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Posted by Harkavy at 8:34 AM, February 25, 2008
Ralph Nader, the newest entrant in the presidential race, is sure to implode, but not before he wreaks some panic among Democrats. He's our own homegrown suicide bomber of politics.
Suicide bombers elsewhere are exploding, not imploding. Yesterday, on the road from Baghdad to Karbala, one of the schmucks killed a couple of dozen of pilgrims at a rest stop:
A suicide bomber on Sunday attacked a crowd of Shiite pilgrims heading toward the city of Karbala to visit the Shrine of Imam Hussein, killing at least 40 people and wounding at least 100, Iraqi officials said. The American military said that at least 60 people had been wounded.
And in Pakistan, one of Nader's kissing-of-death cousins targeted a cop:
A suicide bomber struck Pakistan's military headquarters in Rawalpindi Monday, killing at least eight people, including the army's top ranking medical officer, military officials said.
Nader, however, is the only suicide bomber who publicly announces his intentions:
Nader announced his candidacy on NBC's Meet the Press, as he did four years ago. He said he is running to draw attention to issues ignored by the major candidates in both parties, citing corporate crime, workers' rights, military spending and foreign policy.
"You take that framework of people feeling locked out, shut out, marginalized and disrespected," he said. "You go from Iraq to Palestine to Israel, from Enron to Wall Street, from Katrina to the bumbling of the Bush administration, to the complicity of the Democrats in not stopping him on the war, stopping him on the tax cuts."
Sounds as if Nader's the one who's feeling locked out, shut out, marginalized, and disrespected.
The latest episode of HBO's The Wire, the best piece of investigative entertainment ever seen on TV, is once again instructive. Detective Jimmy McNulty's "serial killer" — a fake murderer springing only from McNulty's imaginative scam to get more money for police work — warranted an FBI profile. And McNulty himself fits the profile — especially the part about the "killer" feeling superior to everyone else.
Back to reality: For once, the New York Times put perspective in a political story — probably because Adam Nagourney didn't write it:
On Sunday, Mr. Nader officially announced that he would seek the presidency as a third-party candidate one more time — driven in part by his frustration over the efforts to thwart his last run.
“If there was no other reason to run — other than the civil liberties, civil rights issue of ballot access — it’d be worth it,” Mr. Nader said in a telephone interview after announcing his candidacy on “Meet the Press.”
Worth it for whom? Nader's quixotic quests for the presidency are reminiscent of Harold Stassen's. Only no one's laughing, except for the Republicans. If McCain's people are smart, they'll start siphoning campaign funds to Nader. So far, the only campaign contributor to Nader in the past six months appears to be one Patricia Gilmartin of Homewood, Illinois, according to federal campaign records. And, schizophrenically, she also has given money to Barry Obama.
Nader came to fame with his auto exposé, Unsafe at Any Speed. But he just can't seem to take his pedal off the metal. Take it out of first gear, Ralph. Your whining is annoying.
Posted by Harkavy at 9:26 AM, February 7, 2008
Hillary desperately shops for gold — and the right brand — after Super Tuesday gives way to Ashes Wednesday.
Now that Barack Obama has caught her, Hillary Clinton is going on a shopping spree for cash — the safe way, from the now-shaky Democratic establishment. It's hubby Bill Clinton who's expected to bring home the groceries from his buddy Ron Burkle, the supermarket billionaire.
Clean up in all aisles, Bill!
Number today as a crossroads in the presidential campaign — actually a crossing of the paths of the campaign and the still-bloody Iraq War, news of which has been pushed back to the grocery ads in your struggling daily papers. The digits are truly lined up:
3,216: Total number of delegates needed for successful nominations (2,025 for Democrats, 1,191 for Republicans).
3,212: Total number of American soldiers killed in action in Iraq as of February 7, 2008.
Just a day or so away from synchronicity. What's your magic number? Anyway, forget about Iraq and focus on the presidential race. Maybe we'll find out that Obama is also leaving a trail of glittering sleaze behind him on the campaign trail, but for now, Hillary has a commanding lead when it comes to that.
