Month: November 2019 Page 2 of 3

Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket, provided by Seth Borenstein from scriptsandscriptors.wordpress.com.

By Eric Anderson

The reason fake news exists is not complicated. The majority of journalists don’t follow a professional ethical code. It’s not that they don’t have an ethical code. It’s that they – or more likely their paymasters — don’t want to be held accountable for breaking it.

Four basic elements comprise the Society of Professional Journalism’s (SPJ) voluntary code of ethics: (1) seek truth and report it; (2) minimize harm; (3) act independently, and; (4) be accountable. But because there aren’t any penalties for not following the code, journalists are perfectly free to: (1) report lies; (2) maximize harm inflicted upon their paymasters enemies, for; (3) a corporate paycheck upon which they are absolutely dependent, and; (4) be left completely unaccountable for the damage done to society. What? You didn’t swoon?

Of course you didn’t. Because, the public already knows this to be the norm practiced by the large majority of “professional” journalists today — as demonstrated by the 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation Survey on Trust, Media, and Democracy. The survey found that an overwhelming majority of Americans (84 percent) believe it is harder to be well informed and to determine which news is accurate. The same percentage also increasingly perceives journalists to be biased and they struggle to identify objective news sources. And again, hold on to the table: The survey concludes that “[a]mid the changing informational landscape, media trust in the U.S. has been eroding, making it harder for the news media to fulfill their democratic responsibilities of informing the public and holding government leaders accountable.”

Given such a trenchant indictment, and amid the obviously changing informational landscape, one might think the SPJ would be inclined toward some out-of-the-box thinking in an effort to address this catastrophic lack of public trust. Wrong! Just witness the puerile arguments regarding the reasons the SPJ doesn’t enforce their Code of Ethics:

• The SPJ thinks that encouraging fellow journalists and the public to hold news reports and commentary up to ethical scrutiny is the most effective antidote to questionable reporting — not quasi-judicial proceedings;
• And that establishing a quasi-judicial system, such as those found among other professions, would inevitably lead to actions by governments, thereby restricting protected speech;
• And that protected speech is vulnerable and placed in jeopardy whenever it’s allowed to be confused with, or limited by, the professional responsibility to act ethically;
• And that professional enforcement of ethics for news reporting would require more detailed provisions and case law that are far beyond their resources to provide, even if desirable, because no set of rules, however detailed, could possibly apply to all the nuances and ambiguities of legitimate expression;

These are nothing more than excuses as to why the SPJ advocates no action be taken to reform journalism in the modern age. Which begs the question: What action has the SPJ taken?

Well, it seems the SPJ has “entered into a partnership with Bloomberg to teach ethics to professionals.” Fox? Meet henhouse.

And, given that the hens are allowing the fox to rule the roost, it would be remiss to not ask another question: Can we really, in good faith, allow journalists to call themselves professionals?

I’m pretty sure the noted sociologist Eliot Freidson would not. Freidson posited five elements that define a professional:

(1) Adherence to an ideology that asserts a greater commitment to doing good work than to economic gain and to the quality rather than the economic efficiency of work

(2) Performs specialized work grounded in a body of theoretically-based, discretionary knowledge and skill that is accordingly given special status

(3) Possesses exclusive jurisdiction in a particular division of labor created and controlled by occupational negotiation

(4) Occupies a sheltered position that is based on qualifying credentials created by the occupation

(5) Has completed a formal training program that produces qualifying credentials, which are controlled by the occupation and associated with higher education

With good reason, all five factors apply to what are traditionally called the “white collar professions.” Because when doctors lie, people die — witness the opioid epidemic. When lawyers lie, people die. Don’t believe me? Do a quick web search of “dishonest prosecutor death penalty.” When engineers lie, people die –witness Boeing. In short, when professionals that broker in public trust tell lies, people needlessly die — witness Judith Miller. And witness, too, the utter lack of accountability that followed her comeback.

Fortunately, the factors outlined above also contain the cure to the changing informational landscape’s problem with fake news. Journalists can create sheltered positions that are based on qualifying credentials created by the occupation, combined with a formal training program that produces qualifying credentials that are controlled by the occupation and associated with higher education. Which, in turn, would result in truly professional journalists that assert greater commitment to doing good work than to economic gain, and to the quality rather than the economic efficiency of their work.

And hear the SPJ protest: Requiring the establishment of a quasi-judicial system, such as those found among other professions, would inevitably lead to actions by governments, thereby restricting protected speech! It might. But it doesn’t have to.

Coming full circle, we arrive back at the point where the SPJ has utterly failed to think outside the box.

