Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual (human) rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
It turns out the Federal Reserve took an active role in pushing for NAFTA which included denying Congress information about the instability of Mexican currency, information that could have sunk the deal.
James Pilant
Anatomy of an economic debacle: How the Fed proposed bailing out Mexico to pass NAFTA – Salon.com
The Federal Reserve is supposedly an independent central bank, that we’re told is above politics. By this telling, it is supposed to be staffed with ramrod straight central bankers, tight-fisted but apolitical. While the Fed can state its opinions on policy matters when asked by Congress, it isn’t supposed to use its power to manipulate the political system. And it isn’t supposed to propose bailing out a foreign country just to get the United States Congress to change policy.
But in 1993, that is exactly what the Federal Reserve did.
On Sept. 28, 1993, Jon LaWare, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, testified before the House Banking Committee in support of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. “I want to make clear that the Federal Reserve supports NAFTA without qualification,” he said, discussing throughout the hearing how NAFTA would help American banks penetrate the Mexican financial system. LaWare, like other regulators testifying at that hearing (including Mary Schapiro, then-head of the SEC before returning to the job under Obama), was pressing the agreement aggressively. The Federal Reserve has, broadly, two reasons to press trade agreements. One, the Fed wants lower labor costs, which reduces inflation. Shipping jobs abroad makes the Fed’s job easier. And two, U.S. banks, which are the regulatory customers of the Fed, wanted to get their hands on the Mexican banking system (which they eventually did).
A frequent criticism of “free trade” agreements is that corporations are elevated to the level of a country. It might be more accurate to say that corporations are elevated above countries.
The muscle in trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement or the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership is the mandatory use of “investor-state dispute mechanisms.” That bland-sounding bureaucratic phrase is anything but bland in its application — these “mechanisms” are the tools used to turn corporate wish lists into undemocratic reality.
The concrete form of these “mechanisms” are corporate-dominated secret tribunals that hand down one-sided decisions with no oversight, no public notice and no appeals. This is so is because governments that sign trade agreements legally bind themselves to mandatory arbitration in these secret tribunals despite (or because of) their one-sided nature. It is a virtually certainty that, should be they passed into law, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will contain some of the most draconian language yet in this area.
(As always with Chris MacDonald’s work, you should go to his web site and read the post in its entirety – and if you think my advice is any good – you should stay at his site and read some more of his fine writing. jp)
Sochi, and Solidarity With the Gay Community | The Business Ethics Blog
The business community can, and should, follow AT&T’s lead in speaking out in solidarity with the LGBT community. On February 4th, the company’s Consumer Blog featured an entry entitled, A Time for Pride and Equality. “We support LGBT equality globally and we condemn violence, discrimination and harassment targeted against LGBT individuals everywhere. Russia’s law is harmful to LGBT individuals and families, and it’s harmful to a diverse society.”
Russia’s anti-gay laws and attitudes are repugnant. Russian President Vladimiar Putin clearly wants hosting the Olympics to signal that Russia is a proud and globally-significant nation once again. But what it’s really doing is making the country look like an oversized banana republic, with values that don’t befit a serious world power. Putin is a man of the times alright — as long as the times you’re thinking of are the 19th century.
“The Anti-gay propaganda law” – the unofficial name for the federal law that banned the “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors” – was adopted by The Duman (Russian parliament) on Tuesday 30th of June 2013 and signed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. In a few words, the distribution of information concerning LGBT rights to under-eighteens and within the media is banned and condemned with large fines. Indeed, fines to promote “non-traditional relations” can go up to 5,000 robles (around £90) for individuals and 1 million (around £17000) for organizations (NGOs, corporations etc). Foreigners can also be fined, imprisoned for fifteen days, or deported for breaking the law. The irony in this law is that it does not clearly uses the word “homosexuality”, but instead references “non-traditional sexual relations”, a euphemism prevalent in the Russian Orthodox Church’s discourse. The orthodox church of Russia, an institution that remains prominent and powerful in the devoutly religious country, is clearly hostile of same-sex relationships.
