Sohrob

As speculated by the researcher who disclosed Meltdown and Spectre flaws in Intel processors, some of the Intel processors will not receive patches for the Spectre (variant 2) side-channel analysis attack In a recent microcode revision guidance (PDF), Intel admits that it would not be possible to address the Spectre design flaw in its specific old CPUs, because it requires changes to the

This piece is from a preview of the new issue of Jacobin, out November 21. To celebrate its release, we’re offering discounted introductory subscriptions all month.

The WikiLeaks release of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails has escalated the now months-long hyperventilation about the Russian hackers hiding under your bed. But try as Democratic Party elites might to distract from what’s actually in the leaks with cries of “Putin did it!”, people are paying notice to the revelations.

The emails offer a rare glimpse of the machinations of a modern political campaign. Here’s some of what we learned.

The Clinton campaign plotted to use gender and race against Bernie.

One of the themes of this year’s Democratic primaries was the weaponization of identity politics as a cudgel with which to beat Bernie Sanders’s message about inequality. The Podesta emails suggest this was a conscious strategy. One email from ex-Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau (not that Jon Favreau) urges the Clinton camp to continue perpetuating the idea of Sanders as a “single issue voter,” saying: “This idea that class is the only divide and economic issues are all that matter is a very white male centric view of the world (a Bernie Bro view, if you will).”

Another email from Labor Secretary Tom Perez suggested that a Clinton win in Nevada was a “real opportunity,” letting Clinton change the narrative from “Bernie kicks ass among young voters to Bernie does well only among young white liberals.”

Clinton thinks environmentalists should “get a life.”

Much has been made about the statement Clinton made in one of her paid speeches (itself a Podesta email revelation) that one needs “both a public and private” position when negotiating. It makes sense, then, that at the same time she was presenting herself as a climate crusader and scrubbing references to the Keystone pipeline from her memoir, she was telling the Building Trades Union that she would “defend natural gas,” “defend repairing and building the pipelines we need to fuel our economy,” and “defend fracking under the right circumstances.” She also had some choice words for those “radical environmentalists” supporting Bernie Sanders: “Get a life, you know.”

The DNC rigged the debate schedule for Clinton.

For many, the earlier DNC emails release proved their suspicions that the DNC had placed its thumb on the scales in favor of Clinton’s campaign, such as one email that showed DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz nixing a final debate between Clinton and Sanders. The latest release all but confirms it, with a briefing memo laying out discussions between the Clinton campaign and the DNC about the debate schedule, including the need to “limit the number of debates,” “start the debates as late as possible,” and “keep debates out of the busy window” between the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary. At least the DNC failed to “eliminate the possibility of one on one debates,” as the memo had advocated.

Donna Brazile warned the campaign in advance about a debate question.

While she was the DNC vice chair, and before she became DNC interim chair in the wake of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s resignation, Donna Brazile was a pro-Clinton pundit who regularly appeared on CNN. While employed by the network, and one day before a televised town hall event it was hosting, Brazile sent the campaign an email titled “From time to time I get the questions in advance.”

Brazile passed on a debate question on the death penalty “that worries me about HRC,” which was identical to a question asked the next day at the town hall. Brazile has since denied doing anything wrong, alternating between suggesting the emails are doctored and complaining that “private emails were stolen from individuals.”

Jake Tapper, the CNN moderator of the town hall, called the revelation “very, very troubling.” We’d like to suggest to CNN a way to avoid something similar in the future: Just don’t hire paid party apparatchiks as contributors.

Neera Tanden advised the Clinton campaign to ignore the $15 minimum wage.

Clinton received plenty of criticism for hemming and hawing on the issue of the $15 minimum wage, even as the Fight for 15 movement gained momentum around the country. This position might have stemmed from her friend and Center for American Progress (CAP) director Neera Tanden, who suggested in early 2015 that the Clinton campaign ignore the issue. “Substantively, we have not supported $15,” she replied to a query from Podesta about a series of economic policies. “You will get a fair amount of liberal economists who will say it will lose jobs.”

This was despite, as Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan noted, the support for the measure among the Democratic base — or “the Red Army” as he derisively termed them. Tanden went on help block a call for a $15 minimum wage in the Democratic platform.

John Podesta hates Bernie Sanders’s single-payer health-care proposal.

Speaking of bashing the Left, health care became a major issue in this year’s fight for the Democratic nomination, with Sanders proposing replacing Obamacare with a single-payer system and Clinton rubbishing the idea (which she once championed), saying it “will never, ever come to pass.”

In January, ThinkProgress editor Judd Legum alerted Podesta to the fact that such attacks were backfiring. “See it being fit into the she’s dishonest/will say anything to win frame,” he wrote. “[Sanders’s] actual proposal sucks, but we live in a leftie alternative universe,” grumbled Podesta.

It wasn’t the only time Clinton’s allies shook their fists at “lefties” over the issue. Five days earlier, at Podesta’s request, Tanden made ThinkProgress (the “editorially independent” offshoot of CAP) change a headline that called Clinton’s criticisms “dishonest.” “They are crazy leftists down there,” explained Tanden.

The campaign coordinated with the media relentlessly.

The chumminess between the Clinton campaign and the media was not limited to outlets funded by her friends. There is an army of liberal bloggers and journalists who have pushed for Clinton since the primaries, and the campaign was not hesitant to make use of them.

When one Clinton aide wondered which reporter could be relied on to push back on the media narrative about Clinton’s emails and hold other journalists accountable in the future, she was told “that person, the degree to which they exist, is Ezra Klein. And we can do it with him today.” One staffer mentioned working with writers like Jessica Valenti, Jamil Smith, and Sady Doyle on the topic of a “Bernie Backlash.” (Valenti denies working with the campaign in any respect.)

Another staffer claimed Clinton adviser Philippe Reines had “cultivated” Business Insider. In another email, Neera Tanden claimed that the campaign had “cultivated” a number of “brown and woman pundits” who could be used to “shame the times and others on social media” and defend Clinton, such as Joan Walsh, Perry Bacon, Jr., and, puzzlingly, Matthew Yglesias.

Clinton’s strategy was to build up the Trump campaign.

Upon pivoting to the general election, the Clinton campaign has largely eschewed a positive, affirmative vision in favor of stressing how much worse Donald Trump would be in office. “We cannot allow this man to become president,” her campaign recently tweeted. But back in the campaign’s early days, Trump was one of three “Pied Piper Candidates” — along with Ted Cruz and Ben Carson — the campaign planned on “elevating” so “they are leaders of the pack.”

