Google Executives Evaded Jail Time in Brazil: Is Business Too Powerful?

In late September 2012, the Brazilian state police detained the head of Google’s operations in the state after the company’s management failed to act on an electoral judge’s order to remove videos from its YouTube site criticizing a candidate in a rural county election. Separately, a judge ordered Google to remove a religiously-offensive video, which had sparked riots in the Middle East, within ten days or face fines. Google’s lawyers claim that the company is not responsible for what users upload. Earlier in the year, Brazil’s government threatened the head of Chevron’s operations there with arrest and passport-confiscation after a small leak occurred in the company.

The full essay is at "Are people in international business above national laws?"

The U.S. Supreme Court: Too Much Ideology in Jurisprudence?

Should the electorate in a republic be able to remove Supreme Court justices due to their past decisions on particular cases? Can this basis be distinguished from removing a justice for judicial incompetence? One thing is clear: the general public does not have the technical expertise to perform a “supervisor’s evaluation” on a judge. Obviously, anyone can see that someone who skips work on a regular basis is not fit for the job, but this is different than evaluating a job by the technical criteria of the profession. Distinguishing between a particular decision and general judicial approach, for example, is more difficult. Moreover, it can be difficult to balance the rights of popular sovereignty (i.e., rule by the people) against the rule of law without respect to majority opinion.

The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012.

The full essay is at "Ideology Twisting Legal Reasoning."

Schindler’s List

In German-occupied Poland during World War I, Oskar Schindler spent millions to save 600 Jews from the death camps. In the 1993 film, Schindler’s List, the gradual transformation of the luxuriant capitalist is evident as the film unfolds. At the end,  he comes to an emotional realization as to the worth of money as compared with human lives. He realizes that had he not spent so lavishly, he could have saved even more lives. He realizes, in effect, his selfishness that had blinded him even to the obvious severe suffering of the Jews around him. The story is thus not simply that of greed giving way to compassion. 

The full essay is at "Schindler's List."

Questioning Universal Basic Income

The gist of basic income is that a government “distributes cash universally. As the logic runs, if everyone gets money—rich and poor, the employed and the jobless—it removes the stigma of traditional welfare schemes while ensuring sustenance for all.”[1] The “logic,” I submit, is flawed even if the basic idea is solid.

The full essay is at "Universal Basic Income."

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1. Peter S. Goodman, “Inequality? California City Is First in U.S. to Try,” The New York Times, May 30, 2018.

Free Speech in the E.U.: Criminalizing Denials of Genocides

While the world continued to look on—like an impotent rich man who cannot afford Viagra—as a genocide was taking place in Syria (i.e., the systemic killing of a group—in this case, of pro-democracy demonstrators), France’s state senate approved a bill on January 23, 2012 criminalizing the denial of officially recognized genocides, which according to the state includes the Nazi Holocaust and the Turkish killing of Armenians beginning in 1915. In the twenty-first century, fining people and putting them in prison for not wanting to remember things so horrible evinces the same kind of nationalist thinking that had led the twentieth to be the bloodiest century. In contradistinction to that decadent century, turning a new leaf following the Arab spring in the twenty-first is a far better strategy.

The full essay is at "Free Speech Compromised in the E.U."

Extrapolating from the Arab Spring to Corporate Social Responsibility

Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic and a myriad of other companies, sees a natural extension or follow-through from the pro-democracy protests in the Middle East and North Africa to more corporate social responsibility. As much as I would like to think that the twenty-first century proffers a new world, I think we have to acknowledge the weight of the political, economic and social strictures that we have uncritically inherited.

The full essay is at "The Arab Spring and Corporate Responsibility."

The Russian Conscience on Human Rights in Syria

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, warned on January 18, 2012, according to the New York Times, “that outside encouragement of anti-government uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa could lead to ‘a very big war that will cause suffering not only to countries in the region, but also to states far beyond its boundaries.’” A very big war, it would seem, with very big stick, would be the result of “outsiders” stepping in to protect the Syrian protesters from their own government. In fact, the Times reports that “Lavrov said Russia would use its position on the United Nations Security Council to veto any United Nations authorization of military strikes against the government [of Syria].” It made no difference to Lavrov that the United Nations, including the Secretary General, had “repeatedly called for Syria [to] end a crackdown on opposition demonstrators, which Arab League monitors say resulted in hundreds of deaths over the past month.” In other words, the U.N. was officially impotent in being able to act on the basis of its “demand” because one of its members has a veto.

The full essay is at "Russia on Human Rights."

The U.S. Federal Reserve as a Regulatory Agency

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve “has operated almost entirely behind closed doors as it rewrites the rule book governing the U.S. financial system.” The paper notes that this has been in sharp contrast to the trend at the Fed toward greater transparency in its interest-rate policies and emergency-lending programs. The complaint of a dearth of public meetings misses, however, not only the scripted nature of such displays, but also the more fundamental question of whether a central bank buffered from political pressure should play such a salient role as regulator. At the very least, the democratic deficit and a lack of accountability may be exacerbated by the Fed’s greater role as a regulator of banks—particularly after the major investment banks become commercial banks, and thus subject to the Fed’s regulations.

The full essay is at "The Federal Reserve as a Regulator of Banks: An Institutional Conflict of Interest."

