Tag: Punting the Pundits

Hong Kong is a sideshow in Beijing’s main act: securing its status as a rising superpower.

Hong Kongers are used to being a pawn in the game of superpowers. In 1997, Britain handed the city over to China under the “one country two systems” principle leaving it “Special Administrative Region” status. The principle was enshrined in the Basic Law, the legal framework for how Hong Kong would be governed from that point on.

The recent ruling by the National People’s Congress (NPC) on the fate of Hong Kong is just a staging post in China’s advance to consolidate its status as rising superpower. The decision is best viewed through this lens. Hong Kong is a sideshow in the main act: President Xi Jinping’s ambition to cement China’s economic and geopolitical stature as a superpower.

Dean Baker: Public should speak up before Fed clamps down on jobs

With the bank’s policy taking cues from the financial industry, a vocal citizenry must push back to sustain growth

The media often cover debates over Federal Reserve Board policy as though it is arcane and technical subject matter beyond the understanding of ordinary people. In this context we are supposed to take the statements of Fed officials as though they are pronouncements from Dr. Science, who “knows more than you do.”

In reality, the basics of Fed policymaking are fairly straightforward. The main question the Fed is considering right now is whether it should have its foot on the accelerator to try to promote growth and jobs, or alternatively whether it should have its foot on the brake to try to stop inflation. In the latter case, the economy will grow less rapidly and we will have fewer jobs and higher unemployment.

Richard Brodsky: Cuomo Wins!/Loses!

Conventional political wisdom has New York Governor Andrew Cuomo winning the Democratic primary and the November general election handily. The same wisdom has him badly damaged in New York and nationally. What gives?

The objective measures of political success show Cuomo on a roll. He’s raised over $35 million. His opponents are starving. His poll numbers are good. Most voters don’t know the opposition. He’s dominated the political news as a candidate in the same manner that he dominated the government.

That may be the rub. His political operation was never satisfied with winning. Opposition was to be crushed and the methodologies were simple and punishing. It worked. Republicans voted for gay marriage and gun control. Democrats folded to an austerity economic agenda that cut taxes for the rich, cut spending, and gave billions to corporations as “economic development.”

Paul Waldman: The Stupidity of Hating Your Senator for Living Where You’ve Sent Her to Work

Should we really get mad if our representatives spend too much time in Washington, where they’re supposed to be doing their jobs?

This year, not one, but two, incumbent senators up for re-election have been dogged by the “issue” of the precise location where they rest their heads at the end of a weary day of lawmaking. First it was Republican Pat Roberts, who, we learned in February, lists the home of some friends as his official residence in Kansas; apparently he crashes there when he’s in the state. And now it’s Democrat Mary Landrieu, whose heretofore unimpeachable Louisiana roots (her father Moon was the mayor of New Orleans in the 1970s, and her brother Mitch holds that office today) are now being questioned. It seems that although Landrieu owns a home in Washington, she’s registered to vote in the New Orleans house she grew up in, where her parents still reside (even though it’s technically owned by Mary and her eight siblings, all of whose names begin with “M”-make of that what you will).

The opposition researchers have certainly been earning their keep. But should the rest of us care? The easy answer is, of course not; this is the kind of inane faux-controversy that consumes campaigns, where one side pretends to take umbrage at something with no importance, then the press pretends it means something because a candidate is “on the defensive.” But as far as phony issues go, this one is actually revealing-not because of anything it says about the senators, but because of what it says about the often absurd and contradictory expectations we have of our representatives. We berate them for being lazy and not getting enough done, but at the same time, we get mad if they spend too much time in the place where they’re supposed to be working

Details of homeowner relief stay opaque while tax deductions and accounting loopholes lower cost to banks

Last week Bank of America reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to the tune of $16.65 billion for its role in selling faulty mortgages in the financial crisis. Such big-dollar settlements with large banks – including, in the past year, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase – sound like harsh punishments but in actuality amount only to slaps on the wrist.

For one, those colossal dollar figures are rarely the actual prices the banks will pay. The real costs to these companies is muddled by tax deductions, unclear directives and accounting loopholes. The secretive negotiation process for settlements is also inconsistent with the civil and criminal process the average American faces.

It’s no wonder, then, that the nation has settlement fatigue; the feeling among consumer advocates and the public is that these agreements have negligible impact on the lives of homeowners affected by the financial crisis.

Julia Zulver: Are reproductive rights human rights?

Women’s lives continue to be endangered by anti-abortion policies.

