Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.
Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.
Ed Montgomery was named on Monday to serve as the Director of Recovery for Auto Communities. He seems like a better pick for auto issues than all the other people Obama has named. It remains to be seen, of course, whether having a Director of Recovery will minimize the pain the Mid-West is going through and will be going through going forward.
Nate, who is more of a Michigander than I am, drew this not-pretty picture of GM’s operating margin over the last half century. He explains that this picture shows that GM has been using healthcare and pension promises to put off the time it registers these real costs on its balance sheet as a way to get the benefit of labor but put off paying the true costs of it.
GM was