Category Archives: Social values

Philip Pilkington: Marginal Utility Theory as a Blueprint for Social Control

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland

A prisoner kneels before the watchtower in a drawing of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’. The Panopticon was an architectural form that Bentham envisioned for a variety of social institutions. The idea was to have a central platform where an observer could cast their gaze over all the observed, thus making them feel constantly under watch and ensuring, in Bentham’s own words, “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Jeremy Bentham is also the father of modern utility theory – a theory often associated with individual liberty, which is actually at heart a blueprint for social control.

It’s not hard to forget just how nonsensical, simplistic and childish the so-called theory of marginal utility is.

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Mark Provost: Occupy Boston – Day One (and Other OccupyWallStreet Updates)

Yves here. Police efforts to contain OccupyWallStreet have had the opposite effect to what the officialdom no doubt assumed would happen: that the demonstrators would either become discouraged or become violent, which would make it easy to discredit them. Instead, the macing of a group of women last weekend, followed by the arrest of over 700 people on Brooklyn Bridge on Saturdy, has given the movement legitimacy and media attention. It was the lead item on the BBC website over the weekend.

Press efforts to diminish the potential of this effort are now shifting.

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Is JP Morgan Getting a Good Return on $4.6 Million “Gift” to NYC Police? (Like Special Protection from OccupyWallStreet?)

No matter how you look at this development, it does not smell right. From JP Morgan’s website, hat tip Lisa Epstein:

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.

“These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe,” Dimon said. “We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”

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Matt Stoller: Boston Fed – “Avoid Engaging with Any Demonstrators”

By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

If the encampment in downtown NYC is a church, then the sprouting of more of these around the country is something of an religious awakening. And the reaction of the other religious faction is pretty telling.

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Friedrich Hayek Joins Ayn Rand as a Hypocritical User of Medicare

We’ve been a bit hard on the left of late, so we figured we’d take some steps to balance our programming. Mark Ames, who has been doggedly on the trail of the Koch brothers, found a delicious failure to live up to his oft-repeated standard of conduct by a god in the libertarian pantheon, Friedrich Hayek. And this fall from grace was encouraged one of the chief promoters of extreme right wing ideas in the US, Charles Koch.

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Matt Stoller: #OccupyWallStreet Is a Church of Dissent, Not a Protest

By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Last weekend, I spent a few days with the protesters downtown near Wall Street, and it was an eye-opening experience. The people there want something, but it’s not a list of demands, and it is entirely overlooked by the media and most commentators on the protest.

If all you read are news stories and twitter feeds about #OccupyWallStreet, the most trenchant imagery that will stick in your mind is that of police brutality, and the politics of Wall Street greed. The debate seems to be organized around whether the protest will be “successful” or not, how the protesters are stupid or a new American Tahrir Square, or rhetoric designed in a media sphere that maximizes attention. Glenn Greenwald suitably demolishes the sneering commentariat. But I think there’s something to add about what exactly this protest is, what it is doing, and most of all, what the people there “want”.

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Why Liberals Are Lame: McCarthyite Identity Politics as Cover for Bankrupt Policies

The latest desperate strategy of Obama’s spin-meisters highlights the rot at the core of the Democratic party: the heavy handed use of identity politics as a cover for neoliberal policies that betray the very groups the party purports to represent.

As Obama’s poll ratings continue to deteriorate, Melissa Harris-Perry, professor of political science at Tulane, argued that the reason white liberals were abandoning him was racism. (Earth to Obama: trying to make your base feel guilty, particularly when YOU are the one who ought to feel guilty, is not going to do you any good)

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Philip Pilkington: Twitterifying Catastrophe

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland

As stock markets continue to fall and the eurocrisis rolls on an independent trader called Alessio Rastani appears on BBC live and gives a candid account of how he, as a trader, views the crisis.

He sees it, he says, as an opportunity to make an awful lot of money. He tells viewers that they too should seek out safe havens – such as US Treasury bills and dollar holdings – to weather the continuing storm.

Not long after the Twitterati are out in droves

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Welcome to the Police State: NYC Cops Mace Peaceful Protestors Against Wall Street

I’m beginning to wonder whether the right to assemble is effectively dead in the US. No one who is a wage slave (which is the overwhelming majority of the population) can afford to have an arrest record, even a misdemeanor, in this age of short job tenures and rising use of background checks.

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The False Dichotomy of Greed

By Sell on News, a macro equities analyst. Cross posted from MacroBusiness

The Euro crisis appears to be developing into something similar to the 1980s Latin American debt crisis when the idea that, to quote Walter Wriston, who ran First National City/ Citibank from the 1960s into the 1980s it was assumed that: “countries don’t go out of business.” The Latin American leadership demonstrated that they, in effect, could, by defaulting. As a number of bloggers at MacroBusiness have pointed out, government finances are not like household finances, although they are often seen that way. That much is well understood in the financial community, although perhaps not as well in the wider public.

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June Carbone: Why David Brooks Misses the Real Source of Moral Decay – Thirty Years of Class Warfare Against the Working Class

By June Carbone, Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of the Constitution Law and Society University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

The New York Times told two separate stories earlier this week, with no apparent recognition that they might be related. On September 12, David Brooks published a column decrying the moral “relativism and nonjudgmentalism” of the young. On September 13, a front page story announced that “Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade,’” explaining how the economic decline of the bottom half of the population over the past decade has grown worse during the financial crisis.

What do the two stories have to do with each other?

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Are Private Investigators Being Used to Intimidate New York Attorney General Schneiderman’s Staff?

The New York Post has a salacious story about Alisha Smith, a lawyer with the New York attorney general’s office, who is a dominatrix in her private life. Frankly, many of the skills honed by being a domme probably come in handy in litigation (such as knowing exactly how much pain and humiliation to administer when).

The problem isn’t with her having a kinky private life per se; it is the allegation by the Post that she may have gotten paid for performing at S&M parties.

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