Probably you’re all familiar with the recent rash of contaminated milk in China.   Over the past 2 years or so, a number of Chinese dairy producers had been surreptiously been adding a chemical called melamine to their baby formula and other milk products.  The melamine, which is tasteless and odorless, artificially boosted the milk’s protein count, and was being used to cover the fact that the milk had first been diluted with water to cheapen production costs.   But melamine is poisonous, and its presence was unmasked by the illness (and sometimes death) that it eventually inflicted on thousands of chinese infants. Read the rest of this entry »

As the economic crisis unfolds people are trying, in some cases desperately, to identify the True Cause — the one factor that, had it been different that it actually was, would have prevented the crisis.  In the onslaught of commentary and analysis meant to slake this understandable need for explanation, a huge variety of candidate causes have been put forward.   Predatory lending practices, the greed of investment banks, the bubble in the housing market, the failure of governmental regulation, the American consumer’s debt addiction, hedge-fund shortsellers, lax rating agencies, and large institutional investors, have all been mentioned.¹   A common theme throughout is the clash of Wall Street with Main Street, the debate as to which one is more to blame.²

I think the truth is that the crisis was caused by kind of financial chain reaction — that all the factors are true causes, and that Wall Street and Main Street are about equally to blame. Read the rest of this entry »

1. See, for example, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1901, http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/04/22/the-financial-crisis-greed-run-amok.aspx, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-weissman/deregulation-and-the-fina_b_82639.html,http://blog.poweropt.com/2008/10/27/housing-bubble-financial-crisis-whos-to-blame-part-1-of-3/,http://www.alternet.org/workplace/62787/, http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1842499,00.html, http://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/10232008_Ratings_Agencies.asp, and http://www.pionline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080428/PRINTSUB/512836157/1025/TOC. [↩]
2. E.g., http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/26/news/economy/easton_backlash.fortune/index.htm. [↩]

November 7, 2008

By any measure, American car companies are in trouble.  In the 1960s, General Motors and Ford together sold nearly 80 percent of the automobiles in America, with GM alone controlling about half the market;  that number dropped to less than 33% as Toyota and Honda gained market share.  Ford last posted an annual profit in 2005, while GM has lost an astounding $18.8 billion in the first half of this year.  Their Japanese and European competitors, however, are still profitable, even in these very tough times for car manufacturers.  As of today, GM and Ford’s stock prices are at record lows of $4.37 per share and $2.03 respectively (compared to Toyota’s $68.53), while their bonds have been degraded to junk status.  In short, customers don’t like their products, the markets don’t like their future, they’re hemorraging cash, and no one wants to lend them money.  Add to this their huge pension and health care obligations, and these former giants of American industry hardly seem like going concerns.  (In fact, today’s NYTimes announced further losses in the billions for each company in the third quarter, and indicated that they faced bankruptcy unless the federal government bailed them out or the economy improved.)

How did this happen?  In my opinion, the answer is fundamentally a matter of corporate culture.  GM and Ford are dominated by a culture of “marketing” rather than one of “product and innovation” –  and this, more than anything else, is the source of their trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired from the Supreme Court in July 2005. Her resignation was unusual (and somewhat surprising) because, instead of following in the pattern of justices who left the Court shortly before their deaths, her departure was premature.  She was relatively young at 76, in good health, and with many years of energy to work ahead of her.   The reason she gave for retiring (or at least what news reports or a court statement at the time said) was that she wanted to spend more time with family, especially her ailing husband who was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

For the past year or so I’ve been thinking a lot about Justice O’Connor’s decision.   I keep feeling two things: 1) that Justice O’Connor may have made the “wrong” decision, and 2) that her gender may have influenced her (as I suppose) faulty decision-making process.   By the first statement, I mean that she might now with hindsight regret her decision and wish she had instead remained on the Court;  and by the second, I mean that a man in similar circumstances and of similar temperment would likely have chosen differently. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are the letters home from on the road in Ohio, September 17 to October 4, 2008.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

