Neville Chamberlain, the Hero

You would think in 70 years the world would "progress" and leaders would have incorporated the lessons of the past and we would have a better world.

But, as Brad DeLong points out, despite Chamberlain's horrible appeasement policy with Hitler, he did get one thing right which leaders today in the UK have got horribly wrong:

Neville Chamberlain is remembered today as the British prime minister who, as an avatar of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s, helped to usher Europe into World War II. But, earlier in that fateful decade, relatively soon after the start of the Great Depression, the British economy was rapidly returning to its previous level of output, thanks to Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain’s reliance on fiscal stimulus to restore the price level to its pre-depression trajectory.

Compare that approach to the expansion-through-austerity policy being pursued nowadays by British Prime Minister David Cameron’s government (with Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne leading the cheering squad). The country’s real GDP has flat-lined, and the odds are high that British real GDP is headed down again.

Indeed, in less than a year, if current forecasts are correct, Britain’s Cameron-Osborne Depression will not merely be the worst depression in Britain since the Great Depression, but probably the worst depression in Britain…ever.

Crystal Balling America's Future

Blogger The Big Picture has a post that notes that five years ago the Wall Street Journal had an article by Robert Frank clearly identifying the brave new world of "plutonomy" that the US, UK, Canada, and Australia were entering.

Exactly 5 years ago today, the WSJ published this post (Plutonomics) about a rather fascinating study on wealth inequality.

It was written by of all folks, Citigroup global strategist Ajay Kapur. In 2005, Kapur’s research team “came up with the term ‘Plutonomy’ in 2005 to describe a country that is defined by massive income and wealth inequality. According to their definition, the U.S. is a Plutonomy, along with the U.K., Canada and Australia.”

What are the basic characteristics of Plutonomies? According to Kapur:

1. They are all created by “disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist friendly cooperative governments, immigrants…the rule of law and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.”

2. There is no “average” consumer in Plutonomies. There is only the rich “and everyone else.” The rich account for a disproportionate chunk of the economy, while the non-rich account for “surprisingly small bites of the national pie.” Kapur estimates that in 2005, the richest 20% may have been responsible for 60% of total spending.

3. Plutonomies are likely to grow in the future, fed by capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity and globalization.

Kapur also noted the impact massive income and wealth inequality had on other aspects of the economy: Savings rates, national debt level, spending patterns, reaction to high commodity prices, and more. All of these, he claimed are substantially affected by the ultra wealthy.

Note that this was from 5 years ago today — circa January 2007 was, ten months before the market peaked, 11 months before the Great Recession began, and 15 months before Bear Stearns, 21 months before Wall Street (AIG BAC C FNM LEH, etc.) collapsed, and about 55 months before Occupy Wall Street began.

Quite fascinating . . .

It is worth your time to go read the entire Robert Frank post in the WSJ. I haven't read his upcoming book The High-Beta Rich: How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust but I've got a hold on it at the library and expect to be entertained and appalled.

Here is a different Robert Frank, this is Robert H. Frank who teaches at Cornell University in a PBS Newshour interview with Paul Solman:



If you listen to 8:00 into the above video you find an interesting straddling of the middle. He argues from the right for the value of the free market and from the left for the importance of government in regulating the market and ensuring a fair playing field. (Funny, this isn't Darwinian. This is Adam Smith who has been misconstrued by the political right to be only the "invisible hand" guy when, in fact, he very much appreciated the role of government in helping to establish the possibility of a market.)

Don't confuse the Robert Frank who writes for the Wall Street Journal with the Cornell professor. Both have something interesting to say, but they are two different voices, but unfortunately with the same name.

As for America's future, it will succeed only if it gets off the destructive path that is creating a more and more unequal society and gets back to something more like the 1950s and 1960s when the middle class bloomed, America was prosperous, and the future looked unlimited. The future requires a more pragmatic politics that isn't dogmatic right or dogmatic left. It needs a politics that overthrows the idiocy of Reaganism and that overthrows the idiocy of a nanny state. The US needs a renewed robust middle, a real middle class, and a real political middle.

Tim Harford Exposes Screwy Reasoning

Here is an excellent post by the economist Tim Harford. It takes to task the ridiculous right with their simplistic "arguments" about the public sector being parasites on the private sector:

“We will set public sector pay awards at an average of 1 per cent for each of the two years after the pay freeze ends . . . while I accept that a 1 per cent average rise is tough, it is also fair to those who work to pay the taxes that will fund it.”

... the chancellor’s autumn statement

“Did you hear about that 1 per cent pay rise?”

“I did. Tough but fair, if you ask me.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, we in the private sector have to work to pay for you in the public sector. It’s only fair that you show some restraint.”

“Well, ‘show some restraint’ is not quite the phrase, is it? It’s not as if I’m choosing my own pay. You must be confusing me with the chief executive of a major PLC. No need for me to show any restraint; George Osborne is quite capable of showing restraint on my behalf, thank you very much.”

“Good job he is, too. I’m paying for your salary.”

“Is this the ‘hard-working private sector funds the bloated public sector’ line?”

“Funny you should mention that, I guess it is.”

“I’ve never understood that. I’ll admit that you pay for my salary, but I pay for your salary too.”

“How’s that?”

“You work in sales for a mobile phone company. I work as a teacher.”

“Yes, my taxes pay for your salary.”

“But my mobile phone bill pays for your salary. If the government nationalised Vodafone – stranger things have happened – and privatised the school system, my taxes would be paying for your salary while my employer would be sending you a bill for my teaching of your children. But we’d still be paying each other. This is a modern economy. Everybody pays for everybody else’s salary, except the subsistence farmers and survivalists, who look after themselves.”

“But…”

“Look, communism didn’t collapse because there wasn’t any private sector to pay for the public sector. It collapsed because the incentives were thoroughly screwed up. There’s no logical reason why an economy couldn’t be 100 per cent public sector. You’re making it sound like that’s impossible as a matter of simple arithmetic.”

“Still, communism is hardly an advertisement for the public sector, is it? The private sector creates wealth.”

