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h/t @inetespionage

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This is a very good documentary on the business practices, and effects of Wal-Mart. If you’re like me, you don’t shop at Wal-Mart & have no intention of ever doing so, but this doc will anger, and sadden you. Wal-Mart is worse than I ever knew.

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• Wal-Mart Demands Even Cheaper Crap [Corporate America] (gawker.com)

“What Good Is Wall Street?: Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless.“

This is an epic article. It’s a must read of the highest order if you care at all about what’s happened to our country not just over the last few years, but over the last 30.

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Here’s an excerpt where the writer, John Cassidy, is talking to an ex finance insider, Paul Woolley:

At first, like most economists, he believed that trading drove market prices to levels justified by economic fundamentals. If an energy company struck oil, or an entertainment firm created a new movie franchise, investors would pour money into its stock, but the price would remain tethered to reality. The dotcom bubble of the late nineteen-nineties changed his opinion. GMO is a “value investor” that seeks out stocks on the basis of earnings and cash flows. When the Nasdaq took off, Woolley and his colleagues couldn’t justify buying high-priced Internet stocks, and their funds lagged behind rivals that shifted more of their money into tech. Between June, 1998, and March, 2000, Woolley recalled, the clients of GMO—pension funds and charitable endowments, mostly—withdrew forty per cent of their money. During the ensuing five years, the bubble burst, value stocks fared a lot better than tech stocks, and the clients who had left missed more than a sixty-per-cent gain relative to the market as a whole. After going through that experience, Woolley had an epiphany: financial institutions that react to market incentives in a competitive setting often end up making a mess of things. “I realized we were acting rationally and optimally,” he said. “The clients were acting rationally and optimally. And the outcome was a complete Horlicks.” Financial markets, far from being efficient, as most economists and policymakers at the time believed, were grossly inefficient. “And once you recognize that markets are inefficient a lot of things change.”

Woolley is also quoted making statements like this: “Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas?”, and: “It is like a cancer that is growing to infinite size, until it takes over the entire body.”

I encourage you to read the whole thing. It shed light on some things without the use of much finance jargon.

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• Can Wall Street Justify Its Existence? (dealbook.nytimes.com)

Know how to manage differences; it’s the key to success in a relationship. Disagreements don’t sink relationships. Name-calling does. Learn how to handle the negative feelings that are the unavoidable byproduct of the differences between two people. Stonewalling or avoiding conflicts is NOT managing them.

Bold mine.

I rarely write people off. If we’ve been friends we likely will continue to be friends unless we “naturally” drift apart.

For me this creates a certain dynamic in the way I deal with people. When I disagree with someone I consider a friend, especially when it’s over something I consider profoundly important, I will stay in that friendship. I will struggle, and argue & debate because I believe friends & family have the most potential to alter the way we look at something.

Solve problems as they arise. Don’t let resentments simmer. Most of what goes wrong in relationships can be traced to hurt feelings, leading partners to erect defenses against one another and to become strangers. Or enemies.

If I have an issue with you, and it is something that can potentially be the downfall of our relationship, I will tell you ASAP. I don’t let it brew or stew. Nothing is more important to me than my personal relationships. My closest friends I’ve known for at least 15 years. I’ve known my best friend for 25 years. I argue & debate with these guys more than anyone else in my life. Over email, on the phone & especially in person.

We all fall somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum. As far as I know I am the closest to a “radical leftist.” We argue/debate things constantly. The older we get the more it happens. I’ve never had an argument with any of these guys where I felt I didn’t know when I would want to talk to them again afterward. We’ve had extremely heated arguments, but we assume good faith on each other’s part, and we assume positive intent. This creates an atmosphere where we never feel like anyone is saying “fuck you” in nicer terms. In fact if we want to say fuck you, we just do it. No beating around the bush.

I say that to try & show why arguing & debating for me has never, and probably will never be a relationship killer. We don’t have to agree on everything. In fact my debating you at all most likely shows the respect I have for you. Especially if it’s one I whole heartily disagree with. I probably wouldn’t bother if I didn’t care about you or the point. As I said earlier, I struggle with my friends. This is important to me. Trying to help someone understand something better is a sign of respect and/or love to me. It’s important for me to not assume they are saying something, but to ask them “what are you trying to say?”

If you don’t understand or like something your partner is doing, ask about it and why he or she is doing it. Talk and explore, don’t assume.

Whenever I think someone close to me is or maybe saying something that I find offensive, hurtful or harmful, my instinct is to question why I’m assuming that & then to ask them to clarify. If I love you, and/or respect you, you get the benefit of the doubt.

