We have begun preparations for renovating our second floor bathroom. What better place to start than with a trip to Home Depot, list and credit card at the ready. Karen and I had already done some research online so we had a very specific stop to make in the toilet division of the plumbing department. We found our box right away, then my eye caught “Bold.Power.” on the end of an adjacent carton. What? Some marketing guru at Kohler has gone haywire or is just reflecting their own bathroom insecurities (desires?).

Is “Bold.” symptomatic of a narcissistic attachment to our bodily excreta? Or, are we supposed to feel “Bold.” when ensconced on the throne? For the males in the crowd, are “Bold.” and “Power.” supposed to call forth some new fulfillment from the vertical position? Perhaps we have been satisfied too long with the simpler idler pleasures of this position? Or maybe, we are supposed to elide these doubly emphatic periods into BoldPower, bringing back to mind the “shock and awe of the Bush years? Maybe there is an interpretive hint in the upper left corner of the box, “Virtually Plug-Free” and “Clean-Bowl Rinse”. With these kinds of assurance from marketing imagery, we will never again have to call on prune power.

So, having momentarily sated my amusement with the wondrous conjugation of corporate marketing prowess and nature, we wheeled our new toilet out to the car and a quick trip home. Though even this seemed fraught with questions about my Power. – Karen wondered aloud several times whether this box was really going to fit into our little Corolla. With a little huffing and scrunching, it did.

The Global Leader in Performance Thrones

When we got home and we carried the box into the front room, I studied its end panel a bit more closely.

I had hit the jack pot. Our choice for a throne promises to be “The Global Leader in Performance Toilets”! Who needs Moses when you can forever trash all of those embarrassingly ineffectual plungers.This update of 19th century engineering innovation achieves the holy grail banishing those blockages that cause such frequent finger pointing in every household.

Not only that, but ours is also “Powerful”, “Comfortable” and “Fast & Easy”. Really, the promise of this last claim seems to stretch credibility. All of my future visits to the loo will not be tests of my core strengths, every visit with come right along with speed and no sweat. I can leave my iPod Touch elsewhere because I will be done in less time than it takes tio bring up the WiFi. Unfortunately, this promise is about an entirely different Fast and Easy. The marketeers at Kohler have mixed messages to different audiences on the same end panel.This is a pitch to plumbers about how installation will be Fast and Easy.

Nevertheless, casting my eyes to the bottom right I feel reassured that I have purchased “The Complete Solution”.

Karen and I got off to an earlier than usual departure from Hudson yesterday and made it into Harlem by 11 am. After some pauses to chase the various children around, we went off to The Museum of the City of NY at 103rd and 5th Ave. It was a warm day so we had a great walk from 121st to the museum, though our winter coats soon became a burden.

At the museum, the Joel Meyerowitz series: LEGACY: THE PRESERVATION OF WILDERNESS IN NEW YORK CITY PARKS (Oct 9 through Mar 21) was good fun. The tapestry size reproductions hanging in the entrance hall are a great reflection of Meyerowitz’s use of a large format camera and the inkjet images on Tyvek. A couple of the images of large trees are worth a pause. Overall, the photography is at times a bit worn out in its approach to framing and selection of topics. Landscapes are such a thoroughly worked over topic that it is hard not to fall into patterns of visualization that produce images that seem a bit predictable if not trite. Nevertheless, I also learned that park space accounts for over 25% of the land area of NYC. Made me think of making more of an effort to get beyond my usual ventures to Marcus Garvey park (aka Mt. Morris Park) and Central Park. Here is a link to the official website of NYC parks where you can explore more about the city’s 1,700 parks.

