Tag: United States

Cramped Altruism

On By southwerkIn Politics

 

Underage workers in the corporate heaven of Foxconn
Underage workers in the corporate heaven of Foxconn

Cramped Altruism

Other People’s Children – NYTimes.com

I’ve noticed this thing quite a lot in American life lately — this sort of cramped vision of altruism in which it’s considered perfectly acceptable to support only those causes that are directly good for you and yours. We even have a tendency to view it as “inauthentic” when people support policies that aren’t in their self-interest — when a rich man supports higher taxes on the rich, he’s somehow seen as strange, and probably a hypocrite.

Needless to say, this is all wrong. Political virtue consists in standing for what’s right, even — or indeed especially — when it doesn’t redound to your own benefit. Someone should ask Portman why he didn’t take a stand for, you know, other people’s children.

Other People’s Children – NYTimes.com

Related articles

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Puritan Success

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

citybeyoPuritan Success

Lynn Parramore: Jamie Dimon’s Ultra-American Rise and Fall: The Great Gatsby Meets Moby Dick

Australians have an old joke about their country’s founding elements: Sure, we got the criminals, but America got the Puritans, which is much worse.

The folks who arrived on our shores from Europe four centuries ago brought with them some peculiar notions. The Puritans believed in the Calvinist “Doctrine of the Elect,” a depressing divine plan whereby God pre-selected those destined for heaven and damned everybody else to hell. You could never know who was on the A-list and who was in for a fiery eternity. At least that’s what old John Calvin had taught.

But mere mortals could never be content with so mysterious a system, so they became obsessed with finding out who was elect. Material possessions, they concluded, must be a sign. Didn’t people who worked hard and kept up their prayers often amass more stuff than others? Hard work was godly, and since it often resulted in riches, they must be godly, too. Wealthiness was next to godliness.

In an essay on The Great Gatsby, America’s great literary ode to our distinguishing love of wealth, John A. Pidgeon notes that the striving for money became a means of salvation. Take the Puritan reverence of riches, add in equal parts transcendentalism and rugged individualism, and you’ve got the American Dream in all its shining glory: If you work hard, if you believe fervently enough, you can make yourself a fortune. You, too, can join the ranks of the elect.

Lynn Parramore: Jamie Dimon’s Ultra-American Rise and Fall: The Great Gatsby Meets Moby Dick

Related articles

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Law School Can Work

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

img165Law School Can Work

Political Animal – Why Law School Doesn’t Work Anymore

The supply of lawyers has made the quality of a legal jobs dramatically worse. Graduates of lower-tier law schools often now toil in contract positions as document reviewers, “who sit in horrible little basement rooms. They are performing mindless work in Dickensian conditions, stuck in there” explains one law professor with whom Stevens spoke. These jobs are dead-end ones, with no potential for career advancement; they merely pay the bills. And the bills are really high. The average student loan burden of new law school graduates is $125,000.

I’ve written about this problem before but I admit that when I’ve addressed this I’ve probably focused too much on the education debt part of this, and the way law schools keep churning out more lawyers despite knowing that the career prospects for most of them aren’t very good.

One thing I’ve missed is how actual law firms operate in this system. I assumed that the problem was simply that many of these lawyers couldn’t get jobs. What Harper emphasizes is that the supply of lawyers means even graduates of good law schools who have jobs at the top firms aren’t doing as well.

Political Animal – Why Law School Doesn’t Work Anymore

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Citizens United and Political Corruption

On By southwerkIn Economic Justice
Human Freedom
Human Freedom

Citizen’s United and Political Corruption

Josh Silver: Discovered: A Cure for Political Corruption

This is the strategic foundation of Represent.Us, the campaign in support of the American Anti-Corruption Act. The campaign was launched November, 2012 by the organization I run. Along with the voucher proposal, the Act would:

