This is Why Obama's Knifing Ellison in the DNC Race Makes a Difference

DNC Chairman Tom Perez has appointed a fierce opponent of the minimum wage to its finance committee, because ……… Hell because the New Dem wing of the Democratic Party needs to accommodate abusive employers, slumlords, Wall Street, and evil people in general, because they want their money to pay for overpriced incompetent consultants:

Various sources have reported that Tom Perez, the Chair of the Democratic National Committee, has appointed Atlanta native Dan Halpern to the finance committee of the party.

Tom Perez just appointed a lobbyist for an anti-minimum wage group in the South as a DNC Finance Chair. I'm not joking.

— spooky neesins🌹 (@LaDemSoc) October 12, 2017

Specifically, he will be part of a squad of deputy national finance chairs. As the Atlanta Business Chronicle reports:

Halpern chaired Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s mayoral campaign in 2009 and served as a trustee for then-President-elect Barack Obama’s 2008 inaugural committee. Halpern also is immediate past chairman of the Atlanta Housing Authority Board of Directors and a past chairman of the Georgia Restaurant Association.

In a party that says it’s trying to be progressive, Halpern is a strange direction. As the head of Jackmont Hospitality and the GRA, Halpern has reliably opposed the minimum wage. His record thus far suggests a hostility towards the kind of worker-friendly policies that the Bernie-era Dems are supposedly pursuing. It suggests Perez, and Perez’s backers and friends, have not gotten the memo about economic justice.

In Halpern’s home state of Georgia, according to Politifact “Senate Bill 314 called for raising Georgia’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, but it didn’t get so much as a hearing.”

Why? Halpern’s people—the Georgia Restaurant Association—claimed that there would be a potential loss of 21,000 jobs, ignoring the increased possibility for consumer spending, for new jobs, for giving hungry people a hand up. Everything must benefit the boardroom, you see, or it’s not worth doing. As Politifact helpfully reminds us, “Georgia’s minimum wage is technically $5.15 an hour (Georgia Code 34-4-3) and has been since 2001. But the vast majority of Georgia employers (some say more than 99 percent) must comply with the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which means they have to pay their employees the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.” If given god-like sway over the business, Halpern and his GRA would probably prefer to keep this amount even lower.

Hardly surprising. When a guy is described by the Atlanta Journal Constitution as a “Georgia Democratic moneyman,” it’s safe bet he couldn’t give two hoots in hell for a single mother making minimum wage at McDonald’s.

Is it any wonder that the Democratic Party brand is in the sewer?

This sort of crap is toxic.

Quote of the Day

The weakness of the Democratic Party is not due to an underrepresentation of venture capitalists and tech company board members.

—Alex Lawson of Social Security Works

This was in response to the self serving proposals put forward by WTF (Really, their initials), a goup of self-absorbed narcissistic Silicon Valley dweebs, which come down to "more of the same".

Not Enough Bullets

Hedge fund workers in London, England, have been given a button on their desk to order Champagne:

Soho office workers will be able to order a glass of champagne for their desks at the touch of a button in a new £100 million “five-star” development.

The planned “at desk” champagne buttons will allow the hedge fund workers expected to be its occupants to order a celebratory drink after a “good day at the office”.

The buttons were inspired by one of Kylie Minogue and Tamara Ecclestone’s favourite restaurants, nearby Bob Bob Ricard, where every table has a “press for champagne” button.

Workers will be able to order cocktails or caviar, as well as bubbly, from the ground floor Sticks’n’Sushi restaurant. They will delivered to the relevant office floor by dumb waiterstyle lifts running through the building.

On the bright side, they can't do any worse than they did sober.

Still, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Also, this is not The Onion.

Preach It, Brother!

In the Guardian, Thomas Frank makes a very good point, that "The Democrats' Davos ideology won't win back the midwest."

The current neoliberal consensus is that globalization benefits the deserving, and that if you lose, it's because you're stupid, and never studied in school:

The tragedy of the 2016 election is connected closely, at least for me, to the larger tragedy of the industrial midwest. It was in the ruined industrial city of Cleveland that the Republican Party came together in convention last July, and it was the deindustrialized, addiction-harrowed precincts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that switched sides in November and delivered Donald Trump to the Oval Office.

