…so…on the one hand

The European Union reached a deal on Saturday on landmark legislation that would force Facebook, YouTube and other internet services to combat misinformation, disclose how their services amplify divisive content and stop targeting online ads based on a person’s ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

The law, called the Digital Services Act, is intended to address social media’s societal harms by requiring companies to more aggressively police their platforms for illicit content or risk billions of dollars in fines. Tech companies would be compelled to set up new policies and procedures to remove flagged hate speech, terrorist propaganda and other material defined as illegal by countries within the European Union.
[…]
The Digital Services Act is part of a one-two punch by the European Union to address the societal and economic effects of the tech giants. Last month, the 27-nation bloc agreed to a different sweeping law, the Digital Markets Act, to counter what regulators see as anticompetitive behavior by the biggest tech firms, including their grip over app stores, online advertising and internet shopping.

Together, the new laws underscore how Europe is setting the standard for tech regulation globally. Frustrated by anticompetitive behavior, social media’s effect on elections and privacy-invading business models, officials spent more than a year negotiating policies that give them broad new powers to crack down on tech giants that are worth trillions of dollars and that are used by billions of people for communication, entertainment, payments and news.
[…]
The moves contrast with the lack of action in the United States. While U.S. regulators have filed antitrust cases against Google and Meta, no comprehensive federal laws tackling the power of the tech companies have been passed.

Yet even as the European authorities gain newfound legal powers to rein in the tech behemoths, critics wondered how effective they will be. Writing laws can be easier than enforcing them, and while the European Union has a reputation as the world’s toughest regulator of the tech industry, its actions have sometimes appeared tougher on paper than in practice.
[…]
Like the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, G.D.P.R. was hailed as landmark legislation. But since it took effect in 2018, there has been little action against Facebook, Google and others over their data-collection practices. Many have sidestepped the rules by bombarding users with consent windows on their websites.
[…]
Policymakers said the prospect of reputational damage could be more powerful than fines. But if the European Commission determined that Meta or another company was not doing enough to address problems identified by auditors, the company could face financial penalties of up to 6 percent of global revenue and be ordered to change business practices.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/technology/european-union-social-media-law.html

…but on the other hand

If you are like most Americans, you think you know Amazon. Recent polling shows that 72 percent of us view the company favorably. This makes it the second-most-trusted institution in the country, after the military. A 2018 study found that Amazon is the only institution to appear among the five most trusted by both Democrats and Republicans. And the Covid pandemic has made Amazon ever more dominant. Industry research estimates that there are now 153 million Prime members in the United States, nearly as many as the number of voters in the 2020 election. About 40 percent of online purchases in the country take place on the site, at the low range of estimates — compared with roughly 7 percent on the site of its closest competitor, Walmart.

Over the past few years, Amazon has mostly avoided the crisis of trust that has engulfed other tech companies. It has had no Cambridge Analytica scandal. There have been no Amazon Papers. Despite some initial difficulties, the pandemic has strengthened its position. Amazon stock prices increased by more than a third since March 2020. This year, as the value of Meta crashed, Amazon’s stock suffered a relatively minor decline. CNN ran its stock market story with the headline “Amazon Is the Anti-Facebook.”
[…]
But a series of product safety cases that have been brought against Amazon over the past few years makes clear that its rewiring of retail poses risks to customers as well. Above all, the cases highlight a significant gap between how most people understand the world’s largest e-commerce company and what that company actually does.

Conversations about Amazon tend to emphasize the company’s omniscience — the cutting-edge technologies that it uses to gather data on its competitors and customers and to discipline its workers. But in reality, as the scholar Miriam Posner has written, supply chains that drive global capitalism depend on “partial sight.” Companies are able to get customers so many things so cheap and fast because they know only what they have to; toward everything else, they often turn a blind eye. […]

In 2006, a year after introducing its Prime membership for customers, Amazon created a service that would drastically expand the seller population. Fulfillment by Amazon, as it was called, enabled merchants to pay Amazon to warehouse and deliver their goods. By making sellers who used F.B.A. eligible for two-day Prime delivery, Amazon incentivized sellers to sign up.

These third-party sellers deserve a lot of the credit for making Amazon the juggernaut it is. By competing with Amazon’s own retail division, they stocked the Amazon catalog, drove down its prices and subsidized the build-out of its infrastructure, both virtual and physical. It also meant that from the beginning, Amazon’s success was predicated on a degree of ignorance.

