Tag: Philosophy

A Good Start

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About f%$#ing time.   It’s bad enough that the current Democratic Party consults make elections more expensive because they get a percentage of the media buys, but they also suck at what they do:

Two alums of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) 2016 presidential campaign have launched a consulting firm to help progressive candidates win elections and to stick a thumb in the eye of the Democratic Party establishment.

MVMT Communications is the brainchild of Karthik Ganapathy, who previously served as battleground states communications director for Sanders, and Mike Casca, the rapid response director on Sanders’ campaign.

“The sort of calcification around the Democratic Party’s agenda has been driven a lot by the consultant class,” Casca, who went on to serve as communications director for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, told The Daily Beast. “We have a party that is driven by a core of strategists that run a lot of their business on corporate clients and it affects everyone’s thinking.”

The launch of MVMT Communications comes as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has said it will not grant contracts to consultants who work with candidates who are running primary challenges against sitting incumbents. Though Ganapathy and Casca didn’t say they created their firm in response to that decision, it is clear that their impetus for doing so was, in part, to try to rally in support of those candidates challenging entrenched incumbents.

Let’s hope that they are more competent than the current lot.

If it Becomes a Wypipo Problem, ALEC Loses

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Arkansas is repealing its ban on municipally owned broadband. because they are sick and tired of getting screwed by the cable and telephone companies:

Pat Ulrich can’t make water-cooler talk about The Handmaid’s Tale or Shrill. “I can’t get Hulu or anything like that,” she says. If it’s on a streaming service, she probably hasn’t seen it.

Her home, in Arkansas, has no broadband internet connection. A cable company once quoted her $44,000 to install one, so she and her husband get mediocre Wi-Fi through a satellite provider. “It’s 20 gigabytes” per month, she says, “no different from using your phone.”

Connectivity isn’t just a problem for the state’s sizable rural population. Ulrich lives in a suburb of Little Rock and commutes into the city each day to work as a web developer for the Arkansas Arts Center. Needless to say, she never works from home.

Arkansas is the least connected of the 50 states, according to BroadbandNow, a group that tracks consumer options. Since 2011, the state has banned cities and towns from building their own networks, outlawing a local solution that has been hailed as an effective way for communities to connect themselves when they don’t have internet providers.

This year, however, Arkansas appears to be having a change of heart. Under the weight of constituent complaints about lousy internet—and after years of waiting for subsidies to goad telecom giants into expanding the infrastructure—the state legislature in February passed a bill to repeal its ban. Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson said he will sign it.

That this is happening at all is significant. That it’s happening in a deep-red state is perhaps monumental.

Arkansas outlawed municipal broadband in 2011 as a wave of other states passed similar laws. It was, in part, a factor of the Tea Party movement, which ushered small-government Republicans into state capitols. By 2018, 21 states had some law banning or restricting municipal broadband; many were cut-and-paste “model legislation” from the American Legislative and Exchange Council, backed by telecom giants. They sought to kill municipal broadband under the belief that “such services should not be offered by government in competition with private-sector providers.”

Yes, the cable companies are so awful that they are getting municipal broadband in Arkansas.

These companies got $250 million from the FCC to build out broadband, and didn’t do squat.

They are the most hated businesses in America for a reason, and the ALEC sponsored ban on municipal broadband has become toxic.

This Also Explains Theranos

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In this examination of toxic individualism to describe how Uber was a Silicon Valley success and a real world failure, (most disastrous IPO in history) it explains a lot about the general lawlessness that permeates the culture.

Essentially, this is Ayn Rand applied to the real world, and failing completely, as it did with Sears:

Uber is now a massive, publicly traded company. Anyone can buy Uber shares at a valuation of about $70 billion. This isn’t bad for a company losing billions of dollars a year, but it’s a fraction of the $120-billion valuation the IPO’s bankers initially floated. It’s roughly what private investors valued it at three years ago, when the company made $7.43 billion less revenue.

………

But some of it should go to Silicon Valley’s cultural divergence from the business reality. Investors loved the company not as an operating unit, but as an idea about how the world should be. Uber’s CEO was brash and would do whatever it took. His company’s attitude toward the government was dismissive and defiant. And its model of how society should work, especially how labor supply should meet consumer demand, valorized the individual, as if Milton Friedman’s dreams coalesced into a company. “It’s almost the perfect tech company, insofar as it allocates resources in the physical world and corrects some real inefficiencies,” the Uber investor Naval Ravikant told San Francisco magazine in 2014.

