Murdoch Mafia update:

James Murdoch went before Parliament today. Here is a primer from New York magazine.

The BBC reports.

Lowlights:

• The Sun newspaper may be shut down if a new allegation of hacking is true.
• Admitted to spying on lawyers representing hacking victims (and one lawyer's 17 year old daughter).

  Mr Murdoch also said revelations that his company had used a private detective to spy on lawyers acting for phone hacking victims in 2010 was "appalling" and "unacceptable" and apologised to committee member Mr Watson, who had also been put under surveillance in the past.

• Claimed not to know about various goings-on at the paper. (New York magazine)

posted by Quiddity at 11/10/2011 09:36:00 AM

Perry in the GOP debate on Wednesday:

Reaganesque. Relaxed, avuncular, and forgetful.


posted by Quiddity at 11/09/2011 08:38:00 PM

Look what this guy is doing now:

Via Atrios, we learn that the right wing is in a tizzy over a Christmas tree tax. The story is being promoted by Drudge and the Fox Nation. Other bloggers are chiming in.

The story originated from the Heritage Foundation in a post written by David S. Addington. (Where it has picked up over 1,000 comments from outraged conservatives.)

Does that name sound familiar? It should. David Addington was chief of staff to former Vice President Dick Cheney. Addington was described by U.S. News & World Report as "the most powerful man you've never heard of".

He was one of the biggest supporters of unbridled executive power:

Addington has consistently advocated that under the Constitution, the President has substantial and expansive powers as commander-in-chief during wartime, if need be. He is the legal force behind over 750 signing statements that President George W. Bush issued when signing bills passed by Congress, expanding the practice relative to other Presidents.

And there are various clams that Addington was a major force behind the authorization of torture.

Now he's blogging about Christmas trees.


posted by Quiddity at 11/09/2011 07:55:00 AM

Keeping an eye on the Murdoch empire:

Why there hasn't been more coverage of these stories is a mystery: (emp add)

A private investigator was hired by the now-shuttered News of the World tabloid to perform surveillance on two lawyers representing victims of the Murdoch company phone-hacking scandal. As if that's not grimy enough, the ex-cop investigator says he's snitching now because News International didn't pay him. Derek Webb claims he was hired to follow Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris, along with Lewis's ex-wife and teenage daughter, to uncover information that might stop them from taking on more phone-hacking cases.

"To follow my teenage daughter, my youngest daughter and video her is nothing short of sick," said Lewis. "On another level looking at me, that's not how you litigate, you play the ball you don't play the man … this is Mafia-like."

A spokesperson for the media company said, "News International's enquiries have led the company to believe that Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris were subject to surveillance. While surveillance is not illegal, it was clearly deeply inappropriate in these circumstances. This action was not condoned by any current executive at the company."

The spying is said to have occurred within the last year and a half, while James Murdoch was executive chairman. Murdoch is due in front of Parliament to discuss the phone-hacking matter on Thursday. The questions continue to mount.

posted by Quiddity at 11/09/2011 07:48:00 AM

One of the better Fox Nation headlines:

Pelosi Accused of Plastic Surgery

posted by Quiddity at 11/04/2011 09:06:00 AM

This doesn't make any sense:

From the NYTimes: (emp add)

Mr. Bowles, speaking for himself and Mr. Simpson, outlined a package that he said could reduce deficits by $2.6 trillion over 10 years. The package includes $800 billion of new revenue, $300 billion in savings from annual appropriations known as discretionary spending, $600 billion from health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid, $300 billion from other entitlement programs and [savings of] $200 billion from use of a less generous formula to calculate cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security and other benefits.

Social Security is not part of the federal budget. It is not going to go into the red in the next 10 years. What's it doing in this package from Simpson and Bowles?


posted by Quiddity at 11/02/2011 03:50:00 PM

David Brooks wants you to focus on something else:

From his column:

The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

He prefaces that with his own analysis which asserts that there are two types of inequality: big city Blue Inequality and small town Red Inequality. Of course, no numbers are provided in this analysis (except for a lonesome pair that do not make his case).

