Yearly Archives: 2010

UC Berkeley’s conservative turn

Berkeley initiative launched on equity, diversity and inclusion…

Does Berkeley not know the concept of “diversity” in higher education was pioneered by conservative Supreme Court Justice Powell in order to promote his reactionary Jim Crow driven view of a permanently racially balkanized world?

Perhaps one is not surprised that the scions of global sweatshop operator Levi Strauss would be so interested in these ideas and so willing to throw money at them.

What has happened at Berkeley to the vision of Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King of a genuinely inclusive, color-blind and post-racial America?  Surely the starting point for such a goal is for the state (and its agents like UC Berkeley) to stop using racial and other classifications that divide society?

220px-mariosaviojpgRecall that it was the experience of Berkeley students in the civil rights movement, and in particular their participation in Freedom Summer in Mississippi, that gave Berkeley its permanent place in the pantheon of progressive politics when those same students led the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus in 1964.

A sad day for my alma mater.

“The entire world is insolvent”

The financial instrument everyone loves to hate – Credit Default Swaps – are now flashing red when it comes to government debt. The worst offenders are the so-called “PIIGS” – Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. But make no mistake, the big battleships like the US are in trouble, too. Note the uptick in the US CDS (the light blue line at the bottom – Greece is the dark blue line at the top) in the graph below.

kyd77hjpg1

Of course, recall that CDS were flashing red in advance of the credit crisis, too, yet were ignored by many.

And one persuasive blogger argues “the entire world is insolvent.”

Washingtons Blog.

The Greek Tsunami?

imagesWith a tsunami its not the first wave that counts, it’s when the water recedes and then ever so slowly a second wave approaches that the alarm bell should sound. It looks like it’s a small inconsequential shift in the tides, but then the water rushes towards the beach and all is lost.

That’s one reason to keep a close eye on the Greek events. Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Greece are all thought to have unsustainable debt levels leading to the need to impose austerity that in turn is feared will trigger social unrest.

A flight to safety causes the dollar to increase in value and undercuts the US recovery.

We are not out of this financial crisis by a long shot.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism points to the role of the investment bank everyone loves to hate in covering up the mess that was building up.

Goldman Helped Greece Disguise Deficit « naked capitalism.

Alito breaks protocol of State of the Union

The President is wrong about the impact of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision – it is hard to imagine that it will unleash special interest groups, as if their role in our political process could get any worse.

But what was Justice Alito thinking when he shook his head and accused the President of misconstruing the Court opinion?

“Not true,” he mouthed visibly in response to the President as the Democrats sitting around him erupted in applause.

A judge, particularly a life tenured federal judge, knows that he sacrifices a certain amount of his right to freedom of speech when he is elevated to the bench. The place for Alito to express his opinion is in his written opinion, not during a state of the union speech by the President.

Ordinarily the Justices sit silently at the State of the Union as a visible symbol of the Court’s autonomy from the rough and tumble of American politics. That autonomy is fragile and yet is also the source of the legitimacy and power of our Supreme Court. Alito forgot that this evening and thus tore a small hole in that veil of legitimacy.

Perhaps it is time to dust off the requirement that a Justice serves for life only if he engages in “good behavior.”

Above the Law

Corporate speech and democracy

My colleague David Yosifon has an excellent Op-ed piece in the SF Chronicle today making the point that in the wake of the Citizens United US Supreme Court decision that corporations enjoy free speech rights these corporations have increased responsibility to insure that their speech reflects democratic input from all of their constituencies, including employees and shareholders.

I like his analysis because it gets beyond the idea of many on the left that somehow it is just plain wrong to allow corporations, which include unions many of which are organized as non profit corporations, free speech rights. Of course corporate personality has long been well established in American law all the way back to a case from Santa Clara County, in fact, dealing with the umbrella of equal protection spreading to corporations as “legal persons.”

The bottom line is that we live in society not just as individuals but through institutions, including unions, corporations, political parties. The goal should be to democratize fully those institutions rather than curtailing their ability to speak for us in the name of a utopian “individualism.”

As the Court itself held: “Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence.”