Archive | April, 2012

America’s dream unravels – FT.com

7 Apr

Has the 1% already flushed the workforce down the tubes?

Far from being an afterthought, or a moral side issue, the fate of America’s labour force is its most pressing problem. Almost every elected American pays lip service to an economy of the future based on brain power. But it takes time to build a new generation of homegrown brains and the country is doing its best to deter foreign ones. Unsurprisingly, much of the action is therefore shifting with the IQs, whether that is to Singapore, Canada, Germany or China. Roughly three-quarters of US private R&D comes from manufacturing companies, which now account for barely a 10th of the US labour force. In spite of a recent shift towards “reshoring”, the trend is still eastwards.

via America’s dream unravels – FT.com.

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Middle America Is Experiencing a Massive Increase in 3.0+ Earthquakes – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic

7 Apr

A new United States Geological Survey study has found that middle America between Alabama and Montana is experiencing an “unprecedented” and “almost certainly manmade” increase in earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater. In 2011, there were 134 events of that size. That’s six times more than were normally seen during the 20th century.

Whoops! But you can guess where this is going, can’t you? Anthropogenetic earthquakes. We’re causing this because we’re walking too heavy on the earth. At least, that’s one view.

The conclusion that at least one environmental group has drawn from this data is that fracking, in one way or another, has caused these earthquakes. The Environmental Working Group notes that more than 400,000 wells were drilled between 2001 and 2010, a 65% increase over the previous ten-year period. They also note that the new extraction techniques require vast amounts of water to be injected into the ground: major producer Chesapeake estimates that it uses about 5 million gallons of water per well. Lots of wells plus lots of water injected underground could change the subterranean conditions and lead to more earthquakes.

While we’re at it, why not set off some nuclear power plants?

via Middle America Is Experiencing a Massive Increase in 3.0+ Earthquakes – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic.

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We don’t need new roads – Energy – Salon.com

6 Apr

As the New York Times just reported, “Many young consumers today just do not care that much about cars,” as evidenced by an 18 percent drop in teen driver’s licenses between 1998 and 2008. A generation ago, Ferris Bueller said that getting a computer instead of a car proved that he was “born under a bad sign” — but the Times cites a new poll showing 46 percent of today’s 18- to 24-year-olds say they would actually “choose Internet access over owning a car.”

Taken together, these attitudinal shifts present a welcome opportunity to change everything from environmentally destructive infrastructure policies to outdated corporate investment strategies. Seizing such a rare opportunity requires only that more of us spend a bit less time in the car when possible. That, or at least an end to a political theology that always presents new roads as a panacea.

via We don’t need new roads – Energy – Salon.com.

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Coca-Cola and Pepsi Drop ALEC | The Nation

5 Apr

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have both dropped their memberships in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the shadowy, ideologically conservative organization behind “Stand Your Ground” and other controversial state laws, including a ban on living wages, school and prison privatization, and disenfranchising voter ID requirements. ALEC links corporations with friendly state lawmakers and drafts model legislation to be pushed in state legislatures. “Stand Your Ground” and its implication in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin have pushed ALEC and its member corporations, including not only Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but also Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, FedEx, Johnson & Johnson, and others, into the spotlight.

via Coca-Cola and Pepsi Drop ALEC | The Nation.

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Three congressional challengers very worth supporting – Salon.com

5 Apr

Glenn Greenwald has been looking for Congressional candidates worthy of support, candidates who see the world clearly and want to change the game. He’s found three. As Charlie Keil says,l they’re “EXAMPLES of INDEPENDENT thinking toward nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear disarmament, stopping wars/empire/ETC.” They’re Truth and Traditions kind of people.

… there are a few new candidates for Congress who are both genuinely exciting and viable, and thus very much worthy of attention and support.

My research assistant, Columbia Law student Jessica Lutkenhaus, and I spent the last several weeks examining a dozen or so Congressional challengers, obtaining their answers to a questionnaire we prepared about vital issues that receive far too little attention, and determining as well as we could which were actually viable candidates to win in their districts. The search was not restricted by party affiliation or any considerations other than quality of positions, independence and viability. From that process, three candidates emerged who I really believe are worth highlighting and supporting: Norman Solomon in California, Franke Wilmer in Montana and Cecil Bothwell in North Carolina. All three have a long, established record of genuine independence and outspoken advocacy on difficult issues, and I’m positive that none will simply become loyal foot soldiers to Party leadership or blend into the rotted D.C. woodwork.

via Three congressional challengers very worth supporting – Salon.com. More below the fold. Continue reading →

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Peak Intel: How So-Called Strategic Intelligence Actually Makes Us Dumber – Eric Garland – International – The Atlantic

5 Apr

Too much power is in the hands to too few organization. More and more, competitive markets are fictions. When the whole world becomes Too Big Too Fail, it surely will, catastrophically and in one big long cascade to the botoom.

Thus, what use is the old model of competitive analysis if you are looking at markets in Greece right now? Which would have more impact on a given market: the clever, innovative actions of a CEO in Athens, or the politics within the European Central Bank? And how about analyzing the future of the housing market in the United States? Are you going to examine how much people are able to pay for accommodations and the level of housing stocks available in given cities, or shall you look at the desires of central bankers and Congressional policy-makers able to start new financing programs to end up with a desired outcome? How can you use classical competitive analysis to examine the future of markets when the relationships between firms and government agencies are so incestuous and the choices of consumers so severely limited by industrial consolidation?

