest peaked after the publication of the English translation of Piketty’s (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The publication triggered a heated debate and brought widespread attention to the issue also from non-academic circles ever since. Not surprisingly, there is as much empirical evidence supporting as broad a variety of arguments as scholars working on the subject.

The interaction between exogenous and endogenous drivers of inequality is of particular interest. At first sight the global trend towards increasing inequality across developed and developing economies suggests that exogenous forces are the main driver of inequality. However, the impact of exogenous drivers can be counteracted or reinforced by national policies and are thus highly country-specific. For example the experience of most countries in Latin America which successfully reduced inequality while being subject to the same exogenous drivers as other countries, suggests that countries do have the means to reduce inequality. One major influence on inequality are the policies adopted (or not adopted) by the respective governments. Those vary considerably across regions and countries and alter the distribution of income significantly. It is argued that the political dimension as an endogenous driver of inequality has been neglected to the benefit of economic-based explanations. Some political scientists and sociologists have explored possible political explanations of increasing inequality (DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux 1995; Bartels 2010; DiPrete 2007; Rosenthal 2004), while economists have mostly neglected the role of the political.

How and to what extent the political dimension has contributed to increasing inequality has been under-researched. In order to analyse the political causes of increasing inequality the U.S. has been chosen as a case study. The research question reads as follows: Which factors are the main drivers of income inequality in the U.S.? The U.S. is of particular interest because the country has experienced a sharp increase of inequality relative to other countries. In addition to that the U.S. is one of the few countries where continuous and reliable data is available. This enables the analysis and comparison of the changing patterns of income inequality from the early 1950s onwards.

Partly, as it is argued, inequality has been caused by politically induced decisions. Certain policies, such as the decreased support for unions and tax cuts favouring the relatively well-off and corporations, have benefitted a small minority of the population at the expense of the majority and have thus contributed to widening income inequality. It is argued that this particular type of income inequality leads to representational inequality. High and persisting inequality in the U.S. has contributed to the strengthening of an economic elite who have a vested interest and the means to influence policies accordingly which increases and perpetuates inequality. This in turn reduces the purchasing power of the majority of the U.S. population (and hence aggregate demand). Thus, growth stalls also due to decreasing means of purchasing goods and services for the majority, or, contributes to economic and financial instability because the stagnating real wages are compensated by increasing accumulation of debts (Onaran and Galanis 2013, 88).

we will be lucky to go medieval...,

kunstler |  The tremors rattling markets are not exactly what they seem to be. A meme prevails that these movements represent a kind of financial peristalsis — regular wavelike workings of eternal progress toward an epic more of everything, especially profits! You can forget the supposedly “normal” cycles of the techno-industrial arrangement, which means, in particular, the business cycle of the standard economics textbooks. Those cycle are dying.

They’re dying because there really are Limits to Growth and we are now solidly in grips of those limits. Only we can’t recognize the way it is expressing itself, especially in political terms. What’s afoot is a not “recession” but a permanent contraction of what has been normal for a little over two hundred years. There is not going to be more of everything, especially profits, and the stock buyback orgy that has animated the corporate executive suites will be recognized shortly for what it is: an assest-stripping operation.

What’s happening now is a permanent contraction. Well, of course, nothing lasts forever, and the contraction is one phase of a greater transition. The cornucopians and techno-narcissists would like to think that we are transitioning into an even more lavish era of techno-wonderama — life in a padded recliner tapping on a tablet for everything! I don’t think so. Rather, we’re going medieval, and we’re doing it the hard way because there’s just not enough to go around and the swollen populations of the world are going to be fighting over what’s left.