Hashmat Moslih recently wrote an opinion piece noting that the concept of human rights faces huge challenges in a culturally diverse global setting. He states: “It is impossible to develop a harmonised human rights philosophy that is not circular. At the heart of the issue of human rights runs the issue of justice and at the heart of justice runs the issue of happiness and it is argued that happiness is attained through acquiring a good life and a good life is one that insures everyone’s well-being. But how do we define well-being?”

There are many definitions of well-being, grounded in various cultural, religious, and historical contexts. Furthermore, as Moslih notes, there are contested views about what constitute fundamental rights, and whether we can ever consider these non-ideological. For example, there is by no means an international consensus about whether sexual and reproductive rights can be considered universal.

Despite this, the words of Morena Herrera, the leader of the Agrupacion Ciudadana por la Despanalizacion del Aborto (Citizens Group for the Depenalisation of Abortion), during a personal interview, will always ring clearly in my mind: “by ruling against an abortion [in the case of Beatriz], El Salvador is ruling against the life of a woman.”

Emma Brockes: Are you a summer person? Because the autumn people are already winning

Good riddance to the sunny, lazy season. You know exactly what you’re going to get with a rainy, productive day

Summer officially ends on Monday and, with it, the wearing of white and that feeling of being on vacation all the time. So, too, the ascendence of summer people over winter people. The calendar year runs January to January, but for many, that sinking, new-school-year feeling that comes around the first of September is the real start of the new year. How depressed the new season makes you – well, that depends largely on which season you think of as “yours”.

I used to be a summer person. I used to think winter people were creepy, pale-skinned, slow-moving creatures who lived in long sleeves and probably cut up their burgers with a knife and fork. In England at least, where the sun comes out for approximately two weeks a year, there was, I thought, a deliberate perversity to those who complained about it.

And then I moved to New York, where the summer is as bald and unrelenting as an English winter. Heat of 90°F with humidity isn’t cheering, it’s sedating – and keeps you inside as effectively as snow.

Reading companies’ annual reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission is a reliable cure for insomnia. Every so often, though, there is a significant revelation in the paperwork. This year, one of the most important revelations came from Microsoft’s filings, which spotlighted how the tax code allows corporations to enjoy the benefits of American citizenship yet avoid paying U.S. taxes.

According to the SEC documents, the company is sitting on almost $29.6 billion it would owe in U.S. taxes if it repatriated the $92.9 billion of earnings it is keeping offshore. That amount of money represents a significant spike from prior years.

To put this in perspective, the levies the company would owe amount to almost the entire two-year operating budget of the company’s home state of Washington.

Dave Johnson: Why Fight for Unions? So We Can Fight an Economy Rigged Against Us

The other day I wrote about how FedEx has been pretending that their employees are not employees, which gets around labor standards for things like overtime, family leave and the rest.

This misclassification game is just one way that big companies have been rigging the rules to give themselves an edge, getting around what We the People set down for our democracy.

The result, of course, is even more people paid even less with even worse working conditions. And the bad players get an advantage that drives out the good ones.

Like misclassification, this game-rigging, cheating, edge-seeking, rule-bypassing stuff is everywhere you look. (Rigged trade deals, corporate tax “deferral” and inversions, corporate campaign donations, too-big-to-fail banks, congressional obstruction, etc., etc…) This rigging of the game in favor of the ultra-wealthy gets worse and worse.

Richard Reeves: Labor Day-You Remember ‘Labor,’ Don’t You?

I woke up last Thursday morning to learn that my FedEx man does not work for FedEx. Voices on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” informed me that although FedEx controls just about every minute of its drivers’ days, the corporation regards them as “independent contractors.”

Thus, no benefits-they even have to pay for their own uniforms-and the workers can be kicked out anytime FedEx feels like it. [..]

 So, I would argue, Labor Day is a farce. Even public employees-read Wisconsin!-are losing what security America offers. At the minimum, the first Monday in September should be called “Reagan Day,” or the date should be changed to Aug. 3 and the holiday called “PATCO Day.” That was the day in 1981 that President Reagan stated that if members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization-the only union that endorsed him in the 1980 presidential election-did not return to work, they would be fired. They did not return and they were fired. Corporate America got the message, and private-sector unions were marked for death.

Now, that is what we celebrate on Labor Day: the rise of management and the death of organized labor.

Eugene Robinson: Have We Gone to War Again?

