NBA lockout: millionaires vs billionaires?
Devin Dignam and Dre Alvarez at Wages of Wins:
We keep hearing the NBA lockout being described as “millionaires versus billionaires”. But most NBA players won’t become big earners like Kobe and LeBron. … Here’s a fun comparison: on average, 1600 people win a lottery of at least $1 million every year! That’s right; the lottery has produced almost twice as many millionaires in the last year as the NBA has in the last twenty years!
Also, as they point out, players retire quite young and once they do that income stops.
This also gets away from the main issue of this labour dispute: it’s a lockout, not a strike. The owners are demanding a greater share of “basketball-related income” than they did under the previous collective agreement.
Hackgate: A Triumph for the Liberal Media?
David Cromwell & David Edwards:
The “ownership of the British media” has always been a red herring. The problem is not that the media is owned by this or that corporate power, but that it is corporate power.
Britain, Qadafi and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
Mark Curtis:
While Bin Laden was drafting his declaration of jihad in early 1996, British intelligence was plotting with al-Qaida-associated terrorists in Libya to assassinate Colonel Qadafi. Qadafi had long challenged British interests and Western hegemony in the Middle East and Africa. The revolution that brought him to power in September 1969, recognised as ‘popular’ by British planners, overthrew the regime of eighty-year-old pro-British King Idriss, which provided a quarter of Britain’s oil and was home to £100 million worth of British oil investment. The ‘security of oil supplies must be our greatest concern’, one Foreign Office official noted a year after the revolution. However, Qadafi set about removing long-standing US and British military bases, nationalising the oil import and distribution industries and demanding vastly increased revenues from the oil-producing companies. The regime later sealed its fate as a British and US bête noire by espousing an independent militant nationalism and sponsoring various anti-Western regimes, as well as terrorist groups such as the IRA.
Flogging is too good for them
Mark Steel:
[According to David Starkey] the riots were caused, apparently, by black culture, and we can get round the fact some rioters were white by saying they’d turned black, and get round the fact most black people don’t riot by saying they’ve turned white. You could use that logic to prove that being Welsh causes boats to capsize, or that everything alive is a penguin.
The more that emerges about the Thameslink contract stitch-up the murkier it gets, but the bottom line is that a government that says it wants to create jobs is actively trying to destroy them in Derby.
‘The absurd reasoning that defines the drug war’
Bill Conroy for Narco News:
Despite the fact that an ICE informant, Ramirez Peyro, helped to facilitate a number of the House of Death murders while working for the U.S. government, because the victims were Mexicans the U.S. government and its law enforcers did not “owe a duty of care” to them. In other words, their murders don’t count, nor is anyone in the U.S. government “negligent” for allowing those murders to occur with an ICE informant’s assistance, even if U.S. officials knew in advance that the murders were to be carried out.
And now, under this same absurd legal reasoning, which defines the drug war, that same informant has legal standing to sue the U.S. taxpayers, essentially, requiring them to make good on money ICE still allegedly owes him for his work — which, of course, includes helping to run the House of Death.
From Salt of the Earth to Scum on the Streets (Part 1)
Owen Jones interviewed by Samuel Grove for the New Left Project:
The idea that ‘we’re all middle-class now’ was embraced by both New Labour and the Tories alike. For the right, the exception to this was the so-called ‘underclass’, who were believed to be the product of state dependency and behavioural problems; for influential US right-winger Charles Murray, the break-down of marriage among lower income groups was the culprit. As well as being dehumanising (who would ever want to be labelled ‘underclass’?), it’s a ridiculous concept - are the rest of us part of an ‘overclass’?
The Myth of The New York Times, in Documentary Form
Chris Hedges, writing about NYT documentary Page One:
The reigning corporate ideology has infected the Times as it has most other liberal institutions. Because this ideology does not challenge the status quo it is defended by these editors as evidence of the paper’s impartiality, balance and neutrality. ExxonMobil, Citibank and Goldman Sachs are treated with deference and respect. The inability to see that major centers of corporate power are criminal enterprises that are plundering the nation and destroying the ecosystem is evidence not of objectivity but moral bankruptcy.
It seems odd that a libertarian such as Staines thinks that the state is incompetent to do almost anything other than decide who to kill.
‘Extreme Dishonesty’ – The Guardian, Noam Chomsky and Venezuela
The Guardian is normally happy to ignore him and his views. But when Chomsky expresses criticism of an official enemy of the West, he suddenly does exist and matter for the Guardian. That indicates what we already knew: that the liberal press is perfectly aware of the importance of Chomsky’s work. They just ignore it because it undermines the wrong interests.
