Counterpunch | For instance, 20 years ago, I took up a sexual harassment lawsuit on behalf of a young woman—a
state employee—who claimed that her boss, a politically powerful man,
had arranged for her to meet him in a hotel room, where he then
allegedly dropped his pants, propositioned her and invited her to
perform oral sex on him.
Here we are 20 years later and not much has changed.
Suffice it to say that it’s the same old story all over again: man
rises to power, man abuses power abominably, man intimidates and
threatens anyone who challenges him with retaliation or worse, and man
gets away with it because of a culture of compliance in which no one speaks up because they don’t want to lose their job or their money or their place among the elite.
From what I’ve read, this was Hollywood’s worst-kept secret.
In other words, everyone who was anyone knew about it. They were
either complicit in allowing the abuses to take place, turning a blind
eye to them, or helping to cover them up.
thedailybeast | By the time Farrow pitched New Yorker Editor in Chief David Remnick
in August, according to multiple sources, he and NBC News investigative
unit producer Rich McHugh, among others, had been pursuing Weinstein’s
alleged serial groping—and worse—of young actresses and female staffers
since the previous December.
Over the course of several months,
scripts were prepared and vetted, and Farrow’s and McHugh’s reporting
was subjected to various layers of both fact-checking and legal reviews,
insiders said, and at one point a senior producer on NBC News’ Friday
night show Dateline carefully re-interviewed many of their sources and witnesses, and concluded they were solid.
The
vetting process lasted weeks and weeks, through much of the summer, but
ended shortly after Kimberley D. Harris, executive vice president and
general counsel of NBC Universal, subjected the material to her own
review. Since Harris oversees the in-house lawyering of all the company
divisions, an NBC source said it would not be unusual for her to review
news division material for potential exposure to litigation. And
although Harris reports to NBC Universal Chief Executive Steve Burke, a
source insisted Burke wasn’t involved in the decision to spike the
Weinstein story.
Indeed, according to this account, Harris never
formally weighed in, because NBC News had already pulled the plug by the
time she finished examining Farrow’s work.
With two such wildly
contradictory versions of why and how NBC News spiked Farrow’s Weinstein
story, it’s difficult to determine what objectively occurred.
But author and New Yorker
media writer Ken Auletta, who has been covering Weinstein for decades
and is among the legions of journalists who’ve tried and failed to
document his casting-couch behavior, also sat for an NBC interview; at
one point, according to witnesses, he turned to the camera and declared:
“This evidence is so overwhelming that if NBC News sits on it, that
will be a scandal.”
comcast | Harris provides legal advice to the NBCUniversal senior management
team and supervises the legal function, which handles legal matters for
all of NBCUniversal’s business units. She also coordinates
NBCUniversal’s global regulatory and legislative agenda.
Harris joined NBCUniversal in 2013 from Davis Polk & Wardwell, where she was a partner in the litigation department.
From
2010 to 2012, Harris served in the White House Counsel’s Office, and
became the principal Deputy Counsel and Deputy Assistant to the
President in 2011. At the White House, she advised senior Executive
Branch officials on congressional investigations and executive privilege
issues. In addition, Harris developed and implemented the White House
response to congressional investigations, and managed litigation matters
relating to the President.
From 2009 to 2010, she was Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division.
Harris
first joined Davis Polk & Wardwell as an associate in 1997 and was
named a litigation partner in 2007. From 1996 to 1997, she served as a
law clerk to the Honorable Charles S. Haight, Jr., U.S. District Court,
S.D. New York.
She serves on the boards of directors for Advocates
for Children of New York, an organization that provides legal and
advocacy services to at-risk students in the New York City school
system, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School
of Law. Harris is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Yale Law
School Center for the Study of Corporate Law.
Harris graduated
magna cum laude from Harvard University, and holds a law degree from
Yale Law School. She lives in Westchester County, New York with her
husband and three sons.
theintercept |As the controversy over protests during the national anthem grew, President Donald Trump denounced NFL owners as being “afraid of the players,” a
state of affairs that he called “disgraceful”. The lament fits a
pattern in Trump’s war with the NFL, which has routinely been
characterized as the president attacking African-American athletes,
when, in fact, Trump’s immediate target is one much closer to him: the
class and race traitors who make up the owners of the NFL.
One of the most haunting aspects of
Trump’s battle with the players has been his consistent refusal to talk
directly to or with them. His complaint, that they are refusing to stand
during the national anthem, has been directed at the owners, a way to
offer up an extra level of disrespect to the players.That refusal continued this week,
as Trump spoke directly to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, reminding
him of NFL rules he said applied to players around the anthem.
When Trump sparked the national debate, he did so by going right over the heads of the players. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL
owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a
bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” Trump
bellowed at a rally in Alabama in September.
Trump went on: “You know, some owner
is going to do that. He’s going to say, ‘That guy that disrespects our
flag, he’s fired.’ And that owner, they don’t know it, they’ll be the
most popular person in this country.”
For Trump, it comes back to being
popular — with the right audience. But if that carrot isn’t enough, he
has the stick of tax and antitrust policy to wield at the owners.