Amazon was able to scale up the way it did precisely because it outsourced the work of knowing where to get things. And as it grew, this model insured Amazon against mistakes. If there was not, in fact, demand for X many more of a seller’s shoes per year, that was not Amazon’s problem. It was the seller’s. As long as sellers paid to list and store their goods, Amazon made money, no matter what happened.
[…]
When you shop on Amazon, you are less likely to be buying something from Amazon than through it. More than 60 percent of physical goods bought on Amazon come from third-party sellers, Mr. Bezos told Congress in 2020. In 2021, industry experts estimated that there were about six million active third-party sellers on Amazon.com and that 3,700 new accounts opened every day, many of them in China. Amazon’s current job listings in Beijing show that it is hiring “seller onboarding associates.” Using F.B.A., manufacturers or private label companies can ship goods directly to Amazon fulfillment centers; Amazon takes care of the rest.

Third-party sellers are a key part of Amazon’s business. A recent report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a think tank critical of Amazon, showed that the fees they pay are Amazon’s fastest-growing major source of revenue: The company pocketed $121 billion in fees from sellers in 2021, up from $60 billion in 2019. Given its market dominance, those fees are a revenue stream that Amazon could most likely turn up. The report also noted that the average seller now gives Amazon a 34 percent cut of every transaction, up from 19 percent in 2014.

On Thursday, Amazon announced a program that will allow some merchants who use its fulfillment services to put a Buy With Prime badge on their own sites; Prime members will be able to buy directly from those merchants while enjoying the perks of Amazon’s logistics empire: speedy delivery and free returns. (How much Amazon will charge the merchants is not yet clear.) In addition to expanding Amazon’s monopolistic power, this move appears to extend its history of strengthening its intermediary position while displacing work and risk onto the third parties whose fees subsidize the build-out of its infrastructure. And it makes questions of liability still more vexing.
[…]
Like other tech firms, Amazon eschews responsibility for the new kinds of interactions that its platform facilitates. There has been much discussion in recent years of the fact that existing laws exempt Google and Facebook and Twitter from liability for user-generated content, even when that content is false or promotes harassment. Amazon has used the same law to argue that it is not responsible for false claims by third parties who sell things on its site. As for fraudulent or dangerous products, the company insists that it is only a channel; in contrast to Walmart, CVS and other brick-and-mortar stores, it should not bear strict liability.

[…] Last July the Consumer Product Safety Commission sued Amazon to force the recall of hazardous products being sold by third parties on its site. The ones it found included 24,000 faulty carbon monoxide detectors, 400,000 hair dryers that lacked immersion protection devices to prevent shock and electrocution and numerous children’s pajamas that did not meet flammable fabric safety standards. Amazon moved to dismiss the case, claiming it served only as a “third-party logistics provider” — like a shopping mall — but in January, an administrative law judge ruled that it was a distributor, like a store, under the Consumer Product Safety Act. (An Amazon representative told The Times, “While we continue to disagree with the notion that we are a distributor, we share C.P.S.C.’s commitment to customer and product safety and will continue working toward that goal.”).
[…]
Amazon does not want to hurt customers. On the contrary, almost everything about Amazon is optimized to please its customers. Like some other retailers, the company often does not even require refunded merchandise to be returned. Amazon did not invent outsourcing or single-handedly create the inequalities that it profits from, any more than Facebook and YouTube invented lying or Uber created the precariousness that motivates many of its drivers to sign up. But as Amazon makes aspects of global exploitation more efficient, its growing monopolistic power means that more and more of commerce operates on its terms. As the broad public has come to recognize of social media, those terms include a great deal of opacity and impunity for platforms.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/opinion/amazon-product-liability.html

…I’m not sure it’s entirely what’s generally meant by the phrase “perverse incentives”

In just eight short years the US, led by our extraordinary scientists, engineers and astronauts at Nasa, had opened up a new world for humanity. And while the entire world rejoiced, there was a special joy and pride in our country because this was an American project. It was our financing, our political will, our scientific ingenuity, our courage that had accomplished this milestone in human history. We had not only “won” the international space race, but more importantly, we had created unthinkable opportunities for all of humankind.

Fifty-three years later, as a result of a huge effort to privatize space exploration, I am concerned that Nasa has become little more than an ATM machine to fuel a space race not between the US and other countries, but between the two wealthiest men in America – Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are worth more than $450bn combined.
[…]
At this moment, if you can believe it, Congress is considering legislation to provide a $10bn bailout to Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space company for a contract to build a lunar lander. This legislation is taking place after Blue Origin lost a competitive bid to SpaceX, Musk’s company.

