Author: Brian

Reuters:

Mexico probably made more money in 2009 moving drugs than it did exporting oil, its single biggest legitimate foreign currency earner.

Abraham Lincoln:

The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.

I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the Bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe.

Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed.

What did the Founding Fathers really think about corporations and their rights?

Rick Ungar:

The reality is that the Founding Fathers didn’t think very much of corporations or, for that matter, any of the organized moneyed interests …

The Constitution speaks to control of government by the people…for the people…and of the people. Why would it even occur to the Founders that a corporation would ever be perceived as one of ‘the people’?

History makes clear that they viewed these entities as forces that preyed on people …

After the nation’s founding, corporations were… limited in how long they were permitted to exist (typically 20 or 30 years), only permitted to deal in one commodity, they could not own shares in other corporations, and their property holdings were expressly limited to what they needed to accomplish their corporate business goals.

In the early days of the nation, most states had rules on the books making any political contribution by a corporation a criminal offense.

A major step toward reform would be to prohibit campaign contributions by individuals employed by registered lobbying firms.

Scientific American’s Jeffrey D. Sachs:

The breakdown of the Washington policy process has four manifestations.

First is … inability to focus beyond the next election. “Shovel-ready” projects squeeze out attention to vital longer-term strategies…

Second, most key decisions are made in congressional backrooms through negotiations with lobbyists, who simultaneously fund the congressional campaigns.

Third, technical expertise is largely ignored or bypassed, while expert communities such as climate scientists are falsely and recklessly derided…

Fourth, there is little way for the public to track and comment on complex policy proposals working their way through Congress or federal agencies.

Mark Thoma asks, “Can a broken policy process be used to fix a broken policy process?”

50,000 sprawl on a nine-hole golf course.

OXFAM’s blog reports on a problem growing by the day.

Nowhere is there a latrine. Tens of thousands camped and not a toilet to share between them. The consequences are potentially disastrous. The risk of disease skyrockets.

People assume that if something is green, it’s a biological sink for carbon dioxide.

Mowing, leaf-blowing, watering, fertilizer and other lawn-tending activities produce far more greenhouse gasses than lawns and fields can suck up.

Open Letter to David Brooks.

100s signing on.

Homeopathy supporters plan mass overdose to protest increasing regulation. Homeopathy skeptics to do same.

Michael Martin:

What happened to Bell Labs? Why aren’t new technologies making it out of our universities and into startup companies? As much as I respect venture capitalists and entrepreneurs today, the kinds of ideas getting funding today are not the same caliber as the kinds of ideas that were getting funding during the Sputnik era, when we were the envy of the world.

When you think you are the highest point you don’t look up.

RT : We need water, we are on terrain Monpellier village, at delmas 33.

RT @my cousin just call said that she is alive at turgeau under the debris of the hospital of SODEC.please her # 38610990/38649188

RT @: Cuban doc need detergent 2 clean place where they receive patients. HELP! Location: near Cathedrale de Port-au-Prince #Haiti

RT @Ducasse is dehydrated and need food water. Rue lamarre impasse Mouzin next of Cine Capitol Port-auPrince #Haiti #HelpHaiti

RT @ 8 days without food carfour debwos in the yard of the Acra no one has gotten to us please help we ask that someone gets to us

RT @: orphan 74 dying babies, ONE LONE Caretaker -a poor old woman Eveline Louis Jacques: 2234-1429 / 3462-5154

http://twitter.com/InternetHaiti

Dan Geldon:

In the years leading up to the crisis, the proliferation of fine print, complex products, and hidden costs and dangers – and the push against government regulations over them – exemplified the larger pattern. While touting complexity as a form of innovation and railing against every attempt at government interference, supposedly pro-market forces used that complexity to clog the gears of free market machinery and to reduce competition and maximize profit.

The proliferation of opacity and the lack of competition in the industry are not an accident.

And those distortions help explain the massive consolidation we’re seeing in the industry, the dwindling of real competition, and the proliferation of faceless conglomerates with infinite leverage over the drafting of terms and conditions.

The greatest lesson from the crisis that we haven’t yet learned is that “industry interests” and “free-market interests” are not the same. In fact, they are more like oil and water, as the industry profits most in the absence of true market competition.

Why Poor Countries Are Poor, by Tim Harford:

Economists used to think wealth came from a combination of man-made resources (roads, factories, telephone systems), human resources (hard work and education), and technological resources (technical know-how, or simply high-tech machinery). Obviously, poor countries grew into rich countries by investing money in physical resources and by improving human and technological resources with education and technology transfer programs.

