#Federalism

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Apple to EU: “Go fuck yourself”

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

There's a strain of anti-anti-monopolist that insists that they're not pro-monopoly – they're just realists who understand that global gigacorporations are too big to fail, too big to jail, and that governments can't hope to rein them in. Trying to regulate a tech giant, they say, is like trying to regulate the weather.

This ploy is cousins with Jay Rosen's idea of "savvying," defined as: "dismissing valid questions with the insider's, 'and this surprises you?'"

https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/344825874362810369?lang=en

In both cases, an apologist for corruption masquerades as a pragmatist who understands the ways of the world, unlike you, a pathetic dreamer who foolishly hopes for a better world. In both cases, the apologist provides cover for corruption, painting it as an inevitability, not a choice. "Don't hate the player. Hate the game."

The reason this foolish nonsense flies is that we are living in an age of rampant corruption and utter impunity. Companies really do get away with both literal and figurative murder. Governments really do ignore horrible crimes by the rich and powerful, and fumble what rare, few enforcement efforts they assay.

Take the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. The GDPR establishes strict limitations of data-collection and processing, and provides for brutal penalties for companies that violate its rules. The immediate impact of the GDPR was a mass-extinction event for Europe's data-brokerages and surveillance advertising companies, all of which were in obvious violation of the GDPR's rules.

But there was a curious pattern to GDPR enforcement: while smaller, EU-based companies were swiftly shuttered by its provisions, the US-based giants that conduct the most brazen, wide-ranging, illegal surveillance escaped unscathed for years and years, continuing to spy on Europeans.

One (erroneous) way to look at this is as a "compliance moat" story. In that story, GDPR requires a bunch of expensive systems that only gigantic companies like Facebook and Google can afford. These compliance costs are a "capital moat" – a way to exclude smaller companies from functioning in the market. Thus, the GDPR acted as an anticompetitive wrecking ball, clearing the field for the largest companies, who get to operate without having to contend with smaller companies nipping at their heels:

https://www.techdirt.com/2019/06/27/another-report-shows-gdpr-benefited-google-facebook-hurt-everyone-else/

This is wrong.

Oh, compliance moats are definitely real – think of the calls for AI companies to license their training data. AI companies can easily do this – they'll just buy training data from giant media companies – the very same companies that hope to use models to replace creative workers with algorithms. Create a new copyright over training data won't eliminate AI – it'll just confine AI to the largest, best capitalized companies, who will gladly provide tools to corporations hoping to fire their workforces:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

But just because some regulations can be compliance moats, that doesn't mean that all regulations are compliance moats. And just because some regulations are vigorously applied to small companies while leaving larger firms unscathed, it doesn't follow that the regulation in question is a compliance moat.

A harder look at what happened with the GDPR reveals a completely different dynamic at work. The reason the GDPR vaporized small surveillance companies and left the big companies untouched had nothing to do with compliance costs. The Big Tech companies don't comply with the GDPR – they just get away with violating the GDPR.

How do they get away with it? They fly Irish flags of convenience. Decades ago, Ireland started dabbling with offering tax-havens to the wealthy and mobile – they invented the duty-free store:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty-free_shop#1947%E2%80%931990:_duty_free_establishment

Capturing pennies from the wealthy by helping them avoid fortunes they owed in taxes elsewhere was terribly seductive. In the years that followed, Ireland began aggressively courting the wealthy on an industrial scale, offering corporations the chance to duck their obligations to their host countries by flying an Irish flag of convenience.

There are other countries who've tried this gambit – the "treasure islands" of the Caribbean, the English channel, and elsewhere – but Ireland is part of the EU. In the global competition to help the rich to get richer, Ireland had a killer advantage: access to the EU, the common market, and 500m affluent potential customers. The Caymans can hide your money for you, and there's a few super-luxe stores and art-galleries in George Town where you can spend it, but it's no Champs Elysees or Ku-Damm.

But when you're competing with other countries for the pennies of trillion-dollar tax-dodgers, any wins can be turned into a loss in an instant. After all, any corporation that is footloose enough to establish a Potemkin Headquarters in Dublin and fly the trídhathach can easily up sticks and open another Big Store HQ in some other haven that offers it a sweeter deal.

This has created a global race to the bottom among tax-havens to also serve as regulatory havens – and there's a made-in-the-EU version that sees Ireland, Malta, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands competing to see who can offer the most impunity for the worst crimes to the most awful corporations in the world.