Bezos is worth some $180bn. In a given year, he has paid nothing in federal income taxes. He is the owner of Amazon, which, in a given year, has also paid nothing in federal income taxes after making billions in profits. Bezos has enough money to own a $500m mega-yacht, a $23m mansion in Washington DC, a $175m estate in Beverly Hills and a $78m, 14-acre estate in Maui.
[…]
The reality is that the space economy – which today mostly consists of private companies utilizing Nasa facilities and technology essentially free of charge to launch satellites into orbit – is already very profitable and has the potential to become exponentially more profitable in the future. Bank of America predicts that over the next eight years the space economy will triple in size to $1.4tn – that’s trillion with a “t”.

In 2018, private corporations made over $94bn in profits from goods or services that are used in space – profits that could not have been achieved without generous subsidies and support from Nasa and the taxpayers of America. The satellite business is growing rapidly. SpaceX alone plans to launch tens of thousands of its Starlink telecommunications satellites over the next few years.
[…]
And while it may seem like a bad science fiction movie today, decades from now the real money to be made will not come from satellites or space tourism but to those who discover how to mine lucrative minerals on asteroids.
[…]
Nasa has identified over 12,000 asteroids within 45m kilometers of Earth that contain iron ore, nickel, precious metals and other minerals. Just a single 3,000ft asteroid may contain platinum worth over $5tn. Another asteroid’s rare earth metals could be worth more than $20tn alone. According to the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, “There are twenty-trillion-dollar checks up there, waiting to be cashed!”

The questions we must ask are: who will be cashing those checks? Who will, overall, be benefiting from space exploration? Will it be a handful of billionaires or will it be the people of our country and all of humanity?

As it stands now, as a result of the 2015 Space Act that passed the Senate with virtually no floor debate, private corporations are able to own all of the resources that they discover in space. In other words, the taxpayers of this country who made it possible for these private enterprises to go into space will get a 0% return on their investment.
[…]
Space exploration is very exciting. Its potential to improve life here on planet Earth is limitless. But it also has the potential to make the richest people in the world incredibly richer and unimaginably more powerful. When we take that next giant leap into space let us do it to benefit all of humanity, not to turn a handful of billionaires into trillionaires.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/22/jeff-bezos-space-elon-musk-billionaires-bernie-sanders

…but it’s got to be in the ballpark?

Elon Musk is the world’s richest person, estimated by Forbes to be worth $270 billion.

That’s about the size of Finland’s economy. It’s also more than a quarter of the about $1 trillion valuation of Tesla, the electric car company where he’s CEO. And those are staggering amounts of money by any measure.
[…]
All of that means instead of spending his vast wealth, he treats his shares in his companies as collateral. Like using property to back a loan, Musk at times last year had put more than half of his Tesla shares down as collateral, according to financial filings, worth tens of billions of dollars.

“If Elon Musk were forced to sell shares of our common stock that he has pledged to secure certain personal loan obligations, such sales could cause our stock price to decline,” Tesla warned in its annual filing.

“We are not a party to these loans,” Tesla wrote, adding that if its stock price declines, banks could force Musk to sell off shares to meet his loan obligations. That could send overall stock prices cratering.
[…]
Musk made public this week his financing plan to acquire the social media platform he says he wants to help serve as the public town square, where he communicates daily with his more than 80 million followers.

He outlined $46.5 billion he secured in funding to buy the social media company. More than half stems from loans from Morgan Stanley and other banks. But $21 billion will stem from his personal wealth.
[…]
And the massive amount of risk — especially after Tesla has shattered market expectations — left some financial analysts puzzled.
[…]
Last year, a financial filing detailed that of his more than 170 million shares in Tesla — which would be valued at more than $170 billion today — more than half were put down as collateral to secure loans.
[…]
Analysts who spoke with The Washington Post said that the sheer volume of Musk‘s collateral was unusual, and they said much of it was probably tied up in Musk’s other business ventures, like rocket company SpaceX.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/22/musk-twitter-financing-tesla/

…much as it’s not a shock that things are stacked to favor those who seem like they could afford to deal with a lot of things many who do, can’t

