Over the past few weeks, the Catholic Church has found itself mired in controversy, plagued by an ever-growing sexual abuse scandal unfolding in Europe. The pope himself has come under substantial criticism, to such an extent that a leading German magazine titled a report, "The Failed Papacy of Benedict XVI."
Yet the media's growing chorus of criticism reveals as much about itself as it does about the mishaps of Pope Benedict XVI. It reveals much about how the media thinks about itself, and about the media's worldview of what society ought to be like.
Once upon a midnight dreary, with my eyes red-rimmed and bleary
(Having late perused fell stories of my party's sins of yore)
I heard outside a distant rumbling, followed hard by footsteps stumbling --
Then a voice came meekly mumbling, mumbling at my chamber door.
I heard the sound of tumblers tumbling, op'ning wide my chamber door:
The Chairman now I stood before!
I knew full well the curse of Nixon, knew Scalia put the fix in
When my party's leaders learned that Bush had really lost to Gore;
But I'd never heard of donors spanking strippers, sprouting boners,
While the party's rightful owners paid the tab that they might score.
Alas! We paid the tab so donors might with kinky strippers score!
Now quoth the Chairman: "Nevermore."
Was this a promise I ought credit? If I did, would I regret it?
Vexing thoughts like these reached deep into my soul's uneasy core.
I gazed upon a bust of Lincoln, hoping I might thereby drink in
Wisdom which might later sink in while I stood inside my door --
When the Chairman's minions asked for money just inside my door.
Quoth Mister Lincoln: "Nevermore!"
Over the past few weeks, the Catholic Church has found itself mired in controversy, plagued by an ever-growing sexual abuse scandal unfolding in Europe. The pope himself has come under substantial criticism, to such an extent that a leading German magazine titled a report, "The Failed Papacy of Benedict XVI."
Yet the media's growing chorus of criticism reveals as much about itself as it does about the mishaps of Pope Benedict XVI. It reveals much about how the media thinks about itself, and about the media's worldview of what society ought to be like.
Historically, the Catholic Church and the Western media have always had moments of tension. The two are almost naturally at odds; their philosophical foundations constitute polar opposites. The church is fundamentally a conservative institution, hierarchy-bound and traditional. It embodies a force - religion - which often works in a conservative direction.
The modern Western media could not be more different from this.
Nevada's top political journalist, Jon Ralston, reports:
In the federal penal code, it is known as "structuring."
And it is a word Sen. John Ensign should remember because it is very likely to be on any indictment with his name on it.
That's what I am told by a reliable source familiar with the deliberations occurring inside the Justice Department as federal authorities in Washington try to do with Ensign what they could not do with former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens: Get their man. Or, because they had Stevens and then lost him because of misconduct, Justice wants to make sure if it goes to the next step with Ensign, the charges stick.
Indictment? Don't mind if I do. (Remember, it was the abysmal Bush DOJ that fumbled the Stevens prosecution.) So what is "structuring?"
Structuring is a broad term that refers to the crime of creating financial transactions to evade reporting requirements - for example, a $96,000 payment to your mistress laundered through a trust controlled by your parents and calling it a "gift" instead of what it obviously was: a severance payment that had to be reported.
Based on the facts already in public domain, it seems there may be enough for an indictment.
Two former federal prosecutors in the past two weeks have said there is enough evidence to indict Ensign. "Just based on what the senator has said himself and what Mr. (Doug) Hampton has said ... under the federal standard of probable cause, there's enough to indict the senator now," ex-prosecutor Stan Hunterton, a well-respected local attorney, said March 19 on "Face to Face." Then, Thursday on the program, Melanie Sloan, the former federal prosecutor who now heads a D.C. watchdog group that has filed several complaints against Ensign, said, "I completely think" Hunterton is right. ...
The department is being very deliberate in assembling a case against Ensign. But Justice has a mountain of documents and e-mails that, combined with the senator's own admissions or statements in e-mails, would seem to amount to a formidable case. And last week's New York Times story, showing how Ensign's contacts with a local company (similar to several other interactions), show how far the senator was willing to go to get Hampton work, mostly while he was employed by ex-Ensign aides who had formed a lobbying/consulting firm. The structure, so to speak, is becoming more transparent all the time.
Beyond Ensign's dire and deserved legal fate, what are the political implications?
If Ensign gets indicted, he will become a national and state nightmare for the GOP. National Democrats will brandish him as a symbol of corruption (they may anyhow) and local Democrats will wrap the junior senator around the GOP Senate nominee's neck, especially because Sue Lowden and Danny Tarkanian foolishly have said they would welcome his support. I wouldn't even be surprised to see Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid directly go after his pal to boost his sagging fortunes. I can hear it now: "Sorry, John. But now you know how Doug Hampton feels - how it feels to be screwed over by your best friend."
