Retired since 2012.
1913 stories
·
5 followers

How to tax billionaires

1 Share
The tax debates currently underway in France and the discussions planned for the 2024 G20 summit demonstrate that the issue of tax justice and the taxation of billionaires is not about to disappear from the public debate. There’s a simple reason for this: the sums amassed by the world’s wealthiest individuals over the last few decades are quite simply gigantic. Those who consider this a secondary or symbolic issue should take a look at the numbers. In France, the combined wealth of the 500 largest fortunes has grown by €1 trillion since 2010, rising from €200 billion to €1.2 trillion. In other words, all it would take is a one-time tax of 10% on this €1 trillion increase to bring in €100 billion, which is equal to all of the budget cuts the government is planning for the next three years. A one-time tax of 20%, which would remain very moderate, would bring in €200 billion and allow as much additional spending.
 
Yet some people continue to reject this debate, and their arguments need to be carefully examined. The first is that these immense private fortunes are merely theoretical and don’t really exist. While it’s true that they often appear as numbers on a screen, just like public debt or salaries paid into bank accounts, these figures have a very real impact on people’s lives and influence the power dynamics between social classes and public authorities. Concretely, how would billionaires pay this 10% tax on their wealth increase? If they don’t make enough profit in a year, they’ll have to sell some of their shares – say 10% of their portfolio. If finding a buyer is challenging, the government could accept these shares as payment for taxes. If necessary, it could then sell these shares through various methods, such as offering employees to purchase them, which would increase their stake in the company. In all cases, net public debt will be reduced accordingly.

The second argument often heard is that modern governments are too weak to impose anything on billionaires. With globalization and the free movement of capital, billionaires can simply relocate to more favorable jurisdictions, making any expected tax revenue vanish. While this argument may seem convincing to some, in reality, it is hypocritical and weak. Firstly, it was governments that set up the free movement of capital, upheld by a sophisticated legal system backed by the public courts, which could potentially be changed. Secondly, this argument reflects an abandonment of sovereignty, particularly from political leaders who frequently discuss the need to restore government authority but often find it easier to exercise their authority over the poor than over the powerful.

Finally, and most importantly, this defeatist rhetoric overlooks the fact that governments still have room to maneuver, including the ability to act independently. For example, when the US threatened to withdraw Swiss bank licenses, Bern put an end to its banking secrecy. Similarly, across the Atlantic in the US, taxpayers are taxed according to their nationality, even if they live abroad. If someone wants to give up their US passport, an option not without risk, there’s nothing to prevent the government from continuing to tax them, as long as their wealth was accumulated in the US or even more simply, if they continue to use the dollar.

France is a smaller country, but it also has considerable leverage. France, for example, could impose an exceptional wealth tax based on the number of years spent in France. A taxpayer who has been resident in Switzerland for one year after spending 50 years in France would, for example, continue to pay 50/51th of the tax required by a French resident. Those who refuse to pay would be outlawed and could face legal penalties.

The final argument against taxing billionaires is that it would be illegal or unconstitutional. This is nothing new: throughout history, the powerful have often invoked legal language to preserve their privileges. However, there is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the implementation of an exceptional tax on the wealth of billionaires, or more generally, wealth taxation, which is a valid indicator of citizens’ ability to pay taxes just as much as income. In fact, this is why a comprehensive system of inheritance and property taxes was established in 1789, and why an exceptional wealth tax was introduced in 1945. The fact that some constitutional judges ignore this and sometimes try to use their position to impose their partisan preferences doesn’t change a thing: this is fundamentally a political debate, not a legal one.

Other solutions are possible, such as Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s tax on incomes over €500,000. However, this tax will bring in €2 billion compared to the €100 billion that could be raised from a 10% tax on the wealth of billionaires. The reason for this disparity is that billionaires’ income constitutes only a tiny fraction of their overall wealth, meaning they would effectively pay very little under the Barnier tax. Consequently, it is the most modest who will bear the brunt of the Barnier budget and the cuts to public services. This strategy leads us straight to the wall: we can’t effectively address today’s social and climate challenges if we don’t start by taxing the wealthiest in a clear and significant way.

 

Read the whole story
cjheinz
4 hours ago
reply
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
Share this story
Delete

Nation’s Indigenous People Confirm They Don’t Need Special Holiday, Just Large Swaths...

1 Share
Nation’s Indigenous People Confirm They Don’t Need Special Holiday, Just Large Swaths Of Land Returned Immediately. “We’re seriously open to letting [Columbus Day] slide if we get back, say, the continent that you stole from us.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

Read the whole story
cjheinz
5 hours ago
reply
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
Share this story
Delete

Pluralistic: Quinque gazump linkdump (12 Oct 2024)

1 Comment


Today's links



A page from a 19th C catalog of ornaments cast in wood fiber, showing a miscellaneous assortment of these ornaments.

