What happened to love, mercy, and forgiveness?
Everywhere you look, the churches of the world are turning their backs on Jesus, choosing social and political power over service to the poor.
The extremism of the Catholic church rears its ugly head again in Brazil, where a nine-year old girl gets excommunicated for getting an abortion to save her life.
Meanwhile in the American South we’ve got Christian militants ramping up, bringing their guns to church as a they build their christian security network.
The Talibanization of Christianity is not surprising when you look at the mindset of these people. They preach the gospel of fear, not love. If it was up to them, the apostles would be armed and dangerous, protecting Jesus by shooting anyone who came too close.
And when these same people start inciting violence, it’s time for reason to step in.
Who would Jesus shoot?
Really, … ask that question, and put away your guns.
Globalization and Corporate Taxes
If corporations want to be treated like persons, then they will have to pay their taxes like normal people. That’s just another founding principle in the ongoing war on corporatism.
If I go work overseas, I still have to pay US taxes – as long as I’m a US citizen. So why should the corporations be any different?
The tax experts may question this line of thinking, but let’s remember who pays them.
The Hindu has an article on the issue which seems fair and balanced.
Of course, more and more companies are choosing to move to Dubai, where, under a dicatator, they enjoy more freedoms than here in the US. More on Halliburton and KBR here>>
Who needs democracy when you can have bigger profits instead?
It’s all about the size and share of the pie…
Funny thing, Dubai is not weathering the global financial as well as might be expected. Many of these offshore companies will come back or disappear. No bails-outs for them! Good luck Dubai.
For individual tax dodgers, watch the weasels squirm as Swiss bank accounts become more transparent. First Switzerland, then Panama and Singapore.
What’s my point in all this raving? Pretty simple really: businesses and individuals have a responsibility to all their constituents, not just shareholders. And the sooner they wake up to that reality, the sooner they will truly become “good citizens of the world.” It’s capitalism 2.0 versus police state 2.0 – which do you prefer?
Why No One Trusts the CEO
I still sense a strong French Revolution 2.0 vibe.
Here’s Exhibit A:
UPDATE: More fun facts here>>
Midnight in the Garden of Evil
The idea that deregulation is a good thing is perhaps the most destructive legacy of Bush’s Republican agenda. Here’s are some of the midnight de-regulations the Republicans need to be held accountable for:
– A rule that relaxes enforcement against factory-farm runoff
– A rule that permits more waste from mountaintop mining to be dumped into waterways
– A rule seemingly designed to protect pharmaceutical companies from being held liable for marketing products they know are unsafe
– A rule that makes it more difficult for workers to take advantage of the Family and Medical Leave Act
– A rule that reduces access of Medicaid beneficiaries to services such as dental and vision care
– A rule that could limit women’s access to reproductive health services.
Read all about it in this report from the Center for American Progress (not funded by Exxon or Peabody).
Speaking of Peabody, here’s more on how Peabody is forcing the Navajos off Big Mountain >>
The business lobbyists that have been of the deregulation gravy train are now going to have to deal with transparency and accountability – starting with official sites like recovery.gov, along with netroots activism. The time for crooked corporatism is over.
The Business Value of Bedtime Stories
Once upon a time, my pet lion (who lived in the attic) started practicing customer-driven innovation. But then he began to challenge his assumptions and now he won’t listen to anything I say.
My 8-year old daughter told me this story last night before she fell asleep.
I’ve really got to start going down to the office when I take those work calls…
The Republican Response: Barney Fife Deputizes Bobby Jindal
After watching the brilliant Republican response by Bobby Jindal, here’s what my wife came up with:
Some husbands admit that their wives are smarter than they are, but this proves my wife is also way funnier than me. Her sense of humor is on display at globeschooling.com >>
UPDATE
HBR: Don’t “Bobby Jindal” Your Next Big Speech
WAPO: How Bad Was Jindal?
NYTimes: Governor Jindal, Rising GOP Star, Plummets After Speech
AP: Republicans, Democrats criticize Jindal’s speech
Gary Hamel: Moonlight Madness or Management Moonshots?
