I didn’t believe that this could even happen. Ethics Alarms has the story.
Is “I need the money.” an excuse for these kind of actions?
James Pilant
Please go to Ethics Alarms and read the whole post.
via Ethics Alarms
Casino Banking
For most of American history, banking was a vital part of economic growth. Bank loans provided the capital for small businesses and government to build factories, stores, highways and other public works. This is no longer the bank’s major function. While bank lending is still a critical part of the function of banks as far as the welfare of the nation is concerned, the profits are elsewhere.
It is hardcore speculation, casino capitalism, where the real money is made. This is not wealth creation, it is more similar to the board game, monopoly, you try to make money speculating on property although in the modern sense this is more likely stocks, mutual funds, derivatives, etc. This is not a benefit to the economy. It is a drag and a danger to the larger economy. When the financial sector loses, the taxpayer picks up the losses, while taxpayers share nothing in the winnings. This is because the nation insures deposits and because changes in the law in 1999 allows banks to speculate with these federally insured funds – Corporate welfare on a scale of trillions of dollars.
This gambling has far reaching societal effects. Those who benefit from this no way to lose game make more and more money while those who insure them against loss make less and less.
From the New York Times Article – Scrutinizing the Elite, Whether They Like It or Not –
Olivier Godechot, a French academic on the sociology panel, presented research that quantified just how skewed the increase in wealth at the very top has become. Mr. Godechot, a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, said that two professions — finance and business services — accounted for almost all of the increase in income inequality.
Professor Godechot has put his finger on it. Our society has focused, fixated on finance as the only mode of economic growth. Everything else from services to manufacturing are poor relations whose share in the wealth and even the concern of the government continues to dwindle.
Because of these changes we have an enormous inequality of income in the United States. From wikipedia –
Americans have the highest income inequality in the rich world and over the past 20–30 years Americans have also experienced the greatest increase in income inequality among rich nations. The more detailed the data we can use to observe this change, the more skewed the change appears to be… the majority of large gains are indeed at the top of the distribution.
The big incomes in America are strongly aligned with the world of finance. So, many of the great incomes in the United States are associated with a socially negative activity that not only produces no value to the large economy but actively endangers the economy through its taxpayer guaranteed bets.
It this wasn’t bad enough, hundreds of thousands of graduates from the most expensive and prestigious universities in the United States pursue careers in this field often starting at a quarter of a million dollars in annual salary, a massive diversion of talent from every other field of endeavor. So, our focus on finance weakens the nation and diverts its future leadership into the same unproductive path resulting in further devastating losses to society as a whole.
What can be done? Well, we could consider making things. We could make actual products in this country, televisions, stereos, building materials, etc. We could base our economy on things of value. We could rise in morality and ethics to a point where the idea of making money by financial speculation becomes an abomination to any upright citizen with even a smattering of civic conscience.
We will do it. Either by choice or by necessity.
You see, the financial way of making money, this casino capitalism, when applied to a society like ours is a disaster that unfolds over the years. It hollows out our country diverting the money that would have built manufacturing and countless other useful investment, diverting the young from useful and productive enterprise and diverting the attention of society away from the important endeavors of life and nation building and into a life of profit based on speculation. Why work, when you can gamble with other people’s money?
When this cardboard edifice falls, once again we will find virtue in the making of value.
James Pilant
(This is a revised version of an earlier post.)
Broadband as a public right of way (via Virtual Democracy)
I have often discussed net neutrality in my blogging sometimes at considerable length and sometimes with considerable passion. I have not discussed the broad band implications. I am not really familiar with broad band. This gentleman is.
He discusses this part of the issue with obvious knowledge. If you are interested in this aspect of the net neutrality issue, this is a good read.
James Pilant
One-Third of Students Don’t Learn Much in College!! (Part 2-The Colleges and Universities)
Part 2 of my series on American Higher Education. (Part 1 is here.)
For those of you who are new to these postings, I include the brief recap below.
From CBS Money Watch –
A new study suggests more than one third of parents aren’t necessarily getting a great return on their investment in their kids’ college education. Two college professors tracked more than 2,300 college students at 24 colleges and universities from their freshman year in 2005 through senior year, testing them along the way to gauge their critical and analytical thinking. According to the authors of a new book based on the study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, 36 percent of college students did not learn much in the way of those cognitive skills.
But at least that was an improvement over the learning curve through sophomore year: In the first two years of school, 45 percent of college students had no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing.
Let us continue our search for answers. In part one we discussed why students have little experience in critical thinking. Now we take up the question of the colleges and universities.
A simple questions – How can we expect students to learn critical thinking skills in an environment where teaching undergraduates is often little more than an annoyance?
The contempt that universities have for undergraduates is legendary.