1) Prevent members of congress from soliciting and receiving contributions from any industry or entity they regulate;
2) Prohibit all fundraising during Congressional working hours;
3) Apply the existing $5,000 PAC contribution limit to superPACs based on the fact that they are coordinating with candidates in contradiction of the Court’s rationale (this is a potent solution to Citizens United-created spending);
4) Close the revolving door between Capitol Hill and the lobbying industry by extending the waiting period to 5 years for members and their senior staff;
5) Expand the definition of and register all lobbyists to prevent them from skirting the rules;
6) Limit the amount that lobbyists can contribute to $500, instead of the current $2,500;
7) Disclose all contribution “bundling”;
8) Strengthen the Federal Election Commission’s independence, as well as the congressional ethics enforcement process;
9) Clamp down on 501c organizations’ political spending; and 10) make all political spending fully transparent as proposed in the current DISCLOSE Act.

Why must the Act take on so many issues? This strategy recognizes that the influence of money in politics is endemic to our current system of government. We cannot fix this by patching the holes in democracy through which money seeps in. We are already flooded. We have to recognize that the influence of money has changed the way our lawmakers think about what is possible. It shapes institutions, limits expectations, and constrains the options for decision-makers. Real change must come with a comprehensive approach that reconfigures the incentives, the pressures, and the circumstances for public governance to reflect more directly the democratic interests of the people.

Josh Silver: Discovered: A Cure for Political Corruption

I think Josh Silver has some good ideas here. But whatever you think of these particular ideas, I suspect you will agree that the system is broken and no longer serves the public interest. The infusion of money, political speech according to a truly wacky Supreme Court, has drowned out the voices of the American people and left us as helpless political onlookers. It’s time for change.

James Pilant

From around the web –

From the web site, More of Dave:

The 2010 Citizens United decision opened the floodgates and allowed millions of dollars of corporate money to flow into campaign coffers. Costs for the 2012 presidential campaign were 6 billion dollars, up more than 7% over the 2008 election.

As far as I know, not a single banker or Wall St. financier has stood trial for his/her role in the 2008 financial crisis. When there are no consequences for bringing the world economy to its knees, we are already living in an oligarchy. That is why every person of every political persuasion has an interest in getting money out of politics as much as possible, and this begins by turning back the Citizens United decision. …

From the web site, Wendy Phillip’s Blog:

In its Opinion, the Court side-stepped the issue and refused to make a ruling on whether foreign corporations would be able to influence our political process by funding election ads.  Instead, the Court stated that there is no need to answer the question, and referred to the fact that 2 U.S.C 441(e) bans contributions and expenditures by foreign nationals. This may be true, but the operative word in 441e is “nationals”. How can this Court say that the question of whether foreign organizations can influence our Nation’s political process is best answered by 441e when 441e applies only to foreign nationals or individuals, and not corporations?  This creates a loophole for foreign corporations.  It will be interesting to see what foreign corporations will do to capitalize on this blunder by the Court.

From the web site, Citizens for Truth:

To give proper deference to legislatures, the Court could have ruled on a narrow issue. In Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party (2008), the Court had emphasized judicial restraint by stating that courts should not “formulate a rule of constitutional law broader than is required by the precise facts to which it is to be applied.” However, without regard for judicial restraint, the Court in this decision “operates with a sledge hammer rather than a scalpel when it strikes down one of Congress’ most significant efforts to regulate the role that corporations and unions play in electoral politics. It compounds the offense by implicitly striking down a great many state laws as well.”

This ruling will “cripple the ability of ….. Congress and the States to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process.” Justice Stevens quotes Burroughs v. United States (1934), “To say that Congress is without power to pass appropriate legislation to safeguard … an election from the improper use of money to influence the result is to deny to the nation in a vital particular the power of self protection.” Therefore, both federal and state legislatures should be allowed to pass laws that regulate corporate political spending.

Related articles

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

American Journalists for Sale

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

American Journalists for Sale

Covert Malaysian Campaign Touched A Wide Range Of American Media

A range of mainstream American publications printed paid propaganda for the government of Malaysia, much of it focused on the campaign against a pro-democracy figure there.

