There was recently a big fuss about how the Hostess company was going out of business, because many people seemed to have a sentimental childhood attachment to its products though I personally had never eaten any, perhaps because I had not grown up in the US. Much of the media spread the message that the cause was that the workers were not willing to grant huge concessions in salary and benefits for the company to stay in business. [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald points out that the soft-glove treatment given by the government to mega-bank HSBC for its crimes illustrates how the US has now gone to a system where a small class of individuals and corporations have been openly given immunity from prosecution for even major crimes, while at the same time ordinary people are cracked down hard for even minor ones. [Read more…]
Reports have emerged that the head of the Fox News network Roger Aisles sent an emissary K. T. McFarland, a Fox News analyst, to Afghanistan in 2011 to try and persuade David Petraeus to run for president on the Republican ticket in 2012, promising that he and Rupert Murdoch would bankroll his candidacy and throw the support of the news network behind him. [Read more…]
The members of the US senate love to describe their institution reverentially as the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body’ but that description gets more laughable by the day as its use of arcane processes to avoid doing anything become more and more ludicrous. [Read more…]
An excellent animation that tells, in a remarkably accurate and understandable way, the story of how we got where we are today and what we should do about it. (Thanks to reader Tim.) [Read more…]
Sunday was the first day that people in the state of Washington could get married following the successful passage of the same-sex ballot measure. Matt Stopera spent the day at Seattle city hall taking photographs of the long line of people who had turned up, accompanied by their friends and families, to get married. [Read more…]
The Atlantic‘s Robert Wright says what I have been thinking too, that if there is one entity that can survive a drop over the ‘fiscal cliff’ because its existing bloat will cushion the fall, it is the defense budget. He argues that the money it will lose will not harm America’s national security in the least. [Read more…]
In a comment to an earlier post, commenter sailor1031 raised a point that has also been bugging me but which I had done nothing about, and that is the use of the word ‘entitlements’ to cover Social Security and Medicare. [Read more…]
Activists in the Democratic party are gearing up to counter disturbing signs that a bad budget deal is in the works, trading small rises in the marginal tax rates for the top 2% (smaller than the already small raises envisaged) in return for reductions in Social Security and Medicare. [Read more…]