Tag Archives: public-policy

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  • Welcome to Middle-Class Poverty— Does Anybody Know the Way Out? – Sara Horowitz – Business – The Atlantic

    "The short-term way to level the playing field is to update the New Deal so it includes and addresses the current workforce. We need to accept that many people don't work full-time for an employer and that "jobs" no longer mean just W-2 employees, as Douglas Rushkoff explained. Richard Cass, a self-employed technical and business consultant and Freelancers Union member, also puts it well: "Government programs that promote small business generally focus on companies with scores of employees and millions of dollars in annual revenue, which is short-sighted." That has immediate implications for our economic and job policies.

    But to really bring a thriving middle class back to life, we need a dramatic shift in thinking, institutions, and assumptions. The role of policy should be to foster newer, more self-sustaining systems that follow this new mutualist paradigm. In the long run, our institutions need to move away from regarding the office as the center of a person's economic life, from business as the provider of benefits, and from government as the provider of social supports. The middle class does not have to be built by focusing on individual wealth. Instead, we can build stable markets and societies where people make a living, communities flourish, and businesses survive — and not at the expense of others. It's not utopian — it's a necessity if we want a successful middle class again."

    coworking freelancers economic-crisis public-policy government revolution

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  • The Copyright Lobby Absolutely Loves Child Pornography | TorrentFreak

    "The conclusion is as unpleasant as it is inevitable. The copyright industry lobby is actively trying to hide egregious crimes against children, obviously not because they care about the children, but because the resulting censorship mechanism can be a benefit to their business if they manage to broaden the censorship in the next stage. All this in defense of their lucrative monopoly that starves the public of culture."

    copyright intellectual-property corporatism public-policy pornography freedom-of-expression filtering

  • Nina Paley: Culture is Anti-Rivalrous

    "Culture is anti-rivalrous. The more people know and sing a song, the more cultural value it has. The more people watch my film Sita Sings the Blues, or read my comic strip Mimi & Eunice, the happier I’ll be, so please go do that now and then come back and read the rest of this paragraph. The more people know a movie or TV show, the more cultural value it has. Monty Python references attest to the cultural value of Monty Python – we even use the word “spam” because of it. Shakespeare‘s works are culturally valuable, and phrases from them live on in the language even apart from the plays (“I think she doth protest to much,” etc.). The more people refer to Monty Python and Shakespeare, the more you just gotta see em, amiright? Or not, it doesn’t matter whether you see them, you’re already speaking them. That all culture is a kind of language, I’ll leave for another discussion."

    intellectual-property economics property copyright commons cultural-assumptions

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  • code as a weapon | clusterflock

    "it's an open source weapon"

    computer-virus westphalian-state-woopsie stuxnet cyberwar open-warfare

  • Towards a Theory of Corporate and Financial Sector Solidarity | Rortybomb

    "Speculation: There’s a critique of the regulators and key decision makers during the crisis that invokes cultural capital and the idea that regulators are socialized with Wall Street in a way that it is difficult for them to exercise any type of power over them, to see their interests in conflict. I wonder if the same is true for the corporate sector. As the firm goes global, and as the white-collar workforce is broken by computerization and globalization, more and more elite corporate positions will be filled by those leaving Wall Street. (Has this already happened? Data/Studies?) If so, you’ll see an even more lucrative revolving door between corporate elites and financial elites. As such, any natural checks to financial sector power coming from the corporate market space is less likely to happen."

    its-the-unnatural-checks-that-will-be-interesting banking financial-crisis public-policy regulation corporatism financialzation social-networks cultural-assumptions

  • The Fed Bails Out the Banks…Again – Credit Slips

    "The lesson here is that if we want serious regulation of banks, we can't trust it to be done by bank regulators. We've seen the Fed and the OCC time and time again bend over backwards to let the banks out of statutory requirements. We've seen this with inaction (HOEPA regs), with aggressive preemption (and OCC is back to its old tricks…).

    And this isn't just in the realm of consumer finance. This is also in the safety and soundness area. I'm not talking about stretched interpretations of section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. I'm talking about affiliate transaction rules and Prompt Corrective Action, cornerstones of the safety-and-soundness regime. Saule Omarova has a great paper that shows how the Fed granted affiliate transaction waivers like a drunken sailor during the financial crisis.  Those were rules that went back to 1932-33 as part of Glass-Steagal.  

    And remember Prompt Corrective Action? That was a response to all of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board's screw ups during the S&L crisis (Who you say? There's a reason the FHLBB doesn't exist any more…). PCA is clear of a bunch of tripwires as you can get. The whole point was to make sure that the bank regulators regulated, not coddled. But Bernanke announced that he was suspending PCA for the banks during the financial crisis. Only after the stress tests cleared the big banks did PCA get applied to the small banks, and with a vengance. What a sorry state of the world we live in where the bank regulators are the last people we can trust to actually regulate the banks. "

    bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now public-policy legislation financial-crisis banking corporatism

  • Rents versus Profits in the Financial Reform Battle and Post-Industrial Economy | Rortybomb

    "Much of the modernization that Marx triumphed was a victory of profit-makers over rent-holders. What Hardt argues is that, as the economy becomes more and more about information, the crucial ends of capital holders is to take things that could belong to the commons and instead appropriate them as property rights and sell them off. The implies a prioritization of rent-holders over profit-makers in terms of power over the economy (also implying a regression back from the future that Marx thought would come after profit-makers – take that Hegelian Marxism!).

    If we look at some of the major economic battles taking place, they are over patents, how the risks and rewards of large, systemically important public-utility style financial institutions are distributed and who gets to control the residual over the delegated ends of the government with the mad rush for the privatization of government resources and responsibilities. These are all, in some way, about rents. And the battle over these will determine a lot about who gains in the future of the economy.

    As such, they are the only place where the financial sector and the real economy fight it out."

    financial-crisis bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now intellectual-property rent-seeking

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  • It’s Back: WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Returns From The Grave | Electronic Frontier Foundation

    "Granting broadcasters and cablecasters intellectual property rights that apply independently of copyright in the programs being broadcast, together with legally enforceable technological protection measures, raises concerns for access to public domain works. These measures would add complexity to copyright clearance regimes for creators of podcasts and documentary films, and interfere with consumers’ ability to make home recordings permitted under national copyright laws. Granting broadcasters and cablecasters exclusive rights to authorize retransmissions of broadcasts over the Internet will harm competition and innovation by allowing broadcasters and cablecasters to control the types of devices that can receive transmissions. It will also create new liability risks for Internet intermediaries that retransmit information on the Internet."

    public-domain intellectual-property public-policy law corporatism

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