Scotland Yard has launched a new investigation into News Corporation, which may have disastrous ramifications for Rupert Murdoch and his employees.Murdoch in trouble? Looks like he may have crossed the line.
British Labor politician Tom Watson, the first MP to speak out against Murdoch, is reported as saying he is not at all surprised that Murdoch is in deeper trouble than ever.
“He is solely responsible for the corporate culture that allowed this scandal to damage his global empire,” Watson said.
“I hope other jurisdictions like Russia will also begin to investigate all the activities of News Corporation around the world. The threat that thousands of people may lose their jobs is ridiculous. The company needs to clean up its act. It will survive without him. The people who work for it understand their social responsibility.”
The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles (via Skeptical Science)| Month | Total_Withdrawals_TGA | Pub_Debt_Redemption | Net_Withdrawals_TGA |
| oct | 933 | 589 | 344 |
| nov | 1035 | 643 | 392 |
| dec | 947 | 651 | 296 |
| jan | 969 | 643 | 326 |
| feb | 992 | 549 | 443 |
| mar | 888 | 511 | 377 |
| apr | 1121 | 751 | 370 |
| may (adjusted) | 1084 | 717 | 367 |
| june | 800 | 505 | 295 |
| july | 933 | 615 | 318 |
| aug (adjusted) | 962 | 607 | 355 |
| sept (projected) | 310 | ||
| FYTD | 4193 | ||
As the NSA revelations have shown, whistleblowing is now an essential art. It is our means of keeping 'public reason' aliveThe Guardian
Investigative journalist Greg Palast has obtained a secret memo authored by then deputy Treasury secretary Larry Summers and his protégé Timothy Geithner detailing their plans to roll back financial regulation. In the piece, titled "The Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis" for Vice, Palast writes:
"The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak's fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top U.S. Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears."
Now joining us to discuss this article is Greg Palast. He's a BBC investigative reporter and author ofVultures' Picnic. Palast turned his skills to journalism after two decades as a top investigator of corporate fraud. Palast directed the U.S. government's largest racketeering case in history, winning a $4.3 billion jury award. He also conducted the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding.
Thank you so much for joining us, Greg.Truthout
The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again....
“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take,” wrote the late Edward Said. “You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.”
“For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence,” Said went on. “If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits....
“The desire to tell the truth,” wrote Paul Baran, the brilliant Marxist economist and author of “The Political Economy of Growth,” is “only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity.”
Those who doggedly challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question the reigning political passions, who refuse to sacrifice their integrity to serve the cult of power, are pushed to the margins. They are denounced by the very people who, years later, will often claim these moral battles as their own. It is only the outcasts and the rebels who keep truth and intellectual inquiry alive. They alone name the crimes of the state. They alone give a voice to the victims of oppression. They alone ask the difficult questions. Most important, they expose the powerful, along with their liberal apologists, for what they are.ZNet
Humanity has pushed the world’s climate system to the brink, leaving itself only scant time to act, the head of the UN’s group of climate scientists said on Monday.
“We have five minutes before midnight,” warned Rajendra Pachauri, whose organisation will this month release the first volume of a new assessment of global warming and its impacts.“We may utilise the gifts of nature just as we choose, but in our books the debits are always equal to the credits,” Pachauri told a conference marking the 20th anniversary of the environmental organisation Green Cross International, quoting fellow Indian Mahatma Gandhi.The Raw Story
“May I submit that humanity has completely ignored, disregarded and been totally indifferent to the debits?“Today we have the knowledge to be able to map out the debits and to understand what we have done to the condition of this planet,” Pachauri said.
Fukushima Radioactive Plume To Hit The US By Early 2014 (via Clean Technica)In the end, Rosenberg and Curtain let mainstream economics off the hook, in the name of designing better institutions and fine-tuning the economy. That’s because they take the goal of economics as a given: to fix market imperfections.
What they don’t understand is that economics is not a singular science, with a singular object, but rather a field made up of a variety of theories and objects. There is neoclassical economics and Keynesian economics and Marxian economics, all of which have different objects. Economists who use those theories literally see different economies and associated economic problems and solutions. Economics is therefore a battleground and no amount of fine-tuning or craft serves to pick out the correct theory or approach. It is still the case that any attempt to “produce some harmony amid the cacophony” on the part of a neoclassical or Keynesian economist (e.g., by implementing rules-based monetary policy or supporting fiscal stimulus) presupposes an economy in which one group of economic actors appropriates the surplus created by another group. No amount of fine-tuning or craftsmanship solves that particular problem.
Did anyone fall off the train on the way to market monetarist enlightenment? I think I see a few MMTers in the ditch along the way, still scratching their heads.ROFL. We are scratching out heads all right. Someone actually pays you to teach economics? Clear instance of a market failure. Or, to quote Bill Gates, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." Of course, this was a favorites saying of Gates, and I find myself saying it everyday when I read the economics blogs. So I don't mean to single out the good professor for special treatment. When the assumptions are wildly unrealistic, the conclusions are bound to be bonkers when extended outside the limited confines of the model, you know, to reality.