Gary Hamel‘s at it again.
This time he’s got 25 moonshots for management:
1. Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.
2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.
3. Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology and theology, and from such concepts as democracies and markets.
4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.
5. Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems.
6. Reinvent the means of control. To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within rather than constraints from without.
7. Redefine the work of leadership. The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.
8. Expand and exploit diversity. We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.
9. Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.
10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.
11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.
12. Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process where share of voice is a function of insight, not power.
13. Develop holistic performance measures. Existing performance metrics must be recast, since they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.
14. Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. Discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.
15. Create a democracy of information. Companies need holographic information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.
16. Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than in the past.
17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.
18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.
19. Depoliticize decision-making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization.
20. Better optimize trade-offs. Management systems tend to force either-or choices. What’s needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.
21. Further unleash human imagination. Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.
22. Enable communities of passion. To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of self-defining communities of passion.
23. Retool management for an open world. Value-creating networks often transcend the company’s boundaries and render traditional power-based management tools ineffective. New management tools are needed for building complex ecosystems.
24. Humanize the language and practice of business. Tomorrow’s management systems must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.
25. Retrain managerial minds. Managers’ traditional deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.
Fine. I think I get it. The real question is how many of our bail-out CEOs will get this Capitalism 2.0?
The War on Greed
In trying times, executive behavior and more importantly, executive compensation becomes a public issue. Here’s an example of what to expect in the weeks and months ahead – warongreed.org has targeted Goldman Sachs for the “reckless” bonuses they handed out to their financial staff – after receiving a $6.5 billion bailout from taxpayers.
Apparently, if Goldman Sachs had shared its bailout billions with their rank-and-file workers at Burger King, they’d have handed out $18,000 to each employee. I must say I’m getting a strong French Revolution 2.0 vibe:
The Truth about Executive Pay
There’s a line of reasoning being echoed in the Obama administration that if we cap CEO pay for bailed-out companies in the financial markets, the best and brightest will leave, seeking greener pastures with foreign companies which don’t have similar restrictions.
This is false reasoning.
Executive pay must be tied to long-term performance if anything is going to change. Here’s some thinking on the issue from Stephen F. O’Byrne and S. David Young in HBR:
The justification for maintaining pay competitiveness is that it reduces the risk of losing good managers, who could be costly to replace. Corporate boards could also argue that it minimizes the risk of seriously overpaying managers as a consequence of large, windfall gains from surging share prices. In short, the claim is that competitive pay policies not only help lower retention risk but also impose limits on shareholder cost. This is false logic. By causing companies to overpay underperforming managers and underpay star performers, a competitive pay policy will actually increase retention risk. The poor performers stay on and the good ones go. What’s more, it ignores the potential wealth-creating effects of strong financial incentives.
Despite their commitment to competitive pay policies, compensation committees sometimes do act to strengthen incentives by increasing option grant shares after a year of strong stock-price performance or decreasing them after a bad year. On the surface, this appears to be good news. But such moves have little overall impact because directors tend to reverse their actions in the following year. In other words, an option grant that rewards good performance or penalizes poor performance is followed, almost half the time, by a grant that penalizes good performance or rewards poor performance. On balance, therefore, ad hoc adjustments by boards contribute almost nothing to wealth leverage.
If companies are serious about rewarding performance and retaining star performers, they will first have to wean themselves off competitive pay. They should give managers fixed-share interests in stock appreciation and economic profit improvement, thereby increasing the impact of future pay on executive wealth. Perhaps most important, they need to review vesting and holding requirements to prevent managers from unilaterally cashing out share-based pay, which also reduces the sensitivity of their wealth to company value.
Secondly, we know the financial sector is grossly overpaid. Even the Chinese will tell you this. I blogged earlier about China’s Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation:
– “If you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people.
– “I have to say it: you have to do something about pay in the financial system. People in this field have way too much money. And this is not right.”
He’s not mincing words, and neither is the Economist >>
I say let them go. It’s time these executives we came back to Earth. If they want to risk their own money great, but why should we subsidize irresponsible management practices?
