New York Now a Toxic City

Bigotry takes many forms.  One form of bigotry involves intolerance of others' political views or economic behaviors. Such bigotry can be as violent as racial or religious hatred.  Dissidents in big-government states have been prevented from working, have been incarcerated, have been tortured, and have been killed.  Examples include the McCarthyism of the 1950s, when communists were prevented from working in the film industry; the suppression of the Soviet Union and China, which often involved incarceration in prison camps, torture, and murder; and the  suppression of dissidents, along with Jews, Gypsies, and uncooperative Catholic leaders, in Nazi Germany.* 

New York increasingly exhibits political bigotry.  The New York Post reported on June 4 that 26 of 51 New York City Councilmen wrote a letter to Wal-Mart demanding that the firm stop giving charity in New York.  The Post reports that Wal-Mart had announced $3 million in gifts to New York this year. It adds, "Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called the donations “toxic money,” and accused Walmart of waging a “cynical public-relations campaign that disguises Walmart’s backwards anti-job agenda."

Rather than Wal-Mart's charity being toxic money, New York has become a toxic city. It is New York that destroys jobs and destroys wages through its inept regulatory regimes, specifically including the state ban on fracking, whose harms are vastly exaggerated. The high cost of regulation in New York has driven hundreds of corporate headquarters out of the city.  When I was a child, a quarter of the industrial firms still had headquarters there. Because of the policies of jobs-destroying politicians like Melissa Mark-Viverito, three quarters of the headquarters are gone.
 
*When I visited the Dachau concentration camp in 1975, I learned that many Catholic priests had been imprisoned there along with Jews.  American universities today are frequently anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic, just as Hitler and Stalin were.

On the Immorality of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee

Democracy Now! quotes Haitian authorities as saying that the death toll due to the earthquake may exceed 300,000. Public service organizations around the world have been donating to the relief effort. Police officers from New York City, the Red Cross and many other organizations have been donating time and money. CNN lists the highest rated American charities that have been helping the Haitians.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee has failed to contribute to the Haitian relief effort. Much as Wal-Mart failed to contribute to environmental causes, so might the Nobel Peace Prize Committee be considered to have behaved selfishly and with disdain for world peace. Its self-centered commitment to its charter overlooks more important social justice considerations. If Wal-Mart ought to have breached its duty to shareholders, why might the Nobel Foundation be exempt from a parallel moral imperative? As of 2007, the Foundation had over $500 million laying fallow.

The mass deaths in Haiti would seem to outweigh the committee's obsession with fiduciary duty. If one might complain about a business firm's lack of corporate social responsibility, might we say that the morals of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee are tainted? And because they are tainted, the Committee has lost credibility in designating a peace prize, which by its own nature depends on good ethics.

Thierry Meyssan of Voltaire.net asserts that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee breached its fiduciary duty in an additional way. Meyssan claims that there was a "despicable relationship between Barack Obama and the Nobel Committee" before the Committee chose to grant the award to him. Meyssan writes:

"in 2006, the European Command (i.e. the regional command of U.S. troops whose authority then covered both Europe and most of Africa) solicited Barack Obama, a Senator of Kenyan origin, to participate in a secret inter-agency (CIA-NED-USAID-NSA)" task force that was meant to destabilize the Kenyan government. The goal was to use his status as a parliamentarian to conduct a tour of Africa that would defend the interests of pharmaceutical companies (against off-patent productions) and to counter Chinese influence in Kenya and Sudan..."

Washington wanted to topple the regime in Kenya, according to Meyssan and recruited Obama to make a much-publicized trip to Kenya, in which he interfered with local politics and indeed helped to destabilize the country and helped his cousin, Odinga. The intervention led to a political crisis, and Madelaine Albright invited the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights to mediate. The Prime Minister of Norway, Thorbjørn Jagland chaired the Center. Jagland went on to become chair of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Meyssan seems to be asserting that Obama and Jagland cooperated in the destabilization of Kenya. As a result, there were elements of self dealing and a moral breach in the award to Obama.