And that's why Google and Facebook haven't been extinguished by the GDPR while their rivals were. It's not compliance moats – it's impunity. Once a corporation attains a certain scale, it has the excess capital to spend on phony relocations that let it hop from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, chasing the loosest slots on the strip. Ireland is a made town, where the cops are all on the take, and two thirds of the data commissioner's rulings are eventually overturned by the federal court:

https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/iccl-2023-gdpr-report/

This is a problem among many federations, not just the EU. The US has its onshore-offshore tax- and regulation-havens (Delaware, South Dakota, Texas, etc), and so does Canada (Alberta), and some Swiss cantons are, frankly, batshit:

https://lenews.ch/2017/11/25/swiss-fact-some-swiss-women-had-to-wait-until-1991-to-vote/

None of this is to condemn federations outright. Federations are (potentially) good! But federalism has a vulnerability: the autonomy of the federated states means that they can be played against each other by national or transnational entities, like corporations. This doesn't mean that it's impossible to regulate powerful entities within a federation – but it means that federal regulation needs to account for the risk of jurisdiction-shopping.

Enter the Digital Markets Act, a new Big Tech specific law that, among other things, bans monopoly app stores and payment processing, through which companies like Apple and Google have levied a 30% tax on the entire app market, while arrogating to themselves the right to decide which software their customers may run on their own devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

Apple has responded to this regulation with a gesture of contempt so naked and broad that it beggars belief. As Proton describes, Apple's DMA plan is the very definition of malicious compliance:

https://proton.me/blog/apple-dma-compliance-plan-trap

Recall that the DMA is intended to curtail monopoly software distribution through app stores and mobile platforms' insistence on using their payment processors, whose fees are sky-high. The law is intended to extinguish developer agreements that ban software creators from informing customers that they can get a better deal by initiating payments elsewhere, or by getting a service through the web instead of via an app.

In response, Apple, has instituted a junk fee it calls the "Core Technology Fee": EUR0.50/install for every installation over 1m. As Proton writes, as apps grow more popular, using third-party payment systems will grow less attractive. Apple has offered discounts on its eye-watering payment processing fees to a mere 20% for the first payment and 13% for renewals. Compare this with the normal – and far, far too high – payment processing fees the rest of the industry charges, which run 2-5%. On top of all this, Apple has lied about these new discounted rates, hiding a 3% "processing" fee in its headline figures.

As Proton explains, paying 17% fees and EUR0.50 for each subscriber's renewal makes most software businesses into money-losers. The only way to keep them afloat is to use Apple's old, default payment system. That choice is made more attractive by Apple's inclusion of a "scare screen" that warns you that demons will rend your soul for all eternity if you try to use an alternative payment scheme.

Apple defends this scare screen by saying that it will protect users from the intrinsic unreliability of third-party processors, but as Proton points out, there are plenty of giant corporations who get to use their own payment processors with their iOS apps, because Apple decided they were too big to fuck with. Somehow, Apple can let its customers spend money Uber, McDonald's, Airbnb, Doordash and Amazon without terrorizing them about existential security risks – but not mom-and-pop software vendors or publishers who don't want to hand 30% of their income over to a three-trillion-dollar company.

Apple has also reserved the right to cancel any alternative app store and nuke it from Apple customers' devices without warning, reason or liability. Those app stores also have to post a one-million euro line of credit in order to be considered for iOS. Given these terms, it's obvious that no one is going to offer a third-party app store for iOS and if they did, no one would list their apps in it.

The fuckery goes on and on. If an app developer opts into third-party payments, they can't use Apple's payment processing too – so any users who are scared off by the scare screen have no way to pay the app's creators. And once an app creator opts into third party payments, they can never go back – the decision is permanent.

Apple also reserves the right to change all of these policies later, for the worse ("I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further" -D. Vader). They have warned developers that they might change the API for reporting external sales and revoke developers' right to use alternative app stores at its discretion, with no penalties if that screws the developer.

Apple's contempt extends beyond app marketplaces. The DMA also obliges Apple to open its platform to third party browsers and browser engines. Every browser on iOS is actually just Safari wrapped in a cosmetic skin, because Apple bans third-party browser-engines:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

But, as Mozilla puts it, Apple's plan for this is "as painful as possible":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24052067/mozilla-apple-ios-browser-rules-firefox

For one thing, Apple will only allow European customers to run alternative browser engines. That means that Firefox will have to "build and maintain two separate browser implementations — a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear."

