That works rather better as a country is on the way up when there are benefits available for widespread distribution but rather less well on the way down when it so visibly becomes every man for himself... M
-----Original Message----- From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 10:36 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; Michael Gurstein Subject: Re: [Futurework] Waiting for Robespierre James Fallows oughtn't to have been surprised by the networking that goes on in the oligarchy. It happens everywhere at all levels. All of us preferentially retain the network of friends that we made in our highly formative adolescent and early adult years (when our frontal lobes were growing and developing enormously as we began to choose the p;articular culture and roles that we wanted in adult life). It's part of our immensely long genetic history in small groups. America is supposed to be more democratic than most advanced countries. But it's rapidly becoming the highly stratified country that older cultures have long since been. In England, for example, the upper middle class, who get their children into the best schools and universities (particularly Oxford and Cambridge), have an almost total lock on the best jobs in the country -- in finance, business, politics, media, academe. And, as James Fallows remarks, many of these people glide in and out of several different networks in which they have pals made in earlier years at university etc.. There are exceptionally gifted individuals who break into these inner circles from below, as it were, but they're relatively scarce in comparison with the "old boy network". This is a tired old phrase, as is "It's not what you know, but who you know, that's important", but true nevertheless. Keith At 15:50 17/12/2010 -0800, Mike wrote: Truthout: BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES Does Pennsylvania Avenue eventually become Wall Street, or does it just seem that way? Obama's former budget director, Peter Orszag, is becoming Citigroup's vice chairman of global banking, at a salary speculated to be well in excess of one million dollars a year - and that doesn't include the "bonuses." Orszag is just one in a long line of top-level Democratic and Republican economic advisers in D.C. who make seamless rides back and forth from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill. As a Reuters article notes: He [Orszag] follows in the footsteps of another prominent Democratic government official - former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who became a senior counselor to Citigroup and helped shape the bank's strategy during the years leading up to the financial crisis. Rubin resigned under a cloud of criticism in early 2009, after the struggling bank accepted $45 billion in U.S. government bailout funds. Rubin has come to symbolize the continuous "neoliberal" school of finance that has been the course of both parties for the last few decades - and many Rubin fellow travelers - such as Geithner and Summers - have been key to the pro-Wall-Street tilt of the current White House. James Fallows of the Atlantic writes that Orszag's jump to Citigroup "should be shocking." But he laments that very few media outlets, political figures or even progressive notables were outraged by another major example of the oligarchy at work. Indeed, Goldman Sachs (which Bush Treasury Secretary Paulson headed at one time) just hired Theo Lubke, the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank's efforts to regulate the derivatives market. Lubke - you know what's coming - will become Goldman Sach's "chief regulatory reform officer in the securities division to help navigate the impending overhaul of financial regulations in the derivatives market." The relationship of government financial advisers and regulators and "banks too big to fail" is as toxic as methane gas in a coal mine. As a result, like the miners who aren't forewarned of the risks of a possible explosion due to the lax regulation of wealthy mine owners, we don't get a warning of financial collapse until it's too late. Mark Karlin Editor, BuzzFlash at Truthout _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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