In any case, it is evident that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has ceased acting as a socially responsible body. The appointment of a political hack like Jagland, who also has been appointed "Secretary General of the Council of Europe following a behind-the-scenes agreement between Washington and Moscow" is consistent with my letter last week that the Committee has become politicized and so no longer retains credibility. In particular, Madeleine Albright is a Democrat and the Committee has awarded two prizes to US Democrats in the past two years.

The public ought to demand that the Nobel Foundation end its self-centered and frivolous fixation on peace prizes and donate the large growth in Alfred Nobel's original endowment to dying Haitians. If Wal-Mart is expected to behave charitably, should we ask less of those who award peace prizes?

Will TIAA-CREF Participants Put Their Money Where Their Rhetoric Is?

Charles Fishman quotes quite a few academics in his book The Wal-Mart Effect. Fishman argues that Wal-Mart should take various actions that would reduce its profit margins but improve its corporate social responsibility. Such actions might even potentially increase stock prices if the public responds positively to Wal-Mart's better public image. The academics whom Fishman quotes universally believe that Wal-Mart stockholders should live with lower returns in exchange for Wal-Mart's enhanced social responsiblity.

I have previously suggested that academics put their money where there mouths are:

"Why doesn't TIAA-CREF, the college retirement fund, take over Wal-Mart? It probably has the capitalization. Then Wal-Mart can be improved socially,and if the professors' stocks drop 30 percent, they will be glad because they saved the third world, right? I haven't heard any screams from MIT, the University of Missouri or other universities for such a strategy."

In order to pursue this proposal, I have just sent the following e-mail to the governing board of TIAA-CREF:

Dear CREF/TIAA Board:

As a TIAA/CREF participant I would like to put a resolution before the board that CREF should devote a 25 percent portion of its diversified stock portfolio to acquire shares in Wal-Mart in order that university and related professions may influence corporate policy and social responsiblity at Wal-Mart. Asking CREF participants to invest in Wal-Mart to improve the lot of 1.8 million Wal-Mart employees is a small sacrifice.

Would you please let me know how to make this proposal before your plenary meeting? Thank you,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Trade, Wal-Mart and New York Democrats’ Attack on the Poor

The Economist 's lead story this week on globalization ("Tired of Globalization: But in Need of Much More of it"—Nov. 5) mentions Senator Schumer’s proposal to impose a 39% tariff on Chinese imports. As well, the New York City Council, the politburo of the People’s Republic of New York City, has imposed a law imposing health insurance costs on large supermarkets in order to capriciously discriminate against Wal Mart. At the same time, there were anti-trade demonstrations in Argentina concerning the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and by implication the latest round of tariff-reduction talks that especially affect agriculture.

Schumer is a Harvard grad and, hopefully was exposed to David Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage in college (although along with the Harvard faculty’s belief that there are no differences between men and women, who knows what laws of economics they have concocted).

These latest assaults on economic freedom do what all restraints on economic freedom ultimately do—assault the poor. Schumer’s bill would forestall economic progress in China, in the long term reducing wage gains and diminishing learning of Chinese workers and future entrepreneurs. The ban on Wal-Mart means that those New Yorkers with low incomes must pay inflated prices for their groceries. The Doha round of trade talks would directly help the farmers of Brazil, Africa and other third world countries and low-wage people in America, while the agricultural tariffs that the demonstators seem to support help domestic producers such as Del Monte at consumers' expense.

I brought these issues up in my class at Brooklyn College, and was interested in how few students (a) had heard of the theory of comparative advantage, (b) had thought about the impact of trade on economic outcomes and freedom and (c) had heard of or were critical of the ban on Wal Mart and protectionism. One student argued that Asians who work in factories would be better off starving to death than working in American factories overseas because of poor factory conditions. This student did not say whether she wished her ancestors had so starved to death in the 19th century. Another student said that it is good that poor people in New York pay higher prices to supermarkets because they would just fritter away the money anyway. I questioned the student whether this wasn't the same economic philosophy that governs North Korea, and why wouldn't he want to live there.

It seems to me that the left’s use of universities and schools to ideologically brainwash students to believe in their failed and erroneous economic theories has worked. It will be a long path to counteract the economic ignorance that the schools and universities have wrought on the American public, and that shows itself in the illiterate discussions of trade among elected officials like New York's Senator Schumer and New York City's politburo, and among left wing demonstrators.