I’d like to know whether the United States is at war with the Islamic State. I’d like to know why-or why not. I’d like to know whether the goal of U.S. policy is to contain the jihadist militia or destroy it.

President Obama? Members of Congress? Please pay attention. I’m talking to you.

The barbarians who decapitated journalist James Foley-and who commit   atrocities on a daily basis-control territory in both Iraq and Syria. I’d like to know why it makes sense to conduct airstrikes against Islamic State fighters on one side of a border that no longer exists but makes no sense to do so on the other side.

In California, reform to shine light on big political donors is on verge of losing. Here’s a surprising reason why

The biggest reason why it will be so hard to get money out of politics is that there’s so much money in politics. The system favors incumbents, from incumbent politicians to their incumbent funders. And they have little incentive to shake up the status quo that brought them to power, even if their constituents and their ideological principles call out for reform.

This is precisely what’s playing out in California. One of the most liberal legislatures in the country has struggled to pass a campaign finance measure that would merely force disclosure on political advertising, because several labor unions that spend heavily on campaigns oppose it. This has infuriated progressive groups in California and across the nation.

The bill, known as the California DISCLOSE Act, is based on the national DISCLOSE Act that came within one vote of passage back in 2010. It would require all political advertising to prominently display the names of the three largest funders, whether on print, radio, mailer, billboard, Web or television spots. The names would have to be the actual original funders, not some fake front group like “Californians for a Better World” or something. The DISCLOSE Act also require campaign committees to publish a website for voters, listing all funders who donated $10,000 or more.

Sasha Weblin: Blockbuster bank settlements leave consumers hanging

Details of homeowner relief stay opaque while tax deductions and accounting loopholes lower cost to banks

Last week Bank of America reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to the tune of $16.65 billion for its role in selling faulty mortgages in the financial crisis. Such big-dollar settlements with large banks – including, in the past year, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase – sound like harsh punishments but in actuality amount only to slaps on the wrist.

For one, those colossal dollar figures are rarely the actual prices the banks will pay. The real costs to these companies is muddled by tax deductions, unclear directives and accounting loopholes. The secretive negotiation process for settlements is also inconsistent with the civil and criminal process the average American faces.

It’s no wonder, then, that the nation has settlement fatigue; the feeling among consumer advocates and the public is that these agreements have negligible impact on the lives of homeowners affected by the financial crisis.

Miles Rapoport: Sen. McConnell Makes the Case

Those of us working on political money issues have a fresh appreciation today for the old saying that politics makes for strange bedfellows. That’s because Sen. Mitch McConnell, long known as a champion of big money in politics, has made a stunningly compelling case for a constitutional amendment that would allow Congress and the states to restore sensible limits on political spending. We appreciate his help and his clarity.

By happy coincidence, the Senate will vote on just such a proposal next month, the Democracy for All Amendment (S.J. Res 19). Senators still undecided about the amendment should study Sen. McConnell’s remarks carefully. [..]

Sen. McConnell called the Democracy for All Amendment radical; it is anything but. In a few sentences, it restores an understanding of the Constitution that was in place for at least a century until recently unraveled by the Roberts court. It affirms that money is not speech and that no one, however wealthy or powerful, has a constitutional right to spend unlimited sums to influence our elections.

It was not even a year ago when we were bombarded with messaging that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a Supreme Evil and Grave Threat, and that military action against his regime was both a moral and strategic imperative. The standard cast of “liberal interventionists” –  Tony Blair, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Nicholas Kristof and Samantha Power – issued stirring sermons on the duties of war against Assad. Secretary of State John Kerry actually compared Assad to (guess who?) Hitler, instructing the nation that “this is our Munich moment.” Striking Assad, he argued, “is a matter of national security. It’s a matter of the credibility of the United States of America. It’s a matter of upholding the interests of our allies and friends in the region.”

U.S. military action against the Assad regime was thwarted only by overwhelming American public opinion which opposed it and by a resounding rejection by the UK Parliament of Prime Minister David Cameron’s desire to assume the usual subservient British role in support of American wars.

Laura Flanders: Surplus Military in a Deficit Society

U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered a review of the distribution of military hardware to state and local police. Great. Now can we have a review of the distribution of military influence throughout US society?

What we’ve learned so far is that under a federal program, more than $5 billion worth of military equipment has gone to more than 8,000 city and state agencies since 1997. I found out this weekend that one small town not far from me received six military HumVees for a police department where just 25 officers work.