………

And what I am here to say is that the midwest is not an exotic place. It isn’t a benighted region of unknowable people and mysterious urges. It isn’t backward or hopelessly superstitious or hostile to learning. It is solid, familiar, ordinary America, and Democrats can have no excuse for not seeing the wave of heartland rage that swamped them last November.

Another thing that is inexcusable from Democrats: surprise at the economic disasters that have befallen the midwestern cities and states that they used to represent.

The wreckage that you see every day as you tour this part of the country is the utterly predictable fruit of the Democratic party’s neoliberal turn. Every time our liberal leaders signed off on some lousy trade deal, figuring that working-class people had “nowhere else to go,” they were making what happened last November a little more likely.

Every time our liberal leaders deregulated banks and then turned around and told working-class people that their misfortunes were all attributable to their poor education, that the only answer for them was a lot of student loans and the right sort of college degree ... every time they did this they made the disaster a little more inevitable.

………

Of course it isn’t working out that way. So far, liberal organs seem far less interested in courting such voters than they do in scolding them, insulting them for their coarse taste and the hate for humanity they supposedly cherish in their ignorant hearts.

Ignorance is not the issue, however. Many midwesterners I met share an outlook that is profoundly bleak. They believe that the life has gone out of this region; indeed, they fear that a civilization based on making things is no longer sustainable.

………

I have no doubt that people in this part of America would respond enthusiastically to a populist message that addressed their unhappy situation – just look, for example, at the soaring popularity of Bernie Sanders.

As things have unfolded thus far, however, our system seems designed to keep such an alternative off the table. The choice we are offered instead is between Trumpian fake populism and a high-minded politics of personal virtue. Between a nomenklatura of New Economy winners and a party of traditional business types, willing to say anything to get elected and (once that is done) to use the state to reward people like themselves. The public’s frustration with this state of affairs, at least as I heard it on my midwestern trip, is well-nigh overwhelming.

………

But when “the resistance” comes into power in Washington, it will face this question: this time around, will Democrats serve the 80% of us that this modern economy has left behind? Will they stand up to the money power? Or will we be invited once again to feast on inspiring speeches while the tasteful gentlemen from JP Morgan foreclose on the world?

The argument of the privileged (center) left is that this is inevitable, and people who are harmed by this are to blame for this harm.

It is a pernicious attitude, one that stems from their inability to recognize their own unearned privilege.

This destructive sanctimony needs to be purged from the Democratic Party.  Let the Republicans have them.

Just get a Persian Cat and Complete the Bond Villain Thing

USS Macon, 1934


Zorin Industries Blimp, 
James Bond: View to a Kill, 1985

Google founder Sergey Brin is making himself an airship:

Larry Page has his flying cars. Sergey Brin shall have an airship.

Brin, the Google co-founder, has secretly been building a massive airship inside of Hangar 2 at the NASA Ames Research Center, according to four people with knowledge of the project. It's unclear whether the craft, which looks like a zeppelin, is a hobby or something Brin hopes to turn into a business. "Sorry, I don't have anything to say about this topic right now," Brin wrote in an email.

The people familiar with the project said Brin has long been fascinated by airships. His interest in the crafts started when Brin would visit Ames, which is located next to Google parent Alphabet Inc.'s headquarters in Mountain View, California. In the 1930s, Ames was home to the USS Macon, a huge airship built by the U.S. Navy. About three years ago, Brin decided to build one of his own after ogling old photos of the Macon.

In 2015, Google unit Planetary Ventures took over the large hangars at Ames from NASA and turned them into laboratories for the company. Brin's airship, which isn’t an Alphabet project, is already taking shape inside one. Engineers have constructed a metal skeleton of the craft, and it fills up much of the enormous hangar.

Seriously.  This, and James Cameron's plans for his "asteroid mining operation" are disturbingly close to a plot device from a Bond film.

These Folks Are Never Going Away, They Just Change Their Name

I am referring to the now-shuttered Democratic Leadership Council, which declared war on the poor and allied itself with Wall Street and the Koch Brothers.

The DLC still exists, of course, it's just renamed itself the "Third Way" while promulgating the same cruel and parsimonious policies:

Stringer Bell had a problem. On HBO's show "The Wire," the rather learned kingpin was concerned that the drugs his gang sold on the streets of West Baltimore were too weak, which jeopardized their control of the streets. So, in a memorable scene, Bell, who was taking economics courses at a community college, asked his instructor, "What are the options if you have an inferior product in an aggressive marketplace?" The instructor offered him some prescient advice, mentioning how WorldCom (now MCI Inc.) once faced a similar problem.