Like everything else with Trump, his
war with the NFL is layered with motivations ranging from the base to
the financial to the personal. It hints at his own history with the NFL,
his particular vision of rule, and ultimately, a sense of betrayal that
has set the league on a collision course with not just Trump, but his
supporters as well.
Trump has commodified a vision of
ownership that demands that bosses project complete dominance lest they
become traitors to both their class and their nation — and, to the
extent that Trump sees himself embodying the national spirit, they are
at war with him personally. Through his so-called populist campaign and
his TV show “The Apprentice,”
he’s democratized that vision, transforming many of his supporters not
into would-be apprentices hoping to learn from the great man, but
mini-moguls with their own innate, incontrovertible knowledge about who
should be “fired” and under what circumstances. Every viewer a king.
hackernoon |At
the heart of digesting online information is the evolutionary
propensity to mine all input as social cues or signals. In the case of
the “trending news,” Facebook was presenting a manufactured image of the
social world which more closely resembles a world which the curators
would approve of, than it does the actual world we live in. This
manufactured world is then presented as social reality. No matter what
side you come down on, this is no trivial thing.
We
humans are built to use attention as a cue for status. We then use
status as a signal of mastery for which we are constantly on the lookout
to apprentice under. Joseph Henrich and Francisco J. Gil-White, while
at the Universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania respectively, describe a
theory of “information goods.” They show that humans, unlike
chimpanzees, use “relative prestige” to assign status, and then use that
status as a signal of what to believe and emulate.
The
challenge is that this evolutionary mechanism was developed long before
mass media. It developed through direct observation. The hunter getting
the most attention is likely the fellow who most often comes back with
the biggest kills. Thus, trusting the attention of others to point you
in the right way was adaptively useful. The Internet is particularly
adept at scrambling these signals. We
are built to believe that seeing others give their attention to
somebody, or something, signals the ability for that someone to teach
you something useful. Therefore we implicitly connect attention with
prestige and prestige with expertise.
Granny Goodness President
Trump, who has an objectively terrible track record with the truth,
provides one example of this. A giant swath of the nation, I assume
mostly reasonable and well-adjusted people, describe her him as trustworthy,
despite what the other half, which I assume are also mostly reasonable
and well-adjusted people, feel is obvious and damning evidence to the
contrary. Her His supporters are surrounded, physically or digitally, by
others who are paying attention to her him. Therefore, some basic, even
primordial, part of their brain signals to them that this is someone who deserves attention, emulation,
and trust. They believe in him, at least in part, because of his ability
to attract attention signals of trustworthiness. When each of President
Trump’s tweets, to his 40 million followers, and now to the whole
world, receives hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets, we
shouldn’t be surprised that he didn’t need to actually do anything to
earn that trust. He just needed to attract attention to himself, and
then claim that he deserves the trust. The attention supports claim.
bostonglobe | While most of us were ignoring the long
anti-elite crusade that began as a cynical attempt to paint opposing
politicians as arrogant East Coast dilettantes, it morphed into a far
more dangerous jihad against expertise at any level of government. To
put it in Gilligan’s Island terms, they have taken the Professor and repackaged him as Thurston Howell III.
That
helps explain Trump’s response to Vladimir Putin’s expulsion this
summer of hundreds of American diplomats and embassy staff from Russia.
Bizarrely, the American president thanked the Russian dictator, saying
these professionals aren’t needed anyway and the expulsion will save the
United States money. (Wrong on both counts. Career foreign-service
officers are entitled by law to reassignment.) Yet somehow Trump faced
absolutely no blowback from a Republican Party that historically viewed
Russia as America’s most dangerous foe. Maybe the diplomats don’t like
cheeseburgers.
Of course, the establishment
elites are not blameless. Over the years, many of them made confident
predictions, about everything from free trade agreements to Middle East
strategy, that turned out to be disastrously wrong. After all, it wasn’t
just Trump who brilliantly tapped into anti-elite sentiment in the 2016
campaign and turned it into electoral success. So did Bernie Sanders, a
septuagenarian socialist who managed to win 23 primaries and caucuses
and 13.2 million votes.
Still, we have
reached a dangerous point when an administration whose party controls
the White House, both houses of Congress, and two-thirds of the state
legislatures can scapegoat thousands of highly experienced government
scientists, diplomats, and intelligence specialists, tossing them all
into a basket of deplored elites.
It’s time to wage a new war in defense of expertise in government. And if it’s too late to prevent the word elite from being used as a weapon, it’s time to embrace it and redefine it as something good.
charleshughsmith |If
you want to understand why the status quo is unraveling, start by
examining the feudal structure of our society, politics and economy.
The
revelations coming to light about Hollywood Oligarch Harvey Weinstein
perfectly capture the true nature of our status quo: a
rotten-to-the-core, predatory, exploitive oligarchy of dirty secrets and
dirty lies protected by an army of self-serving sycophants, servile
toadies on the make and well-paid legal mercenaries. Predators
aren't an aberration of the Establishment; they are the perfection of
the Establishment, which protects abusive, exploitive predator-oligarchs
lest the feudal injustices of life in America be revealed for all to see.
