Politics
Entries related to things political.
Hedge Funds, Lending, and Basic Finance
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/12/2007 - 14:34I’ve spent most of my professional life working on Wall Street, and a fair amount of that time working with hedge funds. Over the past few years, I’ve moved over to spend more of my time working with politics and non-profits. Now, the mainstream media is starting to look at hedge funds and lending and how this relates to the political process.
John Edwards worked for a hedge fund. Barack Obama is having a major fundraising event in Greenwich CT at the house of one of the top names in hedge funds. Chris Dodd received over $380,000 in donations from a single hedge that has become a big player in funding campaigns.
A lot of people are attacking these candidates, yet these attacks seem to reflect a basic lack of understanding about hedge funds, lending or finance. More details below the fold.
Promoting the Urban Forest
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/09/2007 - 20:01When I was down at the Stamford Government Center the other day for peace rally, I noticed a sign on all the trees outside of the Government Center.
Public Notice
Tree RemovalIn accordance with the provisions of Ordinance No. 814- Article 1B Sections (4) and (5), NOTICE is hereby given of intent to remove this tree 30 days from the date of this posting.
When I took the picture of the sign, a security guard came up and told me the trees had to come down because they had termites. I knocked on the wood and it seemed pretty solid to me. The trees looked fairly healthy, so I wondered what this was all about.
Later, I started to receive emails from various people asking why the trees were being removed. People talked about sending letters to the Stamford Advocate, to the Tree Warden, and the Mayor’s office in order to get a public hearing about whether or not the trees should be removed. One person wrote that a person from City Hall said the trees were dead or dying and that was the reason they were getting cut down.
I figured I’d make a few calls myself to see what I could find out. I called the number listed on the form, and got an answering machine. I also called the number of a person on the environmental protection board.
Later in the day, I got a phone call from Erin McKenna, who is a Senior Planner at the City of Stamford’s Land Use Bureau. She provided lots of valuable information. The trees in question, honey locust, are not diseased. They are fine, although they are planted a little too closely together which has hampered their growth. They had been planned to be taken down as part of a project to install a sculpture donated by Rubin Nakian.
The plan is to install the sculpture as part of an overall redesign of the entrance to the Government Center. The new entrance is to be designed by Wesley Stout Associates. They are an award winning landscape design firm, whom I was told are very environmentally conscious. The design should be more attractive and provide better shade.
The current schedule is to wait until the plan is received from the design firm. The plan will then be reviewed internally and then publicly. There will be a public hearing about the removal of the trees, but they are hoping to wait until then plan is available to the public before holding such a hearing.
Music Man '08
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/05/2007 - 19:57Jaya has an interesting post about recent blogging trends. She looks at BlogPulse graphs of the seven deadly sins and the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ and the ‘Seven Roman Virtues’. The two deadly sins that top the charts are Pride and Anger, averaging over four times as much traffic as the other deadly sins. I cannot help but wonder if these are related. After all, how much anger is a result of someone’s pride being damaged? Not only is this the case on the individual level, but where does national pride and national anger fit in?
When you look at the virtues, Hope runs away with the traffic, averaging over six times the traffic of the other virtues. Perhaps hope is the antidote to the pride and anger that is causing so much problems in our society today.
Friday, I went to see my daughter in her school production of The Music Man.
For those of you who haven’t seen, or don’t remember the musical, it is about a traveling salesman showing up in Iowa selling band instruments. The problem is that he doesn’t know anything about music. Typically, he sells the instruments and gets out of town before anyone knows better.
Yet in this small town in Iowa, he becomes interested in a local librarian, sticks around a little longer than he planned and has to confront what he has done. Yet it all turns out well, as the instruments and the band, even though it doesn’t play all that well, brings joy, meaning and hope to the children and their parents.
These days there is a man who spends too much on haircuts and another who is lacking in years of experience traipsing around Iowa trying to sell their wares. When we are lucky, people might talk about the issues they are discussing. More of the time, people are talking about what they look like or other unimportant minutiae.