I’m with Warren Buffet when he says in this letter:
“CEO perks at one company are quickly copied elsewhere. “All the other kids have one” may seem a thought too juvenile to use as a rationale in the boardroom. But consultants employ precisely this argument, phrased more elegantly of course, when they make recommendations to comp committees.
Irrational and excessive comp practices will not be materially changed by disclosure or by “independent” comp committee members. Indeed, I think it’s likely that the reason I was rejected for service on so many comp committees was that I was regarded as too independent. Compensation reform will only occur if the largest institutional shareholders – it would only take a few – demand a fresh look at the whole system. The consultants’ present drill of deftly selecting “peer” companies to compare with their clients will only perpetuate present excesses.”
No one is saying we should stop paying for performance. What we’re saying is let’s stop rewarding unsustainable business practices and outright fraud.
Where are we going to find low-cost, competent CEOs? That’s a business GE should look into. A CEO-for-Hire profit center. Training grounds? India and China, of course.
Cut Capital Expenditures, Not People
When executives want to boost profitability, their first target is often their “most valuable asset” (ha!) – people. But a better way to find value is to bring increased discipline to the capital budgeting process for small items.
Check out Tom Copeland‘s 2000 article in HBR – Cutting Costs Without Drawing Blood.
Here’s what he says:
… a company can almost always create far more sustainable value by sensibly reducing its capital expenditures. How? Not by postponing or eliminating big spending projects, which are usually less than 20% of the budget anyway, but by conducting a rigorous, disciplined evaluation of the small-ticket items that usually get rubber-stamped. Those “little” requests often prove to be unnecessary—in some cases they duplicate other requests—or gold plated. But few managers have the time, energy, or inclination to ask about them. They should.
and:
You get more bang for the buck—or perhaps more buck for the bang—by cutting capex dollars than by cutting payroll. According to my estimates, the increased market valuation that resulted from Kodak’s $400 million payroll cuts could have been achieved by a $280 million reduction in capital spending. The reason for the difference, of course, is that a company has to make severance payments—$600 million in Kodak’s case—to people it has laid off. (There is no severance pay for capital.) The table compares recent payroll savings at Kodak and several other corporations with my estimated value-equivalent capex cuts.
Something to think about very, very carefully.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter on Simplicity
Rosabeth Moss Kanter is one of my favorite business gurus, the “female Peter Drucker,” as I tell people when I recommend they read her book Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End
In her latest blog post at HBR, she tells us that the next big trend is simple: to simplify.
Among her observations:
“Companies sow the seeds of their own decline in adding too many things — product variations, business units, independent subsidiaries — without integrating them. They create complexity, which makes costs increase faster than the potential gains from the new parts.
“Just why did General Motors need 47 brands of cars? Was that responsible for its top-heavy load of managers? Or for cannibalization within the company?”
and this brilliant line:
“When everyone else suffers from over-complexity, there is a market for products and services that simplify life.”
More here >>
Business Models for Short Attention Spans
I wrote once on another blog, that no one has time to read Harvard Business Review, or listen to an entire music CD, or watch the whole movie.
Our attention span is somewhere between 3 to 5 minutes. And that’s the size your idea-bite has to be if you’re going get heard at all. See Twitter, YouTube, CNN, et. al. We’re getting dumber second by second by second.
How do you build a business model for short attention spans? I think this is the key challenge for online publications – from newspapers, to blogs, to forums. Perhaps the key is enticing readers to return over and over – let’s say twenty times a day! So online journals must be updated very often (compare HuffPost with the NYTimes) with corresponding micro-blogging on the same topics.
And the revenue will come not for selling ads, but selling products and services. And sometimes, you may just sell them the longer version of your story.
Is Roy-Bennett in Marondera?
It’s over, Robert Mugabe. Finished. It’s time to step down.
Now Mugabe has gone after Roy Bennett.
You can’t get away with this or this or this.
Obama is doing his part as well.
Keep track of this story here >>
Cartoon: The Republican Vision for America
Is the US repeating Japan’s mistakes?
Looks like the Japanese know something we need to pay attention to in this country.