(One wonders how Apple will treat Americans living in the EU, whose Apple accounts still have US billing addresses – these people will still be entitled to the browser choice that Apple is grudgingly extending to Europeans.)

All of this sends a strong signal that Apple is planning to run the same playbook with the DMA that Google and Facebook used on the GDPR: ignore the law, use lawyerly bullshit to chaff regulators, and hope that European federalism has sufficiently deep cracks that it can hide in them when the enforcers come to call.

But Apple is about to get a nasty shock. For one thing, the DMA allows wronged parties to start their search for justice in the European federal court system – bypassing the Irish regulators and courts. For another, there is a global movement to check corporate power, and because the tech companies do the same kinds of fuckery in every territory, regulators are able to collaborate across borders to take them down.

Take Apple's app store monopoly. The best reference on this is the report published by the UK Competition and Markets Authority's Digital Markets Unit:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63f61bc0d3bf7f62e8c34a02/Mobile_Ecosystems_Final_Report_amended_2.pdf

The devastating case that the DMU report was key to crafting the DMA – but it also inspired a US law aimed at forcing app markets open:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/2710

And a Japanese enforcement action:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-crack-down-on-Apple-and-Google-app-store-monopolies

And action in South Korea:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/skorea-considers-505-mln-fine-against-google-apple-over-app-market-practices-2023-10-06/

These enforcers gather for annual meetings – I spoke at one in London, convened by the Competition and Markets Authority – where they compare notes, form coalitions, and plan strategy:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-registration-308678625077

This is where the savvying breaks down. Yes, Apple is big enough to run circles around Japan, or South Korea, or the UK. But when those countries join forces with the EU, the USA and other countries that are fed up to the eyeballs with Apple's bullshit, the company is in serious danger.

It's true that Apple has convinced a bunch of its customers that buying a phone from a multi-trillion-dollar corporation makes you a member of an oppressed religious minority:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Some of those self-avowed members of the "Cult of Mac" are willing to take the company's pronouncements at face value and will dutifully repeat Apple's claims to be "protecting" its customers. But even that credulity has its breaking point – Apple can only poison the well so many times before people stop drinking from it. Remember when the company announced a miraculous reversal to its war on right to repair, later revealed to be a bald-faced lie?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

Or when Apple claimed to be protecting phone users' privacy, which was also a lie?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The savvy will see Apple lying (again) and say, "this surprises you?" No, it doesn't surprise me, but it pisses me off – and I'm not the only one, and Apple's insulting lies are getting less effective by the day.

Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annelid_worm,_Atlantic_forest,_northern_littoral_of_Bahia,_Brazil_%2816107326533%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

--

Hubertl (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2015-03-04_Elstar_%28apple%29_starting_putrefying_IMG_9761_bis_9772.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[fatherof1789]

omg hii georgr washington my favorite femme dyke >.<

Dear B. Coveredbutch,

What do these words you are using mean? I apologize that modern slang hinders me.

[transrevolutions]

Full stop, we don't live in a democracy. Not even a republic, either.

We live in an oligarchy, with republican* characteristics at best. We have a president that doesn't even need the popular vote to be elected (executive branch), a two-party congress bought out by corporates and lobbyists (legislative branch) and a group of nine appointed-for-life 'justices' who can make decisions overturning decades of legal precedent, who are given their positions not by election but by the president that doesn't even need a popular vote to get in office (judicial branch).

We don't live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchy run by corporations, gun and oil lobbyists, old money, and the Christian fascist far right.

*'republican' here does not mean the GOP, it refers to the system of government, although in these times, the error is easy to make.

[empirearchives]

Short video about Napoleon’s impact in Switzerland:

It includes things I forgot to mention in my other post. For example, he introduced the Swiss Franc in 1799, which is still in use to this day. He also introduced freedom of religion. He introduced equality before the law. One really interesting fact from the video: Adrian Vatter, Professor of political science at the University of Bern, said that the Act of Mediation (1803) was actually the birth of modern federalism. It made all the cantons equal for the first time, and each got their own constitution. The cantons remain equal to this day.

André Holenstein, Professor of Swiss history at the University of Bern, said Napoleon “turned the former subject territories into new, sovereign cantons.” So, he was very important in the making of the modern map of Switzerland.