Licensure does not need to be required in order to be effective. It can be voluntary, because the U.S. Constitution also enshrines another fundamental right – the right to enter into and be bound by contract. Just think, for a moment, the profound trust that would be instilled among the public for the journalists who were willing to put their necks on the line – for the truth.

Thus, the answer to the fake news problem can be solved as easily as it was created. A few brave and principled journalists just need to form a new organization that allows them to submit to licensing requirements, wherein their peers can sanction and revoke licensure like every other “professional” organization in the US that brokers in public trust. And for that, one can only hope their efforts will be applauded and secured throughout the remaining history of what once was, and still can be, a noble profession.

Until that time, journalism deserves every ounce of shame thrown upon its practice.

Hope Is Bullshit

By Ian Welsh

On November 18, 2019

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by Shepard Fairey

I am unintersted in “hope.”

Or as we called it in the Obama bullshit years, Hopium.

Hope is not a plan. Hope is bullshit.

Luck is real, but you don’t count on luck other than in the sense that the harder you work, and the more things you do, the more likely you are to “get lucky.” But luck is usually the odds coming in, and bad luck is as real as good.

In term of climate change, there is no reason for hope. It’s going to be bad and, in almost all cases, signature events are happening sooner than expected: We’re losing Greenlandian, Arctic, and Antarctic ice sooner than expected. We’re getting artic methane releases 70 years ahead of schedule. Every time an event comes in, it’s sooner or worse than the models predicted.

This is because of how systems work when they leave bounds–because they tend to accelerate, we can expect this sort of thing to continue. It’s going to get worse, sooner.

That’s the “luck” we’ve made. We’ve put half the greenhouse gases in human history into the atmosphere in the past 30 years, which is to say, after the time when we knew for a fact we were cutting our own throats.

Obama ran on hope in another sense, and created an economy which did nothing (and worse than nothing) for African Americans and which was shit for somewhere between 80 percent to 95 percent of the population. His signature health care plan was garbage, and in his period the price of various drugs rose to historical heights. He tripled the rate of drone murders over Bush (Trump has ramped them up even further), and so on.

He was human garbage, a man who bailed out bankers and then helped them steal people’s houses with fraudulent paperwork, then had his attorney-general immunize them with fines worth less than what they stole.

But this man is worshiped by many Democrats, because, hey, he was only human garbage, and Trump is a shambling mound of garbage (but has yet, note, to start any new wars, though he’s been happy to keep Obama and Bush’s wars going).

Oh, and because he was black, and that mattered more, to many people, than the fact he was human garbage.

Obama’s done very well since he left office, making lots of speeches and millions of dollars. Bankers have been very grateful and have shown their gratitude–just as they did for Bill Clinton (another mound of garbage, who cut welfare to hurt the weakest in the US, killed Iraqis with his sanctions that included medicines, and instituted judicial “reforms” which swelled America’s prison population while ending financial regulations intended to avoid financial collapses).

None of these people ever intended to do the right thing, and if you listened carefully you knew that. The best you could hope is that they were the lesser evil: a smaller mound of garbage than their opponents.

In the Democratic primaries, there was always a better option and that option was never chosen, because most Democrats are bad people who want Reaganism with a side of “but we don’t really mean it.”

Nothing is going to get better until we, whichever we we belong to, start choosing better leaders, whether presidential, or more local. Those leaders must want to actually do “good.” Yes, good. You know, taking care of the hungry and the sick, and not burying single payer and the public option like Obama did. (Yes, yes he did, and he wound up passing the OCA without Republicans anyways. He made a choice, and his choice was evil.)

Or perhaps taking care of poor people, including blacks. Or not allowing pirates in suits to gouge people on drug prices, or perhaps *gasp* not vastly expanding fracking, which is what Obama did and bragged about, even as he signed the Paris Accords, knowing he had no intention of honoring them.

Nor did virtually anyone else who signed them, of course, and anyone who thought otherwise is either a fool or on the payroll.

Mounds of garbage. Merkel, Blair, Cameron, Trudeau, Harper, your country’s leader, odds are. People who have always wanted to do as much evil as they could, and as little good as they could get away with. (Remember nothing happened to Greece Angela Merkel was not okay with–and all so German banks could be bailed out indirectly. It would have been embarrassing to just blatantly bail them out. So a lot of Greeks died and suffered.)

There is no “hope” as long as our leaders are people like this. None.

Don’t get hooked on hopium.

We need to elect leaders who want to do as much good as they can, and as little evil as possible. Sanders in the US, Corbyn in Britain.

But we don’t want those leaders, not as a whole, do we?

