Truth and Traditions

It’s perfectly fine in establishment discourse to express contempt for one of the two political parties. It’s equally fine to periodically criticize your own. But what is most assuredly not fine — particularly in a high-profile nighttime spot and without having a real power base that comes from mammoth ratings — is to be aggressively adversarial to the political establishment itself and the financial interests that fund, own and control that political system. That is what Uygur was, and while there’s no evidence that this was the primary cause of his removal, it was clearly a serious source of dissatisfaction with the station’s executives, including MSNBC’s chief.

via Cenk Uygur and the ethos of corporate-owned media – Media Criticism – Salon.com.

I couldn’t help thinking that they and their big business colleagues could perform an even greater patriotic service to America by working to create more jobs.

Naive? Not really. After all, as of last week, as per the website Zero Hedge and data analysts Capital IQ, 29 public companies — including Bank of America, JP Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, GE and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway — each have more cash on hand than the U.S. Treasury.

via Corporate America’s sunshine patriots – Great Recession | Economic Recession, Economic Crisis – Salon.com.

[Bold face mine, kubla]

I’ve seen Warren in crowds before; they love her, they feel like finally, here’s a person who is stronger and smarter and better than the bankers. They crowd around her, tell her their stories, of bankruptcy, of joblessness, of sick kid or parent, as if to say “finally someone is listening”, someone who understands. It’s who she is. It’s real leadership. And it’s why she’s been able to coherently assemble a bureaucracy that has already won accolades for its attempts to simplify lending regulations, and why the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel served as a remarkable oasis of intellectual honesty in Washington during the bailouts.

Obama could have chosen Warren just as easily as he could have chosen anyone else, since the GOP has vowed to filibuster any nominee. He just doesn’t think she’s right for the job. But again, this shouldn’t be surprising.

Many people are “disappointed” with Obama. But, while it is certainly true that Obama has broken many many promises, he projected his goals in his book The Audacity of Hope. In Audacity, he discussed how in 2002 he was going to give politics one more shot with a Senate campaign, and if that didn’t work, he was going into corporate law and getting wealthy like the rest of his peer group. He wrote about how passionate activists were too simple-minded, that the system basically worked, and that compromise was a virtue in and of itself in a world of uncertainty. His book was a book about a fundamentally conservative political creature obsessed with process, not someone grounded in the problems of ordinary people. He told us what his leadership style is, what his agenda was, and he’s executing it now.

Let’s repeat that: “His book was a book about a fundamentally conservative political creature obsessed with process, not someone grounded in the problems of ordinary people.”

via Matt Stoller: Elizabeth Warren Versus Barack Obama on Leadership « naked capitalism.

Now, with Murdoch’s News Corp. empire in crisis—collapsing bit by bit under the weight of a steady stream of allegations about illegal phone hacking and influence peddling in Britain—there is an odd disconnect occurring in much of the major media of the United States. While there is some acknowledgement that Murdoch has interests in the United States (including not just his Fox News channel but the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post), the suggestion is that Murdoch was more manipulative, more influential, more controlling in Britain than here.

But that’s a fantasy. Just as Murdoch has had far too much control over politics and politicians in Britain during periods of conservative dominance—be it under an actual Tory such as former Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major and current Prime Minister David Cameron or under a faux Tory such as former Prime Minister Tony Blair—he has had far too much control in the States. And that control, while ideological to some extent, is focused mainly on improving the bottom line for his media properties by securing for them unfair legal and regulatory advantages.

via Rupert Murdoch Has Gamed American Politics Every Bit as Thoroughly as Britain’s | The Nation.

Under the leadership of Ede Miliband, Britain’s Labor Party is connecting the dots between corrupt moguls in the media, politics, andbanking:

The lesson of the phone-hacking scandal, he insisted, was that when too much power had been held by too few people, ordinary citizens had been left voiceless and trust had broken down. The same argument applied to all pillars of the establishment. Politicians and bankers as well as the media – all had had too much power which they failed to exercise responsibly. “We’ve seen it in politics with the expenses scandal, we’ve seen it in banking. We have got to be willing to speak out because it is damaging the fabric of the country, the ethic of the country. We can’t have the responsible country that I think we need if this is going on among the most powerful people in the country.”

via ‘Rupert Murdoch’s only the start, the psyche of British politics has changed’ | Politics | The Observer.

John Quiggan (author of Zombie Economics) continues on at Crooked Timber:

If Labor could tie the Conservative-Liberal austerity package to the protection of the systemically corrupt banking system, they would have the chance to put Nu Labour behind them (I noticed Blair has already credited Brown with killing the brand). Instead of putting all the burden on the public at large, they could force those who benefited from the bubble to pay for the cleanup. The two main groups are the creditors who lent irresponsibly, counting on a bailout and should now take a long-overdue haircut and high-income earners who benefited, either directly or indirectly, from the huge inflation in financial sector income.