The Sochi Winter Games is an occasion to underline the infringements on human rights for the LGBT community in Russia. Indeed, the LGBT community obtained common rights very late in Russia: same-sex intercourse between consenting adult was only decriminalised in 1993, the possibility for transsexuals to legally change their legal gender came in 1997, the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness came in 1999, and the age of consent for same-sex intercourse was only reduced to 16 in 2003. Still today, The Government do not recognize same-sex relationships in civil partnership. A law prohibiting gay parades has been condemned by the Strasbourg court in April 2011. The Russian Government banned 164 pride events and marches between 2006 and 2008. Moreover, since the law passed, violent attacks against homosexuals or “presumed homosexuals” are common in Russia today and often go unchecked.
(Please read the article below and see if you agree with my remarks.)
Is that where we are headed? Is that what we want? Or do we matter any more?
For thirty years now, the middle class has been diminishing in its proportion of the population.
It’s not the inevitable result of globalization or automation or any other outside force. The destruction of the middle class is a policy decision involving tax rates and governmental allocation of resources. It was made deliberately and with intent. The philosophy dictating these policies is called Neo-Liberalism.
But there are other philosophies, some emphasize the importance of people over economic elites and downward wage pressure. Policies can be changed and there is time but not much.
Will there be action? I’m watching.
James Pilant
Daily Kos: Red Lobster Blues
This excellent article on “the eroding Middle Class” by Nelson Schwartz featured in the business pages of the New York Times yesterday.
Schwartz wasted no time painting a bleak picture. After describing middle-class department stores and restaurants closing up and down the East Coast only to be replaced by high-end clothiers and upscale eateries, he delivered this hard-hitting fact about our recent ‘economic recovery’: “about 90 percent of the overall increase in inflation-adjusted consumption between 2009 and 2012 was generated by the top 20 percent of households in terms of income.”
Whew. You read that right. Ninety percent of the growth from just the richest 20 percent of households. (What on earth could that statistic mean for the rest of us?)
Schwartz’s article is based on an equally excellent paper by Barry Cynamon and Steven Fazzari entitled “Inequality, the Great Recession and Slow Recovery” which is very much worth your attention, as well.
Thing is, of course, as Cynamon and Fazzari’s research points out, the middle class has been eroding for years…since the mid-1980’s in fact…
So what I really want to talk about is my belief that Neoliberalism is toxic for higher education, but research libraries can & should be sites of resistance.
To do that, it would probably be good to define neoliberalism. What is neoliberalism?
There are plenty of definitions – but I like this one from Daniel Saunders, who defines neoliberalism as “a varied collection of ideas, practices, policies and discursive representations … united by three broad beliefs: the benevolence of the free market, minimal state intervention and regulation of the economy, and the individual as a rational economic actor.”
Neoliberal thinking emphasizes individual competition, and places primary value on “employability” and therefore on an individual’s accumulation of human capital and marketable skills.
A key feature of neoliberalism is the extension of market logic into previously non-economic realms – in particular into key social, political and cultural institutions.
We can see this when political candidates promote their experience running a successful business as a reason to vote for them, and in the way market language and metaphors have seeped into so many social and cultural realms.
For example, Neoliberalism is what leads us to talk about things like “the knowledge economy”, where we start to think of knowledge not as a process but as a kind of capital that an individual can acquire so that she then can sell that value to the market.
This is where I pause to ask if you have heard the joke about the Marxist and the Neoliberal? The Marxist laments that all a worker has to sell is his labor power. The Neoliberal offers courses on marketing your labor power.
The joke about the Marxist & the Neoliberal
So OK, Neoliberalism is a thing, a pervasive thing, and it includes the extension of market language, metaphors, and logic into non-economic realms – of special concern to us is the extension of neoliberal market frameworks into higher education and into libraries.
And it is really important to remember that one of the really insidious things about ideologies as pervasive as neoliberalism is that we barely notice them – they become taken for granted the way a fish doesn’t know it is in water, or the way many of us Dukies assume an obsession with college basketball is normal.
Obviously, I think this is a bad thing – not the obsession w/ college basketball, of course — but the neoliberal encroachment on education.