You could hear the chuckles and laughter at our next exhibit stop well before entering,  CHARLES ADDAMS’S NEW YORK (Mar 4 through May 16). But, for me the highlight of our visit was the 26 minute video installation, TIMESCAPES: A MULTIMEDIA PORTRAIT OF NEW YORK (Ongoing), a multimedia portrait of New York City. This is a terrific video history of the development of NYC from 1609 to the last few years. For example, NY shippers innovated regularly scheduled “packet” ships that sailed to Europe and back. This greatly increased the flow of goods and people over the previous approach of a ship only sailing when it was full.

After a bit we walked down to the Asia Society at 70th and Park Ave to see artifacts from Vietnam,  Arts of Ancient Viet Nam: From River Plain to Open Sea through May 2, 2010. Glad to have gone and a good reminder of how slight my knowledge of the prt of the world. though I continue to be surprised that human history is quite literally still being uncovered. Some of the artifacts on display had only been unearthed in the last ten years.

Noah’s Basketball Game

We rounded out our day of activities with a basketball game, the championship game for a league that Noah plays in. The game was held at PS 6. The whole family was in attendance, Nyla, Mom and Dad and two sets of grandparents. Despite vigorous  coaching from the stands, Noah’s team was not quite up to the challenge. They lost. But, I was really impressed with the level of play. I am certain that I have never seen organized basketball for this age. I was expecting more of something like swarm soccer. One of the little side drama was the presence of Noah’s best friend, Ben Gross, on the opposing team. As you can tell from the picture, no egos seem to have been shattered nor over-inflated.

Here in Hudson, we just successfully passed a voter referendum to increase the City of Hudson’s support for our library for the first time in a decade. By a better than 60% margin voters here affirmed the importance of the library in our daily life.

Now we are faced with cuts at the state level that will make it more difficult to sustain the library here and across the state.

From the New York Library Association:

This will be the fifth cut in less than two years and will bring Library Aid down from $102 million in 2007 to $84.5 million in 2010. These cuts combined total an $18 million or 18% reduction in funding for library services. Libraries are part of our safety net—they are essential to life long learning, jobs and opportunity, quality of life and community empowerment.

Sign the Online Petition to Support Public Libraries

There is an online petition you can sign to support funding for public libraries in the upcoming state budget:

On a recent visit to the relos in NJ we were gifted with part of their surplus garlic. They shop at Costco and buy in bulk. In this case, we got stuck with seven heads (bulbs, perhaps depending on your dialect) of garlic. These hung around for a couple of weeks until Karen and I finally got to reducing them to soup (we do have one head leftover). We cooked it up tonight. Not bad. But, I think that a little aging will improve it and I want to squeeze some lime over it (Karen and I recall some garlic soup we made a decade or so back that included this) when we next sit down.

Meanwhile, I have to finish up this posting soon. The computer may fog over terminally from garlic breath.

Thanks Ed and Meredith.

With this new policy handed down by the Supreme Court,  corporations can now spend unlimited amounts of money carrying out political activities. The are many troubling aspects of this situation.  Besides the obvious fact that an artificial socio-economic artifact like a corporation can not possibly be a natural person, there are numerous features of corporations that make them particularly dangerous to us human beings. Corporations never die, excepting the rare death by dissolution. Corporations act globally with many agents in place to carry out policies that favor the corporation wherever and whenever required. Through the wonders of contracts and financialization of assets corporations can appear and disappear from any locality at will. One can observe an example of this phenomenon several years ago when corporations like Tyco International moved its headquarters to an off-shore island to avoid US corporate taxes. This, despite the fact that Tyco had dozens of manufacturing facilities and other operations employing thousands here in the US.

Corporations control far more assets than even the richest of individuals, even whole countries (see the chart below). This means that they have the financial assets to buy anything and anyone they wish. Despite even the protestations of Barney Frank, one of our funniest Congressmen, whose seat is a safe one, it is simply not plausible that he can receive the enormous piles of cash from the financial services industry without him becoming beholden to them. Money is too universally corrosive to support his delusions.