"The company was linked to one of the largest fraud cases in history," he said. "So, they decided to change the name."

………

The world of politics and ideas is an especially aggressive marketplace. Here, so-called centrist "New Democrats" adopted a very similar approach. For many years, Democrats proudly associated themselves with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a powerful group founded in the 1980s that sought to build a Democratic Party "liberated"­ from labor and grounded in "support for free market and free trade economics ... an end to the politics of 'entitlement' [and] a rejection of affirmative action."

At the height of its power the DLC was the dominant force in the party, boasting President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as its acolytes. But like Bell's weak narcotics, the DLC, which supported the Iraq War and received money from the likes of the Koch Brothers, soon became a tainted brand. Long before 2011, when the organization dissolved, the DLC label hung around politicians like a scarlet letter. Even President Obama publicly distanced himself from the organization in 2004 as he ascended as a national figure.
So, eager to maintain power and influence, New Democrats did what Stringer Bell ended up doing. They changed the name.So, eager to maintain power and influence, New Democrats did what Stringer Bell ended up doing. They changed the name.

………

Now, as Democrats face an existential crisis in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, these fundamentally conservative organizations, armed with millions in corporate donations, are working with a renewed aggressiveness in the public sphere. They are attempting to convince the party to shun its base and further embrace the so-called "vital center," and the corporatism that has long defined these groups.

If Third Way succeeds, the Democrats will leave an opening for right-wing "populism" to thrive long after the Trump presidency. If this happens, Americans will increasingly (and correctly) see Democrats as a party run by the establishment, and serving the interests of its donors, rather than the working class. This is why progressive activists are fighting hard to rid the party of Democrats who embrace this agenda.

These are folks are saying that "Now is the time for unity," and that no meaningful changes need to be made to both the structure and the policy of the Democratic Party.

Labor and the working man need to get more than lip-service, Wall Street needs to be kicked to the curb, and the corrupt and incompetent political consultants need to find new work.

Not Enough Bullets………

I don't mean the fictitious family^* profiled, I am reserving my opprobrium for the reporter who has asked us to feel the pain and deprivation of a family getting by on just $½ million a year.

You see, they only have about 7½ grand a year free and clear after:

• Putting $36,000 a year in their 401(K) plans.
• Contributing $18,000 a year to charity.
• Spending $5000/month on a mortgage in the City.
• Spending $18,000/year on 3 vacations.
• Spending $42,000/year on childcare.
• Spending $9,500/year on two cars ……… In New York City.
• Spending $23,000/year on food, including regular jaunts to New York restaurants.
• $10,000/year for "stuff that comes up".

Let's also note that the reporter ignores The deductiblity of:

• Charitable donations.
• Mortgage interest
• Child care

Which would lower their tax burden by something on the order of $40K/year.

Also, their biggest expense, the mortgage would likely be half that if we stopped letting mobsters and corrupt politicians launder their money through real estate deals, which inflates real estate prices.

Still, even after all that fiscal incompetence, this fictional family has $140 a week mad money.

Not so bad.

To quote Marie Antoinette's last words, "I'm sorry operator, I've been cut off."

^*We need to have sympathy for this family, because they are fictitious, a condition effecting thousands of families around the world.^†
†Please give generously to the Fictitious Family Relief Fund. They are funding research on making the sufferers of this condition real.^‡
‡At this point, they can only exist in virtual reality.

Quote of the Day

The issue isn't that one small rate hike will destroy the economy, it's that rate hikes like this are the Fed's way of signalling that they will never let wages go up again.

—Duncan "Atrios" Black on the Federal Reserve's 250 basis point (¼%) rate hike.

He is absolutely correct.

It is the official policy of the Fed, and much of the US government, to suppress wages of working people.

Either inflation or deficit concerns are the excuse.

Not Enough Bullets

California is seeing the rise of for fee luxury jails:

………

Instead, Wurtzel, who also had been convicted of sexual battery in a previous case, found a better option: For $100 a night, he was permitted by the court to avoid county jail entirely. He did his time in the small jail in the nearby city of Seal Beach, with amenities that included flat-screen TVs, a computer room and new beds. He served six months, at a cost of $18,250, according to jail records.

