News Updates 4 U: Thatcher

Showing posts with label Thatcher. Show all posts

Monday, April 15, 2013

ICYMI: Innovation, Margaret Thatcher and 7 stories you may have missed

Every Monday, one Marketplace staff member offers their favorite stories from the past week. Here’s a quick hit of some of the things that caught my ear on the Marketplace airwaves recently.

Should you include your race on your resume? Not something I’ve thought much about. As a white person, it’s easy to think sometimes that we’ve achieved a color-blind society. But of course, race can still play a major role in the workplace. We tackled the topic on last weekend’s Marketplace Money.

With the passing of Britain’s Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher, we came up with a couple of nice ways on the PM program to look at her economic legacy and have a bit of fun.

I was happy to hear that innovation is not just the purview of the young in an interview done by Jeremy Hobson on Marketplace Morning Report on Monday.

While we’re on the topic of innovation, our sustainability reporter Scott Tong did a nice spot on Tuesday’s afternoon show about what the impending bankruptcy of Fisker motors says about differences towards innovation on the East versus West Coasts. I liked this story a lot because Scott had a really original angle that I wasn’t hearing anywhere else in the coverage of Fisker’s woes.

We took a more tech-focused look at Fisker with David Brancaccio and our Marketplace Tech cast.

Pausing for a moment for a nod to a really strong freelance piece on Thursday: Youth Radio’s enterprise reporting on what it’s like to have a juvenile record and be looking for work. I thought this piece had strong voices and gave me a great sense of how mistakes made at a young age can cost you so much.

And finally, to end on a light note: Sabri Ben-Achour did a fun piece on the lunatics, uh athletes, who run the North Pole marathon and how much it costs to pull it off.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Euro-Skepticism was Thatcher’s Most Relevant Legacy; Had Europe Only Listened

Margaret Thatcher, former UK prime minister died on Monday. “Euro-skepticism was Thatcher’s most relevant Legacy” says MarketWatch in its report If Europe had only listened to Thatcher’s warning.

Thatcher’s basic take on a tight European federation was that it was unnecessary, unworkable, and dangerous. The nation state, she insisted, should remain at the heart of the international system, and a federated Europe would threaten its sway.
Moreover, Thatcher had misgivings about the Continent as a source of moral inspiration. “During my lifetime,” she reminisced, “most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one form or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions — from outside it.”

That insight alone is priceless, but it still pales compared with what she wrote more than a decade ago, when the euro was still a toddler, and the economies of Greece, Spain and Cyprus seemed as distant from calamity as they now are from salvation. “The European single currency,” wrote Thatcher in 2002, “is bound to fail — economically, politically, and indeed socially.”

Thatcher’s reasoning for this was not ideological. It was monetarist. There can be no such thing as a united currency without a united budget, she argued, at a time when it was impolite to suggest that the euro’s newlyweds would soon accuse each other of theft, deceit, laziness, imperialism and oppression.

Economics of a Housewife vs. Career Socialist Politician

“I am not prepared to accept the economics of a housewife,” said Jacques Chirac, a future French president in 1987. He should have. Look at France now.

Margaret Thatcher’s Last Shot at the Socialists

I have linked to the above video before, and it’s certainly worth a replay now.

Mike “Mish” Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis

Euro-Skepticism was Thatcher’s Most Relevant Legacy; Had Europe Only Listened

Monday, April 8, 2013

Margaret Thatcher"s foes turned anger into big business, and a soundtrack for the "80s

Hating Margaret Thatcher wasn’t just a political stance. It became something of an industry. From punk rock to TV and magazine satires, many entertainers and writers profited by criticizing her policies.

“She diminished a lot of cultural funding. She put the BBC really in her sites,” explains Toby Miller, professor of cultural studies at City University in London. In turn, the BBC put Thatcher in its sites, lampooning her in comedies, such as “Friday Night Live” and critiquing her policies in dramas, such as “Edge of Darkness.” The BBC hit “Dr. Who” even created a Thatcher-like character, Helen A, ruler of humans on Terra Firma.

“There was a lot of cultural creativity that managed to express what wasn’t really getting heard in the mainstream newspapers,” Miller says.

And then there was the music.

“No political figure in British politics has inspired quite so many songs that Margaret Thatcher has inspired,” says Paul Williams, head of business analysis for Music Week. “She certainly was very inspirational in terms of bringing out an anger.”

Williams says the punk movement gained a lot of momentum and global interest because of Thatcher’s policies. Thatcher became a sort of anti-muse for The Clash, Elvis Costello and Pink Floyd. Billy Bragg practically made a cottage industry out of hating the conservative prime minister.

And it wasn’t just British audiences getting the message.

“I can remember being a preteen listening to Pink Floyd’s ‘The Final Cut’ and wondering, who’s this Maggie he’s so mad at?” says Aram Sinnreich, a professor of media at Rutgers University.

He says during the ’80s, cable TV and, specifically, MTV were coming of age, and that put a lot of British music in front of an American audience. “The digital era was just beginning,” he says. “You saw the rise of cable TV, especially of MTV and really the globalization of our media infrastructure… Because of that, the vitriolic hatred a lot of musicians had for Thatcher at the time was imported to us.”

Sinnreich doubts punk would have become the global movement it did without Thatcher.

“She really galvanized the culture war’s troops in England and helped them amplify their message,” he says. ”It’s kind of ironic, because the deregulation that was one of the hallmarks of the politics that Thatcher herself espoused, lead to this explosion of anti-Thatcherist sentiment within the U.S. marketplace and around the globe.”

Sinnreich says thanks to that, the anti-Thatcher industry turned into a profitable export.

PODCAST: The legacy of Margaret Thatcher, a growing salary gap

Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female Prime Minister, died Monday from a stroke. She was 87. Known as the “Iron Lady” for her strong and uncompromising leadership style, Thatcher led a conservative economic resurgence in the U.K. during the 1980s. Thatcher, who served office from 1979 to 1990, reduced the power of labor unions, privatized state-owned airlines, car companies and other assets, and championed financial deregulation. As a result of the so-called “Thatcher revolution,” Britain became more entrepreneurial, and according to some, more efficient.

First quarter earnings come out as the stock markets hit all-time highs. But investors could be more interested in what happens the rest of the year. There are two words that sum up Wall street’s mood for first quarter earnings: Cautiously optimistic.

A new report out today by the American Association of University Professors reveals a widening salary gap between public and private university professors. Given the dismal outlook of State budgets across the country, public universities will have to find a way to compete for talent with fewer resources than their private counterparts. For a doctoral professor at public research university the average salary this year is $ 123,393. That same professor at a private university makes just over $ 167,118. It’s a gap that’s grown since last year.