“No, individual technologists, managers, scientists and entrepreneurs create wealth. Their natural home might well be the private sector but there’s no logical reason why they can’t be employed in the public sector. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while he was working in the public sector.”

“He’s not exactly representative of the public sector.”

“Sure, but Steve Jobs isn’t exactly representative of the private sector either. There are remarkable individuals who do remarkable things, and I’m happy to acknowledge that the private sector is usually the place where those remarkable things have space to grow. But the private sector as a whole is doing something more pedestrian: it’s providing goods and services. And so is the public sector. To suggest that some of these goods and services count as ‘creating wealth’ and others don’t, purely because some are paid for out of taxes and others are paid for in the marketplace, doesn’t make any sense.”

“Still, Osborne was right: we need to make savings. Public sector workers have to do their bit.”

“That’s a fallacious line of reasoning: it assumes that the public sector workers of yesterday are going to be the same people as the public sector workers of tomorrow, after several years of chipping away at their real incomes. They might not be. I might decide to become a mobile phone salesman instead of an economics teacher.”

“The way this conversation is going I wish you’d made that choice a while ago.”

“The question is where you want the best people. Trimming public sector wages might harm current public sector workers, or it might just persuade them to seek new pastures, to be replaced by over-promoted junior staff – or mobile phone salesmen who were sacked because of a sudden influx of better-qualified people who could do their job. It may well be reasonable for Osborne to squeeze public sector pay, but if he does, private sector workers will suffer consequences too. Sometimes when he says that we’re all in this together, he’s right – if only by accident.”

It is always easy to blame "the other fellow" for our problems. But with some hard reasoning we realize that public & private sector employees are all in the same pot. Their salaries are set by others. All contribute to a better society if they work hard at their jobs. To attack one is to attack all. This is a "divide and rule" strategy of the political right.

Peddling Lies

Here is a Goldman Sachs partner taking on an activist/reporter in a debate on UK TV. It is interesting to watch this snake in a suit suavely manipulate the "discussion" to deliver all the same right wing talking points of the last 30 years and pretend that he has a revelation about wasteful "socialism". It was capitalism that crashed the system in 2008. And in Europe today, it is private banks who lent the trillions to governments that has created the latest global crisis. It wasn't people receiving pennies to feed themselves of the dollars to get medical care, the bits of money to find housing. It is the greed of bankers and the ultra-rich that has shut down the engine of growth and wants to impose even more "austerity" as they extract more and more from the bottom 99%.



I love the fact that this slimy Goldman Sachs suit claims that the protesters don't have "a clear agenda" and fail to have "spokesmen" to present a clearly laid out agenda. He pulls the big lie technique by claiming that the protests were "flaccid" and that their protests were over "trivial points". He obviously has never been hit by a truncheon or been gassed by police in riot suits. It takes somebody who hold more than "trivial concerns" and a "flaccid stance" to put up with police brutality and arrest. But this is the spin that the big bankers and ultra-rich want to put on it.

What this exposes is the great divide. These snakes in suits are used to quiet deals with money crossing hands to buy politicians and to buy "justice". The people in the street are used to working long hours, they are used to being lied to by politicians, and they have no clear method to get "heard" by the elites. So they go into the streets. This is messy. This is ugly. But if you can't buy the government, buy the police, buy the politicians, you are left with going into the street and getting your head cracked by a police baton. The bankers just can't understand this.

Occupy & Overthrow Capitalism

Here is a bit from a post by Tim Harford that takes advantage of the Occupy Wall Street protests to point out shortcomings in the current version of capitalism and identifies 5 things that need to be done:

“... It sounds like an attempt to distract from the fact that the rich aren’t paying their fair share of tax.”

“Aha, the 1 per cent, you mean?”

“Exactly, the 1 per cent.”

“How much tax do you think they should pay?”

“Um – well, more.”

“More than what?”

“More than they are doing now!”

“How much do you think they are paying now?”

“Well, not enough.”

“We’re going in circles here. We’ve established that you’d like the rich to pay more than a quantity of tax which you admit is entirely unknown to you. It’s 27.7 per cent, by the way.”

“What is?”

“The percentage of income tax paid by the top 1 per cent of earners in the UK. It’s 27.7 per cent. I looked it up. It’s on the revenue and customs website. It’s a little fact you might find useful next time you get into a discussion about whether it should be more than that.”

“Let’s go back to this something nicer business.”

“I’ve got a five point plan. Number one is more meaningful equality of opportunity. Left-wingers have been too interested in making sure people who make very different choices end up with similar amounts of money. Right-wingers have been too glib about levelling the playing field and accepting whatever outcome the market produces. We need much more attention to the quality of nurseries and schools.”

“More easily said than done.”

“Isn’t everything? Number two, raise more taxes from environmentally damaging activities. For some reason we seem to have decided that jet fuel and domestic heating deserve a tax break, yet simply being rich is regarded as the most profound of pollutants.”

“What about the banks? They’ve been doing toxic things.”

“They have, but the idea that the cause of the crisis was simply fat cat bankers is juvenile. The financial system – its regulations, risk management and ethics – is profoundly flawed. Fixing those flaws is a hugely technical problem as well as a political one. Fighting the banking lobby is going to be necessary but not sufficient. And that’s point three.”

“Point four?”

“We need to pay serious attention to our innovation system. Patents are useful in some circumstances but seem to be distorting the computing industry. There is far too little attention being paid to ideas that really matter, such as low-carbon technology or antibiotics.”

“And point five?”

“Point five is the most ambitious of all. We need a cultural shift in parts of business. Capitalism can’t just be about trying to make money – that’s the ethics of a used car salesman or a drug dealer. Capitalism has to involve a sense of creativity, boldness and pride in a job well done. The most successful companies have usually had this and many still do – from Apple to Brompton to Zipcar – but many financial companies seem to have long ago abandoned them.”

“None of this quite amounts to the overthrow of capitalism, does it?”

“No. I think it’s going to be rather more difficult than that – and a lot more useful.”

