BC POLITICS
Saved by @ThomassRichards

The Democrats are at least two parties. The progressive wing of the party (which is by no means unified) and the finance wing of the party, which is also the party leadership.

1/

 During the leadership race, the progressive wing was represented by @SenSanders and @SenWarren; the former wants to minimize the role of markets in our lives, the latter wants to redeem markets by regulating them. It's a distinction with a difference, but I donated to both.

2/
Both wings of the party have prominent representatives in Congress; Sandersism are most visibly associated with @AOC (whom I donated to) and Warrenism is embodied by @RepKatiePorter (likewise), who was also one of Warren's law school proteges.

3/
Porter is a force of nature. She is infamous - and celebrated - for her brutal, no-holds-barred questioning of both corporate and administration witnesses, using a white-board to pin them down and eviscerating any attempts at bullshittery.

4/
This isn't just about getting facts into the record (though, she is SO GOOD at getting facts into the record!), it's also about effecting change, like when she single-handedly cornered the CDC's chief into guaranteeing universal, free covid tests:

https://t.co/WAfa4Ox5As

5/
During the 2020 election, corporate democrats and their supporters excoriated anyone who dared to question whether the party's corporate establishment would ever rise to the occasion and deliver the transformative change it demands.

6/
This "disunity" was treated as a reckless invitation to an apocalyptic second Trump term. Particular viciousness was directed at we who questioned the party leadership, such as supporters of @ShahidForChange, a radical human rights lawyer who primaried @SpeakerPelosi.

7/
Though Buttar was the target of a racist, Islamophobic smear-campaign mounted by party hacks, he fought a good and important fight (I was a donor to his campaign):

https://t.co/nmX0i2YJUd

8/
Pelosi's return to Congress means that Congressional Dems are now subject to her instincts, whims and loyalties. Those loyalties run deep. Pelosi is a major recipient of finance-sector donations.

https://t.co/ldOG3UlHfg

9/
Finance is one of the great villains of our century, and their cheating, theft, and destruction - foreclosures, fake accounts, usury, theft - have been rewarded, not punished. They showered establishment Dems with unprecedented sums in 2020:

https://t.co/FupfYyQ0fp

10/
One of the bright lines separating the progressive Dems from their establishment rivals is the finance sector. The latter love 'em ("that's where the money is" -W Sutton). The former are eager to euthanize some rentiers (-JM Keynes).

11/
Now, it happens that the Dems' most powerful scourge of the finance sector is Katie Porter, whose public eviscerations of finance criminals and their government enablers are the stuff of legend.

Here she is gutting @jpmorgan's Jamie Dimon:

https://t.co/ezIeQnnX4I

12/
And here she is just slaughtering the henhouse fox from Trump's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau:

https://t.co/NkoMYybLdz

Steve Mnuchin didn't have a chance. Oh my god is that mediocre, upward-failing cartoon villain out of his league.

https://t.co/Cu6xtkL4yW

13/
Which brings me back to Nancy Pelosi.

Who just rigged it so that Katie Porter will no longer be on the Congressional Finance Committee.

https://t.co/qa7lKhbrwN

14/
At a moment where the Dems' midterm fortunes are absolutely dependent on their willingness to deal out a reckoning to the banks for their covid profiteering, they are eliminating their most ardent and skilful finance-fighter.

15/
Pelosi thinks the problem isn't systemic, it's individual: that we have to reform bad banks, not banking itself. Pelosi is also worth ~$200m (mostly through her husband, a prominent finance leader) and depends on finance-sector contributions.

https://t.co/lBtVm9RjY7

16/
As Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is impossible to get a Congressional Majority Leader to understand something when her political career and family fortune depend on her not understanding it."

(Sinclair sometimes got eerily specific!)

17/
Porter is a force of nature. She flipped a red district and then won it again while publicly supporting Medicare For All. She upended the staffer-controlled Finance Committee, ending the reign of underlings who cycled in and out of the finance sector and finance regulation.

18/
The Pelosi-controlled Steering Committee appointed her to two other committees (Oversight and Natural Resources) then refused to waive the rule against serving on more than two committees, forcing her off the Finance committee.

19/
Porter is the only single mom of school-aged children in the House, giving her a unique perspective on finance that is completely alien to colleagues whose fortunes rise to the hundreds of millions.

