"This whole ideology of ‘government is bad, government is the problem’ has I think provided cover for rich people and rich firms to take advantage of things for their selfish benefit.”
How does it feel to be on your own? Sifting through the rubble, bringing up the dead, reassembling history from below.
Showing posts with label NY Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NY Times. Show all posts
The Plot Against America: Building Out Techno-Fascism
Musk finally leaving the government was a big story this past week. A theme of good riddance prevails in what's left of the credible press, naturally -- so outside his Tech Bros and gamer foot soldiers, anyway-- but in various takes there also appears, and I share, a note of incredulousness.
"The implications of DOGE’s actions for Americans are huge. DOGE operatives are now embedded in the U.S. government, where they are mining Americans’ data to create a master database that can sort and find individuals. Former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper called it “a full-scale redirection of the government’s digital nervous system into the hands of an unelected billionaire.”
Letters from an American Historian
Specifically, an unelected billionaire relentlessly disdainful of any government service, all of which he apparently understands as reducible to standing in line at the DMV, condemning all the wasteful deficit spending by the government. But makes no mention of his own massive tax cuts and his own government contracts in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. Is he leaving because he's finally being driven out for his callous inhumanity and destructive incompetence,* as he should be, or did he just finish his phase of the campaign, a blitzkrieg (which, more or less, appears to be his celebrated business mode of operations; a Nazi military strategy, "move fast and break things"; known in tech business circles as Blitzscaling), leaving the independent departments of the US government in disarray and so ready to be reorganized by his brother in digital arms, Peter Thiel's Palantir; ready to be reorganized into a fascist surveillance state apparatus?
(I know I'm a crazy paranoid with TDS. I hope you're right.)
"The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said."
NY Times on Trump's Big Database
I've always thought that I was for expanding database links across administrative bureaucracies in our communities and government. Hell, one of my first jobs in Seattle was setting up a paradox database system for an energy assistance program at a local non-profit. My own budding techno-optimism going all the way back to the 1980s. To this day it feels backwards when I encounter a lack of such links in the health care system. It came as a humiliating slap in the face when I finally learned after my sister's death that the missing person's reports my family filed in Oregon and Washington, many years before, were completely inaccessible to missing person searches in any of the other 48 states, including California where she ended up. And I was astounded to learn some years ago that there is not only no national database tracking guns and gun violence but the NRA has consistently and successfully lobbied to thwart any efforts to develop such a database for decades. Moreover, conservatives like to complain about election integrity, without any evidence let's stipulate, and then use their scaremongering to create greater obstacles to voting. Why not establish a national database for all eligible voters? For one reason, of course, because conservatives really don't want to solve the problem but actually suppress the vote. But why not make it easier for all eligible voters to vote in elections? Or so I've always thought. But all these reflections are based on my perhaps naive assumption that we live in a functioning democracy with laws and basic legal protections for individual privacy and human rights. But when the two billionaire technocrats behind the development of these new proposed national databases are, in fact, openly and flagrantly disdainful of democracy and the rule of law and basic human rights, one cannot help but think this big database they are building cannot be good. This whole AI project evokes Skynet more than good governance or a public service; apparently, even many people working for Palantir think so.
*-"Internationally, Musk’s destruction of the United States Agency for International Development, slashing about 80% of its grants, is killing about 103 people an hour, most of them children. The total so far is about 300,000 people, according to Boston University infectious disease mathematical modeller Dr. Brooke Nichols. Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect reported today that about 1,500 babies a day are born HIV-positive because Musk’s cuts stopped their mothers’ medication." -HCR
Libertarian Plutocrats on Anti-Government Rampage
Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. -Jamelle Bouie @ NY Times
Best distillation of the moment I've come across so far in the legacy press; that Leon wants to destroy, of course.
"This Isn't Reform. It's Sabotage
When the country encountered a rampaging novel disease, he [RFK jr.] told us very clearly, he would have preferred we all faced it naked and alone.