The real and lasting success of the Occupy Wall Street movement isn't the tents cluttering up city centres. It is the fact that it has got jobs, inequality, poverty, and the shortcomings of capitalism onto the political agenda. It is helping to slowly turned the supertanker called "the state" to chart a new course for a better future than the complete freeze-up of society as the 0.01% end up with 90% of the income and 99.999% of the wealth of society. That kind of social pyramid with a handful owning everything ends democracy and destroys the economy. The rich can hire only so many servants to pad around after them braying out praises to keep their egos afloat. A real economy needs a real middle class to keep industry and innovation going.

An Honest Man

It is rare to find somebody with integrity, somebody who values principle more than status & money. So this story in the UK's Guardian is heart-warming:

St Paul's canon Dr Giles Fraser resigned over plans to forcibly evict Occupy protesters from the outside the cathedral.

This makes very clear his unusual background and approach:

On the face of it, Giles Fraser is an unlikely looking cleric. Bald, jovial, worldly, ferociously bright but genial towards those within the fractious Church of England who disagree with him, his favourite form of garb is jeans and T-shirt.

It is a uniform in keeping with the 47-year-old's support for Chelsea football club and his determinedly demotic persona, though he had to change into a more conventional dog-collar and black suit when translated from his parish in Putney to St Paul's two years ago.

Looks are deceptive though: Fraser is the son of an RAF officer, educated at Uppingham private school and Newcastle University and latterly a lecturer at Wadham College, Oxford. He has been a regular lecturer at military staff colleges and at one stage considered becoming an army chaplain.

His family background is Jewish, and he was a teenage Trotskyite before converting to Anglicanism at university. His doctorate comes from a thesis on the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who famously declared that God – at least in the old-fashioned sense – was dead.

Fraser, served his curacy on a rundown Midlands council housing estate and for 10 years was vicar of Putney parish church in one of the most well-heeled parts of London. He equally valued the church as the scene of the post-civil war debates on the sort of society England should become.

He has never made any secret of his generally, leftwing, progressive views both politically and within the Church of England, where he has been a prominent supporter of the pro-gay Inclusive Church group, launched at a service in his church.

It is classic that a tough issue results in the honest man withdrawing while the social climbers and "yes men" cling to power and creep higher up the echelons of society strengthening their death hold on society. In a nutshell this story explains why society makes so little progress and the evils of the past keep repeating and repeating.

Here is the bureaucratic jujutsu that did him in:

Some critics will undoubtedly say that his resignation was waiting to happen, given that Fraser is not an instinctive committee man or church bureaucrat: in Putney he was in charge, at St Paul's he has had to be part of a team. He had been talking privately about possibly needing to resign when the chapter voted to take action against the protesters, but his hand may have been forced – ironically – by the revelation of that in the media. It is an interesting question who leaked it: there are church conservatives who would be delighted to see him fall.

How many times has the honest man gone down for his principles while the more "supple" social climber has climbed higher? Ever wonder how a Stalin, a Hitler, or a Mao got to the top of the heap?

I look at how the media is trying to undermine the OWS movement by questioning their motives or by trying to put them in a box by demanding that they come up with a short list of "demands". The reality is that this is a movement of social protest deeply rooted in decades of mistreatment by a system that is gamed against the 99%. Those on top my slap themselves on the back with a "job well done" by getting rid of Giles Fraser but they are simply upping the pressure cooker of social unrest and ensuring an ever more devastating explosion because the system simply won't give the bottom 99% a fair break. History is replete with popular uprisings gone amok because the "clever" people on the top manipulated things right to the point of complete breakdown.

The Orwellian Media

George Orwell did a great service to humanity with his book 1984, a parody of the Soviet state and Orwell's fears that the West would go down the same path into totalitarianism.

We live in a society where the elites, especially the media, seem intent on achieving a 1984 reality. Here is a post by Paul Krugman on the zombie-like "truths" that the media foist on their readership:

Legends Of The Rentiers

I feel Dean Baker’s pain. Dean is exercised over an NPR report which says that Argentina is suffering from its 2001 default — a claim that is totally at odds with the evidence. Argentina actually did very well by thumbing its nose at creditors.

This isn’t the only case where news organizations consistently report as truth something that didn’t happen, while failing to report what did. Another one that comes to mind is the California electricity crisis of 2001-2002. As some readers may recall, that crisis was caused by market manipulation — and that’s not a hypothesis, Enron traders were caught on tape telling plants to shut down to create artificial shortages. Yet “news analyses” published after the whole thing was revealed would often tell readers that excessive environmental regulation and Nimbyism caused the crisis, with nary a mention of the deliberate creation of shortages.

And as you’ll notice, in both cases the imaginary history just happened to be one more comfortable to status quo interests.

I don’t want to go all Chomsky here, but this sort of thing really can radicalize you.

What makes this particularly disgusting is that the media are paid to ferret out "the truth" and to spend time distilling the truth through "journalistic analysis". But, instead, they repeat the mantras of our 1% overlords. For this they expect to get paid?

No wonder there are tens of thousands marching day after day in the Occupy XYZ movement. Enough with the lies! Enough with the manipulation by the 1% elites. Enough with buying and selling politicians and the corruption of money in democracy.

How the UK Learned from its US Master

The world is well aware of the crimes of George Bush with his secret prisons and torture regime. But with the fall of Gaddafi, the UK is now getting its chance to shuck and jive in the public limelight and offer up excuses and the necessary exculpations for its behaviour. From an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Sami al-Saadi is considering whether to sue the British government after he and his family were 'rendered' in an operation between MI6 and Gaddafi's intelligence services

A Libyan Islamist has told how he and his family were imprisoned after being "rendered" in an operation MI6 hatched in co-operation with Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence services. The rendition occurred shortly before Tony Blair paid his first visit to the dictator.

Sami al-Saadi, his wife and four children, the youngest a girl aged six, were flown from Hong Kong to Tripoli, where they were taken straight to prison. Saadi was interrogated under torture while his family were held in a nearby cell.