Actually, we’ll be lucky if we can go medieval, because there’s no guarantee that the contraction has to stop there, especially if we behave really badly about it — and based on the way we’re acting now, it’s hard to be optimistic about our behavior improving. Going medieval would imply living within the solar energy income of the planet, and by that I don’t mean photo-voltaic panels, but rather what the planet might provide in the way of plant and animal “income” for a substantially smaller population of humans. That plus a long-term resource salvage operation.

the kochtopus would FUBAR the SCOTUS if it captured the #45 POTUS

WaPo |  Brian Beutler has an important piece in which he raises an unsettling question: Could the next Republican president nominate one or more Supreme Court justices who would seek to restore a pre-New Deal judicial conception of liberty of contract, with the goal of undermining much of the regulatory state that many Americans take for granted today?

Beutler reports on a movement among legal-minded libertarians to rehabilitate the Lochner decision, the notorious 1905 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a state law limiting the working hours of bakers, giving its name to the “Lochner era” of Supreme Court rulings in which economic regulations established by popularly elected officials were struck down as unconstitutional. The Lochner era is widely seen to have ended during the New Deal, when the Court upheld (among many other things) a state minimum wage law, concluding that liberty of contract is not an “absolute” right.

Sam Bagenstos, a liberal constitutional scholar at the University of Michigan, tells Beutler that “a full fledged return to Lochner” could ultimately undermine a whole host of economic regulations, including minimum wage, overtime, and worker safety laws and even possibly laws protecting customers from discrimination based on race.

One leading libertarian lawyer tells Beutler frankly that the goal is to invalidate much social welfare legislation “at the federal level,” though I would add that a Lochner restoration might invalidate a fair amount of it at the state level as well. Libertarians are frustrated with the Roberts court for its rulings preserving Obamacare — decisions that have been widely interpreted as a sign of Roberts’ judicial restraint and deference to the elected branches — and the hope is that a Republican president will appoint more unabashedly activist judges when it comes to placing limits on federal power to regulate the economy:

why are white gang members destroying their own community?

HuffPo |  Rival biker gangs clashed violently in Waco, Texas, on Sunday afternoon, in a brawl that ultimately left nine gang members dead and at least 18 others injured. As the fight spilled out of a local restaurant and into the parking lot, participants reportedly used fists, chains, knives and later firearms to attack one another. Eventually they exchanged gunfire with police. Waco law enforcement announced Monday that 170 people had been arrested and will be charged with engaging in organized crime.

The brutality terrorized the surrounding community, leading to large-scale evacuations, closed businesses and ongoing fears, though remarkably no physical harm to bystanders.

The incident has temporarily shoved biker gangs and their overwhelmingly white membership into the national spotlight. But these groups -- which the FBI labels outlaw motorcycle gangs, or OMGs -- typically receive far less media attention than urban street gangs, though the biker gangs' criminal networks reach across the country and have erupted violently before.

Sunday's bloodshed reportedly began inside the bathroom of a local Twin Peaks "breastaurant" that has catered to bikers in the past. Between 150 and 200 gang members were apparently inside at the time, and one witness said that as many as 30 gang members were shooting at each other at the height of the battle.

Police have accused the Waco restaurant of being uncooperative in earlier attempts to scale back large and often contentious biker gatherings, and now its clientele has led to serious consequences for management. On Monday, the Twin Peaks corporate office revoked the establishment's franchise, stating that "the management team of the franchised restaurant in Waco chose to ignore the warnings and advice from both the police and our company, and did not uphold the high security standards we have in place to ensure everyone is safe at our restaurants." The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission had already closed the restaurant for a week in order to avoid further possible violence.

Nearby businesses that fell within the police perimeter were also put on lockdown or evacuated following the initial melee. Walmart reportedly closed early Sunday after being cleared. Best Buy, Cabela's and other stores in the Central Texas Marketplace -- the shopping center that contains the Twin Peaks restaurant -- remained closed Monday as the investigation continued.

The manager of a local Denny's told the Austin American-Statesman that a "huge" group of bikers came into her restaurant a few hours after the shooting. Many were served but left abruptly a short time later, some without paying their checks. The manager said a SWAT team showed up minutes after the bikers departed, leaving her and other patrons rattled.

The Waco Tribune reported that "other local dining and drinking establishments" closed early Sunday amid fears that gang members might be looking to resume the violence.

