Last night (12/15/11), MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes were impressed by a new Pew poll--flagged by Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent--showing that a vast majority of the public believes that corporations and the wealthy have too much power.

The picture one gets from the poll is pretty dramatic:

The question that seemed most important to Maddow and Hayes was why Republican politicians aren't shifting their policies in response to this apparent surge in anti-corporate populism:

MADDOW: The national sentiment right now being expressed to pollsters is that the people at the top are getting way too much of the spoils of both our economy and our political system and I resent it, and I think that even if I'm a Republican.

HAYES: Majority of Republicans say that wealthy people--corporations and people with money--have too much power in this country, a majority of Republicans in the poll.

MADDOW: Are you seeing politicians behave in a way that reflects a desire to meet that concern?

HAYES: What's amazing to me is how unresponsive Republican state level officials are and how much they're responsive to all of their ideological priors, all of the interests that they promised fealty to before they got into office, and how little trimming of the sails they've done.

I mean, Rick Scott just seems to be perfectly happy to plow along at 25 percent, doing all these things that are wildly unpopular. And I think there's a different set of incentive structures on the right, partly because of the way the money works over there, partly because of the ideological cohesiveness of the base.

But what we have not seen largely are course corrections.

MADDOW: Yes.

Of course, MSNBC is likely to focus more on what Republicans are doing wrong, or not doing at all; that's their bread and butter. But setting up a political discussion along these lines presents some problems.

If you're wondering why Republican politicians haven't become more anti-corporate, what about the Democratic Party? Democrats in the poll are far more critical of corporate power than Republicans. Does their party seem politically responsive to this?

(Of course, the first question to ask is whether you really believe politicians are actually sensitive to public opinion at all--read about Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics for another take.)

The most important thing to know is that this new populism isn't new. ABC's been polling on this for a while (results are posted on PollingReport.com):

And FAIR took note of this in 1998 (press release, 6/1/98)  when we compared public opinion to a survey of elite media:

The general public is more critical of the concentration of corporate power in the United States than are journalists. When asked whether they felt "too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few large companies," 57 percent of the journalists agreed, while 43 percent felt they did not have too much power. The numbers were quite different, though, when the Times Mirror Center asked the same question of the general public in October 1995. A full 77 percent of the public felt that corporations had too much power, with only 18 percent feeling that they did not.

The fact that Time magazine named "The Protester" its Person of the Year was maybe a little surprising. Totally unsurprising, though, was the choice of a runners-up: Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, a hero to many in the corporate media for his bold calls to slash government spending on the poor.

It's hard to know where to start with reporter David Von Drehle's tribute. But let's try here:

Through a combination of hard work, good timing and possibly suicidal guts, the Wisconsin Republican managed to harness his party to a dramatic plan for dealing with America's rapidly rising public debt.

Dealing with the rising debt. Remember that idea.

He goes on:

The supply-sider from Janesville, Wis., tapped into a deep well of anxiety over trillion-dollar deficits at home and the threat of debt-fueled calamity in Europe. Did he deliver a perfect plan? Not even he claims that. But Ryan, 41, offered a budget that began to convey the scale of change necessary to defuse the American debt bomb: Sweeping tax reform. Unprecedented spending freezes. Most important, a thorough reinvention of federal entitlements.

Ryan's plan isn't perfect? And he admitted this?  What a guy! Ryan's heroic stance, readers learn, caused fury in both parties. Republicans were forced to make  difficult choices, while "Democrats howled at the sacrilege and Ryan's refusal to raise income tax rates on the wealthy."

Ryan's is a "tough budget"  that "brought President Obama down from his cloud of happy talk about windmills and high-speed trains to acknowledge that America has a plateful of peas to choke down after its binge at the dessert bar." That's right--massive cuts in social spending are good for you, just like eating your veggies.

The crux of the whole piece comes down to this:

Ryan's dramatic proposal would not have gained any traction if it did not address a widely acknowledged problem: Over the next two generations, the U.S. government is on track to spend many tens of trillions of dollars more than it plans to raise. Unless changes are made, that will force so much borrowing that interest payments alone will sink the federal budget.

Thankfully, Time tells us, Paul Ryan has "the courage to look the future in the eye. It is a seer's work to glimpse around the corner and sound an alarm."