"They handcuffed me and my wife on the plane, my kids and wife were crying all the way," he told the Guardian. "It was a very bad situation. My wife and children were held for two months, and psychologically punished. The Libyans told me that the British were very happy."

Saadi says he is now considering whether to sue the British government, making him the second Libyan rendition victim to threaten legal proceedings in less than a week.

The evidence that the family were victims of a British-led rendition operation is contained in a secret CIA document found in the abandoned office of Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi's former intelligence chief, in Tripoli last week.

In London, meanwhile, an official inquiry into Britain's role in torture and rendition since 9/11 says the government has provided information about the UK's role in the affair, and Whitehall sources defended intelligence agencies' actions by saying they were following "ministerially authorised government policy".

It is the first time evidence has emerged that the British intelligence agencies ran their own rendition operation, as opposed to co-operating with those that were mounted by the CIA.

Go read the whole article.

Democracy only works if government is transparent. When governments have secret armies, especially secret torture chambers, carrying out crimes on "behalf of the people" for which the people do not agree and are horrified to discover, then you don't have a legitimate government. Apparently this simple truth hasn't yet registered on the US or UK governments. You can't run secret "wars" and commit "secret crimes" on behalf of a democratic people if you don't tell them what you are up to and get their permission.

How to Destroy a Country

Simple, follow blind ideology and ignore reality.

Here is a bit from an article in the UK's Telegraph newspaper pointing out that the UK is well on its way to transforming itself from a post-industrial country to a de-industrialized impoverished country:

What is the maddest thing going on in Britain today? There may be many competitors for that title, but a front-runner must be what the Government has made the centrepiece of its energy policy, to ensure that our lights stay on and that our now largely computer-dependent economy remains functioning. Last week, the BBC ran a series of reports by its science correspondent, David Shukman, on the Government’s plan to ring our coasts with vast offshore wind farms.

The nearest thing allowed to criticism of this policy came in an interview with the Oxford academic Dieter Helm, who we were told had “done the sums”. What, Shukman asked, had he come up with? The only figures Helm gave were that the Government’s offshore wind farm plans would, by 2020, cost £100 billion – scarcely a state secret, since the Government itself announced this three years ago – plus £40 billion more to connect these windmills to the grid, a figure given us by the National Grid last year.

Helm did not tell us that this £140 billion equates to £5,600 for every household in the country. But he did admit that the plan was “staggeringly expensive”, and that, given the current extent of “fuel poverty” and the state of our economy, he doubted “if it can in fact be afforded”.

...

Compare this with the figures for Britain’s newest gas-fired power station, recently opened in Plymouth. This is capable of generating 882MW at a capital cost of £400 million – just £500,000 for each megawatt. Thus the wind farm is 22 times more expensive, and could only be built because its owners will receive a 200 per cent subsidy: £40 million a year, on top of the £20 million they will get for the electricity itself. This we will all have to pay for through our electricity bills, whereas the unsubsidised cost of power from the gas plant, even including the price of the gas, will be a third as much.

You can't compete economically if you spend far more on energy than your neighbors. You can't compete if you layer huge debts on the population in order to meet a "green" ideology.

The children and grandchildren of this generation will be working to pay off debts of this ideological "splurge". And the cruelest joke will be that those generations will realize that the "global warming" craze was built on an exaggerated threat. People have been stampeded by ideologues and their children and grandchildren will be left picking up the pieces. Sad.

This insanity might be bearable if the cost actually bought the proposed "benefit", but it doesn't:

The insanity does not end here. The Government talks of building 10,000 windmills capable of generating up to 25,000MW of the electricity we need. But when it does so, it – like the BBC – invariably uses that same trick of referring to “capacity”, without explaining that their actual output would be well below 30 per cent. (Last year, onshore turbines generated just 21 per cent of their capacity.) In other words, for all that colossal expenditure – and even if there was the remotest chance that two new giant turbines could be built every day between now and 2020 – we could only hope to generate some 6,000MW. This is not only way below our EU target, it is only a tenth of our peak demand during those cold, windless weeks last winter, when wind power was often providing barely 1 per cent of the power we needed.

To keep the lights on during such times, for every new megawatt of wind capacity we build it will be necessary for to build a megawatt of capacity from gas-fired stations, kept wastefully running 24/7, chucking out carbon dioxide. This will add further billions to the bill we shall all have to pay, while ensuring that wind power does nothing whatever to reduce our overall emission of CO2. But this, again, is another thing that the Government and the BBC are careful never to tell us. Madness is far too polite a word.

Only an ideologue would celebrate buildling a megawatt of wind power and then having to back it up with a megawatt of gas-fired turbine to handle the fact that the wind power isn't sufficiently reliable to be left alone to provide the power. Rather than just building the gas-fired turbine and using it, the green fanatics end up building both and running the gas-fired turbine as "back up"!

Who is Doing the Looting?

Sure low lifes are on the streets of the UK looting shops, but the bankers are in "the City" and doing their looting quietly via the big banks and their schemes to defraud the public and the government.

Here's the discussion in the Keiser Report on RT:



This is an excellent comparison how petty criminals are frog-marched and punished (jail!) while the fine-tailored banker criminals are patted on the head and excused (bailed out!).

The interview with William K. Black is well worth watching at 15:00 into the video.

Don't believe fraud at the top? Read this bit from the Washington's Blog:

SEC Attorney Reveals that Agency Has Shredded Documents for Decades to Cover Up Wall Street Fraud

What should we make of the new revelations by Securities and Exchange Commission attorney Darcy Flynn (background here, here and here) that the SEC has been shredding documents for decades?

As many commentators have noted, the SEC did this to cover up fraud on Wall Street.

The Entire Government Strategy Is To Cover Up Fraud

William K. Black - professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis - says that that the government's entire strategy now - as during the S&L crisis - is to cover up how bad things are:

The entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts.