The predators reckon their aristocratic status in Hollywood/D.C. grants them a feudal-era droit du seigneur (rights
of the lord) to take whatever gratifications they desire from any
female who has the grave misfortune to enter their malefic orbit.
Anyone who protests or makes efforts to go public is threatened by the
oligarch's thugs and discredited/smeared by the oligarch's
take-no-prisoners legal mercenaries. (Recall the Clintons' Crisis
Management Team tasked with crushing any Bimbo Eruptions, i.e. any eruptions of the truth about Bill's well-known-to-insiders predation of the peasantry.)
Should the worst happen and some sliver of the truth emerge despite the best efforts of the thugs, corporate media, legal mercenaries and PR handlers, then the playbook follows the script of any well-managed Communist dictatorship:the oligarch predator is thrown to the wolves to protect the oligarchs' systemic predation and exploitation of the peasantry/debt-serfs.
Just as in a one-party Communist dictatorship, an occasional sacrificial offering is made to support the propaganda that the predators are outliers rather than the only possible output of a predatory, exploitive feudal status quo comprised of a small elite of super-wealthy and powerful oligarchs at the top and all the powerless debt-serfs at the bottom who must do their bidding in bed, in the boardroom, in the corridors of political power, and in the private quarters of their yachts and island hideaways.
Media reports suggest that the real reason Mr. Weinstein has been fired is not his alleged conduct over the past 27 years but his loss of the golden touch in generating movie-magic loot for the oh-so-liberal and politically correct Hollywood gang that was pleased to protect Mr. Weinstein when he was busy enriching them.
libertyblitzkrieg | Two very important articles published in recent days serve to once again highlight America’s metastasizing elite criminality problem. A problem which our justice system simply refuses to address.
This corrupt two-tier justice system is something I’ve been
focused on from the very beginning of my writings, and I continue to see
it as a civilization-level threat for this country if not aggressively
addressed and confronted in the very near future.
The two articles in question focus on different aspects of untouchable elite culture in America.
The first relates to the continued fraud pervasive in
America’s largest financial institution, while the second covers a
thirty year history of predatory sexual behavior by one of Hollywood’s
biggest moguls, Harvey Weinstein.
In both cases, countless
people have known and reported on repeated abuses perpetrated by both
the institution and the man, yet the U.S. justice system and the vast
majority of “elite” culture happily help shield them from justice.
Predators are predators, and elite predators are far more dangerous to
society that your average street crook, so why does our justice
situation deal with it in the exact opposite way?
A desperate email from the film executive surfaced on Monday afternoon, courtesy of Janice Min,
a strategist at Eldridge Industries and part owner of The Hollywood
Reporter. Min tweeted out a transcribed iteration of an email she claims
was read to her “by a disgusted (male) recipient.” She also noted that
the email was sent to Hollywood “CEOs, moguls” mere hours before Weinstein was fired from his role at The Weinstein Company.
“My
board is thinking of firing me,” the letter reads. “All I’m asking, is
let me take a leave of absence and get into heavy therapy and
counseling. Whether it be in a facility or somewhere else, allow me to
resurrect myself with a second chance.”
NYPost | The model behind the release of the video featuring offensive line coach Chris Foerster snorting a white powder before a meeting leaked the damning clip in response to the intense political climate, according to recent Facebook posts.
In a since-deleted comment, Las Vegas-based Kijuana Nige said coaches
should take responsibility for their actions as players who protest
during the national anthem are chastised over their decisions on whether
to stand.
“I have plenty of white friends so I’m not making this a race issue.
People are missing the point. My point is everyone has to be held
accountable for their decisions they roast players over anthems while
the coaches be high as s–t and probably can’t sing along,” she wrote, per Obnoxious Boston Fan.
The 33-year-old model also spoke out Monday on social media.
“The white people mad at me like I forced blow down this mans nose and like I recorded it on tha low,” Nige shared on Facebook. “No those are his habits and he recorded himself and sent it to me professing his love.
“So quick to make excuses for him but will roast a minority player
over an athem [sic], dog fight, weed, domestic issues etc. But y’all
keep saying ALL LIVES MATTER STFU!!” she continued.
The relationship between Foerster and Nige is not clear. In the video, he said he misses her.
Less than 12 hours after the recording surfaced, Foerster announced his resignation Monday following one season and four games with the Miami Dolphins.
Guardian | Where most sci-fi movies quickly date, Blade Runner has improved with
age. Of course, it was always a fantastic ride, superbly detailed and
steeped in neo-noir atmospherics, but its deep, troubling ideas about
technology, humanity and identity chimed with postmodern and cyberpunk
theory, and launched a thousand PhD theses. One of the few student
lectures I can remember was about the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, orders of simulacra,
and how nothing is really real any more. In a down-with-the-kids
gesture, the lecturer stood behind a TV monitor playing a muted video of
Blade Runner. “You’ll probably get more out of watching this than you
will by listening to me,” she said. She was right. Deciphering
Baudrillard’s arcane prose is like wading through treacle; Blade Runner
is a ride you don’t want to get off. And, against all odds, its belated
follow-up, Blade Runner 2049, carries the baton brilliantly, both in
terms of visual spectacle and finishing the debates the first movie
began.