So Americans want change? Hillary, for one, hasn't crossed over to a different aisle, despite what prominent newsmongers are omitting from their stories. Check this out and see if it registers: Blinded by celebrity, the Washington Post's Eli Saslow reports today on Hillary's supposed success in California. Actually, Obama did far better than expected in that Democratic-establishment stronghold. Saslow writes about "Clinton's California dream team," starting out with an anecdote about Rob Reiner, one of the Hollywood meatheads supporting her. Getting to the point in a style typical of the supermarket tabloids, Saslow writes:
Reiner was one of those backers Clinton called on, and there were many others — people such as Amy Rao, a Silicon Valley businesswoman adept at fundraising; Antonio Villaraigosa, the dynamic mayor of Los Angeles; and Dolores Huerta, a labor activist beloved in the dusty San Joaquin Valley.
These four Californians were emblematic of the support Clinton received from the entertainment and technology industries and from the state's Latino leaders. In the week before the Super Tuesday contests, they pushed her message from the opulent ballrooms of San Francisco to the Mexican tiendas of East Los Angeles, working 20-hour days to combat Obama's accelerating popularity. But as Reiner watched the two candidates take the stage to a standing ovation, he couldn't help but wonder: Would their work prove powerful enough to stop Obama?
The Post is so often at the head of the daily-paper pack that it's shocking that this article makes no mention of Ron Burkle, the former bag boy who became Bill Clinton's most dependable bag man. For a quick study of Burkle, read Jason Horowitz's "The Complete Ron Burkle," a quick-and-dirty April 2006 rundown in the New York Observer.
More recent is "What’s Hidden in the Latest Numbers," John Heilemann's excellent piece of numerology in New York magazine. Here are a few of Heilemann's numbers from the February 6 piece:
$32 million, $13 million, $5 million, and $20 million. The first of these is how much the Obama campaign raised in January — a staggering figure. The second is how much the Clinton campaign raised that month — a relative pittance. The third is the amount, we learned today, that Hillary personally loaned her campaign in the past couple of weeks. And the fourth is the amount that her husband, Bill, is reported to be due as a payout after severing his ties with Ron Burkle — and which, presumably, will soon be available to pay for TV ads in Texas and Ohio.
It's Obama against the Democratic establishment, so prepare to be inundated by ad after ad after ad. While Bill Clinton gets cash back at the head of the line, you might want to go back to aisle 14 for the Dramamine.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:53 AM, January 8, 2008
The presidential contenders — a gaggle of self-styled New England patriots, at least temporarily — are hunkered down right now in New Hampshire waiting to see who's going to be voted off the continent.
At the last minute, trailing Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton swore that she is a "doer." Yeah, a doer in the headlights. Her eyes welled up with tears, so the stories say, and though it's more likely that they were crocodilian and that she was cynically playing the stereotypical-female card (or the press was), columnist Errol Louis of the New York Daily News says he thinks those tears were 100 percent saline:
Cynics will say Hillary Clinton's emotional response to a voter's question in New Hampshire was a calculated bid for sympathy, right down to the choking voice and eyes welling with tears, as she spoke about how high the personal and political stakes are in the presidential race.
I think every word was genuine and in no way a negative reflection on Clinton's fitness to be commander in chief. It's not an example of the age-old dilemma that powerful women face when trying to appear commanding and caring at the same time - a tightrope Clinton has always walked nicely, by the way.
But I'm also positive that such appeals can't possibly trigger the last-minute change of mind among voters it would take to save Clinton from losing today's primary to Barack Obama.
Meanwhile, we sit back haplessly and see this tiny — beautiful but really tiny — state decide for the rest of the country who we're going to be stuck with to follow the disastrous Bush regime.
And isn't it fitting that New Hampshire, whose population is 1.1 percent black in a nation whose overall population is 12.8 percent black, may decide the fate of the most viable black presidential candidate ever?
This is democracy? It's like Pakistan, only colder. New Hampshire's state motto is particularly apt: "Live free or die." After the primary results are in, several of these candidates will probably have to exit, ending their free ride of matching campaign funds and potential Secret Service protection and future taxpayer-funded royal living.
