Here, in reverse chronological order, is a summary of art and writing I’ve done for Pando Daily recently:

Cartoon: Disrupting Darwinism: AT&T offers $50,000 to stop cellphone users getting hit by cars

Cartoon: Apple’s virtuous cycle of post-Steve letdowns

Essay: A lot of Europeans want to be forgotten

Cartoon: Google finally admits its workforce is overwhelmingly white and male

Essay: The 9/11 cheese plate goes, the 9/11 gift shop stays: Proof of social media’s limited power

Essay: Fact checking Uber’s claims about driver income. Shockingly, they’re not true

 

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

As I wrote the other day, the traditional taxi industry is going to war with Uber and other ride-sharing start-ups.

Uber’s response makes a diplomatic solution approximately as likely as paying $10 for a ride on a rainy New Year’s Eve.

As Pando’s James Robinson explained yesterday, CEO Travis Kalanick is now portraying his company as engaged in an epic battle for good and evil in which everything is at stake, after which nothing will ever be the same… you’ve seen this movie before.

“You’re changing the way cities work, and that’s fundamentally a third rail,” Re/code quotes Kalanick. We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an asshole named Taxi,” he continued. “Nobody likes him, he’s not a nice character, but he’s so woven into the political machinery and fabric that a lot of people owe him flavors.”

Uber’s demand? Nothing short of unconditional surrender. “We have to bring out the truth about how dark and dangerous and evil the taxi side is.”

If Kalanick sounds a little George W. Bush-y with his “gonna smoke ‘em out” trash-talking, he’s downright Dick Cheney on WMDs when it comes to chatting up the dogs of taxi warfare.

But for all the attention Kalanick’s comments got yesterday, one other aspect of his rhetoric has passed almost unnoticed by the major tech press.

On Tuesday, Uber released a statement claiming that UberX “drivers around the world are seizing Uber’s economic opportunity by building small businesses for community needs long forgotten by the taxi industry: high quality, safe, reliable and affordable transportation options. At its current rate, the Uber platform is generating 20,000 new driver jobs every month. UberX driver partners are small business entrepreneurs demonstrating across the country that being a driver is sustainable and profitable…the median income on UberX is more than $90,000/year/driver in New York and more than $74,000/year/driver in San Francisco.”

Amazing. And yet untrue. Some drivers claim they’re working for less than minimum wage.

Time magazine points at the weasel words “business income.” Which ain’t, you know, what you actually get to keep. Uber’s “figure excludes many of the costs of running a business, including gas, insurance, parking, maintenance and repairs and the original sale or lease price of the car which can take some hefty bites out of the driver’s take home pay.”

“So the truth still lies somewhere in the vast expanse between minimum wage and $90,000, and no doubt is as varied as the businesses being run by the drivers’ themselves.”

Uber also claims spectacular revenues: “The Uber platform generates $2.8 billion per year for the U.S. economy, and is growing.” But if you follow the supplied link to the “ECONorthwest Analysis May 23, 2014″ that supposedly backs up this claim, www.econw.com, you will not find the word “Uber” or any mention of the company’s purported $2.8 billion contribution to America’s economic wellbeing. The link is merely a front page for a consulting firm.

I also searched ECONorthwest’s list of publications. There is nothing on this website about Uber. As far as I can tell, there is no evidence (despite the missing link) to support the $2.8 billion figure. Which isn’t surprising, given that the U.S. taxi industry generates an estimated total of $10 billion annually. Uber is growing, but it probably isn’t collecting 22% of the national take.

The key is the weasel phrase “generates… for the… economy.” This appears to be a stab at what economists call “economic activity,” not revenues, but the much larger multiplier effect. Under this deliberately confusing formulation, an Uber driver who buys a cup of coffee at Starbucks has just generated $2.40 for the U.S. economy.

In addition to his desire to take over the world (its city streets anyway), Kalanick may just be running for the post vacated by the late Steve Jobs: smart, wildly grandiose, grandmaster of bluster and bullshit. We’ll see if he gets as far.

[Illustration: Brad Jonas for Pando]

I will be speaking twice at LeftForum in NYC this coming weekend, Saturday May 31st and Sunday June 1st, each time with my friend and fellow cartoonist Stephanie McMillan.

