Journalism is NOT rocket science

A tweet by Sunny Hundal put a bug in my ear this morning.

This factual news report was produced by an independent, local TV resource and posted on Youtube.

REAL news are popping up everywhere, putting to shame many of the establishment media workers who have become far too cozy with their corporate overlords and the terms of their quasi-indentured employment.

So complacent and blasé are such pseudo-journos, they'd arrogantly assumed that quaint old notion of ethics with regard to conflict of interests in reporting was no longer relevant.

Karma is indeed a bitch.

Hundal's tweet reminded me of the modest yet thorough Lori Martin and the professional manner in which she handled a random PMO-generated information packet that arrived unsolicited at her newspaper, the Barrie Advance.

My co-blogger wrote this about Martin's extraordinary challenge to lazy, *laissez-faire* reporting which appears to have become standard operating procedure.  Martin refused to be a stenographer for the speaking points provided by a Harper Politburo/PMO communication hack.

There are still many old-school journalists steadily doing the news gathering and reporting they believe in - though ego-driven *enfants terribles* tend to get all the glory.

Michael Harris is of this calibre.  Not a single fact in his best-selling _Party of One_ has been countered, disputed or proven wrong by Harper's army of flunkeys at their keyboards.

Bloggers like Creekside and independent news organizations also hold a wild card: dissemination by social media, which sometimes goes viral.  Unless the Harper regime shuts down access with its new legislation that it will try to ram through Parliament to maintain their CPC partisan control. Though I trust more allies like this one will emerge to challenge PMSHithead's autocratic ploys.

Pressure from unfettered media, as well desperate attempts to spin damaging facts that will leak during the election campaign from those Harper's kleptocracy has bullied, antagonized and silenced, could derail the CPC communication strategy.  And the internal cracks are getting bigger.

Let's be fuelled and inspired by the model of what people power did in Greece which gained momentum and will prevail.

Overproduction

To me the biggest lesson regarding the continuing and on-going megafail that is the Eurozone is the fact that we have definitive, living proof that is productivity is not a virtue, and that it is indeed possible to over-produce. That leisure and "laziness" have positive merits. When some countries (people) produce more than they consume, it isn't necessarily a sign of individual national (personal) virtue, and it certainly is not reliable evidence even of their own prudence.

Germans in particular were encouraged to produce more than they consumed. Since we live in a world in which the law of conservation of matter holds, this means that there are only two possible destinations for the surplus:

1. The landfill/incineration/midden heap/the sea.
2. Other people.

We haven't yet entirely reached the level of depravity where we'd openly admit to doing (1). So the excess was exported to other people: most importantly, other Europeans. What wasn't exported directly to them were turned into savings that chased investments in, e.g., the Spanish housing sector.

But what was consumed by other Europeans was exactly what the other Europeans in the indebted countries did not produce, or stopped producing. Which makes perfect sense, because subsidized excess production sold from country A to country B means that it's not economical to produce in country B, especially when country B can no longer protect (ECONOMIST ALARM BELLS) itself from country A.

What should happen is that country A eventually increases its consumption, and brings everything back into balance, or country A stops overproducing.

Country A (i.e. Germany and, really, all the other Eurozone surplus countries) is not increasing its relative consumption, even though its goods have been purchased with enormous debt from country B. And the citizens of Germany are coming to the increasingly angry realization that they aren't going to be paid back for what they produced and have now apparently given to the "slackers" in the Euro south. Who, in the meantime, are suffering under massive unemployment and state austerity.

So the (quite literally) trillion-dollar question is, where did all those payments go? What was all that debt created for?

I leave that question as an exercise for the reader.

"Participation in the political process that exceeds the bounds of logic"

I can't take my eyes off Greece, because it continues to be Ground Zero for the next phase of the economic Great Game we're all forced to play. I was originally going to call this post, "Long Live Death"---this is a title that Dr. Dawg likes to use when referring to fascist-exterminationist tendencies---but then I read this deliciously horrifying Crooked Timber post on security changes at Greek universities.

To put a long story short, as I understand it, after Greece's dictatorship years, police were banned from university campuses for obvious reasons. Greece recently abolished university asylum after the recommendations from a recent report on campus security which ends, after translation, like this:

The politicizing of universities – and in particular, of students – represents participation in the political process that exceeds the bounds of logic.

Now for the horrifying but satisfyingly predictable punchline: one of the coauthors of this report is *drumroll* UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi (who is of Greek origin and Was There during the overthrow of the dictatorship). Y'all have probably already heard of her role in the Kampus Kaptain Kapsicum outrage at UC Davis.

Um. But the quote from the report is delicious indeed. I would like to give it an "amen".

Now the original point I was going to write about is on a very related note, Greece again. This is the "Long Live Death" bit. Mark Ames at Naked Capitalism informs us of just who is participating in the austerity satrapy in Greece. Take a look at this:

That is Greece's new Minister of Industry, as a law student in the 80s, carrying a club intended, presumably, to brain leftist students. Think this was a youthful indiscretion? Sadly, no. He is a member of the neo-fascist LAOS party. Which is, in fact, also an old-fashioned anti-Semitic party: as in, real anti-Semitism, not mere human sympathy for the Palestinians. But real, right-wing anti-Semitism is not really an factor in consideration, when it comes to the empire of austerity so desired by the 1%.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

I hope my caveat in my last post wasn't what jinxed it.

If this is true, then faster than you could say "boo", and as though we needed any more proof, we are once again being shown that we live in a global dictatorship of finance. Not finance, really, but simple kleptocracy. Woe betide anyone who thinks that the people should ever have an opportunity to say no to being fleeced!

They know it too. They spit on us. The contempt is undisguised.

The bailout will not work. Papandreou might have brought about a momentary respite for his career. But Greece will not take a decade or more of poverty to satisfy the entitlement of the undeserving rich masked as ECB inflation fetishism.

I have a faint hope that this "national unity government" will collapse. Faint.

Finance to Greece: elect a new people, or else

I note with some happiness and satisfaction for the future of the human race that the Greek government has decided to put the latest "bailout", handed down from on high by non-Greek politicians in the thrall of big finance, to a referendum. I note with further satisfaction the howls of outrage represented in the "market reaction", and the absolute naked hatred for democracy demonstrated thereby. Exposed and ugly as ever.

Prepare for massive application of shock doctrine tactics to the Greek people. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks were eventually to vote yes, even though I am firmly hoping for a no. Make no mistake: the brutal confidence fairy's insatiable thirst for the well-being of the old and the future of the young will not be slaked by another austerity package.

This is the lesson: you cannot have free trade without political union. One is the other. All supranational free trade (protected investment) zones are political unions. Most of them are hidden corporate dictatorships. Now the Greek government---as part of a gamble for the political capital that they would get on a yes, notwithstanding the fact that the situation had become untenable in Athens---has done the unforgivable and exposed this reality. Europe will have to decide whether it is going to implement democracy or abandon the project (or resort to corporatist military coups in noncompliant states...).

I for one am with you, Hellas. Here's hoping that they'll retain the strength to say no, and to force the rest of Europe to stop trying to pass the buck. The truth is, a referendum is far preferable to what would follow if the world is forced to feed the vampire squid another decade.

I don't believe in fairies. Unicorns, maybe. Fairies, no. Especially not confidence fairies.