I am one of those hopeless idealists who still believes that education is – or should be – a social and public good rather than a private one, and that the goal of higher education should be to promote a healthy democracy and an informed citizenry. And I believe libraries play a critical role in contributing to that public good of an informed citizenry.
So the fact that the neoliberal turn in education over the last several decades has led to a de-emphasis on education as a public good and an emphasis on education as a private good, to be acquired by individuals to further their own goals is of particular concern to me.
In the neoliberal university, students are individual customers, looking to acquire marketable skills. Universities (and teachers and libraries) are evaluated on clearly defined outcomes, and on how efficiently they achieve those outcomes. Sound familiar?
We can find evidence of this neoliberal approach in plenty of recent trends in higher education – which are almost shocking in how blatantly they rely on a market model of education. The penetration of neoliberal thinking in higher education is so pervasive that it is no longer just market metaphors – colleges recruit students with blatant appeals to their economic self-interest and the mainstream argument for a strong education system is that it is an economic imperative – that we, as a nation, must invest in education in order to compete as a nation in the global economy.
As an example – This very recent article on fastcompany.com – Does Ikea hold the secret to the future of college? – reads almost like a parody of an unabashed, uncritical, unselfconscious neoliberal approach to higher education.
In discussing his enthusiasm for bringing his special brand of for-profit eduction to Africa, one educational entrepreneur explains, “There are a lot of young people in Africa who could be Steve Jobs”. It is no mistake that the justification for bringing “higher education” to Africa rests on the image of one of the richest & whitest men in America — someone who also happens to be a college drop-out, by the way.
I’ve always wanted to teach a class with a spreadsheet analysis of several income groups. One would be a family of four at the poverty level, a little more than $20,000 a year and then two more at middle and upper class wage scales. I’d have the students calculate a budget. Then I would throw a few curve balls at them to see how they adapt – nothing spectacular, a flat tire, a child who wants $179 to go to band camp, etc. My students would see very quickly how awful it is to live on the line of financial disaster every day, to risk losing home and automobile constantly. They might see how difficult it is to live even while both parents are working. Of course, a good number of them are in that situation now. But for some, it would still be an important lesson.
It’s a small dream of mine.
James Pilant
8 surprising ways poverty is absurdly expensive – Salon.com
If you are poor you either don’t have a bank account (8 percent of American households) or have one that costs so much your money drains away. 28.3% of Americans conduct at least some of their financial transactions “outside of the mainstream banking system,” meaning they have to rely on expensive alternatives like non-bank money orders, check-cashing services, prepaid debit cards and payday loans.
For the poor, even being lucky enough to have a bank account means high fees. You don’t have enough to meet the minimum balance requirements so you pay a monthly fee that eats away at any money you have. You will pay a fee averaging $6 to cash your paycheck. You will be hit by terrible fees if the money runs out before the month does. Overdraft fees are incredible. A Pew graphic illustrates how the median overdraft for a $36 transaction racks up a median $35 in fees. “If an overdraft was treated like a short-term loan with a repayment period of seven days, then the annual percentage rate for a typical incidence would be over 5,000 percent.”
If you are not able to get a bank account (or don’t want to risk paying 5000% for writing a check), things are even worse. You turn to payday lenders. Payday loans cost an average of more than 138 percent in interest and fees. According to Think Progress,
“Most take out nine repeat loans per year with an interest rate as high as 400 percent. Forty-four percent of borrowers ultimately default, even after paying back their loans several times over, and thus are pushed ever closer to poverty. Critics have called the practice ‘legalized loan sharking’ and describe the industry as ‘bottom feeders.’ In recent years, major banks have also joined in the practice.”
Residents from the Jane and Finch community and their allies have been calling for a $14 minimum wage for over a year.
Thousands of residents in our community support the $14 minimum wage demand because workers, particularly low income workers in our community and across the province, need meaningful raise now in order to meet their most basic needs!
The rumour that the provincial government might increase the minimum wage to only $11/hour does not help. It just continues to legislate a poverty wage.
First, it’s simply unjust to work without pay and, second, it means that only the wealthier students can afford to hold an internship where the contacts and influence acquired will benefit them their entire lives. If the President is serious about wealth inequality, then he should fix the inequity in his own backyard.
