Category: Politics

Obviously a dramatic commentary from the past, but, I think, particularly poignant. See where you stand.

One, and this has been floating around the blogosphere I think, but it is essential:

Human Development Trends 2005 at GapMinder.com.

The second is Harold Pinter’s starkly anti-Amerkn Nobel Acceptance Speech, which you can read at the Guardian.

I caught Bill Maher’s last show last night. It was quite good; I especially liked the give and take between Joe Scarborough and Bill–Joe was in a particularly right-wing propaganda mode, but then tried to gain back “journalistic integrity” by agreeing with Bill on the issue of accountability for the Plame leak.

But Scarborough’s views on Reagan, on Bush being unpopular just due to “historical precedent,” and his conviction that the middle east will benefit from our intrusion in Iraq is just par for the right-wing echo chamber course.

I also caught Comedians of Comedy, the comedy central show with Zach G. that shows four comedians on the road joking around with each other. The show opened awesomely–with Zach resolutely telling a female comedian that “men can have fake orgasms too” in a crowded diner, and then proceeding to actually fake one.

Someone in the crowd of the diner screamed out, “I’ll have whatever he’s eating!” at the end.

Check out this excerpt from Majorie Kelley’s “Divine Right of Capital” (was a recommended read in my last outsourcing talk):

When stockholders might try to improve their negotiating position by organizing into mutual funds, corporations would threaten to cut off payments altogether. The companies would threaten to replace stockholder money with funds from overseas, willing to accept lower returns.

Of course overseas stockholders would have less power. For while 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.”

If stockholders staged protests at the World Labor Organization to suggest changes in this economic order, they would be accused of “tampering with the free market.”

That’s what we’re told today. But we don’t have to buy it. For we can begin to see how the sleight-of-hand of the “free market” serves as an apology for institutional arrangements. The truth is, free market ideology contains two separate assertions, worth unpacking.

First is the assertion that natural processes are self-regulating. Which is valid. We see it in nature, where the renewal of life in spring comes on its own. Where we mate for our own pleasure-and thus help in the rebirth of the world. In like manner, we serve the economic polity best by serving ourselves. The drive to make money gets us out of bed in the morning, and brings us to do our part in holding the world together. Our economic drives are part of the natural order and are trustworthy. We can take comfort in this assertion.

But free market ideology carries a second assertion: that corporate and trade governance structures embody the natural order. And this does not follow logically from the first. For it glosses over institutions of power. To call the stockholder-centered corporate structure “natural” is reminiscent of the ancient claim that the monarchy was the only “natural” way to structure government.

A truly natural free market would free all groups to compete equally, to pursue their own self-interest. Real free markets are not about enshrining the self-interest of one group alone in law. Privilege like that has no place in a market economy. Even an imaginary one.

Why are cars in the United States still so damn fuel inefficient? On /. right now, an argument is going on over whether this might be because gas is so damn cheap in the USA. We see the gas prices fly up to over $2.50, and we get scared. But in Europe, gas prices have been over $6 US/gallon for awhile.

However, in Europe cars are much more fuel efficient (out of necessity). They are also more beautiful and more fun to drive, but that’s beside the point. The main thing is that they are much, much more fuel efficient.

So how can we get that here? Well, one way is to use the European model, because we know it works, and start taxing gasoline more. But I think that’s actually a bit unfair, because it punishes even those who make better purchasing decisions, such as Prius drivers.

I think that we should institute a graduated tax on cars based on their fuel efficiency ratings. Oh, you get below 15 mpg? That’s too bad–now you have to pay for a lot of gas, and your car will cost 20% more. Oh, but you really like your GMC Yukon 4WD? Well, be prepared to cough up an extra few thousand dollars for it, then. We’ll take the money and use it to research alternative fuel sources.

Meanwhile, those cars that are really fuel efficient should get some major price breaks. This already happens sometimes with the Prius. But I think the discounts should be much greater and that America should really open up the market for fuel efficient cars.

We’ve been living in this dream world where the environmental externalities and consequences of our guzzling of cheap oil has absolutely no impact on our lives. It does have an impact, and Americans just don’t see it. They need to be encouraged to buy fuel efficient cars by making the inefficient ones expensive and the efficient ones cheap. That’s really so obvious and easy, I don’t see why it hasn’t happened yet.

(Well, I do see why, but I just wish we weren’t so damn beholden to oil companies.)

I only just tonight got to watch Fog of War, a documentary which interviews Robert S. McNamara and draws from his past experiences lessons about the nature of foreign policy and wars.

One of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking movies I’ve seen about a person who advised presidents who had the power to wipe out entire countries with a single military order, and who years later realized that nuclear warfare and human fallibility can only mean something horrible for this society of ours.

You must see this movie; after you do, you’ll also see why I’m not so quick to buy the line about the necessity of Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

Here are some interesting viewpoints on corporate obligation to shareholders. One comes from Jeff Darcy and the other two from Mark R. Kleiman.

