Ruminations – 5dec2008

George Rebane

Ad losses have put the “newspaper industry into a tailspin”, so reports the Denver Post.  More than 30 newspapers are on currently on the block, notably including The Rocky Mountain News.  Major newspapers like the Washington Post are expected to cease their print editions in the near future, reverting to online news delivery and the printing of occasional feature magazines.  The problem is shrinking readership and ad revenues exacerbated by the current economic downturn.  In the past, newspapers have recovered the ad revenues when things got better, but today the internet is nipping away and many of the advertisers are not expected to return.  This is an ongoing story.  A fortunate sidelight is that small town newspapers are not yet feeling the full effects of this ads flight.  This may explain the ever hopeful reports from the management about the health of our beloved Onion.  Tough times.

A correspondent reminded me that today is the day the Supreme Court will hear the suit claiming that Obama does not have the constitutional qualification of native birth to become President.  This has been an interesting non-news item for the liberal MSM, but the blogosphere has kept the issue alive with reports, analyses, and even forensic investigations of the mysterious birth certificate that the state of Hawaii refuses to release for examination.  Here are stories posted by the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune in their online editions.  And here is a most interesting YouTube video by an image expert (Dr. Ron Polarik) who has received death threats for developing evidence that the birth certificate copy released by the Obama campaign is a forgery.  BTW, people have also claimed that McCain would be similarly unqualified because he was born in the (Panama) Canal Zone.  They are ignorant of the special legal status of the Canal Zone and similar legislation that also covers children born overseas to American citizens in the service of their country (e.g. military personnel and diplomats).

Why did FDR’s civilian government programs fail to get us out of the Depression, yet the military spending on WW2 is credited with restarting our economy?  Correspondent and RR commenter Wade asks this thoughtful and important question (here) which in part reads

However, that leaves my "question" unanswered. The revisionists all seem to agree that the war (big, centralized, tax-and-deficit-fueled government spending) turned the economy around while the New Deal itself (big, centralized, tax-and-deficit-fueled government spending) was horrible. Can anyone reconcile this for me? I truly don't understand it as a coherent point of view...

Wade is an information systems professional who works for a large southwestern city government.  He is also an intellectual, well-read, and amazingly, in spite of my best efforts to date, a devoted and entrenched liberal.  Wade’s “revisionists” are to him academics whose post hoc studies of the Depression have knocked some of the burnish from the visage of Saint Delano.

The short but incomplete answer to his question is that government work programs (e.g. to build/refurbish bridges and roads) executed within a country are of a fundamentally different kind than government programs to wage a global war the results of which are perceived to determine the survival of the nation.  Waging a war in which a major part of the country’s and the world’s labor force was destroyed, along with its infrastructure (save in the US), was an altogether different economic event that brought forth altruistic human sacrifices for subsequent wealth creation that the peacetime building of dams and aqueducts just doesn’t inspire (in spite of the heroic propaganda films put out by the Soviets and our own NRA in the 1930s).  A more complete answer to the effects of different government ‘stimulus’ programs may be found in Hazlitt’s classic Economics in One Lesson, and, of course, Bastiat’s The Law.  But, perhaps, other RR readers can weigh in on Wade’s question which, I suspect, is on the minds of many today.

Comments

[Russ Steele]

When we were fighting WWII everyone was involved, from seniors to kids. As kids we saved our pennies and bought war bonds. We worked in the garden with Grandmother Thomas, it was our war garden. There was rationing and Grandma and her daughters had to game the rationing system to get enough sugar for to canned fruit and make jelly from the blackberries my brothers and I picked along Little Deer Creek. When a news clip showed Uncle Bud Thomas, who was a Seabee, moving a stove off a landing ship to cook Christmas dinner for the Marines who were capturing a remote Pacific Island, the theater invited the whole family to a private showing. The whole community supported the war effort.

Now contrast that with infrastructure projects today. All projects require EIR reports and this results in groups for a project and environmental groups against a project. This regulatory mechanism prevents the community from coming together to create a better community with some improved infrastructure, creating a safer place to live and work.

Local projects include the Dorsey Drive Overpass and sewer connections from Loma Rica Ranch and Industrial Park to the Grass Valley Sewer Plant. Many in the community oppose these projects as "they promote growth", creating delays, and lawsuits, in some times stopping the project cold. A lot of money gets spent on non-productive activities that have nothing to do with building the improved infrastructure. Bring up dams and aqueducts and the conflict pits communities and regions against each other, loosing sight of the larger goal a safer more productive place to live and work. In WWII we all had one goal - beat the enemy. We had colorful names for our enemies then that are not PC today, to I am using a much broader term of enemy. Today we cannot come grips with a common goal, we do not share a common vision of the future, like we did in WWII.

[Jeff Pelline]

I wonder how many bloggers have gone under recently, realizing that their declining retirement portfolios means they better get back to work for themselves and their dependents, instead of entertaining themselves.
In the meantime, here's an interesting article: "The failure of citizen journalism."

[Jeff Pelline]

"Failure of Citizen Journalism":
http://www.levjoy.com/blog/2008/10/23/the-failure-of-citizen-journalism/

[Russ]

Jeff,

Once again I will repeat a statement often made by George, "I am not a Journalist" my role is that of a commentator. Before blogging if I found something in the news that bothered me enough to write, I had to send a letter to the editor, or write an Other Voices in the Union. In many cases those letters just disappeared, or were published so late that the reader was left wondering, what was that all about. Now with blogging I can pick up the laptop and comment in real time on anything that interests me. Read that again Comment!

I no longer have to rely on the very source of my intellectual discomfort to publish my concern. I find that very liberating, and I suspect that editors of local media sources all across the country find it troubling to have bloggers looking over their shoulder fact checking day after day. Especially when some of the bloggers have more subject knowledge than your average reporter.

Then every once is a while what I write a blog post gets some international national attention. My recent critique of Al Gore's appearance on Oprah appeared in the Melbourne Herald blog. It was a guest post on Watt's Up With That, a widely read climate change blog (600,000 to 800,000 page reads a month) and then it was picked up at ICECAP, and this morning there is still a link to that critique, generating traffic.

I also get to read blogs everyday that cover subjects that are rarely covered in the Union, or for that matter any other local or national paper. We are a network of individuals exploring some things that interests us. We could care less about being citizen journalist, yet some of us break news on subjects long ignored by MSM.

You might want to read the comments to the link you posted. It appears this was an analysis of a single case, the election. Many readers did not agree with the single case premiss. I found the blogs selected for the analysis very narrow and leaning left. Where were the strong conservative blogs, like PowerLine, Red State, Hot Air, and PoliPundit. Nor, did the analysis consider the multiple local bloggers that explored local issues and exposed those distorting the truth.

Keep looking over your shoulder, we are going to be here commenting!

[Russ]

Media conglomerate Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy protection Monday, as the owner of the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Cubs and other properties tries to deal with $13 billion in debt, details at Breitbart.com

The New York Times Company plans to borrow up to $225 million against its mid-Manhattan headquarters building, to ease a potential cash flow squeeze as the company grapples with tighter credit and shrinking profits, details at Herald Tribune

Union Section A has only six pages this morning. As local business close and ad revenues declines, will we our local Onion be on the same path as the big boys of publishing? Let hope not, and the Sac Bee will soon be joining the big boys.