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HERE’S a paradox: We’re finding authentic leadership these days not from our nominal leaders in Washington but from unelected (and mostly unelectable) figures whom we like to deride as self-indulgent narcissists.

Congress is so paralyzed and immature, even sleazy, that we reporters sometimes leave a politician’s press conference feeling the urgent need to shower. But look at university and high school students. Sure, plenty still live for a party, but a growing number have no time for beer because they’re so busy tutoring prisoners, battling sex trafficking or building wells in Africa.

Even more startling, we can now turn to moral leadership from — brace yourself — Hollywood’s “most beautiful people.” I know, I know. What we expect from celebrities is mostly scandalous sex lives and crackpot behavior, and some do oblige. But increasingly as our “leaders” debase the national conversation, sex symbols elevate it.

Take Angelina Jolie, who is making her debut as a director and writer with the aching new movie “In the Land of Blood and Honey.” It’s a Bosnian love story set against genocide, and it illuminates the human capacity to both love and kill.

Let me acknowledge that I regularly embarrass my kids with my ignorance of popular culture. The first time I met Jolie, four years ago, I was brought over to a couch where three women were seated — and realized, to my horror, that I had no idea which one she was. She rescued me by introducing herself.

(Maybe I should warn of a conflict here. Jolie submitted a blurb for a book that my wife and I wrote about empowering women. Better yet, she held our book, the cover perfectly upright for the cameras, as a shield when paparazzi were hounding her.)

Jolie’s new movie doesn’t pander to anyone. For starters, she isn’t in it. The cast is made up of unknowns from the Balkans, speaking foreign languages with subtitles. When Jolie wrote the screenplay and proposed filming it, she said, everyone thought she was nuts.

The movie portrays the romance between a Bosnian Serbian man and a Bosnian Muslim woman. When the Bosnian war begins, he becomes an officer in a genocidal army and she becomes a survivor in one of the army’s rape camps. The couple reunites, but she is his prisoner as well as his lover. The army officer reminds me of war criminals I’ve interviewed: a good and decent guy when he’s not committing crimes against humanity.

“How do people get to the point,” Jolie asks, “when they’re murdering the grandmother next door. How does that happen? If we can start to understand it, then maybe we can figure out how to address the signs earlier.”

Jolie also wants viewers to meditate on humanitarian intervention and what can be done to prevent mass atrocities. “I hoped people would watch the film and think, ‘Why didn’t we stop it?’ ” she said.

I started off rather scornful of celebrities dabbling in humanitarian causes. When Mia Farrow inquired about going to Darfur with me, I archly declined on the presumption that she couldn’t hack it. Then she traveled to the region on her own, and I began to run into her anyway.

Once Farrow consulted me about her plan to buy a donkey and hike off by herself across a desert occupied by murderous militias. She planned to travel without even a tent, just a rope to encircle her as she slept in the sand on the theory that snakes and scorpions would turn aside at the rope.

Farrow has since become a friend, but I’m now afraid to travel with her. I might not be able to hack it.

Likewise, the war in Congo is the most lethal since World War II, but it hasn’t been much covered by many news organizations. One person who has visited repeatedly is Ben Affleck. He has made himself an expert on Congo, and he plans to return this month.

Or think of Sean Penn and Olivia Wilde, who have shown a more sustained commitment to Haiti than most news organizations.

Look, as a journalist, I’m proud of my profession. Yet it’s also clear that commercial pressures are driving some news organizations, television in particular, to drop the ball. Instead of covering Congo, it’s cheaper and easier to put a Democrat and a Republican in a studio and have them yell at each other.

Frankly, it’s just humiliating when news organizations cover George Clooney (my travel buddy on one Darfur trip) more attentively when he breaks up with a girlfriend than when he travels to Sudan and uses satellite photos to catch the Sudanese government committing mass atrocities.

So here’s my hope for the new year. That our “leaders” in Washington will pause in their supercilious narcissism and show a hint of the seriousness and moral purpose of, yes, celebrities.

via. “New York Times”.

“And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.”

That’s how the fictional Gordon Gekko finished his famous “Greed is good” speech in the 1987 film “Wall Street.” In the movie, Gekko got his comeuppance. But in real life, Gekkoism triumphed, and policy based on the notion that greed is good is a major reason why income has grown so much more rapidly for the richest 1 percent than for the middle class.

Today, however, let’s focus on the rest of that sentence, which compares America to a corporation. This, too, is an idea that has been widely accepted. And it’s the main plank of Mitt Romney’s case that he should be president: In effect, he is asserting that what we need to fix our ailing economy is someone who has been successful in business.