As the wife of a former president, Clinton will continue to live high with free protection from the commoners, but today still may turn out to be a black moment for her.
There's nothing wrong with weeping — it's only human — but if she cries tonight, those tears will be believable.
The one piece of truthtelling yesterday came from, of all people, Roger Clemens. The pitcher injected at least a little honesty into his Monday press conference when, acting like a 'roid rage driver after a fender-bender, he angrily said, "I put my butt on the line and I worked my tail off . . ."
Yes, he did put his butt on the line so his trainer, Brian McNamee, could inject something into it.
We're still waiting for Clemens's first bout of crying.
Posted by Harkavy at 6:57 AM, October 29, 2007
Merrill's Stan O'Neal wasn't ready for subprime time, but he was a record-setting fundraiser for Bush
 Merrill Lynch's ouster of CEO E. Stanley O'Neal is good timing for the financial behemoth, but it comes a few years too late for America and for thousands of Merrill employees.
He's being driven out for his reckless bundling of subprime mortgages into shaky securities that Merrill aggressively peddled and that are now shaking Wall Street's foundations. Yes, these big financial institutions play funny money with your monthly payments, making millions while you don't see a dime from their monopoly tactics.
Not that this is anything new. The explosion in subprime mortgages is caused in large part by predatory lending practices, which are particularly aimed at black people (O'Neal used to be one of those) and other minorities.
More on O'Neal in a minute, but as I wrote in April 2001 about this financiopathic scheme — "From the Subprime to the Ridiculous" — when the War of Terror was still being waged almost entirely on the domestic front by banks and companies like Merrill:
A guerrilla war that has dealt serious defeats to predatory lenders has spread from states like North Carolina and Massachusetts to big cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, which recently passed ordinances aimed at ending unfair banking practices. So why hasn't the fight against what some have called "financial apartheid" spread to the biggest city of all?
State regulators in Albany adopted new restrictions on finance companies late last year, but activists say the victims of those profiteers still lack meaningful protection—help that could come from city officials. In New York, Mayor Giuliani has taken no action against predatory lending, say community organizers, and the City Council has done practically nothing.
But the big banks are worried about Giuliani's potential successors. Citigroup has already laid big cash on the campaign coffers of prominent Democrats. …
Public Advocate Mark Green can say he probably was the first of the four Democratic mayoral candidates to make a big splash about the serious problem of blacks, Latinos, and the elderly being targeted by abusive lending practices. But neither he nor the other three Democrats have taken strong action to protect the poor from signing their lives away in unfairly structured loans.
Green saw it coming back in 1993, when his Consumer Affairs Office released a report pointing out a growing number of predatory loans in the city. Since then, Wall Street has financed a huge surge in the so-called subprime market, and more people than ever are being seduced into high-cost refinancing plans and shady home-improvement loans that are sending them toward bankruptcy. … Green isn't eager to enact new regulations.
In those days, Stan O'Neal, while firing thousands of Merrill employees, was recklessly expanding Merrill's subprime bidness.
In 2003, as I previously noted, O'Neal, the highest-ranking black man on Wall Street, was a reckless bundler in another way: He set a fundraising record for George W. Bush's campaign by sending out a letter that generated $279,750 from other rich people in less than three weeks' time, the most in such a such a short period.
O'Neal, one of the nine Bush "Rangers" on Wall Street, was a prime bundler before the term hit its current vogue.
As this moneychanger is being driven from the temple, he'll be dragging along a big bag of cash. Details of that aren't immediately known, but, like most CEOs, he had one helluva deal. For instance, as the New York Times's Eric Dash noted this past April, O'Neal had a particularly sweet clause in his Merrill deal just in case the big company wobbled so much that it fell under the control of another big company:
E. Stanley O’Neal could walk away with $251.4 million if a merger sets off a change-in-control payout.
Hell, that was incentive for him to be reckless enough take Merrill into the toilet. If he had stayed around long enough to really ruin the company to the extent that some other behemoth would take control, he would have gotten a quarter of a billion.
Now O'Neal joins the ranks of former Merrill employees. He probably won't be asked to join them for commiseration drinks. He fired more than 25,000 of them during his tenure.