It’s funny, I had a running narrative the moment I got here, and now am back in the motel room and not sure where to start. I got here around 5:30pm, the drive was surprisingly nice; if you just drive down I-76 W, all of Pennsylvania seems to be small farms, many dairy, mostly cow. I only saw one group of sheep. and it’s mountainous around harrisburg/pittsburg. I passed through 5 mountain tunnels. Read the rest of this entry »

October 8, 2008

On a bright Saturday morning in late September, Melissa Hedden, a 51-year-old homemaker and mother of two, gathered 31 women at her house in the affluent Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington for “Pancakes, Postcards, and Persuasion,” as she titled the event.  The women ate homemade pancakes (banana nut, blueberry, and plain) and wrote postcards explaining why they supported Senator Obama to nearly 300 “soft” Republican and undecided women voters.  Melissa and Jody Scarbrough, another homemaker in Upper Arlington, are self-taught political organizers, having discovered their passion and talent when they co-founded, together with two other women in their neighborhood, the grassroots group Upper Arlington for Kerry.  UA for Kerry, which grew into Upper Arlington Progressive Action (UAPA) after the 2004 election, is credited with giving John Kerry thousands of more votes in Upper Arlington, thereby transforming an unquestioned Republican stronghold into an area where the Obama campaign has a real chance at success. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s funny, I had a running narrative the moment I got here, and now am back in the motel room and not sure where to start.  I got here around 5:30pm, the drive was surprisingly nice; if you just drive down I-76 W, all of Pennsylvania seems to be small farms, many dairy, mostly cow.  I only saw one group of sheep. and it’s mountainous around harrisburg/pittsburg.  I passed through 5 mountain tunnels. Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin may have hit on a female leadership style that works.

The night before Palin spoke at the RNC, I talked with Yan, a friend of mine and a 25 year old Republican from Queens, NY.  Asked how he felt about Palin, Yan first gushed about her ideological credentials, political gumption, and small-government, “corruption fighting actions in Alaska.”  He then grew more contemplative: “She’s the ideal woman for a Republican man’s life.”  Why?  “She’s the one that you’d want to be your mother, wife, sister or daughter.  She would fit into any female role in your life.”  He expanded, “She’s tough, she loves you.  For most people, their real mother loves them too.  A lot of mothers are probably tough.  But Palin’s also _cool_.   The manliest men in the lower 48 live in Montana and they shoot bucks, which are still deer.  She shot a caribou and ate it too!” Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Hsing is a councilman in Bridgewater, New Jersey, a prosperous, predominantly Republican suburb less than an hour’s drive from New York City. The town has seen substantial growth in recent years, as pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies opened offices, and newcomers, many of them Asian professionals, settled there, attracted to the jobs, good schools, and prime location. Asian Americans now compose a little less than 12% of Bridgewater’s 44,000 residents, a reflection of New Jersey’s overall demographics. From 1990 to 2000, the state’s Asian population nearly doubled, growing by 95%, as compared to the national Asian growth rate of 13%, giving New Jersey the fifth largest Asian American population in the U.S. in 2000.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the last days of campaigning in South Carolina, Barack Obama made negativity a main issue. Senator Obama struck out against Hillary Clinton at a rally in Columbia, the state capital, one week before South Carolina’s Democratic primary, using approximately one third of his speech in front of thousands to combat what he characterized as distortions by the Clintons and to engage in some negative campaigning himself. When Senator Obama explicitly named Senator Clinton in his comments, he was careful and detailed in describing the problems he had with her.

However, there were many more moments in his speech where Senator Obama did not mention Hillary Clinton by name, but seemed to be clearly referring to her. In these moments, the Senator engaged in what appeared to be the type of negative campaigning that he himself would seem to detest. He accused, without explicitly saying so, Senator Clinton of playing “the same old games,” of being tricky and dishonest, of being willing to say and do anything to win, of being scornful of hope, and of feeding the people cynicism, fear, and doubt. Were Senator Obama forced to be direct and explicit in making these serious accusations, he would likely have needed to substantiate them with specific evidence. Instead, he was able to reference the chief negative stereotypes of Senator Clinton without having to justify himself.

If these stereotypes of Senator Clinton are true, then the candidate who espouses a cleaner politics should provide proof for them. If they are false, then Senator Obama’s manner of talking is particularly egregious.