[Plura-list] Paygo, false consciousness and the IRS; The Public Interest Internet; Concluding How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

[Cory Doctorow]

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

This Weds (5/19), I'm doing a talk called "Seize the Means of
Computation," at the Ryerson Centre for Free Expression:

https://cfe.ryerson.ca/events/how-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-seize-means-computation

And on Thu (5/20), I'm doing a keynote called "Privacy Without
Monopoly," for the Northsec conference:

https://nsec.io/speaker/cory-doctorow.html


_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

Today's links

* Paygo, false consciousness and the IRS: Why we can't have nice things.

* The Public Interest Internet: Reviving pre-enclosure glory.

* Concluding How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism: Now, onto the
audiobook mastering!

* This day in history: 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016, 2020

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

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🩳 Paygo, false consciousness and the IRS

John Steinbeck diagnosed an important American pathology in 1966 when he
called the US a nation of "temporarily embarrassed capitalists" - people
who see themselves as the wealthy-in-waiting and therefore fight
policies that reduce the power that comes from wealth.

It's a restatement of Engels' idea of "false consciousness," and it's
the result of a deliberate strategy on the part of wealthy people - many
of whom believe that they were literally genetically destined to be
wealthy - to convince the rest of us that "anyone can succeed."

Part of the false consciousness program is the money story that goes
like this: the US government takes away "taxpayers' money" from "makers"
to fund "programs," the bulk of which go to the "lazy takers," who
experience the "moral hazard" of subsidized unemployment.

But of course, that's not how money works. Money originates with the
federal government (and its fiscal agents, the banks). In order for the
public to have money to pay off its tax liabilities, the government must
first spend that money into existence.

The IRS doesn't take our tax dollars, pile them up, and give them to
Congress to spend on programs. When the IRS taxes our money, they
annihilate it, removing it from circulation. When Congress spends, new
money comes into existence.

The US government can't run out of money any more than Apple can run out
of Itunes gift cards. It can spend too much money - so much that prices
go up because too many dollars are chasing too few goods - but it can't
run out of money.

Fed spending is constrained by *resources* (what's for sale in dollars)
not money (how many dollars there are). If the ratio of dollars to
resources gets out of whack, there's a risk of inflation.

There are many ways to fix this ratio. For example, the government
usually issues T-bills (savings bonds) whenever it spends more than it
taxes. When you buy a T-bill, you take dollars that might circulate
around the economy, chasing goods and labor, and you sequester them.

A T-bill is just a dollar you're not allowed to spend. In exchange for
surrendering the right to spend your dollars for 1, 5, 10 or more years,
the government offers you interest, trickling out that money over a long
period.

That way the government can buy things today without bidding against
your dollars.

But that's not the only way to fight inflation while spending new money
into existence. The other major way is taxation: simply removing money
from the economy and annihilating it.

Taxation fights inflation. When the government runs a deficit, that
means that it created more money this year via spending than it
destroyed via taxes. The "government deficit" is the "public surplus" -
the money left in the economy for all of us to spend on stuff.

Likewise, when the government runs a "surplus" that means it taxes more
money out of existence than it spends into existence. In a year where
the government runs a surplus, it means that the power of the private
sector - you and me - to buy stuff has decreased overall.

This is fine if there was too much money to begin with - if inflation
was kicking off - but if there's not enough money in circulation (e.g.
if there's a recession), it just makes things worse...but not for everyone.

When the economy is starved of money, banks go to work creating new
money through loans. These loans pay interest (to rich people like bank
shareholders and people who securitize and buy debt).

That's the one-two punch of spending cuts during a downturn:

I. The real economy is starved of the capital it needs to pay workers
and make things for workers to buy;

II. The financial economy grows as desperate real-economy firms borrow
from banks to keep the lights on.

Despite all their talk of "spending taxpayers' money," the wealthy
understand how money works. That's why they were totally indifferent to
the running $1t/year deficits created by the Trump tax-cuts (and
likewise about the Obama finance bailouts).

