Tag Archives: Big Media/Big Tech

Peter Schiff on last weeks jobs report and more

* Slight point of disagreement: One thing I struggle with is Peter’s insistence that we need manufacturing jobs (@0:35). Neither he nor any other single person knows what the economy needs. The free market will decide. Maybe there is a future in services.

Peter says service jobs lead to a trade deficit, but I suspect the whole notion of a trade deficit is BS. Governments (i.e. nations) don’t trade. People trade.

If I buy a loaf of bread from the bakery down the street, I’m richer in bread and the baker is richer in money. Subjective theory of value. We’re both happy.

If I take a long walk, and buy the bread from a baker in Canada, doesn’t the same situation hold true? Isn’t everybody richer? Why do we speak of this latter situation in terms of a trade imbalance? Perhaps it’s for the employment of all those government economists and television pundits.

* Meaningful recoveries all over the world. This is primarily a U.S. problem.

* Metals very strong because dollar is finally weakening. (Investors originally fled to the dollar, follow the old, incorrect philosophy that dollar=security.)

* Tax cuts are good, but government shouldn’t be targeting them, or combining them with business load guarantees.

* Some Bloomberg reporter dismissed double dib with the logic: things are pretty bad, so they probably can’t get worse.

* We probably can’t afford Obama’s latest idea – a new GI bill.

Newspaper Chain’s New Business Plan: Copyright Suits

open quoteBorrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money.

. . . .

Gibson’s vision is to monetize news content on the backend, by scouring the internet for infringing copies of his client’s articles, then suing and relying on the harsh penalties in the Copyright Act — up to $150,000 for a single infringement — to compel quick settlements. Since Righthaven’s formation in March, the company has filed at least 80 federal lawsuits against website operators and individual bloggers who’ve re-posted articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, his first client.close quote (Read more from wired.com)

1) The media is not in trouble, contrary to what many “media studies” students are taught in their University classrooms. The media is in a golden age. Competition with bloggers and independant media have established this golden age. It’s the old media whose lies are no longer effective that are in trouble. They hate losing money and influence.

2) Lets hope this isn’t the avenue the establishment to take back its lost influence over society.

3) Philosophically, intellectual property is not property. More:

Paul Krugman — more dangerous lies

The level of B.S. in this commentary is off the charts. Kudos to the reporter for sounding at least a little suspicious. It used to be hard for me to believe that this can be coming from a Princeton professor, Nobel Prize winner and NY Times columnist, but I think over the course of the past few years, my respect for those institutions has sunken to a more appropriate level.

Incidentally, I predicted Krugman’s call for additional stimulus over a year ago after seeing him speak at the University of Iowa:

When Paul Krugman furrowed his brow and stroked his chin and told the audience that the Obama administration’s plan to create 3.5 million jobs is . . . here he slowed his speech, demonstrating his thoughtfulness . . . “about the right size,” he neglected to elaborate on how government creates jobs.

If government has the power to create 3.5 million jobs, what is the moral justification for stopping at 3.5 million? Why not 4 million, or 10 million? Why not 150 million, so America’s entire labor force can feed from the government trough?

The fact is that government cannot create jobs. Government can only redirect them. Taxes must destroy private sector jobs which produce goods and services people want, so that government may pay for public sector jobs, which exist for political reasons.

The stimulus will make us poorer, and when it does so, Mr. Krugman will furrow his brow and stroke his chin and tell us very thoughtfully that it probably wasn’t big enough.

He cautioned against the “temptation to dwell on the causes of the bubble,” which seems completely nonsensical to me. . . . .

SA@TAC – Is Glenn Beck Killing the Tea Party?

open quoteSo long as anti-government sentiment remained the over-riding tea party narrative, it remained healthy, and so long as the trivial remained such, it was tolerable, becoming not much more than irrelevant fodder for the left. So what in God’s name, quite literally, was the purpose of the Promise-Keepers-like even Beck held last weekend?close quote

As I’ve mentioned before (here, here), Glenn Beck is a saboteur raised by the establishment to derail the liberty movement.

Columiba Univ. President: “Journalism Needs Government Help”

This goes to show you what sort of boot-licking, power hungry cowards rise to positions of prominence in American academia. No surprise he was recently named deputy chair of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

I almost choked when I read Lee Bollinger’s op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal advocating public financial support of the mainstream media. This is the Lee Bollinger who is the president of Columbia University and was recently named deputy chair of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The article says more about the writer and the mainstream media than it does its subject matter. It is unbelievable and irresponsible that anyone in his position should seriously advocate subsidies for the press.

What Bollinger is saying is that he wants us to pay for news from journalists he thinks we should read, not what we think we should read. As a law professor he is an expert in first-amendment issues. If he is an expert then he is the exemplar of the problem with scholarship and intellectualism in America today. He obviously distrusts our ability to make choices about the news we wish to read; he is eager to supplant our judgment with his. If he believes that forcing us to pay for news services we don’t want is the key to constitutional freedoms and freedom of the press, then we are in trouble because he is in a position to do something about it.

