What the hell is Barack Obama's presidency for?

Ask any Tea Party Republican what he thinks Obama's presidency is for, and he'll probably say some variant of, "To establish socialism in America." 

What with so many conservatives convinced that President Obama is the most liberal president we've ever had, I wonder how they process the fact that so many real liberals are so severely disappointed in him for not being liberal enough, for caving or just seeming not to try, again and again?  

Gary Younge captures liberals' collective regret at the wasted promise of Barack Obama's two terms in office:

Barack Obama has now been in power for longer than Johnson was, and the question remains: "What the hell's his presidency for?" His second term has been characterised by a profound sense of drift in principle and policy. While posing as the ally of the immigrant he is deporting people at a faster clip than any of his predecessors; while claiming to be a supporter of labour he's championing trade deals that will undercut American jobs and wages. In December, even as he pursued one whistleblower, Edward Snowden and kept another, Chelsea Manning, incarcerated, he told the crowd at Nelson Mandela's funeral: "There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba's struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people."

If there was a plot, he's lost it. If there was a point, few can remember it. If he had a big idea, he shrank it. If there's a moral compass powerful enough to guide such contradictions to more consistent waters, it is in urgent need of being reset.

What the hell is Barack Obama's presidency for?

By Gary Younge

February 23, 2014 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3n27d

Safety net reduces poverty - now more than ever

LBJ and every Democrat since then was right: the safety net works. We have reduced poverty.

The facts show that we are right and the critics are wrong. Liberals should never apologize for policies that have saved millions of lives. 

We liberals should be proud! 

Study: U.S. poverty rate decreased over past half-century thanks to safety-net programs

By Zachary A. Goldfarb

December 10, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/IMOJhu

What's good for a business is not necessarily good for Business, or for Us

Since the 1980s, business schools have taught future executives that shareholder value maximization (SVM) is the best way to structure the operations of a firm and measure its performance.  Yet a few years ago, precipitated by the financial crisis, something changed.  Even Businessweek, one of the biggest cheerleaders of b-school since its ratings and admissions info is a cottage industry for the publication, acknowledged it in 2010: "How Business Schools Lost Their Way."  

No less than former GE CEO Jack Welch, the hero of many a business school case study, has seen the light and fallen from his high horse, calling SVM "the dumbest idea in the world."  Perhaps that's because GE lost 60 percent of its market value since Welch left in 2001?  Is GE that much worse now, or was it overvalued then?

Explaining what Welch meant, Forbes' Steve Denning argued that in practice, SVM is not so much about executives' maximizing the firm's value, but rather managing (or manipulating) investors' expectations of the firm's value.  Citing the example of GE, he concluded that Welch & Co. were clearly managing the firm's earnings with uncanny precision.  Denning argues for regulatory changes that could thwart the influence of managed earnings and managed expectations, and get business back to the previous dogma of management guru Peter Drucker that, "There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer."  

Using other words, celebrated business leader Steve Jobs echoed Drucker's classic sentiment to biographer Walter Isaacson.

Meanwhile, alternative theories like the Triple Bottom Line and Porter's Shared Value have started to gain credence.  More companies are at least paying lip service to it, and the related concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).  Personally, I believe CSR is bunk.*  Expecting firms to focus on something other than their bottom line is misguided and naive, no matter what they state on their websites and annual reports.  It's not what they're made to do.  What are the internal incentives for firm employees to promote CSR?  Few or none.  Meanwhile, CSR gives irresponsible firms PR cover for their misdeeds.

(*When CSR really works is when consumer watchdogs, labor unions, environmentalists and other organizations shine the light of public scrutiny on the firm's lofty stated aspirations.  Yet this is just public regulation by other means -- and arguably not the most efficient means -- not the result of public altruism by the firm. And crucially, these public critics are often not even the firm's customers, shareholders or employees, but rather "stakeholders" in the most amorphous sense of CSR, meaning they may have no direct economic stake in the firm's performance.)

But I want to talk about the public arena.

Tragically, the theory of SVM has been accepted by many policy-makers and academics as the best model not only for individual firms, but also the model around which to structure our economy.  In effect, these public-sector cheerleaders of SVM gave up their prerogative and obligation to engage in precisely the kind of long-term planning for the common good that firm-level SVM is a incapable of doing.  What is good for the firm is the firm's decision; what is good for society is not.  It's ours, the people's.  

Yet too many have swallowed the Kool-Aid that the "invisible hand," i.e. the mystical, untraceable aggregate of millions of individual business decisions, leads to the best outcomes in all respects for society.  Taken to its logical conclusion, this misguided belief compels policy-makers and regulators not to meddle at all; they should get out of business's way and let the magical accounting of economic debits and credits do its thing.  Because better outcomes for society simply aren't achievable.  Nay, a committed group of human beings with a singular purpose has no purpose, in their view, outside the confines of the firm.  

(The one exception to this rule of human endeavor, conservatives tell us, is private charity, which they believe should replace publicly-funded safety nets.  Yet a simple look at poverty statistics pre- and post-LBJ show us that charity never was, and never can be, nearly adequate to "mop up" the Dickensian poor among us.  Indeed, the key failing of private charity -- with its high overhead, wasteful duplication, lack of scale, and most importantly, non-reporting on performance -- is that it is at its weakest when it's needed most: during economic downturns.)

Certainly, we must strive for a delicate balance between impeding business and giving it free dominion over society.  Unfortunately, today we hear many thinkers and politicians on the Right calling for chainsawing regulations and giving polluting industries and exploitative labor practices free reign over our economy -- all in the name of creating jobs.  Indeed, I have no doubt that gutting regulations would boost those firms' bottom lines in the short and even medium term, and even create jobs.  What worries me is the long term.  When our productivity suffers from lack of skills and capital that have been exported, never to return.  When unaccounted-for pollution creates enormous health costs which nevertheless exist in the real economy yet are absent in polluters' financial statements.  When we have privatized every government service and public asset until we are at the mercy of executives whose primary motivation is this year's bonus, and next year's "golden parachute."  

To whom then do we appeal for amelioration, when there is nobody to appeal to but impersonal market forces?

"The Dumbest Idea in the World": Corporate America's False - and Dangerous - Ideology of Shareholder Value

By Lynn Stout  

August 29, 2012 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/dumbest-idea-world-corporate-americas-false-and-dangerous-ideology-shareholder-value?paging=off