765 American Universities have combined endowments of $340 billion.  The top ten total $100 billion.  Eleven members of SDS at the University of FL are on hunger strike to pressure administrators to invest its $1.2 billion endowment in Socially Responsible Investments.

These crazies obviously failed econ 101.  From HuffPost

At the core of the students' demand is the notion that investors are ultimately responsible for the practices of the companies in which they are invested. If profits are being made by violating human rights or international environmental norms, then investors are morally obligated to do something about it . . .

Maybe not so crazy.    

SRIs screen investments for social and environmental bad behavior.  Typically they reject weapons makers, tobacco goons, union-busters and polluters.  At $340 billion, university endowment funds could profoundly influence corporate behavior.  

Make a call to support SDS.

The following is a response to a question I received yesterday about a comment I made.  In the comment I suggested that war is "the ultimate form of capital devaluation."

The person was asking what I meant.

Below the fold is my reply.

The news isn't good. There is discussion of a US recession and its impacts globally when the appropriate analogy might be depression (financial and otherwise).  Energy prices (partially driven by Peak Oil and other Peaking elements) are continuing their upwards path that might only be stunted by that global recession.  Food prices are escalating, across the board, while supplies are falling.  The financial meltdowns are freezing credit markets.  The economic situation, for many countries and communities and businesses and individuals, is driving people toward an ever greater focus on the immediate challenges rather than longer-term horizons. And, then there is that pesky little thing: Global Warming.

To navigate a course through the Perfect Storm of Peak Oil and Global Warming will require significant investment. Investment in revamped and new infrastructure (energy efficiency and renewable energy). Investment in research. Investment ... And, while that investment offers tremendous opportunity for "gain" (energy savings, profit from renewable energy, societal benefits through reduced pollution, avoided costs due to Global Warming), the financial crunch and other pressures make it that much harder to set aside the resources for that capital investment.

William I. Robinson’s A Theory of Global Capitalism is one of these books that deserve greater visibility, beyond academia. It is short, dense and somewhat demanding on the reader but ultimately well worth it. It is theoretically and conceptually clear. It truly enlightens the reader as to the history, components and dynamics of global capitalism. It is well-written, so, I will be using quite a few quotes.

This review will be broken up into four parts so as to do justice to the substance of the book.

Cross-posted at The Global Sociology Blog.

For the first time since the 1970s a British corporation has been nationalized following the collapse of Northern Rock Bank.

The rough beast that is George W. Bush--gaze blank and pitiless as the sun--is today slouching towards the continent of Africa, decreeing that henceforth the peoples of Africa must, for the greater good of global capital, be pitchforked into The New World Order. In Africa, so sayeth the beast, "joint venturing with good, capable people is what the future is all about."

Fantastically, the people who put the words into George II's mouth have, with the text of his African address, admitted that the interests of the people of Africa must be subsumed in those of global capital (headquartered, natch, in the USA). They are echoing, in Bushspeak, what the exiled Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o so artfully expressed two years ago in his work The Wizard of the Crow.

Side-by-side comparisons of the words of the wizard, and of the beast, below.

Snipped from a report and thread about the loss of real estate industrial complex employment and the spreading repercussions throughout finance and the economy as a whole. Realtors Exiting the Business

>An Observer | 01.10.08 - 12:10 pm - "... all we seem to get are resumes from Indians here on work visas. What's going on?"

Just a few months ago the global marketplace was being applauded as a place of great liquidity (which is what matters, not great value or distribution just lots of cash) and the regulatory environment and everything else about the legal framework seemed to be near optimal for market-oriented, private-profit driven enterprises. Then along came the sub prime scare, which has apparently affected investor sentiment and the markets have taken a plunge. Is this a chink in the armor of "tough love" capitalism (character-building market discipline for the poor and middle class--social welfare for the rich), where the focus on supply-side indicators has left stagnant demand that finally caught up with profit making? The suffering of the less privileged parts of the population, namely African-American homeowners in subtext, now requires a market correction. Does this expose a flaw in the neoliberal policies, those policies which are based on creating a tax/subsidy system which provides a welfare state for the rich and imposes the cost upon the poor?

  This was an old writing of mine that I have decided to post since I am posting other articles in my ongoing "How to Combat Corporate Propaganda" series. I think this site is really starting to be a vehicle for citizens to showcase their analyses of corporatism and the culture the institutions of corporatism has fostered.

I am on a listserv that discusses the death penalty and received this urgent plea to direct traffic to the following YouTube video Workman Video.  The executive order discussed below and the relevant pleadings are here Tennessee Lethal Injection Pleadings.

The rest is below the fold.  Thanks.  

