Austerity and the Modern Banker

Monday 2 January 2012

Simon Johnson | Austerity and the Modern Banker

Simon Johnson, Project Syndicate: "The rationale - or perhaps we should call it ideology - behind supporting big banks is that they are needed for the economy to recover. But this position looks increasingly doubtful when the banks are sitting on piles of cash while creditworthy consumers and businesses are reluctant to borrow."
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If Ron Paul Wins Iowa, Antiwar Democrats and Independents Likely to Provide Margin of Victory
Robert Naiman, Truthout: "While media may miss this story now, if election-night exit polls show antiwar Democrats and independents gave Paul the margin of victory, that story will appear in media around the world."
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Undercutting Vow of Softer Stance, Egypt Again Defends Office Raids
David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times News Service: "Egypt’s defense of the raids escalates a diplomatic feud with Washington that began last Thursday with raids by armed police officers on the offices of 10 nonprofit groups, including 3 supported mainly by the United States government: the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House."
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Dean Baker | Keystone Jobs Versus Competitive-Dollar Jobs
Dean Baker, Truthout: " ... [W]e could say that a 10 percent reduction in the value of the dollar would have roughly the same impact on employment as 500 Keystone pipelines. Since the effect of the dollar on exports is roughly proportionate, even a 1 percent drop in the value of the dollar would create as many jobs as 50 Keystone pipelines."
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Rumsfeld-Era Propaganda Program Whitewashed by Pentagon
Cyril Mychalejko, Toward Freedom: "A controversial public relations program run by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's Pentagon was cleared of any wrong-doing by the agency's inspector general in a report published last month. The program used dozens of retired military officers working as analysts on television and radio networks as 'surrogates' armed by the Pentagon with 'the facts' in order to educate the public about the Department of Defense's operations and agenda."
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Tending the Fire of Peace Through an Afghan Winter
Kathy Kelly, Truthout: "'It's always a present reality that we could die tomorrow or be killed,' said Basir, 'but we would rather do that than have people remember us in the future as people who didn't live in a principled way.'"
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When a Child Is Abused by a War Veteran
David Swanson, War Is a Crime: "'My dad would tell us all the time that he beat us because he thought we were the enemy. Well, if that was the case, why didn't he beat up people outside the family?'"
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Confronting Stereotypes of the Black Woman (Podcast)
Blanche Richardson and Melissa Harris-Perry, National Radio Project: "Since the days of slavery, the African-American woman has been subjected to stereotypes: the mammy, the angry black female and the hyper-sexual woman. These stereotypes continue to this day and permeate through pop culture. On this edition, author and political science professor Melissa Harris-Perry speaks about the stereotypes black women face, its impacts on their identity and how it has limited the ways in which society views them as true 'citizens.'"
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How Will The Occupy Movement Evolve?
Maria Armoudian, Truthout: "What separates successful movements from failed ones?"
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Updating October's Long-Term Debt Projections
James Kwak, The Baseline Scenario: "The most important point remains the same: If we let the Bush tax cuts expire, the national debt will be significant and rising in the long term, but will not be that much larger than today even in 2035. Which means that the national debt problem over the next twenty-five years is as much about tax cuts as about entitlement spending."
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Jim Hightower | Shoveling America's Wealth to the Top
Jim Hightower, OtherWords: "Not since the Gilded Age, which preceded and precipitated the Great Depression, have so few amassed so much of our nation's riches."
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For Better Grades, Try Bach in the Background
Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune: "Recent research suggests emotion plays an important role in learning. Perhaps, like the soundtrack to a movie, the background music put the students in a heightened emotional state, making them more receptive to the information being presented."
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TRUTHOUT'S BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES

Robert Kane Pappas directed the prescient documentary "Orwell Rolls in His Grave." He knows a bit about corporate control of the media frame, and he's deeply concerned that the nationwide crackdown on the Occupy movement was an attempt to divert news coverage back to the status quo frames of the 1 percent.
What concerns Pappas, he said in a conversation with BuzzFlash, is not so much that there might have been national coordination among cities who, within a few days of each other, evicted protesters to squash the physical presence of the Occupy campaign's encampments - an issue which BuzzFlash at Truthout has discussed before. Rather, Pappas is worried that, by depriving protesters of the pieces of land that created a visible image of the movement, the suppression has allowed the media to return to its numbing "process" coverage of politics and the acceptable terms of the DC/Wall Street debate ("debt" reduction, lower taxes for the wealthy, the "need" for more oil, global warming denial, etcetera).
True, the Republican caucuses are tomorrow and certainly deserve political coverage, but the frame that emerged during the "landed" days of the Occupy campaign - the plight of the 99 percent - has already greatly shifted back to mainstream DC lobbyist concerns.
The police crackdown on the nonviolent Occupy protesters fulfilled the number-one exception to corporate-owned television's usual echoing of the wealthy's mantras: violence that could be sensationalized. A crack on the head with a nightstick. A war veteran suffering traumatic brain injury at the hands of the police. Women being pepper-sprayed by a commanding police officer for no reason. All of these incidents, and others, create more news viewers and higher advertising rates. The police "rioting" and over-reaction to persons asserting their First Amendment rights brought a new frame to the news: the inequality of the distribution of wealth in the United States, in which people who sat at desks and gambled with working people's money made off like bandits while the mass of America struggled to pay the bills.
Not only do the superwealthy indulge in gluttonous lifestyles, they also accumulate even more wealth as the working class and the poor go into debt and pay onerous interest rates to survive. Pappas' point is that the shutdown of Occupy's pieces of claimed land was a way to refocus news coverage on the perennial false frames of the "haves."
And judging from the coverage since the closure of the long-term physical encampments of the national Occupy movement, the powers that be have succeeded in reinstating the false frame of "debt," not greed, bringing down America.
Mark Karlin,
Editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout
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