I was disappointed by the results of the big “opt out.” The administration seemed on the verge of caving. So, did the airlines. They fear the public anger but seldom does that fear produce action and this was no exception.
The next invasion of privacy and dignity will occur with even less difficulty after the success of this one.
Supporters will shout “Why should you object if you haven’t done anything wrong?” That is not an American founding principle.
Power will be abused. That is the nature of power. There are few limitations now. We no longer know what information the government has or seeks. Where will it end? I am not a supporter of “slippery slope” arguments save in very special circumstances. I think this is one of them.
Read Rogue Columnist’s take on the situation.
From Rogue Columnist –
Unlike previous generations of Americans, we are largely an easily commanded people, rather like the Germans or Russians of old. Decades ago, Americans genially agreed to be drug-tested in order to get or keep a job, even though this “guilty until proven innocent” technique is of dubious constitutionality. We submit to hundreds of new national security agencies sucking at the taxpayer trough, not least one with the queasily un-American name of “the Department of Homeland Security.” Nary a peep about this in the land of the free and home of the brave. We meekly wait in lines, not least those at the airport. It’s difficult to imagine the World War II generation submitting to pat-downs, much less those that tamed/stole the frontier. But neither have the swindles of the banksters, widespread economic distress and the rule of the fatcats produced the protests of an older America. No, give us a Kinect or an iPad, a call-center cubicle and an H.R. rulebook, and we’re as happy as a baby with a pacifier.
This is serious stuff. Homophilosophicus is on the front lines in the Irish debt crisis. That means on the street. That takes guts. He is blogging regularly. I would like you to go and read his stuff as long as the crisis continues. He has very kindly given me permission to reblog his writings. I’ve just sent a further request to reblog all his posts while the crisis is ongoing.
This is stuff that will never see in the media. This is very close to the events as they are happening. You should read this. These opportunities do not come often.
James Pilant
Earlier this afternoon, Friday 3rd December 2010, two uniformed members of An Garda Síochána from the Bridewell Garda Station, were observed and overheard whilst clothes shopping in Penney's department store on O'Connell Street, Dublin. Both were male officers and were purchasing hooded sweatshirts and sweatpants, carelessly discussing their undercover work at the upcoming budget day protest (Tuesday 7th December) at Leinster House, the seat of D … Read More
Here are three commercials in favor of a “Robin Hood” tax. They are pretty good. The Bill Nighy one is my favorite.
If adopted in the United States, I would favor using it as a simple revenue method. Under this tax no consumer transaction would be taxed only speculative tranasctions.
Taxes should be raised on the socially useless speculations of the banking industry.
The future of the Middle Class - ruins. From the BBC –
A presidential panel set up to help trim the US budget deficit has called for steep spending cuts and tax rises.
The proposal would cut defence, social security and other spending, slashing a total of $4.1tn (£2.62tn) from the budget deficit by 2020.
But analysts say the panel is unlikely to ratify the plan with a vote, calling into question whether the US Congress will act on its recommendations.
“The solution will be painful,” the plan reads. “There is no easy way out.”
The US had a budget deficit of $1.3tn in the year to September, and critics have said the government should do more to narrow the gap.
Social Security pays for itself for another twenty years and its surplus is used in the U.S. to fund things like defense. Social Security taxes are only taken out of the first, 100,000 dollars or so out of income. If we raised the limit even slightly the fund would be intact for many decades.
Why is social security under attack? It’s doctrinal. Friedman economics says that government can do nothing right. Therefore, social security must by its very government nature be a failure. The numbers, the facts, the experience, – mean nothing. It’s very similar to a religion.
It’s why instead of the military rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure, we used private firms. By the Friedman doctrines, this colossal incompetence and theft of government funds would have been much worse if the government had done the job.
Private and public means to accomplish ends are choices. There is no complete superiority of one over another. There never will be. There are just tools to accomplish things, no more.
That people are able to build a strange worshipful doctrine toward “free enterprise” is a symptom of larger moral and ethical problems. But above all, it’s the result of a successful sales job paid for over decades with millions and billions of dollars and preached by dozens of well financed foundations and other advocacy organizations.
Let’s read another section from the BBC coverage –
The panel’s chairman, Mr Bowles, said the panel’s work had – at the very least – made America engage in substantive debate on the deficit issue.