For universities, undergraduate students are unimportant. They are cash cows to be milked until due to lack of advisement or any other concern they flunk out or just get bored with being treated like a semi-useful farm animal. The comedic touch of repeatedly telling these students that they pay only a proportion of their college cost is one I particularly enjoy, that university administrators can say it with a straight face suggests thespian training.
To have a brilliant career in a university setting, a professor must evade teaching if at all possible. The university expects research, publications and grants. The professor gives the students who fall into his area of concern to his grad students, masters degree students who in almost all cases have no training in teaching whatever. There are many fine grad student teachers. I have done it myself. But some grad students are not that good.
I have sat with other professors while we exchanged our stories of worst grad student teachers. The stories usually revolved around those grad students inability to speak English, understand their subject or to act normally. The stories always ended the same way. We discuss what they said, how bad the grades were and how many complaints were made. Then the straight man of the group says, “What happened to the grad student after that teaching fiasco?” The story teller pauses for effect and then says, “He was back teaching the next semester.”
But if a professor should teach, industrial techniques are applied. If you can watch the spectacle of one professor teaching an auditorium of 600 to 1,000 students and then believe for one moment that the university has any concern for the teaching of undergraduates, you have a faith that I do not. Do I have to bring up the cattle analogy?
Then we have the colleges. Intent on maximizing profit, colleges have embarked on out sourcing teaching away from full time instructors to part timers. This is very similar to the use of grad students and once again there are many, many fine adjunct instructors but the statistics are clear, full time professors do a better job of teaching. (Confession – I am an adjunct instructor.) This is another piece of evidence that teaching is not considered to be important.
And then there is online teaching. This kind of teaching is a blessing for those who cannot attend regular classes but there is a powerful temptation to use it instead of regular teaching. Why? No classroom, no facilities use, etc., it saves bundles of money. You almost don’t have to have a college.
What are the standards by which a class is determined to be necessary to be taught online? Obviously if you advertise that as many distance learning colleges do, you should expect online teaching. But where is the line when a class is being taught out of a facility with classrooms and facilities? When does online teaching move from necessity to cash cow? Once again, you have to wonder where the importance of teaching is in the calculations.
Universities insist on removing the best of their faculty from teaching. Colleges substitute part time instructors instead of full time. Online teaching is used not out of necessity but to save money. Everyone of these phenomenon makes student learning more problematic. It makes learning the skills of critical thinking and writing more difficult.
If teaching is not important in universities and is done only as much as necessary in colleges, it is inevitable that our students will not do as well as they might.
Next in Part 3: I will explain why our society is uninterested in critical thinking.
James Pilant
TRUTH: TOUGH TO SPEAK : MORE THAN ANY THING ELSE (via Administration & Management)
This is a thoughtful post about telling the truth. The truth is a strange creature but our writer in this blog is well aware of that and many other things. I like what he has to say. I will let him tell you his story.
James Pilant
One-Third of Students Don’t Learn Much in College!! Brand New National Crisis!! (Part 1-The Students)
It’s time for another shocking report on higher education.
Students are lazy.
Colleges and universities are failing in their jobs.
That nation is in a serious crisis which we mush absolutely, positively do something about right now.
Tell me, did I hit all the high spots?
Let’s have a look at our newest national educational crisis.
From CBS Money Watch –
A new study suggests more than one third of parents aren’t necessarily getting a great return on their investment in their kids’ college education. Two college professors tracked more than 2,300 college students at 24 colleges and universities from their freshman year in 2005 through senior year, testing them along the way to gauge their critical and analytical thinking. According to the authors of a new book based on the study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, 36 percent of college students did not learn much in the way of those cognitive skills.
But at least that was an improvement over the learning curve through sophomore year: In the first two years of school, 45 percent of college students had no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing.
Now, let me rattle you.
There isn’t any crisis. Are the results discouraging? Yes, absolutely. But as a college teacher, there is nothing there that is even remotely surprising.
This is how it is supposed to be. There is no accident that these scores are the way they are. This is the results that were intended.
Let me explain.
Let’s begin with the students. They have been trained now for about one decade under an interesting program called No Child Left Behind. This took a complex multifaceted phenomenon namely our first twelve years of education and decided we could measure its success or failure based entirely on testing.
These students now entering our colleges and universities are superbly trained beyond any possible expectations … in testing. These guys are test takers par excellence. It’s incredible, amazing. When I am teaching, I can at any point say the word, test and every head in the room comes up. In some students you can see an adrenaline rush as the fight or flight reaction kicks in.
As a nation we can be proud of our test takers but there are a few hiccups here and there. For one thing, anytime I ask a student their opinion, they become confused. No one has ever asked them that before. Why would I want to know their opinion? It’s not a test question.