The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.

Trevino lost his column at the Guardian last year after allegations that his relationship with Malaysian business interests wasn’t being disclosed in columns dealing with Malaysia. Trevino told Politico in 2011 that “I was never on any ‘Malaysian entity’s payroll,’ and I resent your assumption that I was.”

According to Trevino’s belated federal filing, the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia, “its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either.” The Malaysian government has been accused of multiple human rights abuses and restricting the press and personal freedoms. Anwar, the opposition leader, has faced prosecution for sodomy, a prosecution widely denounced in the West, which Trevino defended as more “nuanced” than American observers realized. The government for which Trevino worked also attacked Anwar for saying positive things about Israel; Trevino has argued that Anwar is not the pro-democracy figure he appears.

Covert Malaysian Campaign Touched A Wide Range Of American Media

Related articles

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Radioactive Products

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Radioactive Products

How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer – Taylor Orci – The Atlantic

Beginning in the 1910s, the girls instructed to put radium in their mouths didn’t bat an eyelash. They worked for the United States Radium Corporation painting the numbers and hands on watch faces and military instrument panels. Since the work required great detail, the women were told to “point” the small brush head with their lips, thus ingesting a small amount of radium every time. Each woman would repeat this hundreds of times a day. If there was any uneasiness with this process, the good money they got from the job alleviated it. The young women, many fresh out of high school, would playfully paint their nails and teeth with the luminous paint, known as UnDark. About ten years later, these “Radium Girls” would start to die.

How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer – Taylor Orci – The Atlantic

 

Related articles

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Big Banks Immune to Prosecution

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Big Banks Immune to Prosecution

Mike Lux: Holder Confesses

I rarely agree with Chuck Grassley, but when he calls this “stunning,” he couldn’t be more right. This is the ultimate Big F’ing Deal: the nation’s top prosecutor openly admitting that some people and institutions are so big, wealthy, and powerful that it is the policy of the United States to hesitate to prosecute them no matter how terrible their crime. And it isn’t just American banks, either: HSBC, while operating here, is a foreign-based bank.

Look, that this is the policy of the U.S. Justice Department has been pretty obvious for quite a while. The unwillingness to prosecute the big banks in spite of some of the most egregious and obvious financial fraud in American history in the run-up to 2008’s financial collapse has become legendary. But the HSBC case, where thousands of emails over many years along with a great deal of other evidence proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the bank was laundering money for some of the most murderous and evil drug cartels and terrorists on the face of earth, made it crystal clear that once your bank becomes a certain size, the DOJ considers you beyond prosecution. For anything. Too Big To Jail, to the hundredth power. And the penalty they did get? A fine worth approximately five weeks worth of profits — after raking in massive profit from these drug cartels and terrorist-linked groups for many years.

So, yes, it has been obvious that this is the unspoken policy of the DOJ. Now, in front of a Senate committee, fully on the record, it is the official stated policy of the American government that if your bank is big enough, and the judgment is that prosecuting you will have a negative impact on the economy, DOJ will be “inhibited” in, and will find it “difficult,” to prosecute you.

We have truly crossed the Rubicon here. This is a tragic moment in the history of our nation, that we are willing to say on the record to some of our richest and powerful people and institutions that no matter what you do, you will not be prosecuted. What kind of society have we become? How corrupt are we as a nation?

Mike Lux: Holder Confesses

Related articles

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

A Post Office Bank?

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

z090A Post Office Bank?

How to save the USPS – Salon.com

How bad have things gotten for America’s national mail delivery system? The US Postal Service lost $1.3 billion last quarter, and this was regarded as good news. The venerable agency has been saddled with significant financial problems since a 2006 law forced it to pre-fund 75 years of employee retirement benefits, something no other public agency or private company has to do. This cash crunch (the Postal Service gets no money from the federal government and must survive on the revenues it generates) has led to austerity measures for the nation’s second-largest employer (right behind Wal-Mart). Mass layoffs last year were followed, earlier this month, by the announcement that Saturday deliveries of first-class mail will cease come August.