Democrats and Republicans in Congress don’t typically agree on tax policy. But late last month, 216 House Democrats joined with 198 of their GOP colleagues to pass legislation advancing a cause that both parties have championed in recent years: ensuring that high-income individuals can stuff even more money into their tax-advantaged retirement accounts. Only five House members — all Republicans — voted no.
[…]
Bipartisan support for Secure 2.0 is part of a decades-long pattern: While loudly and proudly proclaiming that their goal is to nurture nest eggs for the working class, lawmakers have constructed a complex of tax shelters for the well-to-do. The lopsided result is that as of 2019, nearly 29,000 taxpayers had amassed “mega-IRAs” — individual retirement accounts with balances of $5 million or more — while half of American households had no retirement accounts at all. Overall, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 10th of households reap a larger share of the income tax subsidy for retirement savings than the bottom 80 percent.
[…]
University of Virginia law professor Michael Doran — who held tax policy roles at the Treasury Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — calls the current state of affairs “the great American retirement fraud.” It’s hard to argue with that description. And Secure 2.0 would take the fraud to a new level: Its congressional supporters have engaged in Enron-style accounting gimmicks to mask the bill’s effects on deficits — tricks that, if used by corporate executives, might well land them in jail. (Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced a broadly similar bill in the upper chamber, though without some of the House’s most egregious accounting shenanigans.)

One reason the deception has succeeded thus far is that the details are complicated, allowing Congress to funnel benefits to the donor class without ordinary voters having any idea of what’s going on. Even some lawmakers might have been hoodwinked, though if so, they bear blame for not making an effort to understand the legislation they voted to pass.

The boondoggle began from humble origins. In 1974, Congress passed a provision allowing workers who weren’t covered by employer pension plans to contribute up to $1,500 per year to new “individual retirement accounts.” Workers could claim tax deductions for their contributions — and assets in IRAs would grow tax-free — but distributions would be subject to ordinary income tax (plus an additional 10 percent tax on withdrawals before age 59½).
[…]
In any event, the $1,500 IRA in 1974 was just a start. In the nearly half-century since, Congress has continually expanded the amount that individuals can pour into tax-deferred savings accounts. The advent of employer-based 401(k) plans in 1978 accelerated the process. At the time, the Joint Committee on Taxation, which advises Congress on tax legislation, said that the new 401(k) provision would have a “negligible effect upon budget receipts.” Now, the JCT estimates that 401(k)s and other similar defined-contribution plans cost the federal government $200 billion per year.
[…]
(The very largest IRAs, like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s reported $5 billion account, result from a different loophole: the ability of founders and early-stage investors to stuff IRAs with start-up stock. But Forbes revealed more than a decade ago that Thiel and another PayPal co-founder were using their IRAs to shelter entrepreneurial earnings; the Government Accountability Office flagged the IRA-stuffing phenomenon in 2014; and rather than clamping down, lawmakers from both parties sat on their hands.)
[…]
The costliest provision in Secure 2.0 — clocking in at $9.6 billion over the next decade — is an increase in the threshold age for required minimum distributions. Under current law, taxpayers must begin to take withdrawals from their 401(k)s and traditional IRAs at age 72. (It had been 70½ before Secure 1.0, signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2019, raised the age by a year and a half.) Secure 2.0 would bump that up to age 75. The change would mean that taxpayers with supersize IRAs could enjoy three extra years of tax-free growth before they needed to take money out. Lower-income retirees wouldn’t benefit because they don’t have the luxury of holding off on withdrawals, which they need to cover living expenses.

Another provision would lift the cap on 401(k) catch-up contributions at ages 62, 63 and 64 from $6,500 to $10,000. Factoring in employer matching contributions, that would raise the maximum 401(k) inflow to $71,000 per year. In theory, catch-up contributions are supposed to help people who couldn’t save much until later in life. But if lawmakers were genuinely concerned about retirement security for people who need it, they wouldn’t start by aiding taxpayers who can afford to save more each year than most Americans earn. The higher limit on catch-up contributions will simply allow high-income taxpayers to race further ahead.
[…]
But Secure 2.0 doesn’t fix the most significant flaw in the savers’ credit: the fact that it’s nonrefundable. Workers can’t claim the full $1,000 unless they have at least $1,000 in tax liability. A head of household with two kids won’t hit that threshold until she has at least $38,505 in income (at which point she would be ineligible for the full credit anyway because her income is too high). The credit is, in this respect, another element of the swindle: On paper it looks like it’s designed to help lower-income individuals, but in practice it’s largely a ruse.
[…]
Nonetheless, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), one of Secure 2.0’s promoters, praised the bill as “completely budget neutral” — either because he thought he could play voters for fools or, perhaps, because he was fooled himself. The question now is whether Buchanan’s fellow Republicans can fool fiscal conservatives into thinking that they really care about the deficit — and whether Democratic lawmakers can fool their base into thinking that they genuinely care about wealth inequality. If lawmakers from either party were truly concerned about the plight of low-income retirees, they would focus on strengthening Social Security, which actually provides a safety net for older people, rather than adding more deficit-financed bells and whistles to retirement accounts for the rich.