Social Division and Greed as the Root of "Feral Youth"

Here is a very upfront analysis of the recent rioting in the UK. This is a bit from an article in The Telegraph:

David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the entire British political class came together yesterday to denounce the rioters. They were of course right to say that the actions of these looters, arsonists and muggers were abhorrent and criminal, and that the police should be given more support.

But there was also something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them.

I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.

It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a dinner party in a large house in west London. A security guard prowled along the street outside, and there was much talk of the “north-south divide”, which I took literally for a while until I realised that my hosts were facetiously referring to the difference between those who lived north and south of Kensington High Street.

Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days.

The author,.Peter Oborne, points out one of my favourite complaints: the morbid worship of the rich.

Yet we celebrate people who live empty lives like this. A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.

I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted.

Greed and corruption are rampant and all-pervasive:

David Cameron is happy to have some of the worst offenders in his Cabinet. Take the example of Francis Maude, who is charged with tackling public sector waste – which trade unions say is a euphemism for waging war on low‑paid workers. Yet Mr Maude made tens of thousands of pounds by breaching the spirit, though not the law, surrounding MPs’ allowances.

A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

...

Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.

Here's the bottom line:

These double standards from Downing Street are symptomatic of widespread double standards at the very top of our society. It should be stressed that most people (including, I know, Telegraph readers) continue to believe in honesty, decency, hard work, and putting back into society at least as much as they take out.

But there are those who do not. Certainly, the so-called feral youth seem oblivious to decency and morality. But so are the venal rich and powerful – too many of our bankers, footballers, wealthy businessmen and politicians.

Of course, most of them are smart and wealthy enough to make sure that they obey the law. That cannot be said of the sad young men and women, without hope or aspiration, who have caused such mayhem and chaos over the past few days. But the rioters have this defence: they are just following the example set by senior and respected figures in society.

I very much like Peter Oborne's article. It hits the right balance between condemnation and analysis, and it is willing to follow the logic right to the root and see corruption and immorality at both the bottom and top of society and raise the question of the direction of causality.

Commentary on the UK Riots

This article from the UK Guardian newspaper asks some very important questions:

The year we realised our democratically elected leaders can no longer protect us

The financial crisis, phone hacking and now riots. Where once we may have felt rage, now we can feel only impotence

The soul sinks at the pictures – of a woman leaping from a burning building, of the owners of a family shop seeing their life's work turned to ash, at the sight of a thug unzipping the rucksack still on the back of an injured teenager and taking from it what he wants. The soul sinks at the sight of people trashing the places where at least some of them live.

There is another sensation you feel watching these pictures, and it is one with which we are becoming increasingly familiar, especially in 2011, the year the news refused to stop. It is impotence.

The most unsettling reports have been of policemen standing back, apparently powerless to stop people as they smash and burn and steal. It's deeply unnerving to see those we expect to protect us incapable and in retreat. Read the comment threads and Twitter feeds, with their demands that "this must stop", or even for looters to be "shot on sight", and you see the signs of impotent rage, the desperate desire for somebody to do something.

Read the whole article.

The recent riots in Vancouver had a similar surreal feel as the police stood back and let rioters run amok. I guess I'm too old, but when I was a kid the police would read the riot act and then go in clubs swinging and arrest everybody on sight. Riots didn't last all night. They lasted less than an hour, just enough time to grab and handcuff everybody on the streets.

But these days, hooligans in hoodies with masks roam the street untouched. Since when is there a "right" to be a brazen criminal loose on the street. In the context of a riot, anybody with a mask on should be arrested immediately. Anybody with a stone or a stick should be swept up in two heartbeats. Any gathering of more than 3 people should immediately be arrested and the loners should be given 10 seconds to skedaddle.

What drives me stark raving mad is that the police do the exact opposite of their duty. During peaceful protests over political issues, police these days kettle the demonstrators and hold them for 24 hours in bestial conditions. But when it comes to out-and-out rioters, the police fumble about or stand off and watch while the mayhem is allowed to proceed uninterrupted. That is nutty. The police should stand back and watch proper political demonstrations and kettle the rioters. Why have these basic rules of policing been turned upside down?

My cynical side says the police are doing this under instructions. The rioting is viewed by the elite as a way of putting fear in the bottom 90%. These riots are not threat to the rich so they can treat this as entertainment much as Nero who fiddled while Rome burned. But political demonstrations put a real scare into the elite, so they instruct the police to quash those street gatherings quickly and violently.

Meditation on the UK Rioting

Here's a bit from a post by Umair Haque, a London-based consultant, author & economist, and a contributor (columnist and blogger) to Harvard Business Review:

Wracked from end to end by riots and looting, the country is now starting to admit the existence of the hidden faultlines that lie quivering beneath the humdrum everyday blandishments of society as we live it.

Underneath the surface chatter about police brutality and parental responsibility is a deeper fear, and a not unfounded one: that a social contract's been torn up. If you accept the possibility that there are many kinds of violence — not merely physical, but emotional, economic, financial, and social, to name just a few, then perhaps the social contract being offered by today's polities goes something like this: "Some kinds of violence are more punishable than others. Blow up the financial system? Here's a state-subsidized bonus. Steal a video game? You're toast." (To be painfully clear, I don't think any form of violence is justifiable, excusable, or acceptable.)

There are many kinds of looting. There's looting your local superstore — and then there's, as Nobel Laureates Akerlof and Romer discussed in a paper now famous among geeks, there's looting a bank, a financial system, a corporation...or an entire economy. (Their paper might be crudely summed up in the pithy line: "The best way to rob a bank is to own one.") The bedrock of an enlightened social contract is, crudely, that rent-seeking is punished, and creating enduring, lasting, shared wealth is rewarded and that those who seek to profit by extraction are chastened rather than lauded. Today's world of bailouts, golden parachutes, sky-high financial-sector salaries — while middle incomes stagnate — seems to be exactly the reverse. Perhaps, then, our societies have reached a natural turning point of built-in self-limitation; and this self-limitation is causing a perfect storm to converge.