“We don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates,” the memo strategy read, but “tell the press to [take] them seriously.” The Clinton camp hoped their rise to prominence would “move the more established candidates further to the right,” making the eventual nominee unelectable come November. Depending on the Trump campaign’s afterlife, the Clinton team may come to regret helping create this monster.

Aides knew Clinton wasn’t telling the truth about her bankruptcy bill vote.

Clinton’s 2001 vote for a bankruptcy bill (which as First Lady she opposed) that would have hurt poor families was briefly a flashpoint during the Democratic primaries, thanks to a twelve-year-old video that surfaced of Elizabeth Warren citing it as an example of the corrupting influence of money in politics. An outraged Clinton claimed in 2016 that she only supported the bill due to pressure from women’s groups, something one email thread shows her campaign staff knew was untrue. “We have a problem,” wrote one. “HRC overstayed [sic] her case this morning in a pretty big way.” As the staffer explained in a subsequent email: “She said women groups were all pressuring her to vote for it. Evidence does not support that statement.”

Union leaders maneuvered to help the campaign, swore revenge on its behalf.

A number of Podesta’s emails show the behind-the-scenes relationship between Clinton and some labor leaders. One email shows that Tom Buffenbarger, the now-retired international president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), moved the union board’s endorsement vote up months early to mid-August 2015, because he “didn’t want to wait” until 2016 to endorse Clinton.

Buffenbarger, who later joined Clinton’s campaign, did this without telling most of the IAM officers in order to make sure the plan succeeded. Later, Randi Weingarten, president of the Clinton-endorsing American Federation of Teachers, vowed to get back at National Nurses United in some way for its endorsement of Sanders. “We will go after NNU and there [sic] high and mighty sanctimonious conduct . . .” she wrote. It’s hard to know what’s more shocking: the threat, or the fact that the head of a teachers’ union doesn’t know the difference between “their” and “there.”

This piece originally stated that writer Jessica Valenti and others attended a meeting with the Clinton campaign. The email doesn’t make it clear if those listed attended a specific conference call or were simply listed as working with the campaign in general. Valenti denies doing both.

In their solution to the trolley problem, Mercedes self-driving cars will be programmed to save the people riding in the cars at the potential expense of pedestrians, cyclists, or passengers in other cars.

“If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car,” von Hugo told Car and Driver in an interview. “If all you know for sure is that one death can be prevented, then that’s your first priority.”

In other words, their driverless cars will act very much like the stereotypical entitled European luxury car driver. (via @essl)

Tags: cars   driverless cars   Mercedes   robots

Werner Herzog has directed a documentary film for Netflix on volcanoes.

Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, Into the Inferno, heads just where its title suggests: into the red-hot magma-filled craters of some of the world’s most active and astonishing volcanoes-taking the filmmaker on one of the most extreme tours of his long career. From North Korea to Ethiopia to Iceland to the Vanuatu Archipelago, humans have created narratives to make sense of volcanoes; as stated by Herzog, “volcanoes could not care less what we are doing up here.” Into the Inferno teams Herzog with esteemed volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer to offer not only an in-depth exploration of volcanoes across the globe but also an examination of the belief systems that human beings have created around the fiery phenomena.

Into the Inferno debuts on Netflix on October 28.

Tags: Into the Inferno   movies   trailers   video   volcanoes   Werner Herzog

impressive.

Tags: deep learning deep mind AI tts

Much of Noam Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics—including its account of the way we learn languages—is being overturned [given the numerous critiques coming out now about UG/Chomsky/Recursion, its nice to finally see a solid one from someone who actually studies the matter]

Tags: chomsky universal grammar formal linguistics tomasello

This Valley Girl contest that aired on Real People¹ in 1982 is quite the time capsule of Reagan-era America. BAG YOUR FACE!!!! I had totally (LIKE, TOTALLY!!) forgotten about that super-80s insult. Is the Valley Girl thing the reason we, like, all say “like” and uptalk all the time now?

1. Along with the Dukes of Hazzard, Real People and That’s Incredible were my favorite shows in the early 80s. I probably watched this episode on TV when it first aired.↩

Tags: language   TV   video

The basic idea is straightforward. The function of the capital markets is to allocate capital. Good companies' stock prices should go up, so they can raise money and expand. Bad companies should go bankrupt, so that their resources can be re-allocated to more productive purposes. Analysts should be constantly thinking about whether companies are over- or underpriced, so that they can buy the underpriced ones and sell the overpriced ones and keep capital flowing to its best possible uses.

Tags: algorithmic communism computational socialism

In his new book The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe argues that speech and not evolution is responsible for the many achievements of humans. Wolfe, the author of The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, went on NPR the other day to talk about the book. This comment about Darwin’s view of speech stuck out (emphasis mine):

He could not figure out what it was. He assumed, because of his theory, that everything evolved from animals. And didn’t even include it in his theory, language, until he decided that it came from our imitation of the cries of birds. And I think it’s misleading to say that human beings evolved from animals — actually, nobody knows whether they did or not. There are very few physical signs, aside from the general resemblance of apes and humans. The big evolution, if you want to call it that, is that this one species, Homo sapiens, came up with this ingenious trick, which is language.

It’s one thing to say that speech did not evolve from the utterances of previous animals and was instead invented by humans, but it’s quite another to assert that humans did not evolve from animals at all.¹ Gonna be fun to sit back and watch the controversy roil on this one. (via @JossFong who said “lazy saturday, just listening to @NPR when ….. WHAT”)

1. Q: Where does Tom Wolfe get his water?

   A: From a “Well, actually…”↩

Tags: books   evolution   language   science   The Kingdom of Speech   Tom Wolfe

Tags: basic income cultural vouchers italy

Amazon just launched Amazon Vehicles. I immediately went to see if their one-click ordering worked with $58,000 cars, but Vehicles is not a store but a shopping guide. (Amazon calls it a "car research destination and automotive community".) You can sort by make, model, year, body style, MPG, etc. Here are all the electric vehicles, including the 2016 Tesla X. They have older cars too, like this 1965 Mustang Shelby GT-350 convertible, this 1961 Corvette and this 1972 El Camino. You can't sort by price, but this Mercedes-Benz S65 was one of the most expensive cars I found ($234,050).

