If there is any single person worth listening to on the issue of climate change, it’s Bill McKibben. He’s the global canary in the coal mine, sending out ominous warnings that unfortunately fall mostly on deaf ears. He’s been at this for decades, and his messages, which are backed up by the latest climate science and corroborated by the events unfolding in front of our eyes, are getting louder, clearer, and more urgent. Still the changes made in response to this looming crisis are insignificant, inconsistent, and do not approach the scale of the changes that are required in order…
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Business & Environmental Ethics
Consumer surveillance
Until recently brick-and-mortar businesses have looked upon on-line operations like Amazon with envy because the latter have something that the traditional business do not–an easy and legal way to track consumer behavior and conduct market research. While many proposals have been put forward, none of them have been entirely effective, appropriate (RFID tracking, Payback/Loyalty Systems) or legal (METRO Loyalty card). But recently a new technological approach has been introduced by Prism Skylabs, utilizing the data from security surveillance cameras to track consumer behavior. On their website they state that: Prism Skylabs’ goal is to transform the world’s multi-hundred billion-dollar camera network…
More on the Apple sweatshops
Another article in the mainstream media (in this case from CNN) on the horrible working conditions at the Chinese factories run by Foxconn, the main supplier for Apple and many other high-tech brands. One really has to wonder what Apple has done to deserve all of this bad publicity in the Western press, especially considering that just about every other major western brand is doing exactly the same thing–that is, outsourcing to Chinese sweatshops in which there is neither the incentive nor the inclination to maintain labor conditions that are acceptable by Western standards. The article is worth reading mainly…
Video: Capitalism is the Crisis
This description for Capitalism is the Crisis comes from the website for the film: The 2008 “financial crisis” in the United States was a systemic fraud in which the wealthy finance capitalists stole trillions of public dollars. No one was jailed for this crime, the largest theft of public money in history. Instead, the rich forced working people across the globe to pay for their “crisis” through punitive “austerity” programs that gutted public services and repealed workers’ rights. Austerity was named “Word of the Year” for 2010. This documentary explains the nature of capitalist crisis, visits the protests against austerity measures, and…
Universities caught cheating
As this New York Times article makes clear, when universities are forced to compete for money and honors–exactly what their students are forced to compete for–they do exactly what they teach students never to do, namely, cheat. To climb the U.S. News & World Report rankings, universities have been caught twisting the meanings of rules, cherry-picking data or just lying. The most recent example involves Claremont McKenna, which apparently is “the highest-ranking school to have to go through this publicly and have to admit to misreporting.” It is becoming increasingly difficult for universities to provide any moral guidance for students when they…
Should consumers boycott Apple products?
The New York Times, rather surprisingly, published an interesting article recently on the inhumane and unsafe conditions in which Chinese workers are suffering while making products for high-profile, high-tech Western companies like Apple. The conditions there are so bleak that when workers there aren’t being killed by explosions or toxic chemicals they are killing themselves. And those who manage to survive don’t fare much better, working overtime, sleeping in crowded dorms, living effectively in conditions of slavery. The NYT article, and others like it, have received a lot of attention and caused a bit of an image problem for Apple–surprising because…
Greenpeace gets China to drop GE rice
How they did it is an amazing story, with implications for other environmental causes and progressive movements. You can read about, straight from the horse’s mouth here.