Giving money to rich people causes asset-bubbles (driving up the prices
of houses), but not inflation (a sustained rise in the price of all
goods). That's because rich people can't buy enough *stuff* (fridges,
cars, oranges) to drive up prices.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#payfors

After you've bought three houses and three SubZero fridges and filled
them with the beef of three Kobe cows and three cases of Moet, there's
still a LOT left over (even if you're Jeff Bezos and buy a superyacht
with its own, smaller superyacht).

Those leftovers go to socially useless things, like buying houses to
turn into rent-generating slums (Wall Street is fast becoming America's
biggest landlord, and single family homes are sold for cash to
investment funds instead of families).

And they go to influence campaigns designed to make regular people
defend massive cuts to the IRS and opposition to public spending on
infrastructure, education, health, and other necessities.

This isn't just about Republicans. For years, the Democratic leadership
has supported "balanced budgets" (spending so little that no new money
is left in the economy after all taxes are paid).

The "paygo" rule (which requires all new spending to be matched with
cuts or tax-hikes) is religion for the likes of Pelosi and Schumer.
That's why the Democratic caucus is mired in stupid arguments about "how
we will pay for the stimulus."

As bad as the paygo rule is, though, Republicans have made it worse, by
demonizing and starving the IRS. Paygo means that the US government
operates under the artificial constraint of only spending if it can make
cuts or raise taxes.

Raises taxes is really unpopular, for obvious reasons.

Now, raising taxes on the 1% - who have a lot of excess money that's
fueling political corruption and asset bubbles - is one way around this.

Theoretically, taxing the 1% should have a 99% approval rating.

But canny Republicans have figured out how exorcise temporarily
embarrassed capitalists about the "unfairness" of taxing their bosses,
in part by just flat-out lying about who new taxes would implicate.

But there's yet another way to satisfy paygo's artificial constraint,
without changing the a single word in the tax-code: simply fund the IRS
so that it can collect the trillions that the ultra-wealthy illegally
avoid in tax-payments every year.

But this strategy is also a bust. The GOP campaign to destroy the IRS
has been too successful.

It's a longrunning campaign, but it achieved liftoff in 2013 when the
Tea Party baselessly accused the IRS of discriminating against
conservative groups seeking nonprofit status.

The work-the-ref strategy paid off, providing political cover for deep
cuts to the IRS and putting IRS staffers on notice so they green lit
every dark money group that applied for nonprofit status, no matter how
obviously corrupt they were.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fallout-from-allegations-of-tea-party-targeting-hamper-irs-oversight-of-nonprofits/2017/12/17/6403c1c0-c59e-11e7-a441-3a768c8586f1_story.html

After the cuts, the IRS grew easier to discredit. Understaffed and under
siege, the agency's behavior grew erratic, then indefensible. There were
runaway automated processes that sent out erroneous property-seizure
notices that no one could rescind:

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/14/irs-shutdown-federal-government-shut-down-irs-asset-seizures/

Then there was the aftermath of the Equifax breach, where the IRS first
told Americans that it didn't matter because they'd already been doxed
by other bad companies:

https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/355862-irs-significant-number-of-equifax-victims-already-had-info-accessed-by

Then came news that the IRS couldn't cancel Equifax's no-bid, $7.5m
anti-fraud contract because it didn't have the resources to do its own
fraud prevention (Equifax eventually lost the contract because it served
malware from its anti-fraud site).

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/equifax-irs-data-breach-malware-discovered/

The rich waged a successful all-out war on the IRS. Take the Global High
Wealth unit. For every hour an auditor from GHW worked, they brought in
$4500 in taxes the super-rich had dodged. Even by the topsy-turvy logic
of "government as a business," this was good business.

After a concerted harassment and political influence campaign, the GHW
abandoned the super-rich and switched to the merely wealthy, bringing in
less money and pissing off a lot more people.

The other shoe dropped in 2019, when the IRS admitted it had switched to
preferentially auditing poor people because it was too politically and
legally fraught to audit rich people, even the most flagrant cheaters.

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-easier-and-cheaper-to-audit-the-poor

That was the first year that America's 400 highest earners paid a lower
tax rate than the average American worker:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html

The IRS's transformation into a facilitator of illegal wealth retention
by the super-rich and petty harassment of the rest of Americans made
them very easy to hate.

To that, add the concerted corporate campaigns to use the IRS to rip off
workers.

