openpolitics.com

The former strategist had a different assessment. “She’s the single most self-centered person I’ve run into in politics—it’s all about her. They do these movies together, and she does a word count: she has to have the same number of words on camera as he does or they have to reshoot.”

.. “This is the most adult relationship the guy’s ever had.” But he suggested that it hasn’t been good for his campaign. “The core problem was that he was not willing to do the things he’d have to do to run for President. And Callista did not want him to run for President. That’s why he had to buy her so much damn jewelry.”

.. In the unlikely event that Callista Gingrich did become First Lady, she would be unusually well suited for the position. She is good with children, bending down to touch their hands in Manchester, hoisting them onto her lap to meet her elephant at Mount Vernon. She told me that if she were First Lady she would focus on promoting music education—precisely the kind of uncontroversial passion that plays well with everyone, like Laura Bush’s crusade against illiteracy

.. Once, in Cedar Rapids, I happened to run into her in the women’s bathroom at the airport. In her suit and pearls, with her stiff coiffure, she looked as if she had just exited a beauty parlor in 1962. “I don’t think she owns a pair of jeans,” R. C. Hammond joked. “Casual Friday is not something that happens a lot around Callista.”

If you talk to any security or intelligence professional, they'll tell you that the consequences of the Arab Spring -- it turned one this week -- have been devastating to U.S. security interests in the region. Information gathering, operations, intelligence, and general context about the Middle East and North Africa had become so lopsided -- utterly reliant on the security services of the unpopular dictatorships in the region -- that their overthrow more of less crippled U.S. efforts.

How Bookmarking Became A Consumerist Activity

In a nutshell, that theme—the intended message of the speech—is: I am a reasonable guy, still hoping to be a uniter rather than a divider, and I have a plan to deal with the trends that make us all worry about our economy and society. Also, I'm very patriotic—and if you think I'm weak or pussy-footing, go ask Osama bin Laden about that.

The more beautiful the woman, the simpler the dress should be. Perhaps Matt wrote it to showcase Jackie's gorgeous voice, phrasing, emotive delivery, and felt that a fancier-schmancier song would upstage her.

The Spiritans have a rich history of serving the poor and marginalized. Spiritans in the 1840s dedicated themselves to working with newly freed slaves on the islands of Haiti, Mauritius and Réunion.

As a company and as individuals, we are defined by our values. Unfortunately some people are questioning Apple’s values today, and I’d like to address this with you directly. We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are.

For the many hundreds of you who are based at our suppliers’ manufacturing sites around the world, or spend long stretches working there away from your families, I know you are as outraged by this as I am. For the people who aren’t as close to the supply chain, you have a right to know the facts.

The negotiation displayed some classic Steve Jobs negotiating tactics. Giancarlo said Jobs called him at home at dinnertime on Valentine’s Day, as the two sides were haggling. Jobs talked for a while, Giancarlo related. “And then he said to me, ‘Can you get email at home?’ “ Giancarlo was taken aback. This was 2007, after all, when broadband Internet was ubiquitous in homes in the US, let alone that of a Silicon Valley executive who had worked for years on advanced Internet technology. “And he’s asking me if I’m able to get email at home. You know he’s just trying to press my buttons—in the nicest possible way.”

‘‘We cannot continue to see chief executives’ pay rising at 13 percent a year while the performance of companies on the stock exchange languishes well behind,’’ Cable told Parliament on Monday. ‘‘And we can’t accept top pay rising at five times the rate of average workers’ pay as it did last year.’’ Chilling words for the City, especially since Cable serves in the cabinet of a Conservative prime minister.

.. But the hard part is embracing higher taxes or a lower salary. ‘‘I personally believe that when it comes to policy, you shouldn’t be pursuing self-interest but the public interest,’’ Soros said. But Davos Man prefers to believe in a world of ‘‘kumbaya’’ capitalism, where self-interest and the public interest would coincide. Openly insisting that this is not always the case is how Soros really has betrayed his class.