The era of tax-incentivized saving for retirement is nearly half a century old, and for all that time, Congress has showered high-income savers with generous benefits while paying lip service to the working class. The old adage says you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Bipartisan retirement “reform” puts that to the test.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/04/20/retirement-ira-inequality-budget/

…the how of the thing still manages to surprise me

He’d been earning more than his family could spend since about 1975, and in the decades since then he’d come to see the act of making money less as a personal necessity than as a serious game he could play and win. He invested it, traded it, lent it, gave it away and watched each day as the accounts continued to grow beyond his needs, his wants and sometimes even his own comprehension.

“I don’t want to say it’s all play money at this point, but what else could I possibly spend it on?” he sometimes wondered. His wife’s walk-in closet was already bigger than the South Bronx apartment where he’d grown up. Their Florida home had a custom-built infinity pool, and in five years he’d never once gone in for a swim.
[…]
The past year had been the best time in history to be one of America’s 745 billionaires, whose cumulative wealth has grown by an estimated 70 percent since the beginning of the pandemic even as tens of millions of low-wage workers have lost their jobs or their homes. Together, those 745 billionaires are now worth more than the bottom 60 percent of American households combined, and each day Cooperman could see that gap widening on his balance sheet — up an average of $4,788 per minute in the stock market, $1.9 million per day and $700 million total in 2021. As a record amount of wealth continued to shift toward a tiny fraction of people at the pinnacle of the economy, Cooperman could sense something else shifting, too.

“Billionaires shouldn’t even exist in America,” read one note he’d received after he went on TV to recommend stock picks.
[…]
He responded to most of the personal emails, kept record of the occasional death threats and wrote letters to politicians such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) whenever they criticized billionaires in their speeches, because he couldn’t understand: What exactly had he done wrong? What rule had he broken? He’d been born to poor immigrant parents on the losing end of a capitalist economy. He’d attended public schools, taken on debt to become the first in his family to attend college, worked 80-hour weeks, made smart decisions, benefited from some good luck, amassed a fortune for himself and for his clients and paid hundreds of millions in taxes to the government. He had a wife of 57 years, two successful children, and three grandchildren who were helping him decide how to give most of his money away to a long list of charities. “My life is the story of the American Dream,” he’d said while accepting an award at one charity gala, and he’d always imagined himself as the rags-to-riches hero, only to now find himself cast as the greedy villain in a story of economic inequality run amok.

And now came another series of emails from a stranger who ran a charity in New Jersey. She said billionaires were avoiding paying their fair share of taxes by using loopholes in the tax code. She said their legacy of excessive wealth was “burdening future generations.” She said Cooperman had no idea what it was like to live in poverty or to choose each month between paying rent or buying food.
[…]
He knew what people imagined when they thought of a billionaire. He’d read the stories of excess and extravagance and witnessed some of it firsthand, but that wasn’t him. He didn’t spend $238 million on a New York penthouse like hedge fund manager Ken Griffin; or vacation at his own private island in Belize like Bill Gates; or throw himself $10 million birthday parties featuring camels and acrobats like investor Stephen Schwarzman; or drop $70,000 a year on hair care like Donald Trump; or buy a preserved 14-foot shark for an estimated $8 million like Steven Cohen; or spend more than $1 billion on art like media mogul David Geffen; or budget $23 million for personal security like Facebook did for Mark Zuckerberg.

He didn’t have his own spaceships like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos; or a 600-foot flying airship like Sergey Brin; or a decommissioned Soviet fighter jet like Larry Ellison; or a $215 million yacht with a helipad and a pool like Steve Wynn; or a private train with three staterooms like John Paul DeJoria; or a $5 million luxury car collection like Kylie Jenner.
[…]
Together, he and Toby had learned how to be rich, which mostly meant deciding how not to spend their money. He still felt most comfortable shopping for clothes wholesale and commuting to work on New Jersey public transit. Toby enjoyed her job as a special-education teacher even if she didn’t need the $25 an hour, so she continued working and donated her salary back to the school. They bought a house for $325,000 in New Jersey in the 1980s and later built their $5 million home in Florida. They worried about demotivating their two children by giving them a massive inheritance, so instead they put a small fraction of their wealth into a trust that could be accessed only once their sons turned 35, at which point one was already a successful businessman and the other was an environmental scientist with a PhD.

