“Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, and little fleas have littler fleas – and so ad infinitum…”
I was tootling around Amazon yesterday, as you do, when I came across this book: Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse.
Customers who bought this book also bought, apparently:
Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes by Michael J. Panzner
America’s Bubble Economy: Profit When It Pops by David Wiedemer
The Great Bust Ahead: The Greatest Depression in American and UK History is Just Several Short Years Away. This is your Concise Reference Guide to Understanding Why and How Best to Survive It by Daniel A. Arnold
The Coming Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit from It: Make a Fortune by Investing in Gold and Other Hard Assets by James Turk
The Second Great Depression by Warren Brussee
I’m sensing a trend.
My first thought was that if Wall St and the economic media have such weak confidence in the US economy, it must be in just as bad a shape as has been predicted. But how typically Republican, how very now, I thought, to attempt to profit from your own mistakes.
A commenter at one of the US liberal blogs at the start of the Attorneygate hearings, I forget who, wondered idly what Bushco were up to while the rest of us were watching the dog & pony show in Congress, on the general principle that they’re tricksy, ruthless bastards and should never be understimated, despite their apparent incompetence. Could Attorneygate be another Bushco bait and switch, masking other, wickeder misdeeds?
That struck me, and I’ve been wondering myself ever since.
If you’ve ever interviewed anyone in a counselor/client situation you’ll know that there’s a presenting problem and then there’s the real, underlying problem. Same with Bushco: the scandal you’re presented with is never the one you should be looking at. I know now what I should’ve been looking at.
Even as the political corruption of the Justice Department and the machinations of his corrupt administration was being exposed Bush was making an end run round Congress and any future oversight, issuing the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive; it’s declared purpose the
“Assignment of Power to Executive Branch: the directive assigns sole power to the executive branch of government.”
Screw oversight, screw impeachment: Bushco have been preparing a White House coup, to be implemented by Homeland Security at presidential decree.
John Sweeney has apologised for the outburst against a scientologist which was filmed and then put on the video-sharing website YouTube, prompting criticism of the corporation. The BBC held an internal inquiry but said Sweeney had not breached any guidelines.
The incident is one of the first examples of ‘video ambushing’, where organisations being investigated turn the camera on the film makers. The Church of Scientology, whose members include the Hollywood stars Tom Cruise and John Travolta, shadowed the Panorama team in America with its own camera crew. It has made a ‘counter documentary’, attacking Sweeney’s methods, and distributed 100,000 DVDs to MPs, civil servants, religious groups, media organisations and business leaders.
Sweeney’s a complete dumbass for losing his temper, that’s clear – but the carefully edited clip’s a Scientology hit-piece pure and simple, a preemptive smear. This is the video they put out:
That looks really bad doesn’t it?
Panorama has responded by posting a YouTube clip of its own in which leading scientologist Tom Davis, a friend of Cruise and son of the film actress Anne Archer, also a scientologist, is seen losing his temper at Sweeney’s use of the words ‘sinister cult’ and storming away mid-interview with the reporter in hot pursuit. In a separate clash Archer, an Oscar nominee for her role as Michael Douglas’s wife in Fatal Attraction, is understood to have snapped when Sweeney asked if she could have been brainwashed. The Church has withdrawn consent for the BBC to use the footage and Panorama is being hastily re-edited for broadcast tomorrow, but will still include the Sweeney outburst.
While making our BBC Panorama film “Scientology and Me” I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a “bigot” by star Scientologists, brain-washed – that is how it felt to me – in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers.
Back in Britain strangers have called on my neighbours, my mother-in-law’s house and someone spied on my wedding and fled the moment he was challenged.
[…]
As often in life, I snapped over something completely different and quite trivial.
Top Scientologist Tommy “Don’t mention the word cult” Davis had been goading me all week, and on the seventh day I fell into his elephant trap. He shouted at me and I shouted back, louder.
If you are interested in becoming a TV journalist, it is a fine example of how not to do it. I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it makes me cringe.
I apologised almost immediately, Tommy carried on as if nothing had happened but meanwhile Scientology had rushed off copies of me losing it to my boss, my boss’s boss and my boss’s boss’s boss, the Director-General of the BBC.
[…]
Although this appears on the surface to be about journalistic professionalism, or the lack of it, it’s really about whether one of the richest, most influential and reputedly most controlling untaxed pyramid schemes in the world, which has a special position and privileges because of its legal status as a church, can control what a public broadcaster in another country says about it.
The ‘church’ can call on oodles of Hollywood advice from its members. To counteract the documentary in advance they’ve written their own imaginary screenplay, in which the big, bad, communist, no atheist, bully BBC beats up poor the ikkle ‘freedom of religion’ enthusiasts. Oh the poor, persecuted loves, how they suffer for their faith, with no way to defend themselves! Well not quite, if you believe their former members:
[…]
Three days later, Bowers says, a Scientology official named Philip Jepsen paid her a visit. “He comes with two people in uniforms–very intimidating–and he asks me about Tom Cruise,” Bowers recalls. “It became obvious he knew everything I had told ‘Goldman.’ He grilled me for two hours. At the end, he handed me a Declare.”