Quinque gazump linkdump (permalink)

It's Saturday and any fule kno that this is the day for a linkdump, in which the links that couldn't be squeezed into the week's newsletter editions get their own showcase. Here's the previous 23 linkdumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Start your weekend with some child's play! Ada & Zangemann is a picture book by Matthias Kirschner and Sandra Brandstätter of Free Software Foundation Europe, telling the story of a greedy inventor who ensnares a town with his proprietary, remote-brickable gadgets, and Ada, his nemesis, a young girl who reverse engineers them and lets their users seize the means of computation:

https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann/index.en.html

Ada & Zangemann is open access – you can share it, adapt it, and sell it as you see fit – and has been translated into several languages. Now, there's a cartoon version, an animated adaptation that is likewise open access, with digital assets for your remixing pleasure:

https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann//movie

Figuring out how to talk to kids about important subjects is a clarifying exercise. Back in the glory days of SNL, Eddie Murphy lampooned Fred "Mr" Rogers style of talking to kids, and it was indeed very funny:

https://snl.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Robinson

But Mr Rogers' rhetorical style wasn't as simple as "talk slowly and use small words" – the "Fredish" dialect that Mr Rogers created was thoughtful, empathic, inclusive, and very effective:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/09/the-nine-rules-of-freddish-the-positive-inclusive-empathic-language-of-mr-rogers/

Lots of writers have used the sing-songy fairytale style of children's stories to make serious political points (see, e.g. Animal Farm). My own attempt at this was my 2011 short story "The Brave Little Toaster," for MIT Tech Review's annual sf series. If the title sounds familiar, that's because I nicked it from Tom Disch's tale of the same name, as part of my series of stolen title stories:

https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/

My Toaster story is a tale of IoT gone wild, in which the nightmare of a world of "smart" devices that exert control over their owners is shown to be a nightmare. A work colleague sent me this adaptation of the story as part of an English textbook, with lots of worksheet-style exercises. I'd never seen this before, and it's very fun:

http://ourenglishclass.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/09/bravetoaster.pdf

If you like my "Brave Little Toaster," you'll likely enjoy my novella "Unauthorized Bread," which appears in my 2019 collection Radicalized and is currently being adapted as a middle-grades graphic novel by Blue Delliquanti for Firstsecond:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Childlike parables have their place, but just because something fits in a "just so" story, that doesn't make it true. Cryptocurrency weirdos desperately need to learn this lesson. The foundation of cryptocurrency is a fairytale about the origin of money, a mythological marketplace in which freely trading individuals who struggled to find a "confluence of needs." If you wanted to trade one third of your cow for two and a half of my chickens, how could we complete the transaction?

In the "money story" fairy tale, we spontaneously decided that we would use gold, for a bunch of nonsensical reasons that don't bear even cursory scrutiny. And so coin money sprang into existence, and we all merrily traded our gold with one another until a wicked government came and stole our gold with (cue scary voice) taaaaaaxes.

There is zero evidence for this. It's literally a fairy tale. There is a rich history of where money came from, and the answer, in short is, governments created it through taxes, and money doesn't exist without taxation:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

The money story is a lie, and it's a consequential one. The belief that money arises spontaneously out of the needs of freely trading people who voluntarily accept an arbitrary token as a store of value, unit of account, and unit of exchange (coupled with a childish, reactionary aversion to taxation) inspired cryptocurrency, and with it, the scams that allowed unscrupulous huxters to steal billions from everyday people who trusted Matt Damon, Spike Lee and Larry David when they told them that cryptocurrency was a sure path to financial security:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

It turns out that private money, far from being a tool of liberation, is rather just a dismal tool for ripping off the unsuspecting, and that goes double for crypto, where complexity can be weaponized by swindlers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/

We don't hear nearly as much about crypto these days – many of the pump-and-dump set have moved on to pitching AI stock – but there's still billions tied up in the scam, and new shitcoins are still being minted at speed. The FBI actually created a sting operation to expose the dirtiness of the crypto "ecosystem":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/10/24267098/fbi-coin-crypto-token-nexgenai-sec-doj-fraud-investigation

They found that the exchanges, "market makers" and other seemingly rock-ribbed institutions where suckers are enticed to buy, sell, track and price cryptos are classic Big Store cons:

http://www.amyreading.com/the-9-stages-of-the-big-con.html

When you, the unsuspecting retail investor, enter one of these mirror-palaces, you are the only audience member in a play that everyone else is in on. Those vigorous trades that see the shitcoin you're being hustled with skyrocketing in value? They're "wash trades," where insiders buy and sell the same asset to one another, without real money ever changing hands, just to create the appearance of a rapidly appreciating asset that you had best get in on before you are priced out of the market.

