Who we are

What if We Owned the Banks?

Economic Inequality: Part 3

In June of 2015, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Barclays, among other Libor-rigging giants, pleaded guilty to felony charges related to the [Libor] conspiracy and greed to pay more than $2.5 billion in criminal fines to U.S. regulators.

Protesters and Chase(AP Photo / Edouard H.R. Gluck)

Representing only a single instance of a commonplace practice played out the world over, this corporate criminality instigated the outage of Craig Brandt, an attorney from Oakland, California. He set out to enact an audacious plan. With other individuals, Mr. Brandt endeavored to have the Oakland City Council “take radical action to combat plutocracy, inequality and financial dislocation”. Mr. Brandt wanted to create a city-owned “public bank”.

Recent posts on this blog have explored economic inequality and its ramifications. The post this week continues this series, beginning to focus on potential solutions to what some see as a looming economic catastrophe. As Part 3 our Economic Inequality series, consider this article by Jimmy Tobias: “What if People Owned the Banks Instead of Wall Street?”

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Moral-ity

Jonathan Haidt 06This blog is all about “morality”. To seek Good is to aspire for the attainment of some standard of thought and behavior defined as positive in some manner. As such, a construction such as Moral Foundations Theory represents a paramount interest of this blog (and, presumably those who read it). Likewise, the trustworthiness of such a construction becomes crucial regarding its usefulness. So how useful is this theory—Jonathan Haidt’s MFT, a theoretical, research-based notion about rubrics of our moral perspective?

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Meaning is a Verb

A Life Worth Living?

children playing- smaller

Amid the swirl of thoughts that reverberate throughout life experience, once in a while an interesting idea settles onto Quora, a question and answer website (registration required).  As often as not, users post answers which are more interesting than the questions themselves.  A few weeks ago, just such a response appeared in reply to the question ‘What makes life worth living?’

Many of us ponder this or similar questions, most often with little expectation of receiving a reasonable answer.  In this instance, a responder we will simply call “Jimmy”, a self-defined entrepreneur and ”a Wall Street investor” stated the following:

“Nothing makes life worth living. The fact that this is even a question underlines the lack of life itself to provide a natural answer.”

The phrase “the lack of life” presents a curiously pointed accusation—an accusation directed at reality itself. Jimmy seems to think life owes us something, that life is somehow deficient, leaving us to pick up the pieces so to speak. He continues “Most of life is a sentence [did he mean “sequence”?] of failures and pains, punctuated with only the briefest of moments of happiness.”  What’s wrong with this picture?  (more…)

Self-Recognition

Perspective III

Introduction

Who is We
Many of us are dissatisfied with our experience of the world.  We say we want things to be “better”.  If we really want this “better”—whatever that means—of course we need to step up and make it happen.  So what should we be doing as individuals, as a nation and as a world society?  In the trenches activists like Sophia Burns urges sound strategy and tactics if appropriate change is to be achieved.  Others like a blogger who goes by the moniker “Tisias” encourages left-leaning folks to step up their verbal game in order to engage “the enemy” effectively. Others stress sometimes more and sometime less radical approaches to change.  All of these actions are absolutely necessary or at least potentially useful. But we should also be taking a long, hard look at who is engaging or should be engaged in such noble civic actions.  Before we can answer what we should be doing, perhaps we should first answer the question “Who is ‘We’?”
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