In essence a lot of this is about me being a fighter when it comes to my all my relationships. As long as I believe the other person wants the relationship to continue, and I do as well & I believe we each bring something the other needs or wants, I fight. The world is not full of people willing to stand beside us, and I will fight for & with those I believe are willing to stand beside me.

The quotes above come from the link below. A couple of them are a bit trite, and the article as whole is aimed at romantic relationships, but I believe nearly all these rules should apply to platonic ones as well. From your boss to your best friend.

I’d love to read your thoughts and/or questions.

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• The Rules of Relationships (psychologytoday.com)

Bertrand Russell (1951)

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

 

The crack game, in it’s essence, is pure capitalism.

Profit, over people, at all costs. Eliminate enemies at all costs. Take out the dominant political regime or competition at all costs.  Endless accumulation of property and capital, at all costs. Domination through coercion, violence and if necessary legal
means at all costs.

…the human toll, are all irrelevant.

Above is an excerpt from an excellent post by @Mdotwrites over at her blog Model Minority. Please read the full post.

Mull it over a bit & then think about this bit of satire from The Poke:

Monopoly, the iconic board game that for decades has instilled the values of aggressive capitalism into the young, joined forces today with the hit TV show ‘The Wire’.

Emphasis mine. While “The Wire” version of monopoly is not real, Mdot’s points are very salient. I’m not saying we shouldn’t play Monopoly & the like, but I am saying we need to think a lot more about the ways in which capitalism inserts itself into every single aspect of our society. From board games to “the game”, it’s everywhere, and it’s something we must grapple with much sooner rather than later.

Related Articles

• Sometimes The House Game Remind Me Of The Crack Game (newmodelminority.com)

• Sponsorship And Biases: Musing On The Crack Game And Investment Banking (newmodelminority.com)

• It’s All in the Game: A Monopoly Tribute to ‘The Wire’(artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)

• If Only It Were Real: New Monopoly Board Game, Based On HBO Drama ‘The Wire’ (npr.org)

Karl Marx had a three part intellectual trajectory. He started out as a German philosopher; became a French-style political activist, political analyst, and political historian; and ended up trying to become a British- style economist and economic historian. At the start of his career he believed that all we had to due to attain true human emancipation was to think correctly about freedom and necessity. Later on he recognized that thought was not enough: that we had to organize, politically. And then in the final stage he thought that the political organization had to be with and not against the grain of the truly decisive factor, the extraordinary economic changes that the coming of the industrial revolution was bringing to the world.

And another:

Marx is mostly an economist and economic historian, but he is also part political activist–and also part prophet.

Read or listen to DeLong’s full lecture here.

Spitzer was a guy who seemed like the real deal. A moral crusader fighting for the “average” person. I never would have thought he would be brought down by a scandal of this nature. I just don’t understand how a guy like Spitzer who had made so many powerful, wealthy enemies refused to keep his nose clean. He knew people were out to get him and/or anyone closely associated with him yet there I was sitting in disbelief as my governor was taken down by his own arrogance.

The fact that these assholes on Wall street cheered when his tenure basically came to end tells you all you needed to know. If those were the people against him, if guys like Joe Bruno & Roger Stone were his main adversaries then I knew Spitzer’s side was the one I wanted to be on.

I don’t think I’ll ever not be saddened & angered when I think of the name Eliot Spitzer. I believe he very likely could have put us on track to end the corporatist control of America. Instead he was taken down by the same level of hubris that brought us the economy we have today.

Truth be told, I didn’t want Spitzer to resign. I wanted him to fight it out, and see if he could comeback politically. Americans love to forgive & love 2nd chances. We’ve been seeing a lot more of Spitzer in the media in recent months. I think he’s preparing for some sort of return to glory. Will it be in politics? I doubt it, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Going up against Wall street is generally not considered a good move in the state of NY, but Spitzer is the kind of guy who can buck trends. And in America men still have the power to regain respectability after a sex scandal that women will not have for a long time.

Via Danyel Smith @ The Smithian, here’s the preview of “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.”:

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• Alex Gibney’s Take on Eliot Spitzer (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)

(source: The Lowe Down)

Big h/t @MattOrtega

All of which to say is there’s no need to parse the ethnic origins or political philosophies of Obama’s parents to understand the ideology of Barack Obama. He is a center-left Democrat who supports mainstream Democratic policies. But some conservatives don’t want to talk about policy. They are unable to engage in an argument with liberalism on substantive terms; they know only argument by epithet.  They want to talk about the fact that our blackety black president is blackety black. It has been two years since a black man was elected president of the United States, and for a group of conservatives clinging to their cultural superiority, this was a moment of apocalyptic existential crisis, a moment that refuted all they had come to know and understand about themselves, about black people, and about this country. D’Souza is writing for them, the same kind of audience he has always written for

More here.

