FIRING KEITH OLBERMANN: THE TYRANNY OF THE MEDIA OLIGARCHS

Throughout history, some oligarchies have been tyrannical, relying on public servitude to exist, although others have been relatively benign. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which the exact term is plutocracy, but oligarchy is not always a rule by wealth, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group, and do not have to be connected by bloodlines as in a monarchy. Some city-states from ancient Greece were oligarchies.

January 23, 2011 at 12:02:39

FIRING KEITH OLBERMANN: THE TYRANNY OF THE MEDIA OLIGARCHS

By Prof. Sam Hamod (about the author)

opednews.com

Keith Olbermann is gone from TV; his truthful comments snuffed out by another of the oligarchs -- the new wedding of NBC and Comcast. We all knew if this wedding took place, it would be bad for America, but none of us knew that the right wing would act so fast and so blatantly against the highest rated show on MSNBC.

We are under the control of the four oligarchs in America, and democracy be damned as far as they are concerned. They are: media moguls, corporations and their lobbyists, Congress and the President. The axing of Keith Olbermann -- while the madmen of Fox (Faux) TV and News, radio's Rush Limburger and NBC's donations to political campaigns and feigned unfair punishment for a few days of Olbermann until the public squawked loudly -- make clear that the right-wing fiasco has taken over America. The dumb will be dumbed down even more; the herd of sheeple will continue to grow until whatever is left of debate and freedom of dissent in America's faux "democracy" will be destroyed (once again, that enchanting word that lulls so many Americans to sleep and is used to conquer the world for the American empire).

This loss of Olbermann cannot be measured in mere numbers, but will be felt in many dimensions not only now, but in time to come. There has been no voice like speaking truth to power like his; Rachel Maddow is but a hollow copy, Chris Matthews does not speak out as directly, although his show is one of the best on TV after Olbermann and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. As some have said to me, "I guess he stepped on some toes." But what of it, doesn't a real democracy allow for dissent and differences of opinion? Have we all become small replicas of George W. Bush and the devil Dick Cheney, who put us into two "valued" logic (or illogic) claims -- "you're either with us or you're against us," and "if you dissent from our right-wing policies, you are obviously a traitor."

Have we forgotten the rhetoric that Bush and Cheney used in their lies in the run-up to the attack of Iraq in the name of "freedom" and "democracy"? Lie after blatant lie that Saddam Hussein had "atomic weapons," and "weapons of mass destruction" although, after 10 years of American satellite and air surveillance, nothing had moved an inch in Iraq without American knowledge or acquiescence.

But we had the right-wing media moguls helping to aid the illegal war, with the TV networks, our major newspapers -- especially the New York Times with its dear Judith Miller, and the Washington Post regularly running columns by Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney; and the takeover of the independent Los Angeles Times by friends of the NY Times -- so it was all set for a right-wing oligarchical coup. And now, with the wedding of Comcast and NBC, the oligarchy is complete and there is no more critical commentary left on TV.

Those on the right were quick to jump into the fray. Matt Drudge, with his usual misleading headline, announced that it was mere "Drama"; that Keith just "Wanted More $$." This shake-up MSNBC's fault? Comcast's fault? No way. Nikke and Nellie, a couple of gals writing for Deadline/Hollywood, maintained an unnamed source told them...

"This was all Keith's choice. He has several times over the years said that he wants out of his contract. He never meant it until this year. He started lawyers negotiating twice this year. He stopped them in the spring. Then, about a month ago with the guidance of his new ICM team and a new LA manager (who were making zero $ on his current deal), he once again said he wanted to leave and this time they negotiated the full package.

"Because of all the false threats in the past, it was impossible for the network to know if he was really going to sign the final document yesterday. That's why promos for his show were still running after he quit on the air. The network couldn't really believe it or act on it until he said it on TV. They couldn't tell the promo people to pull Keith's show out of the cycle until they were sure. His staff learned he was quitting when they heard him say it on TV.

"Comcast has had no impact at all on MSNBC [yet]. Phil Griffin has complete authority. He makes deals without having to consult with anyone. He has made proposals over the years on the fly and in high-speed contexts where he is acting alone and with full authority. MSNBC is Phil Griffin's network and no one at NBC thinks they have a better idea than Phil about what to do next."

