Category Archives: News/Opinion

Links and information about current events and op-ed columns

Inequality, Compassion, and Teamwork

Posted on by Wade Lee Hudson

Participation Inequality 90 9 1Does Rising Inequality Make Us Hardhearted?
By THOMAS B. EDSALL

This bifurcation – conservative in theory, liberal in practice – suggests that by using broad terms with liberal ideological connotations like “inequality,” “more widely shared” growth and “decreased mobility,” Obama risks activating voters’ “theoretical” conservatism, as opposed to a strategy that stresses specifics in non-ideological terms, a kind of practical liberalism: raising the minimum wage, raising tax rates on unearned income, job training, early education…. A switch to an ideology founded on redistribution, with economic justice as its core principle, would require a major upheaval, the likes of which we have not seen for some time.

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New G.M. Chief Is Company Woman, Born to It
By BILL VLASIC

…Ms. Barra is hardly a flamboyant figure at the company. She is known inside G.M. as a consensus builder who calls her staff together on a moment’s notice to brainstorm on pressing issues….

In a commencement speech last summer to students at her alma mater, the G.M.-sponsored Kettering University in Flint, Mich., she summarized her inclusive management style. “Problems don’t go away when you ignore them — they get bigger,” she said. “In my experience, it is much better to get the right people together, to make a plan, and to address every challenge head on.”…

The Volcker Rule Is Finally Here (plus more)

Posted on by Wade Lee Hudson

4.2.12Volcker Rule Is a Puzzle That Will Take Years to Understand
By Rana Foroohar

…What I’d love to see is not only a Volcker rule that prohibits prop trading outright, but also tougher capital holding requirements for banks. It’s a little known but important fact that in the years around the financial crisis of 1929 and the Great Depression (from 1929 to 1932), lots of small and regional banks went under, but no major New York bank did. Why? Because these market makers were holding between 15 and 20 % equity capital on their balance sheets — about ten times more than the average today. Prohibiting prop trading would go a long way toward lowering those ratios.

For more on the Volcker Rule, click here.

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Celebrations of Too Big to Fail’s Demise Are Premature
By Simon Johnson

In a major speech last week, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew argued that we need to keep pushing forward with financial reform. He made some encouraging points about the need to reduce systemic risks arising from money-market mutual funds and for appropriate funding levels at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and he spoke clearly about the need for accountability of regulators and of bank executives. But a huge misconception in his remarks threatens to swamp everything.

Lew argued that the problem of “too-big-to-fail” banks is well on its way to being fixed.

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Elizabeth Warren Responds To Third Way Attack By Asking Wall Street To Disclose Ties
By DSWright, FireDogLake

Senator Elizabeth Warren is not taking the attack on her by Third Way lying down. In an open letter to the CEOs of the Too Big To Fail Wall Street banks responsible for the financial crisis of 2008, Senator Warren asks that they disclose their connections to think tanks like Third Way. That way the public will know who is paying the bill for Third Way’s attack on Warren and those asking for economic justice….

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Winning the War on War
by Joshua S. Goldstein

Preeminent scholar of international relations Joshua Goldstein tears down one of the greatest myths of modern history. Despite all the hand-wringing, fearmongering, and bad-news headlines, peace is on the rise. Fewer wars are starting, more are ending, and those that remain are smaller and more localized than in past years….

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Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system
By Decca Aitkenhead

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.

Report: Half of U.S. Families Live on the Edge of ‘Economic Chaos’ (plus more)

Posted on by Wade Lee Hudson

cashregister-thumb-640xauto-9805Report: Half of U.S. Families Live on the Edge of ‘Economic Chaos’ 
by Imara Jones

Half of all families in the United States are poor, near poor or face economic insecurity where “one major setback in income could push them into poverty.” That’s the shocking conclusion of a report released today by The Hamilton Project.

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Is Pope Francis Leaving Vatican At Night To Minister To Homeless?

…A knowledgable source in Rome told The Huffington Post that “Swiss guards confirmed that the pope has ventured out at night, dressed as a regular priest, to meet with homeless men and women.”

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Is Wall Street Too Giddy?
The stock market reaches record highs as incomes stagnate. Tech companies with no revenue are valued in the billions of dollars. More analysts are seeing something unpleasantly familiar.