Nicholas Kristoff has an opinion: see “Escaping the bust bowl” >>
Heart Disease and Indian Politics
India Today gives us a cardio-pulmonary view of the political pulse of India.
I suppose it is pretty stressful being a politician in India and all…
The article also mentions the inevitability of “Rahul Gandhi happening.”
Good luck, Rahul. I hope you’re ready to “happen!”
How Not to Twitter
Thank goodness the Republicans have not yet mastered the art of tweeting. It’s hard to use open communications when you don’t believe in openness.
The Rise of Transparency
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant; electric light the most efficient policeman”
– Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
We need more light like this…
Thank you Lord, for the Internet. I can’t wait to see what develops at recovery.org.
Testosterone and the Market
Now the financial traders can blame their testosterone levels for their risky behavior >>
Weren’t these people supposed to be competing on analytics
Hunger and Republican Values
To get a better idea of what it’s like to live on a food stamp budget, CNN’s Sean Callebs decided to eat for a month on $176 and blog about it >>
What is depressing is the rising number of people going hungry in this, the “land of plenty.”
I’m just sick at the Republicans – first they get us in this mess, then they go obstruct everything. Their idea of a stimulus is more tax cuts for their friends who live in the top 2% – otherwise, nix!
The Republican party stands for one thing: lies and more lies. And the corporate media is just as guilty.
More here about what life is like for an increasing number of people on Main Street>>
The Politics of Evolution
From the Economist:
The US – last – except for Turkey… this is what happens when science education is guided by the politics of faith.
I wonder how many of these same people believe in faith-based open-heart surgery?
Coffee, Dementia, and Other Ramblings
Here’s some news you can use:
“…scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less.”
That “scientific report” prompted me to tell my wife that I needed to drink 5 cups of cold coffee a day to avoid dementia.
My wife’s quick answer: “Too bad it’s not retroactive.”
Obama calls out Wall Street Irresponsibility
Finally, a President who puts the robber-barons on the defensive:
Susan Solomon: “Global Warming is Irreversible”
Now what?
Our carbon drain is clogged, and we’re going to drown in our own bathtub.
Here’s the bad news:
“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years,” says Susan Solomon on NPR
Are you ready for long droughts and rising seas? While some environmentalists are worried about the extinction of polar bears and emperor penguins, or the dying oceans, I’m thinking about human extinction. As usual, the poor will be hit the hardest.
Poor Al Gore keeps trying to wake us up:
This is a national security issue which makes Al-Qaeda look like the Peanuts.
Meanwhile, the Republicans, led by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are still on their “global warming is a hoax” bandwagon.
The Nazi Pope Shows his True Colors
This is just disgusting. More from Jesusland…
Can the Catholic church be saved from itself? Not likely. YouTube or no YouTube, we’re not going to see Catholicism 2.0 anytime soon. As I’ve said before, if Jesus was around he’s kick these bozos out of the Temple…
BTW, isn’t it funny there are NO comments on any of the Vatican’s YouTube videos? That’s what they call an ecumenical dialog!
BBC Documentary: What Now Mr. President? (Wake Up, Everybody!)
Here’s a documentary from the BBC’s Panorama.
Here’s how they pitch it:
“Barack Obama takes over as US President with a promise to dramatically change America and make it a fairer place. He is inheriting the worst economic crisis in almost a century, and a country so unequal that 23,000 people die every year because they cannot afford basic healthcare. To close the gap between rich and poor Obama will have to take on the might of the corporate world, which wields enormous influence in Washington. Can he change the world’s most powerful country, and should he?”
Question: ever wonder why this kind of a documentary never makes it to US television?
Wake Up, Everybody! Check out Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes:
The Two Sides of Google
Even as Jeff Jarvis‘ What Would Google Do?
Michael Arrington has posted a thread from former-Google employees talking about why they left. Sure, disgruntled employees are not always fair and balanced, but it’s interesting to learn that Google does have issues with management, bureaucracy, low pay, poor mentoring, and all the other foibles of corporate stupidity.
So what will Google do about it? Let’s watch.