So, what do we have left, a mild and repetitious Maddow, a careful Chris Matthews, a blustery Ed Shultz? Saturday on MSNBC, a set of broadcasters spent a lot of time talking about a missing child, yet didn't even mention their most famous and most popular commentator, Keith Olbermann, being fired. When asked, they responded tersely -- "We have no comments." And there it was, all done overnight -- no warning, no mercy, no concern about the citizenry or the balance that used to be required in the FCC rules before the Clintonites and Bushites gutted the FCC with people like Michael Powell.

The FCC-destroying Powell is the lying Colin Powell's son. Yes, I no longer regard Colin as anything but a lying tool of the oligarchs, no matter how much he pleads "mea culpa" about Iraq. I remember the Colin Powell, who we hoped would run for president, when he came to Howard University to speak at the graduation commencement, and afterwards at lunch, he and his wife explained he wouldn't run for president because they were afraid he'd be assassinated. So, Colin assassinated his own reputation by lying for Bush and Cheney to take us into war.

I suggest that we all buy at least one or two shares of the new Comcast stock, and then raise hell at a stockholders meeting. And, we should also ask the SEC to investigate on behalf of our rights as stockholders against the oligarchical behavior. We should all write to the sponsors of whatever show is placed in Olbermann's place and tell them we are going to boycott their products, and even have demonstrations outside our local stores letting it be known that we are boycotting their products because of what Comcast did on taking over MSNBC; with letters to MSNBC letting them know that the boycotts will continue until Olbermann is returned to the air.

We should get some good civil rights organizations or the ACLU (of which I am a member), to try to reverse the takeover of NBC by Comcast because it was not in the public interest to allow this merger. But of course, the FCC is as corrupt as Attorney General Eric Holder and his faux "justice department" behavior, and his boss, the weak-kneed Obama, who are guided each day by marching orders from above, and now that Rahm Emanuel is gone, Bill Daley is conveying the orders of the oligarchs to our gutless president.

We may lose, but this fight is worth it for whatever we believe our long lost "democracy" to have been -- not that we ever really had a democracy, but the teeth of the oligarchs were not as visible as they are now. Robert Bly warned us way back during the VietNam War in his fine book, "THE TEETH MOTHER, AT LAST." Yes, we were warned; we thought we'd learned a lesson in VietNam, but we have the same lying, defeated officers from that war chanting the same mantras of lies who are now the generals following Westmoreland's lies. They insist they can "win the hearts and minds of the people," as they brutalize them with drones, cluster bombs, phosphorous bombs, numerous missiles, air strikes and black-op missions where civilians are killed by the dozens. And, the poisonous Depleted Uranium we used to kill people in Iraq, in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, will remain in the blood of those poor people for generations, and will also kill many of our veterans over time just as "agent orange," killed thousands of VietNamese and later killed many of our veterans after they had returned home.

The loss of Keith Olbermann is a bad omen for America. We should be aware of this loss, and do what we can to let others know its impact -- how much of democracy we have lost. I'm sure if George Orwell were alive today, he would weep at this atrocity. Just as we should, but we must also stand strong against these oligarchs. We must realize that they are in control; we must support our alternative media sites so long as we can -- because soon they will be taking our websites down by raising prices and by other underhanded means to silence all dissent -- even on the Internet.

http://www.todaysalternativenews.com

Sam Hamod, Ph.D. is a graduate professor; he has taught courses in creative writing, politics, religion, mass media and intercultural relations. He has one of the very few PhDs awarded by The Writers Workshop of The Univ. of Iowa, has published 12 (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

January 22, 2011 at 19:50:31

The Class War Launched by America's Wealthiest Is Getting More Savage

By larry beinhart (about the author)

opednews.com

from Alternet: January 13, 2011

It's the corporations and the very wealthiest against all the rest of us. We're losing.

In 1962 the wealthiest 1 percent of American households had 125 times the wealth of the median household. Now it's 190 times as much. Is that a case of a rising tide lifting all boats, just a few of them a little bit higher? No.

From 1950 to 1965, median family income rose from $24,000 a year to $38,000 a year. That's close to 4 percent a year, close to 60 percent over 15 years. That's a rising tide.

In 1964 there was a big tax cut. That's when things started to slow down for average people. By the mid-'70s the rise of the middle class stalled. From 1975 to 2010 median family income rose $42,936 to $49,777. That's not quite 16 percent over 25 years, less than six-tenths of 1 percent per year.

Briefly, when taxes went up under Clinton, median income rose, peaked at $52,587 in 1999, and then, after Bush cut taxes, declined. Keep in mind that this is median family income. In the '50s and '60s, family income was usually earned by a single person. Today, family income normally comes from at least two people.