For example, for 20 years, Intuit lobbied the IRS not to make tax-filing
automatic, painless and free, ensuring that Americans would continue to
pay billions to send data to the IRS that it already had:

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free

Reading the IRS's internal emails from this battle reveals an agency in
retreat, where demoralized and ineffectual government employees simply
rolled over for one of the greatest ripoffs in American history:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-tried-to-hide-emails-that-show-tax-industry-influence-over-free-file-program

Intuit wanted to rip us off with taxes. Microsoft, by contrast, just
wanted to break the law. Working with KPMG, the convicted monopolist
created a "transfer" scheme of breathtaking illegality, using its
tax-savings to bankroll its war on the IRS:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher

Which brings us to today, where Democrats are held hostage to the
"payfor" rule and trying to figure out how to mobilize the trillions
Biden has pledged for infrastructure, health, and care.

Republicans - pushing the big lie of "taxpayer money" - are dogwhistling
hard. Senator John Thune, responding to Biden's proposal for $80b for
the IRS, says any tax enforcement efforts "must strike an appropriate
balance between taxpayer responsibilities and taxpayer rights."

Meanwhile Senator Chuck Grassley takes the nonsensical position that
funding the IRS won't help it do its job ("simply throwing money at a
problem doesn’t necessarily yield a solution").

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/553704-lawmakers-bicker-over-how-to-go-after-tax-cheats

Then there's Rep Kevin Brady, warning that a fully funded IRS would
"unleash tens of thousands of new IRS agents on families, farms and
businesses."

But the Democrats own the paygo rule, not the Republicans, and their
leadership have added their own special touch to make funding the IRS
impossible.

https://prospect.org/politics/infrastructure-at-a-crossroads-biden-public-investment/

According to the rules Congress gives to the Congressional Budget Office
(which calculates the cost of government programs), the CBO isn't
allowed to factor in the projected additional revenue from funding the
IRS, only the cost of doing so (!).

Which means that they must factor in the salaries that IRS Global High
Wealth auditors will draw - but they are forbidden from counting the
$4500/hour they generate when they puncture the tissue-thin financial
lies of the super-rich.

The payfor and "taxpayer money" are lies.

It's a shuck sold to the rubes, not economics. Because it's a shuck, it
doesn't have to make any sense - and it doesn't. We shouldn't run
government like a business, but if we must, let's at *least* count
revenues as well as costs.


_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🩳 The Public Interest Internet

I met Danny O'Brien on 9/11/01, at a surreal dinner we pressed on with
despite (or really, because of) the intense terror of the day. He was
wearing a t-shirt from NTK, his seminal digital newsletter, bearing its
slogan: "THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK"

Online culture has its roots in a strange swirl of hobbyists, the
military, corporate misfits fooling around with their employers' vast
computer labs and students and academics dabbling in the early digital
world.

It was no garden of Eden. There was plenty of fighting and plenty of
difference, but there was, despite it all, a sense of mission: a
collegial urgency to build a commons that would be part of the digital
world that everyone could use.

Right from the start, there was a sense that this commons was wonderful
and fragile, facing a remorseless enclosure movement that would turn all
our collective work into someone's private, rent-generating preserve.

It's been 20 years since I met Danny, and the enclosure is well
underway. Danny - who's been warning us about stolen revolutions and
fighting to steal them back since last century - has now embarked on a
wonderful series of essays for EFF on the subject.

These essays are grouped under the banner of the "Public Interest
Internet," EFF's equivalent to Ethan Zuckerman's "digital public
infrastructure" Hana Schank's "public interest technology," the EU's
"public stack" and Eli Pariser's "New Public."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/05/introducing-public-interest-internet

Despite decades of sustained assault, the Public Interest Internet is
still with us and still vital, from the Internet Archive to Wikipedia to
Creative Commons to the vast array of FLOSS projects. Any effort to rein
in Big Tech must not destroy these vital commons.

Danny: "When Big Tech is long gone, a better future will come from the
seed of this public interest internet: seeds that are being planted now,
and which need everyone to nurture them."

