Two cheers for Papandreou

I personally am quite happy the Prime Minister George Papandreou has halted this Greek tragedy unfolding in Europe and decided to put the draconian austerity program for his country's "rescue" to a referendum. Greece, after all, is the birthplace of democracy and the political elites in Europe have wreaked enough harm on their voters without making themselves accountable.

Only two cheers because he should have stood up to the bullies from Germany, France and elsewhere much sooner. There is no reason that the Greek public should have to pay for Germany's prosperity, but that is the result of 10 years of the euro, foisted on Europeans by the French and the Germans.

I happened to be in Athens the day Papandreou's father, Andreas, won his election to become prime minister in 1981, forming the first left-of-center government in Greece in half a century. The celebration in Syntagma Square was heady, much like the dancing in the streets that greeted Mitterrand's election earlier that year. If the Greek Socialist Party can't stand up to the bankers, who can?

The Greeks only sin was to claim their European heritage as part of the euro zone. The Germans have been the beneficiaries of that scheme to lock the slower-growing countries of southern Europe into a currency union with Germany and ensure that German exports would not become too expensive. It was clear the Greeks could not keep up and piled up the debt to counter the surpluses accruing to Germany. And yet now the Germans, smug and self-righteous, blame the Greeks for being lazy, selfish and living beyond their means.

Let Greece leave the euro zone, regain its own currency and devalue as often as necessary. That would be a truly market-driven austerity, and not this dictatorship of the banks. The problem, of course, is that the euro cannot survive the departure of Greece, for Italy and probably Spain would quickly become untenable as well.

Papandreou has simply brought matters to a head more quickly. The Greek electorate could never have submitted to the austerity exacted by the Germans, and there's no reason they should have to. Let the Germans figure out what to do with their banks. They have money enough.

DSK

So now Jack Lang and other Socialist Party members are saying Dominique Strauss-Kahn can return to politics in France, as reports suggest that the prosecution's case against him for sexual assault may collapse.

Maybe, but I think too much has come out about his behavior that even the French, for all their tolerance of sexual peccadilloes, will find reprehensible. Yes, an elected Socialist president could appoint him prime minister, but why would any politician want to help rehabilitate a potential rival? There are many other potential prime ministers who can perform the job capably.

DSK evidently sailed close to the wind for a long time and got engulfed by a wave he couldn't control. May be just time to retire with his wife's millions, if she'll still have him.

Jose Vargas

Haven't blogged here for a while but had to say something about Jose Vargas's moving account of his life as an undocumented alien.

In all evidence, Vargas is a massively talented, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who anguished over the secret of being an illegal alien for 18 years -- what a story! His simple, straightforward account deserves another Pulitzer in a category that doesn't exist.

A sidebar is how the pusillanimous Post once again failed itself and failed journalism in spiking the story. I'm glad I already canceled my subscription (and earlier this week rejected another desperate call to re-subscribe for pennies an issue). Graham should retire and Brauchli should be fired. Once again, the New York Times proved itself virtually the sole hope for the future of daily journalism in this country.

But the main story, and hopefully the main impact, is to address this burning issue and to find a political solution. The government faces the choice of deporting Vargas, not likely to be a very popular move, or proposing a solution to illegal immigration. We'll see what happens.

Paul Benedict Arnold Krugman?

Oh my, Paul Krugman appears to have defected to the troglodytes with a superficial swipe at Modern Monetary Theory.

Fortunately, the ever-vigilant Bill Mitchell is ready to reply chapter and verse.

The question is, since Krugman himself says the argument is not really topical right now, is why he has a bee in his bonnet to make this point now?

Politico

More evidence that Politico is moving toward a pronounced right-wing bias. Talking Point Memo's Josh Marshall drew attention to this story:

There's a feature piece in Politico today that perfectly captures the assumptions most national political reporters, especially at certain publications, bring to the core questions of budgetary politics. The gist of the piece is that 'we' all agree that the message of the 2010 election was that the public has decided that government is too big and wants dramatic budget cuts. But now it seems like the governors who are really going whole hog on this -- overwhelming Republicans -- are getting really unpopular. Ergo, the public isn't really ready for the "grown-up conversation" about budgets that it seemed they might be.

The actual piece by Alexander Burns is even more mind-boggingly obtuse than you would think from this critique:

It was supposed to be one of the clearest messages of the 2010 elections: Voters were finally fed up with government spending.

It felt like the usual rules had changed, and that Americans were worried enough about the size of government to support a new era of belt-tightening. They wanted leaders to make the tough choices – and would stick by the ones who did.