Related books: 

Essays on the Financial Crisis

Institutional Conflicts of Interest

UN’s General Assembly as Nonbinding on Syria

According to the New York Times, “In a powerful rebuke to Syria’s government, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly on [February 16, 2012] to approve a resolution that condemned President Bashar al-Assad’s unbridled crackdown on an 11-month-old uprising and called for his resignation under an Arab League peace proposal to resolve the conflict.” The reporter immediately undercuts his use of powerful by observing that the 137-12 vote (with 17 abstentions) is “a nonbinding action with no power of enforcement at the world body.” The “action” does represent “a significant humiliation” for Assad. I doubt very much if he felt humiliated. His UN ambassador “denounced the resolution as a politically motivated scheme to intervene in Syria by the Western powers and others who ‘would like to settle accounts with Syria.’” Altogether, the first two or three paragraphs of Gladstone’s article can be read in terms of logic as “X, not X.” Of course, the first X gets more attention, so the article gives the impression that the UN did something powerful when in fact the exercise was one of exposing the impotence of the world body.

The full essay is at "The Fecklessness of the UN."

Limiting Bank Size: Crude But Advisable

In February 2012, Tyler Cowen claimed in the New York Times that people across the political spectrum were “talking about splitting up America’s large banks.” At the time, I could discern no such talk, although this does not mean that it was not going on. As the Dodd-Frank financial reform law was being written in 2010, the option of splitting up banks like Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase was quietly but assiduously kept off the front burners. It is difficult to believe that the big banks would have relaxed in their efforts to relegate such threats in early 2012 as if the passage of the legislation in 2010 meant that more astringent options were no longer possible. In his article, Cowen includes some other questionable claims. Reading between the lines, he seems to have been “playing by the rules” in support of the big guys.

The full essay is at "Limiting the Size of the Big Banks."

Naked Royalty: Prince Harry and the Sun

In publishing naked pictures of Prince Harry on holiday in Nevada, the Sun in Britain ignored the warning from the press watchdog that had warned the Sun that it would be breaching a privacy provision in the state of Britain’s press code. That the warning followed an appeal to the Press Complaints Commission from St. James’s Palace, which is Prince Charles’s home and office in London, suggests that the warning came from “the firm” itself to protect one of its own.

                   

A naked royal hits the newsstands in Britain.         Tony Melville/Reuters

The full essay is at "Privacy and the Press."

Losing the Middle Class: An Educational-Industrial Policy

Beneath the headlines showing new figures on unemployment (which do not include the unemployed who are no longer looking for work or applying for unemployment compensation) is the story of the changing distribution of jobs in the American economy. That distribution in turn can give rise to cultural or societal changes. When the jobs in the economic middle are disproportionately lost, American society increasingly resembles a tale of two cities—and by this I do not mean Augustine’s heavenly and earthly cities though the realms of the “haves” and “have nots” could admittedly be called as such by materialists.

The full essay is at "An Educational Industrial Policy."

Frank Lloyd Wright: A Modern Renaissance Man

Perhaps no greater Renaissance man has been cited in American history than Thomas Jefferson. He wrote on the native plants of his country, Virginia, ran a plantation, designed buildings, founded a university, surveyed land,  was the head of state in Virginia, wrote a declaration of independence, and was the third president of the new American Union. More than two centuries after Mr. Jefferson, however, a cleft had become well-ensconced in American society between being an intellectual and a practitioner. The typical lawyer or physician, who holds two undergraduate degrees due in part to the political sense that a well-rounded citizenry makes a good electorate, has scant interest in intellectual endeavor. Indeed, one might even say that the “professions” place scant value on such activity; it is not “real work” or of the “real world.” The disdain is palpable, particularly in among the self-righteous in America. Yet Mr. Jefferson was able to bridge this gulf; so too can we. More contemporary examples can be cited to illustrate the mere possibility. The requisite delimiting "pruning" self-discipline might come as a surprise to people who presume that Renaissance breadth is borne of a wayward inability to "stay put."

The full essay is at "Frank Lloyd Wright.

On Leveraging the U.S. Debt Ceiling: How the Market Mechanism Handles Trust

On May 9 2011, U.S. House Speaker Boehner insisted “on trillions of dollars in spending cuts, and no tax increases, as the price for rounding up enough votes to allow more borrowing and prevent the country from defaulting on its debt,” according to the Huffington Post. The Ohio Republican had “said failure to increase the borrowing limit [in the summer of 2011] would trigger a financial disaster for the United States and the world.” On May 12^th in Congressional testimony, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, cautioned against using raising the debt ceiling as leverage for getting a particular partisan policy-prescription on federal spending enacted into law. Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker had told Reuters, “I do share the chairman’s concern that going up to the edge and playing chicken on the debt ceiling is not a wise strategy.”

The full essay is at "Leveraging the U.S. Debt Ceiling."

Strategic Thinking Beyond the Business Plan

“When smart people came up with ideas for well-conceived business opportunities, we said go for it. As always, organizational charts, management consultants, and business plans played virtually no role in any of this. My own strategic thinking I did mostly while showering or shaving.”

—Alan C. Greenberg, former Chairman and CEO of Bear Stearns

The full essay is at "Strategic Thinking Beyond Plans."