Category Archives: Capitalism

America appreciates teachers, but we don’t value them

Featured | Posted by

CATEGORY: EducationIn the contemporary world, a society’s ability to compete in just about everything – scientific and technical innovation, business innovation, public health, and on and on – depends on making sure that every student is as smart as humanly possible. Your future is literally a direct result of your commitment to education. If the country next door starts with the same basic potential, but dedicates greater resources to developing it, the gap is going to be widening noticeably within a generation. And right now everyone in the developed world has a greater commitment to teaching than the US.

In other words, the better your teachers, the brighter your future. (Teacher quality isn’t the only variable, but it’s a huge one.) However, we entrust that future not to the brightest and best, but to whomever will do the job for what it pays (and whomever will deal with the ridiculous condition under which teachers are often asked to work). We’re lucky in that a lot of the brightest and best are truly committed to the mission and are willing to make the sacrifice. Sadly, the rest of those jobs goes to – and forgive me if I’m a bit harsh here – folks who can’t land a better paying job. Continue reading →

World War III under way; America hasn’t noticed?

Posted on by

“Corporate America ought to be darned worried. If you are a major corporation with very sensitive technology, you have been targeted. Somebody is spying on you right now.” Todd Davis, FBI supervisor in Sacramento

There’s been a great deal of debate lately about spying – FISA and domestic spying issues, for example – and now the news that Blackwater is augmenting its army, navy and air force with its own CIA. While I’m routinely bemused by the conclusions we seem to reach (we’re about to approve a new Attorney General who doesn’t think waterboarding is torture, remember), I do welcome these kinds of discussions. The world of information and intelligence has been changing dramatically for years and our policy deliberations haven’t kept pace. It’s critical to think about what we know, how we know it, what we do with it, and the implications of not knowing it, because despite the fact that they’ve been awfully cavalier about the Constitution, our conservative friends are generally right in noting that there are bad guys in the world. In the end, the question really boils down to how can we best deal with the bogeys without becoming bad guys ourselves.

There’s one area that we aren’t talking about, though, and it’s a topic we ought to be very concerned with: corporate espionage. Continue reading →

Progressive capitalism: Tocqueville, RJ Reynolds, and taking back our American birthright

Posted on by

This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back. – Bono

Business ethics have been much on my mind of late. Gavin (Whythawk) has pounded Scholars & Rogues (a politics and culture blog I contribute to) with a steady stream of posts that come from some really different angles. The S&R crew is largely American and progressive, but he’s African and Libertarian. Unlike many Libs I know, though, he’s not a creature of pure theory – he gets his hands dirty trying to drive investment at the bottom of the food chain in a place where the bottom is about as low as it gets on Spaceship Earth.

The result, for me at least, is that I find myself thinking about how years of fat cat scandal and abuse here in America has worked to make “capitalism” a dirty word among folks to left of center. Continue reading →