Sometimes, I ask them to write five sentences giving me their opinion on a single subject during class. I have had students come to my desk and tell they were unable to think of more than three. These were not dumb students. They could write a hundred sentences if I asked them to recite facts. They could write thousands of sentences, if I sent them to the library to accumulate some facts and on a good day, somebody else’s opinion.
But by God, they can take tests. We made them that way. They have no opinions of their own but they can remember mine just in case it’s on the test. They can’t write or think with understanding but they know when confronted with three multiple choice questions to mark off the obviously wrong one and guess between the other two.
Why should they do well on measures of critical thinking? We never asked about that.
Their school system does not get one thin dime from whether or not they can appreciate a symphony, avoid a business scam, live like patriots or obey the law. They get money for high test scores. So, that’s what we get, students highly skilled at taking tests.
Why should you expect American college students to do well in critical thinking when it has been of little or no importance during all the years of their previous education?
James Pilant
(For Part 2, go here.)
The dynamics of employee dissent: whistleblowers and organizational jiu-jitsu (via FAA Whistleblowers Alliance)
In the modern age, whistleblowing is one of the most effective means of bringing corporate organizations to justice. It is hard to understand what is going on inside a giant organization from the outside. Modern corporations, have their own buildings, their own security systems, their own police forces (security), their own legal systems (company policy, administration and legal staff).
Corporations are hybrids, not quite businesses and not quite independent states. They are a monolithic stack of sole proprietorships and partnerships melded together. In organization they are most like municipalities. They have a certain resemblance to the city states of Ancient Greece, each city loyal to Greece but fiercely guarding its own independence and its own prerogatives.
Enforcing the law against these types of organizations is more a matter of espionage than criminal investigation. Detecting a corporation committing a crime is like trying to penetrate the security apparatus of a small foreign country.
Law enforcement can scan through newspapers and magazines, tap the rumor mill and watch the multiple civil suits filed for and against these organizations. But even then, what do they really know about an organization with thousands of members spread over three or four continents? Not much.
But take one individual inside the organization and combine that one person with just a little authority to access data and a computer work station, and you can gather more data about organizational crime in twenty minutes than independent sleuthing for weeks.
These individuals are a precious last line of defense against corporate wrong doing.
This society should welcome and protect these people. It has been said, “Let justice fall like rain.” It seems a garden hose sprinkle is more acceptable in the popular and business press. They don’t like whistleblowers, and could that be a surprise to anyone? Power and the money it brings may well be the biggest religion of the 21st century, the first truly international religion.
Against the religion of Power equals Money, the notions of law, duty and religious devotion probably appear a little quaint, more than a little obsolete.
Nevertheless, the whistleblower is important to maintaining some element of the rule of law in this country. And remember, the whistleblower is very close to the sole line of defense in discovering corporate wrong doing in other nations directed at the United States.
This article discusses how a whistleblower can use strategy to survive the inevitable fallout more successfully.
You may very well find yourself in the position of knowing what you should not and having to live with the decision of what to do. Read the article, put some knowledge on your plate, so you don’t have to start out cold when the crisis comes.
James Pilant
Do you want to pay more for internet? (via yourkeyed)
I have been appalled at the FCC’s decision making on the matter of net neutrality. Essentially they have abandoned it. The way is open for a corporate division of the internet. It should not be long before web sites will have to pay money for fast service while those unable to pay will sink into obscurity and then disappear. Consumers will (as always) bear the costs of these changes. Your use of the internet will become something like the cable industry with their multiple packages of different channel combinations. You will pay more for certain kinds of services, in particular, a fast internet connection.
The fight over net neutrality continues. Some sites like yourkeyed are still slugging. I like this web site’s spirit and appreciate its call to action.
I hope you hear that call and want to take part.
James Pilant
via yourkeyed
Poverty and its negative effects, and means of eliminating it in Islam (via Islam: Message of Peace)
I have a special list of web sites, one set of favorites I check on every day. There are only a handful of web sites listed. It is the beginning of my search for relevant subjects each day. Islam: Message of Peace is one of those web sites.
Poverty is a matter of business ethics since in the developed world, poverty is closely related to business practices and also related to business philosophies that have worked their way into the political spectrum. Islam: Message of Peace addresses these kinds of issues through religious texts and commentaries. The approach is often very different from the academic, political and religious ideas of the Western world. I find that both refreshing and a possible source of potent ideas.
Since I value this kind of material, it should be obvious that I do not believe that the followers of Mohammed are all terrorists. I find much to praise in the religion of Islam and it is only fair to give people credit for the good and great things they do. At the time of the Crusades, the follower of Islam had universities (Madrasa), and in those schools was the most advanced knowledge of medicine and mathematics in the world. It is through their libraries that Aristotle’s and other philosophers’ writings were rediscovered. Those potent ideas led to the Renaissance and the current civilization of the West. If you benefit from a doctor visit, value the ideas of the Ancient Greeks (like democracy), or balance a checkbook with Hindu-Arabic numerals, you can thank the civilization of Islam. If you as a civilized human seek intelligent answers to difficult questions, this is a good place to look.