There is no good way to reliably predict the future in these markets anymore, except maybe by being privy to the desires of an ever-decreasing number of centrally connected power players. Companies still need guidance, but if rational analysis is nearly impossible, is it any wonder that executives are asking for less of it? What they are asking for is something, well, less productive.

Denial is the strategy of choice in the executive suite:

One senior executive shut down a half-day event about future trends within the first ten minutes after a slide warning about “global aging populations” came up. The silver-haired alpha dog not only refused to discuss the fact that their average customer was near the age of social security and getting ready to leave active economic life, he asserted that Baby Boomers are not in fact aging, that “60 is the new 40,” that all future strategic problems will be solved by “getting our numbers up,” and that nobody in the company was to mention aging populations ever again.

Government too: Continue reading →

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Because: Imperialism! — Crooked Timber

4 Apr

Some very interesting comments by someone identified only as Z:

Graeber posits that actors buy T-bonds because the US has a central role in the world system and also notes that this central role is being contested; both by other industrial powers in the conventional economic sense and by a world movement in the political arena (I am not necessarily endorsing those claims, just trying to present Graeber’s thesis accurately). Confronted to these challenge to its central position, and seeing that its central position is crucial to the functioning of its economy (because it is in massive debt), the US has to maintain its predominance in one way or another. Now think about it as an economist: what is the one comparative advantage that the US has on the rest of the world? Obviously military power. So, on the short term, it might be tempting to US elites to try to organize the world around military power as a way to maintain their quite surprising position within the world economy. This, as I understand it, is Graeber’s thesis: not we buy T-bond because we fear we will be bombed but as long as the world is organized around geo-strategical lines, the US will be able to live off the rest of the world.

via Because: Imperialism! — Crooked Timber.

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How Investing Turns Nice People Into Psychopaths – Lynn Stout – Business – The Atlantic

4 Apr

… even though most of us are not conscienceless psychopaths, when we make investing decisions we often act as if we are. This observation casts an interesting light on Joel Bakan’s award-winning 2004 documentary The Corporation.” In that film, Bakan argued that because corporate managers believe they must maximize shareholder wealth, a corporation is a “psychopathic creature” that “can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.” To the extent this is true, shareholders themselves may be largely to blame. As University of Toronto law professor Ian Lee puts it, “if corporations are in fact ‘pathological’ profit-maximizers, it is not because of corporate law, but because of pressure from shareholders.”

The ideology of shareholder value drives corporate managers to make business decisions contrary to prosocial shareholders’ true interests. Of course, some shareholders may indeed be purely self-interested actors–psychopaths–who don’t mind if their companies deceive consumers, maim employees, or pollute the environment. But the hard evidence indicates the vast majority of us would prefer to tolerate at least somewhat diminished returns to avoid such results. And most studies find that SRI investing erodes investors’ returns only slightly, if at all. Shareholder psychopathy is neither natural nor inevitable but an artifact, the unfortunate outcome of collective action obstacles combined with the ideology of shareholder value.

via How Investing Turns Nice People Into Psychopaths – Lynn Stout – Business – The Atlantic.

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The Pink Menace – NYTimes.com

4 Apr

Pink slime is on the run, for now.

Whether “pink slime” is a fair handle or not, public outrage has thrown it off a cliff. Some of the country’s largest grocery chains have announced that they will no longer sell products containing it, as did McDonald’s, while Wendy’s emphatically insisted that it never has. The United States Department of Agriculture, a major buyer of pink slime for its National School Lunch Program, has offered participating schools the option to order their beef with or without it, though it will likely remain in many schools.

As a result, the largest producer of the stuff, Beef Products Inc., has suspended operations at three of its four plants for 60 days, by which time it hopes to do some public relations hocus-pocus to restore consumer confidence before resorting to permanent closures. We’ll see

via The Pink Menace – NYTimes.com.

Pink slime monster runs amok – Food – Salon.com

3 Apr

The makers of pink slime are on the run. One slime producer, AFA Foods Inc. has filed for bankruptcy; another, Beef Products Inc., is closing plants.

… only in the last few weeks has pink slime captured the national consumer consciousness, and in doing so provided us with just the latest example of how quickly social media grass fires can become conflagrations with real dollar-and-cents consequences. On March 5, the Daily reported that the USDA was holding firm to its plans to buy 7 million pounds of pink slime for its national school lunch program. The very next day Bettina Siegel, a blogger who writes extensively about food and kids, created a petition on Change.org titled “Tell USDA to Stop Using Pink Slime in School Food.” Within a week the petition had over 200,000 signatories and an Internet frenzy had been born.

Fox News columnist Dan Gainor would have us believe that the real villain here is ABC News, which jumped on the anti-pink slime bandwagon with particular passion, but make no mistake, “pink slime” is a semantic framing that was born for the Twitter era. When you have only 140 characters to spread the news, “pink slime” packs all the wallop you need. The process itself, in which fatty trimmings left over at the slaughterhouse are heated, disintegrated via centrifuge, and then dosed with ammonia, is easy to express in a simple Facebook illustration. We saw it with Susan G. Komen for the Cure and we saw it with SOPA — when the social media masses get a bee in their bonnet, they can’t be stopped.

via Pink slime monster runs amok – Food – Salon.com.

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