Mine-resistant trucks aren’t the only war tools showing up in US suburbs. Take those gunshot wounds. Michael Brown, the unarmed teen shot by a police in Ferguson August 9, was shot six times, twice in the head. Ever wonder why so many gun shot victims show up with multiple bullets in their flesh?  It’s certainly the cop, it’s also the gun.

Dave Johnson: Will Republicans Block Action On Corporations Abandoning the US?

There is legislation before Congress to do something about corporations renouncing their US “citizenship.” The odds are that Republicans will block it – and not just because they have obstructed everything else.

There is a wave of news about corporations using a technicality called an “inversion” to renounce their US “citizenship.” An inversion is when a US company buys or merges with a non-US company, and then pretends it is no longer a US company. Today it’s Burger King. Not long ago it was Walgreens.

There is legislation to fix this problem. In particular, the Stop Corporate Inversions Act of 2014 has been introduced in both the House and the Senate.

Will Republicans block this legislation? Aside from the fact that Republicans have obstructed nearly all legislation of substance for years, there is precedent for Republicans blocking bills to end corporate tax loopholes.

Ray NcGovern: Cheney’s Legacy: Honesty Still in Short Supply

As the world marks the centennial of World War I, the guns of August are again being oiled by comfortable politicians and the fawning corporate media, both bereft of any sense of history. And that includes much more recent history, namely the deceitful campaign that ended up bringing destruction to Iraq and widened conflict throughout the Middle East. That campaign went into high gear 12 years ago today.

On August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney – who remains something of a folk hero on Fox News – formally launched the lies leading to the U.S.-UK attack on Iraq seven months later. And on August 30, 2013, Syria was 20 hours away from a similar fate after Secretary of State John Kerry claimed falsely – no fewer than 35 times – to “know” that the government of Syria was responsible for using sarin nerve gas in an attack outside Damascus on August 21, 2013. [..]

As if to mark Cheney’s day of deceit a dozen Augusts ago, this morning’s Washington Post editorializes: “Stepping back into the fray: Stopping the Islamic State will require ‘boots on the ground.'” As is its custom, the Post offers no enlightenment on what motivates jihadists to do unspeakably evil things – in other words, “why they hate us” – or why Gulf allies of the U.S. fund them with such largesse.

You shouldn’t expect women to wear modern chastity belts or a real-life vagina dentata to be safe from sexual assault.

There are a lot of things I expect nail polish to do: dry fast, chip infrequently and make me look halfway put-together. Something I don’t generally depend on my manicure for, however, is warding off rapists. But the members of the all-male invention team behind  Undercover Colors – four students at North Carolina State University – say that, with their new polish,  “any woman will be empowered to discreetly ensure her safety by simply stirring her drink with her finger.”

I’m appreciative that young men like want to curb sexual assault, but anything that puts the onus on women to “discreetly” keep from being raped misses the point. We should be trying to stop rape, not just individually avoid it. [..]

Even if a woman were to wear special nail polish or anti-rape underwear, or if she listens to common – but misplaced – advice about not getting drunk and always walking home in a group, all she’s supposedly ensuring is that she won’t be attacked. (And even then it’s not real security, because women who do all the “right” things get raped too) What about the girl at the same party who decided to have a few drinks that night? So long as it isn’t me isn’t an effective strategy to end rape.

Joan Walsh: White Paranoia Over Ferguson Raises Big Bucks, with Some Help from Fox News

White defenders of officer Darren Wilson are raising money by slandering Mike Brown.

Not surprisingly, a thriving franchise of the nation’s booming white grievance industry has opened up in Ferguson, Missouri, over the last week.  It’s worth examining closely. As usual, it consists of two parts lies, one part paranoia, but at its heart it’s a big grift.

The weekend featured multiple protests supporting Darren Wilson, the missing Ferguson police officer who shot an unarmed Mike Brown on Aug. 9. His superiors apparently withheld Wilson’s name long enough for him to delete all social media accounts and skip town, but his supporters are declaring Wilson, not Brown, the victim here.  A GoFundMe site raising funds for Wilson’s defense – though he’s not been charged with anything – garnered not only $250,000 in donations, but so many ugly racist rants GoFundMe administrators had to disable comments for the site. (They’ll have no trouble taking a cut of the racists’ money, of course.) Wilson’s supporters say they’ve raised $374,000 online and at local events, “to support his family,”  one woman told MSNBC. [..]

