Doing the Work

How to Write When You Suck

A giant typewriter sculpture at Burning Man, with several people admiring and climbing on it.

I’m out on tour again, my first in-person book tour since 2019. I had four books come out during lockdown and “toured” them over Zoom, which was as good as many talented and dedicated publishing PR people, booksellers, and co-presenters could make it.

Now, after three years, I’m out on tour again. It’s an odd kind of tour, because it’s a different kind of book. Chokepoint Capitalism isn’t a novel from a Big Five publisher, it’s a nonfiction critique of monopolies and cartels. That includes the Big Five, which is why we went with an indie, the storied Beacon Press, praised by the likes of Albert Einstein and Howard Zinn for a publishing program that promotes progressive values.

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Pluralistic: 15 Sep 2022 California's antitrust case against Amazon


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Pluralistic: 14 Sep 2022 The Chokepoint Capitalism tour!


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Pluralistic: 13 Sep 2022 Survival of the Richest


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Pluralistic: 12 Sep 2022 Spotify is a ripoff, a Spotify exclusive


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Sound Money

The best money is social, not personal.

Several rows of old rulers and yardsticks, distorted as through a lens.

The inflation hawks have a point: inflation is genuinely destabilizing. When working people’s purchasing power declines, they rightly worry that heating their homes, putting food on the table, or commuting to work will cause them to fall into debt, and, eventually, poverty.

But where the inflation hawks go wrong is in blaming “money printing” for inflation. It’s true that when demand exceeds supply, prices go up, but the nutrition, shelter and transport are not luxury goods whose prices are spiking because we gave ordinary people more money than they deserved.

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Pluralistic: 10 Sep 2022 American healthcare did a fuckery, the White House has a plan for Big Tech big-data


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Pluralistic: 09 Sep 2022 How to die without getting rooked


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Pluralistic: 08 Sep 2022 Billionaires as policy-failure factories; In Real Life, in real life


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