Friedman: “It’s five to midnight…”
Tom Friedman‘s latest:
“It’s five to midnight and before the clock strikes 12 all we need to do is rebuild Fatah, merge it with Hamas, elect an Israeli government that can freeze settlements, court Syria and engage Iran — while preventing it from going nuclear — just so we can get the parties to start talking.”
There’s no point blaming Dubya for the mess other than taking note of his administration’s deliberate incompetence. Obama’s appointment of former senator George Mitchell to head the peace initiative shows he’s serious.
In my opinion, the tragedy is that Israel is not ready for peace. Israel’s leaders are just as delusional as Dubya.
And no matter who wins the February election, we’re not going to see the end of settlements.
Friedman paints the picture of what Israel’s fate looks like: “…without a stable two-state solution, what you will have is an Israel hiding behind a high wall, defending itself from a Hamas-run failed state in Gaza, a Hezbollah-run failed state in south Lebanon and a Fatah-run failed state in Ramallah. Have a nice day.”
So where is Israel’s Obama? Will no one stand up for reality?
Jimmy Carter: War was Unecessary
Says the former-President:
“…the devastating invasion of Gaza by Israel could easily have been avoided.”
Say what?
War Crimes: Has Israel lost its way?
Some would argue that this is Israel’s way. So will it, and its leaders, have to face a war crimes tribunal?
Here are three specific reasons why the “war crimes” charge cannot be taken lightly:
• Collective punishment: The entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.
• Targeting civilians: The airstrikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.
• Disproportionate military response: The airstrikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza’s elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.
Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz:
“Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni will stand at the forefront of the guilty. Two of them are candidates for prime minister, the third is a candidate for criminal indictment. It is inconceivable that they not be held to account for the bloodshed.”
Even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal had an op-ed piece titled: Israel Is Committing War Crimes.
The Bush administration is to blame as well. Their non-engagement policy – to leave the Arabs and Israelis to work out issues on their own – has been a failure of leadership at the highest level. And Gaza is paying for it in blood.
Better Decision-Making: Tom Davenport and Peter Drucker
Here’s a brilliant post from “decision-making” guru Tom Davenport. He asks us to “make 2009 the Year of Better Decisions.”
Here’s what Davenport recommends:
1) Make a list of key decisions: not all decisions are equal, so you have to ask yourself what the key decisions are.
2) Classify decisions by type: For example, is the decision financial, personal, strategic, or tactical? By deciding how to treat different types of decisions differently, companies (and individuals) can become more effective.
3) Track decisions and their outcomes: without this, you can’t improve your decision-making abilities. And if things did go wrong, why did it happen?
4) Establish a decision-making coaching group: to improve decision-making across the company!
5) Create a decision-making process for the company: how do we make this decision? Davenport gives us an example from Air-Products (the company which, I believe, initially decided that not using an ERP system would be a competitive advantage.)
Good stuff.
I’d to bring Peter Drucker into the picture at this point. For Drucker, a decision has not been made until people know:
– the name of the person accountable for carrying it out;
– the deadline;
– the names of the people who will be affected by the decision and therefore have to know about, understand, and approve it—or at least not be strongly opposed to it—and
– the names of the people who have to be informed of the decision, even if they are not directly affected by it.
And one more crucial point from Drucker:
Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake. Decisions are made at every level of the organization, beginning with individual professional contributors and frontline supervisors. These apparently low-level decisions are extremely important in a knowledge-based organization. Knowledge workers are supposed to know more about their areas of specialization—for example, tax accounting—than anybody else, so their decisions are likely to have an impact throughout the company. Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level. It needs to be taught explicitly to everyone in organizations that are based on knowledge.
R.I.P. Peter!
I’m counting on Obama being a far-better decision-maker than Dick Cheney.
The Limits of Green: Environmental Branding gets Messy
Prediction: 2009 will get “greenwashing” companies into hot water.
The danger in cause-related marketing is that it causes more harm to a company than good, especially when companies get involved in less than good faith.
This can happen, for example, when a company like P&G gets overzealous in its PR and engineers its own green awards.
And the slope gets slippery when the Sierra Club gets involved with Clorox.