………

But plenty of companies have experienced founders and do things VCs like. What set Uber apart—and the reason it generated the Uber-for-X phenomenon—was its marketplace model.

The company used computers to restructure the driving labor market (“corrects some real inefficiencies”). Why have a dispatcher send cabs all over a city when an algorithm could do the same thing—with no labor cost or organizational infrastructure, and probably with better results? The cab companies, with their own complex institutional histories, were suddenly irrelevant. Drivers drove and riders rode—and the only thing necessary to connect them was an app on a phone. The model didn’t just make financial sense to people trained to think in Silicon Valley in the 2000s; it made ideological sense.

………

For early Uber investors, Uber was everything that disruption was supposed to be. You took an app, created by a small number of people in a San Francisco office, and used it to erase the institutions—formerly called businesses—that used to sit between the buyers and sellers of services. It wasn’t just a company; it was a company that destroyed the need for other companies. It was pure and uncut Economics 101, capitalism as it was meant to be. And if by eliminating much of the labor that it previously took to organize car services, the company would also generate billionaires … well, to the innovators go the spoils.

………

In Uber’s world, there is no such thing as collective action. Every person is an individual particle of the market, freely interacting with all the others, unless there is pesky government meddling. Uber really was about the triumph of individualism, an ethos that infuses Silicon Valley so thoroughly that it’s hard for most here to see. Companies that fit that pattern are more likely to garner VC attention, get funding, and find success. That’s how Silicon Valley shapes the world.

But they cannot sustain companies within their bubbles of influence forever. They must leave the nest for the public markets, where they are judged on their bottom lines. So far, the market says: This company is worth $50 billion less than its executives and bankers thought.

And in Uber’s world, the market is always right.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled,” the same applies for business, only we need to replace “technology”, with business, and “public relations” must replaced with “ill-conceived and juvenile philosophy”.

Objectivism has failed wherever it has met reality, leaving misery in its wake.

Matt Taibbi at the Top of His Form

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I think that John Hickenlooper, among other, have just stunned Taibbi with his stupidity than Thomas “The Mustache of Idiocy” Friedman ever did.

It appears that the former Colorado Governor, and avid supporter of the fracking industry, is now implying that the Vermont Senator will invoke Stalin type purges and another Holodomor.

In any case, the result has seen Tabbi at his best:

Bernie Sanders has accomplished something no one in American politics has managed for decades: He’s uniting Democrats and Republicans.

It’s early yet, but talking points for the 2020 campaign season are emerging on both sides of the aisle. Republicans and Democrats both have been trying to sell the rise of politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others as stalking horses for the overthrow of capitalism.

………

This is absurd to the point of being funny: First of all, the press has been dumping on Sanders almost recreationally for years now. Meanwhile, fear of litigation has kept the press away from business exposés for decades. Whole genres of corruption go uncovered, from child labor that makes your consumer goods (enjoy that child-mined cobalt ore in your cellphone!) to war profiteering to pollution to industrial accidents. Few news organizations have even one labor reporter anymore. The last collective bargaining session that made a front page probably involved the NFL.

………

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Colorado-governor-turned-presidential-candidate John Hickenlooper — who sells himself as a “pragmatic progressive” — went after Sanders in New Hampshire, though not by name.

“You have to hand it to the GOP for achieving the near-impossible,” Hickenlooper said in early May. “Just years after the collapse of the Soviet Union…who would have imagined the Koch brothers and Donald Trump could help resuscitate the discredited ideas of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin?”

Of course, Hickenlooper went on to say, he wasn’t trying to cast aspersions on Sanders as a human being by comparing him to Stalin, who murdered 20 million people. “Do I respect him?” Hickenlooper said. “Absolutely. Do I respect his supporters? Absolutely.” However, he said, he thinks Sanders is wrongly “demonizing the private sector” with ideas that will “hurt working people.”

………

The irony of all of this is that Sanders, who is painted as a sort of extremist menace and El Coco-style monster from whom we should hide the children, would have been considered a tepid Republican back in the Fifties, when the original red scare was at its peak.

