Yesterday I learned that a press release that the California Public Employees’ Retirement Systems issued last Friday about our suit against the giant public pension fund. It’s quite a remarkable document, and not in a good way.
Read more...I’m clearly too feral to have the proper responses, but I’ve long considered Cokie Roberts to be too lightweight to be worth paying attention to. But since lightweight goes over well in many parts of America, Cokie still has a large following. And it’s separately worth paying attention to a fight she picked over Obama’s stalled trade deal, the TransPacific Partnership. The fact that people with popular followings are still defending it says the Administration remains keen to revive it, so opponents need to guard against becoming too complacent.
Read more...A fellow blogger with substantial experience in Europe sent this BBC footage, which I believe readers will find instructive.
Read more...Back in the late 1980’s, Rupert Murdoch’s latest fiendish plan for world media domination (there’s a new one every decade or so) centred on pay TV. But as the 1990s rolled in, the media baron focused on a new world to conquer: crypto.
Read more...Bill Black is so steamed about a recent New York Times story on the indictment of former partners of the failed law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf that he’s written two posts about it. And they say a great deal about what is rotten at the New York Times.
Read more...We live in a world built on such an overkill of 24/7 propaganda and misinformation that some of it easily slips by. Especially when the topic is the Ukraine.
Read more...We were surprised and pleased when a reporter from the Reuters publication peHUB, Chris Witkowsky, contacted us a couple of days ago about the suit we had filed against CalPERS, the California Public Employees Retirement Systems, over their refusal to provide us with information they had given to three Oxford academics who had used that data as the basis for a recently-published paper.
Read more...Yves here. The writing is delicious. But one thing that is frustrating (and of course quite deliberate) in reading the Western media account of the standoff in Ukraine is that they airbrush out how the West stoked this conflict and can hardly be surprised that Putin finally felt compelled to respond.
Read more...The Sochi Olympics were the great success Russia hoped for.
Read more...Climate change is a hard policy question to address because it pits those who believe in evidence against those committed to knowing as little as possible.
Read more...It’s fun to see someone who got themselves in a hole keep digging deeper.
Read more...Now we know how much it takes to buy PBS programming: $3.5 million.
Read more...The escalating debt crisis in Puerto Rico, where default or bankruptcy look to be likely outcomes, has gotten only cursory notice from the media. That’s quite an oversight when you look at the size and potential impact.
Read more...Yves here. Chase Madar describes the curious phenomenon of how, on an economic and military basis, Israel should be regarded as a client state, yet operates as an equal partner and even tries to dictate US policy. America’s involvement in the Middle East is one of the big drivers of our ongoing military commitments (which increasingly look like overreach) and our ties to Israel help keep the US mired. This in turn has implications for domestic policy, since high levels of military spending compete with other uses, most notably, social programs.
Read more...When Lambert sent me the link to a New Republic article, “The Onion Has Become America’s Finest Marxist News Source,” I first assumed that TNR was engaging in a bit of humorous flattery, as in taking a page from The Onion’s own book in highlighting its success. But on further inspection, I could be wrong. Readers, please help!
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