Cooperman eventually left Goldman Sachs to start his own hedge fund, Omega, and for two decades he compounded his millions at an average of 14 percent each year as the stock market soared, until he and Toby were among the wealthiest few hundred billionaires in the United States. They were invited to dinner in 2010 by Gates and Warren Buffett, who had just started a program called the Giving Pledge, asking billionaires to donate at least half of their money to charity, and the Coopermans committed that night.
[…]
They’d given away $150 million to a hospital in New Jersey, $50 million for college scholarships to Newark high school students, $40 million to Columbia Business School, $40 million to Hunter College, $30 million to performing arts, $25 million to the Jewish Family Fund, $20 million to skilled nursing, $15 million to food banks, and on and on it went. But no matter how much they gave away, their money continued to make more money even as wages for the middle class remained essentially flat. In the past 50 years, the gap between poor families and the top 0.1 percent had increased more than tenfold. Children now had only a 43 percent chance of out-earning their parents.
[…]
He donated to more than 50 organizations each year and also to a number of people who wrote to him in personal distress. “Other than my family, writing checks is the most meaningful thing I do,” Cooperman said, and yet no matter how many zeros he included, it left him wanting to do more. “We’re going in the wrong direction in this country in so many depressing ways,” he said. He believed in the meritocratic ideal of capitalism — “equal opportunity if not equal results,” he said — but it seemed to him that the odds of success remained stacked by race, by gender and increasingly by economic starting position. Rates of intergenerational poverty had gone up in each of the past three decades. The most disadvantaged children were falling further behind. He believed from his own experience that a college education was the best answer, and yet tuition costs were continuing to skyrocket.

“It’s not exactly a fair system until you even up the odds,” he said, and after looking over the list of worthy causes, he and Toby had decided that donating half of their money didn’t feel sufficient. Sixty percent wasn’t enough to meet the country’s needs. Neither was 75. So they’d agreed to set up a family foundation that would eventually give away more than 90 percent of their money, and Cooperman had decided that rather than retiring in earnest, he would continue to manage their account so there would be more to give away.
[…]
He and Toby had spent almost all of their time during the pandemic within the gates of St. Andrews, eating dinner outside at the clubhouse and playing cards with friends, but every few days they liked to go for a drive. Once, early in the pandemic, they’d driven to a quiet, nearby park only to find more than 150 cars lined up in the parking lot as people waited for bags of canned goods at an impromptu food bank. “Depressing and staggering in a country of such wealth,” Cooperman said, and it made him remember a poem his granddaughter had written and published when she was in middle school, called “Seven Miles,” about the physical proximity between the extreme wealth of Short Hills, N.J., where Cooperman had his other home, and the extreme poverty in nearby Newark. “At one end we have too much,” she’d written. “At the other, they have nothing. Spread it all just seven miles.”

She’d gone on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford, becoming an “ultraliberal, socialist type in favor of wealth redistribution,” Cooperman said. He adored her and admired both her empathy and her intellect, but he’d repeatedly fought against the liberal idea that one way to redistribute that wealth was to tax billionaires at a rate of 70 percent or more. He’d written to Sen. Warren about her “soak-the-rich positions,” and to President Barack Obama about “villainizing success.” He was a registered independent, and he’d voted for Joe Biden in the last election because he considered President Donald Trump a “would-be dictator whose comportment in office was beyond disgraceful,” but Cooperman believed most of all in the basic tenets of capitalism. He’d earned his money, and therefore it was his to spend or give away. He sent in a quarterly check for $10 million to the federal government in estimated taxes and said he paid an effective tax rate of 34 percent. He’d told politicians in his letters that he was willing to pay more, but he believed the highest effective tax rate should be no more than 50 percent.
[…]
He finished going through the slides and then asked for questions, and after a while a student in the center of the room raised her hand and waited for the microphone. She said she was also interested in a career in business, and she explained that one of the many barriers in her way was the start-up cost. “In Florida, you need $200,” she said.

“You’re going to need a lot more than that,” Cooperman said.

“I know,” she said. “I just mean two hundred to get the license, the paperwork, from zero.”

Cooperman looked at her for a moment and tried to imagine what it would mean to start again from zero, and what it would be like to ascend from poverty to extreme wealth not in the 1960s but in 2022, when that gap had multiplied 10 times. But he’d occupied these students’ place in the American economy once. His faith in the American Dream required him to believe that they could one day occupy his.
[…]
“I can speak to the issues of both being rich and being poor,” he told them, and as a billionaire in the bifurcating American economy, there was one truth of which he felt certain.