Markin learned about Wurtzel’s upgraded jail stay only recently, from a reporter. “I feel like, ‘Why did I go through this?’” she said.

In what is commonly called “pay-to-stay” or “private jail,” a constellation of small city jails — at least 26 of them in Los Angeles and Orange counties — open their doors to defendants who can afford the option. But what started out as an antidote to overcrowding has evolved into a two-tiered justice system that allows people convicted of serious crimes to buy their way into safer and more comfortable jail stays.

Madam la guillotine needs to come back.

Being Born on 3rd Base and Thinking That You Hit a Triple

It turns out that the single most statististically segnificant characteristic of successful entrepreneurs is that they come from rich families:

We’re in an era of the cult of the entrepreneur. We analyze the Tory Burches and Evan Spiegels of the world looking for a magic formula or set of personality traits that lead to success. Entrepreneurship is on the rise, and more students coming out of business schools are choosing startup life over Wall Street.

But what often gets lost in these conversations is that the most common shared trait among entrepreneurs is access to financial capital—family money, an inheritance, or a pedigree and connections that allow for access to financial stability. While it seems that entrepreneurs tend to have an admirable penchant for risk, it’s usually that access to money which allows them to take risks.

And this is a key advantage: When basic needs are met, it’s easier to be creative; when you know you have a safety net, you are more willing to take risks. “Many other researchers have replicated the finding that entrepreneurship is more about cash than dash,” University of Warwick professor Andrew Oswald tells Quartz. “Genes probably matter, as in most things in life, but not much.”

………

For creative professions, starting a new venture is the ultimate privilege. Many startup founders do not take a salary for some time. The average cost to launch a startup is around $30,000, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor show that more than 80% of funding for new businesses comes from personal savings and friends and family.

“Following your dreams is dangerous,” a 31-year-old woman who runs in social entrepreneurship circles in New York, and asked not to be named, told Quartz. “This whole bulk of the population is being seduced into thinking that they can just go out and pursue their dream anytime, but it’s not true.”

I'm not surprised, but I am a bit disgusted.

We need to understand that much of the sociology of success in the US, as it is everywhere, boils down to nepotism and tribalism.

Not Enough Bullets

At Davos, Jamie Dimon, the famously humorless head of JP Morgan Chase, shouted, "Make Elites Great Again!":

Why did that avalanche hit that hotel in Italy, rather than those rat-f%$#s:

The most telling exchange at the World Economic Forum in Davos came on Thursday afternoon during a closed-door lunch hosted by the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Slate.

A couple hundred people were gathered at the Hotel Seehof, an expansive five-star hotel on the Davos promenade, to discuss the state of the world on the eve of the inauguration of Donald Trump. There were heads of state, both current and former, and captains of industry and finance.

The hostess, Lally Graham Weymouth, a senior associate editor at the Washington Post and daughter of the late Katharine Graham, was calling on people around the room to share their thoughts when she hit upon David Rubinstein, the jovial co-founder of the Carlyle Group. His remarks were different — and, people in attendance said, made as a joke. Rubenstein, three people in attendance told BuzzFeed News, pleaded to those gathered that elites were people too. With feelings! And they deserved to be listened to.

And then Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, replied in his own way, letting out an expressive: “Make elites great again!” The banker, who was compensated $28 million last year, is not known for his sense of humor.

Joseph Evangelisti, a spokesperson for JPMorgan, told BuzzFeed News: “It was tongue-in-cheek.” Those who heard Dimon’s private riposte weren’t so sure.

Amazingly enough, it gets worse from there.

I have a request for ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever: How about hitting Davos next year?

With careful planning you might get some Saudi princes as well.

Not Enough Bullets

Amazingly enough, the story shows the subjects of the story even more self-absorbed and clueless than the headline dows:

Davos Elite Fret About Inequality Over Vintage Wine and Canapés

You morons broke the world.

You were born on 3^rd base and though that you hit a triple.

You are not deserving, you are lucky.

• You won the parent lottery.
• You won the nationality lottery.
• You won the social class lottery.

Now try and do something to make the world a better place for the rest of us.

Peter Thiel Has Officially Become Too Cartoonishly Evil to Be a Bond Villain

I don't mean for his support of Donald Trump, or for his literal exploration of Vampirism to extend his own life, or for his gay baiting in college.

That's evil, but I think that this is not excessive by the standards of Bond villains.

Give him a white Persian cat, and he would fit in just fine.