That’s why I created a petition to President Barack Obama, which says:
“White House internships should no longer be unpaid. These positions can be applied for by those who are in college or just graduates or military veterans with at least a high school education. Only a handful of this pool can afford to work without salary and so only the wealthy need apply. “
Will you sign my petition? Click here to add your name:
For employers who rely on unpaid interns, it’s been the summer of reckoning.
Hundreds of interns have filed lawsuits or raised complaints over working long hours for free. But one group of former interns is sidestepping the courtroom and going straight to the White House to fight for fair compensation.
The Fair Pay Campaign, a grassroots lobby set to launch around Labor Day, is calling on President Obama to pay White House interns in order to set an example for other government agencies and private employers.
“We have a minimum wage law in this country, and just because you call someone an intern doesn’t mean you get out of it,” said Mikey Franklin, the leader of Fair Pay’s charge.
From the web site, Minding the Workplace. This blog belongs to my colleague, David Yamada, an expert in the field of workplace bullying.
This summer, countless numbers of students will work in unpaid internships, in many instances for large corporations that could easily afford to pay them. Not only is this widespread practice often in apparent violation of state and federal minimum wage laws, but also it creates barriers to those who want to break into an occupation but who cannot afford to work for free.
Now there’s an emerging movement against unpaid internships (especially in the private sector), and here’s evidence of its coming out party:
Lawsuits
Well-publicized legal claims for back pay by unpaid interns have played a significant role in bringing this common practice to public light.
It started last fall with a lawsuit filed by two unpaid interns, Alex Footman and Eric Glatt, who worked on the production of the movie “Black Swan,” alleging that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated minimum wage and overtime rules.
While this study has been criticized on both methodological and philosophical grounds, I believe it points out legitimate challenges faced by women in the professional world. One might expect that in the supposedly more liberal culture of higher education that there would be more income equality. However, as this study illustrates, women face hurdles in the academic world that men do not, or more accurately: Women face hurdles that men don’t.
Sadly, as multiple studies have pointed out, women continue to be paid less and promoted at a slower rate in virtually every professional field.
It is important that the issue is being discussed in the public forum. Pretending that things are better or, worse, not even acknowledging the problem would absolutely ensure continuation of current practices. Successful sexism has always relied on a practiced acceptance of the status quo. Acknowledging a problem, recognizing it, is the first step in action.
The first question of our analysis: Do we want professional women to get married? The current statistics seem to indicate that we, as a society, do not expect professional women to get married. Conversely, some would see these numbers as action of the free market, and suggest that delaying or avoiding marriage is a natural phenomenon. Since every last detail of the problem is a human creation, I find free market naturalism- treating humanity like a slightly more sophisticated herd of wildebeests, a ridiculous assertion. What humans have created, humans can change. At its heart, this question is flawed. We already know that people can do well in society married or unmarried. Does encouraging formalized relationships make this nation a better place? There are good reasons to have doubts but the question is a difficult one. A question more subject to analysis: Do we want professional women to have children?
I believe that raising children to adulthood is a critical factor in the success of a nation. I think highly educated women are likely to make better than average parents. One of the basic tenets of Western Civilization is that education produces a more developed human being. The most used phrase in regard to this development is “well rounded.” Certainly this is the case with the academic women I know. If we value the child rearing quality of women, then we as a society should not penalize women for having children.
Employers tend to see women with children much like an employee who has a chronic disease. They don’t like giving maternity leave. They don’t like employees having to leave early or miss days due to children’s needs. They don’t like people who don’t make their work first and foremost in their lives. Children imply an emphasis on relationships as opposed to ambition and money making.
Men have an advantage over women in that raising children imposes no physical changes on them. Men neither carry children or are entertained by the hormonal changes accompanying the process. However, the actual period when women are unable to work is generally only a few days. The chief difference between a working married man and a working married woman is that when they have children, only one bears the chief responsibility for child care.
We have a vision of a good mother as one who sacrifices her career and much else for her children. Why don’t we expect fathers to give up the same things? We don’t because we don’t believe they should. The man is the breadwinner. The woman provides support from the background doing the routine tasks of child care and provides the power behind the throne. That’s our mythology – Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best.