………

Bernie Sanders may not be the answer, but he isn’t Stalin, and voter attitudes aren’t changing because people are romanticizing the Great Terror. We’ve just had awful leadership for so long that demanding fairness and competence from politicians has started to seem like a radical idea. It isn’t, but get used to being told it is, until the next election at least.

Read the whole thing.

It is a truly trenchant indictment of the whole “Socialism” hysteria that the pundits are trying to convince the rest of us means something.

Historical Tweet of the Day

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Картелизация, монополизация во всех секторах экономики, приход банковского капитала во все сферы, от телевидения до ритейла, вывоз капитала и использование наемников для его защиты – это, конечно, совсем не то, о чем В.И.Ленин писал в своей давно потерявшей актуальность брошюре. pic.twitter.com/SEic3Ym7nN

— Константин Семин (@KSyomin) March 27, 2019

The translation reads:

Cartelization, monopolization in all sectors of the economy, the arrival of bank capital in all areas, from television to retail, the export of capital and the use of mercenaries to protect it – this, of course, is not at all what Lenin wrote about in his long-lost relevance brochure.

This reminds me of a joke in Russia from the 1990s, “Everything the Soviets ever told us about Communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about capitalism was true.”

The Seinfeld Candidate

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I am referring, of course, to the candidate about nothing, Beto O’Rourke who has just announced his candidacy for President, and it appears that I am not the only one who notices that there is no “There” there:

Beto O’Rourke is finally ready to end the suspense. The former Texas congressman is expected to formally kick off his presidential campaign Thursday, one day after tipping his hand to a local TV station in Texas. “I’m really proud of what El Paso did and what El Paso represents,” O’Rourke told KTSM El Paso via text. “It’s a big part of why I’m running.” His apparent confirmation came on the heels of a new Vanity Fair cover story—complete with glossy photo shoot—in which he told the magazine that he wanted to run. “I want to be in it,” he said, after describing our current political moment as an existential fight. “Man, I’m just born to be in it, and want to do everything I humanly can for this country at this moment.”

………

Beto is missing one important thing, though: an actual reason to run.

O’Rourke would enter the race as a man without a clear political ideology, a signature legislative achievement, a major policy issue, or a concrete agenda for the country. Those in the know tell the Atlantic that Beto is planning to run as a candidate “offering hope that America can be better than its current partisan and hate-filled politics, and that the country can come together,” but that—brace yourself—he hasn’t yet “landed on how he’ll propose to actually make that happen.” That’s more of the same empty words Beto’s been offering in public since his loss to Cruz. “I don’t know where I am on a [political] spectrum, and I almost could care less,” he said at a recent stop in Wisconsin. “I just want to get to better things for this country.”

………

Beto is missing one important thing, though: an actual reason to run.

O’Rourke would enter the race as a man without a clear political ideology, a signature legislative achievement, a major policy issue, or a concrete agenda for the country. Those in the know tell the Atlantic that Beto is planning to run as a candidate “offering hope that America can be better than its current partisan and hate-filled politics, and that the country can come together,” but that—brace yourself—he hasn’t yet “landed on how he’ll propose to actually make that happen.” That’s more of the same empty words Beto’s been offering in public since his loss to Cruz. “I don’t know where I am on a [political] spectrum, and I almost could care less,” he said at a recent stop in Wisconsin. “I just want to get to better things for this country.”

He is a telegenic candidate about nothing who hopes that voters will project their own opinions on him, with the help of some meaningless, but soaring, rhetoric.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

You’ve seen that T-shirt, the artist who did that logo was Shepard Fairey.

Not interested.

They Make a Desert and Call It Peace

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By extension, it is an indictment of how the various colonial wars that the US has engaged in over the past 30 or so years.

Undoubtedly, the punishment for telling the truth will be swift and severe:

A senior French officer involved in the fight against Islamic State in Syria faces punishment after launching a scathing attack on the U.S.-led coalition’s methods to defeat the group in its remaining stronghold of Hajin, the army said on Saturday.

Colonel Francois-Regis Legrier, who has been in charge of directing French artillery supporting Kurdish-led groups in Syria since October, said the coalition’s focus had been on limiting its own risks and this had greatly increased the death toll among civilians and the levels of destruction.

“Yes, the Battle of Hajin was won, at least on the ground but by refusing ground engagement, we unnecessarily prolonged the conflict and thus contributed to increasing the number of casualties in the population,” Legrier wrote in an article in the National Defence Review.

