[Plura-list] Plute buys mayor's house and serves eviction papers; Podcast of Someone Comes to Town

[Cory Doctorow]

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Tonight I'll be helping William Gibson launch the paperback edition of
his novel AGENCY at a Strand Bookstore videoconference. Come say hi!

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/william-gibson-cory-doctorow-agency-tickets-132831910821

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Today's links

* Plute buys mayor's house and serves eviction papers: How money is
power, and how power corrupts.

* Podcast of Someone Comes to Town: Part 29 - closing in on the terminal
edition!

* This day in history: 2006, 2016, 2020

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

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🥃 Plute buys mayor's house and serves eviction papers

It took decades after the passage of America's landmark antitrust laws -
the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act - for trustbusting to occur in
earnest, and what spurred the action wasn't mere corporate bullying, not
just price hikes and labor abuses.

What tipped America over into a state where a leader (FDR) who told
activists "I want to do it, now make me do it" found the political will
to "do it" was the corruption that attended the extreme concentration of
wealth.

Monopoly was never merely an issue of economics - it's fundamentally an
issue about *politics*. Yes, the monopolist bleeds workers and
suppliers, sucks them dry and amasses a tremendous fortune, but that's
just accumulating ammunition.

What the monopolist does with that ammunition is far more consequential:
when the powerful are small in number and command vast fortunes, they
can come to a consensus about how to deploy their fortunes to corrupt
the political process.

The economic harms are just a warmup, the political harms are the real
deal.

Hoover was beholden to plutes, had a cabinet full of them, turned over
the nation's treasury to a sociopathic monster called Andrew Mellon
whose stated ambition was to own all the world's aluminum.

And so, as the Depression raged, as the nation's breadbasket turned to
dust and blew away, as the country disintegrated and as veterans of the
Great War starved, Hoover continued to make policy on behalf of the 1%,
immiserating the country.

FDR won the election in 1932 - but even more compellingly, Hoover lost
it. The nation wasn't just angry about the economy - they were furious
about politics, about the fiddling indifference of the rich and powerful
to the collapse of their lives, fortunes and future.

The trustbusting tradition endured for generations, and it treated
inequality, monopoly and wealth concentration as political problems, as
the visible sign of an imminent takeover of the nation by self-styled
neo-aristocrats whose wealth was evidence of greed, not ingenuity.

It was Ronald Reagan who made America's official position that wealth
was virtue and virtue was wealth - the plute's circular logic that the
system works if it elevates the best people, and that they, the elevated
were therefore the best.

Reagan, his court sorcerer Robert Bork (a disgraced Nixon administration
criminal) and the Chicago School of economists reframed monopoly as a
purely economic matter, altering the rules so that monopolies were only
prevented or punished if they made prices go up.

The "consumer welfare" version of antitrust abandoned all political
questions - questions that every person had a legitimate say in - in
favor of complex economic models that they alone could create and
interpret.

Thus they could act as modern haruspices, who would evaluate every
monopoly question by staring into the inscrutable guts of an equation
and then pronounce that the gods approved of the monopoly.

The result was the steady encroachment of priorities of the wealthy into
the political sphere, so that Boeing could self-certify its flying
deathtraps, Purdue could lie about its murder pills, bailed out banks
could robosign your house right out from under you.

When people embraced conspiracies about vaccines or aerospace companies
or impunity for rich sexual predators, we blamed "online radicalization"
for exposing the traumatized and desperate to false explanations for
their misery - rather than blaming immiserating corruption.

Wealth is power, and it's unaccountable power that allows it to corrupt
without check. That sounds abstract, so let me make it concrete by
talking about the Epleys, a powerful and fearsome family that dominates
New York State's Hamptons.

The Epleys were longtime allies of Southampton Mayor Michael Irving, who
was trounced by Jesse Warren in a Jun 2019 election. Warren went on to
remove Zach Epley from Southampton's planning board, as is his
prerogative as mayor.

https://nypost.com/2021/01/23/southampton-ny-mayor-squatting-in-his-home-landlord/

In October 2019, Epley left a voicemail message for Warren, telling the
mayor that it was "game on."

Last July, the Epleys bought the house Warren rents from a Citibank exec
called Brandt Portugal.

After initial saber-rattling, the Epleys pledged to leave their new
tenant Warren alone, but then Zach Epley lost a local Village Board
election to a candidate that Warren had backed. Then the gloves came off.

Warren was also unable to renew his lease for his home in October, but
New York State's eviction moratorium protects him.

Warren continued sending rent checks to the Epleys, but they claimed the
certified letters never arrived - so they served him with eviction papers.