Dean Baker gets snarky: (emp add)

This is where Brooks lack of access to data is so important. The wage gap between college grads and non-college grads is really a 90s story and even more an 80s story. In the last decade, workers with only a college degree (i.e. no professional or advanced degree) did not share in the benefits of economic growth. The ratio of the wages of those with just college degrees to those without college degrees has not risen much since the early 90s.

Wages of non-college educated workers did suffer badly in the 80s due to policies such as the over-valuation of the dollar that made many U.S. manufactured goods uncompetitive internationally, the deliberate increase in unemployment during the Volcker years which threw millions of non-college educated workers out of work, and anti-union measures (e.g. the firing of the PATCO strikers and an anti-union National Labor Relations Board). However since the 90s, the wages of workers with high school degrees have not departed much from the wages of workers with just college degrees, the vast majority of the economy's gains have gone to the top 1 percent. It is too bad that David Brooks apparently does not have access to this data.

Brooks is becoming more and more transparently a hack. In his column, he tries to re-slice the pie from 1%/99% to a 30%/60% division by lumping college graduates in with the ultra rich. Nice try.

This comment at Baker's blog is apt:

... again and again in his twice-weekly NYT column, Brooks tosses together a pseudo-sociological mishmash straight from Applebee's non-existent salad bar in an attempt to coin phrases that somehow justify conservative selfishness and shortsightness. Thus "Bobos" of the corporate upper class are highly tolerant of others, "cluster liberals" favor maximum unity, "network liberals" favor coalitions, "creedal conservatives" favor transcendent order, and "dispositional conservatives"are Burkean, tempermental types who prize epistomological modesty. Today (gasp), he provides us with two different kinds of inequality: "blue inequality" between the top 1 per cent and the rest in certain big cities, and "red inequality" between those with and without college degrees in certain smaller cities.

And another:

Brooks supports all this Republican regressiveness. His job is to distract with data free false equivalence arguments that sometimes appear "reasonable" to someone who hasn't checked the facts.

CURIOUS POINT: If Brooks wants to go there - the change in inequality during the 1980's - will he denounce Ronald Reagan for enabling that shift? You know the answer to that.


posted by Quiddity at 11/01/2011 12:42:00 PM

Crooked Timber on neo-liberalism:

An interesting post:

This comment by Yglesias is on target: “the TNR staff editorial on the subject [of OWS] feels distinctly like an op-ed penned eleven years ago about anti-globalization protestors, put on ice, and then re-animated with a hasty rewrite that fails to consider the actual political and economic circumstances.”

The staff editorial itself is not so important. What’s important is that, once upon a time, there were debates about trade ‘liberalization’ ? globalization ? that used to divide neoliberals and liberals and progressives. Basically, the neoliberals were gung-ho for trade on the grounds that the alternative was protectionism that amounted to shooting your own foot, and didn’t do any good for the poor in the Third World. And the progressives saw jobs being outsourced, labor unions weakening. Liberals were those caught in the squishy middle, per usual. ...

[Yglesias] considers himself a neoliberal and sees, correctly, I think, that anyone committed to that market-oriented outlook is more or less committed to sympathy for the core grievances expressed by the OWS protesters. Neoliberalism was always in favor of markets as means, not ends. Neoliberalism was never ? or was never supposed to be ? the view that being in favor of trade liberalizaton means market fundamentalism in everything. Neoliberalism says market liberalization should go hand in hand with progressive taxation and appropriate regulation so the pains that buy the gains are mitigated and borne equitably. Spread the gain, to spread the pain. If liberalization means making the 1% richer and everyone else poorer, you shouldn’t take the deal. Only (some) conservatives and (some) libertarians should be willing to take that deal. ...

About:

"Neoliberalism says market liberalization should go hand in hand with progressive taxation and appropriate regulation so the pains that buy the gains are mitigated and borne equitably."

That never happened. Instead, we got globalization and no relief. This is something neo-liberals still fail to comprehend. What they did do, is orient towards "pity charity" as Freddie deBoer points out: (emp add)

There’s a troubling form of liberalism that is increasingly found in the wonky, think-tank-and-establishment-media blogosphere that is so influential these days. I’ve called it, in the past, globalize/grow/give progressivism. Mike Konczal of Rortybomb has referred to it as pity charity liberalism. ... Whatever you want to call it, this vision of the liberal project defines itself through the social safety net. Its orientation is towards expanding and protecting a redistributive social welfare system. Meanwhile, it is at best uninterested in (and often downright hostile towards) worker organization, unions, regulation, and other attempts to empower workers in relation to capital and poor people in relation to the rich. The idea is that, if you get the economy going well enough, you can redistribute enough money to the poor that they’ll be alright, even while you’ve undermined their ability to collectively bargain, raise the value of their labor, and exercise power. ...