[ancaporado]

oh boy we cooking

[regnigt]

That ask that you reblogged about that American being confused about Germany having states is making me face palm so hard. I can't even begin to just ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I swear we're not all this stupid. Then again, I grew up with a love for maps and so I'd study them passionately and ask, "Why is the US the only country on the globe with states filled in? What about the other countries? Where are their states? What are they called?" Teacher: "They do have states but the map maker was keeping it simple. Also, this is math class." ;)

Well actually a lot of countries are way more centralized than the US and while they have a number of administrative divisions/provinces/districts/whatever they're called, they don't have the independence of American states. Sweden is one of those countries, we are pretty centralized in our manner of government. However post-WWII Germany is very much NOT one of those countries! It's got "Federal" right in the name of the country and it's fundamental to its constitution that the states have a good amount of independent say towards the center. I have to admit I don't know all that much more about it but I do remember that much from school, it was made a point of repeatedly... I like the way your math teacher explained things! Didn't try to obfuscate anything.

[quotesfromall]

No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the States, and of compounding the American people into one common mass.

John Marshall, McCulloch v. Maryland

[cmanateesto]

Whiskey Rebellion: A Frivolous Affair?

The United States was founded and the Militias delayed development. The militias incorporated the same level of resistance as they did prior. This was in protest of a Whiskey Tax. Without context, it seems like a frivolous affair. Public schools teach it in this manner without examining the context. I was also told the militia died down with little incident, which was a blatant lie. 

After the United States won its independence, it incurred a war debt. Several war debts actually. This tab had debts that included France, the Netherlands, and Spain. Alexander Hamilton proposed consolidating the debt into a single fund. While that made keeping track of the debt easier it still left the United States with $54 million worth of debt.

 Elson, Bob. "Foreign Aid." History of the United States of America. Kathy Leigh. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1904. 275-279. Web. &lt;http://www.usahistory.info/Revolution/foreign-aid.html>. 

Chernow, Ron (2004). Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin Press. ISBN 978-1-59420-009-0. OCLC 53083988 – via Internet Archive.

How would they cover this fiscal gap? That’s where the Whiskey Tax would come in. It was a tax on all distilled hard liquor, but Whiskey was the main product. It was an accessible product to many farmers. They produce the Whiskey with surplus barley, wheat, or corn. Many farmers in the western frontiers produced this and used it in absence of the dollar. 

Taxes were already a hot button for many Americans due to previous experiences. Hamilton’s argument that Whiskey was a Luxury Tax, thus would be the most difficult tax to contend with. 

One problem is, Whiskey wasn’t a luxury product. I know, let me explain. Upon rescinding dependency on Great Britain, that meant getting rid of their currency. So what would they use in place of that? The American dollar would stand in place of the pound. The U.S. was a new nation and that meant they would have to print enough money. Enough money so that it can be a currency and flow to the entire economy, not select parts. The problem was that the dollars weren’t getting to everyone fast enough. So does that mean farmers out west would sit and wait until they get their money? No. They would use this hard liquor as a form of currency while they waited. This is a practice often used in hard times when financial institutions are absent.

 Hogeland, William (2006). The whiskey rebellion : George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the frontier rebels who challenged America's newfound sovereignty. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-5491-5. OCLC 1036919582 – via Internet Archive. 

Armitage, S. (2020, January 31). How Vodka Became a Currency in Russia. Atlas Obscura. Retrieved November 17, 2022, from https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/vodka-currency-russia

 When Congress passed the Whiskey Excise Tax, they didn’t take into account how early it was for the country. The country had yet to establish itself to all citizens. It was easy to think that America was ready if you were in a developed region like Boston or New York. They failed to take into account the Western farmers in Pennsylvania or Virginia. 

When the bill passed, if you wanted your distilled liquor to be legal you had to register. This registration already causes two obstacles for farmers. It was a financial and an obstacle of time. The time and distance it took for farmers to mail or travel to a Federal Courthouse were astronomical. Mailing it would take the same amount of time or longer. I also mention that they use whiskey in absence of the government's provision of currency. It was not a luxury product as Alexander Hamilton would argue. 

"We should take time here to understand exactly what these new taxes meant to the farmer-distillers of the time--these guys didn’t have any cash. 

They might have been making a decent living, but many, indeed, most transactions at that time were conducted by barter. It’s a grand way to do business: Pop into the town center with a few quarts of whiskey, trade one to the local seamstress in return for a new dress for the missus, another to the fishmonger who will supply you with dinner for the next four Fridays, and when the landlord is passing by, maybe you can persuade him to take a gallon of your finest whiskey in lieu of a few months rent. The scene and the amounts are merely hypothetical, but it gives you a rough idea of why the farmers had empty pockets."