This should be disqualifying. Instead, it proved the opposite. In the name of reform and government overhaul, the new administration is approving and ushering in something much more like destruction, with the president imploring his new health secretary to “go wild” in the role. The admonition does not apply just to Kennedy and public health, or even just to Musk and his initiative. A new generation of libertarians is not letting the country’s crisis of confidence go to waste. On Tuesday, Ted Cruz declared, “Abolish the IRS.” Up first, apparently: the Department of Education."
David Wallace-Wells @ NY Times
My shaky memory of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine was that the IMF/WB and Chicago schoolers figure out it works out better to apply neoliberal shock therapy when countries have faced some kind of big disruption to normal times, perhaps like the "crisis in confidence" that might follow a global pandemic? In better times the extreme economic austerity, inflation, no jobs, or no living wage jobs freaks people out; they protest and the shock therapy is withdrawn or scaled back. How much damage has already been done may vary but there is always some. But the full fascist ordoliberal state is averted. If economic times are already really tough, however, many of the new austerity measures, slashing government services, might be overlooked, or swallowed as a necessary budget cutting measures during hard times. A small bump in unemployment might go unnoticed. The popularity of Grump will weigh heavy on whatever outcomes result here and surely his popularity will not survive blowing up the economy, or will it? If nothing else, indeed, we must conclude by now Grump is "a prime piece of political horseflesh"; his appeal, while not majoritarian, is undeniable. The only thing we can count on with this guy is that he'll over-estimate his own capacities and under-estimate his enemies and this blundering narcissism fucks stuff up and gets him in trouble with the law, which to date he has always uncannily managed to elude. And will continue to do so until the Law says enough is enough and super majorities or enough to overwhelm his stormtroopers rise up.
Anyway, these are some of the reasons why we can't have nice things.
Possibly another data point related to the gamer-tech New Model Bro Army mob broligarchy "vibe shift" takeover thing:
"And if legalizing online sports books and wallpapering the lives of Americans with enticing advertisements for them strike you as a bad idea — or at least not especially thought-through — well, what does that imply about the country’s apparent shift toward risk-forward libertarianism rather than risk-shy paternalism in recent years?" - David Wallace-Wells, NY Times
David Lynch, Visionary Film Director and Artist, Dies: 1946-2025
"What I saw in him was an intuitive and enigmatic man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get in touch with," Kyle MacLachlan
Or not! But still an awed appreciation for his disjunctive dream and/or nightmare-like imagination, and, yes, sly humor. "Legendary auteur" is right too, in both a positive and negative sense: His cinematic vision is unmistakable but also sometimes indulgent and inscrutable and often disturbing. As an aging Boomer myself the familiar obits are coming faster than I can keep track of but Lynch was especially important to me or so as much as filmmakers go, so worth noting. I saw Kyle MacLachlan throw out a first pitch at an M's game this past summer. He was all grey. There was a goofy pacific northwest vibe, that MacLachlan personifies, that ran through much of Lynch's film work. And Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive were all moving, if not shattering, movie experiences for me. I saw Mulholland Drive alone three times when it first game out just trying to make sense of what I saw. I can't say I ever did figure it all out (other than it is a horror story about how Hollywood ruins innocent lives of aspiring actors) but each viewing increased my respect for Lynch's creativity and craft. Now I need to take another shot at his 2017 Twin Peaks reboot. David Lynch was a true artist and cinematic visionary. R.I.P.
Also, nice writeup in The Stranger by Megan Burbank:
"But Lynch depicts harm with the emotional intensity it requires. In the universe of Twin Peaks, the impact of Laura Palmer’s suffering is framed on a mythological scale. One teenage girl’s ongoing abuse is so incomprehensible and unacceptable that it requires a supernatural explanation. I have always considered this beautiful: Lesser directors would see Laura’s rape as a plot point, an edgy choice. For Lynch, it’s the end of all the good in the world."
Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment
"Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.
So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.
We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world."
