Monday Morning Reads: Systems that Benefit the Privileged Elite

Posted: March 18, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 66 Comments

educationcorporateschoolGood Morning!

I’m going to start the day’s reads off with two really good articles on modern capitalism.  Both actually have titles that ask questions.  I’ll start with the first one written by Richard Wolfe at The Guardian as reprinted by RS.  ” What’s efficiency got do do with capitalism?”   The answer is absolutely nothing.

What’s efficiency got to do with capitalism? The short answer is little or nothing. Economic and social collapses in Detroit, Cleveland and many other US cities did not happen because production was inefficient there. Efficiency problems did not cause the longer-term economic declines troubling the US and western Europe.

Capitalist corporations decided to relocate production: first, away from such cities, and now, away from those regions. It has done so to serve the priorities of their major shareholders and boards of directors. Higher profits, business growth, and market share drive those decisions. As I say, efficiency has little or nothing to do with it.

This is what we call a “positive” economic discussion on policy in that that the data leads one to the conclusion and values don’t play a role in the argument until the end of the article when the author makes a case for democratization of the economy.  This is called making a “normative” case.  For a “normative” economic discussion from the get-go, turn to this article in WAPO by Steven Perlstein.  “Is capitalism moral?”

Note the Gordon Gekko-like logic here: Because pursuit of self-interest is the essential ingredient in a market system, it somehow follows that individuals and firms are free to act as greedily and selfishly as they can within the law, absolved from any moral obligations. And it’s not just in the movies. The same amorality was on display at those Senate hearings in 2010 where Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre and the team from Goldman Sachs tried to explain to incredulous lawmakers why it was perfectly reasonable to peddle securities to clients that they had deliberately constructed to default.

Free-market advocates have a stronger moral case against government “confiscating” the money earned by one person to give it to another.

The traditional liberal defense of redistribution, of course, is that a lot of what passes for economic success derives not only from hard work or ingenuity but also from good fortune — the good fortune to be born with the right genes and to the right parents, to grow up in the right community, to attend the right schools, to meet and be helped by the right people, or simply to be at the right place at the right time. A market system should reward virtue, they argue, not dumb luck.

The problem is that we don’t really have anything resembling textbook market capitalism because all markets don’t exhibit characteristics that make them amenable to an unrestrained market.  Also, we have a political class that is easy to capture via donations and lobbying who set up laws that allow already dominant industries to become more monopolistic and less ‘free’ through preferential legal treatment and taxation.  The worst of the folks that scream about the virtues of ‘capitalism’ are the ones that really know nothing about Adam Smith or the origins of the system and its simple agriculture and industrial roots.  For a real life example of the failures of unchecked capitalism, check out BB’s post last night outlining what’s going on in Cyprus.  The overall mismanagement of lending and under-evaluation of risk by British, American and German banks has cost the citizen’s of many countries a lot of wealth.  The Cyprus situation is unprecedented and sets an especially dangerous precedent.  You can see how the powerful can co-opt the system in this play that takes savings from depositors. Markets all over the world are responding.  Asian markets were the first to tank.

I spent a lot of time yesterday in an absolute rage over the rape apologia rampant in coverage by two of CNN’s women journalists who seemed more concerned with the lasting impact the verdict of the trial would have on the convicted rapists than the victim and possibly more victims of their out-of-control male libidos.   There was also more discussion of the role of teen alcohol abuse in the incident that the attitudes and privileged treatment of the male athletic stars by the media.  It was totally disgusting!! I posted  some of this down thread in the Sunday Reads but feel strong that it needs to frontpaged and repeated.  The judge got the verdict right  while CNN turned into a rape apologia factory.

CNN’s Candy Crowley began her breaking news report by showing Lipps handing down the sentence and telling CNN reporter Poppy Harlow that she “cannot imagine” how emotional the sentencing must have been.

Harlow explained that it had been “incredibly difficult” to watch “as these two young men — who had such promising futures, star football players, very good students — literally watched as they believed their life fell apart.”

“One of the young men, Ma’lik Richmond, as that sentence came down, he collapsed,” the CNN reporter recalled, adding that the convicted rapist told his attorney that “my life is over, no one is going to want me now.”

At that point, CNN played video of Richmond crying and hugging his lawyer in the courtroom.

“I was sitting about three feet from Ma’lik when he gave that statement,” Harlow said. “It was very difficult to watch.”

Candy then asked CNN legal contributor Paul Callan what the verdict meant for “a 16 year old, sobbing in court, regardless of what big football players they are, they still sound like 16 year olds.”

“What’s the lasting effect though on two young men being found guilty juvenile court of rape essentially?” Crowley wondered.

“There’s always that moment of just — lives are destroyed,” Callan remarked. “But in terms of what happens now, the most severe thing with these young men is being labeled as registered sex offenders. That label is now placed on them by Ohio law.”