This scam is as old as con games themselves and, as with other scams- S&Ls, Enron, subprime – the con artists have parlayed their winnings into social respectability and are now flushing them into the political system, to punish lawmakers who threaten their ability to rip off you and your neighbors. A massive, terrifying investigative story in The New Yorker shows how crypto billionaires stole the Democratic nomination from Katie Porter, one of the most effective anti-scam lawmakers in recent history:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster

Big Tech – like every corrupt cartel in history – is desperate to conjure a kleptocracy into existence, whose officials they can corrupt in order to keep the machine going until they've maximized their gains and achieved escape velocity from consequences.

No surprise, then, that tech companies have adopted the same spin tactics that sowed doubt about the tobacco-cancer link, in order to keep the US from updating its anemic privacy laws. The last time Congress gave us a new consumer privacy law was 1988, when they banned video store clerks from disclosing our VHS rental history to newspapers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

By preventing confining privacy law to the VCR era, Big Tech has been able to plunder our data with impunity – aided by cops and spies who love the fact that there's a source of cheap, off-the-books, warrantless surveillance data that would be illegal for them to collect.

Writing for Tech Policy Press, the Norcal ACLU's Jake Snow connects the tobacco industry fight over "pre-emption" to the modern fight over privacy laws:

https://www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-is-trying-to-burn-privacy-to-the-ground-and-theyre-using-big-tobaccos-strategy-to-do-it/

In the 1990s, Big Tobacco went to war against state anti-smoking laws, arguing that the federal government had the right – nay, the duty – to create a "harmonized" national system of smoking laws that would preempt state laws. Strangely, politicians who love "states' rights" when it comes to banning abortion, tax-base erosion and "right to work" anti-union laws suddenly discovered federal religion when their campaign donors from the Cancer-Industrial Complex decided that states shouldn't use those rights to limit smoking.

This is exactly the tack that Big Tech has taken on privacy, arguing that any update to federal privacy law should abolish muscular state-level laws, like Illinois's best-in-class biometric privacy rules, or California's CPPA.

Like Big Tobacco, Big Tech has "funded front groups, hired an armada of lobbyists, donated millions to campaigns, and opened a firehose of lobbying money," with the goal of replacing "real privacy laws with fake industry alternatives as ineffective as non-smoking sections."

Whether it's understanding the origin of money or the Big Tobacco playbook, knowing history can protect you from all kinds of predatory behavior. But history isn't merely a sword and shield, it's also just a delight. Internet pioneer Ethan Zuckerman is road-tripping around America, and in August, he got to Columbus, IN, home to some of the country's most beautiful and important architectural treasures:

https://ethanzuckerman.com/2024/08/29/road-trip-the-company-town-and-the-corn-fields/

The buildings – clustered in within a few, walkable blocks – are the legacy of the diesel engine manufacturing titan Cummins, whose postwar president J Irwin Miller used the company's wartime profits to commission a string of gorgeous structures from starchitects like the Saarinens, IM Pei, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier, Harry Weese, César Pelli, Gunnar Birkerts, and Skidmore. I had no idea about any of this, and now I want to visit Columbus!

I'm planning a book tour right now (for my next novel, Picks and Shovels, which is out in February) and there's a little wiggle-room in the midwestern part of the tour. There's a possibility that I'll end up in the vicinity, and if that happens, I'm definitely gonna find time for a little detour!



A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrago Monsanto stole patented wheat from Indian farmers https://www.gmwatch.org/en/news/archive/2004/7403-monsantos-indian-wheat-patent-withdrawn-in-europe-4102004

#15yrsago Meet the 42 lucky people who got to see the secret copyright treaty https://www.keionline.org/39045

#15yrsago Airlines that charge fees lost more money than airlines that didn’t https://joe.biztravelife.com/09/042309.html

#15yrsago EFF comes to the rescue of Texas Instruments calculator hackers https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/10/13

#10yrsago How state anti-choice laws let judges humiliate vulnerable teens https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/teen-abortion-judicial-bypass-parental-notification/

#10yrsago One weird legal trick that makes patent trolls cry https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/13/one-weird-legal-trick-that-makes-patent-trolls-cry/

#10yrsago Hong Kong’s pro-democracy websites riddled with malware https://www.volexity.com/blog/2014/10/09/democracy-in-hong-kong-under-attack/

#1yrago Microsoft put their tax-evasion in writing and now they owe $29 billion https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/13/pour-encoragez-les-autres/#micros-tilde-one


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.



