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WTO Social Responsibility Exchange allows muck-up in ethics trading

8/17/2012

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Peace and democracy groups suffer while composting benefits

London based HSBC Bank, the world’s third largest publicly held bank, bought and paid for the right to do business with rogue nations, terrorist cells and Mexican drug cartels, fair and square, on the World Trade Organization’s Social Responsibility Exchange (SREx).  On the sell side was Goldman Sachs who claimed to be representing peace and democracy groups that would receive the proceeds as a social offset to HSBC’s dealings.  The practice—quantifying and pricing ethical behavior—is the newest efficiency development by fully implementing the science of neoliberalism across all social spheres. 

In what Goldman Sachs called “a glitch,” the money instead went into offset projects that composted the bodies of those killed in drug wars and general global mayhem for use as soil amendment on hybrid organic/GMO farms in poor urban neighborhoods.  Perhaps not exactly what they promised, Goldman demurred, but a spokeswoman argued that in any case, "We’re closing a loop and helping folks build sustainable lives in troubled inner cities."

When the well-known investigative reporter Matt Taibbi exposed the banks’ activities in Rolling Stone magazine movingly quoting the urban peasants, "Oh God, our compost is people!," the Securities and Exchange Commission swiftly intervened and both HSBC and Goldman Sachs were forced to not admit or deny guilt and pay a fine amounting to a day's pay for each of their top executives (CEO, CFO and COO).  SEC Director, Ben Dover called this a big win--"Ordinarily we're lucky to get the CEO's turkey sandwich out of his cold clammy hands..."  

Free market advocates pointed out that at least HSBC and Goldman were creating jobs, buttressing their case by pointing out that democracy and peace don't create jobs, businesses do.  Funding anti-war and pro-democracy groups is "unfair and a waste of money," said Robbin Wantsalot, spokesperson for the Heartland Institute.  “Competition and conflict are natural and giving money to pro-democracy groups amounts to subsidizing their specific goals, giving them an out-sized voice in the marketplace of ideas,” she added.  


Chief Joseph Wiseacres, Financial News Analyst
Original Peoples Network (OPN); 
Homage to  Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, (1840-1904) 



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Eliteschmerz: Chris Hayes explains why the meritocracy doesn’t feel your pain

8/14/2012

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by Scott Rosenberg (re-posted from Grist)
...Hayes spoke for an hour with David Roberts and other Grist staffers about his analysis of the paralytic dysfunction of the American elite. He paints the 1% as an overcompensated tribe of hyper-competitors who jealously propagate their privileges yet cling to the delusion that they are self-made superpeople. “We are cursed,” he says, “with an overclass convinced that they are scrappy underdogs.”
Hayes’ arguments on the state of media were especially fascinating to me, and I’ll pick up their thread again soon in another post. But first, here are some excerpted and lightly edited highlights from Hayes’ talk.

On elites and meritocracy: The ethos of competition produces elites who feel persecuted — they are always looking up the ladder and never down, and all construct for themselves a story of their own overcoming, even when it’s manifestly ridiculous. Like Mitt Romney, who got up at a Republican presidential primary debate and said, “You know, I could have inherited the car company. But I struck out on my own — I went to Harvard Law, went to Harvard Business School.” This is genuinely felt — it’s not artifice.

Merit proves to be a difficult thing to define, so money becomes a very neat proxy for it. That’s a self-justifying way of seeing things — people make a lot of money, they must have merit, they must be smart and hard-working.

Now, meritocracy is a word coined by Michael Young, a leftist British social critic, who in 1958 wrote a book called Rise of the Meritocracy. It’s a satiric, dystopic vision of the future a la1984, or Brave New World. It’s a horrible future of government by the cleverest, and it ends up in this revolt from below. And Young was horrified to find the word was adopted as a positive thing. He wrote an op-ed to that effect in theGuardian in 2001.

In the U.S. context, meritocracy is in deep tension with our democratic and egalitarian commitment. Yet in America, the word is always a compliment. Bureaucracy is always negative. Meritocracy is positive. It’s in the first line of Goldman Sachs’ recruiting brochure: “Goldman Sachs is a meritocracy.” This model has a lot more costs than we recognize.

The argument my book makes is about the social model of the meritocracy, and that its ethos and principles and also the set of institutions that have been constructed to produce it — which is to say, an elite that is drawn from all of society but is funneled in this intense process down to the most talented and driven — is a system that’s breaking down. And that’s what’s producing a lot of the elite dysfunction, declining social mobility, rising inequality, and increasing social distance between the people who have power to make big decisions and the people whom those decisions affect.

Ultimately, we’ve reached this point in which meritocracy contains the seeds of its own destruction. In telling ourselves that we can neatly distinguish between equality of opportunity on the one hand and equality of outcome on the other, we’ve created a system with vast inequalities of outcomes. And those have then gone about reliably, relentlessly subverting the mechanisms of producing anything that looks like equality of opportunity...

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, by Chris Hayes

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Levi Bryant writes, "McKenzie Wark: How Do You Occupy an Abstraction?"

8/6/2012

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For the last couple of days, I’ve found my thoughts haunted by McKenzie Wark’sbrilliant interview over at Occupy Times.  Apart from Wark’s provocative claim that politics doesn’t exist– though perhaps it could come to exist, in a sense analogous to how Meillassoux talk of a “virtual god”? –this passage, in particular, stuck out to me:

…the problem is:  how do you occupy an abstraction?  Power has become vectoral.  It can move money and power anywhere on the planet with unprecedented speeds.  You can block a particular site of power, but vectoral power routes around such sites.

The abstraction Wark is talking about is, of course, contemporary capitalism.  Contemporary capitalism seems to be characterized by two features:  First, it has the characteristic of being everywhere and nowhere.  You can’t point to a particular site of contemporary capitalism and say “there it is!”.  Rather, it pervades every aspect of contemporary life, while nonetheless being absolutely non-localizable.  Contemporary capitalism is an example, I think, of what Tim Morton has in mind by “hyperobjects”.  


continue... 

 



"Don’t stand in front of Wall Street and bitch at bankers and brokers, occupy a highway...  Block the arteries; block the paths that this hyperobject requires to sustain itself." L. Bryant 




Commercial transactions are "arteries" as well. 
Drop out.
EJW

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