The Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi points out that, in a sane and moral society, we would find room to applaud the NYPD slowdown -- that police officers would be heroes for refusing to "collect() backdoor taxes because politicians are too cowardly to raise them" or "bust() people in poor neighborhoods because voters don't have the patience to figure out some other way to deal with our dying cities." Of course, in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, these cops engineering a "slowdown" act like whiny diaper-loaded brats because Mayor DeBlasio won't say they're always right about everything, and right-wingers love the slowdown even though the slowdown gives the lie to their pet "broken windows" policing cause.
Media Matters provides a Harper's-style list of "liberal" media numbers for 2014, and the list ain't pretty. 975 segments on ebola during the four weeks before the midterms, and a mere 49 in the four weeks afterward? Nah, nothing to see here. Of course, if we want more economists on to discuss economics and more educators on to discuss education, it'd help to disclose conflicts-of-interests your guests have before they spout their idiocy. And if Chuck Todd is right that asking a powerful guest a tough question would guarantee that guest would never go on the show again, then such absences would also give actual qualified people more openings on "liberal" media programs.
Dean Baker comes up with some ideas aiming to fight the very rich's efforts to redistribute more worker income upward to themselves. Some of them are surprisingly backward -- he doesn't say it, but letting more "qualified foreign physicians" practice here in the U.S. is a way of paying doctors less -- but some of his suggestions are fairly novel and innovative, like imposing a Robin Hood tax on mortgage transfers (i.e., between securities firms) at the state level, or having state and municipal governments actually compete with "sharing" services like Airbnb and Uber.
Surprise, surprise, despite consistent budgeting problems and a bunch of regressive tax hikes to fix them, outgoing Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer handed out $160,000 to nearly two dozen staffers as "bonuses" in 2014, while also overseeing pay hikes for over 170 workers that, well, often rather outstripped inflation, not to mention worker wage growth. Let me guess: bonuses are to reward a job well-done, but I must have missed the part where Arizona got out of the budgetary woods. No one in government seems to understand the whole concept of self-sacrifice anymore. The good news? The first one who does will start a trend.
Finally, the Economist explains why so many contemporary workers actually work more hours and have less leisure time than our forebears like John Maynard Keynes predicted. The article is well worth your time, as it were -- tracing the line from "knowledge workers hav(ing) few metrics for output" to women workers still getting the shaft in re promotion is but one of its incisive moments -- but the article's experience of lower-paid workers having more leisure time may differ from your experience, and the article failed to say that workers feel overworked because there aren't enough of them, because corporations go so far out of their way to avoid creating jobs (workers being, after all, a "drain on profits").
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