Posted by Harkavy at 9:04 AM, October 2, 2007
Bad karma: Pitcher's wife gave cash to Bush campaign.
After the worst performance of his career personally guaranteed the worst collapse by a team in baseball history, New York Mets pitcher Tom Glavine was practically blasé — he talked about "we" this and "we" that.
Glavine told the Bergen (N.J.) Record's Steve Popper:
"Where do you want to start? You can point a finger at everything and anything really."
His refusal to stand up and personally take at least some of the blame is reminiscent of George W. Bush's well-known refusal to personally admit mistakes, even in light of the Iraq debacle.
Why be so oxymoronic as to bring up Bush? Back in 2004, Glavine's wife, Christine, gave $500 to the Bush-Cheney campaign. Federal records show that it's the couple's only contribution to any candidate.
That's nothing but bad karma.
Yankee fans had better beware. Alex Rodriguez is another Bush supporter. Records show that star third-baseman A-Rod gave the Bush-Cheney campaign $2,000 in August 2003.
We'll see whether A-Rod comes through in the playoffs and, if not, whether he'll take the heat.
We already know that Glavine, like Bush, is not a stand-up guy. As the Record's Bob Klapisch wrote:
The [Mets'] front office was appalled at Tom Glavine's attitude after the shellacking he took from the Marlins on Sunday. Despite allowing seven runs in one-third of an inning, dooming the season, the veteran left-hander all but ended his Met career when he refused to say he was devastated.
Instead, Glavine prattled on about moving on and learning from the experience, as if he'd just pitched in a mid-July game against the Pirates. "It was an incredibly stupid thing to say. Everyone was shocked to hear that from him," said one member of the organization. [General Manager Omar] Minaya said he would huddle with Glavine in the near future, setting the stage for the left-hander's inevitable return to the [Atlanta] Braves in 2008.
Contrast Glavine's reaction to that of San Diego Padres relief pitcher Trevor Hoffman, also a sure-fire Hall of Famer, whose miserable performance Monday night gave a playoff spot to the Colorado Rockies. Hoffman was all over the news this morning, saying:
"You can't really point to any other factor than my performance tonight."
Mets manager Willie Randolph, whose job is now in jeopardy, had no problem standing up, as the Record's Popper noted:
"I'm the manager of the team," said Randolph, who has spent nearly his entire life in New York, a market that he knows can be demanding. "I'm a big boy. I take full responsibility. I have no problem with that."
Glavine, though, had already cleaned out his locker on Sunday night and was headed home to his mansion in Alpharetta, Georgia — Atlanta's most exclusive suburb — where he's protected in the gated community of Country Club of the South. (His celeb neighbors in Alpharetta have included Jeff Foxworthy, Usher, Morris Day, Greg Maddux, and Damon Stoudamire.)
Glavine won his historic 300th game this season. Mission accomplished. An avid golfer, he'll stroke himself all winter and then possibly return to the Braves, with whom he spent his entire career before joining the Mets a few seasons ago as an aging baseball mercenary.
But it's up to Glavine. He was paid $7.5 million this season and has an option to return to the Mets for $9 million in 2008 — yes, that's a 20 percent raise after pitching the worst inning of his career in the biggest game of the season.
We New Yorkers have probably seen the last of Glavine's TV commercials on behalf of union workers. A leader of baseball's players union last decade, Glavine has earned lavish praise by the AFL-CIO for standing up for his union brothers in other, less glamorous, trades.
At some point, at least, Glavine was a stand-up millionaire guy.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:37 AM, September 28, 2007
Cuba's not a dead issue in the nutty debate over health care for poor kids.
Americans owe thanks this morning to Wyoming senator Mike Enzi for clarifying how different our health-care system is from Cuba's.
During heated debate in the Senate yesterday, Enzi zoomed in on a crucial point of George W. Bush's threatened veto of funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a federal-state partnership that provides coverage to about 6 million poor children.
