WSJ

It's a rare occasion when I agree with Margret Wente. But her comment on the Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the Wall Street Journal hits the nail on the head.

Inside the Journal, you can cut the fear and loathing with a knife. The champions of unfettered capitalism are terrified that somebody is actually practising it on them.

Of course she is not the only one to note the irony of the whining of the WSJ staff and their media sycophants.

All of which means that in an ideal world, the Bancrofts wouldn't let Murdoch within a mile of the Journal. But this is hardly an ideal world, as far as the newspaper business is concerned. I'm not one of the doomsayers who see The End of Newspapers As We Know Them lurking around the next corner, but it doesn't take a genius to see that our industry is in the midst of some of that good old "creative destruction" that the Journal's editorial page regularly praises as the engine of capitalism.

The pro capitalist journalists at the WSJ, purveyors of the American Dream are afraid their will lose their journalistic integrity under Murdoch. Please gimme a break. What do they think that Murdoch will put Bill O'Riley on the editorial board?

And while folks have focused on the WSJ, the Dow Jones publishing company owns other papers which may not share the same fate as the august voice of capitalism. And there are concerns raised about media concentration, in other words good old monopoly capitalism in action.

And before the signatures are dry on Murdoch's purchase of the WSJ there are questions about those in charge of maintaining the journals much lauded editorial independence.

Wall Street Journal watchdog member has Murdoch links

Yep business as usual.



See:

Liberal Or liberal Media

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Ban Me Too

Funny that the Federal Department of Agriculture is banning progressive bloggers, while a staff member at the Alberta Government Department of Agriculture was caught emailing nasty "you're all commie pinkos" comments to the Canadian Wheat Board.

Of course progressive bloggers have been defending the Wheat Board, and we wouldn't want our blogs subverting federal civil servants.




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Slap Upside The Head

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Productivity and Wages

As we know productivity, the bugaboo of the capitalist class, has no relationship to wages. Call it Marxism 101.

Since 2001, middle-class Americans have seen their pay drop by 4 percent, although labor productivity went up by 15 percent during the same period.

SEE:

$63.90 Per Hour

The End Of The Leisure Society

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Petulant Child

Harper throws a temper tantrum, stamps his feet and pouts;

Harper vows to end CWB monopoly

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Slap Upside The Head

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Women And Children First

The reason for this

Journalists booted from Tory retreat

was this;

National caucus chairman Rahim Jaffer defended the action, saying that spouses and children accompanying many of the 125 MPs and 24 senators may be intimidated by the reporters and cameras.

Then don't get into politics.

Political wives and political children whining, gimme a break.

This gives new meaning to Trophy wives. And now we can add Trophy Children to the mix.



"Look Out Dad, there is a journalist."


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Can't Get No Respect

LOL

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LOL III

If a tree falls in the forest.....

"I think there's definitely been a will inside caucus to explore the tax-cutting side. I think that's something we've been discussing, especially leading into this summer caucus," said Rahim Jaffer, chair of the parliamentary caucus.

"I know the minister of finance was particularly interested to hear what caucus was thinking on those particular issues ..." he told reporters.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was not at the meeting.

If he was so interested why wasn't he there?

SEE:

Can't Get No Respect

Conservatives New Nanny State

Canadian Values

Tax Cut Fetish

Flaherty



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Surge Blackout

With bad news like this;

An Iraqi power plant rebuilt with tens of millions of U.S. dollars fell into disrepair once transferred to the Baghdad government, according to the U.S. office that tracks reconstruction spending.

The Iraqis' failure to maintain the 320-megawatt Dora plant, considered an important source of power for electricity-starved Baghdad, is just one of the issues hindering attempts to rebuild the country, the latest audit report to Congress concludes.

The U.S. Government has decided to do this; US drops Baghdad electricity reports

While the Iraqi government points fingers elsewhere.Iraq Electricity Ministry blames provinces

This proves George Bush was right the U.S. is not capable of nation building. Or even maintaining infrastructure in Iraq or at home.

The Bush administration has shown little progress - and in some cases backtracked - on its pledge to do a better job in awarding contracts to small, Gulf Coast businesses for Hurricane Katrina work, a congressional analysis shows.

The review of federal contracts from five government agencies, conducted by the House Small Business Committee, is the latest to document missteps in the award of billions of dollars of lucrative government work since the 2005 storm.

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What He Didn't Say

Iraq; The War For Oil

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Ban Laser Printers

Why not. Cigarettes are blamed for cancer and have been banned from public places.

Laser printers could pose health risk: study

One of the printers released so much dust that it as at a rate comparable to emissions from cigarette smoking.

As I have pointed out before, there are more chemical contaminants in our environment that could account for cancer than just smoking.



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In Canada Work Kills

Forget Cigarettes Ban Asbestos

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Strange Sea Creatures

HAMLET

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Scientists back from a three-week probe in the deep waters off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland discovered a surprising diversity more than 2 1/2 kilometres below the surface.