At the same time, income for the richest soared. In 1979 the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 9 percent of all U.S. income. Now they earn 24 percent of all U.S. income. One percent of Americans earn nearly one-fourth of all the income in the country.

Then came the crashes of 2001 and 2008 and the recessions that followed.

The crash hasn't changed anything. Things have become worse.

From 1990 to 2005, adjusted for inflation -- the minimum wage is down 9 percent, production workers' pay is up only over 15 years 4.3 percent.

At the same time, the rich get richer:

Corporate profits are up 106.7 percent. The S&P 500 is still up 141.4 percent since 1990. CEO compensation is up 282 percent. Call it transfer of wealth. Or call it class warfare.

What's wrong with the rich getting richer?

Slate's Timothy Noah, in "The United States of Inequality ," wrote, "Income distribution in the United States [has become] more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador."

Take a look at that list.

Countries with wide income inequality don't lead the world in research, technology, industry, and innovation. They're unstable. They have large underclasses. They have high rates of crime. They have little opportunity.

In such countries the rich have disproportionate power. They take control of all aspects of society, especially government, the police, and the judiciary. They become self perpetuating.

If current trends continue, "The United States by 2043 will have the same income inequality as Mexico." (Tula Connell, Mar 12, 2010, AFL-CIO Now.)

Countries with high levels of income inequality are third-world countries.

Here's how regular people can deal with cultures of high inequality. The primary, and best, weapon is a progressive tax structure. As people move up the income ladder they pay a higher rate at each rung. Unearned income -"from dividends and capital gains -" is taxed at least as high as earned income (money that people actually work for.) Tax cuts for the wealthy mark, with great precision, the decline in fortunes of ordinary Americans. Tax cuts for the wealthy mark, with equal precision, the increase in inequality. We had a chance to slow the process by letting the last round, the Bush tax cuts, expire. We've lost that round.

People can become educated and move on up.

Back in the '60s, when I was growing up, New York City had free universities. The burgeoning SUNY system charged $400 tuition a semester. The minimum Regents scholarship was $400 a semester. If a student didn't get one, he or she could easily earn enough to pay tuition with a summer job. The same held true for most state university systems across the country.

Today, students have to borrow. The median student debt for an undergraduate degree -" forget about a doctorate, law school, and med school -" is $20,000. The first, and truest, lesson you learn when you go to college is how to be in service to the banks.

We've lost that battle.

What does it mean?

"Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.

"Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ($42,000 to $54,300) had about the same chance of ending up in a lower quintile than their parents (39.5 percent) as they did of moving to a higher quintile (36.5 percent). Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the income distribution were just 1.8 percent."

(Understanding Mobility in America , April 26, 2006, Tom Hertz, American University.)

Working people can organize and form unions. Unions do more than raise wages. They improve working conditions and safety. They provide protection against abuse, intimidation and wrongful dismissal. Non-union employers have to compete, partly to keep out unions, so the existence of unions helps everyone. Unions also have political power, they spend money and mobilize their members to vote.

Businesses have become very good at beating unions. And they're getting better at it. According to Business Week, ("How Wal-Mart Keeps Unions at Bay," 10/28/2002),"over the past two decades, Corporate America has perfected its ability to fend off labor groups."

In the 1940s a third of private sector employees were unionized. Now it's down to just 7.2 percent. Unions only remain strong in the public sector, where membership is 37 percent.

If you read the papers or watch the news, you will see an anti-public service union story almost everyday. These are the people who teach your kids, pick up the trash, clean the sewers, drive the buses and trains, they're the police and fireman. The stories will tell you their pension fund liabilities will bankrupt the states; that it's unionized teachers who have ruined our schools. Charter schools -" without unions -" are the new favorite charity for billionaires.

When a country is, or becomes, a third-world country, the other thing people can do is run. To some place richer and freer. Like America.

But when America becomes Mexico, where you gonna run to?

http://www.fogfacts.com

LARRY BEINHART is the author of SALVATION BOULEVARD, soon to be released as a major motion picture with Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly, Marissa Tomei, Ed Harris, and Jim Gaffigan, WAG THE DOG, more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Taking Censorship to the Next Level

Extra! January 2011

Taking Media Mergers to the Next Level
Comcast/NBC would be unprecedented powerhouse

By Krystle Manintveld

Over the last decade, dozens of media mergers and purchases have resulted in a media industry controlled by a handful of companies—and the cable giant Comcast wants to be one of them.