Or when SC Johnson creates its own Greenlist(TM) process – and logo! Does anyone really believe that Windex is a green product?
Or when Dell claims it’s carbon neutral.
The simple question for business is can we trust you? The answer, so far, is no.
After eight years of laissez-faire, perhaps we are finally entering into a new phase of corporate accountability. And it’s not just about greenwashing.
Israel: Enough!
It’s a sad day when the newspapers in Israel are more critical of its government than the media in this country.
What stupidity.
Israel is alienating its own supporters.
And next in line is Netanyahu… what a disaster that will be.
Update: Journalists-in-Jail Index
Interesting facts:
– there are more online journalists in jail than print journalists.
– China leads the world in putting journalists behind bars
– Suspected perpetrators in journalist murder cases:
* Political groups: 31.2%
* Government officials: 18.5%
* Criminal group: 11.1%
* Paramilitaries: 7.2%
* Military: 5.8%
* Local residents: 2.1%
* Mob: 1.2%
* Unknown: 22%
I consider the “Journalists-in-Jail Index” a true measurement of democracy…
And now, a music video from Alpha Blondy:
Neuro-Selling: Mind Control in the Grocery Store?
The science of shopping?
The article should’ve been called mind control in your local supermarket.
I agree with this: “despite all the new technology, simply talking to consumers remains one of the most effective ways to improve the ‘customer experience’.”
Too bad we can’t spend the same kind of money on research figuring out the best way to teach Johnny how to read, write and do arithmetic…
Here’s “Mind Control” from Stephen Marley:
Torturing Journalists
The television reporter who threw his shoes at President Bush was burned by a cigarette in the hours after his arrest on Dec. 14 and was beaten so badly by Iraqi security personnel that one of his teeth was knocked out, the reporter’s brother said Sunday after a visit to the jail.
Nice democracy we’ve installed in Iraq… I guess they get their “best practices” from Cheney.
Learn more >>
The Financial Crisis: Perspectives from China and India
James Fallows‘ interview with China’s Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation is an eye-opener:
– “People, especially Americans, started believing that they can live on other people’s money. And more and more so. First other people’s money in your own country. And then the savings rate comes down, and you start living on other people’s money from outside. At first it was the Japanese. Now the Chinese and the Middle Easterners.
– “If you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people.
– “I have to say it: you have to do something about pay in the financial system. People in this field have way too much money. And this is not right.
– “Today when we look at all the markets, the U.S. still is probably the most viable, the most predictable. I was trained as a lawyer, and predictability is always very important for me.
– “Americans are not sensitive in that regard. I mean, as a whole. The simple truth today is that your economy is built on the global economy. And it’s built on the support, the gratuitous support, of a lot of countries. So why don’t you come over and … I won’t say kowtow [with a laugh], but at least, be nice to the countries that lend you money.
– “Talk to the Chinese! Talk to the Middle Easterners! And pull your troops back! Take the troops back, demobilize many of the troops, so that you can save some money rather than spending $2 billion every day on them. And then tell your people that you need to save, and come out with a long-term, sustainable financial policy.”
and then there’s the Indian perspective:
– “In India, we never had anything close to the subprime loan,” said Chandra Kochhar, the chief financial officer of India’s largest private bank, Icici. (A few days after I spoke to her, Ms. Kochhar was named the bank’s new chief executive, in a move that had long been anticipated.) “All lending to individuals is based on their income. That is a big difference between your banking system and ours.” She continued: “Indian banks are not levered like American banks. Capital ratios are 12 and 13 percent, instead of 7 or 8 percent. All those exotic structures like C.D.O. and securitizations are a very tiny part of our banking system. So a lot of the temptations didn’t exist.”
– ” “We recognize it as a problem of plenty. It was perpetuated by greedy bankers, whether investment bankers or commercial bankers. The greed to make money is the impression it has made here. Anytime they wanted a loan, people just dipped into their home A.T.M. It was like money was on call.”
Serious business this.
Slavery in Our Time
It’s time to end slavery.
Here’s one way to help >>
Iraqi Farewell: Reporter Pelts Bush with Shoes
Is this what they used to call objective journalism?