A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Super Punch (https://www.superpunch.net/), John Naughton (https://memex.naughtons.org/), Hayley Tsukayama (https://www.hayleytsukayama.com/), Dave Maass (https://twitter.com/maassive).

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Friday's progress: 768 words (63193 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/


This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.


How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Read the whole story
cjheinz
2 days ago
reply
I’m just about finish w my rant on Crypto, definitely need to link to this.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
Share this story
Delete

Pluralistic: Lina Khan's future is the future of the Democratic Party – and America (11 Oct 2024)

1 Comment and 2 Shares


Today's links



The hindquarters of a bucking mule in Democratic Party livery; flying through the air behind them is a distressed-looking millionaire type in tophat and monocle, evidently kicked by the mule's rearmost hoof, which glitters with radiating light. The millionaire type is on a collision course with Uncle Sam, dresses as an old-timey cop and brandishing a billyclub. On his breast is the emblem of the Federal Trade Commission. Behind the scene is a halftones WPA poster depicting the mountains and valleys of Montana.

Lina Khan's future is the future of the Democratic Party – and America (permalink)

On the one hand, the anti-monopoly movement has a future no matter who wins the 2024 election – that's true even if Kamala Harris wins but heeds the calls from billionaire donors to fire Lina Khan and her fellow trustbusters.

In part, that's because US antitrust laws have broad "private rights of action" that allow individuals and companies to sue one another for monopolistic conduct, even if top government officials are turning a blind eye. It's true that from the Reagan era to the Biden era, these private suits were few and far between, and the cases that were brought often died in a federal courtroom. But the past four years has seen a resurgence of antitrust rage that runs from left to right, and from individuals to the C-suites of big companies, driving a wave of private cases that are prevailing in the courts, upending the pro-monopoly precedents that billionaires procured by offering free "continuing education" antitrust training to 40% of the Federal judiciary:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

It's amazing to see the DoJ racking up huge wins against Google's monopolistic conduct, sure, but first blood went to Epic, who won a historic victory over Google in federal court six months before the DoJ's win, which led to the court ordering Google to open up its app store:

https://www.theverge.com/policy/2024/10/7/24243316/epic-google-permanent-injunction-ruling-third-party-stores

Google's 30% App Tax is a giant drag on all kinds of sectors, as is its veto over which software Android users get to see, so Epic's win is going to dramatically alter the situation for all kinds of activities, from beleaguered indie game devs:

https://antiidlereborn.com/news/

To the entire news sector:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Private antitrust cases have attracted some very surprising plaintiffs, like Michael Jordan, whose long policy of apoliticism crumbled once he bought a NASCAR team and lived through the monopoly abuses of sports leagues as an owner, not a player:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/michael-jordan-anti-monopolist

A much weirder and more unlikely antitrust plaintiff than Michael Jordan is Google, the perennial antitrust defendant. Google has brought a complaint against Microsoft in the EU, based on Microsoft's extremely ugly monopolistic cloud business:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-files-complaint-eu-over-microsoft-cloud-practices-2024-09-25/

Google's choice of venue here highlights another reason to think that the antitrust surge will continue irrespective of US politics: antitrust is global. Antitrust fervor has seized governments from the UK to the EU to South Korea to Japan. All of those countries have extremely similar antitrust laws, because they all had their statute books overhauled by US technocrats as part of the Marshall Plan, so they have the same statutory tools as the American trustbusters who dismantled Standard Oil and AT&T, and who are making ready to shatter Google into several competing businesses:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/8/24265832/google-search-antitrust-remedies-framework-android-chrome-play

Antitrust fever has spread to Canada, Australia, and even China, where the Cyberspace Directive bans Chinese tech giants from breaking interoperability to freeze out Chinese startups. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the cost of 40 years of pro-monopoly can't be ignored. Monopolies make the whole world more brittle, even as the cost of that brittleness mounts. It's hard to pretend monopolies are fine when a single hurricane can wipe out the entire country's supply of IV fluid – again:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-11-cant-believe-im-writing-about-iv-fluid-again/

What's more, the conduct of global monopolists is the same in every country where they have taken hold, which means that trustbusters in the EU can use the UK Digital Markets Unit's report on the mobile app market as a roadmap for their enforcement actions against Apple:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63f61bc0d3bf7f62e8c34a02/Mobile_Ecosystems_Final_Report_amended_2.pdf

And then the South Korean and Japanese trustbusters can translate the court documents from the EU's enforcement action and use them to score victories over Apple in their own courts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

So on the one hand, the trustbusting wave will continue erode the foundations of global monopolies, no matter what happens after this election. But on the other hand, if Harris wins and then fires Biden's top trustbusters to appease her billionaire donors, things are going to get ugly.

