Friday, December 17, 2004

MoveOn.org Accepts Sinclair Challenge: "We'll gladly send an email with a Sinclair message" MoveOn.org, a SinclairAction.com supporter, today accepted a challenge from Sinclair Broadcast Group to allow Sinclair to produce a message that MoveOn.org would email to its members. On Tuesday, December 14, Media Matters for America -- supported by MoveOn.org, MediaChannel, Working Assets, Robert Greenwald (director of the film Outfoxed), Campaign for America's Future, Free Press, and AlterNet -- launched a nationwide campaign to expose the conservative slant of Sinclair television news programming. The groups focused their protest on Sinclair's airing of a daily news commentary, "The Point," read by Sinclair vice president Mark Hyman, while providing no opportunity for progressive counterpoints. The groups asked activists to contact advertisers on Sinclair stations to enlist them in the campaign to get Sinclair to provide balance to "The Point." Hyman, in an interview with Broadcasting and Cable magazine on Tuesday, issued a challenge to MoveOn.org. "As soon as MoveOn.org allows me to use their email lists and post to their Web site, maybe then we will have a conversation," Hyman said. If Sinclair will agree on a way to share its license to broadcast into millions of homes, we'll gladly send our members an email with a Sinclair message, said Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org. In accordance with the terms of the license agreements for the 62 television stations it owns or operates, Sinclair Broadcast Group is able to broadcast over the public airwaves at no cost. In return, Sinclair has a responsibility to provide reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views on issues of public importance. The largest owner of television stations in the country is now equating itself with an advocacy organization, rather than a media outlet, said David Brock, President and CEO of Media Matters for America. This highlights a pattern we've seen with members of the conservative media attempting to draw false equivalencies in order to support their arguments. The real issue is that Sinclair Broadcast Group is abusing its stewardship of the public airwaves by not providing airtime for opposing viewpoints. The vehicle for this campaign is a new website, SinclairAction.com, where citizens can register concerns directly with companies that advertise on Sinclair stations. In just 48 hours, more than 51,000 people visited the site and sent approximately 18,000 emails to advertisers. 1:41:36 PM    comment []

Buying Into Failure. The Bush administration wants to emulate retirement systems that have neither saved money nor protected the elderly from poverty. By By PAUL KRUGMAN. [NYT > Opinion] 7:27:57 AM    comment []

The Fine Art of Sampling Contest. Today we launched a new site, and a new contest. Check out CC Mixter to win a chance to be on the next Fine Arts Militia album featuring Chuck D, or a chance to be featured on the Creative Commons release, THE WIRED CD: Ripped. Sampled. Mashed. Shared. Sample The Beastie Boys, David Byrne, DJ Danger Mouse, and many others to win! The Fine Art of Sampling Contest, builds off November's release of the THE WIRED CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share., which contains sixteen tracks licensed under Creative Commons Sampling licenses. The licenses allow you to sample the tracks into your own musical creations, without legal hassle. To demonstrate how easily songs can be sampled, mashed, and shared, we built a new site/application called CC Mixter, thanks in part to the work of veteran music mixer, Victor Stone, and WebJay creator, Lucas Gonze. CC Mixter has all the WIRED CD tracks plus loops from each song. And when you upload your own mashup, the site is able to track connections between songs, so you can quickly see everyone that used that same sample in their own work, and everyone that cut up one of the WIRED CD songs. The site also lets you connect to other people -- say for example, find me all the musicians who like jazz music, you can review tracks, and there's a forum to post questions and comments. We're also happy to announce we're getting the CC Mixter software ready to release as open source software, so that anyone can build their own related community around any kind of content, be that video, fan fiction, educational materials, or whatever you want. [unmediated] 7:25:30 AM    comment []

Netlab, Glocal Village: Sociology of Mobility. My article about the excellent research of Barry Wellman and the NetLab is up on TheFeature.com. Picture a mundane aspect of everyday life that most readers will recognize: you're in touch with a coworker on the other side of the planet via email or IM, and at the same time you get an SMS telling you to bring home a carton of milk: "Glocalization" is what sociologist Barry Wellman and his colleagues at the University of Toronto's NetLab research community call this "local involvement and global reach" enabled by email and mobile phones. NetLab, a network of social scientists with links to the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, the Department of Sociology, the Knowledge Media Design Institute and the Faculty of Information Studies, applies the decades-old methods of social network analysis (among other tools) to the social behaviors enabled by Internet-mediated communication. [Smart Mobs] 7:25:00 AM    comment []