Law enforcement officials in Texas said they've received numerous retaliatory threats from biker gangs following Sunday's incident and have gone on high alert in case of any backlash.

Biker gang violence is not unusual in Central Texas. OMGs play a key role in methamphetamine and marijuana trafficking throughout the region. The FBI says they're involved in cross-border drug smuggling as well as domestic drug trafficking, prostitution, human trafficking and other criminal enterprises. Police said that five OMGs took part in the violence on Sunday, though authorities haven't identified the organizations by name. Fist tap Rohan.

backchannel private security and intelligence-gathering sounds a lot like crime to me

gawker |  Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal's account.

The emails, which were posted on the internet in 2013, also show that Blumenthal and another close Clinton associate discussed contracting with a retired Army special operations commander to put operatives on the ground near the Libya-Tunisia border while Libya's civil war raged in 2011.

Blumenthal's emails to Clinton, which were directed to her private email account, include at least a dozen detailed reports on events on the deteriorating political and security climate in Libya as well as events in other nations. They came to light after a hacker broke into Blumenthal's account and have taken on new significance in light of the disclosure that she conducted State Department and personal business exclusively over an email server that she controlled and kept secret from State Department officials and which only recently was discovered by congressional investigators.

The contents of that account are now being sought by a congressional inquiry into the Benghazi attacks. Clinton has handed over more than 30,000 pages of her emails to the State Department, after unilaterally deciding which ones involved government business; the State Department has so far handed almost 900 pages of those over to the committee. A Clinton spokesman told Gawker and ProPublica (which are collaborating on this story) that she has turned over all the emails Blumenthal sent to Hillary.

The dispatches from Blumenthal to Clinton's private email address were posted online after Blumenthal's account was hacked in 2013 by Romanian hacker Marcel-Lehel Lazar, who went by the name Guccifer. Lazar also broke into accounts belonging to George W. Bush's sister, Colin Powell, and others. He's now serving a seven-year sentence in his home country and was charged in a U.S. indictment last year.

The contents of the memos, which have recently become the subject of speculation in the right-wing media, raise new questions about how Clinton used her private email account and whether she tapped into an undisclosed back channel for information on Libya's crisis and other foreign policy matters.

dominance/prestige: our nature our future...,

cluborlov |  Once upon a time—and a fairly long time it was—most of the thickly settled parts of the world had something called feudalism. It was a way of organizing society hierarchically. Typically, at the very top there was a sovereign (king, prince, emperor, pharaoh, along with some high priests). Below the sovereign were several ranks of noblemen, with hereditary titles. Below the noblemen were commoners, who likewise inherited their stations in life, be it by being bound to a piece of land upon which they toiled, or by being granted the right to engage in a certain type of production or trade, in case of craftsmen and merchants. Everybody was locked into position through permanent relationships of allegiance, tribute and customary duties: tribute and customary duties flowed up through the ranks, while favors, privileges and protection flowed down.

It was a remarkably resilient, self-perpetuating system, based largely on the use of land and other renewable resources, all ultimately powered by sunlight. Wealth was primarily derived from land and the various uses of land. Here is a simplified org chart showing the pecking order of a medieval society.

Feudalism was essentially a steady-state system. Population pressures were relieved primarily through emigration, war, pestilence and, failing all of the above, periodic famine. Wars of conquest sometimes opened up temporary new venues for economic growth, but since land and sunlight are finite, this amounted to a zero-sum game.