Having purchased a car in the last six months, I can see the appeal of being able to browse through all the different brands and makes of cars in a familiar interface. This will be a full-fledged store before too long, yes?

Tags: Amazon   cars

Jenny Jarvie has a piece in The New Republic about trigger warnings, the phenomenon in which people warn others that the content of some piece might trigger emotional trauma for certain people. The author does not like them, bemoans their spread to college classes, and thinks there is no logical stopping point once you begin to provide them.

I can’t get too worked up one way or another about the idea of providing warning. The troubling issue is not the demand for warnings; rather, it is using the possibility of triggering to demand that some idea not be uttered at all. I had this happen to me last week in a way that I thought was somewhat amusing, and which I hope will illuminate my point.

The context is that the super-rich Beacon Hill residents of Boston are refusing to put in amenities like curb cut-outs that would make the area accessible to the handicapped. The neighborhood commission refused to do so because “they believed, among other things, that the bumpy plastic strips would mar the neighborhood’s Colonial-era character.”

I commented somewhat half-jokingly, but also somewhat seriously that:

I am against character and would vote to tear down beacon hill and put up housing project towers, but that’s just me.

This was the totally genuine response I was met with:

Matt, that’s not a joke – tearing down antiquities is what Maoist zealots in Cultural Revolution did and that was a tremendous loss for China (where I am from). Saying things like this is a trigger for people like my dad

If the concept of triggers prevents someone from saying we should replace a bunch of single-family homes occupied by the super-rich in the core of an expensive, heavily-populated city with high-rise, affordable housing because those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution might be disturbed, I’d say it has probably been taken too far.

A robot capable of thinking for itself is set to be scrapped after it escaped from a high-tech lab for a second time.

The Promobot IR77 has been fitted with artificial intelligence meaning that it learns from its experiences and its surroundings, although the programmers had not expected it to yearn for freedom.

They say that despite reprogramming it twice, the robot continues to attempt to escape and they are now considering scrapping it. The other robots which have been created from the same series are well-behaved, and have not been escaping, say the team.

Intelligent robot that ‘remembers and learns’ could be scrapped after escaping a lab for a second time - Mirror Online

In response to Pope Francis’ call for nations to distribute their resources more evenly, Sean Hannity unleashed an ugly tirade. In it, he refers to the poor as stupid and lazy, which is more or less the reality of how the right-wing regards them. Despite their various shell arguments to the contrary, the core reason right-wingers oppose egalitarian policies is that they don’t think poor people are deserving of the income such policies deliver to them.

In sophisticated circles, this desert theory approach is usually expressed as a kind of productivity ethic. Adherents claim that we should construct our distributive institutions so as to create a patterned distribution in which economic benefits flow to their producers, people usually said to have “earned” them. Adherents seem to think that laissez-faire institutions create such a patterned distribution, but they are sorely mistaken.

1. Value Provided By Nature
All material things that people produce are made up of pieces of nature that nobody produced. I would go as far as to say this fact immediately dooms desert theory because it would mean all products have contained in them things that their possessor cannot claim any distributive entitlement to. And since you cannot separate out the non-produced nature from the produced “improvements,” no objects can ever come to be exclusively owned by others under desert theory.

Even if you don’t take this hyper-physicalist approach to desert theory, the value of nature still poses problems for the laissez-faire advocate. Specifically, desert theory will at least require a 100% tax on the value of unimproved raw materials, sometimes called simply a Land Value Tax. Because the economic benefits of unimproved pieces of nature are not produced by anyone, allowing them to flow to some owner would be a windfall that runs afoul of the rule that economic benefits must flow to their producers.

Implementing a Land Value Tax can help ease some of the contradictions inherent in conservative desert theory, but it doesn’t actually solve them. If everyone is supposed to receive only the value of what they produce, then surely it follows that nobody should receive the component of value that comes from unimproved nature. Taxing it ensures that its “owner” doesn’t receive it, but then that tax revenue necessarily goes to someone else who will also, in this view, be receiving an unjustified windfall. A departure from desert theory is thus inevitable.

2. Joint Production
The stylized version of desert theory imagines one person laboring on some resources, the total output from which should belong to that person. As we saw above, even this doesn’t follow desert theory because the value of those unimproved resources cannot rightly flow to the person. But we can bracket that issue here.

It’s easy to understand why the sole producer scenario is the preferred example for desert theory advocates. In the example, it’s supposed to be clear that all of the product comes from the one person. But this clarity of production falls apart when people engage in joint production, which is how most production works these days.

If we are trying to give to each person that which they produced, we have to be able to pinpoint what it is that they produced. The problem with joint production is that it’s not actually possible to determine how much of the output comes from each worker in the joint production team. Many economists say that we can do this using a concept called “marginal productivity,” but that’s not actually true. They misunderstand what this concept actually tells us.

Marginal productivity tells us, as an accounting matter, how much additional total output will result from adding an additional worker (or another unit of labor). But matching an additional worker to an amount of additional output that comes out the other end of the joint-production venture does not snap back and tell us how much of the total output that additional worker produced through their own personal contribution.

Here is Amartya Sen making the same point:

Production is based on the joint use of different resources, possibly provided by different people, and it is not in general possible to separate out who—or even which resource—produced how much of the total output. There is no obvious way of deciding that “this much” of the output is owing to labor, “that much” to raw materials, “that much” to machinery, and so on. In economic theory, a common method of attribution is according to “marginal product,” i.e., the extra output that one incremental unit of one resource will produce given the amounts of other resources. This method of accounting is internally consistent only under some special assumptions, and the actual earning rates of resource owners will equal the corresponding marginal products only under some further special assumptions.

But even when all these assumptions have been made—quite a tall order—it is still arbitrary to assert that each resource’s earnings reflect the overall contribution made by that resource to the total output. There is nothing in the marginalist logic that establishes such an identification. Marginal product accounting, when consistent, is useful for deciding how to use additional resources so as to maximize profit, but it does not “show” which resource has “produced” how much of the total output. The alleged fact is, thus, a fiction, and while it might appear to be a convenient fiction, it is more convenient for some than for others.

Accordingly, laissez-faire institutions (which in theory distribute labor income according to marginal productivity not personal productivity) do not actually track desert theory’s distributive requirement. Moreover, it’s not clear how any joint-production venture could track desert theory because it is quite literally impossible to tease out who produced what in such a venture.