The piece closes by noting that this brave bold plan "wouldn't balance the federal budget until 2040. The prophet of 2011 will be 70 years old."

Wait a second. I thought this was a bold deficit-reducing roadmap to deal with the debt?

The secret to the Ryan plan--the thing media don't talk about much--is that it doesn't do the thing they say they like about it-- namely, reduce the deficit. As Paul Krugman explained in the New York Times, the projected deficit in 2020 under the Ryan plan would be

about the same as the budget office's estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration's plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible--which you shouldn't--the Roadmap wouldn't reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.

Or as James Horney of the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities wrote of Ryan (4/8/11):

Despite proposing $4.3 trillion in what would be the most severe and wrenching budget cuts in U.S. history--two-thirds of which would come from programs for people of low or moderate incomes--the plan barely reduces deficits at all over the next decade. That's because his budget cuts are offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts that would go disproportionately to those at the top. In essence, at least for the next decade, this plan is far less a blueprint for addressing deficits and far more a proposal to redistribute large amounts of resources from those at the bottom to those at the top.

Dean Baker writes that "Representative Ryan's program would imply a massive upward redistribution to the one percent." Maybe that explains why he's a Time runner-up. If "The Protester" is the Person of the Year, journalistic "balance" requires saying nice things about the One Percent.

We know by now that Newt Gingrich thinks he's smart. And we know there are plenty of people in the corporate media who believe the same thing.  How do they show their love for the brainy Republican presidential candidate? Time's Joe Klein shows the way in this week's issue (12/19/11) of the magazine. He doesn't think Gingrich should be president, but he does think Gingrich is full of interesting ideas.

Well, what about that plan to have kids work as janitors cleaning their schools? Klein's problem with it is that it doesn't go far enough:

I've known him for 25 years. I've had more creative policy conversations with him than with any other elected politician (with the possible exception of Bill Clinton). He is one Republican who is legitimately interested in improving the lives of the poor--although his ideas, which almost always involve market incentives, are quite different from the suffocating paternalism that many Democrats favored until Clinton came along. As early as 1990, Gingrich was paying poor children in Atlanta $2 for every book they read. He also proposed paying foreign-language-speaking students to tutor their English-speaking classmates in their native languages. He also proposed giving every literate child in the poorest neighborhoods a laptop. His recent idea of paying poor kids to help clean their schools--which has been the subject of a shrill, silly gust of liberal ire--is more of the same. It's a good idea, which would be much better if it were expanded to all public middle and high schools, with the work seen as an unpaid form of public service, a way to build community spirit and teach civic responsibility.

It calls to mind Paul Krugman's line about Gingrich--that he's "a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like."

Dean Baker (12/9/11) flagged this NPR Morning Edition report today (12/9/11), and it's well worth a positivity.

In the debate over the payroll tax cut, Democrats want to pay for extending the tax break with a surtax on the wealthy. Republicans claim--usually without being challenged by reporters--that a surtax on millionaires would be an attack on job-creating small-business owners.

So NPR decided to go to GOP officials and ask to speak with these small-business-owning, millionaire job-creators. Turned out there was trouble finding any:

We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.

So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to.

They did find a few wealthy business owners willing to talk--and they said their personal tax rate wasn't a factor in their hiring decisions.

Imagine if journalists did this kind of thing all the time?

The Republican Party is in something of a bind. Many oppose White House efforts to extend--and perhaps increase--a Social Security payroll tax cut next year. This might sound strange, since if conservatives are supposed to be fond of anything, it's tax cuts.

So they have some explaining to do. They're given a valuable assist when journalists, thanks to the conventions of corporate media, will print their words with little in the way of critical analysis. Take this from today's Washington Post (12/7/11) by Rosalind Helderman:

A Republican Party that has for decades benefited from a commitment to lower taxes is now finding itself on the defensive on the issue, as members face a deep split over a Democratic plan to extend a payroll tax reduction.

What might normally be a no-brainer for most congressional Republicans is being resisted by many tea-party-conscious members who oppose what they consider a short-term gimmick that would worsen the federal deficit and siphon money from Social Security.