Between the two movies and Philip K Dick’s source novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
Blade Runner serves as a record of how our dystopian fears have evolved
over the past half-century. When Dick wrote the story, in 1968, he was
thinking of the dehumanising process of nazism. His “replicants”
(artificially engineered humans with a four-year lifespan) were
“essentially less-than-human entities”, Dick stated. They were
“deplorable because they are heartless, they are completely
self-centred, they don’t care about what happens to other creatures”.
Ridley Scott’s film turned it around, somewhat. Far from being a
deplorable, heartless machine, Rutger Hauer’s chief replicant,
supposedly the baddie, develops empathy for the cop trying to kill him.
Replicants were the superior beings. “More human than human,” as their manufacturer, Eldon Tyrell,
puts it. Apart from the four-year lifespan, what was the difference?
This was the part Baudrillard and co were so keen to engage with: what
was “real” when the copy was better than the original? “The real is not
only what can be reproduced but that which is always already reproduced.
The hyper-real,” wrote Baudrillard. Human status was no longer a matter
of biological or genetic fact. You couldn’t trust your memories either –
they could just be implants. So how do any of us know we are human?
Booz-Allen | On Thursday, July 20, China’s State Council released the New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan.
Numbering nearly 40 pages, the plan lays out China’s aspirations in
impressive detail. It introduces massive investment that aims to
position China at the forefront of technological achievement by
cultivating the governmental, economic, and academic ecosystems to drive
breakthroughs in machine intelligence. To achieve these goals, the
Council aims to harness the data produced by more the internet-connected
devices of more than a billion Chinese citizens, a vast web of
“intelligent things.”
The plan also details the strategic situation precipitating the need
for a bold new vision: “Machine intelligence [is] the strategic
technology that will lead in the future; the world’s major developed
countries are taking the development of AI as a major strategy… [We]
must, looking at the world, take the initiative to plan [and] firmly
seize the [technology] in this new stage of international competition.[i]”
The China State Council’s plan evokes a document that marked the
beginning of the defining global technological competition of the last
century—the space race. In August 1958, ten months after watching the
Soviet Union launch Sputnik 1, President Dwight Eisenhower’s
administration released the U.S. Policy on Outer Space. In it,
the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) urged massive investment to
cultivate the talent and technology base necessary to exceed the Soviet
Union’s achievements in space.
The United States is now at the precipice of another defining moment in history.
The NSC included an urgent mandate to act, declaring, “The starkest
facts which confront the United States in the immediate and foreseeable
future are [that] the USSR has surpassed the U.S. and the Free World in
scientific and technological accomplishments in outer space, [and] if it
maintains its present superiority…will be able to use [it] as a means
of undermining the prestige and leadership of the United States.”[ii]
The United States is now at the precipice of another defining moment
in history. The world’s greatest powers are entering a technological
contest that will parallel or exceed the space race in the magnitude of
its economic, geopolitical, and cultural consequences. Maintaining our
role as a global superpower requires us to achieve parity, and ideally
dominance, in the race to a future powered by intelligent machines.
Moreover, we must develop a comprehensive national strategy for
maintaining this technological advantage while also advancing our
economy, preserving our social norms and values, and protecting our
citizens’ dignity, privacy, and equality.
Guardian | He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he
describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as
they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook
engineer who created the “like” button in the first place.
A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was
then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but
growing band of Silicon Valley
heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention
economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising
economy.
These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have
little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are
making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a
rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product
managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the
building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to
disentangle themselves. “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for
humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to
have unintended, negative consequences.”
Rosenstein, who also helped create Gchat during a stint at Google, and now leads a San Francisco-based company that improves office productivity, appears most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.
There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology
is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”,
severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study
showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity
– even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,”
Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”
But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact
upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be
attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market
that drives it.
Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and
political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they
contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system
and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it
obsolete.
emotionalsentience | When phenomenal experience is examined through the lens of physics, several conundrums come to light including: Specificity of mindebody interactions, feelings of free will in a deterministic universe, and the relativity of subjective perception. The new biology of “emotion” can shed direct light upon these issues, via a broadened categorical definition that includes both affective feelings and their coupled (yet often subconscious) hedonic motivations. In this new view, evaluative (good/bad) feelings that trigger approach/avoid behaviors emerged with life itself, a crude stimulus-response information loop between organism and its environment, a semiotic signaling system embodying the first crude form of “mind”.
