I am a 53 year old teacher. I have double major in Speech and Criminal Justice resulting in a Bachelor's degree from Northeastern State University in Oklahoma and a law degree.
Gnerally speaking this is not a common post. It was bit of surprise. I told the people at the emergency room that since on Christmas Eve there was virtually no one waiting for the doctor that we would be back next year and, in fact, make all of our emergency room visits on major holidays.
That was as good as it got.
Aside from regular presents, my spouse got a brand new pair of crutches. They are actually kind of shiny.
I may be a bit short on posting the next few days. Things are complex.
You have my holiday best wishes.
Don’t be too concerned, I’m sure we can figure all this stuff out at my house.
Plato falls between Socrates and Aristotle. These three philosophers lived during the Athenian decline. This caused a great deal of turmoil in their lives and deeply influenced their philosophical views. Here is a lecture on Plato I found very enjoyable.
An excellent, relatively brief and clearly ennuciated lecture on Aristotle. I enjoyed it. I continue my philosophical journey intent on mastering ethics and morality to add force and power to my writing.
RomanceMy wife and I are watching romantic movies and eating carryout food requiring no kitchen work at all. Our son is playing an online computer game that he would neither eat or sleep to stop until his body eventually betrays him.
We are going to relax and pretend that we don’t work totally different hours, find our jobs stressful, or see each other so little we wonder who that person who hangs around the house is.
Lee J. CobbHollywood is a business and has been a business for a long time. Whether, studio system, independents or corporate, it has always been a business. During the red scare of the 1950’s, actors and writers were thrown out of work for having “communist” sympathies which generally meant having the wrong ideas at the wrong time. For instance, being opposed the fascists in Spain is okay if you were opposed later than the Spanish Civil War but opposition to the Spanish fascists is suspect if you were opposed during the civil war.
Are we entering a time when having the wrong beliefs, pro religious freedom (letting the followers of Islam build mosques in the United States), expressing opposition to government surveillance (being in league with the terrorists), or believing in progressive values (liberal fascists), can get you fired?
To save your job would you name the names of others who shared your “subversive” beliefs?
Later, Cobb explained why he “named names” saying:
When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The blacklist is just the opening gambit—being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That’s minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. The HUAC did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn’t borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it’s worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn’t worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I’d do it. I had to be employable again.
— Interview with Victor Navasky for the 1982 book Naming Names
What’s worth dying for? What will it take before you sell out your friends for actions you don’t consider crimes?
“The new rules are riddled with loopholes, evidence that the chairman sought approval from AT&T instead of listening to the millions of Americans who asked for real Net Neutrality. These rules don’t do enough to stop the phone and cable companies from dividing the Internet into fast and slow lanes, and they fail to protect wireless users from discrimination. No longer can you get to the same Internet via your mobile device as you can via your laptop. The rules pave the way for AT&T to block your access to third-party applications and to require you to use its own preferred applications.
“Chairman Genachowski ignored President Obama’s promise to the American people to take a ‘back seat to no one’ on Net Neutrality. He ignored the 2 million voices who petitioned for real Net Neutrality and the hundreds who came to public hearings across the country to ask him to protect the open Internet. And he ignored policymakers who urged him to protect consumers and maintain the Internet as a platform for innovation. It’s unfortunate that the only voices he chose to listen to were those coming from the very industry he’s charged with overseeing.”
Well, just another day with the President’s decisions. In a way, it’s entertaining. After all, with many politicians their previous statements are often a guide to their actions. But with the President, it’s one surprise after another.
I was in Washington last week and visited Bernie in his office, mainly to talk about the incredible results of the Federal Reserve audit, about which I’ll be writing more in the upcoming weeks and after the New Year. The audit of the Fed was undertaken because Bernie and a few other members of congress fought very hard during the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform debate to force open Ben Bernanke’s books, and as a result we now know the staggering details of the secret bailout era. We know that Citigroup received $1.6 trillion in loans, and Morgan Stanley $2 trillion, and Goldman Sachs – the same Goldman Sachs that bragged about how quickly it paid back its $10 billion TARP bailout – over $600 billion. We know that hedge fund billionaires who moved their corporate addresses to the Cayman Islands to avoid U.S. taxes were rewarded by their buddies in government with huge Fed loans; we know that the U.S. government likewise has been extending massive loans to a variety of Japanese car companies at a time when many American auto workers in Detroit have seen their wages cut in half, to $14 an hour. There’s that and there’s more on the outrage front, and we know it all because Sanders kicked and screamed and stamped his feet about Fed secrecy until just enough other members of the Senate decided to go along with him.