( I am also happy to report that Stephanie will be taking over my cartoon “Left Coast” for the Pasadena Weekly and my editorial cartoon for the Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News. My new position as Staff Cartoonist and Writer for Pando Daily made it necessary for me to step aside from these, and as much as will miss hearing from readers in Pasadena and Central Pennsylvania, I leave knowing that they’ll enjoy Stephanie’s work at least as much as mine.)

Sat 05:00pm – 06:50pm
Revolution or Omnicide: Our Choice
Room 1.89 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York 524 West 59th st, New York, NY 10019

Sun 10:00am – 11:50am
Comics for Revolution
Room L2.82 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York 524 West 59th st, New York, NY 10019

Please note: Admission is PAID only. Check out the LeftForum website for information.

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

On Sunday, the White House accidentally leaked the name of the Kabul station chief — the CIA’s top-ranked spy in Afghanistan — to a press pool of about 6,000 reporters around the world who received a guest list of dignitaries who met Obama during his hit-it-and-quit-it visit to the war zone over the weekend.

“The name and title of the station chief were removed in a later pool report that urged reporters to ‘please use this list’ of attendees at the president’s briefing instead of the previous one,” reports The New York Times.

American media outlets agreed to the government’s request to forget what they’d seen.

Why the hell didn’t they publish the name?

The Washington Post said it was “withholding the official’s name at the request of White House officials who warned publication of his name could put the official and his family in danger.”

That’s untrue and illogical on several levels.

First: Either the guy’s cover has been blown or it hasn’t. Even if all 6,000 journos (plus whoever) agree to keep the spook’s ID on the down low, it’s too late. His name is out in the world. If Langley cares one whit for operational security, they’ll pull him out anyway.

Second: By several accounts, Mr. CIA Kabul was already well-known in Afghanistan. Trust me when I say, anything the American ex-pat community knows, the Taliban knows in greater detail. If they wanted to kill him, he’d already be dead.

Third: Does Langley really believe that 6,000-plus random civilians can be trusted with CIA secrets? If so, they’re even dumber than we thought.

If reporters were doing their jobs, they’d try to access government secrets, including classified information such as the identities of CIA operatives. When news like that falls into their laps, as in this instance, media organizations have an ethical obligation to their readers to disseminate it. They are, after all, the eyes and ears of those same readers.

Might someone die? Sure. That’s always a possibility when information about people is revealed in public. When a woman’s address appears next to her name in a public notice about her buying a house, her stalker might find her and kill her. Why should a CIA agent — a man who, incidentally, presides over the administration of an expansive torture facility and concentration camp — receive greater consideration than a female civilian?

And when did it become OK for the US media to ask permission from the US government before telling us what they know?

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

“Demonizing the personality of anyone who challenges political power has been a long-standing tactic used by Washington, including by the media,” Glenn Greenwald notes in his new book “No Place to Hide.”

Confirming this truism out of the gate was establishment hack Michael Kinsley, slagging Greenwald (in a “book review,” inexplicably) as a “self-righteous sourpuss” and “a ruthless revolutionary — Robespierre, or Trotsky” as though Greenwald’s bromance potential had anything to do with the NSA and its illegal spy programs against Americans.

The Beltway junta’s transparent “kill the messenger” campaign of distraction launched with CBS anchor Bob Schieffer’s oldsplaining (“just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us“) and Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen’s trans-baiting (“a cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood“).

Now the Snowden-bashing continues with — not a little ironically — NBC’s marketing ahead of its Brian Williams interview with Snowden himself last night.

“INSIDE THE MIND OF EDWARD SNOWDEN,” blares the peacock’s hype machine.

Because you’d have to be crazy to do what he did.

But you know what’s really batso-nutso? NBC’s cognitive dissonance. As cogs in the machine and sister network to primary Obama media organ MSNBC, the network must rip apart the disgruntled spy (watch for Williams’ “objective” snottitude). On the other hand, the profit imperative forces NBC to present Snowden as the undeniably important figure he is.

Sooo confusing.

You can’t have it both ways — well, you can, but strong meds are advised.

For cheese thicker than you’ll find in Philly, check out NBC’s hashtag poll, “Edward Snowden: #Traitor or #Patriot?,” in which viewers (and online readers) are asked to weigh in on their view of the exiled whistleblower, as though there weren’t professional, scientifically sampled opinion polls answering the same question.

