The Divine Right of Capital

A playful paragraph from the book by Majorie Kelly, which I’ve lately been re-reading:

We might note that while employees in the community are left to the protection of the invisible hand, wealth is protected by the visible hand of government and corporations. But this is something, it is hoped, that will be overlooked.

To help us begin to see it, we might, for a moment, imagine a different arrangement of institutional power. Picture a free market in which labor rights are enthroned in law, and property rights are left to the invisible hand. This would be a world in which we believe employees are the corporation. They are, after all, the ones running the place. Hence only employees could vote for the board of directors, and the purpose of the corporation would be to maximize income for employees. In theory, stockholders would receive income they negotiated through contracts. In practice the corporation would dictate those contracts with little real negotiation and stockholders could accept the terms or go elsewhere, only to find other corporations offering nearly identical and dismal terms.

In this world, stock would be sold in a manner controlled entirely by the corporation, much as wages are set today. Stockholders would appear alone at the company where they would be taken into a room and made an offer. There would be no reliable way to compare current stock price to pass price, the return one person receives to what others receive, or to compare returns from one corporation to another. Wage and benefit data, on the other hand, would be published daily in “The Main Street Journal”, and the movement of the Dow Jones wage index would of course be tracked nightly on the news. But returns to shareholders would be considered proprietary information and would not be given out.

If stockholders tried to improve their negotiating position by organizing into mutual funds, corporations would threaten to cut off payments altogether. The companies would talk about replacing stockholder money with funds from people overseas were willing to accept lower returns.

And, of course, overseas, stockholders would have seen even less power. Although free trade agreements would provide intricate protections for labor and environmental rights, they would offer capital no protections. “What does capital have to do with trade?” pundits might ask. “Trade is about goods and services and the people who create them, it’s not about capital.”

Comment on Amazon for Michelle Malkin’s book

I think Michelle Malkin is one of the craziest commentators to come from the right. But her persistence seems like an eternal spring. Here’s a comment I found on Amazon about her book (“Unhinged”) which talks about how the Left supposedly “abuses” the right with verbal attacks and satirical plays.

It is a fact of spiritual nature that humans have an innate dark side also known as mankind’s intrinsic “depraved nature.” Since mankind’s depraved nature is a spiritual problem, it can only be combated by spiritual means by submitting oneself to the God of the Bible and allowing His supernatural love to cleanse and subdue it. Nothing else will work. Overwhelmingly, liberals reject God and therefore, his power for combating their depraved natures. As such, their dark side reigns unchecked, manifesting itself more often and to a more egregious extent than those who have accepted God’s supernatural love – such as most conservatives.

Such is the case as chronicled by Michelle Malkin in “Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.” In this short work, Malkin exposes this innate depravity as it is manifested by liberal leaders and their rank-and-file alike. Malkin sets the tone of her book in the introduction when she states, “The traits that distinguish today’s unhinged Left are the pervasiveness of its pathologies, the intensity of its hatred, and the sanctimony of its self-delusion.”

She then proceeds to document myriad examples of each of these culled from newspapers, television, books and her own personal e-mails. She demonstrates how the speech of the unhinged manifests itself through extreme profanity, paranoia, racial bigotry, fraud, hypocrisy, intolerance, anti-Americanism, and contempt for the military.

Particularly disturbing are the examples of the Left’s desire to assassinate President Bush. Malkin describes several tasteless products, a book, a play and a musical with the theme of presidential assassination produced out of the Left’s seething hatred for Bush. She then opines, “For all the left’s fear and loathing of the `religious right,’ religion and patriotism are powerful conservative incentives to decency – perhaps the absence of liberal decency is explained by their lack of both.” Precisely.

Oh, okay, now I get why Malkin is popular. Because her readers think that the left means “godless” and that godless means “depraved.”

Don’t some other people think the same way? Like, the people we’re supposedly fighting?

More on Internet Radio: NPR Takes Action

From TFA:

This is a stunning, damaging decision for public radio and its commitment to music discovery and education, which has been part of our tradition for more than half a century. Public radio’s agreements on royalties with all such organizations, including the RIAA, have always taken into account our public service mission and non-profit status. These new rates, at least 20 times more than what stations have paid in the past, treat us as if we were commercial radio – although by its nature, public radio cannot increase revenue from more listeners or more content, the factors that set this new rate. Also, we are being required to pay an internet royalty fee that is vastly more expensive than what we pay for over-the-air use of music, although for a fraction of the over-the-air audience.

Save Internet Radio

Internet Radio is in danger.  (Thanks for the heads up, Jeff Evans.)  This means sites like Pandora may have to be shut down.  Do something about it.  I wrote the following letter to my NY representatives:

The Copyright Royalty Fees for Internet Radio broadcasters (like the hugely innovative Pandora.com) have been increased to the point where many of these stations will have to close down.