These Tea Party Republicans are concerned about the effects of a tax cut on the deficit? For real? It's the kind of thing that a reporter might challenge by, say, quoting a critic who would point out this absurdity. But the piece gives readers an array of Republican and conservative quotes, with one comment from Democratic Sen. Harry Reid.

Then again, the claims of the  politicians actually quoted could stand to be factchecked too. Like this one:

"The president’s suggesting we raise taxes on small-business folks to give a temporary one-year tax holiday and make job creators pay it off over the next 10 years," said freshman Rep. Tim Huels­kamp (R-Kan.). "That's not the way you grow this economy."

That "tax on small business owners" line refers to the White House plan to pay for the payroll tax break with a surtax on millionaires. Republicans claim that this would devastate small business owners don't stand up to scrutiny, something the New York Times pointed out yesterday:

But Jenni R. LeCompte, a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, said the proposed surtax "would affect only a very, very small number of small-business owners."

"Only 1 percent of all small-business owners have adjusted gross income over $1 million and would be affected by this surcharge," Ms. LeCompte said, citing a new study by Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis.

Huffington Post reporter Jon Ward did what reporters should do when covering political campaign ads. He told readers, at the top of his story, that the new Mitt Romney ad was based on a lie:

The 60-second Romney ad quoted Obama as saying, "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose."

It sounds like Obama is talking about his own chances in 2012. But it's actually a clip of Obama mocking his 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz), for not wanting to talk about the economy in the final stretch of that election. McCain's response to the collapse of the financial sector in the fall of 2008 is widely cited as a contributing factor to his loss.

That's a pretty astounding bit of deception. It's good that Ward is doing this, because when I read about the Romney ad in this morning's New York Times, I saw a headline that read, "Romney Heats Up Campaign in New Hampshire With an Ad Attacking Obama."

The Times' Ashley Parker wrote that the Romney campaign was heading into "a more combative phase," and that the commercial represented "a step up in the intensity of the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination."

The ad actually projects strength, according to the paper:

By focusing his message on the president, Mr. Romney is trying to show Republicans that he can take on Mr. Obama aggressively, an attribute that conservatives are seeking in a nominee.

To be fair, Parker does have a piece on the Times website today that discusses the ad's inaccuracy. We'll see if there's something in the paper tomorrow.

But for some reporters the inaccuracy of the ad doesn't amount to much. At the Washington Post, Aaron Blake's piece explains the context of the quote, but then seems determined to argue that it's not going to matter:

And how many of Romney’s supporters or other Republicans are going to be truly offended by the use of an out-of-context quote in an ad? We're wagering not many. In fact, Romney's willingness to take Obama on so directly--no matter the means of doing so--will likely accrue to his benefit among GOP primary voters who want a fighter next fall.

It's also worth noting that a lack of context in a campaign ad is nothing new. Just last week, in fact, GOP candidates including Romney mischaracterized Obama’s quote about how America had been "lazy" about attracting foreign investment, by suggesting that Obama was calling all Americans "lazy." (Texas Gov. Rick Perry even ran an ad based on this premise.) And the furor over that lasted all of two seconds.

Going from a political press that doesn't care about factchecking candidates to one that believes factchecking doesn't really matter is not exactly progress. Or is this just the rule that's applied to Republican presidential candidates?

UPDATE: It's worth noting that ABC's Jake Tapper slammed the ad on Twitter, and did a report on World News saying that the ad is "so out of context it's false."

News that Newt Gingrich was receiving millions of dollars to advise Freddie Mac has to be a little unsettling for at least some conservative voters, who are accustomed to demonizing the government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for causing the housing bubble, and hence the recession.

But it's not just right-wing pundits like Bill O'Reilly who are fond of blaming it all on Fannie and Freddie. Here's ABC reporter Jonathan Karl, speaking in conservative shorthand in his job as network news correspondent on This Week yesterday:

Meet this week's new front-runner. He's a good debater, man of ideas, and now Newt Gingrich is riding high in the polls, which means now the spotlight turns to all his baggage. Exhibit A: the nearly $2 million he got from Freddie Mac, a government-backed mortgage company that made so many bad loans, it helped bring the economy down.

We'll set aside the stuff about Newt Gingrich, Man of Ideas (his most recent one involving having poor children replace janitors at their schools).