After a failed attempt to purchase Disney in 2004 for $66 billion (Inter Press Service, 3/20/04), Comcast offered to take over NBC Universal for the bargain price of $30 billion—which would buy a 51 percent controlling interest from General Electric, with the expectation of acquiring the remaining stake over the next seven years (Globe and Mail, 12/3/09).

While Comcast has so far been mainly a cable and Internet provider, with limited involvement in programming, the purchase of NBC Universal would make it a major media conglomerate. In addition to the NBC broadcast TV network, Comcast would get MSNBC, CNBC, Universal Studios, 26 local television stations and several other small holdings. NBC also holds a 30 percent stake in the online TV website Hulu, a point of much discussion in the coverage (New York Times, 11/9/09). If the FCC allows the merger to take place, the company will control nearly a quarter of cable subscribers in the country and 12 percent of all television content (New York Observer, 2/9/10).

On October 4, the FCC asked Comcast and NBC to provide more information before proceeding. Specifically, it wanted the proposed corporation to submit copies of its agreements to distribute Comcast’s cable channels, such as Regional Sports Network, E! and the Golf Channel, to its competitors, including Time Warner and DirecTV (WashingtonPost.com, 10/5/10). The FCC also wanted to know about how pay-per-view and video-on-demand services would be operated and managed, as well as information on advertising revenue from TV and online content.

Big media, consumers unite
Conflict of interest problems have been an issue in media mergers before, but Com-cast/NBC would have unprecedented influence in both media content and distribution—controlling not just what we watch, but how we watch it, potentially keeping content behind a cable subscription pay wall. The Washington Post (1/29/10) outlined these concerns:

If the combined company chooses to charge too much for its shows and movies, prioritize the delivery of its own content, or flat out block its shows from getting to competitors such as Vuze, Sling Media, Boxee, YouTube or Netflix, it would forestall competition in the nascent online video market.

Unlike most other media mergers, the Comcast/NBC deal is not just a case of the public interest versus big business. The proposed merger is “causing sworn enemies and marketplace rivals to stand together to oppose the mega-deal” (Roll Call, 9/22/10), as progressive groups like Free Press and Common Cause join with the right-wing Concerned Women for America and corporations like Bloomberg to try and stop it.

The disputes between cable providers and networks have been escalating, as evidenced by Fox’s recent decision to temporarily pull its signal from Cablevision (FAIR Blog, 10/20/10). But when a stand-alone programmer like Fox withholds its programming from a provider, both sides have an incentive to reach an agreement, since at the same time that the provider is losing content, the programmer is losing viewers and therefore advertising revenue.

Comcast/NBC, by contrast, could drive up its asking price for other networks to carry NBC content, and other cable providers would have to absorb the cost or pass it onto consumers—or risk having Comcast/NBC pull its stations and content. Rather than viewing this as a profit loss, Comcast would be able to advertise that it carries exclusive NBC content, turning its intransigence into a competitive advantage.

The American Cable Association, a trade organization which represents small and medium-sized cable service providers, reported that the merger “could result in $2.4 billion in extra costs to consumers over nearly a decade” (WashingtonPost.com, 11/8/10). Comcast argued that the report “used flawed data and contradicted available data.” But it’s undeniable that this merger would give Comcast/NBC unmatched pricing power and market advantage.

A few senators have also openly declared their opposition to Comcast/NBC, including Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.)—formerly an NBC employee on Saturday Night Live—and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who declared (Democratic Daily, 11/8/10):

There already is far too much media concentration in this country. We need more diversity. We need more local ownership. We need more viewpoints. We do not need another media giant run by a Republican supporter of George W. Bush.*

Hulu and Netflix
NBC’s stake in Hulu adds another twist to the deal. Hulu claims it has 30 million users watching 260 million content streams (i.e., TV shows) every month. It also projects that it will more than double its revenue from $108 million to $240 million next year. Whether or not it reaches these figures, its viewership has been steadily increasing. The speculation is that more and more people are canceling their cable service and exclusively using their computers for accessing content (Venturebeat, 11/10/10).

There are a lot of concerns that Comcast/NBC’s power in this emerging field of online viewing would stifle new competition. After all, Internet television has long been a major threat to the business models of companies like Comcast (New York Times, 11/8/09). The current regulations for cable companies demand that media producers share their content with distributors, but as the Washington Post pointed out (1/29/10), “there are no rules in place to ensure that a merged Comcast/ NBC would share an expanded library of movies and shows with online companies that want to also deliver that content.”

