Here’s a tip for all you wannabe media moguls: If you want to get ahead in the business, make sure you have a very successful parent.

22 year old Gus Wenner, son of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner has been promoted to head up operations at RollingStone.com after a long career in….college. Via JimRomenesko.com:

Here’s Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner’s memo about his son‘s promotion.

From: Jann Wenner <jann.wenner@rollingstone.com>
Date: Monday, May 20, 2013 2:52 PM
Subject: Gus Wenner

Gus Wenner (from his Facebook page)

Dear all:

[Wenner Media chief digital officer] David Kang and I are very pleased — and I am very proud — to announce that Gus Wenner, after leading the re-launch re-design effort for our website, will now continue by heading up the overall operations of RollingStone.com.

Jann

Hamilton Nolan’s take:

Gus Wenner, 22, is an amazing media success story. Just a few years ago, he was a Brown University student playing in a band with fellow celebukid Brown student Scout Willis. Today, he’s still playing in a band with Scout Willis— and also running the website of a major national magazine!…..Gus followed the traditional route to a perch atop the media hierarchy: playing in an alt-country band in college.

[Full disclosure: My father was a big figure in the entertainment industry. He did once get me a job in the video tape library of his company as a runner, but after almost getting fired for incompetence on several occasions, I left after 4 months.]

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Matt Taibbi: Romney has America's best interest at heart?

Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi – his mixture of acerbic wit and penetrating insight is a rarity in journalism these days, and I pretty much agree with his stance on most issues. That’s why I was little alarmed to read this from his blog on Rolling Stone today:

When push comes to shove, we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there, which is why it should be okay to not panic if the other party wins. If some foreign agent attacks us, I seriously doubt a president Mitt Romney would wave the white flag and invite the enemy in. Right? He’ll try his best as Commander-in-chief, just like Obama has, and just like Bush did, and Clinton did, and Reagan did and so on.

That should be the way we think. We should be confident that whoever wins has our collective best interests at heart, even if we don’t agree with his or her ideology, the same way we reflexively assume that the pilot of any plane we board doesn’t want to fly us into a mountain.

Perhaps the storm has affected Taibbi’s memory a little, but here’s what he wrote about the prospects of a Mitt Romney economy a few weeks back:

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

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Matt Taibbi and the Huffington Post’s Ahmed Shihab-Eldin had a great discussion about Mitt Romney’s naked hypocrisy when it comes to the national debt. Taibbi pointed out that Romney’s entire career was built around loading companies up with debt then extracting as much value out of them as possible with no concern for their long term well being – the opposite philosophy he is espousing for political office. Check out the highlights of the conversation:

Romney preaches minimal spending and debt for government not because he genuinely believes  in it, but because he wants to eradicate government programs that help people he doesn’t care about (the 47% he discussed in front of his rich friends last year). The relentless focus on government spending and debt isn’t born out of a real desire to ensure the survival of future generations as he so often claims on the campaign trail, it is born out of  desire to ensure government works for people like himself – the rich and powerful. It should come as no surprise that Romney backed the Wall St bailout in 2008 – after all, his friends livelihoods were on the line. Of course Romney did not extend that empathy towards the automobile industry, a largely blue collar industry that he would not have regarded as equal in social value, and has had no time for welfare programs vital to the survival of the poor.

Romney understands the power of debt and how to use it – he made millions out of it in asset management and understood that for the economy to survive, it was vital to take on more debt in order to sustain the financial system. In Romney’s world, debt is good when rich people make money, but not when the poor stand to gain from it. And how does Romney deal with this seemingly obvious contradiction? Pretty easily – he lies about it.

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Watching Mitt Romney lie truly is a sight to behold – he now does it so effortlessly that you have to give him credit. There has been a metamorphosis in front of our eyes over the past year. Romney once appeared like a stiff robot, fumbling lines and committing gaff after gaff while trying to pass off completely contradictory policy proposals to different demographics. It was painful to watch as you got the feeling that even Romney didn’t believe what he was saying. But now it seems he does, and Romney is lying with astonishing ease.