The more important question: Did Freddie Mac make the bad loans that crashed the economy?

No. You can read about that here or here, among many others. (UPDATE: To be clear, Fannie/Freddie don't actually lend money to people buying homes-- as McClatchy's Kevin Hall and David Goldstein explained back in 2008).

Or read this concise explanation from Fannie/Freddie critic Dean Baker,  part of this response to a David Brooks column on this subject:

The worst junk mortgages that inflated the housing bubble to extraordinary levels were not bought and securitized by Fannie and Freddie, they were securitized by Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lehman and the other private investment banks. These investment banks gobbled up the worst subprime and Alt-A garbage that sleaze operations like Ameriquest and Countrywide pushed on homebuyers.

The trillions of dollars that the geniuses at the private investment banks funneled into the housing market were the force that inflated the bubble to its 2006 peaks. Fannie and Freddie were followers in this story, jumping into the subprime and Alt-A market in 2005 to try to maintain market share. They were not the leaders.

So why is conservative mythology being treated as if it were fact by Jonathan Karl? Because that's what he does.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry's new TV commercial is based on a lie. Will reporters say so?

The ad starts with a Barack Obama quote: ''We've been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades.''

To which Perry responds:  ''Can you believe that? That's what our president thinks is wrong with America? That Americans are lazy? That's pathetic. It's time to clean house in Washington.''

Now, it would be rather unusual for a president to say that.

Obama didn't.

The quote comes from an event where Obama spoke about efforts to woo corporations to do more business in America. Obama's response was that government should being doing more to improve the business environment for corporations--to "make it easier for foreign investors to build a plant in the United States."

If anything, Obama is saying the government has been lazy in its approach to pleasing corporations. As MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell explained last night, this is the kind of thing you can imagine coming from the mouths of Republican politicians and candidates.

So how are media doing fact-checking Perry's claim?

Today (11/18/11) the New York Times has a piece headlined "Perry's Latest Attacks Distort Obama's Words and Past." That's pretty good--though it's a little strange to see the paper's somewhat passive description of Perry's mendacity: "Some of his recent attacks have drifted into the realm of falsehood." How on Earth did they drift into that realm?

But the piece is an improvement over the Times' take on the ad a day earlier, written by the same reporter (Richard Oppel). That article led with the news that that the  commercial "takes a sharper tone" than Perry's previous ads, and that it "may be an effort to shift attention from Mr. Perry's recent stumbles by attacking the White House."

In the sixth paragraph, readers are finally told that "the ad takes Mr. Obama's remark out of context."

Mitt Romney has also been twisting Obama's "lazy" comment, with little push back from the press. Another Times piece described Romney's attack:

Mr. Romney's critique sounded a familiar theme in the Republican primary contest--that the president is out of touch with the ordinary American worker.

Later in the article, an Obama spokesperson says Romney is taking the comments out of context--which is the kind of thing journalists should point out themselves.

In the Washington Post, Chris Cilizza reported the Perry ad this way:

His latest ad, which began airing Wednesday in Iowa and on national cable stations, takes Obama to task for a recent comment that America has grown "a little bit lazy" in attracting foreign investment.

He added:

Romney also took issue with the comment this week, accusing Obama of calling Americans lazy. "I don't think that describes Americans," he said.

And once again, an Obama spokesperson steps in, near the end of the piece, to try and set things straight.

If this is any indication of how the press is going to handle campaign season lying, things look pretty bleak.

One bright spot came on the CBS Evening News (11/17/11):

SCOTT PELLEY: As we get pulled into this campaign season, you'll be seeing a lot of ads by the candidates. And from time to time, we're going to offer some background on the claims that all the candidates are making. This one caught our eye today. Texas Governor Rick Perry is running a spot about what he describes as an outrageous comment made by President Obama.

OBAMA: We've been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades.

GOV. RICK PERRY (R), TEXAS: Can you believe that? That's what our president thinks is wrong with America, that Americans are lazy? That's pathetic.

PELLEY: That would be pathetic. So we hunted down the full comments the president made during an interview Saturday at the Pacific Economic Summit. He'd been asked about U.S. businesses marketing themselves overseas.

OBAMA: There are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity. Our stability, our openness, our innovative, free-market culture. But, you know, we've been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We've kind of taken for granted, well, people will want to come here, and we aren't out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America.

