The mess in Wapping

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Michaela

By Schumpeter ( The Economist)

ON JULY 15th “Fox & Friends”, a show on Fox News, condescended to cover the scandal that is mesmerising the world. Steve Doocy, the host, and Bob Dilenschneider, his guest, conceded that there is a serious problem with hacking: recent victims have included the Pentagon, American Express, Citigroup and Bank of America. But why are the mainstream media focusing on hacking at the News of the World? And why are they obsessing about something that happened a decade ago in London, when America is teetering on the brink of default? Having implied that the News of the World was the hacked rather than the hacker and blasted other media for neglecting the great issues of the moment, “Fox & Friends” moved swiftly on to discussing Casey Anthony, a mother freshly acquitted of murdering her child.

That is probably the dumbest comment yet on the crisis at News International. The smartest may be a piece that Conrad Black, a former press baron who is between spells in jail, wrote in the Financial Times. He described Rupert Murdoch as a “great bad man”. (True to form, Lord Black added that this phrase was first used by Lord Clarendon to describe Oliver Cromwell but was later applied to Napoleon.) Mr Murdoch, he says, has broken his word and debased journalistic standards. But he has also revolutionised an industry.

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No, they don’t represent us

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Michaela

Thousands of “indignant” demonstrators are angered by politicians’ faliure to solve high unemployment and economic woes.

 

 

From the English edition of the Spanish  Newspaper ” El Pais”

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Terrorism is propaganda

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Michaela

By Dr Robert Lambert

With the death toll nearing 100, Anders Behring Breivik has been arrested and charged with Norway’s worst act of terrorism. His lawyer has indicated that Breivik had planned the attack for some time and would explain in court on Monday why he thought his act of terrorism was necessary.

After a predictable and revealing knee-jerk response by security experts interpreting the massacre at a Labour Party summer camp on Utoya island and a car bomb attack on a government building in Oslo as the work of Muslims inspired or directed by al-Qaeda, it transpires that the real culprit in the case was more likely to be motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment.

Significantly, early reports reveal Breivik’s admiration for bigoted groups such as the English Defence League and Stop the Islamification of Europe, which campaign against Muslims and the building of mosques. Similarly, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in Holland appears to win Breivik’s approval because it seeks to protect Western culture from a growing threat of so-called “Islamification”.

While we must await the outcome of police investigations and court proceedings before reaching any firm conclusions about Breivik’s motivation, it will nevertheless be instructive to begin an analysis of a violent extremist nationalist milieu in Europe and the US, and its dramatic shift towards anti-Muslim and Islamophobic thought since 9/11. To be sure, this will certainly be more relevant than an analysis of al-Qaeda terrorism.

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Love is a losing game

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Michaela

Over futile odds
And laughed at by the gods
And now the final frame
Love is a losing game

Amy Winehouse, RIP

 

 

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Left and Right

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Michaela

By Ibrahim Hewitt

A few years ago, the respected Cambridge scholar T J Winter, also known by his Muslim name of Abdal Hakim Murad, gave a fascinating lecture to Humanities staff and students at the University of Leicester. The title was “Islam and the threat of the West”, turning on its head the more usual – then and now – “Islam and the threat to the West”.

It was a novel approach which, in a nutshell, illustrated that, historically, aggression has been directed more from Europe to the Muslim world than the other way round. His evidence for such a view was impeccably sourced.

I thought about Abdal Hakim’s talk this morning as I read the reports coming in of the dreadful bombing and shooting in Norway wherein, of course, there was speculation that these two events were “Islamic-terror related”. No doubt we will learn more over the coming days, but the early signs are, in fact, that the perpetrator was a “blond, blue-eyed Norwegian” with “political traits towards the right, and anti-Muslim views”. Not surprisingly, the man’s intentions were neither linked to these “traits”, nor to his postings on “websites with Christian fundamentalist tendencies”. Any influence “remains to be seen”; echoes of Oklahoma 1995.

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Life is not a burden

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Michaela

Florian Schlosser on embodying Truth

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Relief or solution ?

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Michaela

By N Kulish and S Erlanger

The latest bailout in the Greek rescue has all the elements of what is fast becoming almost commonplace European intrigue.

The French president arranges a private summit meeting with the German chancellor. Europe’s top central banker resists calls to allow Greece to write off some debt, fearing it could undermine the euro. The Greeks cry out that their sovereignty is infringed.

And only when markets teeter toward panic is a deal finally reached in Brussels to stave off more attacks on the euro zone’s vulnerable southern countries and prevent, for the moment at least, a broader run on financial markets.

The dramatic elements in the latest round of messy European compromise are not in themselves new. The question is whether the deal reached Thursday for another Greek bailout, this time valued at $157 billion, and relief for Portugal and Ireland is a decisive step to calm Europe’s financial storm or simply postpones another reckoning for the weakest southern European economies and the euro itself.

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Different visions for our country

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Michaela

By JACKIE CALMES and CARL HULSE

Negotiations over a broad deficit reduction plan collapsed in acrimony on Friday after Speaker John A. Boehner suddenly broke off talks with President Obama, raising the risk of an economy-shaking default.

The latest turn in the summer’s epic clash between the White House and Congressional Republicans came little more than a week before the government hits its borrowing ceiling, and set off accusations from both sides about who was to blame.

A visibly angry President Obama, in a hastily scheduled White House news conference, demanded that Congressional leaders come to the White House on Saturday morning. “I want them here at 11 a.m. tomorrow,” he said. “They are going to have to explain to me how it is that we are going to avoid default.”

Mr. Obama said Mr. Boehner had stopped returning his calls when it became clear that rank-and-file House Republicans would not agree to raise revenues on wealthy Americans as part of a debt-reduction deal, despite Mr. Obama’s concessions on reducing future spending for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Both sides have sought a deficit-reduction agreement as part of the essential vote to raise the government’s $14.3 trillion debt limit, which will be reached Aug. 2.

In a letter to his Republican colleagues on Friday night, Mr. Boehner said, “A deal was never reached, and was never really close.” He added: “In the end, we couldn’t connect. Not because of different personalities, but because of different visions for our country.”

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Of hazard and hope

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Michaela

There are currently 15 million refugees and internally displaced persons in the world – that is 15 million stories of upheaval, dislocation, want and misery. 

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Lack of wisdom

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Michaela

By Paul Krugman

These are interesting times — and I mean that in the worst way. Right now we’re looking at not one but two looming crises, either of which could produce a global disaster. In the United States, right-wing fanatics in Congress may block a necessary rise in the debt ceiling, potentially wreaking havoc in world financial markets. Meanwhile, if the plan just agreed to by European heads of state fails to calm markets, we could see falling dominoes all across southern Europe — which would also wreak havoc in world financial markets.

We can only hope that the politicians huddled in Washington and Brussels succeed in averting these threats. But here’s the thing: Even if we manage to avoid immediate catastrophe, the deals being struck on both sides of the Atlantic are almost guaranteed to make the broader economic slump worse.

In fact, policy makers seem determined to perpetuate what I’ve taken to calling the Lesser Depression, the prolonged era of high unemployment that began with the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and continues to this day, more than two years after the recession supposedly ended.

Let’s talk for a moment about why our economies are (still) so depressed.

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