The charges listed in Bowers’s “Suppressive Person Declare”–essentially an order of excommunication–included “writing anti-Scientology letters to the press or giving anti-Scientology or anti-Scientologist data to the press” and “engaging in malicious rumour-mongering to destroy the authority or repute of higher officers or the leading names of Scientology.” The Declare meant that, in general, no one in Scientology should speak to her again, including members of her family. It was followed by “Disconnect” letters from her sons and ex-husband.
[…]
Sounds like they have the self-defence part pretty well sewn up internally, now if only they could exert the same control over non-members…
Scientology’s use of what’s percieved as a ‘samizdat’ medium like YouTube to give their narrative credibility is a new and interesting twist in the development of online discourse and public media. But I’m definitely going to watch the BBC Panorama documentary tonight, where I might not have before, and I suspect many others will too now – so have the attempted Scientology media psyops actually backfired on them?
The Guardian and Observer newspapers are on a mission to humanise the robotic Gordon Blair Brown ahead of his coronation as Labour leader, and to that end this is the photo on the masthead of The Observer this morning: tell me, non-UKians, is this a face that inspires trust?
Was that really the best they could find to illustrate the new touchy-feely, smiley Gordon? Looks more like a scary uncle with mad starting eyes and wandering hands to me. If he offers you sweets say “no, my mummy told me not to talk to weirdos”.
UPDATE: Can’t believe I let ‘Gordon Blair’ sit up there all day. It’s that one mad staring Blair eye, it seems to be carrying on to Brown. No doubt it’ll be bequeathed to young Milliband in due course as well.
The reporters are being outsourced to India…. are the pundits next?
On the news beat in Mumbai, California
· US website recruits reporters living in India
· Journalists cover council meetings via internet
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Saturday May 12, 2007
The Guardian
It is a story destined to chill the soul of even the most diligent and productive of journalists. A news website in Pasadena, California, has recruited a pair of reporters who will be expected to write one or two 500 word stories each day detailing the business of the local council, as well as two in-depth pieces each week.
They do not need to come into the office. In fact, it is unlikely they will visit the office, meet their editor or even see Pasadena. The two new recruits to PasadenaNow.com are based 7,979 miles away in India, one in Bangalore, one in Mumbai.
“This is a revolutionary idea,” said James Macpherson, the website’s editor. “A few of the people who applied for these posts got the idea and see themselves as revolutionaries at the frontier.”
Unsurprisingly, Macpherson recruited his cub reporters through the internet. “We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA,” said the posting placed on an equivalent of Craigslist earlier this week.
“We do not believe that geographic distance between India and California will present unsurmountable problems, and that working together with you will result in you developing a keen working knowledge of this city’s affairs. This will result in accurate and authoritative reports.”
The two reporters, who will watch council proceedings live on the internet, come cheap by Californian standards: the Mumbai post will attract $12,000 (£6,000), the one in Bangalore, $7,200.
For Macpherson recruiting in India was an obvious solution to his staffing problems. “I’ve had unfortunate experiences with low-cost articles,” he said. Interns and students, “are extremely demanding and produce inferior work.”
[…]
Macpherson is not the first to outsource writing. Reuters news agency has a staff of 1,000 in Bangalore, including 100 journalists writing financial news stories. The Boston Globe also recently announced some jobs would be outsourced to India. But this is the first time that a reporting brief has been handed to journalists on the other side of the world.
[…]
“I have been unable to find anyone to work for me who will sit through them to the very end,” he admitted. “No matter how much I offer them. A lot of work in the US is done by aliens because Americans won’t do it. This is just the same as that.” More..
Americans won’t do the shitwork of reporting because on the one hand students and interns have been suckered into seeing journalism as showbiz and themselves as potential stars, above the tedium and mediocrity of actual boring reporting. They see the pampered DC pundits like Joe Klein and David Broder and they think that’s what journalism is, getting paid for ponitificating and socialising with bigwigs.
On the other hand, many media enterprises treat students like unpaid labour, expecting them to support themselves during internships and then complaining when the students actually expect something in return for their toil.
There’s also a huge mismatch between expectations: media outlets need reporters, whereas students want to be Journalists. Where you could’ve become a reporter straight from school, Journalism is a profession, not an icky, common trade.. Journalism is for the privileged: reporting’s for the oiks,
It’s because of this and the necessity for a private income to support you that journalism is closed to many potential talented reporters who just can’t afford to fund themselves through graduate school and internships – but try getting a job without a journalism qualification – and so it’s the well-off, well-heeled and connected, entitled types who can afford to enter journalism. Which leads us right back to Klein and Broder and their cocktail party punditry again.
It’s a self-perpuating, closed system and even if on the whole I consider outsourcing to be a Bad Thing, in this instance it may actually prove useful in helping, with the explosion of blogging, to break the monopoly of privilege that has a grip on the US western media.