PELLEY: There it is in context.

There--that wasn't so hard, was it?

UPDATE: Syntactical glitch in first sentence fixed.

The public TV show Nightly Business Report has gone through some serious changes over the past year or so--sold by the public station that had produced it for years to a somewhat mysterious private company run by an entrepreneur whose been the subject of various controversies and lawsuits.

The show's been sold once again, and the new owner of public television's premier business newscast is... an investment firm called Atalaya Capital Management. And why not, really.

Paul Krugman argues in the New York Times today (11/18/11) that the failure of the Congressional supercommittee might be a good thing, and that public understanding of what's really happening is hampered by a familiar media problem.

He also makes a pretty safe bet about what coverage is going to look like if they fail to reach a deal:

So the supercommittee brought together legislators who disagree completely both about how the world works and about the proper role of government. Why did anyone think this would work?

Well, maybe the idea was that the parties would compromise out of fear that there would be a political price for seeming intransigent. But this could only happen if the news media were willing to point out who is really refusing to compromise. And they aren’t. If and when the supercommittee fails, virtually all news reports will be he-said, she-said, quoting Democrats who blame Republicans and vice versa without ever explaining the truth.

Indeed.

And he adds for good measure:

Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to "centrist" pundits who won't admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: "Why won't the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?" Mr. Obama: "I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes." Pundit: "Why won't the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?"

Psst--he's talking about this guy:

The general line in corporate media coverage of the so-called "Supercommittee" tasked with coming up with a long-term budget plan is that both sides aren't willing to budge: Republicans won't agree to raise taxes, and Democrats want to protect "entitlements" like Social Security and Medicare.

While some might find the idea of Democrats standing up for Social Security and Medicare, it's not really true--Democrats have offered to make such cuts if there are some tax increases to go along with them. This insistence that a compromise involve a compromise has been depicted, oddly enough, as a refusal to compromise.

But things got slightly more confusing when it was reported that the Republicans had broken their anti-tax stance, and were putting a $300 billion revenue increase on the table. In the Washington Post, Lori Montgomery's piece led with this:

Congressional Republicans have for the first time retreated from their hardline stance against new taxes, offering to raise federal tax collections by nearly $300 billion over the next decade as part of a plan to tame the national debt.

That is big news. In the New York Times (11/9/11):

Republicans, long opposed to tax increases, said Tuesday that they might allow $250 billion to $300 billion of additional tax revenue as part of a deal to shave $1.2 trillion from federal deficits over the next 10 years.

One slight problem: The GOP tax increase is, it turns out, a massive tax cut for wealthy Americans. As Steve Benen noticed (Political Animal, 11/9/11):

Way down in the same article, in the 16th paragraph, the piece gets around to mentioning that Republican want to trade nearly $300 billion in new revenue for "permanently extending the George W. Bush-era tax cuts past their 2012 expiration date, a move that would increase deficits by about $4 trillion over the next decade."

That's the kind of detail that more or less debunks the article’s headline and lede. Think about it: as part of a debt-reduction deal, Republicans want to increase tax revenue by less than $300 billion and cut tax revenue by roughly $4 trillion.

This bit of trickery is still being misreported--in today's Post, for instance:

Some conservatives in the Republican House majority said they could not support the latest GOP offer to raise taxes by as much as $300 billion over the next decade as part of a broader deal to cut spending. The offer marked the first time Republicans other than Boehner have proposed raising taxes above current levels.

Readers had to keep reading several paragraphs to learn that this tax increase is actually part of a massive tax cut--bringing the top rate down to 28 percent.

Perhaps the most bizarre exchange on this topic came on Sunday's Meet the Press, where NBC host David Gregory insisted that his own reporting should be trusted over the word of Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida:

GREGORY: They did agree for tax increases that Democrats have not accepted this week. But I want to ask you about, specifically, about the debt.

SCHULTZ: Well, no, no, no.... Come on, David, that was not a serious proposal. What they proposed was, you know, reducing the number of itemized deductions in exchange for a passage, an extension of all the Bush tax cuts, which actually would've resulted in less revenue and brought the overall top tax rate down to 28 percent. So that was not a serious proposal. We need a serious proposal that balances the revenue the super committee generates and the cuts.