“Being rich is better,” he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/30/moral-calculations-billionaire/

…not that money solves everything

It is undeniable that the United States and its allies were — and still are — right to use sanctions to try to end this war.

Yet as the Biden administration weighs the next phase of this conflict, Americans should be cleareyed about the limits of what sanctions are likely to achieve.

It’s too early to know how history will judge this unprecedented, sweeping effort to make Mr. Putin pay a price for his war. Nor can we predict the unintended consequences these sanctions may produce in the coming months or years. But there are lots of indications that the war — and the sanctions it triggered — could last a long time. As it is wise to have definite goals and an exit strategy when a country enters a military conflict, the same is true for waging economic warfare.
[…]
Here’s the issue: Sanctions historically have not been particularly effective in changing regimes, and their record at changing dictators’ behavior is mixed at best.
[…]
Sanctions alone — at least any sanctions that European countries would be willing to now consider — will not bring Russia to its knees any time soon. As long as Europeans still depend on Russian oil and gas, Russia will be able to depend on significant income from that relationship. The spat over whether gas deliveries will be paid in rubles, as Russia has demanded, only highlights the bind that European countries find themselves in.

The oligarchs who are losing their yachts and the people who are tightening their belts have little sway over the Kremlin. In Russia, with average citizens, Mr. Putin has grist for a loud “I told you so” about the West’s purported longing to bring down Russia.

Will the sanctions imposed by the Group of 7 nations truly isolate Russia? No. A number of countries, including Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and, most significantly, China, remain on friendly terms with Russia. The fact that this list also includes archrivals Pakistan and India, as well as Iran and Israel, illustrates Mr. Putin’s influence as an arms dealer and a power broker in South Asia and the Middle East.
[…]
It is also worth remembering that, although Russia’s invasion proves that economic integration is no cure for war, economic isolation is also not a recipe for peace. Sanctions are often sold as an alternative to war. But they can also be a precursor to war, as seen with the institution of the American oil embargo against Japan and the freezing of Japanese assets about five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
[…]
All the more reason that the United States should have a clear plan for how and under what circumstances it would be appropriate to roll back these latest sanctions. Right now, this has been left deliberately vague to allow the Ukrainians to directly negotiate with Russia. It is laudable to give deference to Ukrainians whose lives are on the line in this terrible war. But creating clear goals and communicating benchmarks for sanctions relief are important factors in successful sanctions. Too often, sanctions are left in place for decades, without evaluation of whether or not they are achieving what they were put in place to do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/opinion/sanctions-russia-ukraine-war.html

…while other things

Ban on Russian gas would plunge Germany into recession, warns Bundesbank [Guardian]

The Former Chancellor Who Became Putin’s Man in Germany [NYT]

…seem to be doing very much what they’ve always been intended to do

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.

The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:
[…]
Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers.
[…]
Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.

Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.
[…]
Such checks and balances as the Framers put in place […] depended on the separation of the three branches of government, each of which, they believed, would zealously guard its own power and prerogatives. The Framers did not establish safeguards against the possibility that national-party solidarity would transcend state boundaries because they did not imagine such a thing was possible. Nor did they foresee that members of Congress, and perhaps members of the judicial branch, too, would refuse to check the power of a president from their own party.
[…]
Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which Trump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride Trump’s coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business. Yet Trump’s triumph also had elements of a hostile takeover. The movement’s passion was for Trump, not the party. GOP primary voters chose Trump over the various flavors of establishment Republicanism (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio), and after Trump’s election they continued to regard establishment Republicans as enemies. Longtime party heroes like Paul Ryan were cast into oblivion for disparaging Trump. Even staunch supporters such as Jeff Sessions eventually became villains when they would not do as Trump demanded. Those who survived had a difficult balancing act: to use Trump’s appeal to pass the Republican agenda while also controlling Trump’s excesses, which they worried could ultimately threaten the party’s interests.
[…]
It was no surprise that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. As for conservative intellectuals, even those who had spent years arguing that Woodrow Wilson was a tyrant because he created the Federal Reserve and supported child labor laws seemed to have no concerns about whether Trump was a would-be despot. They not only came to Trump’s defense but fashioned political doctrines to justify his rule, filling in the wide gaps of his nonexistent ideology with an appeal to “conservative nationalism” and conservative populism. Perhaps American conservatism was never comfortable with the American experiment in liberal democracy, but certainly since Trump took over their party, many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.