Apparently, Comcast does not see any problem with this arrangement, and it has so far not offered to guarantee that it will share NBC’s media library online. “Availability of professional video content for online distribution likewise does not constitute a barrier that places new entrants at a disadvantage relative to incumbent online video distributors,” the company stated in its merger filing to the FCC (Washington Post 1/29/10). As anyone who watches Hulu, online television, or even old-fashioned television can figure out, the unavailability of popular shows like the American Office and Law & Order would certainly decrease any online television company’s userbase.

Hulu is not the only online content issue troubling the Comcast/NBC deal. A “scuffle” between Comcast and Level 3, the company that just signed a deal with Netflix to deliver its movies online, broke out when Comcast demanded a recurring fee for transmitting the streaming video; Level 3 agreed “under protest.” Comcast is accused of putting up an extra “toll booth” for the online movie provider (New York Times, 11/29/10).

Comcast maintained the issue was “a simple commercial dispute” having nothing to do with net neutrality. But this dispute demonstrates exactly the kind of problems that the proposed merger will create. Comcast/NBC will have a vested interest in ensuring its own content-distribution websites receive priority. Without any regulation, Comcast can simply shut off or slow down its competitors’ Internet access.

Public interest?
But Comcast would prefer to avoid public airing of such concerns. In a speech given at the Brookings Institution on November 15, company vice president David Cohen suggested we should just “move on” from the issue of net neutrality. “The courts, the FCC and the Congress” do not really have the “background necessary to work out consensus on what are essentially complicated technical issues,” Cohen said.

While the opinions of engineers are certainly valid in addressing Internet infrastructure issues, it is hard to say why they would override the protection of free speech and consumers’ rights to open access online, which are at the heart of the net neutrality debate. As Free Press points out (11/16/10), Comcast hasn’t proven itself a reliable company on these issues in the past:

The fact is that Comcast was caught interfering with lawful Internet traffic, lied about what it was doing, and tried every trick in the book to evade public scrutiny. Then when the FCC forced the company to stop discriminating against its customers, without even levying a fine, Comcast sued on a technicality to avoid any accountability.

That sort of record may make it hard to credit the “compromises” Comcast/NBC includes in its proposal to the FCC, like NBC’s promise to “maintain local over-the-air broadcasting services and to beef up programming for children and minority viewers” (Washington Post, 1/29/10). Comcast has also cited its charitable donations as evidence of its serving the public interest.

Merger express
Despite the increasingly negative attention directed at the merger, neither the Justice Department nor the FCC are expected to block it, in part because, according the Wall Street Journal (11/15/10), as NBC and Comcast “aren’t direct competitors, it’s harder to mount an antitrust challenge.” The Journal noted that “Comcast executives have said they expect to close the deal by the end of [2010].”

One reason that Comcast might be feeling confident in its success is the many political donations it has made over the past year. Corie Wright, attorney for Free Press, told Extra! that Comcast has given nearly $1 million dollars to approximately three quarters of Congress over the past year. What Comcast received in ostensible exchange for this large sum of money were letters of support from members of Congress urging the FCC to support the proposed merger.

Susan Crawford, a law professor who is writing a book about the proposed merger, suggested that Comcast’s spending “tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists, donations, ads and investments” was “about as subtle as a wet fish in the face” (New York Times, 9/26/10).

As Frederick J. Ryan Jr., president of ABC-affiliated station owner Allbritton Communications, pointed out, “If it’s such a good deal, and it’s so wonderful for everyone who watches television and is interested in news, why do so many lobbyists have to be hired and why does so much money have to be spent to push this merger through?’’

*Stephen Burke, president of Comcast Cable, raised at least $200,000 for Bush’s 2004 campaign (Think Progress, 11/5/10).

See FAIR's Archives for more on:
Corporate Ownership

AlterNet.org


ECONOMY

AlterNet / By Larry Beinhart

How Can the Richest 1 Percent Be Winning This Brutal Class War Against 99% of Us?

How has a tiny fraction of the population arranged for their narrowest economic interests to dominate those of the vast majority?

January 21, 2011 |

Who are they? The richest 1 percent. And maybe the next 9 percent.

Who are we? All the rest.

Which poses an interesting question.

How has a tiny fraction of the population – which is diverse in many ways – arranged for their narrowest economic interests to dominate the economic interests of the vast majority? And, while they’re at it, endanger the economic well-being of our nation, and bring the financial system of the whole world to the brink of collapse.