Before reading this, you should introduce yourself to the nice debate going on in the blogosphere right now on corporate responsibility, sparked by this post.

Here is Jeff’s response.

His [Mark’s] approach is reductio ad absurdum, but I think there’s an even more important flaw in Friedman’s reasoning. This flaw is the all too common assumption that “money is everything” and therefore any value not represented in monetary form is irrelevant. In this case, this leads to believing that people invest only based on (direct, short-term) monetary return, but that’s simply not true. When people buy stock, they do so based on a certain assumptions. They assume that certain legal and moral restrictions are applicable to what the company does, and they invest based on that assumption. This is particularly true of “green” or socially-conscious investors, who might be making decisions based as much on a company’s image or reputation for ethical behavior as on their purely financial performance. In a sense one might say that such investors have monetized their morals by making such investments, but that doesn’t mean they’ve given up those morals forever in return for profit. Presenting such an image and then acting in a wholly different manner is a form of fraud, and unconscionable. The same principle applies to every company and investor, though usually to a lesser degree. If the moral justification for what companies do is fulfillment of shareholder expectations, then expectations other than profit must be considered.

There’s an even more fundamental problem that shareholders do not adequately represent the interests of all who are affected by a company’s actions, and that those others deserve consideration too, but that’s probably best left for a future article.

I think what Jeff has to realize, however, is that the issue here is the morality of proximity. People feel moral obligations to things that are close to them, either physically or sentimentally. I feel moral obligations to homeless people I see on the street in front of me, but don’t feel as much of an obligation toward, say, sweatshop workers in Malaysia who are abused by their managers. Despite any of my moral principles, despite what I think and know to be right, I still end up buying clothes and things made by those sweatshop laborers, or I continue to buy products whose production destroys the environment.

Even if I had all the information in the world, say I knew Gap abuses its workers, and so I knew if I bought a Gap shirt I would be supporting a business that abuses workers. But then things get complicated. The shirt is already made. The abuse was already done. My buying the shirt doesn’t actually abuse workers. I am just buying a shirt. I need a shirt, its price is right, I’m buying it.

We can’t expect ethical principles to just come to us by people boycotting industries that subvert them. Imagine if the abolitionists, rather than forming a political party and trying to get slavery outlawed, simply said, “We will convince everyone not to invest in these companies, and to not buy these goods.” Do you think this kind of boycott would have really succeeded? Do you think without the understanding of basic human moral principles that went along with the abolitionist movement, we would have advanced past that dark part of our history?

Slavery exists today. People are indentured servants in other countries, working for outposts of American companies. I agree with both posters that laws cannot be made for every moral principle. But no one has mentioned that we aren’t asking for laws for every moral principle. We’re asking for laws for all the most basic ones that relate to labor, the environment, etc., such as not being abused in the workplace, and not polluting our precious ecosystems.

As a shareholder, I continue to invest in companies who may be doing morally bad things far away from me. Shareholders didn’t cash in their morality, they just don’t know the bad things companies are doing, or, if they do know, they are being done so far away that they simply don’t care.

If it were a company that abused American sweatshop labor, and polluted rivers in small-town USA, then [most] people probably wouldn’t want to support that company with their wallet. But when the labor is in Malaysia and the polluted rivers are in China, we do it because we simply don’t care about those other places as much.

An interesting piece of philosophy was written on this topic by Peter Unger. It’s entitled, “Living High and Letting Die.” Try to find it at your local library.

Mark also posted a response to the debate.

What the Friedman argument is missing, it seems to me, is a realistic idea of what shareholders want with regard to how their companies do their own business, and all sorts of good behavioral evidence shows that to be a lot more complicated than maximal money returns. Friedman is right that corporate leadership is obligated to advance the interests of shareholders, but it is also obligated to discern these interests and discover–I expect–that shareholders want to trade some possible returns for a clear conscience about environmental responsibility, decent treatment of workers, honesty in trade, and the like.

Yes, they would probably trade some of their returns for a clear conscious. But how about we get to the heart of the matter: shouldn’t American companies be held responsible for immoral actions they do outside of the United States? Don’t we need to come to a global understanding of the rights of workers to healthful working conditions, to a work/life balance, to less abuse? Don’t we have to come to a global understanding that harm done to the ecosystem in China does affect all of us, and shouldn’t we try to do something to stop these companies from ruining our Earth?

Shareholders are just in to make a buck off their investment. They’d prefer it be done in a way that leaves their conscious clear, sure. But we can’t expect shareholders to save the day when it comes to enforcing our society’s (that is, this one, global society’s) minimal moral standards. We need to use our power as a democracy to control these authoritarian structures, even as they hop around the globe trying to avoid any confrontation by going to places with the least restrictive set of laws.

Saw this cartoon in the Village Voice today. Sorry for the bad photo, but you should be able to read it. It’s worth it.