Are we in a stock market bubble that could soon burst?

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‘TipsForJesus’ Is Leaving Thousands Of Dollars For Servers
By Mark Memmot

…TipsForJesus has been chronicling its good deeds on Instagram, saying its mission is “doing the Lords [sic] work, one tip at a time.” Gawker estimates about $54,000 has been handed out in the past several months.

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Third Way’s Anti-Populist, Anti-Warren and Deceptive “Dead End”
By Richard Eskow

An almost palpable air of desperation clings to the anti-“populist,” anti-Elizabeth Warren editorial by Jonathan Cowan and Jim Kessler of the corporate-funded Third Way organization. If they’re worried, they’re right to worry. The world is changing.

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Rumsfeld’s War and Its Consequences Now
By Mark Danner

A review of:

The Unknown Known
a film directed by Errol Morris

Known and Unknown: A Memoir
by Donald Rumsfeld
Sentinel, 815 pp., $36.00

By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld
by Bradley Graham
PublicAffairs, 803 pp., $18.95 (paper)

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’Tis the Season to Be Food-Insecure
BY: EDWARD WYCKOFF WILLIAMS

It is a strange and ironic truth that in the world’s richest democracy, many Americans are going to work in the morning, but they and their families are going to bed hungry at night.

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Homage to the Idols of Idleness
By JESSICA KERWIN JENKINS

…What could be gained from a single day set free from the clock’s tyranny, one spent wandering or daydreaming the hours away?

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The Stem and the Flower
By DAVID BROOKS

…How much emotional and psychic space should politics take up in a normal healthy brain?… politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen’s mind. The rest should be philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture and fun. I wish our talk-show culture reflected that balance, and that the emotional register around politics were more in keeping with its low but steady nature.

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The Families We Invent
By FRANK BRUNI

…As good as we humans are at division, we’re better still at connection.

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The Pope and the Right
By ROSS DOUTHAT

…This Catholic case for limited government, however, is not a case for the Ayn Randian temptation inherent to a capitalism-friendly politics. There is no Catholic warrant for valorizing entrepreneurs at the expense of ordinary workers, or for dismissing all regulation as unnecessary and all redistribution as immoral.

The Ways of Lust (plus more)

Posted on by Wade Lee Hudson

lustThe Ways of Lust
By PAUL BLOOM

HOW does lust affect the way we think about people? …The real worry that people have with pornography — and with lust more generally — is that the targets of the arousal are seen as losing certain uniquely human traits. They are thought of as lower-status beings, stripped of dignity, more like animals than people….

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The G.O.P.’s Racism Tweet
By JULIET LAPIDOS

It took three-and-a-half hours for the Republican National Committee to amend a tweet.

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The Minimum We Can Do
By ARINDRAJIT DUBE

…individuals are often willing to sacrifice their own payoffs to punish those who are seen as acting unfairly…. Support for increasing the minimum wage stretches across the political spectrum.

Pope Challenges Unfettered Capitalism (plus more)

Posted on by Wade Lee Hudson

Pope Francis leads a mass at St Peter's basilica

John Francis Callahan shared this on Facebook:

Pope Francis calls unfettered capitalism ‘tyranny’ and urges rich to share wealth

Pontiff’s first major publication calls on global leaders to guarantee work, education and healthcare

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IMG_20120815_135804

Rob Waters posted this to Facebook:

My latest in Forbes: New series profiles healthcare innovators working to transform their communities

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 End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

By Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich

…In spite of our repeated requests, the N.S.A. has not provided evidence of any instance when the agency used this program to review phone records that could not have been obtained using a regular court order or emergency authorization….

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 A Little Light in the Dark Corridors of Power
By Jeff Fauz

…Now comes Larry Summers — one of the chief designers of the policies that led to our current economic morass — suggesting in a November 8 speech to the International Monetary Fund that this fundamental assumption does not square with observed reality….

Whether through intention or ignorance, lower wages or another unsustainable bout of speculation are the logical consequence of the bi-partisan commitment to austerity that now rules Washington.

It is difficult to believe that many in Summers’ audience at the IMF do not understand this. But the policy implications — i.e., actually doing something about the trade deficit, the misallocation of capital and the corporate war against workers — are too radical for the financial interests that support their careers….