20/
Economically, by every quantitative measure, establishment Dems are significantly to the right of Richard Nixon. Their lip-service to progressive causes stretches as far as replacing half of the 150 white dudes who own the world with women and people of color.

21/
Biden is already moving to stuff his administration with finance sector ghouls who made (literal) bank off of 393,000 US covid deaths.

The decision to call off the banks' fiercest watchdog puts the Democratic Congressional majority at risk in 2022.

22/
And that puts everything at risk: climate, economic justice, and repelling the forces of violent white nationalism.

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The US election news has largely overshadowed a seismic moment in global finance: Ant, a fintech company that spun out of Alibaba/Alipay, was scheduled to have the world's largest IPO, topping even Aramco, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

Then Chinese regulators canceled it.

1/


As @yvessmith writes in her excellent @nakedcapitalism breakdown, the consensus narrative on this is capricious Chinese regulators changed their minds and jerked the rug out from under Ali's billionaire owner Jack Ma.

The reality is a lot

To understand it, you need to understand the difference between the Chinese and American "money story." In the US, there is widespread, unquestioning faith in the fairytale that money predates the state and is separate from it.

3/

In this story, people come together to trade but are plagued by disparate goods: if I want to pay for your chickens with a cow, how do you make change? They spontaneously decide that something (gold?) is money and price their cows and chicks in it.

4/

Then, governments come along tax our gold away, and then to add insult to injury, governments abandon gold and insist that paper is as good as gold, print too much of it and crash the economy!

This probably sounds familiar to you, but it's just not true.

5/
ECONOMY , {GIG MONEY} , BANKING AND REGULATION
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
One of the arguments for permitting monopolies is that they are "efficient." That's the logic under which Universal was allowed to acquire Comcast and NBC - the "vertical integration" would make all three companies better and we'd all reap the benefit.

1/


It turns out that there are DISeconomies of scale, what Brandeis called "the curse of bigness" and really, the Universal-NBC-Comcast octopus is a poster child for that

Comcast has just informed its subscribers that they are at risk of losing access to "Bravo, CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Olympic Channel, Oxygen, Syfy, Telemundo, Universal Kids, NBC Universo, USA Network and NBC Sports

That is, Comcast has warned its customers that Comcast might not license its channels to Comcast anymore.

This is a "carriage dispute" - a dispute over how much the cable operator will pay the broadcaster. It's a common dispute to have.

4/

But in this case, Comcast's dispute is over the accounting fiction of how much one division of a vertical monopolist will nominally charge another to access its products.

5/
ECONOMY
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
After the 9/11 attacks, airlines and public buildings adopted a flurry of "security" measures, like taking away pen-knives from fliers or requiring visitors to office buildings to be photographed or present a driver's license.

1/


Bruce Schneier's seminal 2003 "Beyond Fear" called these measures: #securitytheater.

Schneier pointed out that these measures would be easy to circumvent, and were thus providing only the comforting appearance of security - not security

Security theater is worse than nothing. Security theater gives people the false impression that their risks have been mitigated, when actually things are just as dangerous.

After al, if you know that danger exists, you can take some steps to mitigate or avoid it.

3/

But if you have the false impression that you've been made safer, you might unwittingly engage in risky behavior.

4/

Like, if you know your car's brakes are flaky, you might nurse the car along to the mechanic at low speed on side-streets.

But if you don't know about the brakes, you're apt to discover their flaws at 75mph on the freeway.

5/
FOR LATER READ
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Dependency Confusion; Adam Curtis on criti-hype; Catalytic converter theft; Apple puts North Dakota on blast; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/Osts9lAjPo

#Pluralistic

1/


This weekend, I'll be participating in Boskone 58, Boston's annual sf convention, where I'm doing panels and a reading.

https://t.co/2LfFssVcZQ

2/


Dependency Confusion: A completely wild supply-chain hack.

https://t.co/TDRNHUX0Ug

3/


Adam Curtis on criti-hype: Big Tech as an epiphenomenon of sociopathic mediocrity, not supergenius.

https://t.co/MYmHOosTk3

4/


Catalytic converter theft: Rhodium at $21,900/oz.

https://t.co/SDMAXrQwdd

5/
TWITTER
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Accountancy is more likely to be mocked than celebrated (or condemned), but accountants, far more than poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

1/


Though "bean counters" are employed by firms, they are notionally bound by a professional code of ethics every bit as serious as the Hippocratic Oath: "count things honestly." Without an accurate accounting of quantities, you can't make good decisions on quality.

