Bankers should be boring

The following excerpt is from the "Ideas" list from the July/August 2012 issue of The Atlantic:

During the 1950s and ’60s, financial institutions were tightly regulated. Bankers did not make money by trading for their own account but instead earned fees for providing advice to their customers and serving as a go-between for companies raising capital. Their goal was to get to know their clients well, understand their problems, and act in their best interests—somewhat like family doctors. They were not compensated absurd amounts. Wall Street was viewed as a place not for high flyers but for sober, cautious people who were perhaps a little boring. Meanwhile, the economy boomed and we had very few financial crises. Let us hope we are heading back to those days.

Continue ReadingBankers should be boring

Olympic-sized Intellectual Property Crackdown

This is not a humorous parody from The Onion. What follows is an excerpt from a serious news interview hosted by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: The Olympic Games are estimated to cost British taxpayers a staggering $17 billion. At the same time, Brits near the Olympic Park have been subjected to sweeping censorship laws enacted by their government at the behest of the International Olympic Committee. The laws limit the use of Olympic language and imagery to—strictly to official sponsors, such as Visa, McDonald’s, GE. . . . AMY GOODMAN: And a mock awards ceremony at the Olympic clock in Trafalgar Square descended into farce after police arrested six people taking part. Three people pretending to be corporate representatives from BP, Dow and Rio Tinto were awarded gold medals for being the worst corporate sponsors of the Olympics, before having small quantities of green custard poured over their heads. The good-natured performance took about 15 minutes. It was clearly amusing to a number of passersby, until 25 police officers arrived and arrested six people, including the three corporate representatives and people who were mopping up the small amounts of custard on the ground. Well, for more, we go to London, where we’re joined by Jules Boykoff, associate professor of political science at Pacific University, currently a visiting scholar at the University of Brighton. He was born in England since—he’s been in England since April following the build-up to the Olympics. He’s writing a book on dissent and the Olympics and played for the U.S. Olympic soccer team in international competition from 1989 to 1991. His recent piece in the New York Times is called "Olympian Arrogance." Jules Boykoff, welcome to Democracy Now! Well, tell us what you’re seeing there and why you titled your piece "Olympian Arrogance." JULES BOYKOFF: Well, what we’re seeing here are a lot of what you’ve outlined in terms of the intense militarization of the public sphere. And it really does go back to the International Olympic Committee, or the IOC. And that’s what we are getting at with "Olympian Arrogance." If you want to understand the crass commercialism of the Games, if you want to understand the intense militarization of the Games, it makes sense to start with the IOC. And the IOC has always been a privileged sliver of the global 1 percent. Going back to the 1890s, when it was started by Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, he basically assembled a hodgepodge of counts and dukes and princes together to run the show. In the subsequent, basically it’s remained this basically old boys’ club. In fact, they started allowing wealthy business elites into the club. And only in 1981 did they start to allow women to be members of the IOC. And it’s not just the composition of the IOC that some might find a little bit problematic; it’s the dictates that they impose on host cities. So, for example, right before they make the final selection for who’s going to host the next Olympics, all the candidate city finalists have to sign a document that promises that they will follow all 33 of the IOC’s technical manuals down to a letter. A lot of that has to do with brand protection, which I’ll get to in a second. But it also has to do with creating new laws in the country and the host city that conform to the principles of the IOC. So, here in London, what they did was they passed the 2006 Olympic and Paralympic Act, which did all sorts of things. You mentioned it’s illegal to use the words "2012" and, say, "medals" for commercial purposes in any form, and you can receive a 20,000-pound fine. This all goes back to the IOC and what they set up and impose on host cities. And that’s why you’re seeing, when you look around—you said I was here since April, so I was here for the Jubilee, actually. And when the Jubilee happened for the queen, there were signs in windows, there were people celebrating, shops put little placards up and that sort of thing. Well, right now, during the Olympics, you’re really not seeing that very much, because people are afraid that they’re going to get cracked down on. Just a couple examples. A butcher put a bunch of sausages up in his window in the shape of the Olympic rings; he got asked to take them down. Somebody in Plymouth put up on their menu a "flaming torch breakfast baguette," and they were asked to take it off the menu. A florist was—put up a little display in the front of her store in the shape of the Olympic rings; again, told to take it down or face a 20,000-pound fine. So, the IOC is really where a lot of this starts.

Continue ReadingOlympic-sized Intellectual Property Crackdown

Self-dimming of awareness to protect oneself against anxiety

I'm mostly finished reading Daniel Goleman's 1985 book, Vital Lies, Simple Truths: the Psychology of Self Deception (I found a copy of the book online here). He's preaching to my choir, based on a paper I wrote in 1996 ("Decision Making, the Failure of Principles, and the Seduction of Attention), where I pointed out the critical and often unconscious role of attention in embellishing and distorting our moral decision-making. My targets were the many people who believe that morality is mostly founded on the conscious application of rules. I concluded that humans define and frame moral situations as a result of the way they attend (or don't attend) to the situations. I warned that it is important that we become aware that we have great (often subconscious) power to define the situation as moral (or not). My thesis was as follows:

Attention is constantly steering us in directions which dramatically affect the application of principles [including moral principles]. For starters, if we completely fail to attend to a subject, we will likely be ill-informed about that subject, and likely less competent to make decisions regarding such matters. At the other extreme, excessive attention can bloom into an obsession, causing one to see the entire world through glasses colored by that obsession. Attention also works in subtler ways, however, rigging the machinations of legal and moral reasoning. Attention rigs decision-making in two ways:

1) by the manner in which we attend to our perceptions of the world, and 2) in the way by which we perceive and attend to the principles themselves.

I concluded that high-level decision making is based far more on attentional strategies than on traditional problem solving skills.

Continue ReadingSelf-dimming of awareness to protect oneself against anxiety

The mind of a neocon

Glenn Greenwald acknowledges that Thomas Friedman has value: If we listen to Friedman we will understand the way neocons think. We will understand their rage and we will understand how their rage tempts them to lash out indiscriminately. Here are Greenwald's words:

If I had to pick just a single fact that most powerfully reflects the nature of America’s political and media class in order to explain the cause of the nation’s imperial decline, it would be that, in those classes, Tom Friedman is the country’s most influential and most decorated “foreign policy expert.”
Here is the mind of a neocon in action (from a 2003 interview with Charlie Rose):

Continue ReadingThe mind of a neocon

What does your phone know about you?

Malte Spitz sued his German phone company, forcing it to produce more than 30,000 lines of code it had retained about Malte, including his locations and his use of his phone. This constitutes an extraordinary look into his life and habits, including his associations with other particular people, so much so that many Germans have protested the fact that phone companies store all of this information for at least six months, and up to two years. He points to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, asking whether this celebratory moment could have even been possible if the government of East Germany had access to such data. In the meantime, it appears that the U.S. government is spying on its own citizens through the unbridled collection and storage of this type of data.

Continue ReadingWhat does your phone know about you?