Added:

This is a MUST read.

1st off I don’t get why Gaga needs to be sexual in Paglia’s eyes. Aren’t women sexualized enough in pop culture? One can argue that for a woman to become a huge star while simultaneously being asexual is a triumph, and a sign that younger folks are possibly beginning to move past America’s obsession with sex.

This line is particularly problematic:

Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty.

Paglia seems to give no other evidence for her statement besides people putting more of their personal selves in public.

There is also an enormous amount of “get off my lawn” aspect to what Paglia is saying. She just sounds like an old person who doesn’t get all these weird things, and people some young people are into. Paglia even calls Gaga rude for wearing shades during an interview. Sure it’s a bit rude, but Gaga is a rock star after all. Not the 1st one with an affinity for shades & she certainly won’t be the last.

People like Paglia will never understand why some young & not so young people love Gaga. Gaga isn’t for her. If Paglia would have stuck to the points about Gaga as in artist, especially her point about Gaga’s corporate backing, she would have really hit it out of the park.

One more thing the idea of Paglia as “America’s foremost cultural critic”, as the Times (UK) calls her, is pretty laughable. I don’t know who is, but I know she ain’t.

If someone is going to critique, and attempt to tell people why someone like Gaga is popular it probably shouldn’t be someone who’s 63 years old. I was just talking about the hegemony of old people in positions of power on twitter. It’s not just about politics. It’s about academia, journalism & many other areas. I don’t think we need to push older folks aside, but we need to be much, much less dismissive of young(er) people. They/we know a lot more than folks older than us give us credit for. A lot of our leading thinkers & revolutionaries were in their 30′s or younger when they made names for themselves and/or their organizations.

(h/t Danielle Scruggs)

I generally don’t care if you use it, but let’s drop the pretense that’s it’s always or even mostly used when showing love to another brown person.

I don’t really feel like I’m grasping currently, but there are multiple uncertainties that hang over me. I thought I was over the specific type of insecurity I picked up while living in St. Louis. I’m not. My inability to feel confident in the outcomes of my hard work is particularly troublesome. At some points it just feels like a sisyphean task.

I used to believe that as long as I put forth a good effort in good faith I would get a desirable outcome. It may or may not have been the outcome I expected, but it was desirable in the sense that it was something I could work deal with. My time in StL shattered that notion. After a long hard battle with myself, I thought I had overcome it. The love of friends & family has helped immensely. Yet the uncertainty remains. I used to have the type of confidence that bordered on cockiness. I’m happy to be a more humble person, but there is a difference between becoming humble & being humbled. Dealing with the latter for me has lead to many more bouts with self-doubt than I ever had previous to it.

For me self-doubt leads to inaction, and inaction is terrible place for me to be. I haven’t to succumb to it recently, but it’s always there. In the background, creeping around in my mind saying “fuck it, why bother?” Sometimes I don’t have a good answer. On those days I try to do things that make me happy. Usually talking to or hanging out with a friend. I always laugh when I’m with my friends & my best weapon against inaction is joy. I’ve been fighting inaction for the last week & a half. Fairly successfully, but I still have my moments. Usually it’s me 2nd guessing a lot of the major decisions I’ve made in my life. Moving to StL being near the top of the list. I catch myself wondering if getting humbled in that way was inevitable or if I could have avoided it by not moving. It’s not a worthwhile conversation for me to have with myself. Just sows the seeds of more doubt.

I’ve always had a tendency to dwell on my perceived mistakes. I’ve always been good at forgiving others (maybe too easily), but always bad at forgiving myself. My life has been a jumble of decisions made mostly to make sure I’m happy. My happiness was always what I thought of 1st when making a major decision. Now some of those decisions have come back to bite me & are contributing to whatever unhappiness I have in my life. It makes you wonder what it was all for. I made the best decisions for my well-being with the info I had at the time, but that is cold comfort.

I’m complaining a lot here & really I’m just rambling and thinking out loud, so I apologize for the incoherence & redundancy.

Right now I’m in one of those moments of inaction. My nature is to talk things out ’til I understand them or am ready to move past them. I’m hoping this well help. Thanks for reading.

P.S.

This Flaming Lips lyric kept running over & over in my head while I wrote this:

h/t @writeli

ADDED:

“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

~ A. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus

Big, big thanks to @DegreedUp for the quote.

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.