Now, a new wave of polling has challenged that consensus, raising serious questions about whether voters really are yearning for a grown-up conversation about the cost of government — or would simply rather keep punting the problem down the road, just like in the past.

Almost every governor who’s tried to deliver a take-your-medicine message has paid a price. And widespread polling data suggests a chasm between what Americans say they want and the price they’re prepared to pay to get there.

How convoluted can a logic get?

Let's start from a much more reasonable premise. Americans in the mid-term elections were concerned about unemployment and were unhappy with what a Democratic administration and Congress were able to achieve to reduce joblessness. So many Democrats stayed home and many others voted for Republicans.

When these Republicans got to office, they used this "mandate" to pursue a blindly ideological path of austerity designed to sabotage the role of government. People definitely don't want that and the polls reflect this fact.

As for Politico, I'm beginning to suspect that it's being groomed for sale and Murdoch is one of the prospective buyers.

Exposing Christie

This front-page story exposing the lies behind Chris Christie's "straight talk" is why I switched my daily subscription to the NY Times from Washington Post:
Christie’s Talk Is Blunt, but Not Always Straight

Christie's apparent sincerity and plain truth-speaking shtick are simply deceptive courtroom practices transferred to the political arena. This is the point I was making in my earlier blog on Straight Talk.

Maybe Christie fooled juries with it and he certainly has snowed most of MSM, but his lies are too big to escape notice forever.

Shame on the Post

The Washington Post continues its abominable, one-sided coverage of the Madison protests. The p. 3 story today, by Brady Dennis and Peter Wallsten with no dateline, again parrots Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, adopting his narrative throughout, with no counter-balancing comments or perspective from the unions. In fact, there does not appear to be a single live quote in the long story -- that is, a quote that does not come from a public appearance available to all media or a press release.

The reporters should be ashamed of themselves. The national editor or whoever is responsible for this coverage should be ashamed of himself or herself, and Marcus Brauchli should be ashamed of himself for letting the newspaper that made Watergate happen sink to this level.

The story does deal with the prank call from Ian Murphy, posing as David Koch, to Walker. Instead of exposing Walker to the ridicule he deserves for being taken in by this hoax, the reporters simply quote his affirmation to the faux Koch that "This is our moment."

Would it really kill these full-time staff reporters to pick up the phone and talk to somebody at the unions?

Hello New York Times

I had put my NY Times subscription back down to Sunday only because daily home delivery is a bit pricey, but yesterday, right after I canceled my Washington Post subscription, I called up to restore it to seven days a week. (But see update below.)

Yesterday, the Times had two or three stories taking a union angle on the Madison protests (while still reporting what all those governors were doing). And today it had this nice little story about Wisconsin and Indiana Democrats on the lam in Illinois.

As the great media shakeout proceeds it does look like the Times will consolidate its position as the national quality daily. They, too, do many silly things and the deterioration in quality -- in copy editing alone, for instance -- from their previous high standards is noticeable. But all in all, they still get the job done.

I do find the way overrated Andrew Ross Sorkin's shtick with his "Dealbook" annoying -- WTF kind of annoying -- but you have to take the good with the bad.

Update: Sigh. Seeing the magazine preview today in the Times online with yet another fawning portrait of Chris Christie by Matt Bai makes me realize how unsatisfactory even the Times can be.

Goodbye Washington Post

I'm just staggered by the one-sided reporting in today's Post on the biggest story in the country. An off-lead story on the union protests in three states bylined by Michael A. Fletcher and Brady Dennis and datelined Trenton, N.J., of all places focuses almost exclusively on the point of view of these brave governors.

The budget fights initiated by Republican governors represent a multi-state effort by like-minded politicians to solve budgetary problems in part by weakening public employee unions and demanding significant concessions from workers. After the November elections, Republicans now control many more state legislatures and governorships.

Although the particulars may differ - some governors are seeking to end collective bargaining rights, others are not - the state executives share both a political philosophy and a conviction that the public is prepared to support these measures if they help fix long-term budgetary problems.

Republican officials said there is no coordinated campaign underway. Governors are loosely communicating, sharing text messages and occasional phone calls as they offer moral support to one another.

The story goes on and on like this, giving most of the facetime to the "plain-spoken" Christie, who is one of a "growing group of governors that is attacking yawning budget deficits by facing down public employees and promising not to raise taxes."