In so doing, he has, of course, invited close scrutiny of his business career. And it turns out that there is at least a whiff of Gordon Gekko in his time at Bain Capital, a private equity firm; he was a buyer and seller of businesses, often to the detriment of their employees, rather than someone who ran companies for the long haul. (Also, when will he release his tax returns?) Nor has he helped his credibility by making untenable claims about his role as a “job creator.”

But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.

Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company.

Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.

Yes, there’s a global economy. But six out of seven American workers are employed in service industries, which are largely insulated from international competition, and even our manufacturers sell much of their production to the domestic market.

And the fact that we mostly sell to ourselves makes an enormous difference when you think about policy.

Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.

But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed.

Now, to be fair, being a career politician isn’t necessarily a better preparation for managing economic policy than being a businessman. But Mr. Romney is the one claiming that his career makes him especially suited for the presidency. Did I mention that the last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover? (Unless you count former President George W. Bush.)

And there’s also the question of whether Mr. Romney understands the difference between running a business and managing an economy.

Like many observers, I was somewhat startled by his latest defense of his record at Bain — namely, that he did the same thing the Obama administration did when it bailed out the auto industry, laying off workers in the process. One might think that Mr. Romney would rather not talk about a highly successful policy that just about everyone in the Republican Party, including him, denounced at the time.

But what really struck me was how Mr. Romney characterized President Obama’s actions: “He did it to try to save the business.” No, he didn’t; he did it to save the industry, and thereby to save jobs that would otherwise have been lost, deepening America’s slump. Does Mr. Romney understand the distinction?

America certainly needs better economic policies than it has right now — and while most of the blame for poor policies belongs to Republicans and their scorched-earth opposition to anything constructive, the president has made some important mistakes. But we’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.

—
via. “New York Times”.

When I spoke at Swarthmore College recently, I was startled by one question: Is it immoral for students to seek banking jobs?

The corollary question, with Mitt Romney’s business career under attack even by staunch Republicans, is this: Is it unethical to make millions in private equity?

My answer to both questions: no.

I’ve been sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movement, but, look, finance is not evil. Banking has contributed immensely to modern civilization. By allocating capital to more efficient uses, banking laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution and the information revolution.

Likewise, the attacks on private equity seem over the top. Private equity firms like Bain Capital, where Romney worked, aren’t about destroying companies and picking over the carcasses. Rather, the aim is to acquire poorly managed companies, make them more efficient (sometimes by firing people but often by rejiggering the business model) and then resell them at a profit. That’s the merciless, rugged nature of capitalism.

Liberals should also be wary of self-selecting out of certain occupations. After Vietnam and revelations of C.I.A. abuses in the 1970s, many university students avoided the military and the intelligence agencies. So slots were filled disproportionately by ideological conservatives in a way that undermined everyone’s interests. We would have been better off if more Swarthmore idealists had become generals and C.I.A. officers — and we may be better off if some idealists become bankers as well.

Now for my caveats.

When young people go into finance, I hope that they’ll show judgment, balance and principles instead of their elders’ penchant for greed and rigging the system. Just as Communists managed to destroy Communism, capitalists are discrediting capitalism.

A Pew Research Center poll in December found that only 50 percent of Americans reacted positively to the term “capitalism,” while 40 percent reacted negatively. Among Americans ages 18 to 29, more had a negative view of capitalism than a positive view, the survey found. Those young Americans actually viewed socialism more positively than capitalism. In other words, America’s grasping capitalists are turning young Americans into socialists.

The Financial Times recently published a series about “capitalism in crisis.” It noted that the Edelman Trust Barometer, a survey, found that only 46 percent of Americans had confidence in business to do the right thing (and only 25 percent trusted banks).

Public skepticism is warranted, in my view. Corporations have vastly overpaid C.E.O.’s, handsomely rewarding not only success but also failure. Banks that helped cause today’s financial mess lobbied successfully for bailouts for themselves; they privatized profits and socialized losses.

Meanwhile, more than four million families have lost their homes to foreclosure, according to Zillow.com, a real estate company. Bankers and shareholders found a safety net, but not working-class families. One reason is that the campaign finance system allows financiers to buy access and special favors. If you’re a tycoon, your best investment often is a lobbying firm in Washington to create a tax loophole for you. The last few years have been a showcase not of capitalism itself, but of crony capitalism.

Romney’s average tax rate, which he says is probably about 15 percent, exemplifies the problem. The Romneys benefit because capital gains tax rates have been slashed to just 15 percent, much lower than rates paid on labor income.

Then there’s the most egregious tax loophole of all, for “carried interest.” A triumph of lobbying, it allows private equity and hedge fund managers to pretend that their labor income is a capital gain. So they sometimes pay a tax rate of just 15 percent, compared with up to 35 percent for almost everyone else.

