If you had any doubts the Murdoch’s NewsCorp was a criminal enterprise, this story by Nick Davies of the Guardian (who has been out in front on NewsCorp reporting) should settle it.
Read more...NZ Science Minister who praised New Image runs for cover…New Image spokesperson in a spin…New Image “stand by” colostrum quack cure testimonials but simultaneously repudiate them by taking them off their web site…New Image still flogging worthless fuel economy product Powerpill Fe-3 to Malaysia.
Business As Usual in New Zealand!
Read more...One of the intriguing things about the commentary by the media and political operatives on OccupyWallStreet is how often they try to denigrate it, usually via ridicule and attacks on the appearance or presumed demographics of the participants. The underlying message is that the protestors are slovenly unproductive losers and hence have nothing in common with respectable middle class people. That flies in the face of the evidence on the ground, where the crowd in Zuccotti Park has gotten to be both older than it was at its inception and more mixed ethnically, and many of the Occupy demonstrations in other cities have solid representation of the middle aged and retirees.
Read more...We can all look forward to higher quality trolls in comments courtesy of the New York Fed (assuming we don’t have them already) thanks to a more thorough blogosphere/social media monitoring program the Fed is planing to launch (hat tip reader Tom via TPM):
Read more...The latest desperate strategy of Obama’s spin-meisters highlights the rot at the core of the Democratic party: the heavy handed use of identity politics as a cover for neoliberal policies that betray the very groups the party purports to represent.
As Obama’s poll ratings continue to deteriorate, Melissa Harris-Perry, professor of political science at Tulane, argued that the reason white liberals were abandoning him was racism. (Earth to Obama: trying to make your base feel guilty, particularly when YOU are the one who ought to feel guilty, is not going to do you any good)
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland
As stock markets continue to fall and the eurocrisis rolls on an independent trader called Alessio Rastani appears on BBC live and gives a candid account of how he, as a trader, views the crisis.
He sees it, he says, as an opportunity to make an awful lot of money. He tells viewers that they too should seek out safe havens – such as US Treasury bills and dollar holdings – to weather the continuing storm.
Not long after the Twitterati are out in droves
Read more...Big banks are very powerful, and they destroy politicians they don’t like. Obviously, they don’t do it directly, but operate through front groups. Some of these organizations are known as “media outlets”, such as the New York Post, which outed one of Eric Schneiderman’s lawyers as a dominatrix to embarrass and intimidate his office.
Read more...By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller
The fight over the future, in the form of the fight over who writes the history of the Obama years, has begun in earnest.
Read more...I find it intriguing that the fact that nurses have staged protests against Wall Street has gotten pretty much no coverage in the mainstream media. I checked nurses + protest on Google News, and the only note take of their September 1 protest was a story in the Boston Herald and MarketWatch (but the latter merely published their press releases).
Read more...Watching re-enactments of scenes from the global financial crisis is a very peculiar experience indeed. The opening by the Fed of currency swap lines to allow the ECB and other central banks to extend dollar funding to Eurobanks was seen as an extreme measure the first time around, a sign of how close to the abyss the financial system had come. This time, allegedly because the powers that be acted before things got quite so dire, bank stocks rallied impressively. Similarly, the media treated this move as just another episode in the ongoing Perils of Pauline drama running on the other side of the Atlantic. The $2 billion loss by a UBS rogue trader got far more extensive coverage, even though rogue traders also seem to be all of a muchness.
Read more...This does not pass the smell test. An Associated Press report on a to-be-released book by Ron Suskind tells us that Obama said that Geithner ignored his request to look into the feasibility of breaking up Citigroup (hat tip Buzz Potamkin):
Read more...A new book offering an insider’s account of the White House’s response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks…
A letter to the UK’s Financial Services Authority, by one of the victims of an apparent massive fraud perpetrated on SME customers of Halifax-Bank of Scotland (HBOS)
Read more...The editorial in today’s New York Times may be a sign that the tide is turning. The elites are starting to break ranks with the mortgage industrial complex.
Gretchen Morgenson reported yesterday that the Obama Administration was pressuring the New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to drop his opposition to the so-called 50 state attorney general mortgage settlement. The short form is the banks want a “get out of liability for almost free” card, which is patently absurd. Not only have they caused a colossal economic train wreck, but sadly, they remain such central actors that they need to be involved in remediation. Letting them off cheaply would be tantamount to putting a band-aid on gangrene.
Read more...By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller
everyone I know is working on some type of RMBS litigation. investors suing issuers, issuers suing originators, insurers suing issuers. wild – A tweet from a NYC corporate lawyer, 8/17/2011
Doesn’t it seems like we’ve been on the verge of a 50 state Attorney General settlement with the banks over robo-signing and mortgage securitization liability for nine months? It does, doesn’t it? Why is that? Maybe it’s because… that’s what journalists keep writing.
Read more...The US press appears to have the attention span of a gnat. The S&P downgrade, Euromarket driven stock gyrations, and the Republican presidential race jockeying have displaced older stories. Yet the News International phone hacking scandal is blowing up to Watergate-level proportions in the UK, with fresh evidence showing that Rupert and James Murdoch (at best) misled Parliament in their testimony last month. And since phone hacking appears to be widespread, not just at the now defunct News of the World, but potentially other News International entities in the UK, it isn’t hard to imagine that US news outlets also engaged in questionable and possibly impermissible conduct.
Yet the contrast between the US and UK coverage is marked, and it goes beyond the obvious explanation that l’affaire Murdoch is chock full of major domestic power players. The difference in presentation is marked. The stories in the Guardian, which did the real spadework, and the Independent (to pick two examples) are incisive, direct, and suitably scandalized. The latest stories in the New York Times and Bloomberg (to pick two counter-examples) have headlines almost designed to have the reader ignore the articles.
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