The Senate passed a pretty good compromise to help out those kids. Bush, while asking for an increase of more than $40 billion for the Iraq war, has said he won't spend more than $30 billion on this children's health program. The Senate disagreed — even some of its rock-hard conservatives, such as Orrin Hatch and Pat Roberts — and passed a bill. Roberts, a hardline Kansas conservative, pointed out that Bush is misinformed. You think?
But Mike Enzi is tagging right along with Bush, telling his fellow senators:
"We shouldn't create a new federal entitlement and we shouldn't be laying the foundation for Castro-style healthcare, which Americans don't want."
Our kids should be so lucky — rather, our babies should live so long. Enzi and the other senators didn't bring this up, so I will:
Cuba's infant-mortality rate is lower than the U.S.'s, according to widely accepted stats from the UN's World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision.
The number of infant deaths per thousand live births in the period 2000 to 2005 was 6.1 in Cuba. It was 6.8 in the U.S. In deaths under the age of 5, Cuba's rate is 7.7, and the U.S.'s rate is 8.4
When it comes to overall death rates, Americans have it even worse.
The CIA's World Factbook reveals that the estimated overall death rate in the U.S. in 2007, per thousand people, is 8.26. Cuba's death rate is 7.14.
African kids have it worse than anyone else on the planet. But the U.S. is an anomaly among other developed nations. It has a higher overall death rate than the rates of most of those countries, like France, Sweden, and Japan. In addition, the U.S. overall death rate is higher than the rates in the following countries (this is a partial list):
Cambodia, Bangladesh, Kiribati, Yemen, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tuvalu, Mauritius, Maldives, Paulu, Nauru, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Columbia, Syria, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and Iran.
Yes, according to the CIA, the U.S. death rate is higher than the death rates in Iran, Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza.
If you really want to understand this current problem of health care for poor kids in the U.S., go to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where you can read a readable analysis of the bill and a breakdown of Bush's wrong analysis of the issue.
As for Enzi, a 63-year-old former Eagle Scout, shoe salesman and accountant, let's just say that his personal financial disclosure for 2006 shows that he ranks only 82nd in the Senate in net worth: His is $190,039 to $853,000. But 94 percent of his investments are in oil and gas, plus he does have at least $50,000 in his Senate credit union account — and the time to spend that cash: His tardiness rate is twice as high as the average senator's.
More to the point, he got no campaign money from Cuba, but the health-care industry poured $259,591 into Enzi's campaign coffers last year, second only to the support he got from big finance. And the health-care industry hates federal health care programs unless the money goes directly to the industry.
Enzi's PAC, Making Business Excel — get it? Michael B. Enzi, Making Business Excel? MBE, MBE? — raked in an additional $646,567 last year.
And no surprise here: Enzi gets more campaign money from D.C.-area operatives than he gets from the home folks in Wyoming.
Who cares about death rates when our political system is running so smoothly?
Posted by Harkavy at 11:59 AM, September 19, 2007
$15 billion of your money up in smoke for under-fire mercenary company, other defense contractors.
While Blackwater's mercenaries beg for mercy for killing a baby and 19 other people in Baghdad on Sunday, they're already working on another lucrative government contract on yet another foreign adventure: the "war on drugs."
In a major new outsourcing deal reported by only a few outlets, including the Army Times, Blackwater will divvy up a $15 billion pot of government gold, along with four huge defense contractors: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Arinc.
Blackwater claims to be building remote-control spy airships. Purty darn good for an army based in a little North Carolina town — no, it's Currituck, not Mayberry.
Arinc, a Maryland-based major supplier of airplane surveillance and passenger-counting equipment, is particularly stoked about the deal, which it announced on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:
ARINC already has a wealth of hands-on experience supporting just this type of program. We now expect to play a key role developing and fielding new solutions at the cutting edge of drug interdiction.
Hang on, Arinc, you're getting ahead of yourselves. Here's how GovExec.com's Katherine McIntire Peters describes this other privatized war, which apparently is necessary because, even with the privatized war in Iraq, we still don't have enough troops to conduct all these wars:
The contract, worth up to $15 billion over the next five years, illustrates the extent to which the Defense Department is relying on contractors to perform critical missions while combat forces are stretched thin by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In response to specific task orders issued under the indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract, companies will develop and deploy new surveillance technologies, train and equip foreign security forces and provide key administrative, logistical and operational support to Defense and other agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration.