But reality has power too. We don’t live in that world anymore, and it’s not coming back. Women work. They have to. But social expectations haven’t changed. They still do the bulk of the housework, child rearing and a host of routine maintenance tasks. That’s not right but changes in the economy are only slowly being recognized culturally.
But we can change our culture. We can begin with laws. We can do this through subsidized and regulated, professional day care. We can do this through paid leave. We can do this by giving up stigmatizing single mothers and divorced women. The practice of slut shaming has outlived its purpose, keeping women in their place and regulating their sexuality. We can do better.
Women in this generation cannot escape the social pressures that serve to diminish their professional lives. But we make a new world every day. It is possible to create a world where professional parity is achieved. Maybe I won’t see it. Maybe the current generation won’t see it, and maybe the one after that won’t either. However, we can lay the foundation here and now. We are not helpless. We have the power to recognize and battle inequality.
Hope and action are not contradictory. The time for change is now.
James Pilant
Female economists penalized for getting married, married men rewarded.
According to a study that was presented earlier this month at the American Economic Association, women (who make up about a third of Ph.D students in economics) who got married in the first five years after they received their Ph.D.s had a 23 percent salary growth penalty—in other words, their salaries grew much more slowly— compared with their unmarried female counterparts. Men who got married in the half decade after they got their doctorates? They received a 25 percent salary growth bump—their salaries grew by a larger margin—compared to other men. Wendy Stock, a co-author of the study and a professor of economics at Montana State University, said in an email that among female economists, the penalty for having children was not statistically significant. “In addition, our estimates didn’t indicate that the impact of having a child was any different for males than for females,” Stock wrote. (If Ph.D. candidates have children while still in graduate school, they take longer to complete their studies, regardless of gender).
Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.
Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women–even those with a “feminist” outlook–are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.
“The timing of a first marriage is related to the attractiveness of the alternatives to marrying. When women value roles that provide viable alternatives to the role of wife, they delay marriage.”
(Allen, S. M. & Kalish, R. A. (1984). Professional women and marriage. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 46(5), 375-382.)
Dr de Bergerac is interested in this topic because she witnesses so many professional, attractive, intelligent women who are single and say they don’t want to be. They thrive in their careers, yet they do not seem to find The One. And those who do, do it much later than the population average. Why?
The scientific answer seems to be: they also have better things to do than the population average. If a date competes with a project at work that is fulfilling, bodes success and a higher income – then the date better be at least as fulfilling, easy-to-present-to-others, and liquid. Of course work and relationships fulfill different needs – but they also compete for the same, scarce resource: time. Professional women have less time and higher demands for relationships, given their alternative options. Both together are likely to keep them single.
Steven Mintz, the Ethics Sage, has written a post on charitable giving. He has very kindly offered me the opportunity to put it up early. As always, I am privileged to be a party to his writing and his continued drive for ethics. (His web site is here!)
James Pilant
Global Survey: U.S. Now #1 in Charitable Giving: American Exceptionalism Lives On
The Ethics of Charitable Giving and the Goodness of Americans
The United States now ranks the highest in terms of charity in a comprehensive global survey conducted by Charities Aid Foundation (CAFAmerica), a member organization of the United Kingdom based Charities Aid Foundation International Network of Offices, providing charitable financial services to individuals, global corporations, charities, and foundations. The 2011 survey reflects an increase from fifth place (2010) to first place.
According to those surveyed, two out of three Americans said they donated money to charity (65 percent), more than two out of five volunteered their time (43 percent) and roughly three out of four helped a stranger (73 percent).
This is an impressive example of the goodness of the American people and one reason why the U.S. is a beacon of hope for so many in need of help to survive, to better themselves, and to thrive in an increasingly global competitive economy.
For the past five weeks I have blogged about the decline of ‘American Exceptionalism.’ From excessive and senseless violence, to fraud and corruption ingrained in our systems of government, to a declining work ethic and level of competency that goes along with it, to a perpetually troubled education system that is failing so many kids, to our inability to effectively establish an immigration reform program, the U.S. has remained stagnant and developed ineffective approaches to solving the most important problems of our time, especially those that deal with quality of life issues that are a symbol of an exceptional society.