Just to place the power of corporations in an appropriate global context here is some information from a report from the Institute for Policy Studies in 2000:

Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs) (See Table 2). To put this in perspective, General Motors is now bigger than Denmark; DaimlerChrysler is bigger than Poland; Royal Dutch/Shell is bigger than Venezuela; IBM is bigger than Singapore; and Sony is bigger than Pakistan.

Table 2 referenced in this quote is below:²

What might we do to put corporations in a more suitable position in our society and the world in general?

Perhaps we need to follow the same path that those who brought the suit Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee that resulted in the Supreme Court’s ruling. After all, I do not need to pick up the constitution anew to be sure that the word corporation nor business appears in the first amendment. In fact given the position of organizations like corporations during the Founding Father’s discussions leading to the Constitution I am sure that they would never have thought or written approvingly about corporations as natural persons. On the surface then, all we have to do is find an appropriate situation that can bring such an argument before the fundamentalists (literalists, if you like) on the court and it would seem that they would have a hard time justifying even 124 years of precedent. Where are our windmill tilters for this challenge?

1. see the Wikipedia article on this
2. Source: Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies December 4th, 2000. If you can find more recent data please send it along to me. Despite this being a decade old, I feel quite certain that the concentration of wealth in corporate hands has only increased, though some of the players have changed.

There is an interesting headline in today’s (1/25/10) New York Times, “Huge Housing Complex in N.Y. Returned to Creditors”.¹ This article reports that Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty defaulted (welched?) on their debt obligations of $3 billion for their 2006 purchase of the Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan for $5.4 billion. This is another example of how we think that is it merely a business decision for a corporation to shed unsupportable debt while homeowners faced with the same situation face it as a moral and social disaster. The phrase “returned to creditors” elegantly captures corporate America’s relationship to debt. Its just business.

Default on your home mortgage? What will the friend’s think? The neighbors? Seems to me that what is appropriate for business must be appropriate for individuals. After all, we have been barraged in recent years with call for every person to act as an entrepreneur, a business of one. Any business person looking at continuing to fund a business whose value has shrunk by 30% to 50% while operating costs (mortgage payments) remain fixed would immediately decide to walk away (default) from the debt.

Return Your Sunk House to the Creditors

Time for all those mortgage holders out there to return their underwater houses to their creditors and move on with their lives. This is what these two big real estate firms are doing.

More Readings

For more on the arguments about mortgage defaults see this article in the Sunday New York Times, “Underwater, but wil they leave the pool“, by Richard H. Thaler and the 1/7/10 article, also in the NYTs, “Walk Away From Your Mortgage!” by Roger Lowenstein.

1. photo by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times – The Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town complex in 2006- borrowed without permission

President Obama’s proposals to break up the “too large to fail” mega banks and otherwise reapply the Glass Steagall Act to the financial sector has predictably brought loud complaints that this is populist and anti-business. Even the rhetoric of the reporters and expert talking heads reflects a general bias that anything that we might do to prevent a re-occurrence of last year’s global financial meltdown is anti-business.

How Is It Anti-Business To…. or

Is the New Rule of Banking, “Privatize profits, but socialize losses (risk)”?

As a business person and a citizen I have to point out that having a sector of our economy that caused so much damage to the rest of the economy and citizens continue to conduct themselves in a fashion that is likely to cause a repeat breakdown is not a good state of affairs. How is it anti-business to want to control the gambling addictions of the financial services sector? How is it anti-business to prevent banks and other financial firms to become so large that they can place another call on the the nation’s treasury to bail them out because they indulge another round of gambling with other people’s money through dangerous leveraging? How is it anti-business to want the banking system to perform their primary function that is necessary to make the economy run, that is to take in deposits and make loans? Or, to capture this in a current diddy, we have an economy where for the financial services sector they follow this unique rule of crony capitalism, “Privatize profits, but socialize losses (risk)”.

How Is Gambling With Other People’s Money Good For Us?