But all of that changed when feudalism was replaced with capitalism. What made the change possible was the exploitation of nonrenewable resources, the most important of which was energy from burning fossilized hydrocarbons: first peat and coal, then oil and natural gas. Suddenly, productive capacity was decoupled from the availability of land and sunlight, and could be ramped up almost, but not quite, ad infinitum, simply by burning more hydrocarbons. Energy use, industry and population all started going up exponentially. A new system of economic relations was brought into being, based on money that could be generated at will, in the form of debt, which could be repaid with interest using the products of ever-increasing future production. Compared with the previous, steady-state system, the change amounted to a new assumption: that the future will always be bigger and richer—rich enough to afford to pay back both principal and interest.
 

read this and reflect on our own political situation...,

economic-undertow |  Many of the places that are suffering unrest and war were components of- or client states of the USSR during its heyday: Libya (client), Egypt (a Soviet client before becoming an American client), Somalia (client), Eritrea (client), Afghanistan (client) Yemen (client), Syria (long-term client), Iraq (client); Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Dagestan, Nagorno-Karabakh (all components of USSR); also Vietnam, Laos, Angola and North Korea (all Soviet clients but wars have ended in these countries) … also Russia itself. Seen from a long-term perspective, the end of the Soviet Union government turns out not to be the bloodless event as was advertised, the rotting empire still has some collapse left in it. 

One of the duties of the Economic Undertow is to turn conventional historic narratives on their heads, to where they begin make sense. What Americans have been fed about the demise of the Soviet Union is a self-serving, political/ideological fairy tale: that the United States under the direction of Ronald Reagan’s brilliant conservative leadership outspent the USSR in an arms race that eventually — along with collapsing oil prices caused by new oil on the markets from Prudhoe Bay and the North Sea — bankrupted the Communist government. Once the economic and ideological fault lines were revealed, the various client/satellite states that made up the Soviet empire peaceably went their own way without interference from Moscow. All of this ‘revealing’ and ‘peaceable-ness’ took place over a remarkably short period of time in the early 1990s: here today, gone the next. 

The more realistic narrative has Soviet intelligence agencies — perhaps collaborating with those of the West along with Western interests (banks) — gaining control over Russian assets, shifting them to well-connected insiders, with the decrepit- and ossified Communist government powerless to do anything about it. This process began before- or during the Brezhnev period with matters well underway by the time of Gorbachev … Perestroika being a (feeble) attempt on the part of the Communist establishment to regain both credibility and some measure of control. What happened in Russia was not reform and the end of communism was an accident: what actually took place was the greatest crime of the modern era, the theft of an empire by the country’s intelligence services and criminal associates.

This outcome was a natural consequence of the Soviet Union as a regimented national security state with outsized spy agencies … as well as the slow commercial opening with the West beginning during the Khrushchev era. Within the immense ganglia of the Soviet intelligence- and internal security apparatus there was a kind of singularity or dawning self-awareness … the managers grasped in an instant they had access to the levers of control outside the reach of the Party, the Politburo and the Red Army. The rise of the agencies’ power was a consequence of Stalin’s paranoia; the Stalinist Russia was built on a foundation of intrusive spying and control/liquidation of potential internal enemies. Stalin held the agencies in check by way of periodic purges, no group of operatives could become too comfortable or entrenched, they had to constantly look over their own shoulders. Once ‘Uncle Joe’ was gone there were no further checks on spy agency power, they could act with impunity and did: what occurred was a silent coup d’etat with the KGB state first emerging publicly under Yuri Andropov. Once the looting and undermining was well-established in the center it spread out and took hold among the clients with consequences that can be seen clearly today. 

At the same time, contact with the West, as tentative as it was, informed the Russian intelligence elite what was possible … that the Western standards for wealth and success were both qualitatively- and qualitatively superior to what was available under egalitarian communism. In 1975, to be wealthy and successful as a Swiss or Londoner far exceeded what was possible in Leningrad or Kiev.

Under this scenario, ‘Nemtsov the reformer’ was either a co-conspirator — or, more likely a tool of intelligence services and/or Western business interests; an operative within the looting scheme along with Gaidar, Chubais and others. Instead of being the heir to Stalin’s strongman legacy, Putin recedes to become the technocratic figurehead who serves to distract public attention as the Russian Mario Monti or Antonis Samaras … meanwhile, the stealing takes place in the background.

where the seignurial elites are taking us...,

reformer |  We are awash in capital and yet, around the world, the economic revival is floundering.