An enlightened social contract is not built on subsidies or "handouts" — whether to the impoverished, or to the pitiable welfare junkies formerly known as "the markets." It's built on a calculus of harm and benefit not just accepted by a plurality of its citizens (versus a tiny Chalet-owning, caviar-gobbling minority at the top) — and also a calculus that can be said to meaningful in the sense that it results in real human prosperity. Without such a bargain to set incentives and coordinate economic activity, even the mightiest, proudest societies will find themselves as bent old men on an endless plateau, searching for a lick of shelter as the typhoon bears down.

For much of the previous economic boom, the bargain on offer in modern Britain could have been abbreviated something like: "Want not merely to get rich — but to get richest, fastest? Then loot, plunder, and enjoy the rewards of conquest." (Consider the eye-popping bonuses for bankers just after the economy went into meltdown.) It was a recipe not for prosperity, but for fragmentation and decline; less a social contract than a sociopathic compact. And though the rioters are guilty of much — and that deserves nothing less than the iron fist of the law — I wonder if, perhaps, the crime inside their crime wasn't perversely, insidiously following the hideous logic of this sociopathic compact through to the fatal end.

Call it the logic of opulence: a paradigm of plenitude centred on more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier, now. Its glittering, unattainable fever dream seems to have driven the rioters mad. As one told the Guardian, "Why are you going to miss the opportunity to get free stuff that's worth loads of money?" Indeed: why, given a poisonous compact tattooed into the deeper calculus of everyday culture, not? Hence, as many have pointed out, the mob hasn't exactly been looting bookshops, but the stuff of faux-luxe, mass-designer plenitude: plasma TVs, fast fashion, video games. The vision they seemed to be pursuing, as if their long-denied birthright, is less one of sign-waving activism, fighting against deep-seated social injustice, and more one of raiding a consumerist Disneyland to which they've long been glumly denied a ticket.

Go read the original to get more details and to access the embedded links.

I get no sense that the ultra-rich are even slightly aware of this viewpoint that their greed and their outsize "share" of the social goods is the source of these troubles. I just hope that the shakeout of the 1930s isn't our fate. That required a decade long grinding Depression capped by a half decade of global war to get the death grip of the ultra-rich off the oversize portion of the goodies generated by the economy.

Understanding the UK Riots

This video is probably the best example of why there have been riots in the UK. The BBC tries to do an interview but it is completely at cross purposes because the upper middle class reporter and the poor guy she is interviewing live in completely separate realities. She demonstrates exactly how "official" Briton simply doesn't get it. He is trying to tell his pain but she stops him because of "legal formalities" and then she goes on to label him as a rioter and he is dumbfounded and upset that she could make this accusation out of thin air. He had just been trying to tell her how the police "suspect" all blacks as thieves and criminals and she just labeled him as a rioter.

If you want to understand the riots, this video is an excellent education. An incompetent BBC reporter "interviews" Darcus Howe, a broadcaster and columnist, who lives in Brixton, South London, England:



He shows intelligence by trying to connect the riots in the UK with the world wide rise in youth violence and tries to connect it with a struggle for freedom and dignity, and she just wants to "cover" a riot using the standard rules of "what did you see" and "how did you feel" without trying to understand anything or put anything in context. Worse, she showed the huge divide between the haves and have nots by her completely lack of understanding of him, his pain, and his life. She has the audacity to label him a "rioter", a serious allegation, and she does it freely on the media. But when he tried to talk about a young man having his face blown off she stops him because that is "before the courts" and "you can't make that kind of allegation in the press". Nuts! She can label him a rioter with no evidence. He can't accuse the police of killing because of "legal niceties". What an absurdity!

Here are some bits from a useful article in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

The police shot a black guy in suspicious circumstances. Feral kids with no jobs ran amok. To Tony’s mind, this was a riot waiting for an excuse. In the hangover of the violence that spread through London, the uprisings seemed both inevitable and unthinkable. Over a few days in which attacks became a contagion the capital city of an advanced nation has reverted to a Hobbesian dystopia of chaos and brutality.

...

This is the most arcane of uprisings and the most modern. Its participants, marshalled by Twitter, are protagonists in a sinister flipside to the Arab Spring. The Tottenham summer, featuring children as young as seven, is an assault not on a regime of tyranny but on the established order of a benign democracy. One question now hangs over London’s battle-torn high streets. How could this ever happen?

Among several obvious answers, one is a failure of policing. The evidence so far points to more ignominy for the rudderless Met, as doubts emerge over whether Mark Duggan, whose death inspired the initial riots, fired at police. The stonewalling of Mr Duggan’s family precipitated the crisis, and the absence of officers to intervene in an orgy of looting led to a breakdown of order suggestive of the lawless badlands of a failing state.

...

The real causes are more insidious. It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.

All those factors are again in play. In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then. Last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30 per cent to £333.5 billion.

...

Financial crashes and human catastrophes are cyclical. Each reoccurrence threatens to be graver than the last. As Galbraith wrote, “memory is far better than the law” in protecting against financial illusion and insanity. In an age of austerity, there are diverse luxuries that Britain can no longer afford. Amnesia stands high on that long list.

Go read the whole article. It usefully explores the issues surrounding the rioting.

Negative Review of Obama's Performance

Gavyn Davies is not a journalist. He is a trained economist. From Wikipedia:

orked in Harold Wilson's Policy Unit from 1974–76 and then as an economic advisor to James Callaghan from 1976-1979. Afterwards he had stints as Chief Economist at Simon & Coates and Goldman Sachs. He was later promoted to international managing director for the bank. During this time he also served as one of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's "wise men" during the 1992-1997 Parliament

was the chairman of the BBC from 2001 until 2004, a former Goldman Sachs banker and a former economic advisor to the British Government

Here is a bit from a post by Gavyn Davies in his blog on the Financial Times criticizing Obama:

US economic policy is not yet triple A

According to the GDP statistics released on Friday, the US economy has grown at less than 1 per cent annualised in 2011 Q1 and Q2 combined, a rate which is well below its usual stall speed. This is very sharply lower than I expected at the start of the year. Previously, economists were puzzled by the “jobless recovery” in the past few months. Now the mystery has been solved: there was never much of a recovery in the first place. And the solution to the debt ceiling crisis which may emerge in coming days will, in all likelihood, do nothing to help matters.