“That will haunt them for the rest of their lives.”

The purpose of a justice system is to make sure those guilty of heinous crimes pay for their crimes.  I’m still livid about this and so are most of the folks on my twitter stream. You can look down stream on Sunday’s thread for videos and links.   I found  Dan Wetzel’s post particularly compelling as it describes the entitlements given to male athletes in Steubenville and elseville.

The Big Red players were disorganized crime. No secrets. No code words. No shame. They neither grasped the depth of the crime nor the unrelenting pressure of true authority – not their compliant parents or ball coach, but a legal system that didn’t care a whit about Steubenville High football.

Steubenville’s football program has long been a source of pride in the community. (Reuters)For all the rumors and speculation around town of cover-ups and favoritism being played, the authorities did their job. There is zero indication the Steubenville police did anything but aggressively and swiftly investigate the charges.

When understandable conflicts of interest – only 18,000 people live in the city and everyone knows everyone – arose in the local prosecutors office, the case was handed over to the state’s attorney general out of Columbus. A judge was brought in from across the state, near Cincinnati. And it was Judge Lipps, not anyone around Steubenville, who granted immunity to the witnesses.

Meanwhile, attorney general Mike DeWine called on Sunday for a grand jury to continue an investigation into the case.

“This community desperately needs to have this behind them,” DeWine said. “But this community also desperately needs to know justice was done and that no stone was left unturned.”

It’s still hard to say if Mays and Richmond ever grasped the trouble they were in until Sunday.

Mays knew enough to grow concerned. The girl was never sure whether to press charges, but once her parents found out, there would be no doubt. They culled social media for clues and walked into the Steubenville Police Department with a flash drive of evidence.

Just prior to that, Mays became panicked and texted the girl.

“I’m about to get kicked off my football team,” Mays wrote.

“The more you bring up football, the more pissed I get,” the girl wrote back. “Because that’s like all you care about.”

They had no idea about the severity of what they had done which means there’s an awful lot of parents, teachers, and clergy that need to sit down with some girls and boys and define sexual assault.  They also need to make sure that everyone knows that the laws apply to every one.

I know there are many ‘recovering’  Catholics that read this blog so I thought I’d link to this article in Salon by Andrew O’Hehir entitled “Is Pope Francis a Fraud?”  He makes some valid points about looking at each parish or archdiocese as distinct. He focuses on the recent purge by the Jesuits of their liberal coherts and the position of the new Pope in a church in turmoil.

But the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerges from a Jesuit order that has been largely purged of its independent-minded or left-leaning intellectuals, and his reputation at home in Latin America is decidedly mixed. While Francis seems to be an appealing personality in some ways — albeit one with a shadowy relationship with the former military dictatorship in Argentina, along with a record on gay rights that borders on hate speech — it’s difficult to imagine that he can or will do anything to arrest the church’s long slide into cultural irrelevance and neo-medieval isolation. His papacy, I suspect, comes near the end of a thousand-year history of the Vatican’s global rise to power, ambiguous flourishing and rapid decline. It also comes after 40 years of internal counterrevolution under the previous two popes, during which a group of hardcore right-wing cardinals have consolidated power in the Curia and stamped out nearly all traces of the 1960s liberal reform agenda of  Pope John XXIII and Vatican II.A handful of intellectuals, both inside and outside the church, quietly believe that means Pope Francis isn’t a legitimate pope at all.

I can’t speak to any of those being a WASP turned WASB, but I thought I’d share it all the same since I read the article knowing the role of Popes and the church in history.

President Obama is set to nominate Tom Perez for Labor Secretary today.

Perez, 51, is the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division. If confirmed by the Senate, he would replace Hilda Solis, who resigned in January.

The White House portrayed Perez as someone in line with Obama’s sense of social justice. An official lauded Perez for settling the nation’s three largest fair lending housing cases, boosting enforcement of human trafficking laws and protecting rights of veterans and students. He also led the Justice Department in challenging voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina.“Tom is a dedicated public servant who has spent his career fighting to keep the American dream within reach for hardworking middle class families and those striving to get into the middle class,” the White House official said.

I’d say that’s enough of me writing things.  Now, it’s your turn.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Thursday Reads: Goodbye Google Reader, Pope Francis and the Dirty War, and Other News

Posted: March 14, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 37 Comments

Afternoon-Coffee

Good Morning!!

For the mainstream media, the big news yesterday was the election of a new pope. I’ll get to that shortly, but first I’ll address the even bigger news for bloggers–the imminent demise of Google Reader. Google announced last night that it will be shutting down the popular application on July 1.

From The Atlantic Wire: Like a Dagger to Bloggers’ Hearts, Google Just Killed Google Reader.