Clayton M. Christensen and Derek van Bever, writing for the Harvard Business Review, note the modern era is characterized by "capital superabundance" in which financial assets are today almost 10 times the value of the global output of all goods and services, and that the development of financial sectors in emerging economies will cause global capital to grow another 50 percent by 2020.

"Like an old machine emitting a new and troubling sound that even the best mechanics can't diagnose, the world economy continues its halting recovery from the 2008 recession," write Christensen and van Bever. "Look at what's happening in the United States: Even today, 60 months after the scorekeepers declared the recession to be over, its economy is still grinding along, producing low growth and disappointing job numbers."

Despite historically low interest rates, they write, corporations are sitting on massive amounts of cash and failing to invest in innovations that might foster growth.

The two acedemicians want to know what is causing this behavior.

"Are great opportunities in short supply, or are executives failing to recognize them? And how is this behavior pattern linked to overall economic sluggishness? What is holding growth back?"

The pair, with assistance from alumni, explored a wide range of reasons for the sputtering recovery, including political and economic uncertainty, the low rate of bank lending, a decline in publicly supported research in the United States, and the demise of innovation platforms like Bell Labs.

They believe that the crux of the problem is that investments in different types of innovation affect economies and companies in very different ways, but are evaluated using flawed metrics.

"Specifically, financial markets -- and companies themselves -- use assessment metrics that make innovations that eliminate jobs more attractive than those that create jobs. Efficiency innovations typically pay off within a year or two." Companies invest in efficiency, which eliminate jobs, because on an unexamined assumption, they write, "Which has risen almost to the level of a religion -- that corporate performance should be focused on, and measured by, how efficiently capital is used."

Would you like that in regular English? Short-term profits trump long-term profits in an era when the rule is get as much as you can, as fast as you can and get out.

The result, write Christensen and van Bever, is that the institutions, especially banks, that are meant to "lubricate" capitalism no longer do so.

Christensen and van Bever believe the system can be turned around by appealing to logic, fairplay and appropriate government policy that would liberate capital from short-term profits.

Fat chance, argue some political and economic observers.

"With all due respect ... these guys are thugs and looters," notes Arendt, writing for Daily Kos. "Your polite attempt to point out they are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs will get no traction with conquistadors. They will continue to suck America dry while looking for the next target overseas."

Let's not forget that for more than 30 years, following reduced taxes on the wealthiest Americans and the rolling back of regulations to rein in financial malfeasance, we have been promised the wealth would "trickle down" or that "a rising tide raises all boats." But since Ronald Reagan's days as president, the rich and corporations have stashed more than $30 trillion in offshore tax havens.

"Our surplus has been channeled into the Wall Street gambling casino, the rise of a predatory class of financial capitalists, and a bloated military/intelligence/police budget," notes Arendt.

Michael Lind calls this a "plantation" mentality, "a cruel caste system in which the white, brown and black majority labor for inadequate rewards while a cultivated but callous oligarchy of rich white families and their hirelings in the professions dominate the economy, politics, and the rarefied air of academic and museum culture." Fist tap Dale.

purportedly progressive massachusetts has a "private" SWAT network...,

WaPo | As part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent report on police militarization, the Massachusetts chapter of the organization sent open records requests to SWAT teams across that state. It received an interesting response.

As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments. In 2012, for example, the Tewksbury Police Department paid about $4,600 in annual membership dues to the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, or NEMLEC. (See page 36 of linked PDF.) That LEC has about 50 member agencies. In addition to operating a regional SWAT team, the LECs also facilitate technology and information sharing and oversee other specialized units, such as crime scene investigators and computer crime specialists.

Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations, not government agencies. And therefore, they say they’re immune from open records requests. Let’s be clear. These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they’ve incorporated, they’re immune to Massachusetts open records laws. The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get or who they’re primarily used against.

(Read more: New ACLU report confirms the stunning rise in police militarization)