We’ve been offered them, we have a chance to elect them.

But will we?

Because they have plans, and those plans are to do good.

That’s the only hope you’ve got.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 17, 2019

By Tony Wikrent

On November 17, 2019

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by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

Senate Democrats Join GOP to Back ‘Automatic Austerity’ Bill That Would Gut Social Programs, Hamstring Bold Policies [Common Dreams., via Naked Capitalism 11-15-19]

I include this here because the next link directly addresses the persistence of economic austerity as a policy idea, despite it having failed repeatedly, and causing misery for untold millions of people.

A handful of Senate Democrats joined forces with Republicans last week to advance sweeping budget legislation that would establish an “automatic deficit-reduction process” that could trigger trillions of dollars in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and other social programs—and potentially hobble the agenda of the next president.

The Bipartisan Congressional Budget Reform Act (S.2765), authored by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), passed out of the Senate Budget Committee on November 6. The legislation is co-sponsored by five members of the Senate Democratic caucus: Whitehouse, Mark Warner (Va.), Tim Kaine (Va.), Chris Coons (Del.), and Angus King (I-Maine).

Lambert Strether added: “I really can’t think of a worse characterization for austerity proponents than “deficit scold,” though for some reason liberal Democrats like it. “Deficit scolds” are slaves to the ideas of long-dead economists and have caused a lot of suffering and death. They’re vicious sociopaths, not scolds.”Against Economics

David Graeber [New York Review of Books]

This is one of the best indictments of mainstream economic thinking I have seen in years, and I urge a full and attentive reading of it. In the excerpt below, note the role of John Locke, after whom the big Art Pope- and Koch-funded conservative propaganda outfit in North Carolina, the Locke Foundation, is named.

In England, the pattern was set in 1696, just after the creation of the Bank of England, with an argument over wartime inflation between Treasury Secretary William Lowndes, Sir Isaac Newton (then warden of the mint), and the philosopher John Locke. Newton had agreed with the Treasury that silver coins had to be officially devalued to prevent a deflationary collapse; Locke took an extreme monetarist position, arguing that the government should be limited to guaranteeing the value of property (including coins) and that tinkering would confuse investors and defraud creditors. Locke won. The result was deflationary collapse. A sharp tightening of the money supply created an abrupt economic contraction that threw hundreds of thousands out of work and created mass penury, riots, and hunger. The government quickly moved to moderate the policy (first by allowing banks to monetize government war debts in the form of bank notes, and eventually by moving off the silver standard entirely), but in its official rhetoric, Locke’s small-government, pro-creditor, hard-money ideology became the grounds of all further political debate.

According to Skidelsky, the pattern was to repeat itself again and again, in 1797, the 1840s, the 1890s, and, ultimately, the late 1970s and early 1980s, with Thatcher and Reagan’s (in each case brief) adoption of monetarism. Always we see the same sequence of events:

The government adopts hard-money policies as a matter of principle.

Disaster ensues.

The government quietly abandons hard-money policies.

The economy recovers.

Hard-money philosophy nonetheless becomes, or is reinforced as, simple universal common sense.

How was it possible to justify such a remarkable string of failures? Here a lot of the blame, according to Skidelsky, can be laid at the feet of the Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Money as a Democratic Medium: Money, Democracy, and Morality

Conference at Harvard Law School, December 2018 [Youtube, January 31, 2019]

The way we approach money shapes the moral implications that attach to its design and use. If money is a commodity or private trade credit that emanates from decentralized exchange, it might claim democratic legitimacy from its very genealogy. But if money is a matter engineered out of public debt and issued into circulation selectively, it has a very different relationship to democracy, one that raises the moral stakes for its creation and deployment within a community.

The Carnage of Establishment Neoliberal Economics

The Holy-Cow Moment for Subprime Auto Loans; Serious Delinquencies Blow Out

[Wolf Street, , via Naked Capitalism 11-14-19]

More than 100 National Security and Foreign Policy Experts Call on Congress to Tackle Anonymous Shell Companies (letter) (PDF)

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On November 16, 2019

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Use the comments to discuss topic unrelated to recent posts.

It’s Not OK to Think Everything Is OK or Getting Better and Better

By Ian Welsh

On November 13, 2019

Comments

Globe on Fire I’ve discussed the “better-than-ever world” argument before. I find it questionable, for a number of reasons and if that interests you, read the linked article and the articles to which it links.

What I’ve been paying attention to lately is WHO likes and buys into this argument.

They fall into two groups: the first are techies, the second are neoliberals.