Why so binary? I vote for more choices:

#traitriot

#lenscrafters

#bananarepublic

#dunno

#whaaa?

On the “Today” show’s “Orange Room” (NBC, duh), Carson Daly middleagesplains what’s on the Internet to television viewers who hopefully won’t be so tempted by what they see that they’ll stop watching TV. (For a full dose of this inanity, watch here. Warning: Not Safe for Brains.)

This morning, Daly was in fine form, sharing exactly two (2) posts from social media. So. Fair: one #patriot, one #traitor. Naturally, the #traitor receives added establishment oomph from Secretary of State John Kerry:

If Mr. Snowden wants to come back to the United States today, we’ll have him on a flight today. We’d be delighted for him to come back. And he should come back and — and that’s what a patriot would do. A patriot would not run away and look for refuge in Russia or Cuba or some other country. A patriot would stand up in the United States and make his case to the American people. But he’s refused to do that to this date at least. The fact is that he can come home, but he’s a fugitive from justice which is why he is not being permitted to fly around the world. It’s that simple. And he knows it… Let him come back and make his case. If he cares so much about America and he believes in America, he should trust in the American system of justice. 

No countercomments allowed by pro-Snowden boldface names.

Oh yeah, the “American system of justice.” Where due process is guaranteed and the chance to make your case directly to the people is always guaranteed, fair and square. Unless you get drone-assassinated like Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who never fired a shot at an American, or his teenage son. Or summarily executed, like Osama bin Laden. Or sentenced to a ridiculously long prison term for a minor weapons offense in a foreign country, like John Walker Lindh. Or locked away and tortured like PFC Chelsea Manning, who revealed U.S. war crimes to WikiLeaks.

Let us all praise the American system of justice, where 97 percent of defendants in federal cases are coerced into pleading guilty, including many who are innocent, because prosecutors lard on additional charges that would otherwise add decades to sentences if convicted.

By the way, Secretary Kerry — this rate is virtually identical to those of China and Russia.

Don’t expect Brian Williams to bring that up.

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

A judge in Iran wants ‘Zionist director‘ of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg to appear in court to answer privacy complaints related to Facebook-owned companies WhatsApp and Instagram, according to the news agency ISNA.

As the Jerusalem Post helpfully explained…

Zuckerberg, whose company owns WhatsApp and Instagram, is unlikely to heed the summons. Iran is still under international sanctions over its disputed nuclear activities and it is difficult for US citizens to secure travel visas, even if they want to visit.

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

YouTube has deleted the videos from an account believed to have belonged to Elliott Rodger, the disturbed 22-year-old man suspected of killing six people and wounding 13 in Isla Vista, California.

Flushed down the Memory Hole include selfie-vid rants with titles like “My reaction to seeing a young couple at the beach, Envy” and “Life is so unfair because girls don’t want me.”

A YouTube spokesperson told Mashable: “Our hearts go out to the families affected by this terrible news. Videos threatening violence are against YouTube’s guidelines and we remove them when they are flagged.” Fair enough.

Not so much the next part.

“We encourage anyone who sees material that they think crosses the line to flag it for us,” YouTube’s PR flack continued. “As YouTube is a place where people come for information, where content is posted in a news context it will be allowed to stay on the site.”

But that’s the thing: Elliott Rodger’s rants weren’t merely newsworthy. Though evidently the product of a foggy brain, his videos were/are a rare first-person account of a now-dead mass murderer’s self-proclaimed motivations. They were/are as close as we — as well as the victims and their survivors — will ever get to understanding why six people are dead.

Those videos were/are news. But now they’re gone.

As is, now, Rodger’s freshly-cleansed YouTube account itself.

Media types seem oddly sanguine about this reflexive deletion of history.

I understand the arguments in favor of — there is no other word — censorship. The trouble is, no one is speaking out against what has become the automatic knee-jerk reaction following national tragedies: erase, delete, wipe away. Anything that causes us to feel uncomfortable, that brings back traumatizing memories, is effaced from existence.

Censorship is so obviously the right thing to do that we don’t talk about it.