Let’s look at what Islam has to say about ending poverty – (this is a portion of the article, please click on the link to read all of it)
Praise be to Allaah.
Firstly:
Poverty is one of the calamities that Allaah has decreed should happen, either to a specific person or a family or a society. Poverty has negative effects on people’s beliefs and conduct. Immoral behaviour becomes widespread to a large extent because of poverty, as a means of meeting people’s needs, so theft, murder, zina and sale of haraam things become widespread.
Undoubtedly these things have a negative effect on individuals and societies. Allaah tells us that some of the mushrikeen used to kill their children, the apples of their eyes, either because of the poverty in which they were living or for fear of poverty that might befall them. Allaah says of the first case (interpretation of the meaning):
“kill not your children because of poverty — We provide sustenance for you and for them”
[al-An’aam 6:151]
And He says of the second case (interpretation of the meaning):
“And kill not your children for fear of poverty. We shall provide for them as well as for you. Surely, the killing of them is a great sin”
[al-Isra’ 17:31]
In al-Saheehayn there is narrated the story of a woman of the Children of Israel who, when she needed money and felt under pressure, she could not find anyone but her paternal cousin who wanted to have his way with her in return for giving her money. Then Allaah saved her from that after she reminded him of Allaah and told him to fear Him.
Whatever the case, it is well known that poverty leads to crimes and corruption. Many nations suffer from it and are looking for solutions to this problem, but to no avail, and there is no solution except in Islam, which brought rulings for all people until the Hour begins.
Secondly:
The means that have been prescribed by Islam to solve the problem of poverty and combat it are as follows:
1 – Teaching people to believe truly that provision comes from Allaah and that He is the Provider (al-Razzaaq), and every calamity that Allaah decrees is for a reason, and that the poor Muslim should be patient in bearing his calamity and strive to relieve himself and his family of poverty.
Allaah says (interpretation of the meaning):
“Verily, Allaah is the All‑Provider, Owner of Power, the Most Strong”
Religion and Prosletyzing At Work – My comment exchange in the Associated Baptist Press
A gentleman named Marv Knox, wrote an opinion column in the Associated Baptist Press entitled:Opinion: Baptists and the role of faith in public policy.
I think this paragraph of his sums up what he is trying to say:
Extremists stake out opposite ends of the spectrum, with some saying religious perspectives have no place in public policy and others claiming religious views should trump all others. But most citizens come down in the middle. We realize faith is integral to people’s lives and cannot be banished. We also recognize no religious tenet or organization has the right to dominate others. The tension between the extremes holds up a tightrope we must walk as we balance competing perspectives.
I liked what he had to say and encourage my readers to read his opinion piece. I wrote this as a comment on his writing.
There are many competing forces in the United States that figure in the debate over right and wrong. The Christian religion because of its long historical experience and great learning has much to contribute. I perceive that Christianity prospers in the free arena of ideas. The dangers of exclusionary polices against other religions and of active proselytizing have to be defended against. If the truth sets us free, what kind of Christians are those who demand that their message be the only one? Let us struggle forward seeking what is right but always remembering the dignity and trust we place in our fellow citizens.
My comment was answered by another comment who was critical of my point of view. This is what was said:
We can only hope Huckabee’s presidential hopes are dashed. It was Huckabee who took votes away from Romney which got us (Republicans) stuck with McCain! McCain couldn’t beat Obama but Romney could have won.
My thoughts concerning proselytizing are this. If someone has found Almighty God, the very essence of good in the universe, and does not feel burdened to share then full of bull is the only phrase that is properly descriptive. To know God, maker of heaven and earth, is to share Him.
And I responded with this:
There are appropriate and inappropriate places for proselytizing your religion. There are an enormous number of places where one can advocate for their religion. Using teaching jobs, supervisory positions and government offices for such purposes is wrong. People have a right to work without being told they should be a Christian, a Moslem, a Buddhist, an atheist or a deist.
One of the primary obstacles to the use of Christian principles in teaching morals and ethics is the belief, in my experience justified, that some teachers will use it as an opportunity to push for converts. I teach with Christian principles as one of the alternative ways of thinking about business ethics. I think that it is important to use these teachings. Society needs ethical principles. Business needs ethical principles. But if an advocate of Christianity is compelled to witness at all times and in particular through his job, the absence of Christian principles in all teaching might be a better alternative to putting children and adults in multi week conversion class.
Currently this is where the discussion stands. I realize that this is my forum and I have an advantage in my wordiness. If you would like to comment, I will add them directly to this posting.
James Pilant
(This is a repost of a essay written on this blog, December 11, 2009. I thought it was time to revisit the issue.)
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