The music industry has certainly made a big fuss about threats coming from the Internet, but I don’t spend any of my nights crying for the music industry.  They make millions upon millions of dollars, and keep America locked in a relative monoculture where new and independent artists are left out of the musical discourse while mindless and mind-numbing music is played everyday on radio stations across the ClearChannel nation.

Yet, despite my relative dislike for this exploitive industry, I have to say that every technological innovation that we’ve seen — from LPs to tape cassettes to CDs, and now to MP3s — has seen an increasingly growing recording industry, usually due to, rather than in spite of, these technologies.

Interent Radio actually has more of a potential to benefit the music industry than any other one of these technologies.  If you don’t know, Pandora.com is an amazing site based upon “The Music Genome Project.”  The concept is simple: you enter a song or artist on the site, and it creates a playlist of songs that “sound like” that artist or song.  I can mix these intangibles (“The Doors” and “Michael Jackson” gives me classic rock tones with pop melodies) and discover new artists I had never even heard about, simply by exploring my “taste matrix.”  This amazing functionality comes in particular handy after I get my paycheck, since I go to Pandora.com, see which artists/songs I’ve listened to lately, and with a click I can purchase these songs from the music industry.

I hadn’t bought a CD in years, until discovering Pandora and, through it, independent music I liked.

Who, exactly, loses in this situation?  I discover songs I’ve never heard of, I buy CDs that probably don’t sell very well, I get to benefit from high-quality radio from work on my work PC, and Pandora makes a tiny slice of money on advertising.

I’m sure the music industry wishes they had thought of Pandora, so that the little money that it does make from advertising would be theirs.  But tough!  This is supposed to be a competitive economic system, and if you snooze, you lose.  (Given actions like these by government, I’m not sure that it is really a competitive economic system, unfortunately!)

This is only the beginning of the places these technologies can go.  Don’t allow their efforts to be quelled by big corporate interests!  Please strike down these ridiculous copyright fees!

Think Corporate Power is showing any signs of weakness?  Nope.  The big wheels keep on turning…

Catching up on the reading list

Lately, I’ve been very diligent about catching up on my reading.

I have been perpetually delaying a review of Capitalism 3.0 and Dreaming in Code, both of whom deserve it. But I promise one soon. I use Hofstadter’s Rule of Thumb lately for estimating time: however long you think it’s gonna take, double it and add a unit of time. So if you think it’ll take two hours, it’ll really take four days. If you think it’ll take five days, it’ll really take 10 weeks. And so on.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been busy at work — actually working on some cool stuff from a technology standpoint, mainly in the realm of hacking with pieces of the Eclipse Modeling Framework, and its related projects like GMF, RCP, Eclipse Core, etc.

On my commute, I’ve been enjoying reading Making Globalization Work by Stiglitz. Although one of my friends mentioned to me that this book would be quite boring, and for the most part he was right. Not the lofty stuff of Barnes in Capitalism 3.0; but perhaps Stiglitz’s recommendations are much more practical for ways to improve the current system.

The other book I started recently is a long, written interview with John Kenneth Galbraith (much in the style of Socrates) which is entitled, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics. What’s amazing is to see Galbraith, this towering (literally) Keynesian economic thinker, speaking in the 70s of the growth of corporate power, the undermining of labor, and the insidious nature of market fundamentalism. And yet, here we are, 30 years later, heeding none of his warnings, and entering into the new “global age” of “The World is Flat”.

Oh yes indeed, I do need to write some reviews very soon.

Finished Dreaming in Code

Overall, Dreaming in Code was an interesting book. For programmers who already are obsessed with the classics of software engineering (Mythical Man-Month and friends), you probably won’t learn much new stuff in this book. However, the personal illustrations using OSAF did lead me to some self-evaluation of the work I do. It was also interesting to see the internal workings of an organization which seems to be set up ideally for programmers — a good mission, an open source project, no real deadlines or users in the beginning, design-focused, etc. — and still see it run into the same issues traditional software shops run into.

I’d post a longer review, but I’m headed down to New Orleans today. Will post a longer review when I get back, hopefully also of Capitalism 3.0, whose ideas have been swimming in my head the last few days of commute.  I think they really deserve to be summarized and presented here.

In the meanwhile, I’ve started reading Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz. This book, in particular, has been a kind of catharsis for most of my armchair ideas in economics, at least so far.  It’s a very strange feeling to read the ex-Chief Economist of the World Bank explaining his own ideas about overcoming the zealousness of “market fundamentalism” prevalent in economic circles, while I, who never studied economics formally, think, “Why would anyone trained in this discipline actually believe that markets are a magic force that work on their own?”  But I guess ideology always trumps rationality.