This is why it is so heartening to me that the U.S. is the most giving nation in the world. Clearly, this is a sign of an exceptional society. From the Bill Gates’ and Donald Trumps’ to middle class Americans, to low-income people, the U.S. has a long record of helping others to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and provide a foundation to improve one’s lot in life.
We certainly do this for our own citizens. Think what you may of unemployment insurance, SNAP (i.e., food stamps), Medicaid, and other government assistance, these are programs that demonstrate the humanity Americans have as citizens towards their fellow citizens in need of a helping hand.
Returning to the CFA report “World Giving Index (WGI) 2011”, the second through fifth countries are all English-speaking — Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The four new countries in the top 20 compared to the 2010 WGI report are Thailand, Morocco, Nigeria and Liberia. Of these, Liberia has enjoyed the biggest rise from 39th to 14th place, although Morocco’s increase from 33rd to 12th is equally notable. Other major shifts in the rankings include the rise of the United Kingdom from eighth to fifth, and Thailand’s neighbor Laos moving to tenth place. Perhaps not surprising, although somewhat concerning given their rapid economic development in the past twenty years, China, Russia and India are among those near the bottom of the list.
The WGI report is based on over 150,000 Gallup polling interviews with members of the public in 153 countries. The 2011 report looks at three aspects of giving behavior of individuals in the preceding month, asking if they have donated money to a charity, volunteered time to an organization, or helped a stranger. The U.S. has shown a steady increase in each of the three measures over the past year, ranging from four percentage points ‘volunteering time’ and to eight percentage points ‘helping a stranger.’ It is this even progress across all three measures that underlie the country’s rise to the top of the Index.
Charitable giving does have an ethical component to it. Aristotle and Aquinas assessed it using such factors as the object of the action, the circumstances of the action, and the end of the action. Aristotle believed that the act of charity is a virtuous one if it is done for its own sake and not some external reward. Using the example of giving to charity, exercising the virtue of charity (or generosity) requires that the giving be done for the sake of giving. In other words, the charitable act should be done because of the commitment to aid others and the way it makes one feel inside, not for the sake of getting a tax break.
What about those who give because their religion demands it? Here, we need to examine why the religion holds such a position. Typically, it is for good reasons – to help others and express our humanity towards others. No doubt peer pressure works in these cases.
Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher and central figure in modern philosophy, claimed that what matters morally is the good will and not what the good will accomplishes. Reasoning from that premise, if a person wills the moral law, then that is what matters. Whether the person accomplishes anything practical or not is not relevant to the ethics of the matter. In the case of a charity, what would presumably matter is that a person will in the appropriately good way and the consequences would not matter morally. This would certainly match the idea that what matters in a charity is that this will be shown by focusing on minimizing overhead and maximizing what goes to the charitable cause.
From a utilitarian perspective, what matters is not the intention of the giver, rather it is the consequences of one’s giving. If a large portion of one’s giving never gets to those in need, but is swallowed up by bureaucracy in administering the charity, then a utilitarian might reason the ends of giving and helping others do not justify giving freely of one’s own resources.
So, in this journey I have identified one very important reason why the U.S. is an exceptional nation. While it is true our government gives generously to many countries, there almost always is an ulterior motive for the giving making it less than a virtuous act. Our motive may be to win friends and influence people, or gain help in monitoring and controlling terrorism, or for us to help develop a country economically so its markets expand; business opportunities increase for American capitalists; and low-cost alternatives to needed products emerge to the benefit of the American consumer.
It is not government aid that makes us exceptional. In this season of joy and wonder we should remember that our charitable nature is linked to giving by the average citizen. This is the heart and soul of America – the essence of our giving spirit. We do so out of goodness, caring, compassion, and to help in the effort to wipe clean the image of starving people with little food and water to sustain themselves. This is the exceptionalism of America.
Ethics Sage — December 6, 2013
From around the web.
From the web site, Little Laos on the Prairie. (Which is just a fun site!)