Regan, G., & Regan, M. H. (2020). American Whiskey History. American Whiskey Trail. Retrieved November 17, 2022, from https://americanwhiskeytrail.distilledspirits.org/american-whiskey-history

 Under the conditions of the bill, the more whiskey you distilled, the lower your taxes were. The less whiskey you distilled, the higher your taxes were. If this was a bill that aimed to pay off the war debt wouldn’t it make more sense to tax a higher quantity of whiskey?

Some concessions would come. I.E: a higher tax on liquor distilled from imported products as opposed to local raw products. The distilleries were in favor of this bill when it passed so it didn't seem to affect them much at all. The question then is: did rural production exceed industrial production? Did it warrant focusing on rural output over industrial output?

This moment defines the priorities Hamilton and men like him. Representatives voiced their concerns to Congress in regards to the tax. Hamilton branded them radical Anti-Federalists instead of addressing the issue. Hmm...so avoiding the question is also an American past time?

Library of Congress. (1994). A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774 - 1875. Retrieved November 17, 2022, from https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsp&fileName=009/llsp009.db&recNum=156 

 Holt, Wythe (January 6, 2004). "The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794: A Democratic Working-Class Insurrection" (PDF). University of Georgia. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 25, 2011.

Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History. (2018, May 18). ." Gale encyclopedia of u.s. economic history. . encyclopedia.com. 15 Nov. 2022 . Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved November 17, 2022, from https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/united-states-and-canada/us-history/whiskey-rebellion Slaughter, Thomas P. (1986). The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-977187-5. OCLC 770873834.

Washington did send diplomats to de-escalate the situation. We've already reviewed Hamilton's opinion and many Federalists shared the sentiment. This was a majority of Washington's party despite his disdain for factionalism. The Conditions laid for the people were:

A. Accept this Whiskey Excise Tax. 

B. The Federal Government sends a standing Army to put down the insurrections. 

There was a reason to do this. Tax Collectors were being kidnapped, tarred, and feathered like before the Revolution. There isn't a reason to deny the necessity for using a standing Army, but there were moderate voices. 

There was enough civility on both fronts where diplomacy was an option. The Federalists adopted a belligerent and provocative attitude. Hamilton also favored searching and seizing people's homes for enforcement purposes. 

Hmmm...I recall a certain Bill of Rights that had something to say about that? I don't know. Your scalp gets really itchy pondering the history behind these Amendments.

 Many of the militia who would harass the Feds fled further west. These lands would become Tennessee and Kentucky. The lack of capital offense execution disappointed Hamilton...of course it did. They captured 18 rebels, two convicted of high treason. Turns out the people they captured weren't even the actual leaders of the rebellion. Washington would pardon them instead of letting them hang. 

 Craughwell, Thomas J.; Phelps, M. William (2008). Failures of the Presidents: From the Whiskey Rebellion and War of 1812 to the Bay of Pigs and War in Iraq. Fair Winds Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-1-61673-431-2.

Some schools say this was an event that empowered the Federal Government. I would argue this move only weakened the Federal Government. The Revolution occurred with the understanding that Great Britain didn't respect their autonomy. Common people rejected the monarchy because it taxed them without consideration. Now the United States was pushing a tax that sabotaged rural communities. 

At this point in history, it was no longer endorsed by the people who helped it form. It discarded its popular support by enslaving itself to the whims of radicals. Radicals who were only willing to give concession to total submission. This left no room for conciliation or compromise between the conflicting parties. With those who supported the Whiskey Excise versus those that didn't, it is an epitome. More so than the American Civil War where slavery is often the scapegoat. This distracts from the true conflict between two kinds of American people: rich and poor. The haves and have-nots.

[potted-dandelions]

"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country," is a bold admonishment, one which Americans have failed to live up to in the face of social pressure to elect those candidates who promise to give us the most free stuff.

Way back when JFK spoke those words, they were welcomed by patriotic Americans across the nation. People want to be useful, to contribute, to make a difference in the world, and the United States has traditionally been a place where that attitude is encouraged and even rewarded.

So don't ask why the USA lacks universal healthcare. Ask why do Americans uniquely donate so much more of their income to charity than the rest.

Partly it's because we're better paid, but largely it's to support our communities while maintaining our sense of individuality. Here's the thing: when the sovereign attempts to buy its citizens' loyalty, people discover that loyalty can be sold, and that insight is devastating to our inherent patriotism. Entitlement programs compel us to ask what our country can do for us, to reject JFK's admonition.