Required reading regarding your financial future. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for posting Michael Kinsleys challenge to President Bush’s desire to privatize Social Security. I personally couldnt think of anything more threatening to our future, or more likely to cause economic calamity of the highest order. Before I post Mr Kinsleys challenge, let me define my fear, and some anecdotal evidence to support that fear. The Presidents plan in simplistic terms, is to allow all of us taxpayers to take a small portion of our social security contributions and invest that money as we see fit. The premise is that by investing in things that the Social Security Fund cant , each of us can earn greater returns and better protect our financial future. Wrong. Of course, with the search for greater returns, comes greater risk. Now I always thought that the Social Security program itself was designed to protect us from ourselves. That those of us who might be able to save, didnt save enough to protect us at retirement, and those of us who were never in a position to save, had a fallback that we as a nation all contributed to. Along comes the Presidents proposal which kind of flips the logic. . . . .  . . . In his challenge,  Mr Kinsley correctly describes why it wont work. Let me give you two examples why its even worse than he describes. 1. Our Pension System In the first example, as described so well by the NY Times, when companies were given the chance to make investments to meet their obligations to their pensioners, they were unable to do so. They had the option of taking on more risk, or playing it safe. They took on the risk and lost.  True, there was the inherent use of pension accounting to scam wall street on earnings, but when it was all said and done, when corporations took on the job of investing for the financial security their retirees, they were unable to do so. They are now turning to the government funding of The Pensions Benefit Guaranty Corp with the expectation of being bailed out. If the experts that run our pension system had the expectation of financial protection by the government if they failed, do we really think that all of us wont have the same expectation ? . . . . 2. The First Command Financial Scandal What our President fails to realize is that we wont choose where we invest that money.  We will be marketed to, and sold financial products by companies who want that money. Buy media and brokerage stocks if this change happens. We will be inundated with more dumbass commercials about how this broker from this firm and that firm wants to help secure our future. Translated, they know we are suckers with the money burning a hole in our pockets and they are going to make a fortune in commissions on us. There will be so many scams there wont be enough pages in the Wall Street Journal to cover them. In the First Command scandal, our government couldnt prevent thousands and thousands of military personnel from being sold an investment vehicle that took HALF their first year contribution and paid it to First Financial in commissions !. Not only is it obscene in principal, but financially, that first year money will grow  the most from compounding of whatever interest or gains that might occur. So they robbed the people who we entrust to protect our country TWICE. Personally, I think the principals at that company deserve to be in jail for a long, long time. Instead the were fined $12mm dollars. Whoever at the SEC or NASD settled for those fines is gutless, spineless and has absolutely no conscious. Hopefully its still possible for criminal charges to be filed against those slime and someone will step in and do so.  . . . Here is another way to look at how bad it will be. In absolute dollars our social security contributions are not that high. The percentage available back to us, far smaller.  So we wont be able to buy that much of whatever financial product we are being sold. So our commission per transaction will be high. The highest of any customer most likely. Our commissions and fees as a percentage of our savings will be high. Ten bucks a trade. 1 or 2 percent asset management fee. Its real money. We will pay a lot and the actual amount of money that shows up on your statement is going to be a lot less than what it would have been if you just let the government keep it !  Your money wont have to earn more than the treasuries the government buys. You are going to have to be such a wise investory, that you have to earn more than treasuries after commissions and fees eat up 2, 3, 4 or more percent.  Face it, you probably are going to lose money on that account compared to what the government could have gotten !  . . . Here is Michael Kinsleys challenge. Read it. Email it and fax it to your senator and congressman. Forward copies to friends. Its your family’s future at stake A BLEG FROM KINSLEY: My old boss and friend, Mike Kinsley, now running the editorial pages at the Los Angeles Times, poses the following conundrum, which he invites any of you to refute. Yep, he’s a big media guy turning to blogs for an answer. Write responses to him at michael.kinsley@latimes.com. Here’s his argument: My contention: Social Security privatization is not just unlikely to succeed, for various reasons that are subject to discussion. It is mathematically certain to fail. Discussion is pointless. The usual case against privatization is that (1) millions of inexperienced investors may end up worse off, and (2) stocks don’t necessarily do better than bonds over the long-run, as proponents assume.But privatization won’t work for a better reason: it can’t possibly work, even in theory. The logic is not very complicated. 1. To “work,” privatization must generate more money for retirees than current arrangements. This bonus is supposed to be extra money in retirees’ pockets and/or it is supposed to make up for a reduction in promised benefits, thus helping to close the looming revenue gap. 2. Where does this bonus come from? There are only two possibilities: from greater economic growth, or from other people. 3. Greater economic growth requires either more capital to invest, or smarter investment of the same amount of capital. Privatization will not lead to either of these. a) If nothing else in the federal budget changes, every dollar deflected from the federal treasury into private social security accounts must be replaced by a dollar that the government raises in private markets. So the total pool of capital available for private investment remains the same. b) The only change in decision-making about capital investment is that the decisions about some fraction of the capital stock will be made by people with little or no financial experience. Maybe this will not be the disaster that some critics predict. But there is no reason to think that it will actually increase the overall return on capital. 4. If the economy doesn’t produce more than it otherwise would, the Social Security privatization bonus must come from other investors, in the form of a lower return. a) This is in fact the implicit assumption behind the notion of putting Social Security money into stocks, instead of government bonds, because stocks have a better long-term return. The bonus will come from those saps who sell the stocks and buy the bonds. b) In other words, privatization means betting the nation’s most important social program on a theory that cannot be true unless many people are convinced that it’s false. c) Even if the theory is true, initially, privatization will make it false. The money newly available for private investment will bid up the price of (and thus lower the return on) stocks, while the government will need to raise the interest on bonds in order to attract replacement money. d) In short, there is no way other investors can be tricked or induced into financing a higher return on Social Security. 5. If the privatization bonus cannot come from the existing economy, and cannot come from growth, it cannot exist. And therefore, privatization cannot work. Q.E.D. [Blog Maverick] 7:24:29 AM    comment []