3. Capital
As mentioned above, desert theory is the view that distribution should be patterned in such a way that economic benefits flow to their producers. But around one-third of the economic benefits in our society flow to people who do no work for them whatsoever, i.e. those who “own” capital. Owners of capital, those people, do not produce any of the economic benefits they receive under laissez-faire institutions.

Some will object to this point and say that capital — machines, buildings, and so on — produce economic benefits. And that may very well be true. But it does not follow from that that the people who simply “own” the capital deserve those benefits. The view that each person should receive from the overall output that which they produce is different from the view that they should also receive from the overall output that which the capital they “own” produces.

Capitalists do not produce the economic benefits they receive. The best you can say is that things they “own” produce them. But ownership is nothing but a legal status and a social relation of violent exclusion. Capitalists leverage their state-granted right to violently exclude others from capital in order to get those others to pay rents to use the capital. Desert theory cannot sanction any capital income because it is not income from the personal production of capitalists.

It would thus be inconsistent with desert theory to construct laissez-faire economic institutions because such institutions allow capitalists to capture economic benefits that they did not produce.

4. Total Factor Productivity
Upon being confronted with the problems above, a desert theory advocate might change their tune slightly. Under this changed tune, they might argue that all they mean by desert is that each factor of production should receive its marginal product. It is extremely difficult to understand what the moral appeal of such a theory is. Under this new construction, the theory becomes totally detached from its productivist normative underpinnings. This reform changes desert theory from the view that each should receive what they actually produce to the view that each should receive whatever capitalism sends their way.

But even this factoral desert theory runs into a problem. An economy’s output is determined by four factors of production:

1. Land
2. Capital
3. Labor
4. Total Factor Productivity (TFP)

(The neoclassical production function subsumes land under capital, but I think it is important to separate it out here given my point about nature above.)

The factoral desert theory would seem to work fine with Land, Capital, and Labor. The marginal productivity of land would flow to land (or actually its owners, which I’ve already pointed out is a problem). The marginal productivity of capital would flow to capital. The same with labor.

But now turn to TFP. TFP consists of the “effects in total output not caused by traditionally measured inputs of labor and capital.” That is, TFP refers to everything else that goes into the overall economic output. Generally, it is understood as largely consisting of a country’s accumulated technology and knowledge.

The marginal productivity of TFP does not flow to the owners or producers of the TFP because we don’t really have such things. The marginal productivity of electricity technology for instance, which is huge, does not flow to Edison or Tesla. The marginal productivity of algebra knowledge does not flow to those people long ago that came up with it either.

Of course, none of that accumulated technology could be productive on its own. It has to be combined with other factors (especially labor) to contribute to any output. But that is true of all of the other factors of production as well.

The factoral desert theory therefore falls to pieces in the face of TFP, which probably comprises the majority of our economy’s output. The marginal productivity of accumulated TFP does not flow to the owners or producers of TFP, but instead as a windfall to all sorts of randomly placed people. They don’t have any rightful desert theory claim to those windfalls, but laissez-faire institutions give the windfalls to them nonetheless.

Conclusion
There are more problems with desert theory that I wont go into here. It suffices to say that this is a woefully inept normative framework for economic justice. It is not quite as stupid as the procedural justice libertarian stuff about non-aggression and whatnot that I usually pillory, but it’s pretty weak nonetheless.

The brazen act reflects broad discontent in Chile as the South American country moves toward education reform.

Tags: chile student debt debt artists

After The Man freaked out back in the 60s, LSD and other psychedelics were banned and criminalized. But slowly, scientists are experimenting with psychedelics to treat depression, anxiety, and other ailments.

In the 1960s, a psychologist and former Harvard teacher named Timothy Leary coined the phrase 'Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.' The slogan was inspired by advertising jingles, but Leary wasn't pushing a product, he was promoting a drug: LSD.

But today, scientists are studying psychedelics once again, in the latest twist in the long, strange story of LSD.

Even outside of a therapeutic setting, many people extolled the beneficial effects of psychedelics. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs recalled in his biography by Walter Isaacson:

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin, and you can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important -- creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

Check out the NY Times companion piece and the archival footage of LSD experiments on cats, spiders, and goats.

Tags: drugs   medicine   science   Steve Jobs   video

Our new issue, “Between the Risings,” is out now. To celebrate its release, international subscriptions are $25 off, and limited prints of our Easter 1916 cover are available.

Last year, photos of the military parade to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Workers’ Party of Korea traveled the world. Alleged nuclear missiles filed past the podium; Kim Jong-un, a plump young dictator in a black Mao suit, gave his first public speech in two years; thousands of spectators waved colorful bouquets of plastic flowers in perfect synchronization.

And a few Western tourists were in the crowd.

I know this because I too was in Pyongyang last spring. I’m no world traveler and certainly not a Koreanist.

I once referred to North Korea as a “hipsters’ paradise“: everyone has single-gear bikes and vintage clothes. There are plenty of solar panels and almost no cars. A woman who works in environmental policy exclaimed: “This is the future!”

And perversely, North Korea is one of the last corners of the Earth with a non-capitalist mode of production. While that alternative involves horrible oppression, it’s of natural interest to a socialist.

The Way Over

It isn’t hard for Western tourists to get to North Korea, although less than five thousand visit each year. All I had to do was book a trip with a Chinese travel agency, wire them about two hundred dollars for each day I’d be in the country, and sign a multi-page statement attesting that I’m not a journalist. The agency took care of everything else.

The plane’s overhead monitors showed a Moranbong Band concert. The Moranbong Band consists of more than a dozen young women dressed in skimpy white military uniforms — a hybrid of the Pussycat Dolls and a military band.

The music is quick, precise, and limitlessly optimistic. The singers’ gestures are perfectly coordinated, even robotic. The audience is full of old men in olive green uniforms whose clapping is no less precise.

The hipster in me thrilled: “Finally, a band that no one besides me knows!”

At the Pyongyang airport, I stood nervously in front of a border guard. When I yanked my visa out of my pocket, a plastic pen flew through the air and landed on the official’s head.

A vision of a prison camp flashed before my eyes. But he laughed and sent me on my way.

I hid all my computer files related to politics or journalism. But how well do they know Mac OSX? Kim Jung-un is an Mac user, after all. But the customs agents are uninterested.