There is not a single quote from a union official, not in the top of the story, not in the middle, not in the bottom. How one-sided and irresponsible can you be and still get away with it?

It's the last straw. I've put up with the sloppy and biased reporting up until now, the useless and desperate cosmetic changes, the gutting of the reporting staff, the flippant idiocies of Dana Milbank, the rank inconsistencies of Fred Hiatt's editorial page and reluctanly renewed my subscription. But I'm calling today to cancel. Goodbye Washington Post. R.I.P.

Straight talk

The deterioration of the mainstream media is more than ever evident in the sloppy reporting about the deficit debate. Bullies like NJ Gov. Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Walker are reported as "straight talkers" because that's what they say they are. The hopeless Dana Milbank (will someone please take away his keyboard) calls Christie ugly but says that's appropriate because he speaks "ugly truths."

One blogger called him on that because the implication is that Christie is speaking the truth, when in fact he is simply telling one partisan side of the story and deliberately misleads his audience. The Post, with Milbank's fawning report on Christie's speech in Washington, and its consistently misguided editorial page, is the worst offender and is hastening its own demise. There is no conservative constituency for the Post and by alienating its liberal constituency, it is sealing its doom.

The Times today at least is playing up the backlash story. But anyone who thinks the reporting in MSM is in any sense objective is living in the past. There was a brief period when society was homogenous enough that narrowly balanced reporting held a semblance of objectivity. The current polarization in society has made that impossible. Reporters -- who apparently are no longer required to attribute most of their reporting -- choose sides by their very language, and even those who may be liberal in their own political leanings become ready tools of politicians who now see that lying pays.

To paraphrase the old saying: If there's anyone out there who thinks they're getting "straight talk" from Christie and Walker, I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.

Stan Musial

Stan Musial was one of the recipients this week of the presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.

I was an avid Cardinals fan growing up in St. Louis and saw Stan the Man play once at the old Busch stadium in a game against the Milwaukee Braves, with Warren Spahn pitching.

Even when we moved back to Pittsburg, I listened to the Cardinals every night on the radio. That was the team with Bill White, Ken Boyer, Curt Flood, Julian Javier and other legends. Harry Carey and Jack Buck called the games. It just doesn't get any better than that.

The end of Wall Street

I've been surprised by the lack of reaction to news that Germany is taking over the New York Stock Exchange. Perhaps because it was portrayed as a merger, people don't realize it is a takeover, even though both NYT and WSJ spelled it out his morning?

It was a scandal back in the day when the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center. Now the very symbol of American capitalism is being swallowed up by the Germans. Can people simply not get their heads around the idea that we are actually surrendering the temple to Money on Wall Street? The very building that gives Wall Street its meaning as the center of American finance?

Where is Michael Bloomberg bewailing the end of New York as a global financial center, upstaged by Frankfurt and even by London, which at least retains its primacy in its link with Toronto? Where is Chuck Schumer? Since when does a merger not mean a huge loss of jobs for the acquired company? And not just NYSE itself, but everyone who works in the securities business in New York. Wall Street vanishes and New York has no better claim on being the country's financial capital than Chicago or Boston or San Francisco, perhaps less so.

But wait, you say, the stock exchange will still be there. No, it won't. It's gone, subsumed into a German-controlled financial conglomerate that will ensure stock trading of American equities will become as deracinated from New York as Chinese equities.

But maybe this is all premature, and the deal will fall apart. Or Bloomberg and Schumer have weapons they have not yet deployed. Or that toothless old, uh, lady, the SEC, will put the kabosh on it. Doubtful.

So why aren't people reacting? Has the revulsion against Wall Street reached the point that everyone is thinking Good Riddance? Let Frankfurt worry about Goldman Sachs. The rich underwriting and trading culture that sustained Wall Street has long since vanished into the ether of online trading. The New York Stock Exchange resisted the transition to electronic trading for too long, and then came too late to ever recapture its lead. Or perhaps those jobbers knew what was afoot, and that the exchange was doomed from the moment Nasdaq opened its doors.

Congratulations to Deutsche Boerse. Who would have thought that a little company that used to occupy the attic offices of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange would one day cast its net across the Atlantic and across the continent. For Deutsche Boerse has now succeeded in capturing Euronext after all.

It also signals the victory of futures and derivatives over stocks and bonds, for that is the muscle that enabled Deutsche Boerse to take over the Big Board, which failed here as well to anticipate the future. End of an era.