“We have massively destroyed the infrastructure and given the population a disgusting image of what may be a Western-style liberation leaving behind the seeds of an imminent resurgence of a new adversary,” he said, in rare public criticism by a serving officer.

The coalition could have got rid of just 2,000 militant fighters – who lacked air support or modern technological equipment – much more quickly and effectively by sending in just 1,000 troops, he argued.

………

Legrier’s article has embarrassed French authorities just hours before the coalition is expected to announce the defeat of the hardline Islamist group.

“A punishment is being considered,” French army spokesman Patrick Steiger said in a text message.

The article was removed from the review’s website on Saturday.

I wholeheartedly agree with Colonel Legrier, and I expect that his career is over.

Tweet of the Day

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#BernieInChicago chastizes the crowd for the second day in a row for chanting his name, exclaiming "Nope, no no no, its not about me!"

The crowd then naturally erupts into a #NotMeUs chant with a huge grin on Bernie's face "That's more like it!"#Bernie2020

— Winkle the BernieBro 🌹 (@the_bernie_bro) March 4, 2019

It’s not a surprise that you would hear this from Bernie, but you would never hear this from Hillary, along with running an incompetent and lazy campaign, is why she lost.

Populism, whether real (Bernie) of fake (Donald) derives its power from this.

Portugal’s Solution to Right Wing Populism

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Portugal’s solution is much like Iceland’s solution.

Specifically, they have eschewed German economics and German austerity, and instead have chosen to build up their society, and their societal protections:

Considering the booming economy, dropping unemployment numbers and the return of many once-emigrated young Portuguese citizens, it seems Portugal is on the rise. Facing the policies of socialist Prime Minister António Costa, which include properly supporting the welfare state and investing in the public sector instead of austerity measures, right wing populists don’t stand a chance.

Not too long ago, Portugal stood on the brink of catastrophe: harsh austerity policies and the erosion of labour rights pushed by the conservative government lead to significant rises in poverty and unemployment. The economy dwindled due to the lack of peoples’ spending power.

Today, everything has changed:

“Nowadays, Portugal is considered a prime example among European countries: the economy is booming, unemployment is dropping and investments are rising.”


………

The first major change occurred during the general election 2015. This was time when the right wing conservative government dismantled the social welfare state piece by piece, which resulted in a furious population voicing their dissatisfaction in the voting booth – causing the conservatives to lose 11 percent of their previous electoral votes.

………

Costa succeeded in uniting the severely split left wing in Portugal, who now support the minority government led by him. At first, observers were pessimistic about the potential of this constellation, predicting a collapse after a few months. Moreover, both the EU and German minister of finances saw a grave mistake in the departure from austerity.

Angela Merkel described the prospect of a radical anti-austerity coalition in Portugal as “very negative”. The president of Portugal went further, calling non-conservative economic policies a “danger to national security” and attempting to keep the old government in power.

………

The Portuguese economy has been booming for 4 years. 2017 marked the largest national economic growth of the century.

The Portuguese are not only showing the feasibility of socially conscious policies, but demonstrating the significant potential for success.

“The budget deficit has dropped to its lowest ever since the change to a democratic system in 1974 – simply because the government re-established and strengthened the social welfare state, leading to the Portuguese people having more money to spend.”

The socialists raised the once slashed wages and pensions, reintroduced paid vacations and retracted many tax raises, all while raising wealth taxes which affect only the rich parts of the population. The government also introduced a property and real estate tax designed not to target the homes of average citizens. Costa’s socialists also put an end to the catastrophic privatizations that were once instructed by the EU and resulted in selling state assets at absurdly low prices.

The Germans have been f%$#ing up Europe with their need to run things since 1914.

Deregulation Fail, Banking Edition

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Why we cannot build anything anymore

It turns out that the deregulation of banking had the effect of reallocating resources away from productive investment and toward speculation:

In academic and policy circles there is deep mistrust of public sector involvement in credit allocation, much more than in the credit allocation decisions made by commercial banks. This mistrust continues, despite the financial crisis of 2007–08 demonstrating the huge dangers of a deregulated credit market. Whilst, post-crisis, financial regulators have begun to develop policies aimed at reducing lending in certain sectors, calls for proactively directing finance to support desirable sectors of the economy have largely been ignored.

