ADHD

My youngest sister mentioned this in a recent email. She was having a hard time coping with it--in others. I didn't even know what it meant. So I looked it up on Wikipedia. Then I went on with my breakfast. I didn't think it applied much to Costa Rica, where I live now.

Then it came to me that it did--I know people down here that act that way. One of them is a gringo who is always bragging about his money-making projects--whether you want to hear about them or not. They always have a fantastic future, even though his many projects in the past have always fizzled. He is hyperactive this way, although I never categorized him this way before. I just thought he was a loud-mouth.

And I know a young Tico who cannot pay attention to his business, which really needs it, but has grand plans to become all kinds of things: a opera singer, a ballet dancer, or an actor. If he were still an adolescent, this would be understandable, but he isn't. He takes after his mother, who is also flits from one obsession to the other, never settling down.

The Role of Companies in America's Golden Age

I am still reading Supercapitalism. As I mentioned before Robert B. Reich considers the period between 1945 and 1975 to be America's not quite golden age—and I agreed. Economically is was golden, but socially it was unpleasant with Senator McCarthy (who my father approved of, except for his bad manners) and the start of the Cold War.

He refers to the book The Modern Corporation and Private Property, published in 1932. It noted that top executives of America's giant companies were not even accountable to their own shareholders and operated their companies in their own interest. The solution, the authors said, was to make these executives responsible to a broad range of interests: investors, employees, consumers, and the general public. According to him, this actually happened:

Sitting atop America's largest corporations were men who repeatedly stated that their job was to balance the needs of everyone affected by the corporation. “The job of management.” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address that typified what other chief executives were saying, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the variously affected interest groups...Fortune lectured its executive readers on their duty to maintain a broad national perspective: “To take the professional point of view, the executive must adopt a detached, reserved attitude toward the opportunities and tactics of the moment. He must become an industrial statesman.”

These business leaders could afford to be corporate statesman—acting, in their view, for the betterment of the nation rather than strictly for the benefit of their own consumers and shareholders—because the oligopolistic system allowed them the license to be statesmen. Just as they could grant their blue-collar workers generous wages and benefits without any worry that a competitor would undercut them, they could go to Washington and advocate the Marshal Plan without concern that a rival would steal away market share while their attention was elsewhere.

He finishes this chapter with these words:

Then something happened that changed everything: America and the world got on the road to supercapitalism.

Endocrine Disruptors

From the New York Times: Nicholas D. Kristof

Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip.

Apprehension is growing among many scientists that the cause of all this may be a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products. Some also enter the water supply when estrogens in human urine — compounded when a woman is on the pill — pass through sewage systems and then through water treatment plants.

These endocrine disruptors have complex effects on the human body, particularly during fetal development of males.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

Investigators Suspect Computers Doomed Air France Jet

From the Wall Street Journal

Aviation investigators, running out of time to find the "black boxes" with key information on the crash of Air France Flight 447, suspect a rapid chain of computer and equipment malfunctions stripped the crew of automation today's pilots typically rely on to control a big jetliner.

Based on initial physical evidence and information from automatic maintenance messages sent by the aircraft, these people said, the plane bucked through heavy turbulence created by a thunderstorm without the full protection of its flight-control systems -- safeguards that experts say pilots now often take for granted.

Relying on backup instruments, the Air France pilots apparently struggled to restart flight-management computers even as their plane may have begun breaking up from excessive speed, according to theories developed by investigators.

The New Economy has Destroyed Middle-Class Values

One of these values is the career. The young are no longer interested in one, and the those that have persevered, and accumulated huge college loans, are not happy with the result. They are exploited almost as badly as the factory workers were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. They are well-paid, by comparison, but they are only part of the machinery, which is constantly being improved. As in the Red Queen's world, they have to run to stay in one place.

They are only valued for what they can produce. As one software manager from Microsoft once told me: “They have to produce a lot of high-quality work.” She added that she had demanded that they work on Saturdays, to meet a current crisis. This is is not uncommon in the software world; they sometimes work for days at a time with no sleep, right through the holidays. As another friend told me: “The things you have to do in a startup shorten your life”. After devoting their lives to the company, they get replaced by younger blood when they can no longer keep up the pace. They can always find someone who is smarter and harder-working than they are. To put it bluntly: you gotta kiss ass and eat shit. But I see I have digressed.

I should define some terms. In the title I spoke of the new economy, one that is dominated by the financial industry instead of manufacturing. It is also devoted to a free market, with no social controls of any kind. In other words neoliberalism, but I hesitate to use that term because Americans have no idea what it means—and refuse to acknowledge its existence.

In America, we also speak of the middle-class. In Europe this is referred to in French: the bourgeoisie. Americans are uncomfortable with the term; it is too high-brow for them, and their plain ways of thinking.

I defined these terms so you could understand the following excerpts from False Dawn, by John Gray, a professor at the London School of Economics, where George Soros studied too. We like to think of George as one of our own, but he most definitely is not; he is just another shark swimming where the feeding is best—but one with keen intellectual interests.

To read the following, you will have tolerate some academic language, of the British variety. But it won't kill you. Grit your teeth, and plow on.

Amongst the human needs that free markets neglect are the needs for security and social identity that used to be met by the vocational structures of bourgeois society. A contradiction has emerged between the preconditions of an intact bourgeois civilization and the imperatives of global capitalism. The chronic insecurities of late modern capitalism, especially it most virulent free-market variants, corrode some of the central institutions and values of bourgeois life.

The most notable of these social institutions may be that of the career. In traditional bourgeois societies, most middle-class people could reasonably expect to spend their working lives in a single vocation. Few can now harbor any such hope. (Some American career councilors even recommend a career change every six years. My note.) The deeper effect of economic insecurity is to make the very idea of a career redundant.

In the lives of a working majority, an old-fashioned career in which professional seniority tracks the normal life cycle is barely a memory. The post-war trend to embourgeoisment is being reversed, and working people are being in some degree re-proletarianized.

Although de-bourgeoisification may have advanced furthest in the US, economic insecurity is increasing in nearly all the world's economies. This is partly a side-effect of global free markets, whose workings mimic Gresham's Law (which states that bad money drives out good) by making socially responsible varieties of capitalism progressively less sustainable. World-wide mobility of capital and production triggers a “race to the bottom” in which the more humane capitalist economies are compelled to deregulate and trim back taxes and welfare provisions.

Gray is saying some dynamite stuff here. It's too bad we don't read him—especially Obama's economic advisors. If they really understood him, they might really save America—instead of just pretending to.