We’ll start with neoliberals first. Neoliberals want to claim that everything’s going great so they don’t have to make serious changes. If even the poorest are getting better off rapidly (50K a week, I saw as a recent claim, for improvements in “dire poverty”), then all that is required to the current system are tweaks: It’s working.

More importantly for the neoliberals, if the world is better than ever, the people who have the most don’t have to give anything up–not money, or power, or the way they do things. What they’re doing is basically working, their being rich and powerful isn’t hurting the poor; in fact, it’s lifting the poor up!

So statistics have to show that poor people are getting better off, and if a few show that the poor in parts of the first world aren’t (like certain groups in the US having decreased life expectancy), well that cost has been far outstripped by all the people lifted out of poverty elsewhere and why care more about Americans than people objectively worse off in other countries?

The world order is basically fine. No need to do more than “bend the curve,” as Obama famously said.

Techies have some of the same reasons, especially those who are doing well, like the ones who run Silicon Valley, or who are very well paid. The world is fine, no need to change what’s working.

But there’s something deeper to it for the techies. While neoliberals want to defend neoliberal capitalism–which is why they get offended when one points out that China used mercantalist capitalism to lift people out of poverty. Almost all poverty gains, no matter how you slice the numbers, have been made in China and China DID NOT do what economic orthodoxy says you’re supposed to do.

Techies don’t care about that. Instead they want to defend their legacy and current actions. Forget capitalism, communism, fascism, and all that guff: Really, virtually all the gains of the last 250 years come down to using hydrocarbons to power various engines.

Technological progress is the actual driver of what’s happened. Modern techies identify with the engineers and scientists of the past, especially now that programmers like to call themselves engineers.

Likewise, the computer/internet/telecom revolution which has been driving new industries (I wouldn’t quite say “growth”) since the mid 70s or so is their child, their project. They either worked on it or are still working on it. The world must be doing well because they created it or are creating it, or are maintaining the technology it runs on, the technology that is really responsible for supposed welfare gains.

They believe they are good people, who do good work, and therefore the results of their work must be good.

We all want to believe that the order for which we are responsible, the work we do, and the economics that works to our benefit, is justified, because we want to believe we are good people.

Neoliberals, elites, and techies feel they have created this world. Therefore, this world must be a good one.

Techies also want to think that technology can solve everything, because it’s what they’re good at. And hey, it does demonstrably work. It’s just not clear that it can do everything, or do everything soon enough, since we all will, well, die.

Anyway, the larger point of this is simple: We argue over these things because they are about legitimacy and people’s self-esteems and self-images.

Of course those (like myself) who oppose the current neoliberal order want these figures to be BS. We want to be able to argue that change is urgent, and needed, and that the existing order has failed.

It’s good to understand that, no matter what side you’re on. What do you WANT to believe. Then see if you’re still justified.

Of course, I think I am. This doesn’t mean there’s been no progress, there has. I just think the numbers are wildly over-inflated outside of China, and the progress is unsustainable due to climate change and the impending environmental collapse. I can live like a king if I have a ten million dollar credit card limit, but if I can’t pay it back, eventually that ends.

Also I grew up in the development community. My father worked for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Bangladesh, and had worked before in various other developing countries. I spent time in India, and so on. I listened to development workers talk about what worked and (mostly) what didn’t. There are more cynical (or rather, realistic) groups in the world, but not many.

So there’s always been an off-smell to these numbers to me. I know what works for development (mercantalist policies with the cooperation of the current hegemonic powers, and virtually nothing else, unless you’re a city state) and what doesn’t (anything orthodox development economists tell you to do).

I know who’s been allowed to actually bootstrap up and industrialize (American allies and China–because they bribed American leaders), and who hasn’t (almost everyone else).

And I know something else: If you’re forced off your land into a slum, you make more money, but you’re worse off. The economic and Western obsession with $$$$ as a measure of quality of life is unwise. Even calories (though better) are not great, because for example, when NAFTAs tortilla manufacturers were bought out after NAFTA, their nutritional content plummeted.

So it all smells off, to me.

But even if it didn’t, even if it was all true–that the world was “never better,” radical change is needed because climate change and ecological collapse are on their way, with the leading edge already causing problems. We can’t even keep industrializing the way we have been. If every developing country was allowed to industrialize properly, and we gave them what they needed to do it, we’d just bury ourselves deeper.

The fundamental WAY we have run our economies, both in terms of any type of capitalism (and communism back when, but they’ve been gone for 30 years now, so grow up) and in terms of technology is fucked. Fucked. It cannot continue or we risk civilization collapse. Worse case scenarios are great die-offs which take us down too. Good case scenarios are one or two billion deaths.