The TARP bailout was just a small part of the benefits showered on Wall Street, a Wall Street than in spite of the enormous public funds necessary to keep them operating paid out enormous bonuses.
But just for fun, and because I enjoy it, let’s see what Matt thinks about President Obama.
I contrast this now to the behavior of Barack Obama. I can’t even count how many times I listened to Barack Obama on the campaign trail talk about how, as president, he would rescind the Bush tax cuts as soon as he had the chance. He stood up and he said over and over again – I can still hear him saying “Let me be clear!” with that Great Statesman voice of his, before he went into this routine – that the Bush tax cuts were wrong and immoral. He said more than once that they “offended his conscience.” Then, just as he did with drug re-importation and Guantanamo and bulk Medicare negotiations for pharmaceuticals and the issue of whether or not he would bring registered lobbyists into his White House and a host of other promises, he tossed his campaign “convictions” in the toilet and changed his mind once he was more accountable to lobbyists than primary voters. He pulled an Orrin Hatch, in other words, only he did it serially.
I can live with the president fighting for something and failing; what I can’t stand is a politician who changes his mind for the sake of expediency and then pretends that was what he believed all along. You just can’t imagine someone like Sanders doing something like that; his MO instead would be to take his best shot for what he actually believes and let the chips fall where they may, budging a little maybe to get a worthwhile deal done but never turning his entire face inside out just to get through the day. This idea that you can’t be an honest man and a Washington politician is a myth, a crock made up by sellouts and careerist hacks who don’t stand for anything and are impatient with people who do. It’s possible to do this job with honor and dignity. It’s just that most of our politicians – our president included, apparently – would rather not bother.
In order to know that cases like these are “a tiny percentage of foreclosures,” you need to know what that percentage is, n’est-ce pas? So this defense is not particularly convincing, unless and until we can see some numbers. Surely, mistakes like these would happen occasionally even during the boom years. But if the percentages are rising, that’s clear empirical evidence that overwhelmed servicers are doing an increasingly shoddy job.
Next time a newspaper wants to write about this particular trend, then, let’s get the names of those bank representatives on the record, let’s ask them how they know that the proportion of dreadful mistakes they make is “tiny” or “minuscule,” and let’s be a bit more determined that we should be the ones making the determination as to how small the percentage is, rather than the bank’s own flacks.
Exactly. I made the same point several months ago when the banks said that only a handful of mortgages had been mishandled. The banks were lying about the scale of the problem. It turned out there were minimally hundreds of thousands. This does not give one confidence in bank claims of “just a few cases,” “a few bad apples,” and all those other things you say when you don’t want to admit the scale of your crimes.
I don’t believe Mr. Salmon is mistaken in his assessment. Breaking into people’s homes and taking their stuff is an extremely intimidating tactic. You can just imagine the desk bound suits chortling over a business lunch about how they forced the deadbeats out.
Let’s get some lawsuits going. They are the public’s last line of defense and we can be quite sure law enforcement, politicians and regulatory agencies will sit this one out.
This is 18 minutes and 23 second. A bit long for many of my readers. Nevertheless, this is a good explanation about how the new rules amount to a surrender on net neutrality.
We got into this crisis because Wall Street invented and pedaled fantasy financial instruments that turned out to be junk. While their party lasted, those complex derivatives were a gold mine for the largest financial institutions. According to the New York Times, the profits from the nine largest commercial banks “from early 2004 until the middle of 2007 were a combined $305 billion. But since 2007, those banks have marked down their valuations on loans and other assets by just over that amount.” In other words, the profits weren’t real.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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