A budget deal is now rumoured to be within reach in Congress. While this would be much better than the alternative of no deal, it seems clear that the outcome will bear little resemblance to the comprehensive package which Ben Bernanke and many economists have called for. That comprehensive package would introduce credible medium term policy changes to ensure fiscal sustainability in coming decades, while avoiding an excessive tightening in budgetary policy in the short term.

So what does it seem we will get? Precisely the opposite. The most likely deal will see around $1 trillion of government spending reductions starting next year, along with an automatic trigger mechanism to ensure that the scale of tightening is increased in a second round of cuts before very long. Furthermore, these cuts may be legislated in advance to take effect whatever the state of the economy is at the time. This means that if the economy slides back into recession, any emergency fiscal action has been ruled out in advance.

There is much more. Go read the whole article.

The problem with the US is that it is being ruled by economic illiterates. I worked in the high tech industry and with computers there is a famous saying: garbage in, garbage out. That is exactly what the economic "policy" under Obama (with the ridiculous constraints imposed on him by the Republicans) has become. To have "balanced budget amendments" or "automatic triggers" that remove human intelligence from the management of the economy is asking to be driven off a cliff.

How the Political Pendulum Swings

I find this interesting. Here is a right wing journalist deciding that his views on the left were wrong and he now sides with the left. He doesn't say it, but what I get out of this is "a plague on both your houses" because he points out excesses of the political left in the 1970s and now excesses of the political right over the last 30 years.

From the UK's The Telegraph newspaper:

It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was easy to refute this line of reasoning because it was obvious, particularly in Britain, that it was the trade unions that were holding people back. Bad jobs were protected and good ones could not be created. “Industrial action” did not mean producing goods and services that people wanted to buy, it meant going on strike. The most visible form of worker oppression was picketing. The most important thing about Arthur Scargill’s disastrous miners’ strike was that he always refused to hold a ballot on it.

A key symptom of popular disillusionment with the Left was the moment, in the late 1970s, when the circulation of Rupert Murdoch’s Thatcher-supporting Sun overtook that of the ever-Labour Daily Mirror. Working people wanted to throw off the chains that Karl Marx had claimed were shackling them – and join the bourgeoisie which he hated. Their analysis of their situation was essentially correct. The increasing prosperity and freedom of the ensuing 20 years proved them right.

But as we have surveyed the Murdoch scandal of the past fortnight, few could deny that it has revealed how an international company has bullied and bought its way to control of party leaderships, police forces and regulatory processes.

There is more. Go read the whole article.

The article goes on to look in detail at the perversions of the political process at the hands of right wing ideologue and billionaire press lord Rupert Murdoch.

He ends on a note of hoping the political right makes a comeback. I hope note. What I want is neither right now left but pragmatism, a government based on sound moral principles, uses democracy for it navigator, and uses science for its technical proficiency.

Rupert Murdoch, the Moralist

It is good to see that Rupert Murdoch's heart is in the right place and that he had his flagship newspaper in the UK, The Times, carry this cartoon to remind people that there is something more important than a missing girl's family' hopes were played with by Murdoch's journalists when they hacked her phone (not to mention the other 4,000+ victims of hacking). Rupert Murdoch wants us to quit paying attention to the silly phone hacking story and instead focus on the great moral dilemma of our time: starvation in Africa:

Click to Enlarge
From BoingBoing
It is miraculous that Murdoch has suddenly "got religion" on starvation in Africa. I'm sure this new found moral concern of his has nothing to do with all the press coverage about phone hacking. He understands that in the big scheme of things that tens of thousands starving in Africa is far more important than political corruption (buying police & politicians and using phone hacking to get leverage over people).

This stance demonstrates how great a man Murdoch is to forego the scrutiny of phone hacking and political corruption and instead put his papers on the trail of the truly important story: starvation in Africa.

If you need confirmation of the ruthless and manipulative and evil nature of Rupert Murdoch, the above cartoon should suffice.

Here is Murdoch's news channel in the US, Fox "News", and how it behaves:



If you watch this clip to the end, the CNN reporter is saying that while Fox "News" is ignoring the Murdoch scandal, other Murdoch properties are covering it and he notes The Times. But the above cartoon should cause you to question how seriously the other Murdoch properties are "covering" the scandal.



And this is a prime example of Murdoch's minion's manipulating the coverage of "this hacking problem" by confusing criminal hacking by Murdoch with the fact that the Pentagon is a victim of hacking...




Go see my viewpoint on the above video.

Maureen Dowd Takes Aim at the Mighty Rupert Murdoch

Here is a bit from a NY Times opinion piece by Maureen Dowd which rips proud flesh off an arrogant billionaire:

The hunters became the hunted during three hours of riveting testimony in the House of Commons. The News Corporation trio, baked in the bottom-feeding and whatever-it-takes business, seemed coached. They would say whatever it takes. They stuck to a hoary formula for scandals, claiming the cognitive advantage that being on top of the world left them out of touch.

Mistakes were made, but not by the captains of the ship. We deeply regret these things we were in no way involved in. We’re transparent, even though we’re still paying off former employees to keep their mouths shut.

Playing the ruthless mogul reduced to helpless victim, Rupert came across better than his 38-year-old son James, with the Haldeman buzz cut, the American Harvard dropout accent, the “Mad Men” skinny blue tie, and the ingratiating over-articulateness hiding the arrogant entitlement.

Rebekah Brooks, the 43-year-old former editor of The News of the World and daughter-figure to Rupert, was a prideful pre-Raphaelite Medusa, with a sweet face and soft voice spinning tales of innocence that didn’t quite gel.

At hearings revealing their corruption, the police revealed their incompetence, unable to stop a lame comedian from further victimizing their self-professed victim.

Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids pandered to the lowest common denominator, but, in the end, his sleazy henchmen were lower than the people they pandered to. People had a limit, as it turned out. Citizen Murdoch was brought low, his grip loosened and his myth deflated, by the power of social opprobrium.