In a new UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) working paper, co-authored with Dutch economists Dirk Bezemer and Lu Zhang and Frank van Lerven, we examine the theoretical, historical and empirical evidence around credit policy and its effects on the allocation of credit.

Our motivation, aside from the crisis, is the remarkable ‘debt shift’ in advanced economies over the past 40 years which has seen banks move away from their primary textbook role of lending to non-financial firms to support productive investment. Whilst total bank credit has roughly doubled relative to GDP since the early 1970s in advanced economies, the share of credit supporting firms has actually fallen, from 60% to 40%. The vast expansion in lending has been mainly to support households to buy houses and, to a lesser extent, consumer goods and the purchase of financial assets.

………

These new empirical findings support a much older body of theory that argues that credit markets, left to their own devices, will not optimise the allocation of resources. Instead, following Joseph Schumpeter’s, Keynes’ and Hyman Minsky’s arguments, they will tend to shift financial resources away from real-sector investment and innovation and towards asset markets and speculation; away from equitable income growth and towards capital gains that polarises wealth and income; and away from a robust, stable growth path and towards fragile boom-busts cycles with frequent crises.

The only people who benefit from this are the banksters, and the politicians seeking political donations.

H/t naked capitalism

Common Sense Law Enforcement

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Historical Court Appearance Rates

Reformer District Attorney Larry Krasner has made it his mission to make law enforcement fairer, and one of his signature policies has been the elimination of cash bail.

Now the numbers are in, and they validate his approach:

One year ago, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner announced that his office would no longer seek money bail for a list of offenses that make up 61 percent of all cases in the Philadelphia criminal justice system.

On Tuesday, Krasner, along with Mayor Jim Kenney, City Council members and the Defender Association of Philadelphia, held a news conference to outline the impact of the reform.

“What we had a year ago was not fair. We do not, we should not, imprison people for poverty,” Krasner said. By the district attorney’s count, 1,750 additional defendants were released without bail during 2018, with no increase in recidivism.

Krasner added that he believes the policy is making Philadelphia safer in the long term: “When you don’t tear apart people’s lives, and when you keep them in contact with the things that keep them on course, they are less likely to commit crimes in the future.”

The district attorney’s claims are in part backed up by a study published this week that found the policy shift resulted in a 22 percent decline in the number of defendants who spent at least one night in jail. However, there was no impact on longer jail stays.

………

“We find no effect on failure to appear [in court], on violent offending, or on recidivism,” [Penn State criminologist Aurelie] Ouss [one of the study’s authors] said.

According to the First Judicial District, Philadelphia defendants’ court-appearance rate in 2018 was the highest it has been in a decade, nearly 97 percent in Common Pleas Court and 87.5 percent in Municipal Court.

Tough on crime policing is dumb on crime policing.

Tru Dat

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American Exceptionalism Is a Dangerous Myth

This is true.

Over the past 40 years, this myth has been a license for brutality and plundering on and scale that rivals the height of the British empire:

But it would be more accurate to say that this is who we’ve too often been. This hateful sociopath, immune to all human sentiments save fear and greed, devoid of all principles save a will to power, incapable of seeing the world from anyone’s perspective but his own — this is who we were to the peasants of Vietnam, and to the people of Jacobo Árbenz’s Guatemala, Salvador Allende’s Chile, Mohammad Mosaddegh’s Iran, João Goulart’s Brazil, and so many other fragile republics yearning to breathe free.

Two of the three DC area airports, Dulles and Reagan National, are named after psychopaths.

There is nothing more horrifying than a people who believe that God is on their side.

Both the Wisest and the Snarkiest Thing that I have Heard this Year

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In an analysis of potential murder charges against PG&E for the California fires, Yves Smith related the following from an email exchange:

Arbeit Macht Frei Slave-Labor Was the Original Public-Private Partnership.

This is brilliant.  It may be the most brilliant and snarkiest thing that I’ve heard for last year as well.

For the New Year, I’ll Be Rooting for the Isolationist Right

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Not the “Right” part, I remain a pinko, but the “Isolationist” part.

These days, the only people who seem to be opposing the the US archipelago of wars around the world are the isolationist right, as shown by this essay in American Conservative.

