Category: Capitalism

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual (human) rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

Lee J. Cobb – Blacklists In American

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, ethics

Lee J. Cobb
Hollywood 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?

Read Lee J. Cobb’s account –

From Wikipedia –

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?

James Pilant

Will Wall Street Ever Pay For Its Crimes? Or Just Its Fair Share Of Taxes?

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Corporate Social Responsibility, ethics, Government Failure, Philosophy of Business, President Obama, White Collar Crime

These are brief interviews with Les Leopold. Here is a sample of his writing from Huffington Post –

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.

He also has a book called The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It.

Can Chinese Students Save American Mill Town?

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Government Failure

An infusion of Chinese students would probably be good for any American town. But the reason is unusual. Some American communities have been devastated by free trade. These story is a tale of a community that has no resources.

James Pilant

News Of Death Net Neutrality Working Through The Media

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, ethics, Government Failure, President Obama

Okay, watching this thing is just painful. Not only are sites like mine going to suffer, if you want a decent internet speed so you can watch movies, you’re going to have to pay more for it.

It highlights once again, the President’s ability to take a solemn pledge on an issue, break it, and then declare victory.

Today, the White House hales a victory on Net Neutrality. Maybe they can sell that to the rubes but I can read law.

James Pilant

Internet Dead.

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Corporate Social Responsibility, Government Failure, Philosophy of Business, President Obama

From Steven Axelrod on Salon –

The internet as we know it is officially doomed, as of today, and I’m already feeling nostalgic. Funny that a technology could move so fast across the landscape of my life – from a geeks-only fluke to a curiosity, to a useful tool, to a powerful engine of procrastination and finally a central venue for all my communications, research, entertainment and shopping, only to be reduced to the closed down, controlled, censored corporate cash cow it’s about to become, with the Obama administration’s blessing.

Internet, we barely knew ye.

But of course the Proprietors of our Nation couldn’t allow this internet business to go on the way it was heading. What a frightening thought – free, unobstructed communications, with no control and no profit … people just saying whatever they want, whenever they want, leaking documents, downloading YouTube videos that make Proprietor-controlled media outlets look like liars. You knew there’d be repercussions after the “Colbert bombed at the Press Association Dinner” narrative was reduced to one more punchline, a million downloads later.

He’s right. It will take a while but these things you’re reading like my blog, the sites you surf will probably go the way of the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon.

You might be curious as to why I’m not outraged myself.

In fact, my most fire breathing, screaming fits of anger were over this issue some months ago.

I simply realized that the Obama administration will sell out the internet in a total reversal of the President’s stated position. As far as the President is concerned, words have no meaning. He says whatever is necessary to get whatever he wants at the time.

You want to argue with me.

If so much as one person objects, I will happily put up the You Tube videos where the President declares that he absolutely supports net neutrality and will not compromise. I put them up on a previous post. It took me about a minute to find four separate events where he said these things.

So, it was inevitable.

The best guide to this President’s actions are to go on You Tube, run the issue and see what the President said during the campaign. Expect him to do the opposite and you will only rarely be wrong.

The independence of the internet was critical to the kind of support and networking, the Obama campaign used to win election in 2008. You see, the President isn’t even smart.

It was unwise politically, damaging his own campaign infrastructure and limiting the influence of the blogosphere which did so much for him during the campaign. It also alienates the aforementioned bloggers, who if they are anything like me, will never forget this latest outrage.

I’m not going to forget it.

What happens to me and this blog. Well, I’m going to keep going and I have a monitor that tells me the loading speed for the web site, when it gets longer than say five seconds, I’ll start considering shutting down.

I am stubborn though, maybe I’ll hang on until it’s just me and some close friends who tell me that they log on when don’t or can’t.

And it gets better. Our President is planning on fixing the tax code next year.

Of course, he’s going to cut up Social Security like a butchered steer, George W. Bush’s dream come true.

I’d like someone to tell me what the hell happened?

I want to know.

I can get being betrayed.

I can get changes of allegiance.

I definitely understant political expediency.

But this President makes decisions that don’t even make sense from an election point of view.

Earlier, I said that you could take the opposite of what the President said as a guide, but there is another one. If there are two options and one is the more politically foolish, the White House chooses that one.

Net neutrality is dead. Happy Christmas.

James Pilant

We Invite You To Predict When China Will Overtake America – The Economist

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, ethics, Government Failure, Philosophy of Business4 Comments

The Economist magazine asks this intriguing question.

It posts a comparison of economic growth between the two countries and points out that at the current rate of economic growth, China will overtake the United States in 2019. They then suggest you plug-in your estimates of growth for the Chinese and Americans and arrive at your own figure.

Okay, here’s my prediction of when the Chinese are going to overtake the United States.

Never.

It’s all nonsense. Chinese corruption is endemic. Their real estate market crashed two years ago. They had to do an economic stimulus of 400 billion dollars two and a half years ago. They have foreign policy disputes with almost every bordering country and a large number of those that are not. They are building a fleet to challenge the American Seventh fleet in the South China Sea. The difference in economic development between the coastal and interior provinces borders on the incredible. There are rumors (probably true) of gathering Muslim unrest in the far West. I could go on.

It seems likely to me that the estimates of economic growth put out by the Chinese government bear a strange similarity to East Germany’s constant high economic growth before the country disintegrated in 1989.