She catches the essence of what a billionaire wants out of his government:

His most revealing moment was when he volunteered his admiration of Singapore, calling it the most “open and clear society in the world.” Its leaders are so lavishly paid, he said, that “there’s no temptation, and it is the cleanest society you’d find anywhere.”

It was instructive that Murdoch chose to praise a polished, deeply authoritarian police state. Maybe that’s how corporations would live if they didn’t have to believe in people.

Yes... clean streets and a docile public who know to bow and scrape before their "betters".

Sadly Murdoch is the vehicle of Republican party dominance in the US via its Fox "News" channel which floods TV with right wing propaganda dressed up as "news, fair and balanced". Yep, like Hitler was a democrat who sacrificed himself for "the little people" of Germany by defending them against "aggressors" on all sides. Hitler was as fair and balanced as any of the megalomaniacs who have sought to dominate the world. Murdoch is the commercial version of Hitler, i.e. a person who preened in his own self image as an "artist" who cared for life so much that he was a vegetarian and kept himself pure by refusing sex except with close relatives.

Sizing Up Rupert Murdoch

I think Matt Taibbi has the measure of the man. Here's a bit from a very good, very funny analysis of Murdoch's lament:

At long last, Rupert Murdoch has made it onto the Mount Rushmore of whiners. The recent house editorial in his defense by the Wall Street Journal (which he owns) contains some of the most deliciously absurd calls for sympathy and pity ever expressed in a public forum, far surpassing such classics as “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” and Imelda Marcos wailing about how “It’s the rich you can terrorize – the poor have nothing to lose.”

Now, right up there with those great figures in the history of whining, comes Rupert Murdoch. He didn’t write the WSJ editorial, but he might as well have. The piece has been interpreted around the world as being something very like Murdoch’s true thoughts on the scandal. Andrew Neil of the BBC put it this way: "This, from Wall Street Journal, is closest to what Rupert Murdoch really thinks. Pretty defiant."

And this is the money quote from the WSJ editorial:

The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw. Especially redolent are lectures about journalistic standards from publications that give Julian Assange and WikiLeaks their moral imprimatur. They want their readers to believe, based on no evidence, that the tabloid excesses of one publication somehow tarnish thousands of other News Corp. journalists across the world.

Seeing a Rupert Murdoch publication whine about the meanness and editorial excess of other media companies is almost indescribably hilarious. For sheer preposterousness, I struggle even to come up with credible rivals to this editorial passage. In the ballpark, maybe, is John Wayne Gacy’s famed post-arrest complaint: “I see myself more as victim than perpetrator – I was cheated out of my childhood."

Yep, it is practically criminal how the world's press has misunderstood Murdoch and his heart of gold, his loving concern for fellow humans, and his open and embracing political stance.

I've got my fingers and toes crossed that this scandal will bring down NewsCorp and its evil influence over the media. I pray for the day when Fox "News" is disbanded and replaced with a sensible, honest, politically conservative channel that takes its responsibilities seriously, i.e. to be a voice for a constructive, patriotic right wing political philosophy that can make the necessary pragmatic agreements to govern. Right now, Fox "News" is selling the poison of "my way or the highway" politics.

As Matt Taibbi puts it:

Given the monstrous political influence of Murdoch and his companies – this idiotic game of chicken our government is now playing with America’s credit rating is one of countless policy disasters that I believe can be traced directly or indirectly to the insane propaganda that is a consistent by-product of Murdoch's nihilistic quest for profits – that would be a world-shaking development.

...

When information equals money, and everybody in the business is all about money, pretty soon lines are going to be crossed to get information.

...

Whether or not Murdoch broke the law, he definitely did more than anyone else on earth to screw that up for everybody in the news business. I just wonder if he’ll be busted enough for that in addition to whatever else he specifically did in this one scandal.

We Gotta Deal With This Hacking Problem

Here is a very clever bit of progaganda. Fox "News" is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the very guy who owns the now defunct News of the World. That publication's reporters illegally hacked into roughly 5,000 phones in the UK in order to get dirt for publication. So how does Fox "News" present this fact?



They cleverly confuse the viewer of their "news story" by putting the "hacking" at News of the World side-by-side with the fact that the Pentagon has been hacked by unknown outsiders. This creates the impression that both the Pentagon and Rupert Murdoch are victims of hacking! Sure the Pentagon has been. But it was Rupert Murdoch's reporters who were hacking into the phones of innocent victims. The above "news story" claims "we gotta deal with this hacking problem" and leaves the impression that it is News of the World that is the victim of hacking when in fact it was Rupert Murdoch's company that was the perpetrator!

They do two moves:

1. Present Murdoch as a victim of "piling on" and claim that he "took responsibility" and "acted immediately" to fix the problem. Those are bald-faced lies. He denied responsibility in this scandal which is over a decade old with thousands of victims. Over the years Murdoch has thrown one or two sacrificial lambs in to get the heat off, but when it became clear that his "reporters" had been hacking a dead girl's phone to get "news" for the tabloid and when the mailbox was full deleted messages to make room for more messages to keep the story going (while leaving the parents with the impression that their daughter was alive and updating her mailbox when in fact she was dead). This was just plain cruel, and this is the bit that created widespread revulsion in the UK and has caused these arrests of key managers in the Rupert Murdoch empire.


2. Present Murdoch as a "victim of hacking" by confusing the hacking of the Pentagon with the hacking by Murdoch employees of roughly 5,000 innocent victim's phones in the UK. This is criminality on a massive scale and Fox "News" pretends it is "old news", of limited interest, and is really "unfair" to Murdoch to blame him for how he runs his companies!

This video is presented on Fox "News" as a "news story" but it is pure propaganda being put out by a sophisticated company hoping to confuse people and get them to misunderstand what has really been happening. A real news organization tries to inform people about the facts. Fox "News" is manipulating the "news" to get their boss, Rupert Murdoch, off the hook for his crimes!