But he gave a speech at the National Press Club, he complained that, "If you’re a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system."

PayPal co-founder and tech billionaire Peter Thiel on Monday offered a jaw-dropping defense of his decision to bankroll wrestling icon Hulk Hogan’s invasion of privacy lawsuit against Gawker for publishing a sex tape featuring him.

“If you’re a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system,” he said. “It costs too much. This was the modus operandi of Gawker in large part it was to go after people who had no chance of fighting back.”

The declaration came as Thiel was speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to tout the presidential bid of GOP candidate Donald Trump.

Thiel spent at least $10 million supporting Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. Thiel had been engaged in a personal feud with the website for years. As a result of the lawsuit, Gawker was driven out of business.

Fordham Law School professor and criminal justice expert John Pfaff was quick to note that in 2007, many states’ entire budgets for indigent defense — money allotted to provide legal counsel to those who cannot afford it — is in the single-digit millions.

I hope that his fellow PayPal founder Elon Musk sends him into space, and leaves him there.

Quote of the Day

They Can't All Leave for Mars Soon Enough, for Me.

—Lambert Strether, on wealthy idiots and cockamamie anti-democratic inclinations.

Some Chart Pr0n that Explains Why So the Voters are Pissed Off

This table shows it all. (click on the picture for a larger popup)

Basically, it shows that the wealthy and powerful have become even more wealthy and powerful by stealing from the rest of us.

Even if people don't know the actual numbers, they know that our society has descended into a morass of, "Crony capitalism, pay-to-play politics, [and] special interests," that have further enriched the rich and their pet politicians.

It's why populism on both sides of the political has been so popular lately.

Mme. la Guillotine is looking increasingly attractive to a lot of people for this reason.

H/t naked capitalism.

What is Wrong with the Clinton Wing of the Democratic Party Succinctly Stated

I am not at all surprised that it is a Brit who notes that aggressive identity politics has pushed economic justice out of the political spotlight.

I would argue that some political factions, most notably the Clinton political machine, have done so deliberately, because it allows them to check the "right" boxes while still aligning themselves with what Theodore Roosevelt called the "Malefactors of Wealth".

People like Wal-Mart (Hillary was a member of its board for years) and Goldman Sachs (Hillary's speeches, and they funded her son-in-law's hedge fund) are Hillary's peeps, because they all agree that focusing on identity politics, as opposed to the the increasingly ferocious war on the average American worker or the financialization of our economy, is a good thing:

The rise of identity politics means that the personal is commonly understood to be political. Being a radical today relates as much to who you are as to what you think. Class struggle, at one time the raison d’être of the socialist movement, has been usurped on the left by the personal grievances of women, gays and ethnic minorities.

Identity politics was an understandable response to some of the injustices of the twentieth century. Despite the loftiness of much left-wing rhetoric, sexism, racism and homophobia have never successfully been eliminated from socialist politics for the simple reason that these movements reflect the societies in which they were conceived. It was often made apparent to women in particular that the priorities for leftists lay strictly within the class framework.

It would be wrong to imply that today this dynamic has been turned on its head. One can still find sexism, racism and homophobia on the left as easily as one can find it in wider society. In an article for Slate about the US Democratic primaries, Michelle Goldberg wrote in late 2015 about a cultural phenomenon of so-called 'Bernie Bros' – male supporters of US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders who 'seem to believe that their class politics exempt them from taking sexism seriously'.

………

Ultimately, though, the left should seek to move beyond identity politics for the simple reason that it is compatible with neo-liberal economics. Identity politics can co-exist with the corporate boss who makes more money in a week than his cleaner takes home in a year – as long as the chances of being the boss are assigned proportionally among different ethnic groups, sexualities and genders. Individual winners and losers remain as remote from each other as ever; they are simply sorted in direct proportion to their numbers in society. The ultimate aim of identity politics is to 'tune up' the elite rather than to abolish it.

………

Class politics must certainly evolve with the times – at the very least it should take account of the legitimate grievances of people who feel marginalised for reasons other than their class. However, liberal identity politics is increasingly a zero-sum game in which white men must invariably lose out so that women, ethnic minorities and LGBT individuals can prosper. With no account for the impact of class, this will simply give rise to another injustice, or at the very least, compound an existing one.

(emphasis mine)

I think that the author, James Bloodworth, undersells the deliberate nature of this transformation.