Americans have long understood that governments exist primarily to govern and secondarily to provide what social services only governments can. We begrudgingly accept government as a necessary evil while we work to provide for ourselves and take pride in our ability to do so. As young and pioneering as our culture is, we've acquired a frontier spirit that has worked so well for so long that we are loathe to abandon it. So we still look out for our neighbors in lieu of the dole, only applying for government services when better options are unavailable.

That's why Americans have the highest rate of individual charitable donations in the world. Charities let us provide for the needy and enjoin us to personally help our fellow citizens get back on their own two feet. But our own government cynically competes with us on that score.

I realize how jaded this sounds, but the government dole is a vote-buying scheme disguised as charity. Ideally, taxpayers would feel like they've contributed something useful to humanity for having paid their taxes, but instead it engenders a blithe have-the-maid-do-it mentality.

Truthfully, government welfare programs aren't that much more wasteful or less efficient than the average charity organization, but if a charity wastes revenue, we can always redirect our donations to another one or simply stop donating outright. Taxes by contrast are compulsory.

Americans are keen to wasteful government spending since we have no choice but to pay up, but since we're also human beings, we always want more government benefits for ourselves. Thus are more Americans becoming greedy socialists these days and it's killing our frontier spirit.

Alas, I fear the flame of our charity is threatening to snuff itself out in the face of socialist greed. Charitable giving is harder to fit into the household budget when the government takes so much and then uses it to buy our loyalty. Wealth redistribution is lethal to charity.

There ought to be a constitutional amendment which states that if the people can adequately provide for themselves and each other, the government cannot butt in and directly complete with any charity. Oh wait, there already is, and it (the 10th) was ratified over two centuries ago.

Our 'federal' government transformed itself into a national government so gradually that nobody has lived long enough to notice. Now, Uncle Sam has his hands in far too many domestic matters. Welfare, Medicare and social retirement funds are rightly matters for states to decide. States, after all, are far more accountable and accessible to 'We the People' than our distant and opaque federal government. We deserve more of a say in the dispensation of our tax dollars and far more transparency than federal entitlement programs provide.

As it is, most of us tend to just pay Uncle Sam and then leave him to his own devices, blindly trusting that he's got things under control, only checking in on him every two to four years. This have-the-maid-do-it attitude has an antidote: if you want it done right then do it yourself.

Unlike all federal entitlement programs, you can directly contribute your time, your diligence and your oversight to many charitable organizations by volunteering. You'll accomplish far more for your fellow man in that way than by simply paying your taxes and hoping for the best.

And you'll forget what the government owes you when you see your donations and your personal efforts make a real difference in your community. You'll embody John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" mindset and you'll abolish socialism from your heart.

It's entirely possible to eliminate all federal entitlement programs and replace them with some combination of state entitlement programs, charitable organizations and a robust insurance industry. It's something we should do so our federal government can embrace federalism again.

It's long past time we stopped thinking of the government as our Uncle Samta Klaus come down the chimney with gifts of free healthcare, pensions, and family leave. He only wants your loyalty and he'll buy it with your own taxes. Give your loyalty instead to your fellow Americans.

Give more than your loyalty. Give also of your income, that which you can spare, and give of your free time as well and it will signify that your loyalty is not for sale because it already belongs to your community, your nation and your God. Blessings shared are blessings earned.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Fighting the privacy wars, state by state

In 2021, Apple updated its mobile OS so that users could opt out of app tracking with one click. More than 96% opted out, costing Facebook $10b in one year. The kicker? Even if you opted out, Apple continued to spy on you, just as invasively as Facebook had, as part of its competing targeted ad product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/23/state-of-play/#patchwork

The fact that Apple — a company that has blanketed the world with anti-surveillance billboards — engaged in deceptive, pervasive surveillance reveals the bankruptcy of “letting the market decide” what privacy protections you should have.

When you walk into a grocery store, you know that the FDA is on the job, making sure that the food you buy doesn’t kill you — but no one stops the grocery store from tracking literally every step you take, every eye movement you make (no, really!) and selling that to all comers:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/02/16/forget-milk-and-eggs-supermarkets-are-having-a-fire-sale-on-data-about-you

America’s decision to let the private sector self-regulate commercial surveillance is a grotesque failure of duty on the part of Congress, which has consistently failed to pass comprehensive privacy legislation. There are lots of reasons for this, but the most important is that American cops and spies are totally reliant on commercial surveillance brokers, and they fight like hell against any privacy legislation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

The private sector’s unregulated privacy free-for-all means that cops don’t need to get warrants to spy on you — they can just buy the data on the open market for pennies:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#ppp

The last Congressional session almost passed a halfway decent (but still deeply flawed) federal privacy law, but then they didn’t. Basically, Congress only passes laws that can be sandwiched into 1,000-page must-pass bills and most of the good stuff that gets through only does so because some bought-and-paid-for Congressjerks are too busy complaining about “woke librarians” to read the bills before they come up for a vote.