It’s worth noting the way the phony information and paranoia peddled by well-known, oft-discredited right-wing media activists like Hoft and Loesch makes its way into the mainstream media ecosphere, again and again. CNN media critic Brian Stelter called out Fox this weekend for peddling the fractured eye socket story, and good for him, but to my knowledge he didn’t rap his own network for peddling the phony “Josie” story. The right’s influence on big stories like this can be more subtle and insidious: Who believes  the New York Times would have stooped to calling Mike Brown “no angel” – the evidence? He’d been in some “scuffles” and had “taken to rapping” – without the right wing braying about Brown’s stealing cigarillos and making up stories that he did even worse?

Michelle Chen: When Workplace Training Programs Actually Hinder Workers

Each weekday morning, ex-assembly line workers, struggling single moms, and other job-seekers shuffle into government offices to get help retraining for a new career, to start over as a radiology technician or programmer, perhaps, or finish an associate’s degree. These workforce investment programs are set up to offer workers a chance to jump-start a new livelihood in a sagging labor market. But after decades of plowing billions of workforce investment dollars into federal job training initiatives, it’s still hard to tell how much these programs are helping workers regain their footing in an increasingly precarious economy.

Congress recently reauthorized the main funding law for workforce development, the Clinton-era Workforce Investment Act (WIA), purportedly to invest more wisely in the country’s downtrodden workers. In an apparently bipartisan push to “improve accountability and transparency within the system,” the legislation streamlines coordination between employers and agencies, strengthens oversight of program outcomes and cuts some programs deemed ineffective. But both the training programs and the new reforms amount to small drops in a very deep bucket of labor stagnation.

Moreover, since the reforms do not alter the decentralized structure of the workforce investment system, it won’t resolve the main criticism of WIA-that its investments don’t pay off for workers.

Katie McDonough: College Dudes Worried That Movement to Take Rape Seriously Will Ruin Their Sex Lives

Why still so much confusion about consent?

Trend pieces about so-called college hookup culture tend to overestimate how much sex students are actually having. Last year, a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association found that less than 30 percent of college students had more than one partner in the previous year. Which about equals data from surveys taken over the last twenty years. This means, as  Time’s Maia Szalavitz noted at time time, college students “aren’t hooking up more than they ever were, or even more than their parents did.”

So with this in mind, I didn’t put much stock in a  Bloomberg News headline declaring that hookup culture was waning “amid assault alarm.” According to the piece, heightened awareness about sexual assault on college campuses and a greater move toward justice for survivors has made some college men’s boners shrink in terror. We are, it seems, meant to feel alarmed at these shrinking boners.

To be young, male and black in America means not being allowed to make mistakes. Forgetting this, as we’ve seen so many times, can be fatal.

The case of Michael Brown, who was laid to rest Monday, is anomalous only in that it is so extreme: an unarmed black teenager riddled with bullets by a white police officer in a community plagued by racial tension.

African-Americans make up 67 percent of the population of Ferguson, Mo., but there are just four black officers on the 53-member police force-which responded to peaceful demonstrations by rolling out military-surplus armored vehicles and firing tear gas. It is easy to understand how Brown and his peers might see the police not as public servants but as troops in an army of occupation.

And yes, Brown made mistakes. He was walking in the middle of the street rather than on the sidewalk, according to witnesses, and he was carrying a box of cigars that he apparently took from a convenience store. Neither is a capital offense.

Marwan Bishara: Obama’s miscalculation

And the greater lesson from the Middle East.

President Barack Obama, who by any measure is a smart and shrewd politician, must be feeling rather foolish nowadays. Not only have his predictions proved wrong about Iraq and al-Qaeda, but, under his watch, America is also being drawn back into the Iraq quagmire three years after it withdrew.

The president was all optimistic when he secured US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. But his claim of “extraordinary achievement”, of leaving behind a “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq”, was soon shown to be, at best, wishful thinking – indeed a grave error.  

Despite retaining eyes and ears on the Iraqi ground, the advance of the Islamic State group, over the last few months has clearly taken Washington by surprise. It’s yet another terrible failure of US intelligence services.

How much of this can be said to be Obama’s fault? Of course, he cannot be blamed for the follies of his predecessor, nor is he responsible for half a century of foreign policy that compromised America’s values in favour of its short-term interests.

Still, the president does share major responsibility for the present failures after serving five years in office.

Obama might be careful, calculating and nuanced, but his foreign policy has produced one blowback after another from Libya to Afghanistan through Iraq and Syria.