Nothing is wrong with this picture as far as it goes. Education, factories, infrastructure, and technical know-how are indeed abundant in rich countries and lacking in poor ones. But the picture is incomplete, a puzzle with the most important piece missing.

The first clue that something is amiss with the traditional story is its implication that poor countries should have been catching up with rich ones for the last century or so–and that the farther behind they are, the faster the catch-up should be. In a country that has very little in the way of infrastructure or education, new investments have the biggest rewards.

This expectation seems to be confirmed by the experience of China, Taiwan, and South Korea–not to mention Botswana, Chile, India, Mauritius, and Singapore. Fifty years ago they were mired in poverty, lacking man-made, human, technical, and sometimes natural resources. Now these dynamic countries, not Japan, the United States, or Switzerland, have become the fastest-growing economies on the planet.

Since technology is widely available and increasingly cheap, this is what economists should expect of every developing country. In a world of diminishing returns, the poorest countries gain the most from new technology, infrastructure, and education.

As for education and infrastructure, since the returns seem to be so high, there should be no shortage of investors willing to fund infrastructure projects or lend money to students (or to governments that provide education).

Banks, domestic and foreign, should be lining up to lend people the money to get through school or to build a new road or a new power plant. In turn, poor people, or poor countries, should be very happy to take out such loans, confident that investment returns are so high that the repayments will not be difficult.

Even if, for some reason, that didn’t happen, the World Bank, established after World War II with the express aim of providing loans to countries for reconstruction and development, lends billions of dollars a year to developing countries.

Investment money is clearly not the issue; either the investments are not being made, or they are not delivering the returns the traditional model predicts.

“There is plenty of money…but they put it in their pockets.”
Countries stay poor because corruption is not only unfair; it is also hugely wasteful:

We still don’t have a good word to describe what is missing in poor countries across the world. But we are starting to understand what it is. Some people call it ‘social capital’ or maybe ‘trust’. Others call it ‘the rule of law’ or ‘institutions’. But these are just labels.

The problem is that poor countries are topsy-turvy places where it’s in most people’s interest to take actions that directly or indirectly damage everyone else.

This is a shocking waste.

Government banditry, widespread waste, and oppressive regulations are all elements in that missing piece of the puzzle.

Countries struggling with corruption can ‘rent’ agency services from clean nations.

The recent experience of Angola suggests that a troubled nation can reduce corruption and increase revenue collection by adopting external institutions.

Angola outsourced customs collections to Crown Agents, a British nonprofit with expertise in public financial management. In so doing, the country tripled its tariff revenue in the span of a few years, all the while reducing its tariff rates.

Moscow’s stray dogs seem to be reverting to wild behavior somewhere between house pets and wolves.

The metro dog has uncannily good instincts, greeting the kindly while avoiding the intolerant

About 500 strays live in the subway and about 20 have learned how to ride the trains.

“Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?”

“They figure out where they are by smell, by recognizing the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals.”

NYTimes:

1. Only about half of all Americans with depression receive treatment of any kind.
2. Moreover, only 1 in 5 are getting care — talk therapy, medication or both — that conforms to American Psychiatric Association guidelines.

…pissing contests may get you quick wins—but it also puts people in charge who are good at nothing but pissing…

our world brought about by men

“We are ready from now to cancel Haiti’s debt to Italy,” declares Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini. He added “this is a first step of a beginning.”

Oh dear.

This is like 9/11 on the whole island of Manhattan.

New York Task Force 1, the Fire Department rescue team that combed the wreckage at Ground Zero and Hurricane Katrina:

When you have your head in the hole, you forget where you are. You could be anywhere, really. And that person you’re looking for could be anywhere. It’s real simple though. You want to get them out alive.

It doesn’t matter if it’s manmade or natural.

Even if Haiti didn’t send anything monetarily in 2001, I’m sure they sent their prayers to us and it’s our turn now.

Not a lot left to be said, except build back better:

The scale of the disaster is coming into view. All of the clichés born of extremity came to mind…

First, rescue and relief efforts are far from over. Although for some they are too late, for others they are just beginning.

Second, in-kind donations are not really what is needed now; the only exception is Meals Ready to Eat.

Third, the Haitian government has been dealt a severe blow and not just to its buildings. If at a quarter to five in the afternoon an earthquake takes down not only the National Palace but also the Ministry of the Interior, the State Department, the Tax Bureau, and the Ministries of Finance, Planning, Public Works and Public Health, as well as the parliament building, you can well imagine the gaps.