Aol strikes again

I can't see anything good coming out of the merger between Aol and Huffington Post. I was working at then-AOL when it undertook what is largely seen as the most disastrous merger of all time with its takeover of Time Warner. As a deadweight in Time Warner, Aol missed all the chances to reinvent itself as something useful. After it was spun off and Tim Armstrong came along saying that the company's future lay in content, I was more skeptical than ever.

The idea of the merger, apparently, is to harness HuffPost's large audience to Aol's other content and make real money on ads. There are so many things wrong with this conceptually, it's hard to know where to begin. HuffPost has its audience because it put up content that people wanted to read. The fact that Aol's expensive new content has not found its own audience speaks for itself.

But the crux of the matter is that what makes HuffPost work, and the only thing of value to pay $300 million for, is that the site's hugely left-wing audience loves it for a freedom it cannot possible have as part of a large corporation. The site's main capital is a group of bloggers and commenters and "community" that will now search for a new spiritual home, and leave HuffPost bereft of so much Aol wanted to acquire.

I was equally baffled by the linkup between Daily Beast and Newsweek. Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong are presumably all smart people, so maybe there's just something I don't see.

Even in the AOL-Time Warner merger there were areas where you could pretend there were synergies. There's nothing visible in this new merger except irreparable damage to HuffPost, which was on its way to being something, and another lost cause for Aol, which may finally succumb to its long series of mistakes and missed opportunities.

Howard Kurtz

Wow, Howard Kurtz was erratic even when he had good editors and now at Daily Beast he is verging into total incompetence. His naive whitewash of the Tucson shooting is embarrassing and shameful.

Can he really be stupid enough to write this: "This isn't about a nearly year-old Sarah Palin map; it's about a lone nutjob who doesn't value human life"?

Apparently. The lesson here is clear: inflammatory rhetoric, while poisoning politics for those of use who think of ourselves as rational and stable, can set off the mentally ill, and it is not just the "fault" of the mentally ill. It's like the pathetic shill on TV Sunday who once again proffered the feeble NRA excuse that it's not guns that are responsible since most gun owners are adult. The problem is that a mentally unstable young man, with a documented history of disruption and borderline violence, can get an automatic weapon so easily.

It is not a sign of unity or compassion to bury our heads in the sand like Kurtz would have us do and pretend that, hey, what can you do, there's nutjobs out there? The Pima County sheriff has a much better grasp of what's going on than this useless pundit.

Update: And let's add Peter Beinart, another Daily Beast contributor, whose temporizing pseudoliberalism pretty much destroyed The New Republic to the list of white-washers.

William Daley

I don't really have a problem with William Daley as White House chief of staff, though his work for JP Morgan Chase is disturbing in light of the role Wall Street is now playing in the nation's economy and politics. But he is certainly the cabinet-level stature that Chris Matthews was calling for, and as some have pointed out, he is at least a "grown-up." Perhaps, as E.J. Dionne says, his very presence will reassure the corporate world and give Obama more leeway to veer left, though I think that's optimistic.

What's noticeable is that naming the White House chief of staff is not only front-page news, but lead story news. Don't think that was the case when Nixon named Haldeman and Ehrlichman, though they may be the reason why it is so newsworthy now. But I think it also means that people no longer perceive the president as making his own decisions, and see him rather as an arbiter of advice rendered. Certainly in the first half of Obama's term, decision-making remained totally opaque and it would be disappointing to think that Obama himself made so many bad decisions.

Steven Pearlstein

This Washington Post columnist hit a home run today with his passionate denunciation of Republicans' use of "job-killing" as a hot button description of Democratic policies to distract from the job-killing aspect of their own policies.

Here is Pearlstein's stirring conclusion: "So the next time you hear some politician or radio blowhard or corporate hack tossing around the "job-killing" accusation, you can be pretty sure he's not somebody to be taken seriously. It's a sign that he disrespects your intelligence, disrespects the truth and disrespects the democratic process. By poisoning the political well and making it difficult for our political system to respond effectively to economic challenges, Republicans may turn out to be the biggest job killers of all."

'Wealthy'

I never did understand why Obama and the Democrats latched onto the $250,000 threshold as defining the "wealthy" in the whole tax cut debate.

Just this week, the president explained that Robert Gibbs would be leaving the White House because he's been working for "relatively modest pay." Yet, Gibbs' $172,000 salary, along with the earnings from wife, a practicing attorney, would almost certainly put them in that category of "wealthy."

There's no question Gibbs will make more money working as a "private consultant" for the Obama reelection campaign, but the president's remark exposes the hypocrisy of his rhetoric.