Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse used his 30 minutes of allotted time during Tuesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing not to ask questions of President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett—who repeatedly dodged the straightforward questions of other lawmakers—but to deliver a detailed presentation on the sprawling "dark money operation" fueling the right-wing takeover of the U.S. judicial system.

Displaying a number of visuals and flow charts, the senator from Rhode Island traced the dizzying array of special interests and advocacy groups—from the Koch network to the Federalist Society to the Judicial Crisis Network to the Pacific Legal Foundation—coordinating and pouring money into the effort to confirm Barrett and other far-right, corporate-friendly judges committed to rolling back reproductive rights, voting rights, climate regulations, and more.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/14/look-power-shadows-watch-sheldon-whitehouse-shine-light-dark-money-operation-behind

Artists have lost income because content has been “demonetized.” Putting so much music, text, and video online has rendered much of it worthless, due to piracy or sheer, superfluous abundance. Publishers, labels, and studios all face falling revenues, resulting in ever smaller advances and marketing budgets. Television, having resisted demonetization, is the one bright exception to the trend. Netflix, HBO, and other platforms support a thriving culture of middle-class creators — standing out, for Deresiewicz, as the exception that proves the rule.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-great-unread-on-william-deresiewiczs-the-death-of-the-artist/

Nearly a year has passed since the publication of McKenzie Wark’s short book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? More than half of that time has been spent in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis which has impacted the course of history in ways that cannot yet be fully understood. Simultaneous mass uprisings against racism and police brutality have brought the brutality of the state into stark relief against the transparent unwillingness of the ruling class to deploy its financial resources to mitigate the effect of the pandemic on the public. The novelty of our present historical circumstances are worthy of radical investigation, and the hypothesis of Wark’s book certainly aspires to such radicalism. Caught between algorithmic policing and contact tracing, the time is ripe for rethinking what “information” really means to communists. Unfortunately, the rhetorical content of the book is a stubborn refusal to actually say anything radical. Capital is Dead spends its most of its pages trying to justify its own existence by attacking any dialectical method which might seek to venture onto Wark’s terra sancta, the realms of science and technology in the purely empirical sense which she chooses to conceive them. Seen in retrospect, Wark’s thesis (that we have actually been living through a new and brutal mode of post-capitalist production for quite some time) appears to have been dead on arrival. However, if we proceed from an immanent critique of Wark’s postivistic treatment of information theory, we can recover the critical Marxist insight that a radical understanding of the present can make the past itself seem brand new.

https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/10/12/worse-than-dead-a-critical-response-to-mckenzie-wark/

This year’s ‘Nobel’ (actually the Riksbank) prize for economics went to Stanford University economists, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson.  According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, they “have studied how auctions work. They have also used their insights to design new auction formats for goods and services that are difficult to sell in a traditional way, such as radio frequencies. Their discoveries have benefited sellers, buyers and taxpayers around the world.”

So in a world where inequality is at record levels, global warming and environmental degradation are threatening to destroy the planet and there is a world economic slump not seen since the 1930s, the prize givers recognise the work of two economists on how to make the auctions of commodities, land and services more efficient.

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/10/13/a-prize-auction/