Matt Taibbi points to his first debate performance where Romney finally figured out that he didn’t need to feel guilty about making things up:

From the start of the first debate, Romney has almost seemed liberated, spouting line after line of breathless, ecstatic inventions – things that are, if not lies exactly, at the very least just simply made up out of thin air, and seemingly on the spot, too. The business about the $25,000 “bucket” of deductions which he prefaced, with seemingly half of America watching, with the phrase, “Let’s pick a number”: awesome. Then there was the jobs plan that creates 12 million jobs, another number seemingly plucked out of the ether: it turned out that when asked to justify the number, the Romney campaign cited three studies, none of which came anywhere near justifying claims of a 12 million-job increase…..

Romney’s realized that numbers don’t matter, and past facts don’t even matter that much: he’s run all fall on completely made-up, mathematically-incoherent jobs and tax plans, and not only is he not suffering, he’s made it all the way to a statistical tie with the president (or even a lead, if you believe the Gallup polls), and the presidency is in sight. He’s finally released the burden of all those internal contradictions, and the inventions and devious distortions are coming so fast and so furious now, it’s energized him psychologically, and he seems to be taking flight before our eyes.

I think that Obama’s performance in the second debate successfully highlighted the sociopathic lying Romney has been engaging in, but he’ll have to ram it home again in the next debate to stop Romney from getting away with it. After all, voters are notoriously flaky and they’ll go with the guy offering the rosiest sounding deal. Obama just needs to remind them that purchasing Romney as President is akin to buying the cheap IKEA bed frame. It looks like a real bed, but once you lie down, it falls apart pretty quickly.

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Image by emilydickinsonridesabmx via Flickr

Matt Taibbi on why the 'Occupy Wall St' movement should transcend traditional political labels:

This is an issue for the traditional "left" because it's a classic instance of overweening corporate power — but it's an issue for the traditional "right" because these same institutions are also the biggest welfare bums of all time, de facto wards of the state who sucked trillions of dollars of public treasure from the pockets of patriotic taxpayers from coast to coast.

The Right is desperately trying to frame the movement as a conspiracy between latte sipping liberals and radical Leftists (see Taibbi's hilarious piece on Rush Limbaugh's freakout over how to react to the protests), but this time it looks like the age old spectrum defined by the media isn't washing. Protesters of all age, race and occupation are involved in the movement, defying the Left/Right characterization that has strangled progress in America for decades.

Being broke and in debt goes beyond Right and Left, and no matter how many multimillionaire media figures try to argue otherwise, the reality seems to be trumping the Fox News version of events.

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Matt Taibbi speaks to Don Imus about the problems the 'Occupy Wall St' movement is having articulating their cause and makes some suggestions as to what could be realistically achieved. Taibbi also discusses the possibility that not having a set of objectives might actually be a good thing in the long run, as long as the movement keeps growing:

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Matt Taibbi takes conservative NYTimes columnist Ross Douthat to task for his recent transformation from war hawk to pacifist:

The recent conversions to the cause of foreign-policy prudence by people like Douthat would be obnoxious even if they were believable. It’s easy to respect the position of someone like Ron Paul – he’s been against the war from the start, and for the same reasons throughout.

But people like Douthat didn’t start becoming pacifists until a) the occupation of Iraq went south, helping derail the Bush presidency, and b) Barack Obama became president and started taking ownership of new adventures in places like Libya. Before then, he was just another jingoistic twit doing the “Gooble, gooble, one of us!”chant on the march to war.

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Image via Wikipedia

Video heavy day today, but this is definitely worth watching. While I try to remain objective about opposing arguments regarding the financial meltdown, it is difficult to do so when the evidence weighs heavily on one side. Libertarian Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle has taken issue with Matt Taibbi's extremely well researched piece on the gigantic fraud scheme Goldman Sach's orchestrated against it's own customers, believing that the systems in place were simply 'too complicated' to blame on any one person or company.

McArdle's view, in my opinion, it utterly ridiculous and McArdle's attempt to blame customers for being lied to by Goldman Sach's is absolutely disgraceful. Taibbi's piece is based on real research and an overwhelming amount of hard evidence, and he calls McArdle out big time on her support for Goldman Sachs. Taibbi has no background in business or economics, but he makes McArdle look positively ignorant when it comes to a topic she supposedly specializes in:

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