Yet when you get right down to it, what they are really selling is hope, a commodity that has been in short supply the past six years. They are selling hope, an antidote to the pride and anger that has so damaged our political system and our standing in the world. Which one has the better prescription? Right now, I’m rooting for haircut guy, but they both have the right message and the right approach. Will they be able to deliver? Well, that is part of the magic of hope. The Music Man changed people’s lives for the better, even though people thought he wouldn’t be able to deliver. I believe that our candidates will do the same.
Connecticut NOW’s 19th Annual Feminist Awards Dinner
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/04/2007 - 11:13Last night, I attended Connecticut NOW’s 19th Annual Feminist Awards Dinner. The food was surprisingly good for an award dinner. The speeches were particularly long, but they were very inspiring. At one point, the woman next to me and commented about it being a pity that no one from the press was there. I pointed out that there were at least three bloggers there, Maura, Larkspur, and myself.
Maura and I were sitting at a table with Ned Lamont and Jim Himes. I had gone in Kim’s stead, since Kim had company visiting from out of state. She told me that it was important to make sure that Ned and others did a good job of introducing Jim around.
Jim was given a chance to say a brief hello to the crowd.
Ned was there to receive the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Political Activism on behalf of Women's Rights. I took a brief video of his comments. Unfortunately, I only had my Digital Camera, no lighting, and only thought to record his comments half way through.
A Clash of Cultures
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/03/2007 - 10:33It seems as if much of the discussion online about the Obama MySpace page has gotten mired down in people attacking either Joe Anthony or the Obama campaign, and it is missing something much bigger. The event was but one small example of a clash of cultures, a clash between volunteer driven bottom up activities and paid top down controlled activities. As the Internet empowers more people to take action on their own, we will see more clashes like this.
At the Media in Transition conference, there were discussions about historical contexts. We can look at the Summer of Love when Free Love was the rage, and see how it applies to today when free information is all the rage.
Woodstock started off as a commercial enterprise. An heir to a drugstore and toothpaste manufacturing fortune hooked up with a record company executive and two other people to create Woodstock. Things spiraled out of control until it became a free concert and a precursor to Altamont.
More recently, we see legal battles between groups like the MPAA and RIAA trying to control the distribution of copyrighted materials, going after file sharing companies, individual students, and even sites like Digg. We see a billion dollar lawsuit between Viacom and Google’s YouTube.
Google, themselves, are out there profiting off of all the volunteer driven bottom up activities. They index websites that have been freely put up and make money off of the searches they provide. MySpace is predicted to be worth $15 billion in three years. How did they get there? All the free content created for them by MySpace users. Clearly Rupert Murdoch has done well on his $580 million acquisition.
So, Joe Anthony has spent two years tending to a MySpace page that created value for Rupert Murdoch and for Barack Obama. At some point, issues came up about who has what control over the page and what sort of compensation should be tied to that control. The negotiations didn’t work out well, and now everyone is looking at what happened.
Wikipedia, another organization that benefits greatly from volunteer driven bottom up activities, defines the Gift Economy as “an economic system in which goods and services are given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future quid pro quo. Typically, a gift economy occurs in a culture or subculture that emphasizes social or intangible rewards for generosity”
That definition was a gift to Wikipedia. I hope that the person who wrote those words has at least gotten adequate “social or intangible rewards”. This blog post is, in part, a gift to Google and I sure hope I get some “social or intangible rewards” for the blogging I do. It seems as if Joe Anthony participated in the gift economy as well, yet the rewards, social, intangible, or economic appears to have been illusive.
The gift economy is a great thing. Many of the great things in our country and our world have been a result of the gift economy. Yet we all still need to feed ourselves, pay our rent or mortgage, pay for our children’s education, and so on. You can’t do this on karma alone. There is the old saying, “Follow your dreams and the money will follow”. For my sake, for Joe Anthony’s sake, for the sake of so many who have poured their hearts and souls into campaigns, past and present, I hope it is true.
(Technorati tag MIT5)
(Cross posted at Greater Democracy)