Emotion serves the ancient function of sensory-motor self-regulation and affords organisms e at every level of complexity e an active, adaptive, role in evolution. A careful examination of the biophysics involved in emotional “self-regulatory” signaling, however, acknowledges constituents that are incompatible with classical physics. This requires a further investigation, proposed herein, of the fundamental nature of “the self” as the subjective observer central to the measurement process in quantum mechanics, and ultimately as an active, unified, self-awareness with a centrally creative role in “self-organizing” processes and physical forces of the classical world. In this deeper investigation, a new phenomenological dualism is proposed: The flow of complex human experience is instantiated by both a classically embodied mind and a deeper form of quantum consciousness that is inherent in the universe itself, implying much deeper e more Whiteheadian e interpretations of the “self-regulatory” and “self-relevant” nature of emotional stimulus. A broad stroke, speculative, intuitive sketch of this new territory is then set forth, loosely mapped to several theoretical models of consciousness, potentially relevant mathematical devices and pertinent philosophical themes, in an attempt to acknowledge the myriad questions e and limitations e implicit in the quest to understand “sentience” in any ontologically pansentient universe.
bloombergview | "Politics" might even be the wrong word for it. As Bishop describes it in his book (and Andrew Sullivan does in a new essay in New York magazine),
the divide is really more about identities, or tribes. Policy disputes
aren't what separates us so much as differences in attitude and
language. Which is why Donald Trump, despite his New York County address
and all-over-the-political-map statements on the campaign trail, seems
to be mainly just deepening the divide. Attitude and language -- and
loyalty -- are what he cares about most, so those are the buttons
that he keeps pushing.
How do we counter this growing tribalism, and growing
conviction that those outside our tribes are motivated by Satanic
impulses? I don't know! If I did, I would have told you already. Still,
as a starting place, I recommend this: Just assume that those who
disagree with you politically are really, really stupid.
alt-market | Despite the vicious measures of interference, reports suggest that
the vote was still successful, with 90% of the citizenry in support of
independence. What happens now is unclear, but I can tell you two
things are relatively certain.
First, a 90% vote in favor will result in a militarized response
from the Spanish government. If the vote was less overwhelming, the
government might attempt to pit one side of the population against the
other, causing internal strife and disrupting secession. This strategy
is unrealistic given the mass movement for independence. So, the only
other option for the government is full blown martial law.
Second, such a crackdown will result in a violent counter-response.
This happened in the 1970s in Catalonia and I see no reason why it would
not happen again. When you have almost an entire population in
agreement on separation and you use force to stop them from attaining
it, they will become violent. Civil war is inevitable if martial law is
declared.
It is vital that we examine the root ideological catalyst in this scenario.
The most rational solution would be for the Spanish government to
accept the Catalan vote (if they believe in "democracy" as they claim,
then they have to accept it, otherwise they appear extraordinarily
hypocritical). This could result in a more harmonious economic
relationship and less drastic damage to Spain's fiscal structure.
However, this is not going to happen. Instead, Spain is going to use the
age old collectivist tactics of intimidation and carnage to oppress
the Catalan's and subsume their economic production (as socialist
governments always do). When civil war erupts, and it will, production
in Catalonia will grind to a standstill and Spain STILL loses 20% of
its GDP.
You see, this is a lose/lose scenario for Spain, all because the
collectivist doctrine demands a jackbooted reaction to any movement for
decentralization. Collectivist systems are parasitic in nature; they
see the citizenry as food, as units of production for the state that
cannot be allowed to leave, for the "greater good of the greater
number." Collectivists rationalize their behavior as essential to the
well being of the society at large, but this is dishonest, for their
behavior more often harms society by crushing individual innovation and
instigating wars that might not have ever happened in the first place.
There is at the same time the matter of sovereignty movements across
Europe. The only people who benefit from stopping these movements are
globalists/collectivists. They may also benefit by sabotaging these
movements after the fact, making an example of them and holding them up
to the rest of the world as symbols of the "failures of populism."
zerohedge | We harp on the massive, unsustainable, yet largely unnoticed, debt
burdens of American cities, counties and states fairly regularly
because, well, it's a frightening issue if you spend just a little time
to understand the math and ultimate consequences. Here is some of our
recent posts on the topic:
Luckily, for those looking to escape the trauma of being taxed into oblivion by their failing cities/counties/states, JP Morgan has provided a comprehensive guide on which municipalities haven't the slightest hope of surviving their multi-decade debt binge and lavish public pension awards.
If you live in any of the 'red' cities above, it just might be time to start looking for another home...
From 1937 to 2008 there were fewer than 600 municipal bankruptcies.[2] As of June 2012 the total was around 640.[3] In 2012 there were twelve chapter 9 bankruptcies in the United States, and five petitions have been filed in 2013.[4] Since 2010, 61 petitions have been filed.[5]
Previous to the creation of Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the only remedy
when a municipality was unable to pay its creditors was for the
creditors to pursue an action of mandamus, and compel the municipality to raise taxes.[6] During the Great Depression, this approach proved impossible, so in 1934, the Bankruptcy Act was amended to extend to municipalities.[7][8] The 1934 Amendment was declared unconstitutional in Ashton v. Cameron County Water District.[9]
wikipedia |Mandamus ("We command") is a judicial remedy in the form of an order from a superior court,[1] to any government subordinate court, corporation, or public authority,
to do (or forbear from doing) some specific act which that body is
obliged under law to do (or refrain from doing), and which is in the
nature of public duty, and in certain cases one of a statutory duty. It
cannot be issued to compel an authority to do something against
statutory provision. For example, it cannot be used to force a lower
court to reject or authorize applications that have been made, but if
the court refuses to rule one way or the other then a mandamus can be
used to order the court to rule on the applications.