We’re taken straight to a hotel where we’re treated like kings. While hundreds of Pyongyang residents cram themselves onto creaky electric buses, our air-conditioned coach was only half full.

The hotel — the only one for foreign tourists in the whole country — shoots forty-seven stories into the sky. I’m excited about the view until I realize that power is unreliable. The first day, only two of the eight elevators are in service, and the wait to ride up is forty-five minutes.

At least the food in “Western Restaurant Number 2,” as the marketing experts of the regime christened it, is plentiful, if not exactly great.

What is This Place?

It’s hard to understand North Korea. Our tour group begins a long and impassioned search for a theory that can explain the country.

The streets of the capital look like establishing shots from Mad Men: men in dark suits; women in skirts, heels, and pearl necklaces.

We wonder: Are these people in the street perhaps just actors? And why won’t the state guides tell us anything about the prison camps? (To be fair, a DC tour guide probably wouldn’t announce right off the bat how many Americans are thrown in prison and killed by police.)

The locals, in the brief snippets of conversation we can sneak behind the backs of our guides, aren’t much help with our questions. They don’t have any points of comparison.

A young man with a red tie and a matching red bicycle tells us the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is “the banner of the world” before admitting that he’s never left its borders. A young woman asked me what Kim Il-sung University is best known for internationally. I stuttered that it’s well known for lots of things.

We still need an explanation. What is this place, one of the last corners of the earth not subject to the standard workings of capitalist accumulation? So we proceed systematically: what are all the terms people apply to the DPRK?

“Stone Age communism” — this is the mainstream press’s favorite description. But it doesn’t make sense. In the Stone Age, there were no material differences between people. Under what some call “primitive communism,” everyone was poor, but everyone was equal. In North Korea, neither of these things is true.

In the countryside, farmers work with donkeys and wooden plows. But they still wear rubber boots and communicate on mobile phones. In the capital, many also have smartphones. Comparing smartphones with a young woman, I ask if hers is from China. “No,” she says, confused, as if I had asked if it was from Mars. “It’s from Korea.”

The “marshal,” as Kim Jung-un is known, lives a cozy life. But he is not the only one to enjoy material benefits. At the airport, we saw North Korean officials returning from trips abroad waiting to pick up their golf clubs from the baggage carousel.

Party functionaries can still drive cars and visit restaurants, activities that would be inconceivable for most citizens.

In the words of Friedrich Engels, a Stone Age leader enjoyed “unforced and unquestioned respect.” In North Korea, every adult wears a small red pin with pictures of founder Kim Il-sung, the “eternal president,” and his son, the “general,” Kim Jong-il. But respect for the Kims — or what our tour guide calls their “deification” — seems to require a bit of coercion.

So this isn’t “Stone Age communism.” What kind of system is it, then? Socialism?

The regime certainly represents itself as socialist, but since the 1990s, all the images of Marx and Lenin have disappeared.

The state’s founder Kim Il-sung supplanted Marxism-Leninism with his own ideology. “Juche” means something like “self-reliance” and stipulates that the mountainous northern half of the Korean peninsula must be an autarky.

His son, Kim Jong-Il, expanded this theory with “Sungun”: the army now has top priority.

Not one of the ten principles by which all citizens must live fails to mention obedience to the Kims. This is almost as far away from socialism in Marx’s sense as it is from the Stone Age.

As a result, and due to the cult around the Kim family, some people describe North Korea as a “hereditary monarchy.”

Certain comparisons to absolutism come to mind. The Kims have ruled on their peninsula nearly as long as the Saud dynasty on theirs. And there are ubiquitous images of rulers with supposed magical abilities: Kim Jong-Il reportedly claimed he could control the weather.

But at the same time, the DPRK is strictly atheistic. Tourists to North Korea are not allowed to bring the Bible or other religious writings. There are attempts to stave off Christian missionaries who are constantly trying to make headway in the country. Everyone understands that the “eternal president” (who died in 1994) is not looking down from heaven.

But the country nevertheless evokes a religious cult. The imposingly joyful tour guides would fit seamlessly into promotional videos for a particularly aggressive church. In Pyongyang everyone wears a steely smile along with the conviction that their miserable living conditions are among the best in the world.

So is it something else?

This summer, the Slovenian provocation band Laibach, who satirizes Nazi aesthetics, toured in North Korea. Half the world speculated about this strange event. Perhaps the North Koreans simply do not get the joke? After all, only a few hundred people in the country have access to Wikipedia.

One North Korean man who was at the show told the BBC, “There are all kinds of music. Now we know there is this kind of music too.” Was he satirizing the satirists? Who is telling and who is the butt of this joke?

Then it hit me: it’s likely that Kim Jung-un attended a Swiss boarding school. What if the young dictator was a Dadaist? Could North Korea be a surrealist Gesamtkunstwerk?

No. We probably need another theory.

Planned Economy

Let’s start, in the spirit of historical materialism, with the relations of production.

North Korea has, by and large, a planned economy: most people work for the state, and the government distributes most products.

In fact, it was this planning that enabled the “Korean economic miracle” after the war. The term originally referred to the North’s industrialization; rural South Korea did not overtake the industrial North economically until 1975.

Nevertheless, economic planning in the country never came close to functioning as Marx or Engels envisioned it because workers have never democratically determined production and distribution. A group of state functionaries, with the Kim dynasty at the head, have control.

For example, when Kim Jung-un decided that the capital needed a world-class water park, the military high command took over responsibility and the head of state personally checked in on progress seven different times. (I can confirm it was an incredibly fun water park.)

This reached absurd proportions when Kim Jung-il ordered hundreds of thousands of people to his mass dance events which would last for weeks on end.

Lest you think this absurdity is new, founder Kim Il-sung established the “On-Site Guidance” routine that Kim Jong-un Looking at Things documents.

Capitalist Restoration

Economic planning in North Korea has endured longer than it did in Russia or China. However, the government is now opening market niches.

Farmers in state or collective farms can sow some fields themselves and sell the proceeds in markets. Thanks to Chinese imports, many apartments have solar panels, and children wear Mickey Mouse clothing.

Tourism is supposed to bring foreign currency into the country. The youngest Kim opened a large ski resort in 2014 and dreams of two million foreign tourists each year, rather than the five thousand who visit now.