Fourth…a different kind of urban planning and a long-term respect for the Haitian people’s wishes.

Finally, rescuers will get tired.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. – Mark Twain

Schoolyard gardens: Together, the bureaucrat and the celebrity paved the way for an enormous movement: by 2002, 2,000 of the state’s 9,000 schools had a garden, and by 2008 that number had risen to 3,849, and it continues to grow.

Of course, [Alice] Waters herself is guilty of nothing more terrible than being a visionary and a woman of tremendous persuasive abilities. It’s the state’s Department of Education that is to blame for allowing these gardens to hijack the curricula of so many schools.

But although garden-based curricula are advanced as a means of redressing a wide spectrum of poverty’s ills, the animating spirit behind them is impossible to separate from the haute-bourgeois predilections of the Alice Waters fan club, as best expressed in one of her most oft-repeated philosophies: “Gardens help students to learn the pleasure of physical work.”

Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it?

Cargill envy? What is this author’s criticism seeking to achieve?

Haiti’s now infamous fault line is a linear valley with a stream running through it, as shown in this false-color NASA topograph.

SeismoBlog reports the fault ruptured exactly underneath this valley over a length of approximately 25 miles.

Within roughly 15 seconds, the north shifted almost 9 feet to the left, while the southern block moved a similar distance to the right, resulting in a fault slip of about 18 feet.

Most Caribbean islands lie close to a major plate boundary.

Let’s take a longer-term view of economic and societal well-being. Let’s make something good from this that will benefit our grandchildren.

Maxine Udall:

Please, sir, may we have some justice?

We and our elected representatives have a choice to make.

We can continue to compensate clueless bankers way beyond their value and we can continue to allow them to cluelessly manage financial institutions for their own short-term short-sighted gains until they plunge the rest of us into serfdom or we can change how they are compensated and maybe even who is compensated (as in throw the bums out) and we can change the rules by which they are allowed to ‘play’ with our money.

The latter shouldn’t be rocket science were it not for the wealth and power bankers are able to exert in their own interest.

If the political will is not there now to do this, for heaven’s sake, when will it be????

Joe Moran:

Boredom is a modern notion: if our ancestors suffered from it, they didn’t call it boredom.

The verb ‘to bore’ was first used in the late 18th century, while the noun ‘boredom’ dates only from the mid-19th century. By then, it was often seen as an illness: in Bleak House, Charles Dickens refers to it as a “chronic malady”. The literary critic Patricia Meyer Spacks traces a shift from 18th-century notions of boredom, which saw it as an individual’s personal responsibility or moral failing, to more modern notions which situated the sources of boredom outside the self. Spacks argues that this “reflects a state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power”.

Stuart Staniford:

I think the general topic of denial is very pertinent to any discussion of global risks.

When something is scary, people have an incentive to somehow avoid dealing with the facts… you have a psychological incentive to deny evidence that maybe the problem is not so severe after all… either ignoring the problem, or if that is no longer working, minimizing it, attacking the integrity of the proponents, etc.

Meanwhile, the other side is at risk of exaggerating the seriousness of the problem.

I didn’t find much in the way of scholarship on the general phenomenon – there’s lots of practical books on denial in addiction. Other than that, I guess we are still in denial about denial…

Naomi Klein:

There are many acts of destruction for which the Bush years are rightly reviled – the illegal invasions, the defiant defenses of torture, the tanking of the global economy.

But the administration’s most lasting legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the US government what branding-mad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: it hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most essential functions of government, from protecting borders to responding to disasters to collecting intelligence.

This hollowing out was not a side project of the Bush years, it was a central mission, reaching into every field of governance.

And though the Bush clan was often ridiculed for its incompetence, the process of auctioning off the state, leaving behind only a shell – or a brand – was approached with tremendous focus and precision.

She’s summarizing:

The Bush administration’s determination to mimic the hollow corporations it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to “rebrand America” for an increasingly hostile world.

And these errors do not cease.

“We do not create, we discover.” – R. Buckminster Fuller:

The earth is a small spaceship.

The equator speeds around at 1000 miles and hour and the whole planet speeds around the sun at a speed of a million miles a day.

The rim speed of rotation of our galaxy is tremendous and the speed of the whole galaxy traveling through space is phenomenal.

The environment does work in preferred ways and finding those ways will make us a success. We need to live on the income not the capital.