They have money.

We have votes.

Theoretically, that means we should have the government. Theoretically, government should be a countervailing force against the excesses of big money, take the long view for the good of the nation, and watch out for the majority. Let alone for the poor and downtrodden.

What we actually have is one political party that is flat out the party of big money and another party that sells out to big money.

Well, at least we have safety nets.

George Bush’s biggest regret is that he didn’t privatize social security. Why so eager?

One reason is that it is a big pile of money. Absolutely gigantic. It drives the bankers and brokers crazy that they can’t get their hands on it.

The other is ideological hatred. Stephen Moore (senior fellow at the Cato Institute, contributing editor of National Review and president of the Free Enterprise Fund) wrote, "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."

Where Bush failed, Obama has now taken the first step.

His recent tax deal includes cuts on employee contributions to Social Security. Which means defunding, weakening, and setting a new precedent, that Social Security contributions can be cut to “stimulate” the economy.

The crash has put the states in trouble. Rather than raise taxes, or borrow, several have decided on cuts to Medicaid, the program that services several categories of low income people: pregnant women, children under 19, the blind, disabled, or who need nursing home care. If you’re a poor kid who needs a liver transplant, you can beg, rob a convenience store, or die.

This shift to the right is a triumph of a long and very well-funded propaganda campaign.

Every time I read an op-ed in the New York Times that was written by a “senior scholar” from the Hoover Institute or a “fellow” from the Cato Institute, I want to scream, please replace that with “paid whore funded by psychotic right-wing billionaire.” Which is significantly more accurate.

They, in turn, have a great influence on the mainstream media. “As conservatives decried the media's left bias, they saw their institutions mentioned in various media almost 8,000 times in 1995, while liberal or progressive think tanks received only 1,152 citations” (How Conservative Philanthropies and Think Tanks Transform US Policy, by Sally Covington, Covert Action Quarterly, Winter 1998).

Their influence on the national media affects the whole national dialogue.

Now, of course, they’ve taken the think tank concept to a whole new level – Fox News.

What about the media? Aren’t journalists – outside of Fox News – supposed to be objective?

In journalism there is no objective reality. There are only objectively collated quotes. Quotes can only come from “valid” sources. A journalist cannot look at tax cuts and compare them to economic results – job growth, changes in the median wage, and the like – and report that tax cuts do not create jobs. They can only quote politicians, like Bush and Obama, who say that tax cuts are a stimulus, and then look for someone of equal authority – or at least significant authority – to say the opposite, then go Chinese menu, two quotes from column A, one for column B. But what if there are no heavyweights ready to go on record for column B?

Here’s where it gets stranger than strange.

A whole field, economics, has lost its way.

This became obvious when 99.7 percent (that’s a made-up but probably accurate number), failed to predict the crash of ’08. Failed to diagnose the housing bubble, failed to understand the derivatives bubble, and failed to realize the world’s biggest banks were all bankrupt.

After the crash, they failed to cry out against the tax cuts that brought it on. They failed to come up with a way to solve the problems. Which, based on history, seem fairly obvious, raise taxes and spend the money on useful things that private industry can’t or won’t do, like hiring people.

Paul Krugman’s theory, loosely paraphrased, is that economists suffer from physics envy, which is like penis envy, but dumber. Economics is a social science, which is soft. Social scientists look at physics, the hardest of the hard sciences. They see lots of math and formulas. They imagine that if they have lots of math they will get hard, too. In order to create mathematical models out of the messy complexity of human activity, they presume perfect markets. So long as the economy is stable, that frequently works.

Faith in the perfection of markets promotes deregulation and tax cuts. That destabilizes the economy. The economists, therefore, help create the disasters that don’t exist in their mathematical models.

Charles Ferguson, who directed the superb documentary Inside Job, is much more cynical. He believes that academic economists, like doctors who shill for pharmaceutical companies, are on the take from big money interests. He does a marvelous job in the film of demonstrating exactly that.

Indeed, all of academia – except perhaps for English departments – have become part of the business, banking, military, and political nexus.

The ivory tower was supposed to be above the mucky world. That was one of our final defenses in the class war -- a place devoted to knowledge for its own sake and truth just because it was true.

Now, universities pursue truths that someone will fund a grant for.

Tomorrow’s truth is what’s paid for today.

Larry Beinhart is the author of "Wag the Dog," "The Librarian," and "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin." His latest book is Salvation Boulevard. Responses can be sent to beinhart@earthlink.net.