John Nichols: Secret $700,000 Donation Has Scott Walker Scrambling to Address ‘Appearance of Corruption’

When Gogebic Taconite LLC began moving in November 2010-the same month Scott Walker was elected governor of Wisconsin-to develop an open-pit iron mine in one of the most environmentally sensitive regions of northern Wisconsin, the Florida-based mining firm got a lot of pushback. Residents of the region objected, along with Native American tribes. So, too, did citizens from across Wisconsin, a state that has long treasured the wild beauty of the Penokee Range. Environmental and conservation groups voiced their concerns, as did local and state officials from across the political spectrum.

The outcry heightened as Gogebic Taconite and its allies promoted a radical rewrite of existing mining regulations in order to promote a project that could grow to be four miles long, more than a mile wide and 1,000 feet deep. Democratic and Republican legislators began to ask tough questions. Yet Governor Scott Walker remained “eager to advance a mining bill,” according to Wisconsin media that reported extensively on the governor’s determination to overrule objections to the grand schemes of an out-of-state corporation that newly released documents show secretly steered $700,000 to “independent” efforts to provide political cover for the embattled governor.

Wendall Potter: [ Docs, Drug Companies, Insurers Drive Up Medicare Costs

Obamacare forced cuts at hospitals, but not for other segments of industry http://www.publicintegrity.org…

As one of an estimated 78 million baby boomers in this country, I was delighted to hear that Medicare’s Hospital Trust Fund won’t run out of money until 2030 – 13 years later than projected in 2009, the year before Congress passed the Affordable Care Act. [..]

But the Hospital Trust Fund accounts for only about half of total Medicare spending. Most of the rest goes to cover physician fees, prescription drugs and to provide incentives for health insurance companies to participate in the Medicare Advantage program and administer the Medicare drug program.

The Affordable Care Act could have done much more than it does to curb spending in those areas. Because it doesn’t is a testament to the power and influence of the lobbyists who represent doctors, pharmaceutical companies and health insurers.

Europe’s economic depression has now lasted longer than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Meanwhile, America’s “Great Recession” also drags on thanks to cutbacks in government spending since the stimulus.

Europe’s leaders somehow were convinced that austerity – “deficit reduction” through cutbacks in government – would somehow lead them out of their economic doldrums. They believed that taking money out of the economy would help the economy. The result has been terrible. The Washington Post’s Wonkblog calls Europe’s austerity-lengthened depression “one of the biggest catastrophes in economic history.”

To top it off, Europe’s governments are learning that cutting back on spending not only worsens the economic picture, causing terrible unemployment, poverty and human misery, but the worsened economic picture means less revenue coming in, thereby increasing deficits instead of lowering deficits. In other words, austerity cutbacks to fight deficits have instead made deficits worse and hurt people.

Ralph Nader: Corporations Spy on Nonprofits With Impunity

Here’s a dirty little secret you won’t see in the daily papers: Corporations conduct espionage against U.S. nonprofit organizations without fear of being brought to justice.

Yes, that means using a great array of spycraft and snoopery, including planned electronic surveillance, wiretapping, information warfare, infiltration, dumpster diving and so much more.

The evidence abounds.

For example, six years ago, based on extensive documentary evidence, James Ridgeway reported in Mother Jones on a major corporate espionage scheme by Dow Chemical focused on Greenpeace and other environmental and food activists.

Greenpeace was running a potent campaign against Dow’s use of chlorine to manufacture paper and plastics. Dow grew worried and eventually desperate.

David Mitchell: Trust us, say the online giants – we won’t make you think for yourself

Are eBay and Facebook trying to protect users from their own stupidity with their nannying tactics? It’s more sinister than that

We’ve got it covered… Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in California, January 2012. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

Here’s a tip for the dynamic go-getter on a time and money budget who’s determined to live the luxurious dream: when eating your lunchtime Pot Noodle, try putting on a CD of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. It’ll make everything seem so posh. Just close your eyes and each chemical forkful will be transformed to caviar as it crosses your tongue. Or, if not quite caviar, maybe a high-end ready meal. Or some toast made from expensive bread. At the very least, it’ll elevate your perception of the quality of any jam you happen to be eating. How much probably depends on you, but on average it’s 5%.

This is one of the key findings of a survey published last week: that classical music isn’t just good for discouraging teens from loitering around tube stations – it also makes shoppers overrate a product’s quality by about a twentieth. The purpose of the study was to find out how our purchasing choices are affected by sounds.