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Wall Street, investment bankers, and social good

Wall Street, investment bankers, and social good
A few months ago, I came across an announcement that Citigroup, the parent company of Citibank, was to be honored, along with its chief executive, Vikram Pandit, for “Advancing the Field of Asset Building in America.” This seemed akin to, say, saluting BP for services to the environment or praising Facebook for its commitment to privacy. During the past decade, Citi has become synonymous with financial misjudgment, reckless lending, and gargantuan losses: what might be termed asset denuding rather than asset building. In late 2008, the sprawling firm might well have collapsed but for a government bailout. Even today the U.S. taxpayer is Citigroup’s largest shareholder. The award ceremony took place on September 23rd in Washington, D.C., where the Corporation for Enterprise Development, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to expanding economic opportunities for low-income families and communities, was holding its biennial conference. There is something in what Mack says.

How Dems Allowed the Tea Party to Rebrand the GOP TRNN Replay (first published days before the 2010 elections) - Paul Jay: Top six ways Obama and the Democratic Party allowed a resurgence of the Republicans - Transcript PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to the The Real News Network, I'm Paul Jay in Washington. More Info Comments Our automatic spam filter blocks comments with multiple links and multiple users using the same IP address. The Epicurean Dealmaker How Austerity Is Killing Europe by Jeff Madrick On the last day of 2011, a headline in The Wall Street Journal read: “Spain Misses Deficit Target, Sets Cuts.” The cruel forces of poor economic logic were at work to welcome in the new year. The European Union has become a vicious circle of burgeoning debt leading to radical austerity measures, which in turn further weaken economic conditions and result in calls for still more damaging cuts in government spending and higher taxes. The European debt crisis began with Greece, and that nation remains the European Union’s most stricken economy. But it has spread inexorably to Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Spain, and even threatens France and possibly the UK. It need not have done so. Over the past two years, the severe 2009 recession, which started in the US but spread across Europe, have imperiled the finances of one European country after another. But this is pre-Great Depression economics. Indeed, austerity economics has not worked in one single case in Europe in the last two years.

Petty China's Nobel problems to continue China reacted initially by terming the award an “obscenity” and demanded an apology. It accused Europeans generally of using the Nobel prize as part of a plot to contain China. It has also accused the West of trying to force its values on China. It is unclear who will receive the award on Liu's behalf. It is also highly unlikely that his wife, Liu Xia, will be allowed to do that either. Liu's wife has made public a list of about 140 names of his friends whom she has asked to receive the award on her husband's behalf. However, there are one or two dissidents who are currently overseas, and who may therefore be able to fly to Oslo. One is the writer Dai Qing, a leading dissident who is on Liu Xia's list and who is currently in Canada on a speaking tour. After calling on Beijing to allow Liu's wife or friends to receive the prize in his stead, she declared that if no one in China is allowed to go to Oslo, then “I will go there to fulfill my duty to my friend.”

Synthetic Assets The Clash of Ignorance Labels like "Islam" and "the West" serve only to confuse us about a disorderly reality. Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and reaction. About the Author Edward W. We mourn the loss of Edward Said, who passed away on the morning of Thursday, September 25, 2003. Also by the Author With the "war on terror" now official nomenclature, the problematic conflating of ethnic, religious and "terrorist" identities is now a matter of policy as well as media distortion. This essay--Edward W. "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The challenge for Western policy-makers, says Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular.

false consciousness Author: Daniel Little University of Michigan-Dearborn “False consciousness” is a concept derived from Marxist theory of social class. Marx offered an objective theory of class, based on an analysis of the objective features of the system of economic relations that constitute the social order. Marx’s theory of ideology is presented in The German Ideology (Marx and Engels [1845-49] 1970). Twentieth-century Marxist thinkers have given more systematic attention to a Marxist theory of consciousness and ideology than Marx provided. A more sociological treatment of class consciousness was provided by Karl Mannheim in his effort to formulate a sociology of knowledge in the 1930s (Mannheim 1959 [1936]). Antonio Gramsci significantly extended Marxist thinking about ideology and consciousness in the 1930s (Gramsci 1971). The French philosopher Louis Althusser provided an influential perspective on the role of ideology in a class society in Lenin and Philosophy (Althusser 1971). References

Wall Street's Latest Campus Recruiting Crisis Sparked by Goldman Controversy Casey Kelbaugh for The New York TimesCory Finley has written a play called “The Private Sector” that is set at a hedge fund corporate retreat. Wall Street, once a magnet for America’s best and brightest, is facing a recruiting problem. The industry’s cachet, which was tarnished during the financial disaster, has been further stained by the lingering economic slowdown and a series of highly publicized industry scandals that have drawn critical attention to the big banks. The most recent public relations storm stemmed from a resignation letter this week on The New York Times Op-Ed page, written by Greg Smith, a former Goldman Sachs executive director. Mr. Smith, who took the bank to task over what he described as a “toxic and destructive” culture at the firm, said his moment of ultimate realization had come while extolling the benefits of a Goldman career to college students. “It’s something that fulfills me in a deep way,” said Mr. “I have no interest in working at Goldman,” he said. Mr.

Why Do Some People Learn Faster? | Wired Science  The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure. A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using electroenchephalography, or EEG. The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. The experiment began with a flanker task, a tedious assignment in which subjects are supposed to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series, such as “MMMMM” or “NNMNN.”

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