Ron Paul
Ron Paul is a very interesting figure in American politics. Progressives love his foreign policy but hate his economic plans and his positions on domestic issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and health care. Conservatives, on the other hand, love Paul’s domestic agenda of reducing the size of the government, lowering taxes, and abolishing the Federal Reserve, but they seem to hate his non-interventionist foreign policy. So Paul has been received differently by different political groups, but even among liberals and progressives, Paul has generated a significant amount of controversy. Consider Kathy Pollit’s recent essay, which outlines the reasons why…
Keeping the public in the dark about climate change
If enough people were well informed about the reality and likely consequences of climate change the political changes required to bring this problem under control would surely be happening a lot quicker than they are. An important question then is why this problem is still insufficiently appreciated. There are a number of well-known and documented causal factors contributing to public ignorance about climate change. In the first place, according to this recent study by the Daily Climate organization, media coverage of climate change is actually decreasing at the very time (2010, 2011) that it should be increasing. Here is a…
Even the IMF is now questioning capitalism
Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and former chief economist at the IMF recently published two interesting articles on Project Syndicate: Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable? and Rethinking the Growth Imperative. The articles, which are worth reading in full, are not at all what one would expect from a former chief economist at the IMF. Here are a few excerpts: From Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable?: It is ironic that modern capitalist societies engage in public campaigns to urge individuals to be more attentive to their health, while fostering an economic ecosystem that seduces many consumers into an extremely…
Bill McKibben on Irene and climate change
Democracy Now once again demonstrated its ability to connect the dots–in this case on climate change. In an interview with Bill McKibben on Hurricane Irene, Amy Goodman remarks: We did not hear those words, “global warming.” I watched a lot of the media coverage this weekend. What about this? I mean, to say the least, there was time in the endless coverage. That the dots are not being connected by the mainstream media is deeply disappointing because it is precisely what the IPCC was predicting all the time: Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis 3.8.3 Evidence for Changes…
Dani Rodrik on economics
Dani Rodrik, author of The Globalization Paradox and professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, wrote an interesting article on contemporary economics called Occupy the Classroom? which comments on the Harvard students who walked out of an economics class taught by Greg Mankiw. While the students complained that the introductory economics course “propagates conservative ideology in the guise of economic science and helps perpetuate social inequality,” Rodrik insists that it is only at the undergraduate level (or in media reports) that economics conveys that impression. In Rodrik’s view, that appearance of conservative ideology evaporates at the graduate level. Consider the following: “Let…
Constitutional amendment: corporations are not people
Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed an amendment to the Constitution to exclude corporations from First Amendment rights to spend money on political campaigns. The bill is a reaction to the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the government cannot put limits on election advertisements funded by corporations, unions, or other groups. Democrats have charged that the decision essentially treats corporations as people who can enjoy First Amendment rights. Some Quotes: Make no mistake, the Citizens United ruling has radically changed the nature of our democracy, further tilting the balance of power toward…
Climate change is not just a theory
One still hears people saying that climate change is not a fact but a theory. Indeed that is what the U.S. House of Representatives recently declared while cutting off its funding for the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the claim that climate change is just a theory does not stand up to scrutiny. Already in 2005 a study was conducted to examine this problem and to reveal the biased presentation of the issue (Climate of scepticism: US newspaper coverage of the science of climate change). Here are some quotes: The results of this study indicate that…
The network of global corporate control
Unfortunately, though there are many books and articles written on the tight grip multinational corporations have on global governance, there is relatively little empirical research conducted on this matter. This recently published paper by Swiss researchers however provides some practical empirical evidence and background research on the network of global corporate control: Abstract: The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along…
Study reveals that traders are worse than psychopaths
St. Gallen University in Switzerland recently conducted a study to examine the differences and similarities between stock market traders, clinically diagnosed psychopaths, and representative “normal” citizens when tested with the classic prisoners dilemma game. As expected, the traders revealed a much higher penchant for competitive advantage and destructive behavior than the “normals”. What wasn’t expected–and what is highly interesting–is that the traders outdid the clinical psychopaths in psychopathic tendencies. Thomas Noll, one of the conductors of the study said in a Spiegel interview: “Naturally one can’t characterize the traders as deranged, but for example, they behaved more egotistically and were more willing…
Video: Speech by Chomsky on academic freedom and the corporatization of universities
On April 6, 2011 Chomsky gave a speech at the University of Toronto mainly focusing on the decline of academic freedom going and the coporatization of universities. In his speech he connects the issue with the larger picture of corporate reality. The recorded Q&A session after his speech is especially worth watching. Quote: There’s, furthermore, no way to measure the human and social costs of converting schools and universities into facilities that produce commodities for the job market, abandoning the traditional ideal of the universities: fostering creative and independent thought and inquiry, challenging perceived beliefs, exploring new horizons and forgetting…
Responding to corporate crime
According to this article in the Hankyoreh, the Fair Trade Commission of Korea recently fined 10 corporations in Korea and Taiwan, including Samsung and LG, a total of $176 million for conspiring to fix prices and delivery quantities. The conspiracy was conducted by firms that control 80% of the global LCD market. The group of firms conspired to set the timings of product price increases and price differences. This is of course just the latest (and by no means the most egregious) example of corporations seeking to maximize profits at the public’s expense. Ignoring these abuses only guarantees that they…
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