Tag Archives: rachel maddow

Oil spills and economic crises: once more, with feeling

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A clip on Rachel Maddow’s show Thursday showed that the oil leak still pouring into the Gulf of Mexico bears an uncanny resemblance to one from 1979. Each one of the failed containment plans (top hat, top kill and junk shot) was tried unsuccessfully in 1979; indeed, both platforms were owned by the same company–Transocean Ltd. Maddow points out that only relief wells eventually plugged the 1979 leak.

Yet the oil spill also obliquely recalls in form the global financial crisis of 2008. In particular, it demonstrates the inability of lawmakers to learn from the mistakes that lead to the crisis.

The first repetition is the unwillingness of American lawmakers and regulatory bodies to regulate private industry. The beginnings of the economic crisis undoubtedly lie in the easing of banking restrictions by Congress in 1999, and the subsequent failure to regulate the arcane and risky derivatives market. Similarly, the Deepwater Horizon was given a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act. Continue reading →

Corporate interests always win: the silencing of the O’Reilly-Olbermann feud

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Glenn Greenwald, the Salon blogger known as much for his stinging critiques of the corporate media as he is for his passionate defense of civil liberties, highlighted this New York Times story about how General Electric, the corporation that owns NBC and MSNBC, collaborated with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to quietly silence the public—and occasionally obnoxious—feud between MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and FOX News’s Bill O’Reilly.

Olbermann is often a blowhard, and his feud with O’Reilly often descended into mere name-calling and spouting off his ratings, but there is no denying that he is a progressive voice on cable news. What’s more, he and MSNBC’s other leftist host, Rachel Maddow, have been as willing to critique behavior from President Obama as they were from President Bush.

Olbermann and Maddow have been the loudest voices in the corporate media calling for attention to Obama’s continuation of Bush policies like indefinite detention, almost as loud as Greenwald himself.

That said, Olbermann (and Maddow) work for MSNBC, which is run by GE. GE is one of the world’s leading weapons manufacturers and one of its largest corporations. No matter how much Maddow and Olbermann may appear to be the good guys, they always have to work within a series of constraints, which are always going to be defined by the interests of the corporation and its profits.

It appears that those profits were being affected by O’Reilly’s tendency to go after GE in retaliation for Olbermann’s attacks on him. Greenwald writes:

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To fire Pat Buchanan is to miss the point

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Barack Obama nominated for his first opening on the Supreme Court Puerto Rican Bronx native Sonia Sotomayor. The appellate court judge has more judicial experience than anyone currently on the bench, and has a center-left record bolstered by the fact that her first judicial appointment came from Republican president George H.W. Bush. Still, you didn’t think that Republicans could let the first black president put the first Latina on the court without some drama, right?

In the wake of the hearings, paleo-conservative commentator Pat Buchanan appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and delivered a screed in defense of white male privilege, calling Sotomayor an “affirmative action baby” and arguing that even if Obama needed to nominate a woman, that this one simply wasn’t qualified. He offered no factual arguments other than Sotomayor’s own admission that she had gotten into college via affirmative action.

Petitions immediately popped up across the Internet to have him fired. While I have no qualms about Pat Buchanan’s financial situation and need for a job, and would probably be quite pleased if I never had to hear him popping up like the racist great-uncle you can’t argue with, these petitions struck me as a bit wrongheaded.

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