The first problem with pity charity liberalism is that the people advocating it tend to be far more optimistic about getting the social welfare state they want than they should be. I’ve been using the example of health care reform: a decent health care system has to be a part of a minimally fair social welfare system. We had a president with a serious mandate who campaigned explicitly on health care reform, majorities in both houses of congress, a uniquely favorable political moment, and an objective that broad majorities of Americans have supported for years. We just barely got a compromised bill through, and it is under perpetual legal and political threat. If those are the conditions that we’re going to have to defend the welfare state under, I don’t see how anyone can be confident in purely redistributive liberalism.

Contrast that with the history of the American labor movement. Check the record: on every issue of worker rights and protections, workers went first. They didn’t ask politicians to give them safer conditions, cleaner conditions, higher wages, shorter hours, more bargaining power, and a better system to redress their grievances. They demanded those things from the bosses, and they did so with the threat of shutting the whole operation down. Only after they had won those things did they eventually become codified in law. (It’s for this reason that May Day―a joke here, I’m afraid, but celebrated passionately in much of Europe and South America―is specifically a celebration of Haymarket square and American unions.) If we’ve lost those gains since, it’s been because of a very well-funded, coordinated and consistent effort by people in power to undermine unions and refuse to enforce existing labor law.

Even if you could guarantee a certain minimal welfare state, the idea of poor and working people depending on the largesse of the rich and powerful is obscene. Sometimes, people have to live under the charity of others. But nobody wants to in perpetuity, because they then are not in control of their own lives, and because having to do so leaves many feeling robbed of personal dignity. As long as economic security is a gift of those at the top, it can be taken away. And if the last several decades have shown us anything, it’s that for the richest, what they already have will never be enough. No matter how income inequality spirals out of control, no matter how absurd the gap between those on top and everybody else grows, they’ll look to take more. And the more that you make the people on the bottom dependent on charity, the less they’re able to protect their own interests.

Kevin Drum has thoughts along those lines:

The problem is that a system that generates enormous income inequality also generates enormous power inequality ― and if corporations and the rich are allowed to amass huge amounts of economic power, they'll always use that power to keep their own tax rates low. It's nearly impossible to create a high-tax/high-service state if your starting point is a near oligarchy where the rich control the levers of political power.

Which is pretty much where we are today.


posted by Quiddity at 10/31/2011 06:48:00 AM

Who agrees with this sentiment?

From Think Progress:

Bachmann: Uninsured Americans Can Rely On ‘Charitable Organizations’ For Health Care

“We will always have people in this country through hardship, through no fault of their own, who won’t be able to afford health care,” Bachmann said. “That’s just the way it is. But usually what we have are charitable organizations or hospitals who have enough left over so that they can pick up the cost for the indigent who can’t afford it.

“But what we have to do is be a profitable nation that’s growing, so that we can pay for those people who can’t afford it through no fault of their own. Once ‘Obamacare’ is gone, this is what we have to do.“

That sentiment was echoed on NBC's Nightly News this Monday with this:

Boy, 7, raises money for cancer racing go-karts (Bing video)

Seven-year-old Timmy “Mini” Tyrrell learned his friend had cancer, and he decided he could help raise money by racing go-karts. Timmy calls it “Mini’s Mission,” and so far he’s raised $7,000 and counting. NBC’s Anne Thompson has the story.

The day before, CBS ended its evening news with a story about how a single mom was in economic trouble (unemployed, etc.) and how a lady befriended her and helped her out.

There could have been stories about how government aid agencies - and the staff - help people. Instead, we are shown problems being solved by private effort. Both take place, of course, but the bias in reporting is to the "feel good" maudlin story that excludes government programs that we have established and paid for.


posted by Quiddity at 10/26/2011 05:57:00 PM