Pacific Standard As many have noted, this is a largely manufactured crisis. Simply relaxing the pre-funding requirement—as the postmaster general beseeched Congress to do this week—would wipe out virtually all of the Postal Service’s deficit. (Absent this heavy payment, the agency would have made $100 million in the last quarter.) But given the reduced use of letters in an age of digital communication, it’s nonetheless true that the Postal Service is due for some changes to its business model. Democrats from Sen. Tom Carper to Rep. Elijah Cummings have laid out various ideas. But there’s one idea they haven’t suggested that would kill two birds with one stone: make money for the Postal Service and level the financial playing field for some of the most vulnerable Americans. Namely: We should allow the Postal Service to return to the practice of offering simple banking services.

According to the FDIC’s 2011 National Survey, over 10 million US households are “unbanked,” with no access to the financial system. Another 24 million households are “underbanked,” meaning they have a bank account but they also rely on providers of “alternative financial services”: remittance or money order shops, payday lenders, check-cashing operations, pawn shops, or associated services. Many of these services are among the most unscrupulous in American society, preying on people with few other options and charging usurious interest rates or carving out large fees. These roughly 68 million unbanked or underbanked Americans represent a huge market for non-bank financial predators.

How to save the USPS – Salon.com

Why is Congress strangling the postal service? The most likely reason is to give up the postal service’s function to private companies. The destruction of this public service will add riches to certain firms. I don’t think I need to name any names. You know the names of the companies as well as I do.

This kind of greed can drive you to despair. A public service with a history of success duplicated by other countries around the world is being dismantled to make a few Americans richer.

Privatizing successful public functions and then destroying or exploiting them to the fullest for maximum profit has become an American preoccupation. A vicious outgrowth of Friedman economics, it’s predator capitalism at its worst.

Can any of this be stopped? I don’t know if there is the public will particularly with the enormous money thrown into the equation by Citizens United.

Public minded human beings are hardly significant compared to that kind of money.

James Pilant

From around the web –

From the web site, Center for Financial Inclusion (Nigeria):

Opening a new bank branch is expensive. It requires a substantive up-front investment, and to stay open, the institution has to maintain an ample volume of business. This poses a challenge when trying to reach the financially excluded – many of whom live in relatively remote rural areas, and many of whom don’t have financial needs that draw a high volume of banking transactions. Mobile money is one way to mitigate this cost of bricks and mortar. But it is not the only way.

In pursuing financial inclusion, more and more countries are turning to the post office to offer on-the-spot financial services. Using this preexisting network, financial institutions are teaming up with postal services, outfitting the post offices so that they can conduct financial transactions, and training postal employees. Post office banking is only one variation of agent banking, which is increasingly practiced around the world, turning supermarkets, convenience stores, pharmaceutical retailers, and even lottery outlets into banking outlets.

From the web site, Your Postal Blog:

PostFinance, the banking arm of Swiss Post, may soon be spinning off from its parent company in the summer of 2013. However, independence from the Post won’t place it on the same playing field with other banks in the industry, as certain restrictions still apply.

When PostFinance begins life as its own separate entity, Swiss Post will still, technically, own it. The Post will own all shares of the financial institution when it ventures out on its own. This places ownership of the bank squarely in the hands of the Swiss government, as they own the Post Office.

As a state owned entity, PostFinance will continue to be subject to restrictions that prevent it from engaging in certain competitive activities that could take business away from existing banks. This limitation is welcome news to competing banks, but that insulation may not last indefinitely.

And from the web site, Dandelion Salad:

Neither rain nor sleet nor snow may have stopped the Pony Express, but the nation’s oldest and second largest employer is now under attack. Claiming the Postal Service is bankrupt, critics are pushing legislation that would defuse the postal crisis by breaking the backs of the postal workers’ unions and mandating widespread layoffs. But the “crisis” is an artificial one, created by Congress itself.