He frames the debate in these terms:

We have entered a momentous period in the history of the American press. The invention of new communications technologies — especially the Internet — is transforming the human capacity to speak, perhaps as monumentally as the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. This is facilitating the largest and fastest expansion of global economic growth in human history. Free speech and a free press are essential to a dynamic economy.

At the same time, however, the financial viability of the U.S. press has been shaken to its core. The proliferation of communications outlets has fractured the base of advertising and readers. Newsrooms have shrunk dramatically and foreign bureaus have been decimated. My best estimate is that there are presently only a few dozen full-time foreign correspondents from the U.S. covering all of China, despite the critical importance of that nation to our future.

Let me translate what he is saying — competition thrives because of new media, yet because newspapers and television journalism have failed to innovate and keep up we must subsidize them, because their reporting is (was) better. He cites NPR, PBS, and BBC as the ideals of journalism. The common theme is that these services are all supported by government. Further, he suggests, we need, as an instrument of foreign policy, to compete with China’s CCTV and Xinhua News, and Qatar’s Al Jazeera. If the BBC is the standard, then I urge you to actually listen to it as it drones on about what is happening in the UN or Mali today.

Bollinger believes that press freedoms and government support are compatible, not antithetical. If anything in history is obvious, it is the fragility of freedom of the press. Of course, this is something Jefferson and Madison fully understood when they thought they nailed down press freedom forever. (Read more from mises.org)

The one and only Peter Schiff on the dollar, bonds, GM’s IPO, the media and more

* Bond Fund manager and Freddie/Fannie-guaranteed mortgage holder Bill Gross advocated the Freddie/Fannie bailout. He has recently suggested government should 100% nationalize Freddie and Fannie, and allow everybody to refinance at a lower rate.

* Bill Gross argued this would stimulate consumer spending and thereby the economy. Of course, what our economy needs is more savings, not spending.

* Real Estate prices are still too high and should never have been propped up. They need to come down. Artificially high prices for homes deprive more productive endeavors of resources.

* Do not buy Government Motors IPO. Some profit might be made by those with good timing, but they will go bankrupt again. The bailout prevent the restructuring they needed. They company is not run to produce good cars at a profit. It is run to serve labor.

* Dollar strengthens despite bad news based on weakness in stocks. Old habits (like buying dollars on bad news) die hard.

* Congressional Budget Office increases deficit estimate, but the estimate remains complete bullshit. Nothing to do with reality.

* Big Media (Robert Reich) continues to sing the praises of debt, and demonize saving.

* Peter’s predictions about Freddie and Fannie come true.

* Refinancing homes at (artificially suppressed) lower rates is creating a ticking time bomb for banks who will be holding 30-year paper. Once the paper becomes worthless there will be rampant bank failures.

* NY Times publishes BS article about why we won’t have a recession. Sheer propaganda. The implicit argument is that a zero Fed rate will avoid a recession. This is nonsense.

* Bonds remain overpriced, as Americans who attempt to save decide to lend money to the government. Inflation will punish bond-buyers.

* A better scheme for unemployment benefits would be an initial lump sum. This would avoid the disincentive to work. Of course, we’d all be better off if people decided for themselves whether or not to buy unemployment benefits, creating a market for various flavors of unemployment insurance.

* Peter has bet against the advice he gives. If the government actually followed his advice, it would undermine his investments.

* The sooner the crash happens, the better, because the longer the malinvestment persists, the more effort it will take for the economy to restructure.

Ron Paul on the Mosque debate: “Nero fiddled while Rome burned”

“Is the controversy over building a mosque near ground zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery?

“It has been said, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” Are we not overly preoccupied with this controversy, now being used in various ways by grandstanding politicians? It looks to me like the politicians are “fiddling while the economy burns.”

“The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.

“Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”

“Just think of what might (not) have happened if the whole issue had been ignored and the national debate stuck with war, peace, and prosperity. There certainly would have been a lot less emotionalism on both sides. The fact that so much attention has been given the mosque debate, raises the question of just why and driven by whom?

“In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it. (Read more from caffeinatedthoughts.com)

Time Magazine Exploits Afghan Girl Who Had Her Nose Cut off to Defend Occupation

The cover of the new issue of Time — with its photograph of a young woman whose nose and ears were cut off by the Taliban, accompanied by headline “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan” — is disgraceful on several levels. (The image is here, and no, it’s not pretty; the cover story is here.)

Atrios (here and here) and Greg Mitchell (here) have made the obvious point: um, this happened while we were in Afghanistan. So the proof of how necessary it is for us to protect young women from brutal attacks of this kind is the fact that we couldn’t protect this young woman?

And does anyone at Time know the story of Zahida Parveen? She suffered a similar attack, yet even more brutal: her husband, believing she was having an affair, not only cut off her nose and earlobes but blinded her and beat her while hanging her upside down. Oh, but that took place in Pakistan in 1998. Following Time’s logic, I suppose the U.S. should have invaded and occupied Pakistan to prevent this from happening. (Read more from blogs.alternet.org)

This is so fucking dishonest, and an example of why I find it hard to not hate the mainstream media. They would just as quickly sensationalize the Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja if they could blame it on terrorists.