Next Tuesday, I'm helping @bruces launch "Robot Artists & Black Swans," a book of sf short stories in the Italian "fantascienza" mode, at Austin's @BookPeople!
#Iowa's HSB 272 ("An Act relating to tax collection and penalties, tax permits and loans made by state-chartered banks") is the kind of bureaucratic maneuver Woody Guthrie's meant with, "Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen."
On its face, the bill is a completely ordinary piece of tax-code cleanup, purging some superannuated rules and consolidating others. But as Iowa law prof @ChrisOdinet writes for @CreditSlips, there's a clever gotcha hidden in that bloodless language.
Here's where the knife slips in: "The general assembly of Iowa hereby declares… it does not want any of the provisions of any of the amendments contained in Public Law No. 96-221 (94 stat. 132), sections 521, 522 and 523 to apply with respect to loans made in this state…"
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As far back as 2015, the agribusiness monopolist @JohnDeere was taking steps to ban farmers from fixing their own tractors, arguing that copyright law made trafficking in tools to effect these repairs a felony.
The company took this to the US Copyright Office, saying that farmers couldn't fix their tractors because they don't OWN them, despite paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for them - software in tractors means they can only be licensed, not owned.
Deere bolstered this argument with a paternalistic warning that farmers are just not qualified to service tractors, prompting electronics specialist Willie Cade - grandson of a legendary Deere engineer - to speak out against the company.
No one epitomizes the hollowness of the pose of the "hard-nosed businessman" than @ScottWalker, the union-busting thug who, as governor of Wisconsin, signed up to give away $3b to the Taiwanese electronics giant @foxconnoficial, who promised a massive new factory.
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This was an obviously bad deal right from the start. For literally decades, Foxconn had been tricking rubes like Walker into handing over vast public subsidies for electronics plants that were then drastically scaled down, or canceled altogether.
But Walker - presently joined by Trump - didn't care. All he cared about was being able to maintain the pretence that "business-friendly" policies (smashing unions, eliminating worker protections) would attract "investment" that would make everyone better off.
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