2/

Though accountancy concerns itself with counting things, it is inextricably bound up with the realm of ideas, and accounting conventions (how you account for things) are philosophical matters, not empirical ones.

3/

It's no coincidence that #ModernMonetaryTheory owes more to accountancy than it does to economics. Economic accounts of the economy have an unfortunate tendency to proceed from first principles, creating models based on pure reason, without checking in on the actual world.

4/

For example, neoclassical econ's "homo economicus," the rational value-maximizing actor who populated so many models; or economists' insistence on targeting inflation with interest rates; or treating national "debts" like they were household debts.

5/
HISTORY

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Seth Abramson
Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
(MAJOR NOTE) The reason Manafort took over Trump's campaign in just 3 weeks despite being hired as a mere delegate counter is that ROGER STONE initiated a whisper campaign against Corey Lewandowski. That campaign started...days after Manafort returned from meeting with WikiLeaks.

2/ Stone and Manafort are longtime business partners; we'd expect Manafort to tell Stone what Assange told him, and for him to expect Stone to then pressure the campaign not only to hire him but quickly elevate him.

And who was Stone in touch with at the campaign? Trump himself.

3/ I bet you Manafort's late March emails are very interesting and that some of them are to/from his longtime business associate Roger Stone. And I bet Roger Stone's late March phone calls are very interesting and that some of them are to/from his longtime friend Donald Trump.

4/ At the end of March 2016, Trump suddenly convenes a NatSec meeting. At that meeting he directs his NatSec team to change the RNC platform in July to benefit Putin. Who later takes credit for that change?

Paul Manafort's business associate, Kremlin agent Konstantin Kilimnick.

5/ Why did Donald Trump suddenly convene a NatSec meeting 3 days after he finally hired Manafort? Why did he issue a pro-Kremlin directive at that meeting that Manafort's camp would later take credit for? What did Manafort tell Trump in the days leading up to that NatSec meeting?
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Greg Olear
Greg Olear
@gregolear
Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. Let’s sort it out.

[THREAD]


1/ Two nights ago, Rupert Murdoch called on Mitch McConnell, after hours. Since then, two Fox News-related Twitter accounts have not tweeted.

2/ Trump fired Sessions on Wednesday, replacing him with human dildo/Putin collaborator Matt Whitaker. Sessions had asked to stay until Friday and was told to leave immediately. So there was clearly some urgency to install the dildo...er, puppet.

3/ The Democrats won the SHIT out of the Midterms. Come January, the House check on Trump will leave him so hobbled, he’ll be like the dude from Misery.

4/ Trump went to Paris, ostensibly for an Armistice Day centennial event. He skipped the event, and much of the dinner tonight, because of “weather,” which everyone seems to agree is a bullshit excuse.
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@40_head
1. @SidneyPowell1, @LLinWood and any others who are digging into 2020 election fraud, you might want to look at Ryan Macias. He's the former acting director of the Federal Election Assistance Commission. He tested and certified Dominion systems, then profited from their failure.
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Caroline - Real Feminists XX \U0001f1ff\U0001f1e6
Caroline - Real Femini...
@radicalhag
Transition, 'inclusion' etc all have political ramifications. Instead of buying into the remarkably masculinist assumptions of queer theory that the dissolution of boundaries is always good, we should be examining them from the point of group power relations.

Transactivists try to conflate identifying as trans with gay marriage, in attempts to demonstrate the progressiveness of their cause, but the comparators are actually transracialism, trans-abledness, identifying as w/c etc.

The diagram shows the asymmetrical nature of such identifications. Identifying down is colonisation. Identifying up is impossible. The most you can do is improve your individual status relative to your class of origin, which leaves everyone else behind.


It also shows that the classes are occupied. If you identify as disabled, or as a woman, or as black, you are demanding access to spaces and facilities which were set aside for people based on a characteristic which you don't share.

How well tolerated this is gives us a clear insight into which oppressions are tolerated. We're rightly paying a lot more attention to racism, so Rachel Dolezal was fired by the NAACP. Other white women in the US who've tried this have been heavily criticised.
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Mohammed Zubair
Mohammed Zubair
@zoo_bear
Several Hindutva supporters, BJP members, Far RW propaganda websites and a few prominent handles (Journalists, Singers etc) were supporting this hate monger Mahant Yati Narasimhanand Saraswati. Let me share a few things he said about, The Missile Man of India, Dr. Abdul Kalam. 👇

This hate Monger claims, Dr. Abdul Kalam had a huge role in making Atom bomb for Pakistan.