When one looks at the professional class, doctors, lawyers, and (most significantly) college professors, the top 2-5%, this focus on identity politics benefits them.

While they have not benefited to the degree of the top 1% of 1%, they have benefited, and now it's easier to for them to find inexpensive domestic help.

Not Enough Bullets

The pay of hedge fund managers, who have underperformed the market forever, and lost money last year, is simply obscene:

The world’s top 25 hedge fund managers earned $13bn last year – more than the entire economies of Namibia, the Bahamas or Nicaragua.

Kenneth Griffin, founder and chief executive of Citadel, and James Simons, founder and chairman of Renaissance Technologies, shared the top spot, taking home $1.7bn each – equivalent to the annual salaries of 112,000 people taking home the US federal minimum wage of $15,080.

The earnings of the best-performing hedge fund managers, published by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine on Tuesday, dwarfs the pay of top Wall Street executives who have been under fire for their multimillion-dollar pay deals. The best paid banker last year was JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who collected $27m.

The huge pay at the top comes despite a tumultuous year on Wall Street that has led many well-known hedge funds to lose billions of dollars and others to close down. Daniel Loeb, CEO of Third Point, a hedge fund that manages $17.5bn, has described market conditions as a “hedge fund killing field”.

The, "Heads I win, tails you lose," system of remuneration in Wall Street is wrong, and creates a lot of evil in our society.

Not Enough Bullets

A Russian Oligarch just spent $1 Billion on his son's wedding:

Russian energy tycoon Mikhail Gutseriev's son Said married his girlfriend Khadija Uzhakhovs during the weekend in a lavish ceremony that reportedly cost $1bn (£700m). The wedding, at Moscow's upscale Safisa restaurant, was attended by around 600 guests and saw Sting, Jennifer Lopez and Enrique Iglesias among others perform.

The bride reportedly wore a $374,000 gown, which was bedecked with precious stones, imported from Paris and weighed in at 25kg. Her pricey wedding gown was matched with a handbag, diamond tiara and pendant.

Gutseriev, who was ranked the 38th richest person in Russia by Forbes in 2015, flew in the who's who of the music world to perform at his son's wedding. Gutseriev is estimated to be worth $6.2bn, and his assets include oil company Russneft besides K Neftisa, OAO Russian Coal and others.

This is simply obscene.

Stupid IP Tricks

European tax authorities going after Starbucks for "Recipe" payments in order to artificially lower its tax payments in Europe:

If there are two edicts I try to follow whenever I'm writing, they are, first, write what is true and, second, avoid cliche at all costs. I bring that up only as a preface before saying the following: the UK is walking down an Orwellian path. It's nearly the cliche of cliches to say something like this, and yet it happens that the cliche is true. While there is most certainly a real thing known as a threat from Islamic terrorism, there is also such a thing as overreaction. What started as the British government's attempt to ban extremist thought from social media and television (under the notion that some thoughts are too dangerous to enjoy the freedom that other thoughts deserve) then devolved into the conscripting of teachers that were to be on the lookout for children that might become radicalized. To assist them with this, the government helpfully provided spy-software to use against students. Spy-software which itself was found to be exploitable in the most laughably easy of ways. This employed two of the most horrifying aspects of Orwell's Oceania: the concept of thought-crime and the employ of citizens to fearfully surveil one another.

And now it seems the UK is going even further, adopting Oceania's reputation for the swallowing up of citizens should they be found suspect of thought-crime by those watchful citizens. Specifically, the Family Division of the Judiciary has put out a memo declaring exactly how it will remove children from the homes of anyone it suspects might radicalize those children. Here's a snippet.

Recent months have seen increasing numbers of children cases coming before the Family Division and the Family Court where there are allegations or suspicions: that children, with their parents or on their own, are planning or attempting or being groomed with a view to travel to parts of Syria controlled by the so-called Islamic State; that children have been or are at risk of being radicalised; or that children have been or at are at risk of being involved in terrorist activities either in this country or abroad.