How is it anti-business to call out as gambling the markets in financial “products”, these very products that the last year has shown most people in the industry itself do not understand and no one understood the risk of these products to the stability of the entire financial system that we all depend on. And, we have to note that these products depended on the use of huge amounts of other people’s money. Certainly if the creators of the products had to put up their own money instead of other people’s money, very little would ever have been traded. It all depended on a strategy of gambling with other people’s money in so-called market that looked a lot like new version of a Ponzi scheme. How is it anti-business to say to institutions who take deposits from people (insured by the public FDIC) that they should not engage in obviously very risky gambling, rather they should turn these deposits around to be loaned to individuals and businesses in the real economy where goods and services are produced by the traditional methods, not by trading in derivatives, loaning money to hedge funds and other excessively leveraged ventures. How is it anti-business to want our banks to do the traditional business of underwriting and holding their own loans? How is it anti-business that banks be subject to the same rules of capitalism that the rest of the economy is?

How Big Is The Financial Industry Anyways?

I suppose that it is no surprise that David Wessel of the Wall St Journal, during an interview on last night’s PBS NewsHour, would conflate anti-Wall St. and anti-business. This reflects a common rhetoric by the media that anything that upsets Wall St. (meaning here the big banks, hedge funds, and other financial services, for the most part recipients of government bailout monies firms) is anti-business. This also reflects the outsized share of mind that the financial services sector has in our national dialogue. Stop for a moment and imagine what share of the total economy  financial services is? Look at the chart¹ shown to the left to discover that it trends around 4% with a high in 2008 of roughly 8%. So, financial services is a large sector and one that, like electricity, telecommunications, oil, and others, one that we can not do without, yet, it is not the whole economy. It is not anti-business to want this sector to do its job within the whole economy and not do things that endanger the whole economy by risky behaviors. Just imagine our our electrical system carried out activities that might cause a complete meltdown and failure? Would we by anti-business for assuring proper processes were followed in that sector?

1. borrowed from The Evolution of the US Financial Industry from 1860 to 2007: Theory and Evidence.
   by Thomas Philippon New York University, NBER, CEPR November 2008 http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~tphilipp/papers/finsize.pdf

So, to get it out of the way, this movie is a classic American morality tale. Re-runs of the old cowboy movies deliver the same messages. The only updating is the corporate villain, the natives as good guys,  and the new age touchy-feely stuff about the interconnected world spirit. Similar ground has also been rummaged through almost continuously for decades in the science fiction world.

Nevertheless, Avatar is enormously entertaining, even enthralling at times. The visual and audio experience is completely engaging. The enormous array of special effects support the story line without sticking out with moments where you might say there were gratuitous displays of technique. A very worthwhile trip to the movies. And, as the corporate blather before the movie began, seeing it in full digital audio and visual on an enormous screen is something that you can not find at home.

The winning team found all of the balloons in 6 hours 52 minutes. The team used a cascade of financial incentives; they shared the $40,000 prize among those who helped find the balloons. To drive the social network, those who referred those who found a balloon received part of the winnings. Listen to Riley Crane on Colbert Nation and look at the team’s website for more about how it worked.

I think that we need to seize on this social invention to solve some pressing matters in our recent history. For instance, why not use this technology to find, for example:

• evidence of crimes or egregious unethical behavior committed by Dick Cheney
• managers of sub-prime mortgage companies who intentionally targeted people who could not financially support home ownership, those who created low-doc and no-doc mortgages.
• members of the defense and spy establishment who knowingly foisted the WMD strategy on the world to support Bush’s craziness
• what happened to the $billions in cash disbursed in Iraq during the early years of the Bush War?

How would this work? Well, some ideas will lead directly to real money, others will require some wealthy folks with interest in the question to put up some short change to invent the discoveries. Then, we just sit back and watch the social web work.

There is a problem here, that is fairly obvious and not without some risks. The same social discovery process can be used by anyone with a little cash and access to the web. We will see a tsunami of questions from a less desirable portion of the world.