Even though the framers were pretty bad about race, and they certainly didn’t understand sex equality, the one thing the framers got was class. They understood that the biggest risk was to create an aristocracy. And so they insisted, as Madison said, that ‘the people’ meant ‘not the rich more than the poor.’ We’ve completely betrayed that commitment.
— Lawrence Lessig
Watch Lessig’s entire 12-minute interview with Bill Moyers:
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
— Lord Acton
I was born in Canada and came to the US between my sophomore and junior year in high school. One of my first courses in my newly adopted country was high school civics. I learned with a newcomer’s sense of awe about the three branches of government and their important role in each checking the power of the other. It is highly attributed that this system of checks and balances is the genius of the America.
In the intervening years since those wide-eyed high school years I have been a casual observer of the reality that power and money are self preserving. …
A tip of the hat and a hearty thank you to Len Edgerly and his new podcast, The Kindle Chronicles. I joined the Kindle revolution a few months ago and have been amazed at how beautifully this gadget fits into my arsenal of tech toys. I went looking for a podcast that would allow me to get even more out of my Kindle. I stumbled on to Len’s Kindle Chronicles and have been hooked ever since.
The Kindle Chronicles have a wonderful format that includes well defined sections for
It is a great format and his recent effort to keep the show around 30 minutes has resulted in an outstanding half-hour of content. …
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair.
— George Burns
David Byrne has an excellent article on the music business over at Wired. He offers this brilliant insight into music business today:
What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.
A very good read.
Gretchen Morgensen has written an insightful article in the Sunday Business Section of the New York Times. After the heartbreaking introduction of a homeowner in New Jersey who would like more than anything to keep her home, Gretchen offers the following insight:
Lenders, government officials and loan servicers, who take in borrowers’ monthly mortgage payments, contend that troubled borrowers everywhere are being helped to stay in their homes by those overseeing their loans. But neither data nor anecdotal evidence supports this view. A recent survey of 16 top subprime loan servicers by Moody’s Investors Service found that for the first six months of 2007, an average of only 1 percent of loans experiencing an interest rate adjustment, or reset, had been modified.
A few minutes of logical thought would lead one to assume that lowering the interest rate of troubled loans so that the homeowner can continue to make payments and keep the house would be the best result for all concerned. …