News of the World? Tick. Fox News…?

by | Jul 15, 2011 | Influence and networks, North America, UK

While we Brits have been enjoying this week’s takedown of the Murdoch imperium’s UK satrapy, yesterday’s edition of Popbitch offered up an even more tantalising prospect:

A US media insider has told us that top US Democrats already have a strategy to try and emasculate Fox News in time for the 2012 election. Every effort will be made to dredge up unsavoury News Corp phone hacking links to 9/11. Eliot Spitzer has just fired the first salvo in this war…

 The link points to an article by Spitzer on Slate.com, and he does indeed appear to be taking aim – here are a few excerpts:

…how does all this concern Americans? First, it is hard to believe that the misbehavior in Murdoch’s media empire stopped at the water’s edge. Given the frequency with which he shuttled his senior executives and editors across the various oceans—Pacific as well as Atlantic—it is unlikely that the shoddy ethics were limited to Great Britain.

Much more importantly, the facts already pretty well established in Britain indicate violations of American law, in particular … the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act … We do not want companies whose headquarters are here—as News Corp.’s is—or that are listed on our financial exchanges—as News Corp. is—polluting the waters of international commerce with illegal behavior. 

The other reason to investigate here is that there is serious doubt that this matter can be investigated properly in Great Britain. Scotland Yard is already implicated, as is Cameron’s government. DoJ can and should fill the void.

If DoJ does investigate and if a court were to find News Corp. liable, the penalties should extend beyond the traditional monetary fine. News Corp. should also have its FCC licenses revoked. Licensure and relicensure by the FCC require that the licensee abide by the law and serve the public interest. News Corp. appears to have blatantly violated this basic standard. Its licenses should be pulled.

As Gawker gratefully observes, “this scandal has become the Murdoch gift that keeps on giving”.

PS – while we’re on US angles on the story: if by some strange chance you missed Jon Stewart’s take on the scandal, go watch this…

Is there a new kind of fragile state?

by | Jul 13, 2011 | Conflict and security, Economics and development, Global system

What do Pakistan, Yemen, Nigeria, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Sudan and perhaps Libya, Egypt and Tunisia have in common? Fragility and middle-income status.

The World Bank did its annual assessment of who’s a poor country and who’s not this week (see blog here for details).

In short, there are only 35 low-income countries remaining out of around 200 countries that the World Bank tracks. And that’s down from 63 in 2000 and this is projected to fall to perhaps 20 or so low-income countries by 2025.

New middle income countries this year include Ghana and Dambisa Moyo’s Zambia.

Foreign Policy also released the annual Failed States Index this month (see here) prepared with the Fund for Peace covering 60 countries noting how none of the various fragile states indices (see other three fragile states lists here) helped to predict the Arab uprisings but then these are broad-sweep, medium term indicators not predictors of sudden crises.

Interestingly, FP argues that very fragile states are largely a threat to their own inhabitants and that transnational risks are more associated with better-off fragile states. This latter point raises the question of is there a new kind of fragile state and if so what are the implications for international support to fragile states.

In between the two ways of looking at countries – income and fragility – there is a new kind of country – countries which are fragile and middle income. This isn’t supposed to happen though is it? Countries are poor, then they stabilise and then they get rich don’t they?

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Yes but who does the laundry? The World Bank on women and domestic work

by | Jul 11, 2011 | Economics and development

The World Bank’s ‘Development Impact’ blog has a fascinating post on the relationship between low-skilled migration and high-skilled women’s work.  Increasing the number of low-skilled women in a region as more migrants arrive seems to lead to longer working hours for high-skilled women, as, presumably, they get someone else in to do the laundry and the cooking and use the extra time to do more work.  The impact seems to hold across regions – they’ve found evidence of this effect in the USA, Italy, and Brazil.

This is a tough one.  Do all the benefits from 100 years of women’s liberation just add up to the right to find another woman to do your dirty work?  Or is this a positive expression of more choices for everyone – the migrants get higher wages than they would at home, and their female employers can get on the world as men have always done?  The Bank see this as a positive development.  So does Caitlin Moran in her hilarious and insightful new book on feminism.  I think they’re right, but to really make this deal work for women on both sides of the washing machine I’d like to see domestic workers get more of the protections at work that their employers take for granted.  What we really need here is a cleaners’ trade union.