It's morning now
and I am awake
I stretch and bloom
greeting the sun
I feel the warmth
right on my skin
seeping inside
healing my core
I hear the breeze
nearing the rain
and when it falls
it will be sweet
I am a flower
and you are my water
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
I'm in Love
Yesterday, I discovered Sufjan Stevens with his album Illinois (where was I hiding? I know...) and now I just can't stop listening to it. In so many words, it is a masterpiece, plain and simple. And since so much has already been written about it, I will abstain from commenting any further, at least until I am able to fully digest it. If you, like me, have been living under a rock for the past five years or so and have never listened to Illinois, do yourself a favor and go experience this beautiful piece of art.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
The Monopolistic Behavior of Corporations
And the government that allows it
I am sure you've had this experience one way or another with a computer, an iPhone, or some other thing. You buy the thing, say, a computer, and then you add some ram, or upgrade the hard drive. Then something happens and when the maker of the thing finds out that you have modified or opened the thing, they say the warranty is void. So, what they are really saying is that when you buy something from them, you have to do everything they say, like not add components from a cheaper source, or they will not guarantee even what they made (or, the entire machine). So, I wonder, where exactly is the free market? If I can't add parts to a computer unless I want to jeopardize my entire investment, where exactly is the consumer's choice?
So the people, the government, should step in and prevent this type of monopolistic behavior from happening in the first place. But instead we see a government going against the people's will, sometimes simply by not acting, and sometimes by cooperating with those who are taking advantage of their position of power. And in this vein, we see President Obama say that he doesn't mind that the Wall Street bankers who got rescued by the people should be rewarded for their reckless actions that put the entire world economy at risk with bonuses. Here is what he said to Bloomberg BusinessWeek on Tuesday:
Is President Obama saying this because he believes it? I think I have to trust him that he does; and if he does, then he is part of the problem, not the solution. He doesn't see that there is nothing entrepreneurial about profiting from the American people rescuing them from oblivion. We saved the system to save "our way of life", I get it; but does our way of life include getting run over by the system? I would prefer not. Also, I don't think a baseball player who would recklessly put the survival of the team in jeopardy would be rewarded with a bonus or a new contract. So I am really not sure what President Obama is trying to accomplish here, but maybe he is simply hedging, as he's been doing pretty much since he became president.
I am sure you've had this experience one way or another with a computer, an iPhone, or some other thing. You buy the thing, say, a computer, and then you add some ram, or upgrade the hard drive. Then something happens and when the maker of the thing finds out that you have modified or opened the thing, they say the warranty is void. So, what they are really saying is that when you buy something from them, you have to do everything they say, like not add components from a cheaper source, or they will not guarantee even what they made (or, the entire machine). So, I wonder, where exactly is the free market? If I can't add parts to a computer unless I want to jeopardize my entire investment, where exactly is the consumer's choice?
So the people, the government, should step in and prevent this type of monopolistic behavior from happening in the first place. But instead we see a government going against the people's will, sometimes simply by not acting, and sometimes by cooperating with those who are taking advantage of their position of power. And in this vein, we see President Obama say that he doesn't mind that the Wall Street bankers who got rescued by the people should be rewarded for their reckless actions that put the entire world economy at risk with bonuses. Here is what he said to Bloomberg BusinessWeek on Tuesday:
Q: Let's talk bonuses for a minute: Lloyd Blankfein, $9 million; Jamie Dimon, $17 million. Now, granted, those were in stock and less than what some had expected. But are those numbers okay?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, first of all, I know both those guys. They're very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That's part of the free market system. I do think that the compensation packages that we've seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance. I think that shareholders oftentimes have not had any significant say in the pay structures for CEOs.
Q Seventeen million dollars is a lot for Main Street to stomach.
THE PRESIDENT: Listen, $17 million is an extraordinary amount of money. Of course, there are some baseball players who are making more than that who don't get to the World Series either. So I'm shocked by that as well. I guess the main principle we want to promote is a simple principle of "say on pay," that shareholders have a chance to actually scrutinize what CEOs are getting paid. And I think that serves as a restraint and helps align performance with pay. The other thing we do think is the more that pay comes in the form of stock that requires proven performance over a certain period of time as opposed to quarterly earnings is a fairer way of measuring CEOs' success and ultimately will make the performance of American businesses better.
Is President Obama saying this because he believes it? I think I have to trust him that he does; and if he does, then he is part of the problem, not the solution. He doesn't see that there is nothing entrepreneurial about profiting from the American people rescuing them from oblivion. We saved the system to save "our way of life", I get it; but does our way of life include getting run over by the system? I would prefer not. Also, I don't think a baseball player who would recklessly put the survival of the team in jeopardy would be rewarded with a bonus or a new contract. So I am really not sure what President Obama is trying to accomplish here, but maybe he is simply hedging, as he's been doing pretty much since he became president.
Monday, February 8, 2010
iMonk
His name was Nicholas, and I met him at the Apple service center in New York City. At first I thought he was someone hired by Apple as a publicity stunt: the buddhist monk sitting in the cool chair with the iPhone at the Apple store. As I sat across him waiting for my turn, I was chatting on Skype with my friend Sburk thanks to the store's complimentary wifi. After describing the scene to her she agreed that he was probably a fake, mostly because of the fact he was wearing boots instead of the customary sandals. Eventually though, it turned out he was a real monk. He happened to have the queue number just before mine and upon being called, he went up to the counter and pulled out a Powerbook and a Mac mini apparently needing repair. That's when I decided to take this picture of Nicholas, the iMonk.
Friday, January 22, 2010
The Court’s Blow to Democracy
The New York Times
January 22, 2010
EDITORIAL
With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.
Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.
As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.
The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)
The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.
In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.
This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.
Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.
The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.
The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.
After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.
Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.
These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy.
January 22, 2010
EDITORIAL
With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.
Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.
As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.
The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)
The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.
In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.
This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.
Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.
The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.
The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.
After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.
Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.
These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy.
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