Category Archives: Social values

Bill Black: Zero Prosecutions of Elite Banksters is Too Many for the Wall Street Journal

Yves here. Although Bill Black’s post starts with how the Republicans have linked their attacks on the IRS to a broad-brush effort to depict any and all government oversight as an evil plot to destroy the profitability of upstanding businesses, he includes how the Clinton-Gore “Reinvent Government” initiative set out to cripple the IRS, and how that has hurt enforcement generally. Readers may recall one example discussed regularly on this blog: how the IRS refused to penalize clear violations of REMIC (Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit) rules that resulted from the failure to convey borrower notes to securitization trusts as stipulated in the 1986 Tax Reform Act.

In general, as tax maven Lee Sheppard has pointed out, the US does little in the way of tax law enforcement. As if you believe in the broken glass theory of lawbreaking (that failing to prosecute minor violations of the law, like petty vandalism, broadcasts that policing is lax, which encourages more serious crimes), it’s not hard to see that having a barely-on-the-job IRS would tell the moneyed classes that they can push the envelope in other areas and probably get away with it there too.

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Why Progressives Are Lame

Yesterday, we ran a post by Bill McKibben on leadership in social change movements. McKibben argued for a “small l” leader model versus a “big L” leader, which readers debated. Some argued that the Leader model was really code for “Great Man” that was a less viable approach than it once was due to assassinations. Others were struck by the emphasis on distributed leadership, which is an obvious analogy to modern computer and communications networks, and how political commentators to frame their ideas of social order in terms of the technology of the day. Some pointed out that the idea of minimal oversight and control of communities was a long-stading Utopian line of thought, often espoused by people who wound up implementing the exact opposite.

However, I was particularly struck by Dan Kervick’s remark, which came late in the thread:

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Bill McKibben: Movements Without Leaders

Yves here. The 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is ten days away. Brace yourself for the reminisces, most of which will be genuine, heartfelt, and insightful, while others which will treat the occasion as an opportunity for brand identification.

McKibben, a well-known and effective climate change activist, raises the question of leadership in movements to promote social change. He argues that the charismatic chieftain is out, and the model now is that of distributed leadership, with lower level “leaders” being more critical to movement success than ever before.

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A Disturbance in the Force?

Perhaps I’m just having a bad month, but I wonder if other readers sense what I’m detecting. I fancy if someone did a Google frequency search on the right terms, they might pick up tangible indicators of what I’m sensing (as in I’m also a believer that what people attribute to gut feeling is actually pattern recognition).

The feeling I have is that of heightened generalized tension, the social/political equivalent of the sort of disturbance that animals detect in advance of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, of pressure building up along major fault lines.

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Yanis Varoufakis: Three Tales of Greeks Coping With Breakdown

By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog

As a child, I was fascinated by my mother’s, and her mother’s, tales from the 1940s, and in particular their stories about life under the Nazi occupation. Greece is in the grip of a calamity that those who lived through the 1940s had thought they would never have to live through again. But I must desist. For this is not the place for analysis and argumentation about our contemporary Greek catastrophe. This is a piece of brief summer tales. So, allow me to relate three such stories.

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Bill Black: The FBI’s 2010 Mortgage Fraud Report Reveals Why the Banksters Love Holder

Yves here. Black has written the sort of post I particularly like. He’s given a close reading of the FBI’s latest (and tellingly, not all that recent) mortgage fraud report and parses what its use of language and its omissions say about its assumptions and priorities.

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Bill Moyers with Richard Wolff on Inequality, Wage Slavery, and Economic Justice

Bill Moyers has a wide ranging and lively chat with Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and author of many books including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. Wolff is a fierce advocate of the need for policies for fairer wages for workers and argues why better pay is salutary not just for the employees but the broader economy.

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Are New York City “Feminist” Organizations Sock-Puppeting for Wall Street in Attacking Spitzer?

Yves here. Regular readers may notice that this article is a departure from normal NC fare, in that this site has steered clear of posts that address a particular demographic or ethnic group. But we’ve decided to go this route in response to the feint being used by the Wall Street and its Democratic party sock puppets to go after Eliot Spitzer’s campaign to become Comptroller of New York City.

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Questioning the Underlying Structures of Property and Power is “Off the Table”

Yves here. The Real News Network interview below with Vijay Prashad, a professor of international studies at Trinity College, is part of a series that examines the power dynamics that undergird our economic system. Unlike most interviews, this one is more ruminative. Rather than trying to deliver some key observations to viewers, this one is more intended to help people recognize that they have blinkered views on some issues.

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Trader Describes How Dishonesty Pays in Finance, Big Time

Yves here. It may seem like a “dog bites man” account to describe yet again how traders are fixated on their bonuses, often have tawdry personal habits (cocaine, whores, flashy cars) and have no compunction about leaving rubble in their wake, be it customers or the firms for which they work.

However, it’s one thing to hear it from outsiders or people who’ve managed to spend some time on a dealing room floor, and another to have someone in the industry describe what goes on.

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