— Rather than make the rich pay their share of taxes, the state of Michigan is taking away democracy from yet another town so it can destroy what’s left of its middle class in the name of “fiscal responsibility”:
Now, Harris is black, and the other cities with EFMs aren’t as segregated (Pontiac is 39% white and 48% African American and Ecorse is 52% white and 40% African American, though Detroit is 12% white and 81% African American).
But it is rather telling that the first city in MI to have its democracy taken away under Rick Snyder’s EFM law is one that has long suffered under both globalization and racism. Rather than finding real solutions to those long-festering problems, we’re just going to shut it down.
— Wonder what life is like growing up with an Objectivist parent, a worshiper of welfare queen and moocher Ayn Rand, goddess of the Tea Party? Wonder no more, as Alyssa Bereznak describes the behavior of her Randroid father:
From what I understood of his favorite capitalist champion, any form of altruism was evil. But how could that kind of blanket self-interest extend to his own children, the people he was legally and morally bound to take care of? What was I supposed to do, fend for myself?
The answer to my question came on an autumn weekend during my sophomore year in high school. I was hosting a Harry Potter-themed float party in our driveway, a normal ritual to prepare decorations for my high school quad the week of homecoming. As I was painting a cardboard owl, my father asked me to come inside the house. He and his new wife sat me down at the dinner table with grave faces.
“We were wondering if you would petition to be emancipated,” he said in his lawyer voice.
“What does that mean?” I asked, picking at the mauve paint on my hands. I later discovered that for most kids, declaring emancipation is an extreme measure — something you do if your parents are crack addicts or deadbeats.
“You would need to become financially independent,” he said. “You could work for me at my law firm and pay rent to live here.”
— Hugh Grant may well have broke open the News of the World phone hack scandal case, by breaking through the various firewalls put up around Andy Coulson, Rebekah Wade Brooks, and other Murdoch employees (and Tory government employees, at least in Coulson’s case). His method? Giving the person who bugged him a taste of his own medicine. (The audio is here.) Here’s a portion of the transcript:
Me So, how’s the whistleblowing going?
Him I’m trying to get a book published. I sent it off to a publisher who immediately accepted it and then it got legal and they said, “This is never going to get published.”
Me Why? Because it accuses too many people of crime?
Him Yes, as I said to the parliamentary commission, Coulson knew all about it and regularly ordered it . . . He [Coulson] rose quickly to the top; he wanted to cover his tracks all the time. So he wouldn’t just write a story about a celeb who’d done something. He’d want to make sure they could never sue, so he wanted us to hear the celeb like you on tape saying, “Hello, darling, we had lovely sex last night.” So that’s on tape – OK, we’ve got that and so we can publish . . . Historically, the way it went was, in the early days of mobiles, we all had analogue mobiles and that was an absolute joy. You know, you just . . . sat outside Buckingham Palace with a £59 scanner you bought at Argos and get Prince Charles and everything he said.
Me Is that how the Squidgy tapes [of Diana’s phone conversations] came out? Which was put down to radio hams, but was in fact . . .
Him Paps in the back of a van, yes . . . I mean, politicians were dropping like flies in the Nineties because it was so easy to get stuff on them. And, obviously, less easy to justify is celebrities. But yes.
Turns out that it wasn’t just the News of the World doing it, but the Daily Mail and The Sun as well — and when Rebekah Wade (now Rebekah Brooks), the current chief executive of Murdoch’s News International, was editor of the Murdoch tabloid The Sun:
Me So everyone knew? I mean, would Rebekah Wade have known all this stuff was going on?
Him Good question. You’re not taping, are you?
Me [slightly shrill voice] No.
Him Well, yeah. Clearly she . . . took over the job of [a journalist] who had a scanner who was trying to sell it to members of his own department. But it wasn’t a big crime. [NB: Rebekah Brooks has always denied any knowledge of phone-hacking. The current police investigation is into events that took place after her editorship of the News of the World.]
Oooops.
Mercury Rising 鳯女 