Granted, young people haven’t been pouring into finance in recent years out of eagerness to reform this rigged system but to milk it. In 2007, on the eve of the financial crisis, 47 percent of Harvard’s graduating class headed for consulting firms and the financial sector — a huge misallocation of human capital. However well-meaning these new graduates are initially, they often end up caught up in the scramble at the trough.

In the postwar years, labor unions became greedy and rewarded themselves with feather-bedding and rigid work rules — turning much of the public against them. Likewise, Wall Street feather-bedding is tarnishing the public image of banks and business and undermining confidence in capitalism itself.

When financiers rig the system, they should remember the warning of John Maynard Keynes: “The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.”

So university students would be wrong to mock their classmates who choose Citigroup over CARE. Banking and private equity aren’t evil, and I would never urge college students to stay away. Maybe today’s young socialist sympathizers, along with healthy regulation and a loud public outcry, can help rescue capitalism from the crony capitalists.

via. “New York Times”.

The Wall Street JournalMatt Cutts, a Google software engineer, lays out the case for South Korean webmasters to open their sites to global search engines. He used examples of South Korean companies that succeeded globally in part by rejecting Korea-only thinking.
It’s hard to believe that anybody with a Web site would not want use a global search engine to attract attention to it. But then, the South Korean government isn’t anybody.

One of the strange hangovers of the let’s-block-competitors-and-do-everything-ourselves mentality that is thankfully declining in South Korea is that when government agencies were building Web sites in the 1990s and early 2000s, they blocked access to global search engines.

Part of the thinking, no doubt, was that this would cause South Koreans to favor local search engines rather than the global players like Google and Yahoo. South Korea-based Naver and Daum do dominate the nation’s Web search market and control its online advertising market.

South Korean companies, driven by the commercial imperative of trying to snag as many eyeballs and users to their Web offerings as possible, long ago made sure their Web sites could be seen, indexed and prioritized by global search engines. And when there’s a big news story in either of the Koreas, we’ve noticed that some South Korean media organizations have become skilled at optimizing their headlines and story placement to draw attention to themselves on the news pages of Google, Yahoo and Bing.

In recent months, Google has stepped up its effort to persuade holdout South Korean Web sites to let its search robot crawl their sites, index their pages and present them to users of the Google search engine.

On Monday night, one of Google’s top engineers, Matt Cutts, gave a presentation to about 80 government officials, attorneys, webmasters and journalists to illustrate the problem. “If a country turns away from the open Web, it risks turning into an island,” Mr. Cutts said.

A South Korean newspaper last month carried a story with a list that showed near half of the government’s web sites blocked access to search engines. Among the quickest to change after that article was the presidential web site, although the Blue House web gurus still haven’t figured out how to maximize their exposure as a search for “President Lee Myung-bak” on Google, Yahoo and Bing still returns his Wikipedia biography first.

Mr. Cutts dismissed concerns that hackers might find their way to Korean Web sites via Google’s search engine. He noted that hackers tend to target Web sites by using IP address numbers rather than domain names.

And when a reporter suggested Korea’s search engines do a better job of protecting privacy than Google, Mr. Cutts replied that Google has developed many tools to help webmasters identify whether private information is appearing on their site.

One of those in the audience was Kang Min-koo, a senior judge in the Seoul High Court. When he saw the court’s Web site was on Mr. Cutts’ list of government sites that couldn’t be indexed by Google – and thus couldn’t be found on a Google search – he sent a text message by phone to the court’s webmaster ordering it to be changed.

Since the change can be made by altering just a few lines of software code, the webmaster had it done in no time. When it came time for questions, Mr. Kang asked Mr. Cutts to check if the High Court’s site showed up on Google – and it did.

“That’s amazing,” Mr. Cutts said, calling it an example of South Korea’s “balli balli,” or hurry-up, culture and promising to use the experience in future speeches.

When an attorney from one of the country’s most prominent firms asked if other countries also blocked Google from listing their Web sites, Mr. Cutts said South Korea was unique among the developed, prominent countries of the world as “one of the few that has done more blocking.”

Of course, the issue is a competitive one for Google. If it can’t deliver prominent Korean web sites in its search engine, Koreans or people who are interested in Korean content are less likely to use Google.

Mr. Cutts appealed to the vanity and pride of those in his audience in his appeal. “If Korea opens up a little bit more, more people will realize how important it is,” he said.

That’s true on so many levels of society and in so many facets of business that it’s just part of the conventional wisdom among foreigners who live and work in South Korea – and just another example of why Korea wasn’t called the Hermit Kingdom for nothing.

Google to Korea: Show Yourself on the Web By Evan Ramstad
via. “The Wall Street Journal”.

via. “Stocklogos.com”.