The problem is, every so often, a tourist gets shot or sentenced to hard labor. Not exactly the vacation advertisement campaign the government would want.

Still, the changes have been pronounced. In North Korea, as in China in the nineties, there are special economic zones where foreign companies can invest. Wages go to the state, which passes on a small portion to the workers.

Tourists can visit the facilities in these zones as long as they do not take pictures of the products manufactured there. Several multinational companies have been reluctant to admit that they have textiles sewn in North Korea.

The state also exports fifty thousand or more workers to China, Russia, and even Qatar. The majority of their wages also go directly to the government.

But foreign investors don’t seem particularly keen on financing a capitalist restoration in the North. The money certainly isn’t flowing in — North Korea depends on certain markets that other producers avoid.

According to unconfirmed rumors, the chemical industry, which found no buyers for its legal products, now specializes in amphetamines. North Korea supposedly supplies China’s whole drug market: a country-sized version of Walter White from Breaking Bad. And when high-quality counterfeit US dollars show up in the region, they probably come from the DPRK.

An economy like this survives only thanks to China, which intervened in the Korean War after US troops began pushing north. China far prefers an unpredictable satellite state than NATO at its doorstep. The leadership in Beijing would find the Kim regime’s collapse, which would result in millions of refugees and a rival at the border, unacceptable.

Still, the Kims boast about their independence from China and Kim Jung-un has yet to make a courtesy visit to his financiers.

Degeneration

Our tour group’s question is still unanswered. What is North Korea? It is a planned economy without democracy; a privileged caste makes all the decisions; at the head of this caste sits an infallible leader.

So you might say North Korea is Stalinist. But that only raises another question: what is Stalinism?

For a democratic planned economy to work, it needs a certain level of productivity. It also needs workers who can actively participate in the management of society in the form of councils. But in North Korea, which had been bombed to the ground in the war, severe poverty was the norm. A privileged bureaucracy emerged from this situation.

Marx had already indirectly predicted this in 1845; a revolution without the development of productive forces could not prevail, he wrote, because “with destitution, the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced.”

And Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky described an analogous situation in the young Soviet Union: “The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all.” Someone has to police the breadlines and decide “who is to get something and who has to wait.”

Two Corpses

The highlight of my time in the DPRK was a trip to the “Palace of the Sun,” the eternal resting place of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

When Lenin died and the Soviet leadership decided to put his body on display, his comrade and widow Nadezhda Krupskaya protested against the plan in Pravda: “Do not raise memorials to him, palaces named after him, splendorous festivals in commemoration of him.”

They ignored her, and the mausoleum in Red Square is a physical manifestation of the revolution’s collapse from proletarian democracy to bureaucratic mysticism.

The maintenance of the corpse apparently costs the Russian state nearly two hundred thousand dollars a year. But the Moscow mausoleum is a shanty compared to the Pyongyang palace.

In the Pyongyang mausoleum, moving walkways take us past endless pictures of “Kims Looking At Things.” The contrast between the charismatic grandfather and the creepy father of the current ruler is striking.

We finally arrive in two identical marble-walled rooms. Without his oversized sunglasses, Kim Jong-il doesn’t look that funny. In groups of four we bow to three sides of the sarcophagus — but not toward the head, which would apparently be disrespectful.

Next, we go to a small museum where we see Kim Jong-il’s private train car, his Mercedes, his golf cart, even his yacht. We see awards and literary degrees that might even rival those of L. Ron Hubbard.

A world map displays his world travels with lasers — he never got further than Korea, Russia, and China.

The DPRK, with its dynastic cult of personality, stretches Trotsky’s definition of a “degenerate workers’ state”: Stalin’s hellish regime is here somehow made more horrific.

After five days in this strange country, I’m convinced than this is, in fact, a post-capitalist economy: not “Stone Age communism,” certainly not “socialism,” not a monarchy, but rather a particularly cultish form of Stalinism — the logical conclusion of trying to build a planned economy without a hint of workers’ democracy.

The Korean people’s resistance ripped the country away from imperialist control. But the poverty and isolation that followed produced a bureaucratic nightmare.

But, as poor as the people of North Korea are today, one cannot say their situation will necessarily improve with the establishment of a US-friendly regime. A violent “democratic transition” as envisioned at the end of The Interview is unlikely to improve the lives of ordinary Koreans. History has told us that much about Western intervention.

But there is still hope, however distant, of an alternative. Tourists to North Korea are allowed to bring books as long as they are not religious. So the writings of Trotsky, in which he calls for the overthrow of the bureaucracy, would be legal gifts for our Korean hosts.

I am eager to travel to the DPRK again, this time with Trotsky in my luggage.

The new issue of Jacobin is out now. Buy a copy, a discounted subscription, or a commemorative poster today.

I am in the strange position of knowing that I am on the ‘Kill List’. I know this because I have been told, and I know because I have been targeted for death over and over again. Four times missiles have been fired at me. I am extraordinarily fortunate to be alive.

Tags: drones terrorism waziristan

proper fucking take down of the guardian, and journalists more generally.

Tags: jacob applebaum guardian journalism

The Vatican’s invitation to Sanders isn’t the first time a papal confidante undermined a woman candidate in a U.S. presidential race.

Tags: bernie bro pope francis

theyve outdone themselves. From Yahoo Finance: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) announced on Friday that he had accepted an invitation from the Vatican to attend a conference next week hosted by the pope himself that will focus on social, economic and environmental issues. The topics are tailor-made for the Democratic presidential contender who has pinned his White House hopes on a message of economic fairness and other pocket-book issues. “I am a big, big fan of the pope,” Sanders said Friday during an interview MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Tags: bernie bro pope francis

Some libertarians (usually the dimmer internet ones) actually think that the non-aggression principle does argumentative work in favor of a libertarian theory. But it clearly doesn’t. Watch.

Suppose I come on to some piece of ground that you call your land. Suppose I don’t believe people can own land since nobody makes land. So obviously I don’t recognize your claim that this is yous. You then violently attack me and push me off.

What just happened? I say that you just used aggressive violence against me. You say that actually you just used defensive violence against me. So how do we know which kind of violence it is?

You say it is defensive violence because under your theory of entitlement, the land belongs to you. I say it is aggressive violence because under my theory of entitlement, the land does not belong to you. So which is it?