“The era of debt denial and the denial of its consequences is over,” he said. “We have started an adult conversation that will dominate the debate until the elected leadership in Washington does something real.”
This is nonsense. These measures have been preached for decades by “free market” conservatives.
Besides the real issues aren’t even on the table. Why do we allow companies based and operating in the United States to offshore their tax burden? What is fair tax code and what do we need to do to enforce it? I could go on.
But if you want to quickly discover the intellectual and moral absence in the committee’s recommendations, you only have to examine the question of a bank tax.
Formerly, the United States was a manufacturing giant, so it gathered its taxes from a well paid middle class and by taxes on goods. Now we live in a nation based on finance and “play” money. Financial speculation is the rule of the day. Since our economy is now based on finance, doesn’t it make sense to change the nature of our tax structure to reflect our current realities? What we have now is a shrinking manufacturing base and a deteriorating middle class. We also have a banking and financial industry wedded at the hip to tax rescues and government guarantees. That merits taxation. Yet, a tax to raise a mere twenty billion dollars to help pay for another bailout was defeated in the middle of this year.
No one seems to talk about this one either. Did the debt commission talk about this for page after page? You’re going to read more about it here.
A report on this kind of tax suggests that even a small, simple tax will produce 100 billion dollars in revenue each. Obviously, a trillion in a decade.
That’s deficit reduction.
There is much more to talk about. But there seems little likelihood of a genuine discussion outside of the limits established by the beltway pundits. We can only talk about Medicare, Social Security and a PR campaign of little significance to rein in defense spending. I see nothing else in the proposals likely of actual action except the mortgage deduction.
President Obama stacked the committee with those who had long wanted to attack social programs. Those programs that benefit the middle class are those that will be successfully attacked. The middle class has been targeted for four decades with continued success. There is no reason for Washington to stop now.
* One-quarter (24%) of 2008 bachelor’s degree graduates at for-profit schools borrowed more than $40,000, compared with 5% of graduates at public institutions and 14% at not-for-profit schools.
* Roughly one-in-four recipients of an associate’s degree or certificate borrowed more than $20,000 at both private for-profit and private not-for-profit schools, compared with 5% of graduates of public schools.
* Graduates of private for-profit schools are demographically different from graduates in other sectors. Generally, private for-profit school graduates have lower incomes, and are older, more likely to be from minority groups, more likely to be female, more likely to be independent of their parents and more likely to have their own dependents.
* Although private for-profit schools specialize in different fields of study than do public and private not-for-profit schools, the differences in borrowing patterns persist within fields of study. For almost every field of study at every level, students at private for-profit schools are more likely to borrow and tend to borrow larger amounts than students at public and private not-for-profit schools.
Here’s some more from the report –
Undergraduate college student borrowing has risen dramatically in recent years. Graduates who received a bachelor’s degree in 2008 borrowed 50% more (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than their counterparts who graduated in 1996, while graduates who earned an associate’s degree or undergraduate certificate in 2008 borrowed more than twice what their counterparts in 1996 had borrowed, according to a new analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data by the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project.
I’m sure there are people who look at this and say these young people are borrowing too much money and that may often be true. But if you follow the costs of going to college, tuition, books, etc., you come to a different conclusion. Since students can borrow money to a guarenteed level, tuition and fees will rise toward that level each year. When the level is raised, the college and university costs start their inexorable increase to get all the loan money possible. When the top borrowing amount no longer works for a number of institutions, the borrowing cap is raised and it starts all over again.
Tuition costs have increased at twice the level of medical costs increases over the last decade. That’s right. Even the insurance companies couldn’t keep up with the colleges and universities of the United States.
My previous post (actually about twenty minutes ago) discusses the Irish debt crisis. But I am not on the scene, I don’t live in Ireland. But homopilosophicus is a citizen and writes from there. Here is his take on the crisis. It’s intelligent and it’s a person, not a media company, not a corporation. He’s not selling anything or wanting you to do anything except understand.
James Pilant
On Sunday 28th November 2010 the Fianna Fáil government of Ireland, which now governs without the mandate of the electorate, signed a contract with the International Monetary Fund which guarantees a crippling debt burden for the Irish taxpayer to bailout the financial institutions of this country. The government entered into such negotiations with the European Central Bank and the IMF in secret whilst denying the fact to the people of Ireland. Ev … Read More
Ireland’s international bailout boosted its bank stocks Monday, but outraged many hard-pressed taxpayers, who questioned why the government’s pension reserves must be ravaged as part of a deal that burdens the whole country with the mistakes of a rich elite.