Mandamus may be a command to do an administrative action or not to take a particular action, and it is supplemented by legal rights. In the American
legal system it must be a judicially enforceable and legally protected
right before one suffering a grievance can ask for a mandamus. A person
can be said to be aggrieved only when he is denied a legal right by
someone who has a legal duty to do something and abstains from doing it.
nakedcapitalism | And speaking of Goldman, notice that Trump takes an explicit swipe at
the investment bank turned Beltway heavyweight. He must be chafing at
have been leashed and collared by the generals and the Goldmanites.
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday while on a trip to
Puerto Rico to observe hurricane recovery efforts that the island’s
massive debt will have to be wiped out.
“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street and we’re
going to have to wipe that out. You’re going to say goodbye to that, I
don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is you can wave goodbye
to that,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.
Even before the storm brought Puerto Rico to a near
standstill, the government there already struggled with an economy in
shambles and a default on billions of dollars of public debt.
Today, the U.S. territory has nearly $70 billion in debt, an
unemployment rate 2.5 times the U.S. average, a 45 percent poverty rate,
nearly insolvent pension systems and a chronically underfunded Medicaid
insurance program for the poor.
Puerto Rico’s job base continues to shrink, taking its economy along
with it. Since the recession ended, a lack of job prospects has sent
many Puerto Ricans fleeing to the mainland, where the job market is much
stronger.
However, it is unlikely that Goldman would suffer much, if at all, in
a Puerto Rico bankruptcy. It might hold some bonds in its trading
inventory, but its big exposure would come via funds it manages. On
those, under the Volcker Rule, Goldman is limited to owning a small
percentage of the equity investment in the fund (3% is the nominal
amount, although there may be some tricks of the trade for increasing
the exposure).
But David Dayen has found one of the big owners of Puerto Rico debt,
as reported in a new story at the Intercept. If you read the article in
full, tracking down the who was behind the shell company used to hide
the ultimate owners is very reminiscent of the sort of gumshoe work that
Richard Smith does chasing international scammers.
nakedcapitalism | As reader RabidGhandi had caught, the Spanish government has already
put itself in the position of using its power over the banking system to
control the payments now being made by Catalonia’s government. As I
read this article
(and I welcome corrections and additions, since trying to understanding
legal/regulatory interventions via an article translated by Google is a
fraught business), Spain has used the secession threat to take control
of Catalonia’s spending, taking the view that the violation of the
Constitution gives it unlimited authority to intervene. From the rough English version of the El Mundo story:
The government begins to hit and where it hurts most. The
Generalitat will not have free from its budget. Cristóbal Montoro has
confiscated the keys of the box. From next week all the expenses
destined to cover the essential public services of Catalonia will have
to have the approval of Finance that will be who directly pay them. It
is a question of preventing the money from being diverted to the
referendum of 1-O .
This decision of exhaustive control of the Catalan accounts affects
the salaries of the civil servants, the cost of the health, the
education, the civil protection, the dependency and the diverse
transfers in aid and subsidies to the families. In total, the
approximately 1.4 billion euros per month of community funding is left
to the central government, which is prepared to ensure that not a single
public euro is diverted to pay for the 1-O referendum and the
secessionist process…
What the Government decided this Friday is practically the
application of Article 155 of the Constitution for economic purposes. It
is true that the Government does not seize political competition from
the Generalitat but, in fact, it binds its hands to decide on what it
spends the money, since who will open the portfolio and make the
appropriate payments, after strict justification by the Intervention
General of the Generalitat , will be the Ministry of Finance.
And notice the mechanism for seizing control:
The central government will supervise even the
approximately 250 million euros per month of own collection in Catalonia
– a relatively small item, in the words of the minister – since when
the Government orders financial institutions to make payments from these
funds, thereof.
In this sense, Hacienda will send to the banks the text of the
agreements adopted so that they are vigilant and do not allow any
payment that is not justified by a certificate of the Catalan
Intervention. If they detect that any of the operations may be related
to the celebration of the independence consultation, they must
immediately notify the Attorney General’s Office. It is a very similar
method to that used to avoid criminal operations of money laundering.
In other words, Spain has mechanisms already in place by which it can
require banks to step in and seize control of collections and
expenditures made by parties engaging in criminal activity….and Spain’s
courts have deemed the secession to be illegal. Reader Sue confirmed our
reading of Spain’s ability to strangle Catalonia’s finances:
Banks cannot issue payments to Catalan public servants
and Catalan institutions which depend on the Catalan Government,
“Generalitat”, without previous paperwork submission and rubber stamp
approval from the Spanish State bureaucracy. This has caused some anger
among some Catalan public sector enterprises and contractors doing work
for them when quick timely payments are of the essence. Nevertheless,
right now public servants and organizations directly or indirectly
linked to the Generalitat are being paid because Catalonia as of today
is not a State and, (although micromanaged and surveilled and controlled
by “Spain’s Ministry of Plenty”), payments reach their destination.
So what would happen if Catalonia actually secedes? Rajoy does not
need to send in troops when he has banks, although he could use the belt
and suspenders approach.
