Author Archives: sdiamond

What’s the matter with Wisconsin?

Here is my take on the recent events in Wisconsin, in the form of a short talk and roundtable discussion at Santa Clara’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, where I am an Ethics Fellow.

Here is a recap:

Governor Walker’s attack on unions is part of a longstanding animus from employers in this country to unions, what some call American exceptionalism because this kind of hostility to trade unions is rare in the rest of the world, outside of countries like China.

Walker’s approach is also dysfunctional because it is an attack on labor policy but it does nothing to address deep concerns we should have about fiscal policy and social policy, which are the other two key pieces of the debate.

Our fiscal policy is out of whack because pension funds are now used by Wall Street for financial engineering at great expense to those funds not for investment in long term economic development.

[Left out as there was a time constraint]: We need to shift our approach to social policy away from the volatile and chaotic capital markets to investment in infrastructure and other methods of revitalizing the economy, a process in which state and local public employees can play a vital role.

Santa Clara University – Podcasts from Ethics Center Events.

Scott Walker goes Greek – the real agenda in Wisconsin

This essay in the Guardian makes the key point about Wisconsin and also shows why a narrow trade union approach to the issue will fail. Walker is implementing the Greek solution – the looting of public goods to fend off the bond markets.

Greece tried it and it failed and it nearly brought down the EU. If the Republicans want to go down this road they better be ready for the consequences.

But the left must broaden their response – it is about trade union rights but only because the trade union acts a check on the abuse of power that would return to the state sector if these reforms go through.

Scott Walker’s real agenda in Wisconsin | Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers

Egypt Could Rescue Libyan Revolution

Forget a US led No Fly Zone or a Nato intervention force, the force that could save the Libyan chapter of the people’s revolt in the Middle East and North Africa now is the Egyptian military.

It is an army in which all Egyptians serve – its leadership is corrupt but no doubt the reason that leadership was not willing to use force to crush the Egyptian revolution was the fear that the rank and file soldier would refuse and then it would be all over for the officer corps.

Now that army faces a real test and so does the heart and soul of this region-wide movement. As the brutality of Qaddafi is on full display against poorly armed people’s forces, the Egyptian army could intervene and tip the balance.

Not only would the Libyan revolution have a chance to succeed, it could be the first step to genuine regional independence from the world state system that has sent only the IMF and World Bank, together with training in torture of dissidents, to the region over the last two decades.

Who owns faculty inventions? Stanford v. Roche

Apparently Stanford University thinks they do. And if they succeed in a court case to be argued at the Supreme Court on Monday their approach to faculty inventions would be a reversal of nearly a century of protections of faculty academic freedom.

The case (Stanford v. Roche) involves an interpretation of the Bayh-Dole Act which was passed in 1980 to encourage the commercialization of research funded by the federal government. Congress granted universities who receive federal research money the right to commercialize new technology through the licensing of patents to which they have proper title. Stanford maintains the Act gives them, automatically, full title to faculty inventions.

Typically, when hired faculty assign their rights, in writing, to inventions to their university in return for a division of any royalty revenue the invention might generate if licensed to the private sector for commercial purposes. For some universities, particularly Stanford and U.C. Berkeley, this has been a very lucrative arrangement. Companies like Genentech and Google have generated billions of dollars of licensing revenue back to those universities and to their faculty inventors for use of those original inventions.

Since the federal government did not think they were very good at that process of spinning off intellectual property they allowed universities to step into their shoes when inventions emerged from federally funded research on university campuses. But that grant of any rights the federal government may have had was not meant to take away the right of faculty to their own inventions much less to any revenue stream those inventions might generate.

If Stanford’s view of the world were to prevail it would reduce the status of faculty, who hold appointments, into mere employees engaged to do “work for hire” that belongs to the university. In other words, the university would cease to be a university, it would become no different than a private sector corporation. This would of course destroy the unique incentives and culture found at a university that lead to pathbreaking innovation in the first place.

An amicus brief defending the rights of faculty has been filed by the AAUP (of which I am a member), the IEEE-US and IP Advocate. The American Intellectual Property Law Association has also filed an amicus brief that makes a parallel argument.

Modern finance capital’s godfather Joe Flom Dies at 87

Flom’s leadership of Skadden Arps, the giant NY based corporate law firm, helped alter the shape of modern capitalism. Flom helped revitalize the market for corporate control as the investment banking world warmed up to the idea that they could and should help with hostile take overs. An era of significant change in management culture followed.

Joseph H. Flom, Pioneering Deal Lawyer, Dies at 87 – NYTimes.com.

Crony Capitalism and “The Great Arab Revolt”

The only comment I would add to this otherwise excellent analysis of the current revolutionary wave washing over the middle east and north Africa by Michigan historian Juan Cole is that the combination of authoritarian rule and neo-liberal reform is not peculiar to the region.

There is no alternative, as Thatcher would say, to authoritarian rule in order to implement neo-liberal reform – from Poland to China to Egypt it has always and everywhere been accompanied by repression, forced restructuring and unemployment and political corruption leading to inequality and the harshening of class conflict.

The myth of the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall that globalization would lead to a stable rule of law and democracy has now been exposed for what it is. The events of the last few weeks, only the most visible of a long wave of resistance to restructuring in places like Egypt, only highlight this reality.

Cole says there are now renewed hopes for liberalization, which he suggests indirectly are naive. That is to be determined. The question is the content of “liberalization” – the aspirations of a Wael Ghonim, the Google entrepreneur in Egypt, are likely to be satisfied with a far different approach to reform than the textile workers at Ghazl Shebeen el-Koum.

The Great Arab Revolt | The Nation.

Is Egypt headed for the Weimar “Solution”?

The Times finally wakes up and notices the Egyptian labor movement. Of course, more than 2 million workers have gone on strike in Egypt in the last few years. The 3 week effort to push Mubarak out of power was the cherry on the sundae of a very deep and long effort.

But big questions remain: how will labor organize itself? will it push beyond demands for union recognition and confront basic questions of economic and political organization?

In Germany in 1919 a revived labor movement at the heart of the German Revolution of 1981-19  led to the fall of the monarchy and then the creation of the Weimar Republic. While many on the left viewed it as a new form of progressive government it was hobbled by all sorts of political compromises that in fact left a door open for the restoration of authoritarian rule – in the form of the new Nazi party.

Egypt must avoid that outcome. It is not clear that there is an “Egyptian solution,” however, without a regional solution that encompasses the rest of the Arab world and Israel as well. None of the countries in the region can stand on their own. to be independent of big power influence they need to organize together, democratically.

Workers Press Demands After Aiding Egypt’s Revolt – NYTimes.com.