Published on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Big Coal's Call to Arms? Should Feds Stop West Virginia Rally from Triggering the Next Arizona?

by Jeff Biggers

What happened to the new era of civility?

Less than two weeks since the Tucson shooting tragedy, coalfield residents in central Appalachia and around the country are stunned and increasingly concerned about a "call to arms" issued by coal industry representatives for tomorrow's planned rally at the state capitol in Charleston, West Virginia.

An emergency situation of thinly veiled threats and increasingly strident rhetoric in West Virginia now has besieged coalfield residents wondering if the Department of Justice should intervene before their state becomes the next headline tragedy.

At the very least, coalfield residents are asking whether the permit for the "call to arms" rally should be revoked for inciting violence.

More so, it is still unclear who is footing the bill for the rally's "call to arms."

Despite pleas to "cool off the rhetoric in the coalfield rhetoric", coal industry front group "Friends of Coal" is hailing a rally planned by Acting Governor Earl Ray Tomblin for Thursday, January 20th at the state capitol in Charleston, West Virginia as a "call to arms."

Threats from the coal industry are nothing new---I've written many times about Big Coal Gone Wild episodes of violence, threats, intimidation and the seeds of hate crimes.

In his campaign last fall, US Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) made national news for firing a rifle while invoking President Obama's name and commitment to cap and trade policies. While shooting the gun, Manchin said he would take "dead aim."

Manchin, among other West Virginia politicians, has followed the coal industry's slogan to take on the Obama administration's "war on coal."

A little over a year ago, the great US Senator Robert C. Byrd called on the coal industry and its allies in government to end the fear-mongering. Byrd wrote: "Let's speak the truth. The most important factor in maintaining coal-related jobs is demand for coal. Scapegoating and stoking fear among workers over the permitting process is counter-productive."

At the memorial service for the Tucson shooting victims, President Obama called on the nation to end such violent rhetoric and use words that heal and not wound:

At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized--at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do--it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds."

Besieged coalfields residents live daily with the violence of mountaintop removal mining.

As three million pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives continue to be detonated daily for mountaintop removal mining operations, raining fly rock and silica dust and taking the peace and prosperity from affected residents in historic coalfield towns and mountains of West Virginia--and in Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, southwest Virginia and stripmining communities around the nation--President Obama's pleas for restraint could never be more timely.

Let's hope they are heard in West Virginia before it is too late.

AlterNet.org

WORLD

AlterNet / By Lauren Kelley

Swiss Banker Gave WikiLeaks Information Revealing Crimes by World's Most Powerful People, as Attacks on Assange and the Site Continue

The mountain of damning information acquired by WikiLeaks just keeps growing -- as do attacks on Assange.

January 17, 2011 |

The mountain of damning information acquired by WikiLeaks just keeps growing, this time thanks to former Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer, who has reportedly fed the whistle-blower site information that could uncover "massive, unmitigated tax evasion " by powerful individuals and corporations around the globe.

Elmer handed over two optical discs worth of data, said to contain Swiss bank accounts linked to thousands of individuals, including some 40 politicians and "pillars of society" from the U.S., Asia and Europe. Speaking at a press conference outside the Frontline Club, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is under house arrest, Elmer called WikiLeaks "my only hope to get society to know what's going on" and said "it is damaging our society in the way that money is moved."

After leaving a Cayman Islands outpost of the Swiss bank Julius Baer in 2004, Elmer alleged that many of the bank's top clients engaged in tax fraud with the full cooperation of Julius Baer leaders, according to Raw Story. Elmer, who went on to found the Swiss Whistleblower website, has fed significant information to WikiLeaks once before, in 2007. He faced a court hearing over that release just last Tuesday.

Assange said he plans to release the information in "a matter of weeks," as soon as it's been verified.

The news comes as Assange faces allegations of sexual misconduct and attempts to extradite him from the UK to Sweden. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is continuing its efforts to smear Assange and punish everyone involved with his website. Most notably, Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. soldier behind a massive leak of classified government documents, is being tortured by being kept in solitary confinement in a Virginia prison.

Assange himself has received numerous thinly-veiled (and not so thinly-veiled) death threats from people all over the world, including individuals associated with the governments of the U.S. and other countries. A website called "People OK With Murdering Assange" compiles the most egregious statements from individuals -- including politicians and prominent media personalities -- who have called for him to be killed.

The Feds have convinced a number of major companies, including PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Amazon, to stop doing business with Assange's site.