Well, maybe money can't buy you love but it can, apparently, buy you an election, a POTUS, the most powerful elected official in the world, Lusk contributing over $250m to Grump's campaign, and which is way too much power to give to any spurned lover, I might add.
Krugman is hanging it up at the NY Times. This is his last column. Way too much the apologist for mainstream economics for my tastes but one of the few on a mainstream media platform even willing to challenge out loud how the capital order-- voodoo economics, confidence fairy, zombie ideas, etc-- doesn't always add up. Those of us who care about economic and social justice will miss him.
Hold the press: Krugman is retiring and jumping ship on the NY Times but reactivating a dormant substack account, which he's calling "Krugman wonks out," and in the first two posts at any rate, resemble more his longer wonking out posts at the Times, which get more into the numbers than his regular word-limited columns.
This first post, very promising, does a post-by-post takedown of the DOGE's performative crusade against "waste, fraud, and abuse":
In sum: Half the problem with "Muskaswamy" (the Krugmeister has still got it, right?) is where they go in the federal budget actually isn't where the big money is and they don't even recognize what is actual federal spending and what is local spending, school teachers, police officers, and public health workers, budget items controlled by local governments. And the other half the problem with their so-called "budget analysis" is the excessive overhead in health care spending they call out, relative to health systems in other developed economies, is almost all attributable to private for profit insurers in the US, when of course a major goal of Muskaswamy is to privatize as much of the federal government as they can. Anyway, Krugman wonks out on the DOGE clown show. Check it out.
What Will We Do With Our Free Power?
The shocking rise of solar is reshaping the energy landscape
“I simply cannot believe where we are with solar,” says Jenny Chase, the BloombergNEF analyst and quite possibly the person in the world who knows the most about the business of turning the light of the sun into electricity. “And if you’d told me nearly 20 years ago what would be the case now, 20 years later,” she continues, “I would have just said you were crazy. I would have laughed in your face. There is genuinely a revolution happening.” By just 2030, Chase estimates, solar power will be absolutely and reliably free during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year “pretty much everywhere.”
David Wallace-Wells in NY Times
The expert on turning solar into electricity thought free solar was crazy 20 years ago and I could swear people were still complaining only 10-15 years ago that solar would never be cheap enough to compete with natural gas or whatever fossil fuel. So what I want to know is how the experts got this so wrong? Not so much so as to have someone to blame but maybe their skepticism reflects some old ways of thinking, free market ideology, innovation must come only from private investment based on market demand, stuff like that, that we ought to be rethinking sooner rather than later? Maybe with some common sense "Industrial Policy" 20 years ago we might already have free solar power? As for 'What Will We Do With Our Free Power?' Well, if we leave its production and distribution entirely up to private industry I'm going way out on a limb and guessing we won't likely be giving it away free to anybody any time soon.
The NY Times Abridged Version of Recent Inflation
As usual NY Times does a story about recent inflation without mentioning that it was global, or comparing the US inflation ride with the rest of the world's experience, and not a word about the many stories of corporations using the cover of post-pandemic supply-shock inflation (to be expected after any big disruption in global economic operations) to engage in price gouging and record making profiteering. Again, we're counting on the electorate being able to see through the fascist turn in corporate rule and the major media are NOT helping. Beware.
Inflation's Wild Ride, NY Times
What War by A.I. Actually Looks Like, By David Wallace-Wells, NY Times
Skynet is a network based computer system that goes rogue and turns on humans in the Terminator movie franchise that began way back in 1984. Hal the computer in 2001, even further back, 1969, was an iconic precedent for this creepy sci-fi story premise: What if our technology, machines, computer intelligence, or AI turned against us? Hard to think of a more ominous real world analogue than Israel using AI to bomb Gaza to rubble without seriously degrading Hamas's political authority, as would appear to be the case at the moment. At any rate, looks like AI warfare promises to expand our notion of collateral damage significantly, and tragically. Or maybe provokes reforms, limiting the use of AI as a weapon. Wish I felt more optimistic about the latter possibility.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)