A new, excellent long-form Bloomberg article by Josh Eidelson and Max Chafkin gives a sense of the battle raging just below the surface of the Democratic Power, built around a superb interview with Khan herself:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-09/lina-khan-on-a-second-ftc-term-ai-price-gouging-data-privacy

The article begins with a litany of tech billionaires who've gone an all-out, public assault on Khan's leadership – billionaires who stand to personally lose hundreds of millions of dollars from her agency's principled, vital antitrust work, but who cloak their objection to Khan in rhetoric about defending the American economy. In public, some of these billionaires are icily polite, but many of them degenerate into frothing, toddler-grade name-calling, like IAB's Barry Diller, who called her a "dope" and Musk lickspittle Jason Calacanis, who called her an all-caps COMMUNIST and a LUNATIC.

The overall vibe from these wreckers? "How dare the FTC do things?!"

And you know, they have a point. For decades, the FTC was – in the quoted words of Tim Wu – "a very hardworking agency that did nothing." This was the period when the FTC targeted low-level scammers while turning a blind eye to the monsters that were devouring the US economy. In part, that was because the FTC had been starved of budget, trapping them in a cycle of racking up easy, largely pointless "wins" against penny-ante grifters to justify their existence, but never to the extent that Congress would apportion them the funds to tackle the really serious cases (if this sounds familiar, it's also the what happened during the long period when the IRS chased middle class taxpayers over minor filing errors, while ignoring the billionaires and giant corporations that engaged in 7- and 8-figure tax scams).

But the FTC wasn't merely underfunded: it was timid. The FTC has extremely broad enforcement and rulemaking powers, which most sat dormant during the neoliberal era:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The Biden administration didn't merely increase the FTC's funding: in choosing Khan to helm the organization, they brought onboard a skilled technician, who was both well-versed in the extensive but unused powers of the agency and determined to use them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

But Khan's didn't just rely on technical chops and resources to begin the de-olicharchification of the US economy: she built a three-legged stool, whose third leg is narrative. Khan's signature is her in-person and remote "listening tours," where workers who've been harmed by corporate power get to tell their stories. Bloomberg recounts the story of Deborah Brantley, who was sexually harassed and threatened by her bosses at Kavasutra North Palm Beach. Brantley's bosses touched her inappropriately and "joked" about drugging her and raping her so she "won’t be such a bitch and then maybe people would like you more."

When Brantley finally quit and took a job bartending at a different business, Kavasutra sued her over her noncompete clause, alleging an "irreparable injury" sustained by having one of their former employees working at another business, seeking damages and fees.

The vast majority of the 30 million American workers who labor under noncompetes are like Brantley, low-waged service workers, especially at fast-food restaurants (so Wendy's franchisees can stop minimum wage cashiers from earning $0.25/hour more flipping burgers at a nearby McDonald's). The donor-class indenturers who defend noncompetes claim that noncompetes are necessary to protect "innovative" businesses from losing their "IP." But of course, the one state where no workers are subject to noncompetes is California, which bans them outright – the state that is also home to Silicon Valley, an IP-heave industry that the same billionaires laud for its innovations.

After that listening tour, Khan's FTC banned noncompetes nationwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

Only to have a federal judge in Texas throw out their ban, a move that will see $300b/year transfered from workers to shareholders, and block the formation of 8,500 new US businesses every year:

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18376/federal-judge-tosses-ftc-noncompetes-ban

Notwithstanding court victories like Epic v Google and DoJ v Google, America's oligarchs have the courts on their side, thanks to decades of court-packing planned by the Federalist Society and executed by Senate Republicans and Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump. Khan understands this; she told Bloomberg that she's a "close student" of the tactics Reagan used to transform American society, admiring his effectiveness while hating his results. Like other transformative presidents, good and bad, Reagan had to fight the judiciary and entrenched institutions (as did FDR and Lincoln). Erasing Reagan's legacy is a long-term project, a battle of inches that will involve mustering broad political support for the cause of a freer, more equal America.

Neither Biden nor Khan are responsible for the groundswell of US – and global – movement to euthanize our rentier overlords. This is a moment whose time has come; a fact demonstrated by the tens of thousands of working Americans who filled the FTC's noncompete docket with outraged comments. People understand that corporate looters – not "the economy" or "the forces of history" – are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble.