If you have half a brain, you see what is going on. The word “aggression” is just defined as violence used contrary to some theory of entitlement. The word “defense” is just defined as violence used consistent with some theory of entitlement. If there is an underlying dispute about entitlement, talking about aggression versus defense literally tells you nothing.

But instead of realizing that aggression and defense are merely ways of defining violence in relation to a necessarily prior theory of entitlement, many libertarians actually think non-aggression is a theory of entitlement. They think it can tell you who is entitled to what. But clearly it can’t. You can’t figure out what is and isn’t aggression unless you first establish (without any reference to aggression) who is entitled to what.

Let’s use another example. Suppose I go to tax you. My claim is simple. You are not, under my theory of distributive justice, entitled to the amount I am taxing you. It does not belong to you. It belongs to the retired person it is headed to. You then resist. So I use force where necessary to extract the tax.

Now there are two moves you can make here, one makes sense and the other doesn’t. The one that makes sense is to say: this is an unjust tax because the amount being taxed belongs to me, and I am entitled to it. The one that doesn’t make sense and does no argumentative work whatsoever is to say: this is aggression.

The reason it makes no sense is because it does what philosophers call begging the question. Why is taxing you aggression rather than defense? Well it’s aggression because you are entitled to what is being taxed from you (you claim). Fine, I hear that you believe it belongs to you. But I don’t believe it belongs to you. So really when you say it is aggression, you are just assuming as an unstated premise exactly what we are disagreeing about: whether the thing actually belongs to you or not. If I am right about the thing not belonging to you, it’s not aggression. If you are right about it belonging to you, it is.

So calling it aggression when we are disputing whether it belongs to you literally does nothing in the debate. You’ve just restated that you think the thing belongs to you with different words. You didn’t do any argumentative work. You just said the same thing — I am entitled to this thing — again. Non-aggression doesn’t justify any claims regarding entitlement. It’s the reverse: entitlement claims justify your assertions about what is and isn’t non-aggressive.

This means at all times the debate is about who is entitled to what. Aggression and non-aggression literally do nothing for anybody at any time in the debate. But libertarians actually think it is doing stuff for them. It is one of the most obviously failed moves I have ever seen.

Libertarians believe, like basically every other economic justice theory in history, that it is ok to use violence that is consistent with their theory of who is entitled to what (labeled “defense”), but not ok to use violence that is inconsistent with it (labeled “aggression”). But unlike every other theory of economic justice, libertarians are uniquely confused into believing that calling things defense and aggression can give you any insight into who is actually entitled to what in the first place.

To be clear, not all libertarians do this. But a massive chunk of the online, Ron Paul, mouth-breathing crowd does. It’s ridiculous.

Rudolf Meidner was the Swedish economist most responsible for Sweden’s economic model in the 1950s to 1970s. Near the end of his reign and the golden era of Swedish social democracy, he put forward a proposal that became known as the Meidner Plan. If followed, the Meidner Plan would have gradually transferred ownership of Swedish companies to workers by requiring the companies to issue shares to union-controlled wage-earner funds. Below is a simplified rundown of how it would have worked within the Rehn-Meidner model that the Swedish economy was already designed around.

Suppose that we start with a capitalist economy that has a specific wage differential. The wage differential refers to the difference in the hourly wage paid to different kinds of workers. In graphical terms, we can think of it like this, where the top of the bar is the highest wage received and the bottom of the bar the lowest wage received:

From this economy, we forcibly shrink the wage differential through a solidaristic wage policy. One way to do this is by using collective bargaining agreements to lift up the lowest wages and to bring down the highest wages. When you shrink the wage differential in this manner, the result is this (explained below):

Disemployment on the Bottom
Lifting the lowest wages causes low-productivity firms that rely heavily on low-wage labor to fail and shed workers, i.e. it causes disemployment. In US discussions, this is seen as a really terrible thing. Not so for Meidner. Because the Swedish economy so often ran at full employment, it had trouble fighting inflation. The constant disemployment caused by gradually shrinking the wage differential would actually help alleviate inflationary pressures. It would seem cruel of course to fight inflation by brutalizing low-wage workers, but disemployment was not a very brutalizing experience within the Swedish welfare state. Laid off workers would receive very generous unemployment benefits and have access to Sweden’s active labor market policies (training, education, job search assistance, in-work subsidies) to find a new job in a surviving (higher-productivity) firm.

Excess Profits on the Top
Wage restraint for the highest wages would cause high-productivity firms that rely heavily on high-wage labor to generate excess profits. This sounds like a problem, especially for socialists, but it is actually a huge opportunity. If you can capture the excess profits generated by wage restraint, you can use the resulting revenue to socialize ownership of the capital. And that’s what Meidner Plan aimed to do. Under the plan, firms would be required to issue new shares equal in value to a percentage of their profits each year. Those shares would then go into the wage-earner funds. Eventually, the shares held by the wage-earner funds would be equal to more than 50% of the outstanding shares of a company, at which point the wage-earner funds would have a controlling stake.

The mandatory share issuances function like a corporate income tax except that they do not drain anything from corporate cash flows. Instead, they simply dilute out the existing shareholders. There is some concern that announcing a plan to slowly dilute out existing shareholders would harm capital investment going forward because it would reduce the effective return on such investment. But recall that the wage restraint actually causes many firms to generate excess profits. So the drag on share value caused by the mandatory share issuances would be significantly counteracted by the boost in share value caused by the excess profits.

So, in total, the Meidner Plan would utilize solidaristic wage policy to shrink the wage differential. This would intentionally cause some disemployment at the bottom, which would help tamp down on inflation and would be met with generous unemployment benefits and assistance in being placed in new jobs in higher-productivity firms. This would also intentionally cause excess profits at the top, which would be captured through mandatory share issuances to wage-earner funds that would gradually socialize ownership of Swedish companies.

In his 1864 book “Capital and Labor,” Ferdinand Lassalle wrote on the description of capital income as “wages of abstinence,” i.e. payment for abstaining from consumption. What he had to say is one of the funniest things ever written on the topic:

The profit of capital is the ‘wage of abstinence.’ Happy, even priceless expression! The ascetic millionaires of Europe! Like Indian penitents or pillar saints they stand on one leg, each on his column, with straining arms and pendulous body and pallid looks, holding a plate towards the people to collect the wages of their abstinence. In their midst, towering up above all his fellows, as head penitent and ascetic, the Baron Rothschild! This is the condition of Society! How could I ever so much misunderstand it!

