Things just keep getting rougher for average citizens in Europe. Some have faced government seizure of accounts to help fund government operations and requirements that they explain withdrawals to their banks. Now, the European Central Bank (ECB) is imposing a negative interest rate on banks for their deposits. So, you can keep your money under your mattress or put it in a bank where the bank will use it to earn money while charging you for the pleasure. This is of course the central bank which directly relates to individual banks as opposed to individual depositors. Those banks will now pay to park their money and those costs will be passed along to depositors. Banks are likely going to try to hide the fact that the interest rate is now negative through fees and other measures.
The ECB cut the rate on its deposit facility for banks from 0 percent to minus 0.10 percent. It also cut its main interest rate to from 0.25 percent to 0.15 percent as well as cutting the rate on its marginal lending facility by 35 basis points to 0.4 percent from 0.75 percent.
It is an interesting situation where banks will now be treated as solely a safe place for holding your money but you will pay for the service as a fee. Much like the airlines where aspects of what was once viewed as the basic service are being converted into fees, banks will now be treated as akin to a safety deposit box. However, unlike airlines or safety deposit boxes, the banks are making money off the deposits. It is a fundamental change in function of banks.
I have long been critical of the tax increases and measures in Europe that will likely have displacement impacts on investments and movement of citizens and businesses. In this case, I would expect people to look for alternatives from Internet banks to foreign banks.
Paul,
Throwing crap into the atmosphere faster than it falls back to earth or than the trees can filter it out causes problems.
Here’s an example of a condensed release of crap:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull
The climate change problem is going to get worse before it gets better. Accordingly, in order to protect the citizens in areas of wild fires, floods and the like we’ll need all the help we can get from the Transportation Corps of the military. I’m not in favor of shrinking the military, I’m in favor of keeping it sharp by enabling it to respond to national disasters in a Wagnerian fashion.
I don’t believe in allowing Democrats and liberals to sign away the farm or nail the country to a cross HOPING the rest of the world will follow. I do believe that the mindset that abhors paying for the same real estate twice (i.e. conservatives) will play a key role in solving the problem.
RTC – “there is a preponderance of evidence from other sources that confirm the role of human activity in climate change”
Such as?
Help! Two comments stuck in the drain!
“If you believe that science is based on others validating your experiments, you would never back Michael Mann.”
Maybe, if all I was relying was Dr. Mann, but there is a preponderance of evidence from other sources that confirm the role of human activity in climate change
RTC – any preponderance of the evidence is based on Michael Mann’s data. And if there is only a preponderance of evidence then certainly there is room for deniability.
Schulte: It doesn’t matter how much the Koch’s pay you for your participation here, the truth about the anthropogenic causes of climate change is undeniable.
Thanks for your input, but you’ve only compromised any pretension to reasonable and intelligent debate you might have had.
RTC – if Michael Mann would free up his supposed data, we would know if anthropogenic climate change was deniable. He has twice won lawsuits claiming the data is proprietary and thus not available for scientific validation.
If you believe that science is based on others validating your experiments, you would never back Michael Mann.
Nick: Your link is not a “fact” about Rachel Maddow; it is an assertion, and an incorrect assertion, at that.
Halperin’s assertion rests on the fact that Romney, in his May 4 speech, did not specifically say 4% unemployment would be a failure on the part of the Obama administration, but that clearly was his contention. He was speaking of 4% in relation to the 8% unemployment rate the administration was “celebrating”, and describing it as inadequate. Who else could he have been talking about – Clinton?
And yes, he did set the target fro his own administration at 6%, which the CBO projects will already happen without him. Typical Romney. The guy would order water to flow downhill and take credit for having the powers of Moses
Bob: I think CNN is pretty lame, from a journalistic standpoint, with no redeeming factors. It jumped the shark with the OJ saga.
Chris Hayes? He may be intelligent, but his show is like watching paint dry.
Rachel Maddow is wicked smart, and yes, she is way too soft on Obama. She needs to explain herself for that. Her credentials allow her to snag the type of interviewees that O’Reilly wishes he could get. And she doesn’t try to bluster them; she asks tough questions and lets them answer.
Fox doesn’t do journalism, it does pure propaganda. It’s untrustworthy. If what they’re saying isn’t an outright lie, then it’s an exaggeration. They don’t try to disguise it when new talking points are issued. They start in the morning and hammer away until the lie becomes real.
I rarely watch TV, particularly for the news. I listen to the radio more often, NPR usually. Occasionally, I’ll listen top Thom Hartman, who’s also respected by the conservative establishment.
