When I first saw the news the some anonymous buyer had purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the largest paper in the state, it occurred to me that we might be seeing the next big step in the oligarchification of public life in America. To be clear, rich people have been buying newspapers for a mix of vanity and political influence for generations. There’s absolutely nothing new about it, though in the past there was usually a deeper rootedness in the communities in question. The Chandler family and The Los Angeles Times is a good example of that history. But you always knew who they were.
Now we know that Sheldon Adelson is the purchaser of the Review-Journal, and given his demonstrated willingness to buy power and influence on a massive scale, one can only imagine what a joke the paper will soon become. But here’s where things connect up, where this connects up to other strains of the oligarchification of America.
As you know, we’re in the midst of a big four part series on the rise of wealth inequality in the United States. I wanted to let you know about part three in our series. Our first two installments were essentially historical and in the second piece focused on the politics of inequality. Part three takes a different, critical approach. Jared Bernstein, one of my favorite economists and former chief economic advisor to Vice President Biden, gives us a deep but accessible look at the actual numbers. What do we know? What do the numbers tell us about inequality? What don’t we know? And as best as economics can tell us, what factors seem to be driving this trend? It’s a great piece and I really recommend it to you. If you don’t have time for it now in the middle of the work day, bookmark it to read this evening. If you care about this issue, you should read this piece. Because you can’t think critically about how to solve a problem until you understand the basics of what the problem is. Here’s the piece, TPM’s Deep, Deep Dive into the Economics of Inequality.
I wanted to follow up on the news that Sheldon Adelson purchased the biggest newspaper in Nevada, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. We can never know quite what to expect when a ultra-wealthy person purchases a newspaper. Will they use it as their own political mouthpiece or will they take a more disinterested approach focused on stewardship? When it comes to Sheldon Adelson, we don’t have to guess.
Adelson plays in two countries: Israel and the United States. He is actually a much more dominant figure in Israeli politics than American politics, notwithstanding the fact that he’s an American citizen and is also an extremely powerful figure here in the US.
Newspapers are a big, big part of his game. And he’s not subtle.
Let me say that first that Martin Shkreli makes me sick. He started making me sick when he revealed himself as a master of pharmaceutical IP piracy and again as recently as this week when he bizarrely invited Taylor Swift to fellate him (who talks this way?) for the opportunity to listen to a one of a kind Wu-Tang Clan album he bought for two million dollars. I first smiled and then laughed when I heard he got arrested by the Feds for securities fraud. But I will say this: having watched this stuff for a few decades, the best way to get yourself arrested by the feds for various financial crimes is to become extremely unpopular and widely vilified. I don’t mean, Shkreli didn’t do it. I suspect he did. And I’m sure he deserves it since he seems to be such a conscienceless, awful person. But this is a thing with federal prosecutors.
This Rubio-Cruz fight over immigration can get a bit weedy, but it’s an important battleground both in the GOP primary and in the larger political and historical context of this era so there’s some value in unpacking it and remembering the context of the failed 2013 immigration reform push. Benjy Sarlin has a very nuanced explainer that I recommend to get you caught up on the backstory.
Neither Rubio nor Cruz has covered themselves in glory at any point in the debate. So you can’t feel much sympathy for either one of them as they clamor for meager political advantage. But TPM’s Tierney Sneed talked to some of the key reform figures today and the consensus among the people she talked to is that Cruz is full of it.
Over the last week or so I noticed that initial reporting that San Bernardino assailant Tashfeen Malik had talked about jihad with friends through private messages on Facebook has metamorphosed into reports and public discussion to the effect that that she was openly posting “Booyah! Jihad” type comments on her Facebook timeline.
It wasn’t clear to me whether there was new reporting or, as I suspected, an echo chamber effect from publication to publication and from initial reports to the presidential campaign trail which had simply transformed the story. I became even more curious yesterday when FBI Director James Comey stated definitively that the FBI had uncovered no information at all about her posting such statements publicly to social media.
I really want you to read this Tierney Sneed piece about how immigration reformers are coming forward to dispute Ted Cruz’s account of where he was on immigration reform back in the key months of 2013. It’s become an issue because his account is at the center of a dispute between him and Marco Rubio. And that dispute is looking critical to determining which of these two freshman senators will get to be the alternative to Donald Trump going into 2016.
Again and again over the last six months we’ve seen Donald Trump take memes and messages which are either implicit in mainstream Republican politics or explicit on the fringes of conservatism and make them loud and explicit. That might be on bashing Mexican immigrants, banning Muslims or any number of other examples. Now we’re seeing the same thing with Vladimir Putin.
Bernie Sanders’ campaign is about to hold a press conference at campaign headquarters in Washington DC. You can watch it here.
As this gets underway, here’s the latest: The DNC chair is defending the decision to suspend the campaign’s access to the party’s voter data base; and the AP, citing unnamed sources, is reporting that as many as four Sanders aides “accessed proprietary voter data compiled by the campaign of rival Hillary Clinton.”
Ed. note: Post updated to reflect that the campaign, not Sanders himself, is holding the presser.