Danny's published two case studies so far. The first, "The Enclosure of
the Public Interest Internet," recounts how early film enthusiasts
migrated from Usenet's rec.arts.movies to the volunteer-maintained and
hosted Cardiff Movie Database.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/05/enclosure-public-interest-internet

You probably haven't heard of the Cardiff Movie Database, but you've
certainly heard of IMDB, the Amazon-owned system it turned out,
privatizing the hard work of public-spirited volunteers and turning it
into the exclusive preserve of a digital monopolist.

IMDB shows us how volunteers' passion projects can turn into someone
else's private concern, but as Danny writes, this isn't inevitable. From
Wikimedia to Openstreetmap, public interest projects have shown how to
resist enclosure

The next installment is "Outliving Outrage on the Public Interest
Internet: the CDDB Story." The first great volunteer music metadata
database became the private property of Nielsen.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/05/outliving-outrage-public-interest-internet-cddb-story

But the volunteer love of music is alive and well: from gnudb to
Metabrainz, public interest music metadata - a necessity for finding,
enjoying, and paying for music - has resisted enclosure.

The next installment - still forthcoming - deals with the thorny
question of how you finance a commons.

There's always someone who wants to steal the revolution. But there's
always a rebel alliance who'll fight to steal it back.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🩳 Concluding How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

This week on my podcast, the seventh and final part of my serialized
reading of my 2020 One Zero book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM,
a book arguing that monopoly – not AI-based brainwashing – is the real
way that tech controls our behavior.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

The book is available in paperback:

https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907

and DRM-free ebook :

https://sowl.co/bm2F7c

and my local bookseller, Dark Delicacies, has signed stock that I'll
drop by and personalize for you!

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html

Here's the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/05/17/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-07/

And here's part one:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/04/05/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-01/

And part two:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/04/12/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-02/

And part three:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/04/19/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-03/

And part four:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/04/26/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-04/

And part five:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/05/02/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-05/

And part six:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/05/10/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-06/

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

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_389/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_389_-_How_To_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism_07.mp3

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🩳 This day in history

#20yrsago Danish birds imitate ringtones
https://web.archive.org/web/20020209120444/http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_288774.html?menu

#15yrsago Wired News publishes damning docs from EFF vs AT&T
https://www.wired.com/2006/05/att-whistle-blowers-evidence/

#10yrsago HOWTO Make an office-supply X-Wing Fighter
https://www.instructables.com/X-Wing-Fighter-from-Office-Supplies/

#5yrsago Brian Wood’s REBELS book one — read the first issue here!
https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/17/brian-woods-rebels-book-one-read-the-first-issue-here/

#1yrago Instagram's slow-mo appeals court
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/17/cheap-truthers/#robot-sez-no

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🩳 Colophon

Currently writing:

* Breach, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. Friday's
progress: 352 words (352 words total).

* A short story about consumer data co-ops.  PLANNING

* A Little Brother short story about remote invigilation.  PLANNING

* A nonfiction book about excessive buyer-power in the arts, co-written
with Rebecca Giblin, "The Shakedown."  FINAL EDITS

* A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause."  FINISHED

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues."  FINISHED

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (Part 06)
https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/05/10/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-06/

Upcoming appearances:

* Seize the Means of Computation, Ryerson Centre for Free Expression,
May 19,
https://cfe.ryerson.ca/events/how-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-seize-means-computation

* Privacy Without Monopoly, Northsec, May 20,
https://nsec.io/speaker/cory-doctorow.html

* In conversation with David Dayen (Second Life Book Club), Jun 4,
http://www.draxtor.com/sl-book-club-coming-up/corydavid

* Book launch for Terry Miles's Rabbits (Book Soup), Jun 7,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/terry-miles-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-discusses-rabbits-tickets-154613644573

Recent appearances:

* Interoperability and Alternative Social Media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlKDlBagkj0

* Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans
https://open.spotify.com/episode/01dGJO8sqjQ9IoLy58f1rR

* Can Antitrust Laws Destroy Surveillance Capitalism? (Majority Report)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stDGbYAduKE

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
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "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.

Upcoming books:

* The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics,
Beacon Press 2022

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🩳 How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/web/accounts/303320

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and
advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/attachments/20210517/a761dd39/attachment.sig>