Like the billionaires publicly demanding that Harris fire Khan, private equity bosses can't stop making tone-deaf, guillotine-conjuring pronouncements about their own virtue and the righteousness of their businesses. They don't just want to destroy the world – they want to be praised for it:

  • "Private equity’s been a great thing for America" -Stephen Pagliuca, co-chairman of Bain Capital;

  • "We are taught to judge the success of a society by how it deals with the least able, most vulnerable members of that society. Shouldn’t we judge a society by how they treat the most successful? Do we vilify, tax, expropriate and condemn those who have succeeded, or do we celebrate economic success as the engine that propels our society toward greater collective well-being?" -Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo

  • "Achieve life-changing money and power," -Sachin Khajuria, former partner at Apollo

Meanwhile, the "buy, strip and flip" model continues to chew its way through America. When PE buys up all the treatment centers for kids with behavioral problems, they hack away at staffing and oversight, turning them into nightmares where kids are routinely abused, raped and murdered:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/they-told-me-it-was-going-be-good-place-allega-tions-n987176

When PE buys up nursing homes, the same thing happens, with elderly residents left to sit in their own excrement and then die:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/24/nursing-homes-private-equity-fraud-00132001

Writing in The Guardian, Alex Blasdel lays out the case for private equity as a kind of virus that infects economies, parasitically draining them of not just the capacity to provide goods and services, but also of the ability to govern themselves, as politicians and regulators are captured by the unfathomable sums that PE flushes into the political process:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-burn-is-private-equity-out-of-control

Now, the average worker who's just lost their job may not understand "divi recaps" or "2-and-20" or "carried interest tax loopholes," but they do understand that something is deeply rotten in the world today.

What happens to that understanding is a matter of politics. The Republicans – firmly affiliated with, and beloved of, the wreckers – have chosen an easy path to capitalizing on the rising rage. All they need to do is convince the public that the system is irredeemably corrupt and that the government can't possibly fix anything (hence Reagan's asinine "joke": "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help'").

This is a very canny strategy. If you are the party of "governments are intrinsically corrupt and incompetent," then governing corruptly and incompetently proves your point. The GOP strategy is to create a nation of enraged nihilists who don't even imagine that the government could do something to hold their bosses to account – not for labor abuses, not for pollution, not for wage theft or bribery.

The fact that successive neoliberal governments – including Democratic administrations – acted time and again to bear out this hypothesis makes it easy for this kind of nihilism to take hold.

Far-right conspiracies about pharma bosses colluding with corrupt FDA officials to poison us with vaccines for profit owe their success to the lived experience of millions of Americans who lost loved ones to a conspiracy between pharma bosses and corrupt officials to poison us with opioids.

Unhinged beliefs that "they" caused the hurricanes tearing through Florida and Georgia and that Kamala Harris is capping compensation to people who lost their homes are only credible because of murderous Republican fumble during Katrina; and the larcenous collusion of Democrats to help banks steal Americans' homes during the foreclosure crisis, when Obama took Tim Geithner's advice to "foam the runway" with the mortgages of everyday Americans who'd been cheated by their banks:

https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/this_man_made_millions_suffer_tim_geithners_sorry_legacy_on_housing/

If Harris gives in to billionaire donors and fires Khan and her fellow trustbusters, paving the way for more looting and scamming, the result will be more nihilism, which is to say, more electoral victories for the GOP. The "government can't do anything" party already exists. There are no votes to be gained by billing yourself as the "we also think governments can't do anything" party.

In other words, a world where Khan doesn't run the FTC is a world where antitrust continues to gain ground, but without taking Democrats with it. It's a world where nihilism wins.

There's factions of the Democratic Party who understand this. AOC warned party leaders that, "Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl":

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1844034727935988155

And Bernie Sanders called her "the best FTC Chair in modern history":

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1843733298960576652

In other words: Lina Khan as a posse.


Hey look at this (permalink)



A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Entertainment companies bent on wholesale slaughter of Betamax, puppies https://web.archive.org/web/20041010092552/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001987.php

#15yrsago What’s wrong with Search Engine Optimization http://https://powazek.com/posts/2090

#15yrsago Gag order blocks Guardian from reporting on Parliament https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/oct/12/guardian-gagged-from-reporting-parliament

#15yrsago Copyright vs. folk music https://web.archive.org/web/20091016014623/https://freemusicarchive.org/member/stevenarntson/blog/The_Absent_Second_An_Explanation

#15yrsago xkcd: volume 0 https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/12/xkcd-volume-0/

#10yrsago Chinese Supreme Court makes service providers liable for “human flesh search engine” https://archive.shine.cn/national/Rules-to-protect-personal-rights-online/shdaily.shtml