Spanish banks, like Santander and the cajas like Caixa/Caixabank, are
licensed by the Spanish government. Spain can revoke the licenses of
any Catalan banks and could also make it illegal to transfer funds in
and out of Catalonia, similar to the sanctions imposed on Iran. Any bank
licensed by Spain would fall into line immediately out of the threat of
losing its license. It would take the cooperation of the bank
regulators in other European countries for them to put similar
restrictions on their banks, but given the unified EU position against
separatist movements, similar rules would almost certainly be issued on
an emergency basis.
As least as important, the case study of Greece 2015 shows that the
ECB is perfectly happy to be the heavy as long as it has elected
officials giving it political cover.
How this would play out in detail is way over my pay grade, but here are some of the things I imagine would happen:
1. No more stocking of cash in Catalonia’s ATMs
2. Cutting off merchants from electronic point of sale systems
3. Bank closures, as in at least a bank holiday and possible
shuttering of banks/bank branches, with what happens to frozen
Euro-denominated deposits an open question.
Notice that the measures imposed on Catalonia could be even more
brutal than what was done to Greece, which merely behaved very badly in
negotiations while having its banking system dependent on ECB life
support. A declaration of independence is a much greater act of
intransigence.
libertyblitzkrieg | While extremely significant, the Catalan independence movement is
just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a global drive toward
political decentralization. For example, just today I came across
another potential secessionist hotspot in an unexpected place, Brazil.
Inspired by the separatist vote in Catalonia,
secessionists in three wealthy southern Brazilian states are redoubling
their efforts to break away from the crisis-battered nation.
Residents of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Parana states are being called to vote in an informal plebiscite
on Oct. 7 on whether they want independence. Organizers are also urging
residents of the three states to sign a legislative proposal for each
of their regional assemblies that would call for a formal, binding
referendum. The non-profit group “The South is My Country” aims to mobilize a million voters in 900 out of the region’s 1,191 cities.
Cooler, whiter and richer than the rest of Brazil, these southern
states have long nursed separatist ambitions. Rio Grande do Sul even
briefly claimed independence 180 years ago. Few Brazilians expect the
current movement to succeed any time soon, not least because it is
prohibited by the Constitution. But the country’s deepest recession on
record and a massive corruption scandal have exacerbated the region’s
longstanding resentment towards the federal government in Brasilia. With
just one year to go until general elections, the rekindling of
separatist sentiment in the south is another indicator of the unsettled
state of Brazilian politics.
Celso Deucher, the leader of The South is My Country, says the
region contributes four times as much tax as it receives and suffers
from a below-average level of political representation. He argues that
such an unjust situation outweighs any legal concerns. “Whenever the subject of separatism comes up, they ban it
because the federal Constitution does not allow it,” he said. “But the
law is not immutable.”
Rio Grande do Sul is currently immersed in a financial crisis and
has lost much of its economic clout, according to Fernando Schuler, a
professor of political science at Insper University in Sao Paulo.
“There’s a huge cultural detachment between the Tropicalia Brazil
and the South,” he said. “The reasons for separation are solid,
justifiable, but I don’t think they are viable.”
There are two aspects of the above story I’d like to address. First,
is that, like Catalonia, the regions thinking about secession from
Brazil are relatively wealthy. This is not insignificant and certainly
worth thinking about when it comes to wondering what sorts of
responsibility these regions should have to the former union should a
peaceful breakup go forward. It’s also worth remembering that the
leaders of the American revolution were also extremely wealthy. An
Independence movement driven by wealthy factions doesn’t necessarily
preclude the creation of a superior governing structure.
The second point relates to the fact that Brazil, like Spain,
apparently provide no “exit option” for any province or region which
decides it no longer wishes to be part of the nation-state. As such,
this is by definition an oppressive and involuntary political
relationship completely inappropriate to conscious human beings. As I
explained in Monday’s post,
all political associations should be voluntary and it’s absurd that
people are simply born into nation-states that are assumed to be forever
entities with no escape latch.
In June 2014, Wolfram officially announced the Wolfram Language as a new general multi-paradigm programming language.[65] The documentation for the language was pre-released in October 2013 to coincide with the bundling of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language on every Raspberry Pi computer. While the Wolfram Language has existed for over 25 years as the primary programming language used in Mathematica, it was not officially named until 2014.[66] Wolfram's son, Christopher Wolfram, appeared on the program of SXSW giving a live-coding demonstration using Wolfram Language[67] and has blogged about Wolfram Language for Wolfram Research.[68]
On 8 December 2015, Wolfram published the book "An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language"
to introduce people, with no knowledge of programming, to the Wolfram
Language and the kind of computational thinking it allows.[69] The release of the second edition of the book[70] coincided with a "CEO for hire" competition during the 2017 Collision tech conference.[71]
Both Stephen Wolfram and Christopher Wolfram were involved in helping create the alien language for the film Arrival, for which they used the Wolfram Language.[72][73][74]
wikipedia | The thesis of A New Kind of Science (NKS) is twofold: that the nature of computation must be explored experimentally, and that the results of these experiments have great relevance to understanding the physical world. Since its nascent beginnings in the 1930s, computation has been primarily approached from two traditions: engineering, which seeks to build practical systems using computations; and mathematics,
which seeks to prove theorems about computation. However, as recently
as the 1970s, computing has been described as being at the crossroads of
mathematical, engineering, and empirical traditions.[2][3]
Wolfram introduces a third tradition that seeks to empirically
investigate computation for its own sake: He argues that an entirely new
method is needed to do so because traditional mathematics fails to
meaningfully describe complex systems, and that there is an upper limit to complexity in all systems.[4]
Simple programs
The basic subject of Wolfram's "new kind of science" is the study of simple abstract rules—essentially, elementary computer programs.
