1. New Jersey's conservative, Republican governor Chris Christie has discovered YouTube is a very effective propaganda tool. This tactic became evident during a recent town hall meeting, in which a questioner was "escorted" to the stage by a state trooper. Then, in a physically bullying manner, the governor responded to the inquiry without allowing any sort of reply. A trooper removed the questioner and that was that: a perfect YouTube moment available for Governor Christie's fans. The Star-Ledger of New Jersey included the episode in its print coverage (no YouTube, sorry) of the town hall meeting.
2. In fairness, it should be noted Christie did confront a sacred cow of prosperous, typically Republican suburban communities at the town hall meeting. One of his questioners asserted his municipality's right to pay its school superintendent above the $175K cap the Christie Administration has decreed suitable for the position. The municipality used a line of reasoning which must have sounded familiar to its many highly compensated, Wall Street inhabitants: the proposed superintendent's salary was "competitive" with the local school system's perceived peers.
Senior management compensation committees and consultants have used the "peer" ploy to boost key personnel pay schemes for some time. The rationale is usually accepted without complaint, and the top dogs make a killing via compliant corporate boards. The superintendents and local boards of education know this game, and have shamelessly played it. Prosperous suburban communities have rarely hesitated to use financial incentives to land the candidates they want. As long as the school system stayed "highly rated," and the connection between a school system's quality and housing prices remained ironclad, the money would be found. While Governor Christie's politics and public personality are repellent, he's on the mark on this issue.
3. China v. Google -- The WikiLeaks material in The New York Times included some profoundly disturbing information regarding the Chinese government's relentless grip on its domestic information dissemination, its mistrust of Google as a tool of the American government (read the Le Monde summary of this episode for some of the juice), and the sinister efforts of elements within China to conduct cyberwarfare against United States interests. Keep in mind China holds trillions of dollars of United States government debt.
4. Google Settles "Street View"/Privacy Lawsuit for One Dollar -- A couple sued Google for its unwelcome photographing of their Pittsburgh area home. According to a story based on original reporting in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Google employees drove 1,000 feet onto private property in order to get the photo of the couple's house. Google fought the lawsuit, only to eventually give in and pay a symbolic one dollar settlement fee. However, the couple had to pay their own legal fees. How many people have pockets deep enough, and time substantial enough, to fight Google? The FCC, meanwhile, is looking into allegations that Google's Street View campaign collected passwords and other personal information from unguarded WiFi locations. That information is quite significant in location-based marketing; the commercial leveraging of it by the aggregate information's possessor has the potential for a staggering financial bonanza.
5. Wild and crazy Mark Cuban made a fascinating post on Vator.tv called "The End of Location-Based Apps?" His thesis involves the increasing use of face-recognition software to identify prospects and customers in a specific location. He also makes a chilling assertion: "few people exclude their basic name and picture information from public search, so FB [Facebook] could be the first to provide a database of names and faces to the commercial world of facial recognition."
6. Zero Hedge posted a CNBC segment in which former Reagan Administration budget director David Stockman tells some very unpleasant truths about the American economy. Stockman notes how offshoring strongly and negatively impacted job creation in this country. (Liberals should take note this happened during the Clinton years as well as the Bush 43 nightmare. The corruption runs deep, my friends.) Stockman pointed out the inconvenient fact that most "new" jobs that have appeared during the Great Recession (Stockman's phrase) are mostly part-time jobs. He noted that government jobs will decline, as municipal and state governments are broke. And implicit in his observations is the time line for "recovery" is very, very long.
A December to remember? More likely, you'll want to take a rain check on this month. As Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca, "I drink to forget."
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