According to the work statement provided to bidders, the vast majority of the drive will be conducted overseas.
Blackwater clearly knows how to deal with foreigners. But how does a little ol' company get to share our wealth with such huge defense contractors? No doubt it's got low friends in high places.
It probably didn't hurt the mercenary army that, according to federal campaign records, its top execs gave $1,000 to Tom DeLay's campaign on December 14, 2004. Or that they contributed mostly to other openly God-fearing lawmakers, like Bono pal Rick Santorum, Kansas's Todd Tiahrt, and Indiana's Mike Pence — whose campaign-finance tool is the Principles Exalt a Nation PAC.
Praise the Lord and pass the ammo. Better make that a blunt.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:41 AM, August 3, 2007
Karl Rove's revised (by me) disclosure form.
Free of charge, I'm updating the "liabilities" section of Karl Rove's personal-financial-disclosure report to the Federal Election Commission in light of Washington Post reporter Paul Kane's story this morning:
A young White House political aide was grilled inconclusively by the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday about the firings of U.S. attorneys after Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser, failed to show up at the committee's hearing in response to a subpoena.
J. Scott Jennings, 29, the deputy political director for the White House, refused to address the firings but tried to explain how thousands — or possibly millions — of White House e-mails to and from the political office were transmitted only through communications accounts controlled by the Republican National Committee.
That use of the RNC accounts put some of the political office's messages outside the reach of the National Archives, which sought to preserve them under a federal law mandating eventual public access, and the reach of Democratic congressional investigators, who have sought to look at them for evidence of improper actions.
Jennings offered a stripped-down explanation: He wanted a White House-supplied BlackBerry and was told no, and so he got one from the RNC, as many other political affairs aides had done. …
Jennings's testimony on the RNC e-mails was the most detailed explanation to date of why President Bush's top political aides had sent and received so many e-mails on their RNC accounts. House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) is probing whether the use of RNC e-mails for official purposes violated federal laws requiring presidential records to be preserved.
The RNC told Waxman recently that it has more than 200,000 e-mails sent and received by Rove, Jennings and Sara M. Taylor, the former White House political director.
Posted by Harkavy at 11:40 AM, July 18, 2007
One good thing about Rupert Murdoch's looking-good bid for the Wall Street Journal: He won't do much damage to the paper's editorial page.
The news pages, however, are a different matter. Looks as if the Dow Jones board didn't pay much attention to Slate's Jack Shafer, whose one-man campaign to stop this Caesar's seizure has made for entertaining/depressing reading. Last night, the board recommended to the Bancroft family that it accept the press barren's $5 billion offer. Those of us who admire, and depend upon, the Journal's dynamic news pages are left feeling a little barren ourselves.
Not all the Bancrofts are on board, but if the sale goes through, we'll be inundated pretty soon by the Fox Business Channel, which would be propped up by all that snazzy Dow Jones bidness info.
Don't expect this new cable business network to do any groundbreaking exposés of mighty China. Murdoch does more than just pour money into political campaigns of U.S. pols (most of it to Republicans). Shafer has pinned the tail on donkey Murdoch, who has repeatedly caved to Chinese authorities to protect his bidness interests.
The real concern, of course, is the Journal, which is the best daily paper in America. (Editorial pages don't count.) Some people at the Times (U.K.) say Murdoch's purchase didn't hurt their paper. And after all, it was that paper that broke the story of what became known as the Downing Street Memo. Others may point to the fact that, as many people say, Murdoch didn't directly interfere much with the Village Voice when he owned us. That may be true, but he was too savvy to destroy the Voice's lefty-rag rep, and thus its value, and we were small potatoes anyway.
The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, is a business-news behemoth, and business is Murdoch's main business.