Have a ‘sue kwan’ blessing for your first born and the Lao will come in droves. Your aunts, uncles, cousins and cousin’s cousins will shower you with lump sums of money and food. Have a fundraiser for a charitable cause like say, UXO removal, and maybe one or two Lao will show up with a few bucks to donate here and there. Beyond the excuse of being constantly broke, it’s the current reality of Lao American giving. It’s not to say that the Lao are terrible charitable givers, but it raises the discussion about what, how and why do Lao Americans give in the first place.
Dad said the true soul of Lao people consists of two main characteristics: humility and generosity. The Lao will cherish a single grain of rice under the most difficult financial times, yet they will tell you they don’t need any pity saving (or as some will call it “vow keu” aka they’re just pretend-saying that they don’t need saving, but really they want you to save them in some significant way).
The Lao in need don’t just need your money. They want a sustainable way of improving their livelihoods. Show them. Teach them. Provide them with resources and training. You’ll see how they pave the path towards prosperity on their own terms.
My friend, Jayaraman Iyer, made this comment on one of my posts and I want to share it with all my readers.
James Pilant
“Yes, children do learn ethics in schools and No, they don’t learn to practice greed in the universities. You have to continue teach them business ethics. But they should learn how to measure ethics, subtler than the subtle.
First in the series of CREAM™ Report on Corporate Rating I have created a rating system on Hindustan Unilever that leads towards self-governance. JP Morgans, or Lehman Bros cannot be controlled but we can measure them with the published materials as to the extent of ethical values practiced within. We let them commit attrocities and try catch them. No, we have to have rating system on real-time.
CREAM™ Report on Corporate Rating on Hindustan Unilever is about 350 pages [A4] of 189 issue areas with no single issue analysed beyond a single page.The data is shrunk to arrive at their rating of 1,1,1,2,1, for the years 2008-09 onwards till date. With the optimum level of 5 the study suggests areas how they should work towards reaching self-governance.
The measurement methodology adopted is unique. I want universities and corporate to learn the technique of evaluating by ethical responsibility. It fetches more $ and better stability. Companies with better rating will attract the public to invest, as Paul Polman CEO of Unilever says: Increasingly consumers will vote with their wallets for companies that are just and equitable. More importantly the Society is benefited. We don’t need JP Morgans but we should learn how to create companies practicing self-governance as corporate culture.
Jayaraman Rajah Iyer is a Chartered Accountant from ICAI, New Delhi (1966) who has a unique insight into major changes in accounting in India’s history culled from experience with major firms across the globe. He interned at Hindustan Lever, worked his way up holding key positions at API and Mafatlals. He introduced the principle of Likely Ultimate Cost while appointed as Forestry Operations Accountant at Wimco. Leaving India in 1977 was appointed as General manager of ITI Nigeria, Lagos. Selected by Sir William Castell who is now the Chairman of the Wellcome trust, joined the Wellcome Foundation, UK to set right the accounting functions of Wellcome Nigeria. He had also been visiting faculty at SPJIMR, SIES School of Management, and Vivekananda School of Management where he taught Balanced Scorecard and Strategic Cost Management based on the Proprietary IBCM (Jayaraman owns the copyright to Inactivity Based Cost Management, 2006).
He is the son of the renowned educationalist late Rajah Iyer, Headmaster, policy maker and Member of the Legislative Council of Tamil Nadu till his death in 1974. Jayaraman’s Rajah Iyer Foundation provides a support system for teachers.
I was cruising the Internet when I came across this site. I immediately liked it and I recommend it to you. He prefaces his posts with this –
I grew up in a middle-class family, the first to go to college full-time and the first to earn a Ph.D. The economic policies of the last 35 years have reduced the middle class’s security, and this blog is a small contribution to reversing that.
I, James Pilant, grew up in a middle class family, was the first to go to college, and the first to earn a J.D. So, I feel a certain affinity. I wish my fellow economic blogger luck and continued success. As for you, my kind readers, please go to the site and become a follower. You won’t be sorry.