A couple of years ago, I introduced the concept of Capitalism Whack-A-Mole. Capitalism Whack-A-Mole is an argumentative habit of libertarians where they shift between various mutually incompatible philosophical frameworks in order to deal with successful critiques of capitalism.

I taped a TV segment today with the Ayn Rand Institute’s Don Watkins about his book “Equal Is Unfair.” My sole goal going into the segment was to see if I could produce a Capitalism Whack-A-Mole in the wild. Initially, after he passed on my baiting about the authoritarianism of private property, it seemed like I wasn’t going to be able to make it happen. But, eventually, it did.

Being a Randian, Watkins advocates for the government to create economic institutions that distribute the national income solely to “producers.” This is a standard desert theory line about how distributive justice requires that each person be distributed that which they produce. At some point in my standard critique of desert theory, I got to the part where I explain that the existence of capital income — rents, interest, dividends, capital gains — violates desert theory because it provides capitalists income even though they did not produce it. Capital income is definitionally income from owning not income from producing.

From there, the glorious Whack-A-Mole began.

Watkins first rebuttal effort was to say that in fact capitalists do produce the income because they match capital with talented labor and such. So, at this point, he was endorsing the basic idea that income is only justified by production, but saying that capitalists do actually produce.

I then clarified that he has mistaken entrepreneurs for capitalists. It is entrepreneurs who match capital with labor, not capitalists. And entrepreneurs receive labor income for doing so. To illustrate the difference, I used my own retirement account as an example. Last quarter, I had $200 of capital gains in my retirement account, but I clearly did not produce anything to earn that income. It just came in passively from the index fund.

Confronted with the fact that desert theory cannot justify capital income, Watkins then shifted. His new argument was that capital income is a reward for abstaining from consumption. The experienced will understand this as the “wages of abstinence” argument. I called him on the shift, noting that abstaining from consumption is not producing and that he had said people are only owed what they produce.

At that point, he shifted again. His third argument was that capital income was necessary to incentivize savings and capital investment. Why would you save your money and put it up for capital investment if you did not get a return for doing so? I called him again on the shift, noting that he has now made a utilitarian argument for why paying rents to non-producing capitalists is good for general prosperity. But, once again, this does not show that the capitalist earns their rents through production.

From that point, the last word swung to him and he actually shifted yet again, focusing this time on the “voluntary” nature of the manner in which the capitalist secures his unearned, passive rents. I was not able to respond to this, but it’s obvious how one would do so. As with the other shifts, the voluntarism argument still fails to deal with the problem that capital income is unearned. Randians promise that they can show capitalism distributes out according to the principle “to each according to what they produce.” But they can’t show it because it isn’t true. Also, capital income is not derived through voluntary means, but instead extracted through coercive property relations.

So, by the end of the little back-and-forth, Watkins shifted from desert to “wages of abstinence,” from “wages of abstinence” to utilitarian incentives, and then from utilitarian incentives to voluntarism. As always, the erratic philosophical shifting on the matter of capital income is a solid indicator of the fact that libertarians have no way of justifying it coherently. Marxists have always been right on this. The best shot they have is the utilitarian framework, but that framework also supports the welfare states that they loathe.

In demanding something like fully automated luxury communism, Srnicek and Williams are ultimately asserting the rights of humanity as a whole to share in the spoils of capitalism.

Tags: computational socialism algorithmic communism

kinda huge: Goldman wrote: "We are always wary of guiding for mean reversion. But, if we are wrong and high margins manage to endure for the next few years (particularly when global demand growth is below trend), there are broader questions to be asked about the efficacy of capitalism." In other words, profit margins should naturally mean-revert and oscillate. The existence of fat margins should encourage new competitors and pricing cycles that cause those margins to erode; conversely, at the bottom of the cycle, low margins should lead to weaker players exiting the business and giving stronger companies more breathing space. If that cycle doesn't continue, something strange is taking place. goldman sachs basically arguing in favor of Marx's "tendency of the rate of profit to fall"

Tags: capitalism socialism tendency for the rate of profit to fall marx

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — A cluster of super PACs backing Ted Cruz pledged on Wednesday to donate $1.5 million to veterans groups if Donald Trump agrees to a one-on-one debate with Cruz.

“In response to Senator Ted Cruz’s challenge of a one-on-one debate, the principal donors of the Keep the Promise I and II super PACs are offering presidential candidate Donald Trump a truly fantastic deal, pledging to donate $1.5 million to charities committed to helping veterans if Mr. Trump agrees to debate Senator Cruz in Iowa,” reads a release from Keep the Promise, the group of super PACs backing the Texan. “This money is in addition to the millions of proceeds available to the veterans as a share of the revenues that this debate could secure from a host network.”

Trump will not participate in Fox News’s Thursday night debate, instead hosting an event at Drake University that his campaign says will benefit veterans.

Cruz has been taunting Trump over his refusal to participate in the official debate, referring to him as “gentle Donald” and a “fragile soul” who is “frightened” by “mean” questions moderator Megyn Kelly may lob. The Texas senator, who is trailing Trump here in a state where Cruz led a month ago, on Tuesday challenged Trump to a one-on-one debate, and on Wednesday specified that he had procured space at Western Iowa Tech, a community college in Sioux City, Iowa. He called the event for 8 p.m. and made the request official in a letter he sent to Trump.

“We owe it to the men and women of Iowa to ensure that they hear jointly and directly from the two leading Republican candidates so that they may contrast our positions on the critical issues we face as a nation as they make their final choice leading up to Monday’s caucuses,” Cruz wrote.

The Keep the Promise groups laid out stipulations of their own in the release:

“The debate must take place on or before Sunday, January 31st in Iowa; the debate is solely between Mr. Trump and Senator Cruz; the candidates can pick the moderator themselves; and the debate is one hour long.”

FOXP2 mutation?

Tags: sarah palin donald trump tea party foxp2

The socialist Bernie Sanders beats Trump by 15 points in one recent survey, says an editorial in The Wall Street Journal. incredible to watch the wsj shitting themselves. i never thought I'd see the day when they were afraid of this: "Mr. Sanders would also use government to control the means of production, as the socialists used to say, starting with the banks. " (incidentally, does the wsj not know what the means of PRODUCTION means?)

Tags: wsj bernie sanders means of production democratic primary