The catastrophic failure to protect Americans’ privacy has sent human rights groups hunting for other means to accomplish the same end. On the federal level, there’s the newly reinvigorated FTC, under the visionary, muscular leadership of Lina Khan, the best Commission chair in a generation. She’s hard at work on rules to limit commercial surveillance:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

But FTC regs take time to pass, and it can be hard for ordinary individuals to trigger their enforcement, which might leave you at the mercy of your local officials when your privacy is invaded. What we really need is a privacy law with a “private right of action” — the right to go to court on your own:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

The business lobby hates private right of action, and they trick low-information voters into opposing them with lies about “ambulance chasers” who sue innocent fast-food outlets for millions because they serve coffee that’s too hot:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

With Congress deadlocked and privacy harms spiraling, pro-privacy groups have turned to the states, as Alfred Ng writes for Politico:

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/22/statehouses-privacy-law-cybersecurity-00083775

The best provisions of the failed federal privacy law have been introduced as state legislation in Massachusetts and Illinois, and there are amendments to Indiana’s existing state privacy law — 16 states in all are working on or have some kind of privacy law. This means businesses must live with the dread “patchwork of laws,” which serves the business lobby right: they must do business in potentially radically different ways in different states, and small missteps could cost them millions, in true fuck-around-and-find-out fashion.

As Ng writes, these laws don’t have to pass in every state. America’s historically contingent, lopsided state lines mean that some states are so populous that whatever rules they pass end up going nationwide (the ACLU’s Kade Crockford uses the example of California Prop 65 warnings showing up on canned goods in NY).

As Congress descends further into self-parody, the temptation to treat the federal government as damage and route around it only mounts. It’s a powerful, but imperfect strategy. On the negative side, it takes a lot of resources to introduce legislation into multiple states, and to win legislative fights in each.

Think of the incredible fuckery that the coalition of Apple, John Deere, Wahl, and other monopolists got up to defeat dozens of state Right to Repair laws, even snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in New York state, neutering the incredible state electronics repair law before it reached the governor’s desk:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/17/more-details-on-how-tech-lobbyists-lobotomized-nys-right-to-repair-law-with-governor-kathy-hochuls-help/

Indeed, the business lobby loves lobbying statehouses, treating them as the Feds’ farm-leagues, filled with naive, easily hoodwinked rubes. Organizations like ALEC use their endless corporate funding to get state legislation that piles farce upon tragedy, like the laws banning municipal fiber networks:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

The right has always had hooks in state legislatures, but they really opened up the sluice gates in the runup to the 2010 census, when a GOP strategist called Thomas Hofeller started pitching Republican operatives on a plan called REDMAP, to capture state legislatures in time for a post-2010 census mass-redistricting that would neutralize the votes of Black and brown people and deliver permanent rule by an openly white nationalist Republican party that could lose every popular vote and still hold power.

Of course, that’s not how they talked about it in public. Though the racial dimension of GOP gerrymandering were visible to anyone on the ground, Hofeller maintained a veneer of plausible deniability on the new REDMAP districts, leaving the racist intent of GOP redistricting as a he-said/she-said matter of conjecture:

https://www.klfy.com/national/late-gop-redistricting-gurus-files-hint-at-partisan-motives/

That is, until 2018, when Satan summoned Hofeller back to hell, leaving his personal effects in the hands of his estranged anarchist daughter, Stephanie, who dumped all her old man’s files online, including the powerpoint slides he delivered to his GOP colleagues where he basically said, “Hey kids, let’s do an illegal racism!”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pked4v/the-anarchist-daughter-of-the-gops-gerrymandering-mastermind-just-dumped-all-his-maps-and-files-on-google-drive

Sometimes, laws that turn on intent are difficult to enforce because they require knowledge of the accused’s state of mind. But there are so many would-be supervillains who just can’t stop themselves from monologing, and worse, putting it in writing.

