Links for Friday, January 5
'Through my tears I see opportunity.' George W. Bush
Happy New Year, all. Bonne Année à toutes et à tous.
This is a light feast to help us welcome the year. I’ll have a serious look at the near past and future in a coming piece. For today, six curated links and your musical treat.
Links
If today has a theme, it’s a pascal one: the lambs of God picked clean by predators. Why we allow it is almost unfathomable, yet it’s almost never not true.
At the end of this set of links, there’s a thought on revolt — not from me, but Rick Perlstein. Something worth thinking about.
• The Big Myth About “Free” Markets That Justified History’s Greatest Heist (Jon Schwarz)
In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California, released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.” … Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might be the largest material theft since human civilization began. It examines a simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 level through 2018, how much more money would the bottom 90 percent of Americans have made during these 43 years? Put another way, how much additional wealth flowed to the top 10 percent during this time, thanks to increased income equality?
If you have a butt, you should hold onto it, because the answer is 47 TRILLION DOLLARS.
This is a number so large that it surpasses human understanding. …
This piece hits a lot of bases for me. It’s a review of a new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, two of my favorite climate authors, and it’s written by Jon Schwarz, one of my favorite Intercept writers.
Oreskes and Conway wrote a seminal paper on the fear of climate scientists (see below), and Schwarz wrote one of the most memorable posts in the history of posts (see also below).
File under “If God wanted them to be wealthy, He wouldn’t have let us rob them totally blind.”
• Democrats and the Iron Law of Institutions (Jon Schwarz)
Democrats operate according to the Iron Law of Institutions. The Iron Law of Institutions is: the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.
This is true for all human institutions, from elementary schools up to the United States of America. If history shows anything, it's that this cannot be changed. What can be done, sometimes, is to force the people running institutions to align their own interests with those of the institution itself and its members. …
Read the rest to see that, indeed, Democrats tanked George McGovern in 1972. They wanted no part of him and the horse he rode in on. Thus, Mr. Nixon again.
Brilliant. That blog, A Tiny Revolution, was a treasure.
File under “Why Democratic leaders worry less about Trump than you do.”