All this has left few dissenting voices within the Republican ecosystem. The Republican Party today is a zombie party. Its leaders go through the motions of governing in pursuit of traditional Republican goals, wrestling over infrastructure spending and foreign policy, even as real power in the party has leached away to Trump. From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.
[…]
The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and into the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield Trump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Thus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, in their roles as party leaders, run interference for the Trump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, while Republicans in lesser positions cheer on the Jan. 6 perpetrators, turning them into martyrs and heroes, and encouraging illegal acts in the future.
[…]
Those who criticize Biden and the Democrats for not doing enough to prevent this disaster are not being fair. There is not much they can do without Republican cooperation, especially if they lose control of either chamber in 2022. It has become fashionable to write off any possibility that a handful of Republicans might rise up to save the day. This preemptive capitulation has certainly served well those Republicans who might otherwise be held to account for their cowardice. How nice for them that everyone has decided to focus fire on Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.

Yet it is largely upon these Republicans that the fate of the republic rests.
[…]
Specifically, they have refused to work with Democrats to pass legislation limiting state legislatures’ ability to overturn the results of future elections, to ensure that the federal government continues to have some say when states try to limit voting rights, to provide federal protection to state and local election workers who face threats, and in general to make clear to the nation that a bipartisan majority in the Senate opposes the subversion of the popular will. Why?
[…]
We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/

…& yeah…it’s not like the pandemic hasn’t altered a lot of things…but…well…things weren’t looking so hot even before that

Gun violence overtook car accidents as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the US in 2020, according to a report from the University of Michigan.

The finding was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday as part of longer term research effort from the university’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention (IFIP).
[…]
Although 2020 marked the first year that more children and teens were killed by guns than in car accidents, gun violence has been the number one cause of death among Black teenage boys over 15 for at least a decade, according to CDC data.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/22/us-gun-violence-leading-cause-of-death-youth

…some things…some things seem like they should be impossible to ignore

https://time.com/3791176/malcolm-browne-the-story-behind-the-burning-monk/

…but…hard as it might be to believe…that first time might stand out…but we can kind of lose track after that

Thich Quang Duc, an elderly Buddhist monk who set himself alight in the lotus position in Saigon in 1963, was the first globalised self-immolation. Some argue that this act, regarded as a sacrifice of great selflessness in some Chinese Buddhist scripture, was inspired by religious antecedents. Most of the 3,000 acts of self-immolation since have occurred in countries with Buddhist or Hindu traditions, as sociologist Michael Biggs records in his book Making Sense of Suicide Missions. Many who self-immolate are monks but they do not generally believe, like cult followers who die together, that their suicide heralds a more exulted existence.

The dominant interpretation placed on Quang Duc’s death, which was widely reported in America (Malcolm Browne’s famous photograph is the cover image of Rage Against the Machine’s debut album), was that it was directed against the South Vietnamese dictatorship. This view has since encouraged clusters of self-immolations: Indian students in 1990, Kurds in Turkey, Falung Gong followers in China and even Americans protesting against Vietnam.

Self-immolation makes authorities – both democratic and totalitarian – nervous. The self-immolation of Graham Bamford, who set himself on fire outside Parliament in 1993 over Britain’s failure to halt atrocities in the Balkans, received little coverage at the time.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2012/mar/07/self-immolation-ultimate-symbol-protest

…seems unbelievable…& yet…how bright a beacon did this make in yesterday’s media landscape?

A Colorado man died after setting himself on fire outside the Supreme Court on Friday evening, according to police.
[…]
The incident occurred about 6:30 p.m. Friday, said Patricia McCabe, a spokeswoman for the court. A helicopter landed on the plaza to take Bruce to a hospital. Supreme Court police, Capitol Police and D.C. police all responded to the incident, she said.

McCabe said the incident was not a public safety issue, but the plaza was closed to permit investigation. By Saturday it was full of life: fountains splashed, the American flag whipped in the breeze, people snapped photos and posed alongside the marble pillars, a family shared lunch on the steps.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/04/22/man-fire-supreme-court-plaza/

…hell…that’s only a couple of paragraphs short of quoting the whole of the appearance it made in the pages of the post…a man traveled from colorado to the steps of the supreme court & lit himself on fire…& it barely made the news

…yeah…I got nothing…but here’s a thing…I can’t promise I won’t have another laundry list of misery next time I try to put one of these together…but…if a couple of you would be willing to throw yourselves into the breach…those could be escaped next weekend…& the tuesday after…when I’m going to be preoccupied by family…& without any guarantee of being online…you could consider it a public service, even…& it feels like we could all do with some better karma?

…anyway…that’s more than enough out of me for today…I’ll go look for some tunes