Even the newly crowned Miss America got some jabs in at WikiLeaks' expense, saying during the question portion of Saturday's pageant, "You know when it came to that situation, it was actually based on espionage, and when it comes to the security of our nation, we have to focus on security first and then people's right to know. It's important that everybody who's in our borders is safe and so we can't let things like that happen, and they must be handled properly." That answer may have won Teresa Scanlan the crown, but it is of course inaccurate, since no one has ever been successfully prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

Lauren Kelley is an associate editor at AlterNet and a freelance writer and editor who has contributed to Change.org, The L Magazine and Time Out New York. She lives in Brooklyn. Follow her on Twitter here.

The top 1% must believe they live in another dimension outside the laws and responsibilities of the rest of us.

Published on Monday, January 17, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

Julian Assange Vows to Reveal Tax Details of 2,000 Wealthy People

Swiss banker gives WikiLeaks founder data 'to educate society' about amount of potential tax revenues lost to offshore schemes

by Esther Addley

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, today pledged to make public the confidential tax details of 2,000 wealthy and prominent individuals, after being passed the data by a Swiss banker who claims the information potentially reveals instances of money-laundering and large-scale illegal tax evasion.

Julian Assange (l) receives CDs containing data on offshore bank account holders from Rudolf Elmer. (Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters)

In a carefully choreographed handover in central London, Rudolf Elmer, formerly a senior executive at the Swiss bank Julius Baer, based in the Cayman islands, said he was handing the data to WikiLeaks as part of an attempt "to educate society" about the amount of potential tax revenues lost thanks to offshore schemes and money-laundering.

"As banker, I have the right to stand up if something is wrong," he said. "I am against the system. I know how the system works and I know the day-to-day business. I wanted to let society know how this system works because it's damaging society," he said.

Elmer will appear in a Swiss court on Wednesday charged with breaking Swiss banking secrecy laws, forging documents and sending threatening messages to two officials at his former employer.

He denies the charges.

He refused to comment on the period of time covered by the data, contained on two compact discs, or the precise source of the information; nor would he give the names of any corporations or individuals whose details he was handing over, saying that the information needed to be "investigated" before it was released into the public domain.

Assange, making his first public appearance since being bailed in December on sex assault allegations, for which Sweden is seeking his extradition, said he would pass the information to the Serious Fraud Office(SFO), examine it to ensure sources were protected, and then release it on the WikiLeaks site, potentially within "a couple of weeks".

"Once we look at the data, yes, there will be full disclosure," he said.

He would not be drawn on questions relating to the extradition case, which will be heard at Belmarsh magistrates court on 7 February, or on other leaks the site has promised are forthcoming, including information involving a "big US bank", which many believe to be Bank of America.

The site was not yet fully functional, he said. "We are not open yet for public business. The volume of material that we would receive is too high for our internal mechanisms, but we are receiving in other ways, like this, in this manner," he said. The release of leaked US diplomatic cables, which the site originally released through the Guardian and four other international media organisations, would continue, however. Elmer said he was passing the information to WikiLeaks because he had previously approached universities with the information but it had not been followed up. He said his attempts to interest the Swiss media had resulted only in his being dismissed as "a paranoid person, a mentally ill person".

"I was close to giving up, but then a friend of mine told me: 'There's WikiLeaks.' I looked at it and thought: 'That's the only hope I have to [let] society know what's going on.'"

In 2008, he released to the site a much smaller collection of documents, also detailing the tax details of some of the bank's clients. Though the site has never published that information, Julius Baer succeeded briefly in shutting down Wikileaks.org before the site, supported by a number of US media and civil liberties organisations, succeeded in overturning the injunction. He also passed the information to the US tax authorities.

The data was later seen by the Guardian, which found "details of numerous trusts in which wealthy people have placed capital. This allows them lawfully to avoid paying tax on profits, because legally it belongs to the trust"; the data also "[appeared] to include several cases where wealthy individuals sought to use trust money as though it were their own".

In a statement to the Observer on Friday, Julius Baer said: "The aim of [Elmer's] activities was, and is, to discredit Julius Baer as well as clients in the eyes of the public. With this goal in mind, Mr Elmer spread baseless accusations and passed on unlawfully acquired, respectively retained documents to the media, and later also to WikiLeaks. To back up his campaign, he also used falsified documents."

A spokeswoman for the SFO said it would "consider allegations made to it to determine if the matter is within its jurisdiction and criteria for investigation or possibly for another authority to consider".

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2011