Truly, the recent capital gains and dividend tax cuts are a monster get-over for the rich, and rob the rest of us who work for a living. I illustrated this to myself just now with crystal clarity, as I went over my tax returns.

Last year I made some $68,000, not too shabby. Some small portions of that were interest, dividends, and capital gains from my miscellaneous investments.  When it all shook out, I paid $11,689 in tax.

I then thought about interest, dividend, and capital gains income, and thought, "what if all of my 2006 income (same $68,000!) had been composed of these? What happens to my taxes then?" Read on for what I discovered...

This is a revisitation of Joel Kovel's (2002) book The Enemy of Nature in light of a discussion I had with Joel, who says he is currently working on a 2nd edition.  Kovel's work is the quintessential manifesto of ecosocialism (notwithstanding the actual "Ecosocialist Manifesto" he co-wrote with Michael Lowy).  The ecological crisis is dire, and capitalism is at fault.  But there are many other reader-accessible works which display an ecosocialist bent; what is important about Kovel's work, I argue here, is its attack on the cynicism of our time.

I know this is late in the news cycle, but in case no one else mentioned it, George Will bloviated about the minimum wage on the WaPo op-ed page today, saying,

But the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices.

Will really disgraced himself and everything he professes to believe in by making this statement. Calling labor a commodity, i.e. something that has a price in a market, is the same as calling humanity a commodity. This is the ideology of slavery, including our own present version known as a wage slavery, where one just rents oneself out to the highest bidder and which was sorely resented as the "daring new depravity of the times" by Civil War veterans returning from battle.

Someone George Will may be familiar with had a little bit different take:

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

This is from Abraham Lincoln's First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861.

George Will is odious and loathsome.

This is the heading for a paragraph in Rich Karlgaard's (publisher of Forbes Magazine) column this issue - the title of the whole piece is "Our Challenge is Change not Globalization".  

He mentions a number which seems to astonish even he, one of the cheerleaders of capitalism.  

A few columns ago I speculated that the sum of all venture capital, private equity and LBO funds in the world totaled somewhere north of $500 billion.  Whoops, I was wrong.  It's more like $2.1 trillion.  This actually makes my point better.  There's an ocean of money sloshing around the planet in search of opportunity.......

BTW he also mentions "the left wing bloggers of Daily Kos" and some of the favorites here recently elected in the context of "globalization.".... I think this place is considered a dire threat to capitalism as we know it.....Sorry, for the record, I do NOT consider myself "left wing" - I suspect I am one of a now extinct species, a "Rockefeller Republican" - conservative in many respects but socially conscious.........

more below

The Democrats are faced with a dilemma: what to do with the AMT. It should not be scrapped (too much revenue would be lost) but in present form it will tax people it was not designed to tax: the middle class, the people who elected them. Democrats are also faced with the sunset provision on the estate tax; they have to do something about that, too.

Conservative economists have sold us a bill of goods with the idea that we should cut taxes on capital and only tax income from work. That has been part of the rationale behind both Reagan's and W's tax cuts. We now tax work much more highly than capital; conservatives would like to strip all taxes on capital--and on wealth. What should Democrats do?

I have heard it said we've already done all that which TR's Bullmoose agenda called for -- and to an extent, that's right. Only, since the early 1980s, since Reagan, in fact, we've been steadily UNDOING all that.

Wake up America and learn how to count your own money once again.

Forgive me if it seems like I'm just writing this to hear myself talk, but this trend is scaring the shit out of me.  Again, just a reminder, I'm a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER ^TM Professional.  I give people money advice for a living.  Okay, that's out of the way.  So I want to talk about a phenomenon I've now seen enough times to call a problem.  There are a lot of really nice people, who are scuttling their retirement ship on the hopes of opening and operating a successful franchise.  While the appeal is bipartisan, I've found dittoheads to be particularly vulnerable to the siren's song.  In the first quarter of this year I met with 5 different people (3 were self-described dittoheads...and, no, they didn't know about my book.  I don't mix money and politics) who wanted to know about a scheme that would let them use their 401(k) money to open a franchise.  

Many have had the misfortune of hearing me talk adnauseam about economics and how our purchase decisions influence investment. I have often talked about how vital it is that society addresses not only the investment side of the equation, however the demand side too. Without integrating Corporate Behavior/Social Responsibility data into the shopping and purchasing experience people will simply consider product quality and price (generally). Thus a low cost, moderate quality product will typically generate a healthy return to all within its supply chain. This return will help shape equity value or investment performance of the stock. And this performance will shape how the stock attracts investors. Therefore, if investment remains isolated from market demand -companies that produce purely low cost goods without regard for sustainability, people or resources will benefit by attracting greater equity value and access to capital for expansion.