Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals.
The US increasingly displays characteristics that we have seen many times in middle-income “emerging markets” – new dimensions of vast inequality, forms of financial instability that benefit the best connected, and consistently easy credit for the privileged. But this raises the question: who exactly is going to dominate our economic and political landscape moving forward?
. . . . . . .
But we are entering a new, more global era of state capture, and the US government (or, more precisely, its credit) was handed over – rather meekly – during the past 12 months.
For the last hundred years, rightsholders have fretted about everything from the player piano to the VCR to digital TV to Napster. Here are those objections, in Big Content's own words.
By Nate Anderson | Last updated October 11, 2009 10:00 PM CT
It's almost a truism in the tech world that copyright owners reflexively oppose new inventions that do (or might) disrupt existing business models. But how many techies actually know what rightsholders have said and written for the last hundred years on the subject?
Chuck Spinney weighs in today on the manner in which the US citizen is being looted–right now, as this is written–by private equity firms (Allen & Co comes to mind, home to Bill Bradley and George Tenet), and point us to an article in Naked Capitalism worthy of review.
There has been a convergence of inattentive and under-informed citizens (including employees ill-served by labor unions that have themselves sold out); managers lacking in integrity and all too willing to serve as intermediaries in the destruction of public equity in favor of private equity; and of course Wall Street, which bought Congress, owns the Federal Reserve, and has crafted modern legalized looting or “klepto-capitalism.”
The New York Times tonight features a generally very good piece, “Buyout Firms Profited as a Company’s Debt Soared,” by Julie Creswell that falls short in one important respect: it fails to call a prevalent and destructive practice of private equity firms by its proper name.
In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading
By Robert Fisk
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.
Phi Beta Iota: This is what happens when citizens abdicate their role as sovereigns over Congress, and allow Congress to sell out to Wall Street and the Federal Reserve (which is neither Federal nor a Reserve, just a front for Wall Street).
Roger Martin is Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the
University of Toronto
Amazon Page
Pre-order his forthcoming book
In response to the question: What does Wall Street have to change to produce better leaders, a different culture and a more long-term focus?
Forget about it. Don't even waste time thinking about it. The purpose
of Wall Street firms is to trade value for their own benefit not to
build value for the economy either short-term or long-term. While at
one point in its history, a non-trivial part of Wall Street's activity
involved financing the growth of American companies, that is now a
minor piece of its business. Wall Street is primarily engaged in
encouraging individuals and companies to trade value between one
another and tolling the parties for the service, and trading against
the outside economy for its own account.
Phi Beta Iota: This author not only gets it, he provides a solution. Wall Street, and the Fed, need to be creatively destroyed, and we need to restore bottom-up Human Scale locality-based business. Government “regulation” of financial crime is idiocy on top of illusion.
Citing an under-representation of commercial software companies and their employees in open source, the CodePlex Foundation aims to work with particular projects to bridge the gap between the open-source and commercial worlds.
The Redmond giant has contributed $1 million to the foundation and has filled out its board and advisory panel with many Microsoft staffers, including Sam Ramji, who is leaving Microsoft as its open-source point man but is also becoming CodePlex Foundation's interim president.