In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA), which forced the USPS to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees, many of whomhadn’t even been hired yet. Over a mere 10 year period, the USPS was required to prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years, something no other government or private corporation is required to do. As consumer advocate Ralph Nader observed, if PAEA had never been enacted, USPS would now be facing a $1.5 billion surplus.

Related articles

 

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Ethics and the Personal Finance Industry

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

 

Seemed like a good idea at the time.
Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Ethics and the Personal Finance Industry

The personal finance industry can’t save us – Salon.com

How does the industry prey on our fears about our inability to save and plan for the future?

We can’t articulate that for all too many of us our problem is not an inability to manage and invest money effectively; it’s that we’re expected to do more and more with less and less. So we think we are individually messing up, that we lack the financial skills and smarts to get ahead. The financial services industry presents itself as our savior. But by doing that, it has to confirm our cultural bias that we are alone responsible for our financial fates.

You see this dynamic especially in personal finance and investment initiatives aimed at women, which contain an almost odd mix of the language of empowerment and infantalization. They tell us we are women, we are so strong because we do so much more around the home and work than men, but yet we are financial illiterates who have no clue. In fact, both sexes have low financial knowledge. Men have more money than women for the most obvious of reasons: they earn more.

You mention the work of economist Teresa Ghilarducci, “the most dangerous woman in America.” Who is afraid of her and why?

It became very clear to me while reporting this book that Teresa Ghilarducci had hit a nerve in the financial services sector that no one else had. The reason, to me, was obvious. Most other people discussing retirement reform schemes (Auto IRAs, Save More Tomorrow and the like) were talking about expanding the role – or at least the bottom line of — the current dominant players on the retirement scene. I mean the retail brokerages, the 401(k) plan providers, the dominant mutual fund companies and the like. Ghilarducci’s Guaranteed Retirement Accounts calls BS on this model. First, she points out how much money the current retirement is making on what we think is our money. Second, her model would bring new players in, and I mean new, powerful players – state pension funds, institutional investors, and hedge funds – into the game.

The personal finance industry can’t save us – Salon.com

Ethics and the Personal Finance Industry

Personal responsibility. I believe in it. I recognize the power of it, the usefulness of it. But circumstances have to be taken into consideration. We do get injured, become ill and suffer accidents. We can be killed by natural disaster or more mercifully, have homes or businesses destroyed. Choice and environment interact to produce our reality.

Here we have a situation which the personal finance industry proclaims loudly and persistently that if you only change your decision making and be tough on yourself, that you can attain financial stability and even possible eventual wealth. I would prefer that industry to look at this situation from a business ethics stand point and promise less because personal choice is only part of the equation. If a great majority of the American people had shared in the profits of the increased production and financialization of the last thirty years, I think most financial suffering might be attributable to poor planning. But here again, we have circumstances, downward wage pressure, very high unemployment, a replacement of stable pension with the disastrous 401K’s, the changes in the bankruptcy act, the plague of student loans, etc.

Americans of the middle class suffer from real wage pressure and for many, no amount of planning will fix those problems. Americans of the lower class are simply in the midst on an ongoing week to week, day to day, financial disaster.

Financial planning can be useful but only in proportion to the amount of disposable income in the individual cases. If the disposable income is inadequate, no amount of planning can fix it. Promising magical fixes from non-existent resources is not ethical. Financial planning is not for everybody.

James Pilant

From around the web –

From the web site, Personal Finance for Beginners:

Your questions in personal finance would revolve around the following:

How much money will be needed by you at various points in the future?
Where will this money come from (e.g. savings or borrowing)?
How can you protect yourself against unforeseen events in your lives, and risk in financial markets?
How can family assets be best transferred across generations (bequests and inheritance)?
How do taxes (tax subsidies or penalties) affect personal financial decisions?
Your Personal financial decisions will involve paying for education, financing durable goods such as real estate and cars, buying insurance, e.g. health and property insurance, investing and saving for retirement. Personal financial decisions may also involve paying for a loan.

