Weiye Loh's Library tagged Plutocracy → View Popular, Search in Google

Jul

2011

The Fall of the House of Murdoch - Jonathan Schell - Project Syndicate

www.project-syndicate.org/...English

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Media Politics News of the World Phone-Hacking Power Plutocracy

It all unraveled when The Guardian reported that the tabloid had hacked into the voicemail of missing 13-year-old Milly Dowler, apparently in the hope of obtaining some private expressions of family members’ grief or desperation that it could splash on its front page. When the girl’s murdered body was found six months later, the family and the police thought she might still be alive, because The News of the World’s operatives were deleting messages when her phone’s mailbox became full. (According to Scotland Yard, Murdoch hacks reportedly bribed mid-level police officers to supply information as well.)
A cover-up ensued. James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and Chairman and Chief Executive of News Corporation’s European and Asian operations, authorized a secret payment of £1 million ($1.6 million) to buy the silence of hacking victims. Millions of in-house emails reportedly have been destroyed. Still, it seems safe to say that the peculiarly repellant inhumanity of the original deeds will remain more shocking than the details of this or any other cover-up.
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- The Murdochs call News Corporation a journalistic enterprise. In fact, it is, first, an entertainment company, with the bulk of its revenue coming from its film and television holdings. Second, and more importantly, it is a propaganda machine for right-wing causes and political figures.
- This is News Corporation’s main face in the US, in the form of Fox News, whose hallmark has been relentless propagation of right-wing ideology. Whereas political propaganda had once been the domain of governments and political parties, Fox News is formally independent of both – though it overwhelmingly serves the interests of America’s Republican Party.
- In Britain, News Corporation has been creating a sort of state unto itself by corrupting the police, assuming police powers of surveillance, and intimidating politicians into looking the other way. In the US, it has behaved similarly, using corporate media power to breathe life into a stand-alone political organization, the Tea Party.
- All of this is far removed from what a journalistic organization is supposed to do. Journalism’s essential role in a democracy is to enable people to fulfill their roles as citizens by providing information about government, other powerful institutions, civil movements, international events, and so on. But News Corporation replaces such journalism with titillation and gossip, as it did when it took over the 168-year-old News of the World and turned it into a tabloid in 1984, and with partisan campaigns, as it did when it created Fox News in 1996.
- the UK phone-hacking scandal is of a piece with the Murdochs’ transformation of news into propaganda: both reflect an assault on democracy’s essential walls of separation between media, the state, and political parties. The Murdochs are fusing these entities into a single unaccountable power that, as we see in Britain today, lacks any restraint or scruple.
- too many people want what the News Corporation has been offering. And what too many people want can be dangerous to a civilized, law-based society.

Rationally Speaking: Why I don’t like Larry Summers

while reading Debra Satz’s Why Some Things Should not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets, which I highly recommend to my libertarian friends, as much as I realize of course that it will be entirely wasted on them. The book is a historical and philosophical analysis of ideas about markets, and makes a very compelling case for why thinking that “the markets will take care of it” where “it” is pretty much anything of interest to human beings is downright idiotic (as well as profoundly unethical).
But I’m not concerned here with Satz’s book per se, as much as with the instance in which she discusses for her purposes, a memo written by Summers when he was chief economist of the World Bank (side note to people who still don’t think we are in a plutocracy: please simply make the effort to track Summers’ career and his influence as an example, or check this short video by one of my favorite philosophers, George Carlin). The memo was intended for internal WB use only, but it caused a public uproar when the, surely not left-wing, magazine The Economist leaked it to the public. Here is an extract from the memo (emphasis mine):

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...i-dont-like-larry-summers.html

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Economics World Bank Inequality Plutocracy

1. The measurement of the costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2. The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost ... Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world-welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
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- 3. The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity ... Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing.
- The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in least developed countries (intrinsic rights to certain goods, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.”
- there are three ethical objections that can be raised to the memo: first, she maintains that there is unequal vulnerability of the parties involved in the bargain. That is, the poor countries are in a position of marked disadvantage and are easy for the rich ones to exploit.
- Second, the less developed countries likely suffer from what she calls weak agency, since they tend to be run by corrupt governments whose actions are not in the interest of the population at large (whether the latter isn’t also true of American plutocracy is, of course, a matter worth pondering).
- Third, the bargain is likely to result in an unacceptable degree of harm to a number of individuals (living in the poor countries) who are not going to simultaneously enjoy any of the profits generated from the “exchange.”
- I simply do not buy the fundamentalist (yes, I’m using the term on purpose) libertarian idea that economics is all there is or that should count in pretty much all human transactions and social problems. The hallmark of a just society is precisely that it does consider issues of intrinsic rights — not just to life and property, as the libertarians would have it — but also to health, education, housing and jobs. The whole point of living in a structured society, as opposed to Hobbes’ war of all against all, is so that our lives are not going to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Which means that what Summers dismisses as “social concerns” really ought to be central to the way we structure our societies. Economic systems ought to be the servants of human flourishing, not its masters.
- what was someone like Summers doing in both the Clinton and Obama administrations? The answer is that this (and plenty of other inconvenient or disturbing facts, depending on your political persuasion) clearly shows that both Clinton and Obama were moderate centrists, certainly not the “socialists” and “radicals” that Republican-generated nonsense would have them be.
- By the way, did you notice Summers’ point that if one objected to his memo on ethical grounds one may just as well object to pretty much every policy suggested by the World Bank? Ponder the consequences, then start asking for the closing or radical restructuring of the World Bank.
- I recall that the stock libertarian answer here goes something like: Yes, markets sometimes fail to address social concerns, but then so do governments.
  
  The argument invites an empirical response (e.g. by citing correlations between social well-being and policy), which (to my mind, anyway) under most circumstances settles the debate in favor of social democracy over market fundamentalism.
- Summers committed the sin of confusing positive and normative economics, among other infringements. It is one thing to conclude (from analysis of economic models and empirical economic behavior) that dirtier activities are carried out (and possibly move to) poorer areas of the world, and even to conclude that such developments carry an economic benefit to both sides of the transaction; and it is quite another thing to recommend taking active steps to encourage such developments. The latter involves the implicit judgment that those economic models and economic facts and trends are all there is to this issue. Normative recommendations should take also other factors into account.