Post-tragedy, politicians and other public figures follow a standard script. The vacuous statement: “Our hearts go out to the victims and their families, our thanks to the first responders, blah blah blah.” Studiously missing the point: Too many guns! Too much misogyny! Culture of violence! (Hint: sometimes crazy people snap. Always have, always will.)

Finally, Full Orwell.

After mass school shootings at Columbine and Sandy Hook, radical renovation and demolition of the buildings. Because, you see, moving walls and drop-off addresses helps the healing process.

After Sandy Hook, one victim — Nancy Lanza, the shooter’s mom ­— was disappeared from the total count of victims. Talk about misogyny! She didn’t deserve to be mourned because (a) she gave birth to a monster and/or (b) could have been a mom.

Had 9/11 occurred in a different country, there is a strong chance that the pile of debris would have been left in place. What could have served as a more powerful memorial? In Bush-era America, there was no debate. What remained of the World Trade Center was hauled off, body parts and all, and unceremoniously vanished into the city dump.

News media sanitized their web archives, deleting footage of office workers falling to their deaths.

Censorship is almost always baseless. What is the rationale of banning the sale of Nazi ephemera on eBay? It isn’t as though Americans are about to be seduced by 75-year-old pins into forming a neo-Nazi party. You can still find the anti-tax screed of a man who flew his small plane into the Austin IRS office in 2010; four years later, there’s no sign of copycats.

Americans deserve a discussion over whether historically significant, newsworthy bits of information should be cavalierly deleted from the Internet. Whether it is the Isla Vista shooter’s so-called manifesto, or his YouTube videos, or footage of 9/11 jumpers, these are important and historically relevant artifacts that not only the historians of the future but ordinary Americans today have an inherent right to see should they so desire.

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

On Friday, Courthouse News Service reported:

Fifteen Connecticut cab companies sued the ridesharing app-providers Uber and Lyft in Federal Court, seeking an injunction against the unlicensed services they say flout public transportation laws and are equivalent to ‘a fleet of gypsy cabs.’

‘Over 90 years of regulation in Connecticut have produced a set of rules designed to meet the needs and protect the rights of individuals who need a car and driver on short notice – i.e., a taxi,’ the complaint states. ‘Technological advances have made taxi dispatching more efficient over the years, but the defendants’ approach ignores virtually all taxi regulations designed to protect customers who suffer from disabilities, who live in less secure neighborhoods, or who simply cannot afford a limousine.’

Lead plaintiff Greenwich Taxi claims that the ridesharing companies ‘carefully crafted [a] plan to insert itself, at no cost and without legal authority, into the taxi and livery infrastructure that has existed in Connecticut since the 1920′s. The defendants then profit by simultaneously flouting and taking parasitic advantage of a transportation system in which all other players must comply with safety rules and consumer protections established by state and city laws.’

Cabbies in Houston and San Antonio filed a similar lawsuit against Uber and Lyft in April.

Taxi regulators in New York, Vancouver, Seattle, and elsewhere have also challenged Uber. Last year California became the first state to legally accommodate the ride-sharing business model.

On the other hand, European taxi drivers aren’t driving off so quietly into that good night. In January, Paris cabbies went on a violent Uber car-bashing spree. In London, traditional taxi drivers are threatening gridlock next month unless Uber gets banned.

The taxi industry, responds Uber founder Travis Kalanick, is a “protectionist scheme.” He claims that the industry doesn’t care about the drivers, and the cab cartel “would prefer not to compete at all and like things the way they are.”

Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t they?

Kalanick is a smart guy, but I think his glib response to the growing avalanche of cease-and-desist notices is missing a unique aspect of the taxi biz: It’s one of the few sectors in which the interests of labor and management are not diametrically opposed. And that makes for an unusually powerful alliance of enemies.

As in other lines of work, taxi profits are a zero-sum game. But taxi owners and drivers share a desire for higher fares and restricted supply. This common interest is so pronounced that, in many places, taxi “drivers” unions represent and are managed by bosses.

In most cities, cabbies work under one of three basic payment schemes. The oldest is a commission system under which the owner of the cab pays its driver a percentage of the total on the meter at the end of the day. This has pretty much vanished because too many drivers cheat by driving off-meter. The norm for drivers who don’t own their own taxis is the lease system. You rent the cab for a fixed rate, say $150 for 12 hours, return it with a full tank of gas, and keep whatever you make over the lease fee plus gas. Finally there is the elite class of owner-drivers – drivers who own their own taxi.