Because when you fire a person the wrong way — that is, without generosity and respect — you can be sure of two things.

1. You’ve hurt someone unnecessarily.
2. And you’ve set up your organization for a future relationship from hell. After all, terminated employees don’t just fade away. They usually reappear, and pretty rapidly, as customers, suppliers, distributors, or in the worst-case scenario, competitors with an ax to grind.

By the way, this is a column about Ron Paul.

.. But Paul is not really the GOP’s problem. It’s his followers, perhaps as much as 15 percent of the general electorate, many of them young, vocal and highly energized. Like Paul himself, they’re not exactly party regulars. No, Paul and his followers promise to be a lot like that fired employee who, if “handled” incorrectly at farewell, will make it his life’s work to, if not bring your organization down, at least show you how very wrong you were to cut the cord.

Citelighter saves, organizes, and cites information for you while you research so you don't have to

But after seeing clips from a June 1, 2010 CNN report, in which the harsh realities of life at Foxconn are revealed, Stewart quickly changes his tune. According to the segment, Foxconn employees work up to 35 hours at a stretch for $.31 an hour. If they try to form a union they could get 12 years in prison, which Stewart points out wouldn't be much of a difference from life at the factory where workers live in 8-person dormitories.

"This is an abomination and yet I am complicit," admitted Stewart, who goes on to say he must abandon his gadgets

.. Siri informs Stewart that were Foxconn to implement humane conditions, his iPod would cost 23 percent more.

Stewart is aghast: "Wow! I would expect if we were working people to death, we'd be getting like 30 to 35 percent savings," he joked.

Not long after the iPad went on sale in early April, the Ilinois Institute of Technology announced that it would be providing each member of next fall’s freshman class with one of the new Apple devices. School officials said that the iPad would allow students to take notes, check email, and read books. Which books they had in mind is not precisely clear except for this: they are not likely to be textbooks. While a number of publishers, like McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin, have signed on with software developer ScrollMotion to produce textbooks for the iPad—works that would exploit its multimedia capabilities with video lectures, historical film clips, educational games, and interactive quizzes—almost none of those books yet exist.

Collect and Highlight, Then Remember

Harley Earl was the first designer brought in by a major auto manufacturer.

The most contentious example of postmodern design, however, is the AT&T building in New York which was completed in 1984.

.. “The terrible roar of objection centred on the top—the broken pediment,” she explained. “They hated it. There were people fighting each other in the pages of the press: aggressive, personal, vindictive, often nothing to do with architecture. Some people petitioned. Others denounced us. A lot of people attacked the authorities that had allowed construction… it went on and on.”

.. Postmodernism aimed further than merely calling for a re-evaluation of power structures: it said that we are all in our very selves nothing more than the breathing aggregate of those structures. It contends that we cannot stand apart from the demands and identities that these structures and discourses confer upon us. Adios the Enlightenment. See you later Romanticism. Instead, it holds that we move through a series of co-ordinates on various maps—class, gender, religious, sexual, ethnic, situational—and that those co-ordinates are actually our only identity. We are entirely constructed. There is nothing else. And this, in an over-simplified nutshell, is the main challenge that postmodernism brought to the great banquet of human ideas because it changed the game from one of self-determination (Kant et al) to other-determination.

.. we are all becoming more comfortable with the idea of holding two irreconcilable ideas in our heads: that no system of meaning can have a monopoly on the truth, but that we still have to render the truth through our chosen system of meaning. So the postmodern challenge, while no less radical, somehow feels less powerful to us. We are learning to live with it.

.. A lack of confidence in the tenets, skills and aesthetics of literature permeated the culture and few felt secure or able or skilled enough or politically permitted to distinguish or recognise the schlock from the not. And so, sure enough, in the absence of any aesthetic criteria, it became more and more useful to assess the value of works according to the profits they yielded.

.. In other words, increasingly, artistic success has become about nothing except money; and, increasingly, artists have come to judge their own success that way, too.