#10yrsago NSA agents may have infiltrated the global communications industry https://web.archive.org/web/20141011080630/https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/10/core-secrets/

#10yrsago Librarians on the vanguard of the anti-surveillance movement https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/10/03/librarians-wont-stay-quiet-about-government-surveillance/

#5yrsago AT&T hikes business customers’ bills by up to 7%, charging them to recoup its own property taxes https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/att-raises-prices-7-by-making-its-customers-pay-atts-property-taxes/

#5yrsago Google continues to funnel vast sums to notorious climate deniers https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/11/google-contributions-climate-change-deniers

#5yrsago Mayor accused of failing to fullfil road maintenance promises is dragged through the streets by angry voters https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49984987

#5yrsago CBC sues Canada’s Conservative Party for using short debate clips in campaign materials https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2019/10/cbc-sues-the-conservative-party-of-canada-for-copyright-infringement-citing-campaign-video-posting-debate-excerpts-on-twitter/


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.



A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 758 words (62424 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/


This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.


How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Read the whole story
cjheinz
3 days ago
reply
#MustRead
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
Share this story
Delete

Why Kamala Harris Must Secure the Endorsement of Sabnock, the Great Marquis of Hell

1 Comment

With America more politically polarized than any time since the Civil War, the most important issue facing the next president is figuring out how to heal our divided nation. Vice President Harris is undoubtedly the candidate most likely to bring our country together, but she will need to build a bipartisan coalition to do so. In September, the Harris-Waltz ticket earned a crucial new supporter: former Vice President Dick Cheney. While Cheney’s endorsement goes a long way in helping Democrats win over Halliburton diehards and torture connoisseurs, there is one endorsement that will almost certainly put her over the top: that of the demon Sabnock, the Great Marquis of Hell.

Despite being a staunch Republican, Sabnock, according to reports of recent proclamations made to his faithful army of cursed souls, appears to be wavering in his support for the party, and could be made to understand the unique threat to democracy that Donald Trump presents. With the help of the fifty legions at Sabnock’s command, Kamala Harris would be assured victory, lest the people of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia suffer the consequences for a thousand lifetimes. These legions of demons can assist in reigning hellfire upon those who oppose Kamala Harris, filling their wounds with worms and making them regret for eternity their foolish ways, all in the name of preserving democracy.

While the vice president and the Great Marquis of Hell do not see eye-to-eye on every issue (Harris, for instance, supports a woman’s right to choose while Sabnock wishes to incinerate all women and enslave their souls), they are completely aligned on other issues, such as immigration and foreign policy. Seeing Sabnock, with his body of a man and head of a lion, next to Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz on the campaign trail, would help inspire the nation to finally come together and heal. Their act of unity would demonstrate to the American people that regardless of race, sex, or creed, it is our basic decency as human beings and/or cursed angels damned by God that unites us.

Sabnock’s presence would undoubtedly assist Democrats in projecting strength and gravitas and could also help them project Kamala Harris’s voice through the mouths of every fly within a five-thousand-mile radius. This unlikely coalition, however, would not only benefit Harris and her campaign, but with his extensive military and ruling experience, a cabinet seat would almost certainly be on the table for Sabnock. Come January, we could potentially see the first woman sworn in as president, and the twenty-ninth demon sworn in as secretary of defense.

While Gallup polling shows that 72 percent of Democrats support a Medicare-for-All-style government-run health plan, and more than half of all Americans (including 83 percent of Dems) support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, preliminary polling indicates that 100 percent of mortals will bow before the awesome power of Sabnock or burn in both this world and the next. This endorsement will likely require some compromise from Harris and her staff as they work to make their party’s platform amenable to the nobleman from Hell. For instance, Sabnock’s legions will need to be fed the souls of the innocent, something Harris’s team should be able to accommodate, but he is also vehemently opposed to fracking, which he views as theft from the underworld, and that change may be trickier for many of Harris’s donors to stomach.

Left-wing critics of Harris have noted the absence of abolishing the death penalty from the Democratic party platform for the first time in a decade. This change, detractors fail to realize, is due to Harris’s awareness that death is not the end of punishment or suffering, and that there are larger gains to be won if we work to find compromise with the demons of the afterlife. While naive voters rally in the streets and threaten to withhold their vote until the Democrats adapt a more humane foreign policy strategy, Vice President Harris must continue to tune out the noise and focus on the important work of courting the support of Hell’s most fearsome beasts.