Journalists and geeks united in exasperation on Wednesday evening when Google made a very sad announcement: The company is shuttering Google Reader. We should’ve seen this coming. And those that didn’t see the inevitable death of Google’s RSS feed organizer and reader might’ve easily missed the news, since Google buried it halfway down an official blog post about a bunch of other stuff. But it is true. The search giant will pronounce Reader dead on July 1, 2013. Based on the somewhat storied history of Google killing Reader features, though, we’re pretty sure someone will start working on an alternative within the next few hours.

Apparently most computer geeks weren’t surprised, because Google stopped updating and servicing the reader back in 2011, even when they could have done so using cloud computing. But plenty of people were freaking out. Immediately after the announcement, twitter went nuts and the pope jokes faded into the background. Here’s Tom Watson at Forbes: Google’s Strange Attack on Bloggers and the Public Internet: the Massive Reaction to Reader Shutdown.

Does Google understand the concept of corporate social responsibility? That seems to be the basic question around the company’s strange decision to shut down a tiny service that serves as a major audience conduit for many thousands of bloggers, citizen journalists, and self publishers.

Google’s announcement today that it is destroying Google Reader, the most popular RSS syndication tool was a massive blow to the blogging community – and to most of those speaking out tonight via social media, an entirely unnecessary attack on an important corner of the public Internet by a company with more than $50 billion in revenue and a newly-won reputation as a tech giant on the move.

“That giant “NOOOOOOOO” sound is the Internet’s reaction to Google’s most unpopular decision in — well, as far back as I can remember,” wrote Pete Cashmore at Mashable, in a post emblematic of the flood of negative reaction to Google’s strange decision.

The thing is, Google is the giant gorilla of the internet–so it can do whatever it wants and everyone else has to just deal with it. Here are some articles with suggestions of how to do that, but be aware that things could change quickly. I downloaded Feed Demon last night, and then learned that it is now going to go out of business when Google reader shuts down.

Lifehacker: Google Reader Is Shutting Down; Here Are the Best Alternatives

Ars Techinica: Poll Technica: Where should we go when Google Reader is put out to pasture?

Forbes: Google Reader and the Underpants Gnomes

ComputerWorld: Google Reader alternatives roundup; RSS FTW!

Now, on to pope news.

I found some articles last night that address the biography of Pope Francis a hell of a lot more realistically that the corporate media did yesterday. The best is probably this one by investigative reporter Robert Parry: ‘Dirty War’ Questions for Pope Francis.

If one wonders if the U.S. press corps has learned anything in the decade since the Iraq War – i.e. the need to ask tough question and show honest skepticism – it would appear from the early coverage of the election of Pope Francis I that U.S. journalists haven’t changed at all, even at “liberal” outlets like MSNBC.

Pope Francis

The first question that a real reporter should ask about an Argentine cleric who lived through the years of grotesque repression, known as the “dirty war,” is what did this person do, did he stand up to the murderers and torturers or did he go with the flow. If the likes of Chris Matthews and other commentators on MSNBC had done a simple Google search, they would have found out enough about Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to slow their bubbling enthusiasm.

Bergoglio, now the new Pope Francis I, has been identified publicly as an ally of Argentine’s repressive leaders during the “dirty war” when some 30,000 people were “disappeared” or killed, many stripped naked, chained together, flown out over the River Plate or the Atlantic Ocean and pushed sausage-like out of planes to drown.

The “disappeared” included women who were pregnant at the time of their arrest. In some bizarre nod to Catholic theology, they were kept alive only long enough to give birth before they were murdered and their babies were farmed out to military families, including to people directly involved in the murder of the babies’ mothers.

Instead of happy talk about how Bergoglio seems so humble and how he seems so sympathetic to the poor, there might have been a question or two about what he did to stop the brutal repression of poor people and activists who represented the interests of the poor, including “liberation theology” priests and nuns, during the “dirty war.”

More at the link. Some other sources of information on Bergoglio:

Alternet: Cardinals Elect a New Pope from Argentina — Does the New Pontiff Come with a Dark Past?

Foxcrawl: “Sins” of newly elected Pope Francis I: accused of kidnapping and torture during dictatorship in Argentina

2005 story in LA Times: Argentine Cardinal Named in Kidnap Lawsuit

Via Greg Mitchell, a 2011 article from The Guardian: The sins of the Argentinian church

A final note–I’ve heard that the name chosen by the new pope may not be a tribute the St. Francis. More likely after St. Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuits.