Why are the national and state Republicans mute? Cowardice, perhaps? Or is it, as NBC political guru Chuck Todd tweeted Friday, repeating something he previously said on "Face to Face" a couple of weeks ago: "NV/DC GOPers desperate to wait for Gov. Gibbons to be out of office before pushing Ensign out but can they really (http://nyti.ms/91kElt)?"
The Web link in Todd's tweet is to last week's Times story, emphasizing the point that if the Republicans wait too long, their silence could be very costly. And if Ensign gets indicted and no prominent Republican has called for him to resign, there's no way to structure that deal to the GOP's benefit.
Ensign and Washington Republicans can continue to do what they've been doing all along - ignore, ignore, ignore. But they might not be able to run out the clock on Election Day 2010 - still seven months away - before indictments come down. And, as Ralston points out, if the Washington Republican establishment stays mum on all of this, the issue becomes a matter of the entire Party coddling its corrupt members. Hmmmm, Republican Culture of Corruption, where have I heard that before? And that's on top of the already-competitive gubernatorial and Senate races in Nevada, which is also a key 2012 swing state, don't forget. (Lowden's and Tarkanian's poorly thought out statements welcoming Ensign's support will no doubt bite them in the backside if either is the Republican nominee against Majority Leader Harry Reid. The political ad writes itself.)
Particularly as it relates to the 2010 Senate races, the Senate Republican caucus is the Ensign-Vitter caucus. Every Republican incumbent Senator and candidate for U.S. Senate should be asked by their local media if they think hypocritical lawbreakers like John Ensign and David Vitter should resign their seats. They should be forced to call for the ouster of these hypocritical, lawbreaking Republicans or be forced to serve as apologists for them and let the voters decide. Though the media around the country largely may be dropping the ball on their responsibility, it appears federal investigators aren't. The national media that gave a relentless week of news coverage to the Eric Massa absurdity still hasn't fully given the Ensign matter (or the Vitter matter) its due. However, the handing down of indictments, should that come to pass, will be national news and should force the issue for every Republican seeking federal office in 2010.
The U.S. economy may finally be bottoming out. But if the worst is really behind us, we are likely facing a painful period of "growth" that looks very much like the present. Without increasing unionization and mitigating racial inequality, our economic progress will prove as hollow as it is slow. While the economy may improve in a dry, statistical sense, the foundation for a productive economy has been decimated over the past three decades.
The economy has shown some encouraging signs of strength lately. Home prices have actually increased and the pace of layoffs slackened quite a bit in July. But that data doesn't signify a strong recovery, as Andrew Leonard notes in a pair of blog posts for Salon. Even in areas where there is some good news-housing and the job market-there is plenty of contradictory bad news. First, mortgage delinquencies are at an all-time high, and the souring loans are not just subprime. Even people with relatively affordable mortgages have problems paying when they lose their jobs, and with the unemployment rate at 9.4%, a lot of people are losing their jobs.
What's worse, Leonard notes, new claims for unemployment benefits escalated in August, suggesting that last month's job market improvements may have been a fluke. And while home prices may be ticking up slightly, they have been abysmal for the past two years. Since many households accumulated debt based on higher home values, the overall ratio of consumer debt to household net worth is perilously high.
Household net worth is a crucial statistic and is often overlooked by a focus on day-to-day measurements of worker well-being, like wage growth. While wages matter for paying the rent and buying groceries, our long-term economic security is defined not by what we make each week, but by the value of the things we own. In a piece for The American Prospect, economists Derrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. detail the massive racial disparities in household net worth in the U.S. While the median white family has roughly $90,000 to its name, the median Latino family has just $8,000, while the median Black family has only $6,000.
Centuries of discrimination have resulted in today's inequality, but Hamilton and Darity propose a simple, straightforward solution: The government should establish savings accounts for children born into poor families, and fund it with a relatively small amount of money. Children will not be able to access the accounts until they turn 18, but over the years, interest will accrue on the accounts to the point where children should have between $50,000 and $60,000 by the time they can withdraw funds. Since so many people of color are born into households with relatively low net-worth, establishing a policy to use government money to boost the wealth of those born without it would have the effect of promoting racial economic equality.
But we also have to worry about jobs. President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package has succeeded in creating or saving hundreds of thousands of jobs since going into effect earlier this year, but it is important to focus not only on creating jobs, but on creating good jobs. As Laura Flanders of GritTV emphasizes in a roundtable discussion with key academics and labor representatives, our increasingly hostile attitude towards unions has created major barriers to a sustainable economic recovery.
The legislation critical to ending this intimidation is known as the Employee Free Choice Act, one of the most important bills presented to Congress in decades, although it has been overshadowed by the debates surrounding health care reform and financial regulatory overhaul. Flanders' panelists include Kate Bronfenbrenner, a Columbia University Professor who wrote a recent paper for the Economic Policy Institute examining 1,000 attempts to establish unions all over the country, and found that employer opposition to unionization is more aggressive than ever. A full 30 million workers want to be part of an organized union, but only 70,000 workers successfully organize each year.