Eviction would end Warren's residency in Southampton and thus his
eligibility to run again for mayor. On Jan 16, Zach Epley and his father
Mark Epley (formerly the town mayor) showed up to demand that Warren
leave in an absurd encounter that was recorded and posted online.

Warren has closed on a new home in town and will be moving at the end of
the month.

On the one hand, this is a spicy story about small town politics, but on
the other, it's a tale of how money becomes power becomes corruption.

A powerful family of sore losers can turn their wealth into the power to
evict the mayor and thus expel him from town  and end his political
career in town - it's a perfect microcosm for how money can undo the
democratic will of the people.

And that's why inequality is bad: not merely because the wealthy hoard
the resources the rest of us need, nor because the alleged prosperity
that allowing these soi-dissant giants direct our resources never
materialized.

But because wealth is power without accountability, and that power
corrupts.

The Epleys are why Reagan and Bork were wrong: wealth concentration was
never solely (or even primarily) an economic matter.

It's always been political.

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🥃 Podcast of Someone Comes to Town

This week on my podcast: part 29 of my serialized reading of "Someone
Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," my 2006 novel that Gene Wolfe
called "a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read."

https://craphound.com/news/2021/01/25/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-29/

You can catch up on the other installments here:

https://craphound.com/podcast/?s=%22someone%20comes%22

and subscribe to my podcast feed here:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet
Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever, too!):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_375/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_375_-_Someone_Comes_to_Town_Someone_Leaves_Town_029.mp3

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🥃 This day in history

#15yrsago Library’s one-year anniversary of lending video-games
https://www.gamingtarget.com/article.php?artid=4941

#15yrsago UK music industry execs can’t talk straight about DRM
https://web.archive.org/web/20060203090643/http://rock.thepodcastnetwork.com/2006/01/25/digital-music-the-industry-answers/

#5yrsago Starve: the best, meanest new graphic novel debut since
Transmetropolitan
https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/25/starve-the-best-meanest-new-graphic-novel-debut-since-transmetropolitan/

#5yrsago Swiss pro-privacy email provider forces a referendum on mass
surveillance
https://theintercept.com/2016/01/25/how-a-small-company-in-switzerland-is-fighting-a-surveillance-law-and-winning/

#5yrsago Stop taking “probiotics”
https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/21/probiotics-shaky-science/

#1yrago Warner claims ownership over the numbers 36 and 50, and
demonetizes Youtube videos that incorporate them
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/annemunition-bizarre-copyright-strike-youtube-random-numbers-1317750/

#1yrago I reviewed William Gibson’s novel “Agency” for today’s LA Times
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-01-24/agency-william-gibson

#1yrago  The answer to the Clearview AI scandal is better privacy laws,
not anti-scraping lawshttps://www.wired.com/story/clearview-ai-scraping-web/

#1yrago Chicago PD’s predictive policing tool has been shut down after 8
years of catastrophically bad results
https://twitter.com/sh4keer/status/1220470166355468288

#1yrago The cum-ex scam stole $60b from European tax authorities: it’s
monumentally boring, complicated, and very, very important
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/business/cum-ex.html

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Super Punch (https://www.superpunch.net/).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Friday's progress: 525 words (102594 total).

* A short story, "Jeffty is Five," for The Last Dangerous Visions.
Friday's progress: 282 words (1077 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 27)
https://craphound.com/news/2021/01/11/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-27/

Upcoming appearances:

* Evening with William Gibson, Jan 25,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/william-gibson-cory-doctorow-agency-tickets-132831910821

* Launch for the print edition of HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE
CAPITALISM, Jan 28,
https://medium.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_GfnYHzZCSY-cCMVL5ZCDBw

* Launch for the young adult edition of Edward Snowden's memoir
PERMANENT RECORD, Feb 9,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/edward-snowden-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-136734968973

* Boskone, 58, Feb 12-15, https://boskone.org/

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Upcoming appearances:

* Evening with William Gibson, Jan 25,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/william-gibson-cory-doctorow-agency-tickets-132831910821

* Launch for the print edition of HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE
CAPITALISM, Jan 28,
https://medium.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_GfnYHzZCSY-cCMVL5ZCDBw

* Launch for the young adult edition of Edward Snowden's memoir
PERMANENT RECORD, Feb 9,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/edward-snowden-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-136734968973

* Boskone, 58, Feb 12-15, https://boskone.org/

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Recent appearances:

* Monocle Reads
https://monocle.com/radio/shows/meet-the-writers/monocle-reads-87/play/

* Hedging Bets on the Future (Motherboard Cyber):
https://play.acast.com/s/cyber/hedgingbetsonthefuturewithauthorcorydoctorow

* Applying the Pandemic Mindset to Climate Change:
https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/12/applying-the-pandemic-mindset-to-climate-change-with-cory-doctorow

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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