Owners and publishers not only gripe at their editors about stories done or not done. They also set budgets. And they have other ways of getting over on their staffs. Citing a 1984 Journal story by Jane Mayer about Murdoch, Shafer makes a good point about the impact of publishers:
Mayer talks to Jack Newfield, then a columnist at the Village Voice, then owned by Murdoch — but one property that he never tamed. Newfield speaks thorns over Murdoch's habit of using his outlets to push his political views. "He doesn't have to come into the newsroom and personally slant stories. Reporters anticipate his needs — like Russia under Stalin," Newfield says.
It's bad enough that Murdoch has changed the New York Post into a rabid right-wing rag that marched blindly into Cheney's War of Terror. Those things happen — you can't blame Murdoch, after all, for Judy Miller's war propaganda in the New York Times. WSJ reporters are less likely than most to practice the kind of self-censorship that Newfield alluded to, but the WSJ is all about business journalism, and that has a direct impact on Murdoch's global dealings. The Journal's daily revelations of foul bidness practices won't sit well with Murdoch, and the editors under him will feel his heat one way or another.
Shafer (full disclosure: I know him and like him.) dreams of a Wall Street Journal that is as independent of Murdoch as another Murdoch property: The Simpsons.
That won't happen. Murdoch's more of a homer than Homer.
Posted by Harkavy at 11:15 AM, June 28, 2007
His company has made millions with a lizard as spokesman, but Warren Buffett is no Gordon Gekko.
The barely fictional Wall Street character that won Michael Douglas an Oscar was famous for saying, "Greed is good."
At a $4,600-a-seat Manhattan fundraiser for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, Buffett blasted the outrageous U.S. tax system in ways that few other billionaires do.
Some news outlets reported Buffett's wonderful dig at George W. Bush:
He recalled a saying, "buy stock in a company that's so good that an idiot can run it, because sooner or later one will." When he added, "now I think that sort of applies to the country too, actually," the audience burst out laughing.
"We have an opportunity in 2008 to repair a lot of damage," Buffett said.
That Reuters story noted that Hillary — who has spent a lot of time with the super-rich, including, pardon her husband, Denise Rich — mostly kept quiet, something she's getting skilled at doing. She has too much fundraising to do to start blasting the rich as Buffett did.
Unfortunately, you have to go overseas for the best story on Buffett's homily to the fellow rich. Under the blaring headline "Buffett blasts system that lets him pay less tax than secretary," Tom Bawden of the Times (U.K.) writes this morning:
Mr Buffett said that he was taxed at 17.7 per cent on the $46 million he made last year, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 per cent. Mr Buffett told his audience, which included John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley, and Alan Patricof, the founder of the US branch of Apax Partners, that US government policy had accentuated a disparity of wealth that hurt the economy by stifling opportunity and motivation.
Even a caveman can do the math.
Yes, Buffett is so rich from GEICO and a slew of other companies that he can afford not to be greedy. Shares of his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, are going for $107,000 each, and he owns more than 3 million shares. Nevertheless, he often says things that you don't have be a Junior Achievement member to love.
His folksy annual letters to Berkshire shareholders are rich, even for those of us who aren't. The wealthy are so fond of quoting Ronald Reagan, but the idiosyncratic Buffett taps a different vein. In his 2006 letter, speaking of "giant-company managers" he admires, Buffett picked the one Reagan quote that summed up his presidency and could easily apply to George Bush Jr. as well. Buffett wrote:
I don't think I could do the management job
they do. And I know I wouldn't enjoy many of the duties that come with their positions — meetings,
speeches, foreign travel, the charity circuit and governmental relations. For me, Ronald Reagan had it
right: "It's probably true that hard work never killed anyone — but why take the chance?"
Posted by Harkavy at 8:17 AM, June 18, 2007
The joke's on us: McCain and Bush share a stage in March 2005 during one of the GOP's innumerable PR campaigns to hoodwink people about Social Security and other issues.
Just as his final stab at the presidency is failing — being a fan of the war doesn't help — John McCain has finally succeeded at completely remolding his image.
He's spent a lifetime careening from one tragedy and/or scandal to another by embracing the monsters that pursued him. Now he's a full-fledged "reformer" in the eyes of journalists. It's a remarkable story, and not a new one — read Amy Silverman's still excellent May 1997 dissection, "The Pampered Politician" in Phoenix New Times — but he continues to fool journalists.