"It's always been hard to organize, but employers now have made it harder than ever. They've literally have said to workers that, 'If you try to organize, we will go after you in every way possible,'" Bronfenbrenner said. "They threaten workers, they harass them, one in every three employers fire workers for union activity . . . . There literally is a war on workers who try to organize."
Another panelist, Mark Winston Griffith, Director of the Drum Major Institute, notes that the decline of unionization has weakened the economy. In the 1950s, when one-third of all U.S. workers belonged to a union, the potential foundation for the economy was strong. Workers were well-paid and had excellent job security, which created a strong source of demand. With less than 8% of U.S. workers unionized today, our economic demand is fueled by household debt, which has left families struggling for financial security and has injected a heavy dose of instability into the entire economy.
Writing for The Nation, Sarah Jaffe details the difficulties faced by a group of security officers in Philadelphia trying to unionize under current labor laws.
But while the workers who form the foundation of our economy are gasping for air, the elite have almost never had it better. A recent study found income inequality to be deeper than any period since World War I, and this absurdity plays out in public policy. While workers struggle to get a fair shake from their employers, executives and managers evade taxes through elaborate international financial deception. Swiss banking giant UBS recently agreed to turn over the names of thousands of its clients who allegedly used the company's banking operations to skip out on the bill for Uncle Sam.
UBS has been caught with its hand in nearly every cookie jar labeled "bank scandal" over the past two years, from the subprime mortgage crisis to phony securities peddling to diamond smuggling. But as Robert Scheer explains at Truthdig, former senator and deregulation hawk Phil Gramm (R-Texas), has been an executive at the firm while the company has been destroying its reputation. Gramm helped pass some two key anti-regulation bills later years of the Clinton administration, and was unabashed about jumping to UBS immediately after leaving office. Scheer notes that the public knows almost nothing about Gramm's role at the company, including any potential involvement in its laundry list of scandals.
Real economic progress in the U.S. is impossible without a stronger base of unionized workers. But it's just as important to invest in our future by giving the children of poor families an even economic playing field.
SEIU leader loses post over scandal
Service Employees International Union removes head of Michigan
local who has been tied to spending probe of L.A. chapter.
By Paul Pringle, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 15, 2008
Apparently feeling there's no other way to win, the McCain campaign is now trying to "go negative" in an effort to make Obama unelectable.
Obama has tried to stay above that sort of thing...and while Obama may be a better human being than that...I'm not.
We will divert away from the usual high minded conversation about issues today-and we will instead lay out a few unpleasant facts John McCain would rather you forget about.
Some of today's discussion reveals McCain's financial corruption...then there's McCain giving "aid and comfort to the enemy" back in his Vietnam days...and for those who may have forgotten, a few words about ugly divorces and near-bigamy and the ending of McCain's friendship with Ronald Reagan.
My first instinct was that Palin would survive all the revelations and give a strong Checkers-esque speech tonight, but that the drip, drip, dripping away of nervous-making stuff about her will make her an on-going liability for the McCain ticket. My second instinct, seeing one new revelation after another over the last 48 hours, was that the Republicans just might have to dump her over the side.
I'm back to my first instinct. The right wing is rallying around her like she was Joan of Arc, and McCain would look downright goofy if he drops her now. The Republicans, absent some really huge new revelation, will defend her to the hilt, call any attackers sexist, and do their best to turn her into a martyr. And, frankly, the media has reached a saturation point where they have too much material to discuss related to Palin, so damaging new revelations aren't sinking in.
Obviously, if Barack Obama had a pregnant 17-year-old daughter, there's no question that conservatives would be blowing every available dog whistle on the subject of fallen African American females and the moral disintegration of "urban" communities.
But progressives should think very carefully before exploiting the fact that Bristol Palin is pregnant. Americans do not want to see this girl humiliated on national T.V. And while there are obvious points to make about the absurdity of abstinence-only sex education (and the fact that a young woman had no choice but to carry her child to term and get shot-gun-married to a boy-husband), I think it will appear very unseemly if Obama surrogates make political hay out of this private matter.
Let's also remember that, as progressives, we are better than our gynophobic adversaries. Bristol Palin has nothing to be ashamed of and has no reason to submit herself to the judgment of the the community elders. She is not accountable to the public for her personal actions and decisions. She has a long life ahead of her and I hope and trust that she will grow up to be a better woman than the reactionary and corrupt ogress that is her mother.
For nearly two weeks, a scandal surrounding Rudy Guiliani has been garnering serious attention, with serious press. And, well, the name associated with that scandal is so appropriately named Sex on the City. Yet, well, those who rely on The Washington Post for their news and information remain almost utterly ignorant of even the existence of a major scandal associated with a Republican front-runner.
Does it seem like there's a new Republican scandal in the news every single week? Well, that may be because there is.
That seems like an awful lot of corruption, scandal, hypocrisy, impropriety, and jail-worthy crime, huh? A lot of corruption. One might say an entire Culture of Corruption.
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