And watching the Chinese lurch from one foreign police misstep after another hardly gives one any confidence in the nation’s future. If you’re willing to force the Philippines to take your lead painted toy imports by threatening economic retaliation, you have only the vaguest concept of a) right and wrong and b) how you appear to the rest of the world. If one of your ship captains decides to deliberately ram a Japanese naval vessel and you get him out of it by threats, that might not have long term positive results. If a dissident gets a Nobel Peace Prize and you demonize the award rather than keeping a discrete silence and resort to every measure short of blackmail to discourage other countries from attending, you’re not demonstrating balanced judgment. If when faced with a dissident receiving a Nobel Peace Prize, you create, fairly instantly,a bogus “Confucius” prize which you then present to the former President of Taiwan who admits he doesn’t know what it is and fails to appear for the ceremony, you don’t impress anybody.

Never.

This is all just part of the policy narrative from the media beltway. As always, they only ask hard questions of ideas they oppose. This isn’t one of them. The terror of Chinese competition, of their eventual success, is a reproach to criticism of free trade and authortarianism. It calls the very importance of democracy for economic success into question. It makes the idea of open society with rights of privacy seem unnecesary to a nation’s future.

When China has failed to become number one, it will have outlived its usefulness, their will be a new narrative of America losing out. Will it be India, Islamic nations, South Asia or even a resurgent Japan? Who knows? But its’ necessary. It’s a club against policies you don’t like and it works.

James Pilant

Is Regulation A Form Of Socialism?

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Corporate Social Responsibility, ethics, Philosophy of Business

The Economist says that many of the charges of socialism directed at financial regulation are misplaced. Such regulation has been a normal part of the American economy for more than fifty years and was in effect during the height of the cold war.

Apparently all over the United States, charges of socialism and communism are bandied about as if Soviet style governing committees has sprung up all over the United States. Ironically, many of these same individuals are worried by the specter of Sharia law, not a likely possibility and fully contradictory to a anti religious Marxism. The latest and quite possibly strangest concept of all is liberal facism. Liberals were opposed to both Italian and German fascism early on and paid for it in blood. Yet the example of their courage to the point of sacrificing everything has no effect on the current dialogue. It is okay to affiliate one of the opposing belief systems that brought down Nazism because the phrase, National Socialist, has the word, socialist, in it? Is that academic analysis? Does that bespeak intelligence? Or judgment?

Read what the Economist has to say.

From the Economist –

The Economist is in favour of free markets, but both words are important. If banks are too big to fail, then their cost of capital is implicitly subsidised. This creates barriers to entry and encourages risk-taking at the taxpayers’ expense; the market is thus not truly free. In an ideal world, we ought to be able to let banks fail in the same way that we let widget manufacturers fail. But since bank failures have a devastating economic impact, we need to have some approach to regulating them. Markets also have externalities, a concept long established in academia; a chemical company cannot be free to pollute a river, for example.

To say that any further regulation is socialism, or that any consideration of inequality is misguided, seems wilfully blind. If banks earn huge profits, and their traders huge bonuses, only because of an implicit state subsidy, that seems a legitimate matter of public concern. For those who believe this is the road to Cuba, one might easily respond that the other camp is on the road to 18th century France, where wealth was concentrated in the hands of a tiny, hereditary elite. A gross caricature? No more than the Cuba example. After all, the evidence suggests that social mobility is falling in America and Britain, probably because the wealthy can gain advantages for their offspring via private education.

The issues of education, a level playing field and “too big to fail” are not going away. The issue of whether to regulate or not to regulate is a legitimate one. There is no religious imperative to not regulate. The same people who say that Marxism failed and would have failed no matter how it was practiced are unwilling to believe the same thing about unregulated markets, but the evidence is clear. Unregulated markets are inherently predatory. There is no historical example that can be pointed to where this was not the case.

Market choice and regulation are choices of policy. They require intelligence to apply. They are not matters of faith.

James Pilant

An Interview With US Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky

On By southwerkIn Capitalism, ethics1 Comment

The Congresswoman discusses the decline of the middle class, current legislation and the START treaty.

James Pilant

Rogue Columnist Asks A Few Pertinent Questions

On By southwerkIn Capitalism, ethics2 Comments

Jon Talton
Rogue Columnist observes the signing of the tax cut bill with contempt for the beltway narrative. He is not overly impressed by the current occupant of the oval office but sees no leadership on the horizon. But the best part of his column is my mind is this paragraph, which I quote below.

From Rogue Columnist –

I’ve been spending time with the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. One harsh fact is that America is a poorer country. Vast swaths of the nation have seen their median family incomes fall from 2000 to 2009. Even the banking center of Charlotte has seen income drop 15 percent. Silicon Valley, off 11 percent. And of course great damage has been done in the areas least able to absorb it, the already lower-income Red States (the exception being counties with fossil fuels or big, subsidized ag). Now, this is a fact. How does one proceed from it? How does one proceed when it is put in the context of stagnant wages for most Americans going back 30 years? Does one change the policies that caused this? Or just keep doing them? Where is the centrist position on union busting? On monopolistic corporations such as Wal-Mart? On the big banks that privatize profits and socialize losses while continuing to have a gun to the world economy? On the loss of so many well-paid American jobs connected to actually making something of value, rather than peddling financial frauds and “the American Dream”?

Do we hear any answers out there? Will we?

James Pilant

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (via occasional links & commentary)

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism

A Christmas Dire Economic Post!

Well, I was in the holiday mood, if only for a moment.

This is a really interesting web site. It has a lot of wonderful pictures, cartoon and good number of scary economic graphs. Did I mention the good writing? You might hit the link and explore further.

James Pilant

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come Alan Blinder gets it: current economic conditions are reminiscent of the setting of Dickens's "A Christmas Carol." America may now be the greatest place on earth to be rich but an awful place to be poor.   Exactly! The problems Blinder cites are unemployment (both its level and duration), wages (the gap between growing productivity and stagnant wages), taxes (payroll taxes now bring in almost as much revenue as incomes taxes), and deficits ( … Read More

via occasional links & commentary