James Pilant
Middle Class Political Economist: Subsidy Insanity in Western Missouri
I have written before about the gross waste of taxpayer monies on retail in the St. Louis region. According to the East-West Gateway Council of Governments (p. 18), governments in the bi-state metropolitan area pumped about $2 billion worth of subsidies into retail projects from 1990 to 2007, but only saw a net increase of 5400 jobs, meaning that each low-wage, low-benefit retail job cost the cities of the region $370,000 apiece. The price is only this low on the generous assumption that the subsidies were solely responsible for this job creation. However, given the growth of incomes in the metro area during that time period, it is likely that most if not all the jobs would have been created without the incentives provided.
By David Rohde – For decades, praising the middle class has been a staple of American politics. Candidates vow to defend the middle class and accuse their opponents of betraying it. But what, exactly, is the “middle class”?
Despite the incessant political lip service paid to the middle class, there is no official American government definition of the group. The middle class has been intensively studied but no political consensus exists over how it was created or how to strengthen it.
The closest the task force came to defining the middle class was a January 2010 report “Middle Class in America (pdf).” The study never gives an exact income level that is “middle class.” Instead, echoing academic studies on the subject, the document concludes that “middle class families are defined more by their aspirations than their income.”
Foundations, charities but mainly for-profit groups claim to have all the answers to “fix” education in the United States. Their principal tool is the standardized test, and not just any standardized tests, the ones they have created. It’s funny they always talk about accountability but what harm does it do to millions of students to be rated by tests that make little sense and measure only a small part of the results we expect our schools to produce?
As as society, it should be a matter of some concern that tax free foundations are the weapons of choice in the battle to replace public education with a neo-liberal set up where you get what you pay for. Essentially, the taxpayers are substituting anti-democratic initiatives across the country.
It’s bizarre that the United States is one of the pioneers in creating public schools is the nation where it seems most under attack.
James Pilant
Privatization is undoing Brown v. Board of Education – Salon.com
Untaxed and Unqualified Foundations Want To “Save Our Schools”
The “starve the beast” mentality allows the privatizers to claim that our “Soviet-style” schools don’t work, and that a business approach must be used instead. Philanthropists like Bill Gates and Eli Broad and Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family, who have little educational experience among them, and who have little accountability to the public, are promoting “education reform” with lots of standardized testing.
But according to the National Research Council, “The tests that are typically used to measure performance in education fall short of providing a complete measure of desired educational outcomes in many ways.” Diane Ravitch notes that the test-based Common Core standards were developed by a Gates-funded organization with almost no public input. Desperate states had to adopt the standards to get funding.
Bill Gates may be well-intentioned, but he’s a tech guy, and his programming of children into educational objects is disturbing. One of his ideas is to videotape teachers and then analyze their performances. The means of choosing ‘analysts’ is unclear. Another Gates idea is the Galvanic Skin Response bracelet, which would be attached to a child to measure classroom engagement, and ultimately gauge teacher performance. It all sounds like a drug company’s test lab.
As noted by Ravitch and others, philanthropic organizations tend to contribute to “like-minded entities,” which are likely to exclude representatives of the neediest community organizations. They are also tax-exempt. And when educational experiments go wrong, they can just leave their mess behind and move on to their next project.
I completely agree with the Education Bug. Standardized testing has its place in schools, but it is extremely flawed. In today’s society standardized testing greatly impacts the lives of every student and teacher in the public school system. We have created these tests to measure students intelligence, as well as the performance of teachers in the classroom. One problem with this (which must not have stood out when we decided to implement these in our schools) is that just like every student learns differently, they test differently as well.
Another problem with standardized test is that it takes away from a teacher’s freedom in the classroom to teach what they think the students should know.When a teacher steps into a classroom each morning they focus on only the things that may be on the big test at the end of the year, leaving out crucial information that may not necessarily be on the test. The curriculum of our schools are now being based around the content of the standardized tests. This not only limits teachers’ creativity and ability to share knowledge with their students, but also caps students’ learning and retention of information. Students take in the information in a way only to regurgitate it for the test and then they soon forget what they have learned. Among the many flaws of standardized testing, curriculum is only one. Governmental spending on test preparations and how great the impact these tests have on students’ educational careers are also pitfalls of the standardized tests.
The Fed Cheated for NAFTA
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