American Thinker?

I just stumbled across this online newsletter called “The American Thinker.”  I will not link to it because I refuse to give this piece of trash a boosting in any search engine ranking.

I read an article on there (the first one I saw) called “Cultural Marxism.”  Its thesis is that though self-proclaimed communists hardly exist in America, the “new left” is organized around Marxist principles and is just a form of “masked communism.”  Here’s a nice quote:

Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America.  They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity.  All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.

Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah …. it would be funny, if only it were made up.

Search for it yourself.  This is what the American Right reads and how they frame the progressive movement.  Absolutely stunning.

Way more interesting than YouTube

I found a site today called “Fora.tv”. It’s way more interesting than YouTube: it’s a free video site that features intellectuals and figures in public discourse.

Perfect for my commute. Up till now, I’ve been depending on PBS, which has good content, but doesn’t give it all away for free.

Check it out: Fora.tv.

In particular, there’s a talk by Peter Barnes (author of Capitalism 3.0) in there.

Finished reading Capitalism 3.0, missed speakers, drank dark beer

I finished reading Capitalism 3.0 a couple of days ago, and it was quite good. I promised a review, so that will be coming shortly. I also noticed that Joseph Stiglitz (ex-Chief Economist for the World Bank) wrote a new book as a follow-up to Globalization and its Discontents which is titled, Making Globalization Work, probably a nice follow-up to Capitalism 3.0.

Today after work I headed to NYU to hear Jimmy Wales give a talk on Wikipedia, but was dismayed to discover that the auditorium was packed and I couldn’t get in.

Then, I noticed that Ralph Nader was at the IFC Theater on 6th Avenue presenting the new documentary made about him called “An Unreasonable Man,” and I was about to go to the 4:55pm showing of that, but tickets sold out for that! Man, what bad luck!

At the end of the day, I ended up meeting Max for drinks at McSorley’s, so that’s not so bad. We talked a bit about Richard Dawkin’s book “The God Delusion,” and whether it’s a good thing that there is a zealous atheist roaming the streets of intellectual-dom.

The Unkindest Cut

A relatively unsophisticated article on circumcision showed up on Salon a few days ago. It’s entitled “The Unkindest Cut” and is about the conflict of a Jewish father between his Jewish mother and his non-Jewish wife over the issue of whether to circumcise his newborn son. Although it mentions some of the history of circumcision in the United States, it doesn’t go into nearly enough depth about how strange and barbaric the practice is. A letter that came into Salon from a reader has some good points, however:

This is one of the hottest parenting issues (along with breastfeeding and sleeping). I am not surprised that Salon is already flooded with letters and the emotions are rising high on both sides. I am the mother of a 3-year-old boy. He is uncircumcised and the idea of having him circumcised never even crossed my mind. I am from Europe, therefore circumcision is not part of my culture. My husband is a Hindu from India, so it isn’t part of his culture either. There is more and more evidence that shows that circumcision is an unnecessary procedure. There are more and more organizations and individuals trying to educate the public about this. Two of my favorites are: www.jewsagainstcircumcision.org and www.nocirc.org.

There is lots of very useful information regarding this topic. There are a few points I’d like to make for the sake of argument against it. Some fathers say: I want my son to look like me. So if you had a finger, a hand, or an arm missing from birth or as a result of an accident would you want to chop off your child’s corresponding body part just to make him look like you? (Sorry this is not my own idea but I like it a lot). The other point is my original thought: we, as Western society are outraged by the practice of female circumcision (mostly practiced in Africa and some predominantly Muslim areas elsewhere). What is the difference? That female circumcision is not a tradition in our culture. So it’s O.K. to keep mutilating our boys as long as we leave our girls alone… How hypocritical! And on top of that both traditions originate on the same basis: to reduce sexual pleasure and the desire to masturbate and enjoy sex.

As per some first person accounts from men who grew into adulthood intact and then got circumcised, they tell exactly how much less pleasurable sex is afterwards… Do a search on your favorite search engine for more info on the topic.

So as a parent of a boy I will leave my son’ penis alone and will make sure that everybody else does until he is old enough to make a decision about having his own body part cut off (which I think would only occur if he ends up having problems with having foreskin and sex would be unpleasant or painful).

I am not condemning people who think differently. I simply feel sorry for their baby boys… I hope one day we’ll come to our senses about this painful and inhumane practice.

As for the author, I feel sorry for him too, that he had to go through this emotionally painful experience to come to understand that he made the wrong choice.

I have a lot more to say on this topic (in fact, in college I wrote long research papers on the topic, including some original research into grotesque Victorian age masturbation control techniques, which were the precursors to routine circumcision), but probably won’t get the time to write it up. If you’re wondering about it, drop me a line.