In other news…

Yesterday was the first day of the Steubenville rape trial. The Atlantic Wire is following the story closely, so it is probably the best source for updates. From yesterday:

Enter the Trial in Steubenville, Where the Cast Is Not Merely Football Players

The case of two high-school star football players accused of raping a 16-year-old girl as they travelled party to party last summer finally heads to trial on Wednesday morning in Steubenville, Ohio, the small fading steel town that became the focus of a social-media firestorm in big-time football country this winter. As the spotlight returns with open media access around but not inside Jefferson Country juvenile court, America will start putting faces to names that have been dragged through the headlines as violently as that Jane Doe from West Virginia allegedly was, while heavily intoxicated, on August 11. But a lot has happened since the hackers and leakers and protesters descended upon the town of 18,000 with a tortured past, beyond the shooting threats and the revoked scholarships and the FBI investigation — indeed, there were even developments late Tuesday night: The country may have looked elsewhere, but there’s a new judge after ties to Big Red football forced yet another legal player to recuse himself, and the hackers have now returned to the social-media pile-on as investigations into police cover-ups have given way to actual prosecution in the courtroom, where the alleged victim might testify after all, her friends can now testify against her, and the suspects are already speaking out.

The article then offers “a who’s who” of everyone involved in the crime and the trial. A couple more links:

The Steubenville Defense Will Center on Date Rape Not Existing

America Finally Hears the Case for the Victim on First Day of Steubenville Trial

On the trial of James Holmes in Aurora, Colorado, Time Magazine had a shocking report yesterday: Judge in Aurora Case Calls for Use of ‘Truth Serum’— But Does It Work?

If accused Aurora mass shooter James Holmes wants to enter a plea of insanity in the “Batman” movie theater massacre, he will have to agree to narcoanalysis.

That’s the ruling from judge William Sylvester, who made the narcoanalysis— in which defendants are injected with drugs to lower their inhibitions and presumably be more willing to tell the truth about their alleged crimes under questioning by prosecutors — a condition of an insanity plea.

WTF?! There’s no way forcing a defendant to take truth serum could be constitutional.

Experts were surprised by the legal determination that “truth serum” could be required in order for Holmes to use the insanity defense. They say that drugs touted for “narcoanalysis,” which typically include the barbiturates sodium amytal and sodium pentothal, are are not effective and certainly not reliable enough to meet legal standards of evidence.

“I was floored by it,” says Scott Lilienfeld, professor of psychology at Emory University upon learning of the ruling, “The claim that truth serum is truth serum is no longer taken seriously by anyone in the scientific community to my knowledge.” Moreover, Colorado is one of the states that apply the “Daubert” standard, in which scientific evidence can be disputed by the defense or prosecution. It requires that evidence meet certain standards to be admissible.

To pass the Daubert test, truth serum would have to be widely accepted in the scientific community and research literature and its use would have to yield a known error rate, both standards that experts say narcoanalysis does not meet. “In my view, it would not stand up,” says Lilienfeld.

But a former prosecutor, now a law professor at the University of Colorado and defense attorney, Karen Steinhauser, told CBS News that the technique is allowed under Colorado law. However, it is used so rarely she could not find any relevant case law.

Unbelievable!

pigs-4

The mystery of the thousands of dead pigs floating in China’s Shanghai River has been solved. Bloomberg: Shanghai Finds 6,600 Dead Pigs as Farm Confesses to Dumping

The number of dead pigs found in Shanghai’s Huangpu river climbed to at least 6,600 as the official Xinhua News Agency reported a farm in neighboring Zhejiang province confessed to dumping carcasses in the water.

The municipal government pulled 685 hogs from the river yesterday, adding to the 5,916 it had retrieved earlier, according to a statement on its website. A farm in Jiaxing admitted to discarding dead pigs in the river, after 70,000 of the animals died in the city from crude raising techniques and extreme weather at the start of the year, Xinhua said yesterday, citing the Jiaxing authorities. The Xinhua report didn’t specify whether other farms were involved in the dumping.

The discovery of the hogs comes as China’s legislature addresses food safety and citizens become more vocal on public health and environmental issues. The government said March 10 at a National People’s Congress meeting that it plans to create a regulator with broader authority to ensure food and drug safety and said the agriculture ministry will oversee the quality of farm products.

ancient grave

Finally, Beata posted this ancient burial news link this morning in the late night thread, and I thought I’d include it here to make sure that Dakinikat and JJ see it: ‘Medieval knight’ unearthed in Edinburgh car park dig

The remains of a medieval knight or nobleman found underneath a car park are to be moved to make way for a university building.

The grave and evidence of a 13th Century monastery were uncovered when archaeologists were called to an Edinburgh Old Town building site.

An elaborate sandstone slab, with carvings of a Calvary Cross and ornate sword, marked the grave.

It’s amazing what’s buried under parking lots in Great Britain!

Hey–I managed to avoid news about the economy and Village politics, and I wasn’t even trying! Now it’s your turn. What are you reading and blogging about this morning?

 

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