"Not so long ago, these deep waters were thought to be barren, and what we're looking at and finding is that they're quite rich," said Ellen Kenchington, one of 20 scientists who participated in the research mission aboard the coast guard ship Hudson.

This was deep-water fauna, creatures of the inky blackness and the stuff of Jules Verne: The metre-long dumbo octopus (so named for its prominent fins); the xenophyphore, a single-celled organism better known as "the Green Blob"; and the long-nosed chimera.

Amidst the weird and wonderful are three types of coral key to understanding climate change: Primoa, Paragorgia, and Keratosis, also known as seacorn, bubblegum, and bamboo coral respectively.

An octopus with ears like an elephant? Scallops that hang like bats? Yup, they're real and they live off the East Coast.

The creatures were found after Canadian marine scientists fitted the coast guard ship Hudson with Canada's most powerful deep-sea diving robot, and sent it to explore water too deep for humans.

The octopus was spotted on the second dive at 2,500 metres. When the robot got close enough, the researchers could see the metre-long octopus had fins near its eyes.

"It looks like Dumbo the elephant," Kenchington said, showing off some of the more than 3,000 digital images, hundreds of hours of videos and dozens of live samples taken during the research trip.

It was a creature that had never been seen in the Atlantic before, but Kenchington later found out one had been spotted in the Pacific Ocean.

The robot picked up images of many other creatures, including orange scallops hanging from underwater cliffs, and yellow and pink bubblegum-coloured coral.

More than half of the dives were below the 1,000-metre threshold, and they discovered "at least a dozen" species not previously found in Canadian waters. Particularly striking, she said, was the discovery of a type of bubblegum coral far from the nearest known colony of that species. The largest sea-floor invertebrate, bubblegum coral can live hundreds of years and grow at least a metre off of the bottom.

"How did it get there?" Dr. Kenchington mused. "How are they connected to the nearest neighbours, which are hundreds of miles away?"

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Sea Serpent

Die Vurm

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Turning Lead into Gold

Alchemy has long been misinterpreted as being about turning Lead in to Gold. In fact it is a mythological allegory about the transcendence from feudalism to capitalism. In that sense the 2oth Century discovery of Nuclear power was the ultimate philosophers stone.

In post WWII America lead based paint was cheap and applied everywhere. It was banned in the seventies. Today in the Global Economy the same lead based culture is once again being revived, in China. And of course its all about making gold, that is cold hard cash.

And think of the workers who applied this paint to the toys, if the danger is there for the consumer it is even worse for the workers.

Fisher-Price recalls almost one million toys

Toy-maker Fisher-Price is recalling 83 types of toys — including the popular Big Bird, Elmo, Dora and Diego characters — because their paint contains excessive amounts of lead.

The worldwide recall being announced Thursday involves 967,000 plastic preschool toys made by a Chinese vendor and sold in the United States between May and August. It is the latest in a wave of recalls that has heightened global concern about the safety of Chinese-made products.

The recall is the first for Fisher-Price Inc. and parent company Mattel Inc. involving lead paint. It is the largest for Mattel since 1998 when Fisher-Price had to yank about 10 million Power Wheels from toy stores.

Chinese authorities are now daily rounding up companies suspected of faulty products. The safety crackdown on domestic producers has been accompanied by a public relations campaign aimed at international traders.

"The Chinese government pays great attention to addressing flaws in product quality, especially the quality of food products," Li Changjiang, minister in charge of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said at a specially convened press conference.

The government's acknowledgement of existing problems makes a remarkable departure for a bureaucratic system prone to cover-ups.

When a pet-food ingredient produced in China was linked to the deaths of cats and dogs in North America in April, Beijing's first reaction was to deny it. "The poisoning of American pets has nothing to do with China," claimed a report in the Communist Party's flagship newspaper, the People's Daily.

Export-control officials argued that food contamination occurred both within the United States and with US exports to China. "No food-inspection system is foolproof," Li Yuanping, director general of the Import and Export Food Safety Bureau, countered at the time.

But international worries about China's exports have continued to mount with more and more reports about substandard and fake products coming to light. Since April, a slew of exports - including toothpaste, tires, seafood and toys - have been recalled or rejected around the world. What is worse, mislabeled drug ingredients in Chinese exports have been blamed for killing and injuring people in Panama and Haiti.

As a result, China has come under political pressure from the US and the European Union, where politicians are demanding assurances about the quality and safety of Chinese exports.

The decline in New York City's violent crime rate can be tied into the theory of a Fairfax, Va. economist, who believes lead poisoning accounts for most of the violent crime in the United States, according to an article in today's Washington Post.

Economist Rick Nevin has argued in a series of papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce exposure to lead poisoning.

Nevin has spent more than a decade researching and writing about the relationship between early childhood lead exposure and criminal behavior later in life. His theory offers a unifying new neurochemical explanation for fluctuations in the crime rate.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin told the Washington Post. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

SEE:

Criminal Capitalism: Pet Food Scandal

China Burps Greenspan Farts Dow Hiccups

China Dolphin Free

Business As Usual

Temporary Workers Exploitation

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