Today's A1 story in the New York Times portrays him as a maverick crusader who has finally pissed off big campaign donors just too many times.
Who would have guessed 25 years ago that McCain, a war hero and son of an admiral who morphed into a carpetbagging congressman solidly in the grasp of S&L financiopath Charles Keating and crooked governor Fife Symington, would ever be thought of as a reformer? From today's story, by David D. Kirkpatrick and Michael Cooper:
At a critical moment for him, his presidential campaign may be paying the price for a career of positions seemingly calculated to alienate constituencies that according to Washington custom should be prime sources of campaign cash. Mr. McCain’s campaign filings show just $61,000 from the military industry in the first quarter — less than half as much as the long-shot campaign of Democratic Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Followed by this:
The twist is lost on no one: a candidate who has spent decades fighting to minimize the influence of money on politics is under extraordinary pressure to scare up tens of millions of dollars to prove he can jump-start his campaign. And after months of trying to make up with factions of the conservative coalition he has snubbed in the past, fund-raising has turned into another example of the balancing act he faces as he tries to appeal to the Republican establishment without giving up his aura as a straight-talking reformer.
"Aura" is what he projects. Delusion is what it is. It's okay to say he's a reformer, I suppose, but how can you not at least mention his former ties to Keating, which were the subject of televised ethics hearings?
And yet, the guy is one of the few people in Congress who actively tries to clean up the fight game and stop the spread of guns. Captured by the North Vietnamese, he later embraced them. Hounded by campaign reformers for his ties to Keating, he later embraced campaign reform. Pilloried by the religious right for blasting Jerry Falwell in 2000, he embraced Falwell by delivering the 2006 commencement address at the evangelist's university. And McCain does continually hammer at Defense spending.
Silverman's piece from 10 years ago in New Times is required reading during what has to be McCain's final bid for the presidency. She explains why journalists are drawn to him, and she parses his career nicely.
If you can stand the misspellings and breathlessly conspiratorial tone, go to the Western Missouri Shooters Alliance and read David Ickes' dot-connecting piece from a few years back. It goes into McCain's link to the Hensley liquor fortune, which itself is linked to shady Arizonan Kemper Marley, whose attorney way back when was a young William Rehnquist.
Posted by Harkavy at 4:42 PM, February 25, 2004
Bush has one economic adviser who understands which numbers really count.
Last May 5, MIT economist Kristin J. Forbes contributed $5,000 to the 2003 President's Dinner Committee, one of the GOP's most powerful fund-raising tools. This was Forbes's first-ever campaign contribution to any presidential or congressional candidate or committee, according to FEC records. But her timing was good.
Ten days later, Bush announced the appointment of the 33-year-old Forbes to his three-member Council of Economic Advisers, the supposedly independent thinkers who serve at his pleasure䴊and who, by the way, almost never give campaign contributions to the people they serve.
Six days after that, on May 21, came the $2,500-a-plate dinner in D.C., which raised a staggering $22 million for GOP congressional campaigns. Nobody's reported her campaign donation until now, and Forbes, the youngest ever CEA member, hasn't replied to our request for comment.
Slate's Daniel Gross nailed Forbes's particulars last year when he noted that her most prominent journal article argued that income inequality was good for a country's economic growth. So when Forbes and her colleagues, Chair Greg Mankiw and Harvey S. Rosen release a statement saying, "The economy appears to have moved into a full-fledged recovery," as they did on February 10, check your wallet.
Posted by Harkavy at 4:41 PM, February 25, 2004
The following is a message from the Voice's Center for Missing and Exploited Political Children: Where are you, Mary Cheney? The openly gay daughter of Dick Cheney shelled out $850 last fall to the Bush-Cheney campaign, but she pulls down big bucks working for the campaign: $2,775.93 net, every two weeks. How does she feel about Bush's proposed constitutional amendment barring gay marriages? As we write this, she's been mum for weeks. People at dearmary.com are also wondering. Check out their plea at dearmary.com/mary/milkcarton.html.
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