Rushkoff on Murdoch vs. Google

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Railing against “content kleptomaniacs” like Google, Microsoft, and Ask.com—which effectively syndicate News Corp. content without paying—Murdoch even suggested he might put up walls that prevent the stories in his papers from appearing in Google searches at all.

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And it’s not as if Google is in this merely for the public good. Google makes its money by keeping everyone else’s content open to its searches and the ads that are stacked up alongside them. A world of open content is a world that is open to Google.

Neda Scholarship

The scholarship is fine; the opposition to it is ridiculous.

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The Iranian embassy accused Oxford of abusing Neda’s case, insisting, as the government has repeatedly done, that the young woman’s death was suspicious and was still being investigated by police.

In a reaction to public pressure, the government of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad has claimed that a sophisticated plot was behind Neda’s death, in which opposition and foreign powers had conspired.

Rogoff on The Great Recession of 2008-2009

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The Great Recession was turbo-charged by a financial crisis, making it a far more insidious affair that typically has far more long-lasting effects. As Carmen Reinhart and I argue in our new book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly , the Great Recession is better described as “The Great Contraction,” given the massive and simultaneous contraction of global credit, trade, and growth that the world has experienced.

Stiglitz on the Borlaugs in finance

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But the worst effects were on our human capital, our most precious resource. Absurdly generous compensation in the financial sector induced some of our best minds to go into banking. Who knows how many Borlaugs there might have been among those enticed by the riches of Wall Street and the City of London? If we lost even one, our world was made immeasurably poorer.

Chomsky twice

I’m not familiar with the work of Noam Chomsky but I note here two things. First, he was quoted by Hugo Chávez in a recent interview with the Nation.

Greg Grandin: But how do you explain the intransigence of Roberto Micheletti, the president installed by the coup? … So why wouldn’t the de facto government want a negotiated solution, allowing a symbolic return of Zelaya to the presidency for a short period in order to legitimate the outcome of the election?

Hugo Chávez: Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called Fear of Democracy. There is your answer. Fear of democracy.

Second, according to Gideon Rachman of the FT, Chomsky’s works have been banned from Guantanamo Bay. Here’s Rachman:

But I see it another way. Obama has said that he is banning the use of torture on prisoners at Guantanamo. Subjecting them to the works of Noam Chomsky is clearly incompatible with the torture ban.

What’s winning in Afghanistan?

Stanley McChrystal profile in the FT (here). It used to puzzle me how right-wing pundits would shut down a discussion about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by asking their anti-war interlocutors if they wanted to win, if they wanted America to win. How would I answer this question? What does victory mean in these conflict situations? Gen. McChrystal gives what I think is a good answer:

“At the end of the day we don’t win by destroying the Taliban, we don’t win by body count, we don’t win by number of successful military raids or attacks,” he said in London, highlighting his goal of gaining the sympathy of the Afghan population. “We win when the people decide we win.”

Obama’s Nobel: Great Suggestion

Robert Reich (here):

I’d rather Obama had won it after Congress agreed to substantial cuts in greenhouse gases comparable to what Europe is proposing, after he brought Palestinians and Israelis together to accept a two-state solution, after he got the United States out of Afghanistan and reduced the nuclear arm’s threat between Pakistan and India, or after he was well on the way to eliminating the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. Any one of these would have been worthy of global praise. Perhaps the Nobel committee can give him half the prize now and withhold the other half until he accomplishes one or more of these crucial missions.

Good news from CBO

CBO has a reputation for being very conservative in their estimations. So this is especially good news.

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The Obama administration has done little to disguise its delight at the approval of the Senate finance draft on Wednesday night by the independent Congressional Budget Office, which put the bill’s costs at $829bn over 10 years, well below the White House’s self-imposed $900bn (€612bn, £566bn) ceiling.

The CBO also estimated the bill would reduce the US fiscal deficit by $81bn in its first decade and by between a half and a quarter of a percentage point of gross domestic product in its second decade – a moral victory for a White House increasingly concerned to project a fiscally conservative reputation.

Rio 2016 and Chicago

Though I’m happy that Brazil won the bid for the Olympics in 2016, I can’t help but think about the repercussions of Chicago’s loss in the U.S. once Obama returns. Jon Stewart showed yesterday clips of news people asking how many things a president should have on his mind, whether it was a good idea for him to leave during the health care debate, etc. It is not hard to imagine that the rhetoric will worsen with Chicago’s defeat.

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For President Obama, his decision to fly to Copenhagen in the midst of numerous political and economic battles at home and abroad attracted only minor criticism in the US. But Chicago’s disastrous result and his association with the bid will not have done his personal reputation at home much good.

The Brandeis Brief

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Indeed, he developed the legal technique — called “the Brandeis brief” — that was used by progressive lawyers to support legislation in the face of constitutional challenges, especially those based on the property rights of corporations. The Brandeis brief, which has become commonplace today, not only presents the court with an analysis of legal precedents but also marshals current factual material — statistics, scientific experiments, governmental records — to demonstrate that the legislature had a reasonable basis for its actions.