Unfortunately, the (very) few mainstream anti-War voices on the left are largely silent these days, because of the fear of being seen as supporting Trump, but we do have meaningful movement supporting a reduction of America’s imperial ambitions on the right:

The mainstream media has attacked President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria as impulsive, blindsiding his own national security team. But detailed, published accounts of the policy process over the course of the year tell a very different story. They show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our indefinite presence on the ground in Syria.

The entire episode thus represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed military deployments in a war zone. The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state.

The article is worth a read, as well as some serious consideration for the upcoming year.

Making Bernie Sanders Look George H.W. Bush

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When Bernie Sanders talks socialism, Jeremy Corbyn says, “Hold my coconut water,” (He doesn’t drink alcohol).

Case in point, his proposal to require that company’s customers and employees have a vote on executive compensation.

But wait, there’s more:  He would put an end to stock options, and force companies to name their highly paid executives:

Customers of Britain’s 7,000 biggest companies would be given the right to vote on the pay of top executives under plans for a clampdown on boardroom pay being considered by Labour.

A report commissioned by Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary, and John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, calls for an annual binding vote on executive packages to include all stakeholders – including employees and consumers.

Other suggestions include scrapping all forms of share options so that executives are paid only in cash, a ban on golden handshakes and punitive fines for directors of companies that persistently fail to pay the minimum wage. The report also proposes that all companies in Britain with more than 250 staff would have to reveal the names of employees paid more than £150,000 a year. [$190,000.00]

………

Party sources stressed it would be wrong to assume all the suggestions would make it into the party’s next manifesto but Long-Bailey and McDonnell are well disposed towards five key reforms proposed by Sikka:

  • That executive remuneration contracts in large companies be made publicly available
  • That executive remuneration be in cash, because rewards in share options, shares and perks invited abuses.
  • That pay differentials between executives and employees analysed by gender and ethnicity be published
  • Company law be amended to give all stakeholders the right to propose a cap on executive pay and bonus package
  • The remuneration of each executive at large companies be subject to annual binding vote by a range of stakeholders.

Stakeholders includes shareholders, long-term customers and employees.

Labour believes an attempt to curb boardroom pay is justified by the lack of restraint shown by company boards and the failure of voluntary codes to have any impact on executive remuneration. Sikka’s proposed reforms would apply to the 7,000-plus companies in the UK that have 250 or more employees, accounting for more than 10 million workers.

Good politics and better policy.

I so want Corbyn to become PM.

Unfortunately, what May hands him will be a complete sh%$ show.

Another Free Market Failure

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Pai’s FCC has doubled down on deregulation and tax cuts, and as a result investment in wireless infrastructure has declined.

It’s exactly the opposite of what one would expect from the world view of the free market mousketeers, but it is exactly what you would expect if you were dealing with monopolists working to maximize their profits:


You’ll recall that one of the top reasons for killing popular net neutrality rules was that it had somehow killed broadband industry investment. Of course, a wide array of publicly-available data easily disproves this claim, but that didn’t stop FCC boss Ajit Pai and ISPs from repeating it (and in some cases lying before Congress about it) anyway. We were told, more times that we could count, that with net neutrality dead, sector investment would spike.

You’ll be shocked to learn this purported boon in investment isn’t happening.

A few weeks ago, Verizon made it clear its CAPEX would be declining, and the company’s deployment would see no impact despite billions in tax cuts and regulatory favors by the Trump FCC. Trump’s “tax reform” alone netted Verizon an estimated $3.5 billion to $4 billion. A recent FCC policy order, purporting to speed up 5G wireless deployment (in part by eliminating local authority over negotiations with carriers), netted Verizon another estimated $2 billion. And that’s before you even get to the potential revenue boost thanks to the repeal of net neutrality and elimination of broadband privacy rules.

Ironically, Verizon’s dip in CAPEX came right on the heels of the wireless industry and Ajit Pai, in perfectly coordinated unison, trying to claim that a CAPEX rise in 2017 was directly due to the repeal of net neutrality. They ignored an important point however: net neutrality wasn’t even repealed until June of this year. If this endless roster of favors was to impact network investment, accelerate network deployment, and unleash a magical wave of “innovation,” that should all be happening right now. And yet, the opposite is happening. And of course it’s not just Verizon. AT&T and Sprint are also reducing overall CAPEX:

This is no surprise.

Monopolists spend their money extracting rents and buying politicians, not on improving their products.