With the exception of the relatively low number of existing drivers who join Uber, every class of driver and owner is threatened by competitors, especially since Uber attracts the well-heeled fares who travel longer distances.

Taxi drivers aren’t paranoid. They know there isn’t room on city streets for both them and Uber.

During the mid-1980s, when I was working my way through college working my way through massive student loan debt as a yellow taxi driver in New York, my average earnings for a 12-hour shift fell from $240 to $85. The economy hadn’t changed. The number of taxis had gotten too big.

A fixed number of yellow cabs — 13,595 “medallions,” as set by a law signed by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1937 — is licensed by the city to pick up street hails in the five boroughs. New Yorkers perennially complain that they can’t find taxis at rush hour or during a rainstorm. (Most cabbies would reply, what about the rest/most of the time, when they’re riding around empty?) Beginning in 1982, in order to address the relentless editorial page screeds declaiming the supposed shortage of yellow cabs, the Taxi and Limousine Commission created a new category.

Each medallion owner received two licenses for so-called “black cars,” so named because the black Lincoln Town Car became the standard package. They couldn’t accept street hails; they were dispatched by radio.

Wall Street banks, law firms and other Manhattan companies soon signed contracts with the black cars to spirit their executives home to Westchester and Connecticut. Black cars secured a monopoly on long, lucrative $200 fares; yellows were relegated to the $5.60 hops across Central Park (here, keep the 40¢). Adding to the effect of the bifurcated fare structure was simple supply-and-demand: with three times as many taxis chasing the same number of customers, per-driver revenue plummeted as accidents caused by desperate drivers cutting each other off rose. As wages fell, experienced drivers quit. I was one of them.

San Franciscans are witnessing the same phenomenon.

“They’ve flooded the streets with too much supply,” Trevor Johnson, a driver and director of the San Francisco Cab Drivers Association said. “It’s already the Wild West out there. Go down Polk Street on Saturday at 10 PM. and every car out there is for hire. It’s gridlock.”

Uber and Lyft may not be on the ropes — in dollar and cents terms, in places like San Francisco, they’re destroying the yellow cabs — but they ought to be worried. The old-school taxi industry enjoys extraordinary high political clout derived from well-placed donations to entrenched figures in city government, that unique solidarity between worker and boss, and a perception — undeserved, in my experience — that “official” yellow cabs are safer and more professionally driven than these snotty young punks in their Benz S550s.

Riffing off the death-by-Uber-driver of a 6-year-old girl in San Francisco, Trevor Johnson, one of the directors of the San Francisco Cab Drivers Association, asks Business Week: “Would you feel comfortable if you had a 21-year-old daughter living alone in the city, using a smartphone app to get in a vehicle for hire, and that vehicle ends up being a 2001 Chevy Astro van with 300,000 miles on it?”

Of course, you can die in a regular cab too. As I witnessed firsthand, safety inspectors looked at your $100 bribe, not your car, which was more often than not a hot mess of duct-taped pipes, fenced spare parts, threadbare tires, and secondhand brake pads moments from disintegrating. One time I drove a car that stalled when you tried to turn right. I took every customer around the block left after left after left until one guy insisted I go right. We struck a parked car. When I threw in the towel as a driver (after being held up at knifepoint for $12), my owner-boss mourned: “But you’re my safest driver! Only 24 accidents!” (Of which only one, a fender-bender, was my fault. But still.)

Because passengers remain ignorant of the ugly truth beneath the hood, the safety issue remains a potent weapon in their war against Uber, Lyft and other ride-sharing outfits.

“Taxi drivers and cab company owners have a long history of not getting along, but they’re united in their opposition to the newcomers,” reports SFGate. “They say the [Public Utilities Commission] regulations are minimal, essentially allowing anyone to haul passengers for money in their personal cars with a minimum of rules and red tape. That makes it easier for ride services to hire drivers, they say.”

One owner’s quote sums it up:

“Who wants to go through the process of getting a license and going through training when you can just get a couple of apps and start picking up people in your 1999 Mazda?”