Only a local authority can start care proceedings (see section 31(1) of the Children Act 1989 – the police powers are set out in section 46). However, any person with a proper interest in the welfare of a child can start proceedings under the inherent jurisdiction or apply to make a child a ward of court.2 Usually, in cases falling within the description in paragraph 1 above, it will be the local authority which starts proceedings under the inherent jurisdiction or applies to make a child a ward of court, and the court would not expect the police (who have other priorities and responsibilities) to do so. There is, however, no reason why in a case where it seems to the police to be necessary to do so, the police should not start such proceedings for the purposes, for example, of making a child a ward of court, obtaining an injunction to prevent the child travelling abroad, obtaining a passport order, or obtaining a Tipstaff location or collection order. Given the complexities of these cases, I have decided that, for the time being at least, all cases falling within the description in paragraph 1 above are to be heard by High Court Judges of the Family Division.

In other words, the High Court Judges within the Family Division are now tasked with determining whether children will be made wards of the state based solely on suspicions of possible radicalization. Children torn from mothers and fathers in Muslim homes will be subject to the whims and inherently flawed watch of the larger citizenry. A citizenry, mind you, that has had its vigilance unduly ramped up by the government's past actions and requests. It's hard to imagine a better recipe for the unfair targeting of Muslim families than this. Unfortunately for all concerned, this same memo imagined just such a recipe, making things even worse.

………

Tax avoidance [Note: Tax avoidance uses legal, though frequently unethical, techniques to lower the tax burden. Tax evasion is a crime.] is a sore point in the United States, where the largest companies, including Apple, Amazon and many others, routinely try to minimize their bills. In Europe, the cases have hit a raw nerve in countries where citizens have been squeezed by years of austerity, and stoked friction among member states that are jockeying with one another for jobs and investment.

………

After asking Dutch tax authorities and Starbucks to provide details of their tax deals last year, the commission determined the company’s tax setup with the Netherlands had no realistic economic justification. The case zeroed in on Alki, the British-based entity at the center of Starbucks’ efforts to reduce its Dutch and European tax bills.

In 2001, Starbucks installed its European corporate headquarters and a massive new coffee roasting plant in Amsterdam after conferring with Dutch tax authorities. The setup proved beneficial: Starbucks created several Dutch partnerships that were not subject to the country’s corporate tax, including one named Emerald City, a nickname for Seattle.

Emerald City owned Alki, which was set up in London to house Starbucks’ intellectual property. The intellectual property included logos and the recipe for roasting coffee beans, which Starbucks subsidiaries pay Alki a royalty to license. Because of its structure, Alki was not subject to corporate tax in the Netherlands or Britain.

………

The recipe was basically the temperature for roasting beans, and appeared to be more like instructions than intellectual property. Yet counting it as such allowed Starbucks’ roasting unit to reallocate most of its profit to Alki in the form of royalties, the commission said, nearly wiping out the Dutch tax bill. No other Starbucks companies or roasters paid royalties for the same information, the commission said.

Crap like this happens, because we as a society have made a conscious decision to encourage rent of this sort behavior.

IP protections are there to incentivize creativity, and when we extend those incentives far beyond what is necessary for this, we create a cesspool of corruption and self-dealing.

It also one of the things that contributes to a less equal society, because the unearned proceeds create resources to lobby for even more rentier behavior.

Today's Lesson from Sesame Street

Silly poor kids, educational TV is for rich kids:

For more than four decades, the television show Sesame Street has existed to teach children lessons. Today’s lesson is that people without disposable household income are in an inferior position and should be happy to receive secondhand goods.

The original purpose of Sesame Street was to provide uplifting educational programming to the widest possible audience of young children. Yesterday, the Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces the program, announced that for the next five years, new episodes will not run on the nonprofit, over-the-air Public Broadcasting Service, but will be distributed through HBO, a premium cable channel owned by the for-profit Time Warner media megacorporation.

In the press release, Sesame Workshop CEO Jeffrey Dunn described the arrangement as “a true winning public-private partnership model.” What does this winning model entail? It entails removing public goods and services from the commons, to repackage them as luxury products for affluent consumers.

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Now Sesame Street will be restricted to a network that reaches less than one-third of American households. According to the announcement, with the money it gets from HBO, Sesame Street “will be able to produce almost twice as much new content as previous seasons.” And poor kids won’t be able to see any of it. 

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Or, more precisely, they will be able to see it after the expiration of a nine-month HBO window of exclusivity—at which point the no-longer-new episodes will be passed on to PBS, while the children whose parents can afford to pay for premium cable are watching new-new episodes. The old Sesame Street block has been gentrified, so that HBO can build a sleek high-rise with a separate poor door. 

We have become an ugly society.