Shares in Ireland’s banks rose sharply as markets were encouraged by the bailout’s immediate focus on injecting €10 billion into the cash-strapped lenders out of a total of €67.5 billion ($89 billion) in loans.
But the Irish were shocked by a key condition for the rescue — that the government use €17.5 billion of its own cash and pension reserves to shore up its public finances, which have been overwhelmed by recession and exceptional costs of a runaway bank-bailout effort.
Opposition leaders and economists warned that the EU-IMF credit line’s average interest rate of 5.8 percent would be too high to repay. They also questioned why senior bondholders of Ireland’s struggling banks — chiefly other banks in Britain, Germany and the U.S. — still weren’t being asked to bear some costs.
Here’s what’s been happening. About twenty years ago, the Irish bought in to the Friedman Economic Theories (FREE MARKET) and freed their system from the chains of regulation. After that, the economy took off like a rocket. Actually the economy did take off but only for certain sectors of the economy particularly the financial industry. All that rocket climb was just a bubble of speculation and when the cloud of dust settled the state banks were deep in the hole. The Irish nationalized the banks and have since bailed them out to the tune of 100 billion dollars. This is smaller than the the U.S. bailout (TARP) but from a very, very much smaller nation (4.5 million people).
They are getting to a loan to keep their economy afloat from other European nations. To get it, they have to put the nation’s pensions funds up as a guarantee. People are unhappy about this.
But here’s the kicker. This is what is really making people mad. The bondholders of these banks are not required to pay for any portion of this at all. Zero!
If they had turned away the huge profits made during the “Celtic Lion” period like a benevolent aristocracy, I might cut them some slack but they didn’t quibble about taking the money. And now the Irish people, in particular, the ones that never profited from the whole economic de-regulation, speculation nightmare, are going to pay for it.
In this brief (7:54) video, Ms. Nussbaum explains her view of the idea of the social contract and, of course, the examined life.
The social contract is a vital concept in business ethics and ethics in general. The theory underlies much of our modern political thought but the business implications are staggering.
So, currently I’m working on this concept. Journey along with me if you like. It’s good to have intellectual company.
If you have been to my blog for the last few days, you will find that I am investigating the beginnings of ethics. You can blame this on Chris MacDonald, who runs an excellent web site called Business Ethics Blog. I like his ethical analysis of various societal ethical problems (the Gulf Oil spill, etc.) and feel that my analysis is more plebian(a kind way of saying – not as good). So, I am going to study ethics in more detail and with more care. I’ve had classes and I have actually read a good number of the ethical philosophers. Unfortunately I was neither looking for the philosophers’ perceptions of the business world or how to analyze using their rules. I’ve got a general idea about the rules, but that is not enough, so I am working on the subject.
I’ve been listening to lectures on the internet from You Tube on this subject carefully skipping anything from the Hoover Institute or the National Review.
Sometimes when you are browsing on the web, you are incredibly lucky and find something wonderful.
I did. I found a lecture on Aristotle by a fellow named Mark Steel. Have you ever wanted to attend a serious course taught by a stand up comedian? Well, this is it. You get laughs and a lot of fascinating information. Further, I liked his analysis of the Aristotle’s teachings.
So, if you want a good laugh, a good time and some knowledge of classical philosophy. This is where to go!
James Pilant
P.S. I’ve posted the first one of three ten minute sections. The second two are on the right side of the page when you bring up the first one. I’d put them all up but my WordPress account is not putting them up the way I want.
By the way, if you think I intend to get good with the purpose of out pacing Chris MacDonald, you are entirely mistaken. On an academic plane, he is better than me. I really occupy a different niche in the business ethics blogging. On academic matters, I learn from him.
This is an opinion of one of fellow bloggers. I liked what she had to say. I hope you do too.
James Pilant
Homework Question: Do you think that computer monitoring of employees by businesses is ethically justified? Make logical arguments either for or against the practice. Since I am typing this on a work computer that is being monitored I should probably say yes I think it is justified but I don't. A company is paying you to do a certain job. If you are completing that job on a daily basis why do they need to see what you are doing the rest of the ti … Read More
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