From the web site, Finance for Youth: The Blog:

A couple of days ago, a young student approached me and asked me for some career advice. The student wanted to understand a little more about what banking and finance is about, and how it measures up in terms of their “dream job“. I was very impressed with this young student, because unlike many of their peers, they were actually trying to look at their future and start planning. This student, to be fair, is part of an advanced group of students. They get tutoring as part of their regular school day, they have additional instruction in note-taking and other study skills, and they are in advanced Math and English classes. They have a leg up over many students already. This young person seemed to have a leg up on even this group.

And from the web site, Nancyeewing:

You need to make a plan of what you really want in life that money can buy. Then you must find out how to get the money it takes to finance it and finally start to implement this plan. This is the long term part of your financial life – the process of personal financial development from the state you are in right now – to the state you want to be in. This journey toward financial freedom is in my opinion the most interesting and exciting part of personal financing you can have.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Executives Have Vivid Imaginations

On By southwerkIn Opinion

Executives Have Vivid Imaginations

American Workers Lack Common Sense Skills, Executives Say

 

Workers lack communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creative skills executives say, according to a recent survey by the American Management Association. Turns out, bosses aren’t too excited about their underlings’ abilities, a prospect they’re getting more worried about considering such skills will be more important amid a changing business landscape, they say.

The number of executives rating their employees as below average increased across all four areas since the survey was last taken in 2010. Almost 20 percent of workers lack at least average creative skills, according to executives.

American Workers Lack Common Sense Skills, Executives Say

img156Yes, there has been a collapse in worker capabilities since that grand old time of American capability: 2010! That’s right. According to these executives (experts?), in the last three years, workers have become more incompetent. At a time, when the pool of available workers desperate for employment has been the highest since the great depression and they having the pick of the litter, the workers just aren’t as good.

Do you know what this means? It means these executive get together, talk a lot and gripe, then they take surveys. Next year, they may decide the food is bad or they don’t like the weather or they’ll go back to complaining about, that old favorite, “economic uncertainty.”

The idea that educational and judgment standards have dropped across the board in this country in three short years is simple nonsense. There is no change in the educational system, in hiring, or anything else, that would explain such a change. It’s just imagination, a particularly vivid imagination. What’s worse is that some people take this kind of survey nonsense seriously.

I tell you what, let’s ask the workers if their bosses have become less competent over the last three years. In fact let’s survey the workers the same way we do “executives” about basic skills and who has them. Then we could compare. That would be interesting statistics.

James Pilant

From around the web –

From the web site, Ideagency:

Obviously, the notion that Americans aren’t hard-working isn’t supported by the statistics.  Beyond the numbers, however, my experience working with my own clients support Begala’s argument.  The people I meet – whether they work in finance, manufacturing, retail, technology or health care – are not lazy.  Far from it.  Despite the lack of raises, bonuses, and other perks that have been severely cut back (or eliminated), the vast majority of employees I encounter are diligent, industrious, and proud of the work they do.  I would imagine this holds true for most workers.

From the web site, Irregular Times Diaries:

Yesterday, Senator John McCain was giving a political speech in front of the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department, when he blasted American workers as lazy, ungrateful people incapable of doing a good day’s work

Senator McCain said it was necessary for farmers to employ illegal aliens because American workers are too lazy and wimpy. McCain thought that he was being clever when he rhetorically offered to pay anyone in the audience 50 dollars an hour to pick lettuce.

And from the web site, Understanding China, One Blog at a Time:

A commenter recently called me a malingerer, surprised by such harsh words, I rushed to m-w.com to see just what the word meant— malingerer “to pretend or exaggerate incapacity or illness (as to avoid duty or work)” Reflecting on those harsh words, as I scanned the interweb aimlessly, I came across the following photos. And although I would not say that I am a malingerer (in terms of feigning illness) one could argue that I am currently not devoting all of my neurons to the task of making money for any one company , thus the word loafer may be more appropriate..

Related articles

 

 

Enhanced by Zemanta