In almost any class of a computational system, one very quickly finds
instances of great complexity among its simplest cases (after a time
series of multiple iterative loops, applying the same simple set of
rules on itself, similar to a self-reinforcing cycle using a set of
rules). This seems to be true regardless of the components of the system
and the details of its setup. Systems explored in the book include,
amongst others, cellular automata in one, two, and three dimensions; mobile automata; Turing machines in 1 and 2 dimensions; several varieties of substitution and network systems; primitive recursive functions; nested recursive functions; combinators; tag systems; register machines; reversal-addition. For a program to qualify as simple, there are several requirements:
Its operation can be completely explained by a simple graphical illustration.
It can be completely explained in a few sentences of human language.
It can be implemented in a computer language using just a few lines of code.
The number of its possible variations is small enough so that all of them can be computed.
Generally, simple programs tend to have a very simple abstract
framework. Simple cellular automata, Turing machines, and combinators
are examples of such frameworks, while more complex cellular automata do
not necessarily qualify as simple programs. It is also possible to
invent new frameworks, particularly to capture the operation of natural
systems. The remarkable feature of simple programs is that a significant
percentage of them are capable of producing great complexity. Simply
enumerating all possible variations of almost any class of programs
quickly leads one to examples that do unexpected and interesting things.
This leads to the question: if the program is so simple, where does the
complexity come from? In a sense, there is not enough room in the
program's definition to directly encode all the things the program can
do. Therefore, simple programs can be seen as a minimal example of emergence.
A logical deduction from this phenomenon is that if the details of the
program's rules have little direct relationship to its behavior, then it
is very difficult to directly engineer a simple program to perform a
specific behavior. An alternative approach is to try to engineer a
simple overall computational framework, and then do a brute-force search through all of the possible components for the best match.
Simple programs are capable of a remarkable range of behavior. Some have been proven to be universal computers. Others exhibit properties familiar from traditional science, such as thermodynamic behavior, continuum behavior, conserved quantities, percolation, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and others. They have been used as models of traffic, material fracture, crystal growth, biological growth, and various sociological, geological, and ecological
phenomena. Another feature of simple programs is that, according to the
book, making them more complicated seems to have little effect on their
overall complexity. A New Kind of Science argues that this is evidence that simple programs are enough to capture the essence of almost any complex system.
Mapping and mining the computational universe
In
order to study simple rules and their often complex behaviour, Wolfram
argues that it is necessary to systematically explore all of these
computational systems and document what they do. He further argues that
this study should become a new branch of science, like physics or chemistry. The basic goal of this field is to understand and characterize the computational universe using experimental methods.
The proposed new branch of scientific exploration admits many
different forms of scientific production. For instance, qualitative
classifications are often the results of initial forays into the
computational jungle. On the other hand, explicit proofs that certain
systems compute this or that function are also admissible. There are
also some forms of production that are in some ways unique to this field
of study. For example, the discovery of computational mechanisms that
emerge in different systems but in bizarrely different forms.
Another kind of production involves the creation of programs for the analysis of computational systems. In the NKS
framework, these themselves should be simple programs, and subject to
the same goals and methodology. An extension of this idea is that the
human mind is itself a computational system, and hence providing it with
raw data in as effective a way as possible is crucial to research.
Wolfram believes that programs and their analysis should be visualized
as directly as possible, and exhaustively examined by the thousands or
more. Since this new field concerns abstract rules, it can in principle
address issues relevant to other fields of science. However, in general
Wolfram's idea is that novel ideas and mechanisms can be discovered in
the computational universe, where they can be represented in their
simplest forms, and then other fields can choose among these discoveries
for those they find relevant.
Wolfram has since expressed "A central lesson of A New Kind of Science
is that there’s a lot of incredible richness out there in the
computational universe. And one reason that’s important is that it means
that there’s a lot of incredible stuff out there for us to 'mine' and
harness for our purposes."[5]
wikipedia | As a young child, Wolfram initially struggled in school and had difficulties learning arithmetic.[28] At the age of 12, he wrote a dictionary on physics.[29] By 13 or 14, he had written three books on particle physics.[30][31][32] They have not been published.
A 1981 letter from Feynman to Gerald Freund giving reference for
Wolfram for the MacArthur grant appears in Feynman's collective letters,
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. Following his PhD, Wolfram joined the faculty at Caltech and became the youngest recipient[42] of the MacArthur Fellowships in 1981, at age 21.[37]
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