No matter what, we are past the point where we aren’t going to be able to change the environment in a way that prevents the climate from being fundamentally warmer and different from the environment and climate which has existed for the entirety of human civilization.

That’s not an economic or technological system which is more or less OK, or producing more or less good results even IF the triumphalists were right about everything.

It requires change, and radical change, if we are to avoid, not disaster (we’ve already had those), but multiple catastrophes of civilization-shaking levels.

It’s not OK to think everything is OK.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Bolivia’s Evo Morales Forced Out of Presidency

By Ian Welsh

On November 11, 2019

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Evo Morales

Well, strictly speaking he resigned, but not only has the military come out against him, his followers’ houses were being firebombed and the guards at the presidential palace left.

“Resign or die” is the fairly-clear message. This is how you force a politician out.

Did he cheat on the election, as he’s been accused of? I don’t know, but I do know that, absent the military turning on him, he’d still be in office.

What we’ll see now is if the violence continues: If there is a right wing “militia” sweep which sees the murder of his supporters, along with rape and torture.

If so, then yeah, it was a right-wing coup.

Morales was virtually the last South American left-wing leader. They’ve almost all been swept from power over the last few years. This is because commodity prices crashed. Their prosperity was based on high commodity prices.

Nonetheless, Morales dropped poverty rates by half, and unemployment by a third. He was unquestionably good for most Bolivians.

However, because these leaders never secured the state’s coercive apparatus, they were relatively easy to get rid of (with the exception of Venezuela and to a lesser extent Peru). For example, the situation in Brazil, wherein Lula was forbidden to run (because they knew he’d win) due to corruption charges, after which the prosecutor who charged him joined the new government.

Left-wing governments need to control key parts of the state apparatus: the military, police, and courts. They also need a press which is at least neutral. If they don’t control these thing, when they lose power it often results in horrible consequences: firebombings, imprisonment, death squads, rape, and torture.

This isn’t a game. The people on the other side are rich, ruthless, and scared, and they will do anything to keep power. They don’t play by the “rules.”

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 10, 2019

By Tony Wikrent

On November 10, 2019

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 10, 2019

by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

Yanis Varoufakis – Capitalism, Democracy and Europe
[Brave New Europe, via Naked Capitalism 11-7-19]

The first two decades after World War II were the Golden Era of capitalism for a very simple reason: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was projected onto the rest of the West under the Bretton Woods system. It was a remarkable, though imperfect, system, a kind of enlightenment without socialism. Structures to restrain financial capital were put into place. Banks could not do as they pleased; that’s why bankers hated the Bretton Woods system. Recall that Roosevelt banned bankers from attending the Bretton Woods conference and subjected them to reserve controls and rules against shifting money across international borders.

The result of the Bretton Woods system was a remarkable reduction in inequality concurrent with steady growth, low unemployment, and next to zero inflation.

Note that this “Golden Era of capitalism” is never discussed in the same way by conservatives and libertarians, because of their ideological hostility to Roosevelt and the New Deal.

The Carnage of Establishment Neoliberal Economics

The World Has Gone Mad and the System Is Broken

Ray Dalio [LinkedIn, via Naked Capitalism 11-6-19]

Money is free for those who are creditworthy because the investors who are giving it to them are willing to get back less than they give. More specifically investors lending to those who are creditworthy will accept very low or negative interest rates and won’t require having their principal paid back for the foreseeable future. They are doing this because they have an enormous amount of money to invest that has been, and continues to be, pushed on them by central banks that are buying financial assets in their futile attempts to push economic activity and inflation up. The reason that this money that is being pushed on investors isn’t pushing growth and inflation much higher is that the investors who are getting it want to invest it rather than spend it. This dynamic is creating a “pushing on a string” dynamic….

At the same time as money is essentially free for those who have money and creditworthiness, it is essentially unavailable to those who don’t have money and creditworthiness, which contributes to the rising wealth, opportunity, and political gaps. Also contributing to these gaps are the technological advances that investors and the entrepreneurs that I previously mentioned are excited by in the ways I described, and that also replace workers with machines. Because the “trickle-down” process of having money at the top trickle down to workers and others by improving their earnings and creditworthiness is not working, the system of making capitalism work well for most people is broken.

This set of circumstances is unsustainable and certainly can no longer be pushed as it has been pushed since 2008. That is why I believe that the world is approaching a big paradigm shift.

Given the pent-up demand to create and build what the world needs to exit the era of fossil fuels, this situation is insane.

Modern Cities Breed Alienation. Insurgent Urbanists Are Pushing Back.