Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings.

Exactly.

Matt Stoller today at Twitter: "The core theme in the #bigtechhearings today was the contrast between democracy and monopoly power."

Why the Super-Rich Keep Getting Richer, by Grace Blakeley

Billionaires like Jeff Bezos aren't obscenely wealthy because they work harder but because their corporate empires drain society's resources – and we'd all be better off without them.

... In an interview the other day, I was asked why we should care about Jeff Bezos’ wealth if it makes everyone else better off. But the extreme inequalities generated by modern capitalism are making obvious something that Marxists have known for decades: the super-rich generate their wealth at the expense of workers, the planet and society as a whole.

In a rational and fair society, the vast resources of a tiny elite would be put to use solving our social problems.

Choosing between Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos is like the choice of Pabst or High Life. It's no choice at all.

Center of the target.

Trump's enemy is not your friend: why we shouldn't defend Amazon, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

Why must we choose between the worst president of our lifetimes and one of the most rapacious corporate enterprises in the country?

... Confronting concentrated, autocratic economic power is what Democrats used to do. It was the definition of the species. They fought against monopolies in oil and food and transport that ripped off producers with one hand and consumers with the other. But now it’s Trump who, in his clumsy and authoritarian way, is trying to swipe that legacy.

I am making a tricky point here, so let me be clear: I don’t like Amazon, and I don’t like Donald Trump either. I would approve enthusiastically if a president started enforcing antitrust laws, but that’s not what Trump is proposing to do. What we are being offered instead is a choice between the worst president of our lifetimes and one of the most rapacious corporate enterprises in the country. And, eagerly, we are lining up with one or the other.

This in turn seems to me an almost perfect representation of the wretched choices available to Americans these days, as well as the megadoses of self-deception we are swallowing in order to make them. It is everything that is wrong with our politics, and it extends from the most sweeping matters of state right down to the individual reader.

The brutal conclusion:

And this is where we are now in the world’s greatest democracy. We have the billionaire Republicans, with their bigotry and their war on all things public, and the billionaire Democrats, with their oblivious ideology of globe and technology. To the common people, assembled in all our majesty, the momentous question is posed: who do you hate more?

New Albany's elected officials continue to ignore Jeff Bezos's and Bertrand Russell's sage advice.

While I don't give a tinker's damn about Jeff Bezos, this 2012 rumination, forwarded to me by B., strikes me as valuable if not earth-shattering. Another, more succinct variation comes from Bertrand Russell, circa 1950.

The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Think City Hall, and read.

Some advice from Jeff Bezos, by Jason Fried (Signal v. Noise)

He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a well formed point of view, but it means you should consider your point of view as temporary.

What trait signified someone who was wrong a lot of the time? Someone obsessed with details that only support one point of view. If someone can’t climb out of the details, and see the bigger picture from multiple angles, they’re often wrong most of the time.