He claims, The person who you (Hindus) chose as your role model, He (Dr, Abdul Kalam) was one of the biggest Jihadi India has ever produced. One of the biggest...


He further vomits, 'When Abdul Kalam visited USA, He was stripped naked. When Dr. Manmohan & Sonia G Objected, USA sent 124 files & said, He might be a Scientist to U, but according to our files, He is a terrorist, guardian of Pakistan & Father of Pakistan's Atom bomb'


He says, 'Anyone can recite a few slokhs of Gita & fool u.. Not once did Abdul Kalam miss Namaz. Yes, He was a vegetarian, But if he hadn't been a Vegitarian, How would've he got a Padam bhushan or Bharat Ratna. How would have he fooled you & made a Atom bomb for Pakistan..."
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Sharing one incident... After Modi's Trichy youth conference, the very next morning when police were clearing up their mini-control room, they found 5 strange boys who were roaming there with bags. When police enquired them "Sir, we are from Subramaniapuram in Trichy.

Whatever political meeting or conference is held in this ground, we come here on the same night or morning hours to collect the Liquor bottles to sell in the scrap shop for 50 paisa to 1 rupee per bottle and we used to earn Rs 200 to Rs 400 on each such event.

Even in the last DMK meeting the very next day we collected around 1500 bottles. But for Modi's BJP meeting, we could not find even a single bottle in the whole ground. We are coming around and around and not a single bottle in any corner of the G Corner ground in Trichy,

we are much disappointed, sir!". Police seem were stunned and pleasantly surprised. This is what Modi magic does in this nation. Modi is the one who can lead our nation and make everyone prosper with hardwork in right direction and proper approach.

This funny but interesting anecdote was published by a statewide local daily Dinamalar. I have just translated and posting it here for rest of the nation;
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Trump is gonna let the Mueller investigation end all on it's own. It's obvious. All the hysteria of the past 2 weeks about his supposed impending firing of Mueller was a distraction. He was never going to fire Mueller and he's not going to


Mueller's officially end his investigation all on his own and he's gonna say he found no evidence of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Democrats & DNC Media are going to LITERALLY have nothing coherent to say in response to that.

Mueller's team was 100% partisan.

That's why it's brilliant. NOBODY will be able to claim this team of partisan Democrats didn't go the EXTRA 20 MILES looking for ANY evidence they could find of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election

They looked high.

They looked low.

They looked underneath every rock, behind every tree, into every bush.

And they found...NOTHING.

Those saying Mueller will file obstruction charges against Trump: laughable.

What documents did Trump tell the Mueller team it couldn't have? What witnesses were withheld and never interviewed?

THERE WEREN'T ANY.

Mueller got full 100% cooperation as the record will show.
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Sri Parasurameswara Swamy Mandir, Gudimallam, Andhrapradesh

Gudimallam is a small village located in Chittoor district. It is seven miles away from Tirupati. This small village came to significance,due to it's very beautiful Shiva Mandir with history of thousands of years. 1/n


The main importance of the mandir lies in the Linga which is housed in the Garbhagriha of the temple & considered as the only one of such type. It is the earliest Linga discovered so far and it has been assigned to the 3rd century BCE.(Satavahana period) 2/n
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Jeet Heer
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1. Now that Stan Lee is being eulogized far and wide, it's important to remember how marginal Stan Lee and his collaborators (Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) were in the 1950s and 1960s.

2. Marvel Comics (before that Atlas) was just a cog in the machine of a bottom pulp publisher run by Martin Goodman, the husband of one of Lee's cousins. It was the lowest of the low in the publishing world.

3. Now Mario Puzo (not yet the author of the Godfather) shared offices with Stan Lee in the 1950s and 1960s. Puzo wrote for garrish men's adventure magazines and, like Lee, dreamed of writing a novel & breaking out. But Puzo looked down on Lee.

4. Flo Steinberg, 1960s secretary at Marvel: "They were always making jokes about us. They'd come in and giggle. mario Puzo would look in and would see us all working on his way to the office and say, 'Work faster, little elves. Christmas is coming.'"

5. When JFK was killed, the whole office of Magazine Management was stunned and quiet. Except Lee. He continued working. "He was still working on the comic books," Puzo said. "Like that was the most important thing in the world."
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