Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men.
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26 January 2012
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19 January 2012
Ravitch: Big Business, Cuomo Have Failed to Lead on Transportation | Streetsblog New York City
The business leaders of today, Ravitch argued, lack the public spirit of that earlier generation, and he expressed little optimism that they would eventually become advocates for the infrastructure of their city. “Their preoccupation on the whole is, honestly, keeping the Bush tax cuts, keeping the government from regulating them and making sure they’re too big to fail,” said Ravitch. Indeed, who has heard current Chase CEO Jamie Dimon ever mention the MTA?
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28 October 2011
What does Third Way bring to table? They bring no activists, no door knockers, no phonebankers, no silo of issue supporters. They don’t speak for Democrats. They don’t even bring in much money for candidates who back their corporate agenda. And the tide of public opinion is obviously against them right now, to say nothing of political momentum. So why are they and their media flacks relevant, again?
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20 June 2011
Neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.
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23 May 2011
N.C. Gov Won't Veto Anti-Municipal Internet Bill
There is a need to establish rules to prevent cities and towns from having an unfair advantage over providers in the private sector.
Is there? This is the state of North Carolina telling its cities and towns—telling the citizens of those cities and towns—that they aren’t allowed to provide themselves with internet access. They can’t do this because it would be “unfair” to out-of-state corporations. Being fair to her own communities who see an opportunity to do things more efficiently (and to include their poorer citizens in the 21st century—but that’s liberal thinking!) is of no real concern to the North Carolina governor.
This, for the record, is precisely how Republican lawmakers and Democratic governors (bipartisanship!) respect the rights of local governments when a revenue stream of their corporate owners is at stake.
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11 May 2011
In Defense of the Corner Market
To say that food sellers who do more than $2 million in business provide fresh food and those who sell less do not is a rough estimate to say the least.
Ah, yeah. Way to stick it to small businesses, USDA!
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10 April 2011
If you tell journalists that they are restrained in adversarial reporting by such motivations, they will vehemently deny it and perhaps even believe their denials.
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29 March 2011
And this is how, in the course of 30 years, our political system has migrated so far in favor of corporate handouts that Ronald Reagan is now beyond the far left fringe of acceptable tax policy.
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28 March 2011
Make No Mistake
Can’t any of us begin the reform of the Democratic Party, starting with resigning from being Wall Street’s bitch? Granted, the age of labor unions may be over for a while, maybe forever (who knows?), and the age of government money hand-outs on the grand scale to everybody-and-his-uncle, too. But how about just a party of intelligence and courage? Wouldn’t that be enough to start with? A party capable of setting some limits and enforcing them. A party able to understand the signals that the future is sending us about resource scarcity. A party willing to engage and defeat stupidity, such as climate change denial, and drill-drill-drill cretinism, and “creation science,” and all the pietistic hypocrisies of the Sunbelt know-nothings. A party willing to drag characters like Lloyd Blankfein into a court of law to answer straight-up fraud charges. A party willing to admit that if you can’t control both the terrain and the people’s behavior in Afghanistan, then there’s no excuse for prosecuting a war there.
Seriously.
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1 March 2011
Many establishment journalists love to tout their own objectivity — insisting that what distinguishes them from bloggers, opinionists and others is that they simply report the facts, free of any biases or policy preferences. But if Goldsmith is right — and does anyone doubt that he is? — then it means that “the American press” generally and “senior American national security journalists” in particular operate with a glaring, overwhelming bias that determines what they do and do not report: namely, the desire to advance U.S. interests.