Bush Says Social Security Plan Would Reassure Markets. President Bush continued to lay the groundwork for a strong effort by the White House to overhaul Social Security. By By RICHARD W. STEVENSON. [NYT > Business] 7:20:37 AM    comment []

The Wisdom of Crowds who don't check facts. Let’s try and step on this canard before it grows wings … Oliver Kamm is quoting some writer at Fortune saying something that ain’t true about election betting markets. The reputation of exit polls was perceptibly if unfairly damaged by the US presidential election. But, as a writer in Fortune magazine points out, another predictor was unambiguously accurate. This was the electronic predictions market: the various websites allowing punters to place bets on the electoral outcome. As anyone who was watching the CT Election Night Special will know, this just isn’t true. The election markets, on the big day, were more or less exactly as bad at providing us with predictive information as were the exit polls. I think that we may have been the only place recording the intraday fluctuations on the prediction markets (which were massive), so maybe it’s important to summarise the facts. [Crooked Timber] 7:18:44 AM    comment []

I left out: Great work! Tooth fairy when I listed HSC Dinner Apres Mardi Gras  Stay home  12:20:25 AM    comment []

Was the nanny a mirage? (And will Gonzales get a pass?). The stocky legs on the Bernie Kerik story just won't quit: Now there's a sudden pre-nomination resignation from a Long Island firm's advisory board to ponder, more ties to mob-connected businessmen, stalking allegations, and then there's the slow realization of what Josh Marshall predicted and the New York Times entertains today -- that Kerik probably never had a "nanny problem" after all. It's quite possible that he only wished his baggage was so light -- or that he could create the impression that it was, and thus shoo probing journalists away from the real trouble. No one, including those top-notch sleuths in the White House Counsel's office, seems to know who this supposed nanny is -- and it seems no one even tried to find her. [Salon.com] Of course, this is the administration that restored integrity to the White House, as with the Laura Callahan fraud and "w"-key-on-the-typewriter lies. (On Callahan, see also this post. On the "w" key nonsense see HSC Dinner or Apres Mardi Gras or Stay home from 2001.) (Super-duper curious coincidence: All three of those days from t'other blog --  HSC Dinner, Apres Mardi Gras, and Stay home  -- also include Star Wars coverage, just as today does. Explanation welcome.) 12:14:50 AM    comment []