As bad as state politics can be, they’re still winnable battlefields. Last year saw a profound win on Right to Repair in Colorado, where a wheelchair repair bill, HB22–1031, made history:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

That win helped inspire Rebecca Giblin and I when we were writing Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about how Big Tech and Big Content rip off creative workers, and what to do about it.

https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Many readers have noted that the first half of the book — where were unpack the scams of streaming, news advertising, ebooks and audiobooks, and other creative fields — is incredibly enraging.

But if you find yourself struggling to concentrate on the book because of a persistent, high-pitched whining noise that you suspect might be a rage-induced incipient aneurysm, keep reading! The second half of the book is full of detailed, shovel-ready policy proposals to get artists paid, including a state legislative proposal that works from the same playbook as these state privacy laws.

If your creative work entitles you to receive royalties, your contract will typically include the right to audit your royalty statements. If you do audit your royalties, you will often find “discrepancies.” We cite one LA firm that has performed tens of thousands of record contract audits over decades, and in every instance except one, the errors they discovered were in the labels’ favor.

This is a hell of a head-scratcher. I can only assume that some kind of extremely vexing, highly localized probability storm has taken up permanent residence over the Big Three labels’ accounting departments, making life hell for their CPAs, and my heart goes out to them.

Anyway: if you find one of these errors and you tell your label or publisher or studio, “Hey, you stole my money, cough up!” they will pat you on the head and say, “Oh, you artists are adorable but you can’t do math. You’re mistaken, we don’t owe you anything. But because we’re good natured slobs, we’ll offer you, say, half of what you think we owe you, which is good, because you can’t afford to sue us. And all you need to do to get that money is to sign this non-disclosure agreement, meaning you can’t tell anyone else about the money we’re stealing from them.

“Oh, and one more thing: your accountant has to promise never to audit us again.” As Caldwell-Kelly said when we talked about this on Trashfuture, this is like the accused murderer telling the forensics team, “Dig anywhere you’d like in my garden, just not in that corner, I’m very sentimental about it.”

https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/amazon-billing-amazon-for-amazon-feat-cory-doctorow-and-rebecca-giblin/

Now, contracts are a matter of state law, and nearly every entertainment industry contract is signed in one of four jurisdictions: NY, CA, TN (Nashville), and WA (games companies and Amazon). If we amended the state laws in one or more of these to say, “NDAs can’t be enforced when they pertain to wage theft arising from omissions or misstatements on royalties,” we could pour money into the pockets of creative workers all over the world.

Yes, the entertainment giants will fight like hell against this, and yes, they have a lot of juice in their state legislatures. But they’re also incredibly greedy and reckless, and prone to such breathtaking and brazen acts of wage theft that they lurch from crisis to crisis, and at each of these crises, there is a space to pass a law to address these very public failings.

For example, in 2022, the Writers Guild of America — one of the best, most principled, most solidaristic and unified unions in Hollywood — wrested $42 million from Netflix, which the company had stolen from its writers:

https://variety.com/2022/film/news/wga-wins-42-million-arbitration-netflix-1235333822/

Netflix isn’t alone in these massive acts of wage theft, and this is certainly not the only way Netflix is stealing from creative workers. There’s never just one ant: if Netflix cooked the books for writers, they’re definitely cooking it for other workers. That means there will be more scandals, and when they break, we can demand more than a bandaid fix for one crime — we can demand modest-but-critical legislative action to fix contracts and prevent this kind of wage-theft in the future.

The state legislatures aren’t an intrinsically better battlefield for just fights, but they are an alternative to Congress, and there is space to make things happen in just some of the 50 state houses that can ripple out over the whole country — for good and bad.

[Image ID: Blind justice, holding aloft a set of unbalanced scales; in the lower scale is a map of the USA showing the state lines; in the higher scale rests the capitol building.]

[fatherof1789]

geowge washingto n/.......owo:(

What the fuck

[destielmemenews]

source 1

source 2

[empirearchives]

Will Durant on Napoleon’s dream of a peaceful Federation of European States:

“In that Association Européenne, all the component states would have the same money, weights, measures and basic laws, with no political barriers to travel, transport and trade. When Napoleon reached Moscow in 1812, he thought that only a just peace with Alexander remained in the way of realizing his dream. He had underestimated the centrifugal power of national differences.”

[brianbachochin]

Prophecy Brief: Our Constitutional Republic and the Kingdom of God

Scripture: Revelation 13, Genesis 11 Links: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/04/the-gateway-drug-to-post-christian-paganism

[metaosophy]

Democratic Federal Constitutional Republic