I rely on several websites for political news: Good ol’ Turleyblog (cha-ching); Flower’s for Socrates; Fivethirtyeight, Nate Silver’s statistically driven blogsite; Propublica; and McClatchey.
As far as evaluating bias’, my critical thinking is well honed, thank you. I’m certainly nowhere near as delusional as some here. Climate change is a perfect example of how the truth is accused of being a liberal bias. Evolution is another. Just go the posts on this blog and look at the mania surrounding “Cosmos” and Dr. Tyson.
If truth is when knowledge meets object, what is it when someone objects to knowledge?
Wait…I know the answer to that. It’s Intelligent Design.
RTC – with all the academic fraud attached to Michael Mann and his fellow paleoclimatologists, you still believe in man-made climate change. This belies any statements you make about critical thinking.
RTC wrote: “I rarely watch TV, particularly for the news.”
How then can you criticize Fox News? Do you base your analysis on gossip?
Nick: I have bias for ferrets; wish there were more of ’em. I’m not sure who Jake Tapper is, but if he’s who I think he is, then I think he might be a weasel. I don’t watch a lot of evening news.
Bob Esq, I chuckled w/ you tuning in for a good “Bush bashing.” I watched the insane Olberman during the 2008 primary to watch him rip Hillary. And, O’Donnell is the most condescending, smug, a-hole this side of O’Reilly. The fact that they’re both Irish is strictly coincidence. I’m half Irish, I get a pass.
RTC, The problem w/ “calling them like you see them” doesn’t account for your bias. That’s why you need studies and polls to ferret out bias.
Bob Esq, One of the studies on bias compared 1985 to 2004 I think. In just those 2 decades the bias grew greatly. I agree for the most part w/ your assessment of the individual reporters you listed. I think Tapper is the best TV reporter on the air. Straight, tough, intelligent, humorous, self deprecating. I have a serious man crush!
Forgot to mention Frederica Whitfield on CNN over the weekend. Another excellent anchor who does a great job handling interviews for the legal issues.
RTC: “It’s also worth noting that you, Nick, and Bob dismiss the media as having a liberal bias. … You guys – Paul, Karen, Bob (maybe, I don’t know him very well yet) – you guys consider truth itself to be a liberal bias.”
Wrong.
I’m old enough to remember the days when news was just news. No bias. That’s the news I prefer.
CNN tries to be neutral. But then there’s Ashleigh Banfield and Don Lemon and a few others that tend to color the news with their liberal opinions.
Anderson Cooper, Drew Griffin, Jake Tapper, Randi Kaye, Dana Bash & John Berman, are excellent reporters.
Christine Romans is definitely under-appreciated and probably underpaid. She’s basically CNN”s top utility player, along with Brooke Baldwin, and their best financial reporter and they have her working round the clock.
And maybe it’s me but Kate Balduan seems to show perfect restraint around Chris Cuomo when he’s trying to be campy. They should give her hazard pay just for laughing at his stupid jokes and not snapping like a postal worker. She’s also an excellent skeet and trap shooter; which is pretty cool.
Far as MSNBC goes, it’s almost pure left wing propaganda. Rachel Maddow is incredibly intelligent but, as much as she’ll deny it, she is biased towards the left. However she does score points for being a liberal with a spine. Nonetheless, if she were a tad more principle centered, she would have gone after Obama as hard as she went after Bush. Same goes for Olberman (when he had a show).
The guy who used to sit in for Maddow that has his own show in the weekend now is intelligent and informative and admittedly biased — but I can’t remember his name at the moment. Hayes?
Lawrence O’Donnell is insufferable and completely unwatchable. And so is Tameron Hall; especially after that disgusting broadcast where she attempted to sell Snowden on returning to the U.S. on behalf of Obama. Christ I needed a shower after seeing that.
Chris Matthews and Morning Joe are … well, they just are.
I’ve usually avoided FOX in the past; especially during the Bush administration. It was pure propaganda. But ever since I saw the evil side of liberalism, i.e. that extra amount of scienter from liberals who refused to call out Obama for doing the same things they hated Bush for, I’ve occasionally turned to FOX for expanded coverage of Obama’s hypocrisy and unlawful activities. It’s pretty much like the way I would tune in to MSNBC when I was jonesing for a good Bush bashing from Olberman or Maddow.
Howie Kurtz does an excellent media show on FOX on Sundays at 11am; he used to be on CNN.
And I’m now wondering what ever possessed me to write all this out.
Oh, yeah; RTC accusing me of thinking truth itself has a liberal bias.
What a load of crap.