.. So, paradoxically, we arrive at a moment where literature itself has become threatened, first by the artistic credo of postmodernism (the death of the author) and second by the unintended result of that credo, the hegemony of the marketplace.

.. The postmodern solution will no longer do as a response to the world we now find ourselves in. As human beings, we avowedly do not wish to be left with only the market.

.. If we tune in carefully, we can detect this growing desire for authenticity all around us. .. We can recognise it in advertising campaigns such as for Jack Daniel’s, which ache to portray not rebellion but authenticity. We can identify it in the way brands are trying to hold on to, or take up, an interest in ethics, or in a particular ethos.

.. Go deeper still and we can see a growing reverence and appreciation for the man or woman who can make objects well.. We uncover a new emphasis on design through making in the hand-crafted work of the Raw Edges Design Studios, say, with their Self-Made collection, objects that are original, informed by personal stories and limited edition.

This being the WEF, there was lip service paid towards the idea that a group of smart and powerful people, if you get them all in the same room, could come up with ways for the international community to improve the state of the world. But the actual participants didn’t show any sign of believing that: they were insightful with respect to diagnosing the state of the world, tentative in proposing solutions, and downright skeptical when it came to handicapping the likelihood that any of those solutions might actually be implemented.

Certainly there seems to be no belief at all, even among the well-intentioned technocrats at Davos, that coordinated international action will or should solve this particular crisis. And the inevitable conclusion is that the crisis is not going to be averted: it’s only going to get worse. It’s a very scary prospect — but one which it’s very important for global elites to come to terms with. And that’s exactly what they’re doing in Davos this week.

Technological innovation was at the heart of Schumpeter’s vision, and no one today objects to the role of venture capital in financing tech start-ups or to the re-engineering of businesses to take advantage of new technology. Reorganizing firms to exploit special provisions in tax, securities, and bankruptcy laws is a different proposition. That kind of restructuring can be immensely profitable, transferring wealth to investors while making no positive contribution to growth and employment.

The standard operating procedure for private equity has been to buy firms, take them private, and load them up with debt. By taking them private, the new owners escape from the securities laws, which apply only to publicly traded companies. By loading them with debt, they cut the companies’ taxes because the interest is fully deductible from profits, and they use those tax savings to pay themselves generous fees and dividends. If an overleveraged enterprise then fails, they take it into bankruptcy, firing workers and stiffing creditors even though their own firm has already pocketed large gains. And because private-equity partners can receive those gains as “carried interest” (taxed only at 15 percent), they benefit from special legal advantages in yet one more way.

I went to one session on executive compensation yesterday, which was filled with global CEOs of various stripes. And a couple of questions that Lance Knobel would like to ask were, amazingly, raised: should there be some kind of cap on CEO compensation? Maybe in terms of the ratio between the CEO’s pay and that of the average employee? The answer came swiftly and unanimously: no.

.. That panel really helped me understand the general Davos attitude towards Occupy. The delegates here don’t feel threatened by it, so much as they just feel a bit indignant at how misguided it is. Obviously, in a big inchoate sense, inequality is a problem. And maybe Occupy is a manifestation of that problem. But the Davos crowd is not even close to listening carefully to what Occupy has to say: they’re evidence of the problem, but they’re not remotely helpful when it comes to solutions.

As Lance says, “an organization that is at heart a grouping of the world’s largest corporations isn’t necessarily in the best position to improve the state of the world, particularly in an era of the Arab Spring and Occupy”. It’s another way in which Davos feels past its prime.

For the first time in his 60-year career, Soros, now 81, admits he is not sure what to do. “It’s very hard to know how you can be right, given the damage that was done during the boom years,” Soros says. He won’t discuss his portfolio, lest anyone think he’s talking things down to make a buck. But people who know him well say he advocates making long-term stock picks with solid companies, avoiding gold—“the ultimate bubble”—and, mainly, holding cash.

“The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.” To Soros, the spectacular debunking of the credo of efficient markets—the notion that markets are rational and can regulate themselves to avert disaster—“is comparable to the collapse of Marxism as a political system.