GREGORY: All right. Well, there was new revenue that was proposed, but I realize that's still a subject of debate. But let me, let me focus...

SCHULTZ: That would result in less revenue overall.

GREGORY: Let me--well, again, that's in dispute, according to my reporting on that.

It would be of great value to the country--and to the GOP--if Gregory could explain what his investigation turned up.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (11/9/11) went to India in order to appreciate how the grassroots movement to stamp out political corruption there is superior to Occupy Wall Street.

Still, he sees a common thread:

The world's two biggest democracies, India and the United States, are going through remarkably similar bouts of introspection. Both countries are witnessing grassroots movements against corruption and excess. The difference is that Indians are protesting what is illegal--a system requiring bribes at every level of governance to get anything done. And Americans are protesting what is legal--a system of Supreme Court-sanctioned bribery in the form of campaign donations that have enabled the financial-services industry to effectively buy the U.S. Congress, and both political parties, and thereby resist curbs on risk-taking.

Hear, hear! Wall Street has bought the political process. But what can save us? A magical centrist internet-based third-party presidential candidate, that's who!

What has brought millions of Indians into the streets to support the India Against Corruption movement and what seems to have triggered not only the Occupy Wall Street movement but also initiatives like AmericansElect.org--a centrist group planning to use the Internet to nominate an independent presidential candidate--is a sense that both countries have democratically elected governments that are so beholden to special interests that they can no longer deliver reform. Therefore, they both need shock therapy from outside.

Huh?

Americans Elect is the brainchild of a group of hedge-fund investors--or, as a columnist named Tom Friedman once reported, it is "financed with some serious hedge-fund money."

These are the people who are going to deliver a outsider shock to the system that will curb the influence of the financial services industry. Wall Street will save us from Wall Street?

Bonus irony: Democratic pollster Doug Schoen is the chief strategist for Americans Elect--the same Doug Schoen who was very recently proclaiming that Democrats should distance themselves from the Occupy Wall Street protests. As Jedd Legum pointed out, Schoen misrepresented that polling in a column for (where else?) the Wall Street Journal.

The November 1 broadcast of ABC World News couldn't have been any clearer about what's happening in Greece: Their pampered, early-retiring workforce is stealing from Americans.

Anchor Diane Sawyer explained:

If you were watching your stocks today, you saw a nosedive. The Dow down nearly 300 points, so, what changed?  Well, blame it on the country of Greece, long criticized for being undisciplined, and now threatening American retirements.

OK, since we probably were all "watching our stocks" on Tuesday--like any other day--why is Greece doing this to us?

ABC correspondent Dan Harris explains how this all works by introducing us to 2 workers. The Greek--Yannis--is a 52-year-old bank teller, already retired for two years (naturally). The other is a 60-year-old Florida resident--Emma--who is  "still having to work around the clock and doesn't have enough savings to retire."

How representative are those workers? While Yannis resembles the Greek worker most familiar in the U.S. media, it's not clear that he's at all typical. This chart, for instance, shows the Greek retirement age isn't all that different from the rest of Europe.

Harris explains that Greeks live it up:

And check this out. While our maximum Social Security payment is around $28,000 a year, over in Greece, where Yannis lives, it's 20 grand more, $48,000 a year.

It's hard to figure out exactly what is being compared here, or where the figures come from. But you get the idea. Harris goes on to say that Greece "is a country of generous benefits, of pools and Porsches," with American workers footing the bill:

And so here is how Emma is now paying for Yannis.

In order to pay for all the retirement packages for people like Yannis, the Greek government borrowed big time from banks all over Europe. Now, Greece says it can't pay. So, those banks are facing huge losses and that could push Europe into a depression. Since America does so much business with Europe, we would be pulled down, too, and that, of course, would hurt Emma's savings.

I'm confused. Emma doesn't have much in the way of savings; even still, it's hard to fathom how that money is at risk. America might get "pulled down" and that would...affect her Social Security checks? There's no explanation for how that could possibly be true. But there is a graphic:

Oh. Now it makes sense, right? You can see the dollars floating out of the U.S. bank right into Europe.

You seem to hear more about Greek retirees than Greek workers, which makes stories like this fuel a sense of outrage at what Harris calls Greek's "fat pensions."