Truth is the agreement between knowledge and its object. If you’re looking for truth on television, you’ve got to triangulate it for yourself by beginning with the neutral and looking away from the particular bias that’s denying the truth and towards the particular bias that happens to have the hammer at the moment.
And that’s my two cents.
Sorry Nick: I call them like I see them. You would certainly think less of me if I weren’t being honest. But thank you for the heads up on the Dedmon story. I’ll try to find that and check it out. For the record, I don’t think MSNBC is perfect. Far from it. But they did fire their big draw in Olberman for making campaign contributions.
There is an incredible amount of reporting, polling and studies all showing a very liberal bias in the media. RTC, you broke my heart w/ your assertion.
RTC, MSNBC Investigative reporter, Bill Dedman did a piece for the Politics page of the MSNBC website. It is dated 6/25/07. He interviewed 143 members of the MSM from MSNBC to ABC to the WSJ to Fox to CBS, etc. It is a great sampling of print and broadcast journalists. The question was did they donate money to politicians and to what party were they affiliated. And, it is not anonymous, all of the reporters are listed by name! Of the 143, 125 donated to Dems and 16 gave money to Rep. Let me repeat 125 to Dems, 16 to Republicans. You asserted that the media “is conservative.” I was born @ night, but not last night. You diminish yourself when you make incredibly bogus assertions like that.
David: I don’t watch a great deal of MSNBC, but I have noticed that Rachel Maddow is able to get some of the brightest minds among conservatives to come on her show and be interviewed – knowing that tough questions were coming.
Now, I have to point out that I find Maddow’s speaking voice to be irritating. But she deals in facts and she presents them intelligently, and that makes her show worthwhile.
It’s also worth noting that you, Nick, and Bob dismiss the media as having a liberal bias. Actually, the members of the media are quite conservative. however, many of them are concerned about their integrity. Sure, it only goes so far, as Tim Russert demonstrated, but they hate to get scooped. And when someone has the truth, and they have a way to get that truth made public, like Risen, then the other guys will not be scooped. Too bad Seymour Hirsch wasn’t able to pull together a book before we launched a war in Iraq.
But I digress. You guys – Paul, Karen, Bob (maybe, I don’t know him very well yet) – you guys consider truth itself to be a liberal bias. I forget who it was, perhaps Sy Hirsch, but there was a White House reporter covering Reagan who would call Reagan out on all the “discrepancies” in the Gipper’s statements each week; they called it truth squadding. They were flooded with complaints, criticizing them for picking on good ol’ Ronnie.
We still see this strategy at play all the time these days. Reports of 200 miles of streams being filled in and destroyed, poisoned – it’s a liberal bias. Plastic microbeads in our soaps and toothpaste making their down our drains and into waterways, where they are mistaken for plankton by fish, and they end up on our plates? Commie-ass reporters.
Remember the election in 2012? How Nate Silver was predicting a comfortable, landslide victory for Obama. All you guys swore he was smoking crack.
He nailed the final results…. Bam.
Fox has found a way to appeal to viewers with background colors and music as successfully as Oprah did, and they’ve assembled a cast that appeals to every demographic, as long as it’s white. And all of them tow the line; their job is to push the talking points that come down from the message center. If they don’t, security escorts them to their car. You guys lap it up because they tell what you want to hear, which is how bad the left is. And how great you ideas are.
There was a study done to find out why Asian airlines suffered so many crashes. Turns out that the Asian culture of respect demanded that copilots never tell the pilot when he was making a mistake, even if he was flying into a mountainside. Point is, it’s helpful to hear things that you might disagree with.
BTW, Rachel Maddow is reporting that Eric Cantor lost his primary race.
RTC – some facts about Rachel Maddow.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/05/rachel-maddow-fails-the-carney-test-124428.html
Thank you Elaine for those posts. I’m going to save those so whenever these guys start insisting how “fair and balanced” Fox is, I can whip that out.
I also want to thank you for catching David’s weaselly insistence that the 15 page plan referring to people as “lazy” was about liberal news watchers. Now, I know David’s a smart guy…to an extent; therefore he had to know just how specious his comment was. That’s how Fox operates much of the time.
DaaavidMmmmmm: So. You have done TV production, hmmmmmm.
Do tell.
Just to be clear, we are talking about TELEVISION production, right?
I happen to know a thing or two about TV production. I would be interested to know about your experience. Specifically, how does it inform your opinion about what’s going on at Fox and MSNBC.
Nick and Bob: I have to agree with about Al Sharpton. Because of his role in the Tawanna Bradley affair he is no better than Breitbart. He has shown himself to be an eloquent spokesman articulating the inequities of racism in society, an eloquence Breitbart never approached, but he is definitely not “show-worthy”.