Pilant’s Business Ethics CBS News
Just when you thought the President’s HAMP program couldn’t be any worse, it is. I teach my classes that just when you think you’ve reached the bottom that there is always more down. Here is solid evidence from the gentlemen at Foreclosureblues.
James Pilant
via Foreclosureblues
From MSNBC -
Nearly half of elderly Americans will face a future with at least one year below or close to the poverty line, according to a new study that showed a huge racial divide in prospects for the elderly.
Mark R. Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said the results of his research contradict popular beliefs about the economic stability of America’s elderly population.
“We have an image of the elderly as doing pretty well,” he said, adding that data spanning 35 years does not support that assumption.
Nobody is safe. Nobody is secure. We face an economic future in which those that have created value, those that have worked for a living, are just pawns in a game of financial monopoly.
James Pilant
A majority of Americans feel that America has is “on the wrong track,” and that they are worse off than they were in 2008.
In a sweeping poll released by Bloomberg today, 66 percent of respondents said that they felt that “things in the nation…have… gotten off on the wrong track,” compared to just 27 percent who felt the country was heading in the right direction. 51 percent of respondents said they were worse off now than they were two years ago.
We need leadership and we need someone in power whose first concern is the welfare of the middle class. Period.
James Pilant
The picture is not directly related to the story (but is fun anyway).
Tammy Hatley stopped to ask a doctor whether he wanted a refill on his coffee before she continued to the front desk this morning.
It may have saved her life.
An elderly patient arriving for an appointment at Lakewood Chiropractic, 2434 N. Woodlawn, shortly before 10:30 a.m. hit the gas pedal instead of the brake, propelling her car through the wall and into the office.
Five hours later, it happened again — this time an elderly man broke the freshly replaced front window with his car.
“It’s been a pretty exciting day,” said Tammy Hatley, a chiropractic assistant.
From the Associated Baptist Press -
Since the origin of Christian social ethics in the late 19th century as an Anglo-American academic-ecclesial discipline, economic problems have been at the center of our profession’s concerns. Christian ethics was born during the days in which the contrast between the vast prosperity of the industrial barons and the vast suffering of those who worked for them became unbearable. The moral concerns that drove early Christian ethics helped contribute to the regulation of industrialization’s excesses during the Progressive Era. The same social compassion supported the creation of a modest social safety net during the Depression and New Deal era.
As a Christian ethicist, I stand in a tradition that both rejected communism as an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism and recognized very early that the only way capitalism would or should survive was through legal regulation of its worst excesses. I don’t say moral regulation because, as Reinhold Niebuhr taught us in his formative work Moral Man and Immoral Society, huge group entities and social structures do not respond to moral suasion. If you are asking a corporation — or a group of corporations, or an entire economic structure — voluntarily to act in such a way as to limit profit, you will fail. You will have to coerce it to do so under the power of law or some other countervailing power, such as the organization of labor.
First, you should go read the whole essay. Gushee posts only after much thought, and since a Christian perspective on business ethics is much rarer than I would have believed, this is important writing.
Second, he is right that large economic units only react to force. The idea of a self regulating marketplace is only partially a reality at the best of times.
James Pilant
Ho-Hyung (“Luke”) Lee writes on economic problems. He begins 
thusly –
He then lays out his conception of a solution. It’s well worth your reading.
James Pilant
Moody’s warned Monday that it could move a step closer to cutting the U.S. AAA rating if President Obama’s tax and unemployment benefit package becomes law.
The plan agreed to by President Obama and Republican leaders last week could push up debt levels, increasing the likelihood of a negative outlook on the United States rating in the coming two years, the ratings agency said.
A negative outlook, if adopted, would make a rating cut more likely over the following 12-to-18 months.
For the United States, a loss of the top Aaa rating, reduce the appeal of U.S. Treasuries, which currently rank as among the world’s safest investments.
We just spent several months with every commentator screaming out that we can’t afford to spend more money, that social security had to be cut, that things could not go on the way they had been and then -
President Obama made a deal with the Republicans to add trillions to the debt! (and social security will still get cut!)
The bizzarro world of Washington marches on. But there will be pain, there will be payback.
James Pilant