But occasionally another message breaks through, like in this USA Today piece (5/10/10):

ATHENS -- A hard life is about to get harder for Manolis Fylaktidis.

Greece's cash-strapped government is cutting the schoolteacher's $27,300 salary by about $5,300 as part of a dramatic austerity move the prime minister says is needed to pay the country's ballooning debt. "It is difficult now.... We have to change our life because life is too expensive," Fylaktidis says.

Even as the 44-year-old teacher's salary falls, the government is raising the value-added tax on most purchases for the second time in as many months, to 23 percent, and increasing electricity and water charges.

We might live in a very different world if workers in one country saw what they have in common with workers in another country, instead of being made to feel angry about supposedly cushy retirements.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou's call for a referendum on the EU bailout package seems to have prompted media outlets to rummage through their store of Greek cliches.

The Washington Post's editorial against "Mr. Papandreou's ill-advised announcement of a referendum" led with a classical reference:

Not since the night when soldiers emerged from the belly of a giant wooden horse in ancient Troy has Greece engineered a more stunning surprise.

On the CBS Evening News (11/1/11), Mark Phillips weighed in with a culinary metaphor:

This was supposed to be the week that world leaders gathered in France to chart the next course of the economic battle. All through the week, the demonstrators gathered to tell them what they were doing wrong. Now the whole agenda has been tossed up in the air like a Greek salad.

Is that what people do with Greek salads? I thought it was plates they were supposed to throw around.

And on the Today show (11/2/11), CNBC reporter Mandy Drury skipped the imagery and just vented directly about how irritating she thought Greece was:

Yes, that news that Greece has called a referendum on its bailout scuttled stocks yesterday, and it looks like it could be a drag on stocks today as well. I know, it is so annoying that one small country could have that much of an impact on worldwide markets and indeed, essentially, your 401(k), but there you have it, our globalized and interconnected world.

On a happier note, though, starting today Starbucks is going to collect donations of $5 or more from customers in order to stimulate jobs through its Jobs for USA program. I guess that's just another reason to reach for the java, Natalie.

Well, thank goodness for Starbucks.

On the Meet the Press roundtable on Sunday (10/30/11), talk turned to Steve Jobs. And, as one might expect from the avalanche of hero worship that accompanied news of his death, the chatter concerned how we might all one day live up to Jobs' legacy.

Here's host David Gregory, speaking to Tom Brokaw:

Tom, it's interesting, author and journalist Jeff Greenfield tweeted recently about Steve Jobs the following: "Imagine a Steve Jobs in the auto industry, in healthcare, in energy, even in government. We'd have a different country."

We know from Walter Isaacson's biography that Jobs had some pretty strong views about how the government should work--specifically, he wanted to "break" teachers' unions, and praised the light regulatory burden on corporations doing business in China.

That certainly makes Apple more profitable. But consider this passage from the New York Times' review of Mike Daisey's monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," about one Chinese facility:

While the official Chinese workday is 8 hours, the norm at Foxconn is more like 12 and even longer when the introduction of a product is at hand. One worker died after a 34-hour shift. Some of the workers he meets are as young as 13, and because of the repetitive nature of the labor, their hands often become deformed and useless within a decade, rendering them unemployable.

Back to the NBC panel, where Isaacson was using Jobs' legacy to underline a point in Tom Brokaw's new book:

ISAACSON: I think that painting a vision for the future, saying "Here's where the country really ought to go," we all know the broad outline, Steve Jobs knew the broad outlines, which is better jobs, skills for those jobs, and a chance for everybody to move up. (CROSSTALK) Well, I think that we all agree that there should be a fairer, flatter taxes...

GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

ISAACSON: ...but there should also be a reduction in the inequality in this country.

GREGORY: Right.

We all agree that there should flatter taxes? I don't think so.

And Apple, for the record, seemed to think it should pay no taxes:

Apple has made money so quickly and so prodigiously that it holds an outrageous $76 billion in cash and investments--an awesome sum thought to be parked in an obscure subsidiary, Braeburn Capital, located across the California border in Reno because the state of Nevada doesn't have corporate or capital-gains taxes.

If only such a company could dominate every facet of our lives, commercial and political.