Read the whole story
cjheinz
4 days ago
reply
Somehow, the humor at this site is normally not particularly in my wheelhouse. But this is funny, thanks!
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
Share this story
Delete

Interview with Paul Krugman: Economic Geography and Mysteries of Productivity

1 Comment

Cardiff Garcia of the Economic Innovation Group interviews Paul Krugman at The New Bazaar website (October 9, 2024). The interview has a number of points of interest. Here are two themes that caught my eye.

The study of “economic geography” focuses on why economics activity may tend to cluster, or to spread out, or to happen in certain locations. The general theory is that there are “agglomeration economies,” which refers to the idea that clusters of certain kinds of firms, workers, and suppliers benefit from being close together, perhaps with clusters of consumers too. But on the other side, clusters of economic activity can also lead to congestion, crime, even disease. Thus, there is a push and pull of the clustering of economic activity over time. In the last few decades, should improved information and communications technology lead economic activity to spread out, or to become more centralized? Krugman notes:

I mean the idea that agglomeration economies of one form or another exist is obviously not new … There’s forces pulling things together and forces pulling them apart. And the balance can tip one way or another. In fact, over the past 200 years, it has tipped first one way, then the other, then back again.

And the modern forms of agglomeration are different from the ones that prevailed in the 19th century. I like to say that the models that I was writing down 30 years ago had this kind of steampunk feel. They all kind of were very much focused on manufacturing and on industrial clusters, and we all lavished attention on these great stories — like the detachable collar and cuff industry of Troy, New York, and that sort of thing. And which mostly have gone away in the United States, although not totally — they do exist to some extent even in manufacturing, but these days if you really want to find old style industrial clusters, you go to China.

So if you actually look at — there’s a variety of measures — but basically, in the United States, there was a lot of regional convergence, convergence in incomes, convergence in basically regions becoming more similar, from the 1920s up until about 1980. Then in 1980, they started pulling apart again, and you started to see metropolitan areas with highly educated workforces pulling in even more educated people, pulling in even more of the information economy — and stranding regions that didn’t have those preconditions. … [F]for prep for a future conference, I’ve been looking at just kind of within New York State, and looking at greater Buffalo versus greater New York City. Buffalo was not all that poor or backward compared to New York City in 1980, and now it’s vastly poorer. …

So we’re back in a world where we have these extremely localized clusters. And modern communication technologies, Zoom, work from home, they make it possible to do some things without being in the place, but they’re not a full substitute. And in a rich society other things tend to matter. Particularly for high skill, high pay workers, you need amenities. High tech workers are not going to move to someplace in the middle of the country, even if they have excellent internet access, because where are the good restaurants? Where are the live concerts? So in some ways the fact that we’re rich enough that people can make decisions on that basis matter. So I think we’re in some ways back to the kind of unequalizing development that we had in the late 19th century

While it’s agreed (among economists) that productivity growth is essential to growth of the standard of living, the exact recipe for sustained productivity growth remains elusive. Indeed, standard calculations of productivity are carried out by trying to measure what part of overall output growth can be accounted for by changes in hours worked, skill level of workers, and capital investment–and then “productivity” is measured as the leftover or residual amount of output growth that could not be explained by the other factors. Because the economist Robert Solow did some of the classic work in this area, the productivity residual is sometime called the “Solow residual.” Here’s Krugman on the mystery that is productivity growth:

But if you look at a chart of U.S. potential GDP growth over the past 50 years — we had some pretty big political swings in there, big changes in tax policy. If you didn’t know that there have been changes of administration, changes in tax policy, you would never guess. It’s pretty much just a flat line. The reason is that economic growth is largely driven by the Solow [productivity] Residual. And who knows how to make that change very much.

If someone says “I have a policy that could raise potential GDP growth by a quarter of a percentage point,” I’d say, “okay, I could possibly believe that, show me the details.” If somebody says they could raise it by one percentage point, I think that’s crazy. Nobody knows how to do that.

My favorite Bob Solow quote, although there are so many of his … he was actually talking about Britain lagging behind post World War II, but it applies to lots of things, he said, “every attempt to explain this ends up in a blaze of amateur sociology.” That, in the end, we really just don’t know very much about why countries have different rates of economic growth. We still don’t know why productivity slowed down in the early ’70s. We kind of know why it had a bump for a while around IT [information technology], mid ’90s to mid 2000s. But ultimately, talking about innovations, there’s a big mystery now. It feels like we’ve had a lot of technological change these past 16, 17 years, and yet, if we believe our numbers, which maybe we shouldn’t, but if we believe our numbers, total factor productivity growth has been really pretty lousy for that whole period.

The post Interview with Paul Krugman: Economic Geography and Mysteries of Productivity first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Read the whole story
cjheinz
4 days ago
reply
#Krugman
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories