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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist

PLURALISTIC

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23.06.2025 à 17:08

Pluralistic: The case for a Canadian wealth tax (23 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4076 mots)


Today's links


A gilt-roofed, gabled mansion with a hole chopped in its side. From within glitters a weath of gold coins. In the foreground stands a lumberjack, swinging an axe at the mansion. The background is a blown-up, half-toned late 20th century Canadian $50 bill.

The case for a Canadian wealth tax (permalink)

A major problem with letting billionaires decide how your country is run is that they will back whichever psycho promises the lowest taxes and least regulation, no matter how completely batshit and unfit that person is:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/nations-are-people

Billionaires have farcical, almost unimaginable resources. These let them take over whole political parties, even "left" parties, with the result that all real electoral options disappear. Voting for the other party gets you a different set of aesthetics, but the same existential threats to the human race and the planet:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/22/starmer-backs-us-strike-on-iran-and-calls-for-tehran-to-return-to-negotiations

After generations of increasingly oligarch-friendly policies and billionaire entryism into the Democratic Party, America may well be cooked, a total write-off for generations to come. The path to saving the world and our species arguably lies through strengthening other countries to resist American psychos and protect the planet from the consequences of their brainwormed leadership.

Writing for Jacobin, Alex Hemingway sets out a plan for imposing a wealth-tax on Canada's oligarchs, one that incorporates lessons from previous attempts at such a tax:

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/wealth-tax-canada-inequality-austerity/

Even on the left, the idea of a wealth-tax is controversial – not because leftists are sympathetic to billionaires, but because they are skeptical that a wealth tax can be carried out. It's a practical, not an ideological objection:

https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/196-the-problem-with-wealth-taxes-with-steven-hail-part-1

After all, under capitalism, wealth always grows faster than the economy at large, meaning that over time, the rich will get steadily richer, and inequality will widen and widen:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Ideally, we would counter the trend of wealth piling up into dynastic fortunes with continuous redistribution and predistribution: taxing capital gains at the same rate (or a higher rate) than income, so that income from labor isn't treated worse than income from ownership; steeply graded progressive taxes, with top rates of 70-99%, high inheritance taxes, and so on. We had a system like that, from the end of WWII (when the rich were poorer than they'd been in centuries, with their influence in tatters) until the Reagan era (when the rich had rebuilt their fortunes and were able to seize the reins of power). In the 45 years since the rise of the new oligarchy, we've lived through accelerating wealth accumulation, and as the rich got richer, they used their wealth to dismantle any barrier to creating new aristocratic dynasties.

So here we are, trapped in the new oligarchy. It's too late to rely on income taxes, not if we're going to euthanize enough rentiers to free out politics from their toxic influence and save the human race any of several foreseeable mass-extinction events. Making the ultra-rich poor again is going to require new tactics.

In Canada, the 1% owns 29% of the country's wealth. The 87 richest families in Canada control as much wealth as the bottom 12 million Canadians combined. This is better than the US (where the 1% own 35% of the country), but not by much:

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/wp-content/uploads/attachments/Born%20to%20Win.pdf

Can we make a wealth tax work? Here's Hemingway's program for making it work in Canada:

  • Make it apply to all kinds of wealth equally. No carve-outs for real-estate, which makes it very easy to shift wealth among asset-classes to duck the tax;

  • Aim it at the super-rich alone. Avoid even the upper middle-class, who lack the liquid assets to pay the tax and could get wrecked if they have to liquidate their holdings at the same time as everyone else, which will depress asset prices;

  • Use third-party assessments of asset values. Don't take billionaires' word for how much their assets are worth! Canada's got an advantage here, thanks to the Canada Revenue Agency's requirement for financial institutions to report their account holders' income, including capital gains. Canada's also recently created "beneficial owner" registries that record the true owners of assets;

  • Use lifestyle audits: anyone caught engaging in tax-evasion will face severe penalties, as will the enablers at financial services firms that help them.

One frequent objection to high taxes is that it encourages capital flight – rich people hopping to another territory to avoid taxation. That's a reasonable fear, given how pants-wettingly terrified the rich are of paying tax. Hemingway points out that a wealth tax is different from an income tax – income taxes are levied on the outcome of productive activities, while wealth taxes target accumulated wealth. High income taxes can starve a country of the capital it needs for a productive economy, but that's not the case with wealth taxes.

Hemingway points to the OECD's Common Reporting Standard, through which more than 100 countries have agreed to share financial information, which will help Canada catch billionaires as they funnel their wealth offshore. Meanwhile, if the rich try to move with their money, we can hit them with an exit tax, like the 40% that Elizabeth Warren has proposed.

It's an article of faith that the rich will move offshore at the first hint of a wealth tax, but the research shows that rich people often have reasons to stay that trump their taxophobia. The economic effect of rich people Going Galt is pretty darned small:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/publications/workingpapers/2022/taxation_and_migration_by_the_super_rich/

The modern prophet of oligarchy and its origins is the French economist Thomas Piketty. In a recent Le Monde column, Piketty examines the failure of a French wealth tax proposal that would have shaved a modest 2% off the fortunes of the 1,800 French people with more than €100 million:

https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2025/06/17/the-senate-beside-the-story/

The proposal passed the National Assembly, only to die in the Senate, an institution with a long history of pro-oligarchic activism (the Senate killed every French income tax passed by the Assembly from 1896-1914). The Assembly's wealth tax addressed the problem of tax exiles, levying the wealth tax for 5 years after an oligarch relocated. For Piketty, this didn't go far enough: he wants a pro-rated tax based on the number of years an oligarch spent in France in their lifetime: if you were educated and cared for at French expense from birth and went on to become a billionaire, then a modest share of your wealth would forever be owed to the country that made it possible. Piketty says that a wealth tax could be paid in shares instead of cash, with the stock going into a trust for workers, who would get board seats as well.

He points out that decarbonization is going to require large sacrifices from all of us, but that these will be impossible to demand with a straight face so long as the super-rich are paying taxes that are trivial relative to their assets and income.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Snapple floods Manhattan with 17.5 tons of frozen kiwi-strawberry slurry https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006460.html#006460

#20yrsago Beloved Toronto singing cowboy/mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, RIP https://www.blogto.com/city/2005/06/ben_kerr_a_toronto_legend_passes_away/

#20yrsago Heinlein’s house https://web.archive.org/web/20050625235954/http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html

#20yrsago Banned Nepali radio station transmits via megaphone https://reliefweb.int/report/nepal/banned-air-nepal-news-radio-hits-streets

#20yrsago Queen Liz: Sony remotes are too hard to use https://web.archive.org/web/20050815080728/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?email&NewsID=11914

#15yrsago ASCAP raising money to fight Free Culture https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/ascap-raising-money-to-fight-free-culture/

#15yrsago Original Pac-Man sketches https://www.control-online.nl/2010/06/22/iwatani-toont-gamesgeschiedenis-in-meest-pure-vorm/

#15yrsago Viacom v Internet: round one to Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/viacom-v-internet-round-one-to-internet/

#15yrsago A Canadian author’s perspective on “radical extremism” and copyright https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/a-canadian-authors-perspective-on-radical-extremism-and-copyright/

#15yrsago Gate guarded McMansion suburb in Walt Disney Worldhttps://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/disney-unveils-golden-oak-luxury-homes-offering-a-chance-to-live-in-the-walt-disney-world-resort/

#15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister declares war on copyright reformers https://web.archive.org/web/20100626073040/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5138/125/

#15yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Shareable.net story about astroturfer gulag https://www.shareable.net/the-exterminators-want-ad/

#15yrsago Corruption: FCC’s closed-door meetings on open Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20100626222659/http://blog.broadband.gov/?entryId=518087

#15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister smears DMCA opponents as “radical extremists” https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/06/moore-and-radical-extremists/

#15yrsago US IP Czar’s report sells out the American public to Big Content https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/22/us-ip-czars-report-sells-out-the-american-public-to-big-content/

#15yrsago I Love Paree: new sf story podcast https://craphound.com/news/2010/06/22/i-love-paree-part-1/

#10yrsago Australia’s own Immortan Joe turns off the water, I mean, Internet https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/australia-passes-controversial-anti-piracy-web-censorship-law/

#10yrsago GCHQ psychological operations squad targeted Britons for manipulation https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-domestic-law-enforcement-propaganda/

#10yrsago GCHQ hacking squad worried about getting sued for copyright violation https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/gchq-reverse-engineering-warrants/

#10yrsago The Girl With the Parrot on Her Head https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/22/the-girl-with-the-parrot-on-her-head/

#10yrsago FDA & FTC mull homeopathy’s future https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/homeopathic-industry-and-its-acolytes-make-poor-showing-before-fda/

#10yrsago Tie your shoes the Ukrainian way http://shnurovka.com/en/step-by-step-instructions-english/

#10yrsago Outstanding paper on the impact of ebook DRM on readers, writers, publishers and distributors https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Bittar_Ana_Carolina.pdf

#10yrsago You’ll falafel about this horrifying new pita-sized crypto-key-sniffing hack https://www.wired.com/2015/06/radio-bug-can-steal-laptop-crypto-keys-fits-inside-pita/

#5yrsago Against AI phrenology https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

#5yrsago Privacy in tracing tokens https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#trace-together

#5yrsago Congress wants to read all your DMs https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#crypto-wars

#5yrsago Blueleaks https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#ddosecrets

#5yrsago Surveillance electoralism https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#aaronsw

#5yrsago The real cyberwar is Goliath, slaughtering an army of Davids https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/22/jobs-guarantee/#selection-bias

#5yrsago The Case for a Job Guarantee https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/22/jobs-guarantee/#job-guarantee

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

21.06.2025 à 15:21

Pluralistic: Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' (21 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4087 mots)


Today's links


The Grove Atlantic cover for Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers.'

Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' (permalink)

I picked up Daniel de Visé's The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic at LA's Diesel Books; it was on the receiving table I sat next to as I signed books after a book-tour reading, and I snuck peeks at the back cover while I chatted with the long line of attendees:

https://danieldevise.com/product/the-blues-brothers-an-epic-friendship-the-rise-of-improv-and-the-making-of-an-american-film-classic

By the time the line was cleared, there was no question that I was going to buy this book, even though it wasn't formally for sale for a couple days (the bookstore staff were kind enough to make an exception for me, not least because I promised them that I wouldn't get a chance to read it for quite some time as I flitted from city to city on the rest of the tour).

Like many people of my generation, I grew up with The Blues Brothers. I taped the movie off of TV when I was about 14 and literally wore the tape out in the next four years, re-watching and re-re-watching the movies on that tape – Animal House, The Blues Brothers and Spinal Tap – so many times that I can still just about recite those movies verbatim, more than 30 years later.

The Blues Brothers is sunk so deep into my psyche that I don't know that I ever questioned why they were so embedded in my outlook. I don't know if I can even tell you when I first saw the movie. Certainly, my friend-group was very into the movie, and my best friend and I went as Jake and Elwood on multiple Hallowe'ens at the Rocky Horror Picture Show at Toronto's Roxy Theatre, until it became such a cliche for us that we felt the need to mix it up and dress up as zombie Jake and Elwood.

But beyond the movie, I was taken with the Blues Brothers' music. I didn't know much about blues, boogie woogie and other roots music before the Blues Brothers came into my life. The combination of the Blues Brothers movie and its sound-track sent me on a treasure hunt for music by the band, its musical guests, and the artists whose song they covered. By the time I was 20, I'd amassed a vast collection of used records, tapes and CDs featuring Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Willy Mabon, The Chips, Floyd Dixon and more. Soon, I was leaping from one artist to others. I found an incredible Pop Staples/Steve Cropper/Albert King collaboration "Jammed Together":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sarzs8VRSg

Within a few hops, I'd found my way to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and thence to the immortal James Cotton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl4IcMlrJwM

I started skipping Rocky Horror to see the house band at Chicago's on Queen Street, and from there found my way to the weekend jams at Grossman's:

https://torontobluessociety.com/venue/grossmans-tavern-2/

It's not an overstatement to say that The Blues Brothers altered my life, changing the music I listened to and the way I understood the musical ancestry of everything that went into my ears. Indeed, the effects that The Blues Brothers had on my life are so pervasive that I effectively stopped noticing them. When I put on a Memphis Slim album, it doesn't occur to me that the reason that music is on my hard-drive has something to do with that worn-out VHS cassette in my parents' living room in the 1980s.

Standing there at the counter at Diesel Books for an hour, sneaking peeks at the back cover of de Visé's book, set me to considering exactly how this weird and remarkable phenomenon came to be. I knew a little, of course – my friends and I used to trade the information that Aykroyd came from a family of famous Ontario Tories the same way we would have gossiped had his father been a famous serial-killer. And no one could escape some of the more salacious details of Belushi's death, though I absorbed most of what I knew via one of the greatest short stories I've ever read, Bradley Denton's "Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians," about Belushi and Lenny Bruce leading a revolt in Comedian Hell:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calvin_Coolidge_Home_for_Dead_Comedians

So I bought a copy off the receiving table, straight out of the warehouse box, and I've finally gotten around to reading it, and holy moly is it fascinating! I confess that in the months since I brought the book home and stuck it on the TBR shelf, I'd mostly forgotten why I'd picked it up and had started to view it as a book full of production trivia, and when I picked it up this week, it was with an eye to skimming it quickly before putting it out at the curb in my Little Free Library. Instead, I found myself utterly engrossed in a brilliantly told, brilliantly researched tale that left me with a much deeper understanding of – and appreciation for – the cultural phenomenon that I was (and am) swept up in.

De Visé devotes the first third of the book to snappy, revealing biographies of Belushi and Aykroyd, who grew up in very different milieux, and were of very different temperaments, but who both found their way into comedy just as the tradition of Borscht Belt comics and variety shows were giving way to a younger, weirder kind of comedy, a mixture of Monty Python, National Lampoon and improv.

These biographical sketches are short, but they don't shy away from nuance – Belushi's parents, for example, are simultaneously painted as loving and also reckless and self-involved. De Visé gives the lion's share of attention to Belushi, but he doesn't stint on detail about Aykroyd, strongly implying that "Danny" is on the spectrum, with a deep collection of "special interests" and a deep discomfort with eye contact that accounts for habit of wearing sunglasses.

As the two men find their way into various pioneering comedy projects – Second City, National Lampoon radio shows – they start to inch towards Lorne Michaels, and thus to each other. As de Visé painstakingly traces the ups and downs of their comedy careers, he paints a vivid picture of the wild swings of talented, striving artists at the start of their careers. By the time we get to the SNL chapters, the show itself becomes the star, and its rocky early days strongly echo the struggles of the comedians we've followed to its stage.

The actual production story of The Blues Brothers movie doesn't start until more than halfway through the narrative. By that time, we've been set up with the way that filmmaking, comedy, popular culture, and politics have all changed to make The Blues Brothers movie a possibility. De Visé shows us how Belushi had won over a long list of household names in the entertainment industry, and how Aykroyd's meticulous, obsessive nature honed and directed Belushi's wild talent.

The actual production of, and reception to, The Blues Brothers movie arrives in the book as a kind of extended climax and denouement, and yes, there are tons of funny bits of production trivia and gossip in this section. From winning over the mayor of Chicago (who reversed a decades-long policy of all-but-total prohibitions on filming permits in the city) to dropping a Ford Pinto thousands of feet, to the garage where, every night, dozens of surplus police cars that had been crashed that day were refurbished and gotten into shape to be crashed again the next day.

And while all of this is going on, de Visé gives us a vivid portrayal of Belushi's spiraling addiction, the disease that is killing him right there, in front of everyone who loves him. That story carries over into the film's aftermath, as it is laboriously cut from more than three hours (it was originally intended to be shown with an intermission!) and released to hostile critics and an adoring public.

These are the final days of Belushi, something we all know and can see coming. But even as Belushi approaches his final days, we learn how The Blues Brothers movie had created a legacy. It was Aykroyd who got Belushi into the blues, and the schtick they did about wanting to preserve this music from a world that was set to bury it and forget it wasn't just for the movie.

Aykroyd and Belushi wanted to bring the music back. They couldn't stand that the likes of Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and James Brown were playing county fairs and half-full night clubs. They wanted the music to escape from history and live again. And they succeeded. In a "where are they now" coda straight out of the closing credits of Animal House, de Visé documents how the artists featured in the movie – and the musical traditions they represented – experienced a massive revival following the film's release, which the musicians themselves credit to the movie.

Which is where I came in, I suppose. That's how I got here, in this form, with a hard drive full of R&B, blues, country swing, jazz, boogie woogie and jump blues that vie with Talking Heads for play in my shuffle.

This isn't a book about a movie; it's a rich and engrossing tale of an extraordinary creative collaboration that found an unlikely foothold at just the right time and place. It's a sensitive, funny, and revealing account of Belushi, Aykroyd, and the comedians, impresarios and friends in their orbit. Even if you didn't wear out a VHS cassette and memorize the whole damned movie, you will find something surprising and delightful in these pages.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Canada’s DMCA introduced https://web.archive.org/web/20051027190726/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/home.php?blog_disp_vars=days&blog_date=20050620&day=20&month=06&year=2005&blog_arch=2&v=99

#20yrsago Dead online game resurrected by dumpster-diving its servers https://games.slashdot.org/story/05/06/21/0133233/classic-mmog-raised-from-the-dead-by-past-players

#15yrsago Mickey Mouse, amphetamine shill https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/mickey_mouse_medicine_man/mickey_mouse_medicine_man.shtml

#15yrsago Economic reality versus ideology: spending cuts and recovery https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/opinion/18krugman.html

#10yrsago UK High Court’s insane ruling: ripping CDs is illegal again https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/european-copyright-madness-court-strikes-down-law-allowing-users-rip-their-own-cds

#10yrsago Schneier: China and Russia probably did get the Snowden leaks — by hacking the NSA https://www.wired.com/2015/06/course-china-russia-snowden-documents/

#10yrsago The snitch in your pocket: making sense of Stingrays https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/notetoself/episodes/stingray-conspiracy-theory-daniel-rigmaiden-radiolab

#5yrsago Juneteenth in the Internet Archive https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#juneteenth

#5yrsago "Longshot" NYPD surveillance transparency law passes https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#Quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes

#5yrsago Everybody Knows https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#slicey-boi

#1yrago How to design a tech regulation https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/20/scalesplaining/#administratability

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

20.06.2025 à 15:05

Pluralistic: Oregon bans the corporate practice of medicine (20 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3745 mots)


Today's links


A billionaire in a tuxedo with dollar-sign cufflinks, stands at a podium, yanking a lever shaped like a gilded dollar sign with one gloved hand. From the other hand, he contemptuously dangles a bloody corpse. His head has been replaced with the head of a doctor in a surgeon's blue cap, with red, glaring eyes. The background is the text of Oregon's new Corporate Practice of Medicine law, in blown-out, red type.

Oregon bans the corporate practice of medicine (permalink)

Private equity firms are the demon princes of the hellspace that is the imploding, life-destroying, plutocrat-generating American economy. Their favorite scam, the "leveraged buyout" is a mafia bustout dressed up in respectable clothes, and if you mourn a beloved, failed business, chances are that an LBO was the murder weapon, and PE was the killer:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

(Despite simplistic explanations and bad-faith apologetics, a leveraged buyout is nothing like a mortgage – it is a sinister, complex, destructive form of financial fraud:)

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

As bad as this is, it's ten quintillion times worse when applied to healthcare. When PE buys your hospital, people die. A lot of people:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

PE doesn't even have to buy the whole hospital – for a long time, PE groups bought out anesthetist practices affilated with hospitals and pulled them out of the hospital's insurance affiliation. Unsuspecting patients who went in for routine surgical care at a hospital that was in-network for their insurer would get a rude awakening from their sedation: "surprise bills" running to tens or hundred of thousands of dollars. PE groups did the same thing with emergency rooms, so that people experiencing serious medical emergencies who had the presence of mind to insist upon being brought to an in-network ER nevertheless got hit with life-ruining surprise bills:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

Donald Trump sometimes panders to anti-elitist elements in his base by threatening the private equity racket. For example, Trump has frequently railed against the "carried interest" tax loophole that allows PE bosses to pay half as much tax as you or I would on their vast takings. "Carried interest" is a tax law that gave 16th century sea-captains a break on their "interest" in the cargo they "carried." It is both weird and fantastically unjust that the richest, worst financiers in America are able to take advantage of this Moby Dick-ass-law:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

But while Trump sometimes talks a good line about fighting private equity looters, he does not, has not, and will not lift a finger to them. He dares not. The carried interest tax scam is preserved in the Big Beautiful Bill, joined with many other giveaways to the least productive, most guillotineble looters America has produced:

https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/no-changes-carried-interest-big-beautiful-bill-so-far.html

Working people cannot rely on Trump's federal government and the Republican Congress to protect us from these vampires. But this is America: when the feds fail, that creates an opportunity for state legislators to step in and act. And that's what's just happened in Oregon, where the state legislature has passed sweeping, bipartisan legislation that bans corporations from owning or operating a medical practice in the state:

https://prospect.org/health/2025-06-13-united-health-care-oregon-corporate-medicine/

This is called the "corporate practice of medicine" (CPOM) and it's already banned. The American Medical Association has a longstanding, absolute prohibition on medical practices that are run by anyone except a doctor. Oregon has had a CPOM ban on the law-books since 1947. Private equity meets this prohibition with a very transparent ruse indeed: they get a "rent a doc," often out of state, to serve as the nominal owner of their practices, and the doctor takes orders from the PE firm, and hires the PE firm's outsource agencies to actually operate the clinic or hospital, absorbing the entirety of the practice's profits.

The Oregon bill closes this loophole, and not a minute too soon. Giant healthcare monopolists – most notably groups associated with Unitedhealth, the largest health corporation in America – have embarked on a statewide buying spree, buying and shutting down rural hospitals and clinics, and transforming the remaining facilities into understaffed charnel houses that hemorrhage doctors.

The bill took several tries to get through the legislature. As Oregon House Majority Leader Representative Ben Bowman told Matt Stoller and David Dayen on their Organized Money podcast, the statehouse was crawling with lobbyists hired by out of state private health-care firms who were worried about "contagion" if Oregon's bill passed and spread to other states:

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-oregon-is-ending-corporate-run

But the bill passed anyway, thanks to a combination of two factors. First, during the bill's legislative adventure, Unitedhealth's Optum bought out the Oregon Medical Group and made working conditions so terrible that dozens of doctors quit, leaving thousands of rural patients (from predominantly Republican districts) without medical care. Optum "fired" thousands of patients, including some who were undergoing cancer treatment, on the basis that they weren't profitable enough to care for:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/private-equity-unitedhealth-take

In the midst of all this, another Unitedhealth monopolist, Change Health, got hacked and virtually no one in America could get a prescription filled – worse, the hack exposed the health records of almost everyone in America, the largest health-related breach in US history:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Then, as icing on the cake, Unitedhealth's Oregon operation screwed over multiple, cancer-fighting lawmakers who were serving in the state-house as the bill was under debate. Combine this with testimony from doctors who described how they were unable to practice medicine after leaving Unitedhealth's terrible facilities because they had been trapped with noncompete clauses in their contracts, nor could they warn other doctors away from falling prey to this trap because they were also bound by nondisparagement clauses.

The new bill, SB 951, passed out of the legislature and was signed by the governor earlier this month. It is now good law in Oregon, which means that corporations can't operate medical practices, and that medical personnel can't be subjected to noncompete clauses (fun fact: every noncompete clause is written by a lawyer, but the American Bar Association prohibits noncompetes for lawyers).

Now it's time for those out-of-state healthcare looters' worst fears to be realized. It's time for the contagion to spread to other states.

The US federal system is a big, gnarly mess, but by design, it leaves a lot of power in local hands. That's bad news when local power is being used to ban trans people from peeing, or to attack school librarians, or to ban masking. But it's good news when states and cities can use the American system to create sanctuary systems that welcome asylum seekers and treat them with dignity (which is why the American right, the standard bearer for "states' rights" when it came to school segregation and voter suppression, is now all-in on sending armed soldiers to terrorize their fellow Americans with assault rifles).

Another reason to like state and local politics: local Democrats often suck way less than the necrotic federal Dem establishment. Some of them are even good! In Philly, Mayor Cherelle Parker just signed the Protect Our Workers, Enforce Rights (POWER) Act, which protects 750,000 workers from wage theft:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-06-18-how-philadelphia-secured-basic-rights-for-750-000-workers/

The POWER Act shifts the burden of proof for wage theft allegations from workers to their bosses and allows them to recover their stolen wages plus $2,000 in statutory damages per violation; it sets up a new fund (replenished with employer fines) that gives money to victims of retaliation, and it creates a public "bad boss" database of repeat offenders.

As Brock Hrehor writes for The American Prospect, the POWER Act was passed after Trump gutted the National Labor Relations Board and left it unable to protect American workers. The POWER Act tackles one of the most pernicious forms of crime in America: wage theft, which accounts for more losses than all property crime in America combined, with losses overwhelmingly borne by Black and brown workers, especially women. Wage theft is notoriously hard to police, thanks to fear of retaliation and the precarity of victims of this crime.

The POWER Act passed as a result of the combined efforts of unions (SEIU, AFL-CIO) and the Working Families Party. Along with the Oregon Corporate Practice of Medicine ban, it shows how local, grassroots activism can protect everyday, working people from even the worst corporate criminals, even in Donald Trump's America.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#10yrsago What’s in the Pope’s barn-storming environmental message? https://www.wired.com/2015/06/popes-memo-climate-change-mind-blower/

#5yrsago Microsoft criticizes Apple's monopolism https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#honi-soit-qui-mal-y-pense

#5yrsago Austerity in disrepute https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#breadlines-r-us

#5yrsago Avia, c'est mort https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#avia

#5yrsago Trump's covid "test-tubes" are contaminated miniature soda bottles https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#art-of-the-deal

#5yrsago Trump wants to dismantle the OTF https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#save-otf

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

19.06.2025 à 16:03

Pluralistic: Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed (19 Jun 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4499 mots)


Today's links


A moody room with Shining-esque broadloom. In fhe foreground stands a giant figure the with the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar; its eyes have been replaced with the glaring red eyes of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and has the logo for Meta AI on its lapel; it peers though a magnifying glass at a tiny figure standing on its vast palm. The tiny figure has a leg caught in a leg-hold trap and wears an expression of eye-rolling horror. In the background, gathered around a sofa and an armchair, is a ranked line of grinning businessmen, who are blue and flickering in the manner of a hologram display in Star Wars.

Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed (permalink)

Back in 2006, AOL tried something incredibly bold and even more incredibly stupid: they dumped a data-set of 20,000,000 "anonymized" search queries from 650,000 users (yes, AOL had a search engine – there used to be lots of search engines!):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release

The AOL dump was a catastrophe. In an eyeblink, many of the users in the dataset were de-anonymized. The dump revealed personal, intimate and compromising facts about the lives of AOL search users. The AOL dump is notable for many reasons, not least because it jumpstarted the academic and technical discourse about the limits of "de-identifying" datasets by stripping out personally identifying information prior to releasing them for use by business partners, researchers, or the general public.

It turns out that de-identification is fucking hard. Just a couple of datapoints associated with an "anonymous" identifier can be sufficient to de-anonymize the user in question:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1508081113

But firms stubbornly refuse to learn this lesson. They would love it if they could "safely" sell the data they suck up from our everyday activities, so they declare that they can safely do so, and sell giant data-sets, and then bam, the next thing you know, a federal judge's porn-browsing habits are published for all the world to see:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/01/data-browsing-habits-brokers

Indeed, it appears that there may be no way to truly de-identify a data-set:

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/understanding-the-maths-is-crucial-for-protecting-privacy

Which is a serious bummer, given the potential insights to be gleaned from, say, population-scale health records:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/health/data-privacy-protection.html

It's clear that de-identification is not fit for purpose when it comes to these data-sets:

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/precautionary.pdf

But that doesn't mean there's no safe way to data-mine large data-sets. "Trusted research environments" (TREs) can allow researchers to run queries against multiple sensitive databases without ever seeing a copy of the data, and good procedural vetting as to the research questions processed by TREs can protect the privacy of the people in the data:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

But companies are perennially willing to trade your privacy for a glitzy new product launch. Amazingly, the people who run these companies and design their products seem to have no clue as to how their users use those products. Take Strava, a fitness app that dumped maps of where its users went for runs and revealed a bunch of secret military bases:

https://gizmodo.com/fitness-apps-anonymized-data-dump-accidentally-reveals-1822506098

Or Venmo, which, by default, let anyone see what payments you've sent and received (researchers have a field day just filtering the Venmo firehose for emojis associated with drug buys like "pills" and "little trees"):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/technology/personaltech/venmo-privacy-oversharing.html

Then there was the time that Etsy decided that it would publish a feed of everything you bought, never once considering that maybe the users buying gigantic handmade dildos shaped like lovecraftian tentacles might not want to advertise their purchase history:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/etsy-users-irked-after-buyers-purchases-exposed-to-the-world/

But the most persistent, egregious and consequential sinner here is Facebook (naturally). In 2007, Facebook opted its 20,000,000 users into a new system called "Beacon" that published a public feed of every page you looked at on sites that partnered with Facebook:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon

Facebook didn't just publish this – they also lied about it. Then they admitted it and promised to stop, but that was also a lie. They ended up paying $9.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by some of their users, and created a "Digital Trust Foundation" which they funded with another $6.5m. Mark Zuckerberg published a solemn apology and promised that he'd learned his lesson.

Apparently, Zuck is a slow learner.

Depending on which "submit" button you click, Meta's AI chatbot publishes a feed of all the prompts you feed it:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/the-meta-ai-app-is-a-privacy-disaster/

Users are clearly hitting this button without understanding that this means that their intimate, compromising queries are being published in a public feed. Techcrunch's Amanda Silberling trawled the feed and found:

  • "An audio recording of a man in a Southern accent asking, 'Hey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?'"

  • "people ask[ing] for help with tax evasion"

  • "[whether] family members would be arrested for their proximity to white-collar crimes"

  • "how to write a character reference letter for an employee facing legal troubles, with that person’s first and last name included."

While the security researcher Rachel Tobac found "people’s home addresses and sensitive court details, among other private information":

https://twitter.com/racheltobac/status/1933006223109959820

There's no warning about the privacy settings for your AI prompts, and if you use Meta's AI to log in to Meta services like Instagram, it publishes your Instagram search queries as well, including "big booty women."

As Silberling writes, the only saving grace here is that almost no one is using Meta's AI app. The company has only racked up a paltry 6.5m downloads, across its ~3 billion users, after spending tens of billions of dollars developing the app and its underlying technology.

The AI bubble is overdue for a pop:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/measures/

When it does, it will leave behind some kind of residue – cheaper, spin-out, standalone models that will perform many useful functions:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Those standalone models were released as toys by the companies pumping tens of billions into the unsustainable "foundation models," who bet that – despite the worst unit economics of any technology in living memory – these tools would someday become economically viable, capturing a winner-take-all market with trillions of upside. That bet remains a longshot, but the littler "toy" models are beating everyone's expectations by wide margins, with no end in sight:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00259-0

I can easily believe that one enduring use-case for chatbots is as a kind of enhanced diary-cum-therapist. Journalling is a well-regarded therapeutic tactic:

https://www.charliehealth.com/post/cbt-journaling

And the invention of chatbots was instantly followed by ardent fans who found that the benefits of writing out their thoughts were magnified by even primitive responses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

Which shouldn't surprise us. After all, divination tools, from the I Ching to tarot to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies deck have been with us for thousands of years: even random responses can make us better thinkers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

I make daily, extensive use of my own weird form of random divination:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/

The use of chatbots as therapists is not without its risks. Chatbots can – and do – lead vulnerable people into extensive, dangerous, delusional, life-destroying ratholes:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

But that's a (disturbing and tragic) minority. A journal that responds to your thoughts with bland, probing prompts would doubtless help many people with their own private reflections. The keyword here, though, is private. Zuckerberg's insatiable, all-annihilating drive to expose our private activities as an attention-harvesting spectacle is poisoning the well, and he's far from alone. The entire AI chatbot sector is so surveillance-crazed that anyone who uses an AI chatbot as a therapist needs their head examined:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc

AI bosses are the latest and worst offenders in a long and bloody lineage of privacy-hating tech bros. No one should ever, ever, ever trust them with any private or sensitive information. Take Sam Altman, a man whose products routinely barf up the most ghastly privacy invasions imaginable, a completely foreseeable consequence of his totally indiscriminate scraping for training data.

Altman has proposed that conversations with chatbots should be protected with a new kind of "privilege" akin to attorney-client privilege and related forms, such as doctor-patient and confessor-penitent privilege:

https://venturebeat.com/ai/sam-altman-calls-for-ai-privilege-as-openai-clarifies-court-order-to-retain-temporary-and-deleted-chatgpt-sessions/

I'm all for adding new privacy protections for the things we key or speak into information-retrieval services of all types. But Altman is (deliberately) omitting a key aspect of all forms of privilege: they immediately vanish the instant a third party is brought into the conversation. The things you tell your lawyer are privileged, unless you discuss them with anyone else, in which case, the privilege disappears.

And of course, all of Altman's products harvest all of our information. Altman is the untrusted third party in every conversation everyone has with one of his chatbots. He is the eternal Carol, forever eavesdropping on Alice and Bob:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob

Altman isn't proposing that chatbots acquire a privilege, in other words – he's proposing that he should acquire this privilege. That he (and he alone) should be able to mine your queries for new training data and other surveillance bounties.

This is like when Zuckerberg directed his lawyers to destroy NYU's "Ad Observer" project, which scraped Facebook to track the spread of paid political misinformation. Zuckerberg denied that this was being done to evade accountability, insisting (with a miraculously straight face) that it was in service to protecting Facebook users' (nonexistent) privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

We get it, Sam and Zuck – you love privacy.

We just wish you'd share.

(Image: Japanexperterna.se, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#10yrsago What’s in the Pope’s barn-storming environmental message? https://www.wired.com/2015/06/popes-memo-climate-change-mind-blower/

#5yrsago Microsoft criticizes Apple's monopolism https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#honi-soit-qui-mal-y-pense

#5yrsago Austerity in disrepute https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#breadlines-r-us

#5yrsago Avia, c'est mort https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#avia

#5yrsago Trump's covid "test-tubes" are contaminated miniature soda bottles https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#art-of-the-deal

#5yrsago Trump wants to dismantle the OTF https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/19/art-of-the-deal/#save-otf

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

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