[p2p-research] What's different about this economic downturn? -- the severe unemployment

[Samuel Rose]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Michel Bauwens<michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would venture that, with the exception of Berlusconi's Italy, most
> European governments are substantially less in the pocket of private
> interests.
>
> Comparing cultures is a tricky business. In many countries, European
> companies would be internally more hierarchical than U.S. companies, less so
> than Japanese ones ... though that is compensated by stronger employee
> rights in Europe, and the collective culture of East Asia (i.e.
> paternalistic goodwill to the whole community of employees)
>
> Gauging 'efficiency' in different models is difficult, because they are most
> like more efficient in different areas ...
>
> Michel
>

Of course you are right, Michel. My reply was more sarcasm/muckraking
than rational argument.

Still, I would say that for the last 30 years, there has been a
special kind of crazy going on in US corporations that is tough to
find anywhere else.

Paul Malizewski uncovered some of this in his "I, Faker" series of
fake letters to business journals and newspapers in the late 1990's

http://www.amazon.com/Fakers-Hoaxers-Artists-Counterfeiters-Pretenders/dp/1595584226

quoted from http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/books/70761/thats-all-hoax



"(Malizewski's)  experiences at the Business Journal—examined in the
book’s incisive and savagely funny essay “I, Faker”—cast the framework
for the pieces that follow. Fresh out of an M.F.A. program at Syracuse
University and fed up by his newspaper’s uncritical corporate
cheerleading, Maliszewski used his adopted personae to go on the
offensive, writing letters and articles that played into his editor’s
thirst for articles that confirmed or encouraged an evidently strident
laissez-faire economic ideology. In an especially damning bit of
tomfoolery, Maliszewski tweaked the language of a School of the
Americas torture manual to make it read like a managerial tutorial.
“Detention and a deprivation of sensory stimuli are two methods which
on the surface sound draconian, but which can, on second look, be
easily adapted for the workplace,” reads one excerpt. In their lack of
self-awareness, Maliszewski’s fictional blowhards and dispensers of
clichéd corporate advice struck a comedic chord similar to that of
cable TV’s reigning parodist, Stephen Colbert.

Maliszewski, who went as far as submitting a fake news article written
under an invented name, feels no remorse about his own exercises in
deception. “I gave them every opportunity to reject the pieces,” he
says of his former employer. “They could publish it or they could say
‘not for us’ or ‘not true,’ but they didn’t, so I don’t feel really
bad about that.” (He was never caught.)

Rather than shake his finger at those who perpetrate fraud,
Maliszewski holds a mirror to those audiences (and editors) who enable
it. His essays on early-20th-century confidence tricks and modern-day
fake memoirs illustrate, convincingly and provocatively, a pattern of
supply meeting demand. “The desire for authenticity and a well-told
story, for gritty dispatches from little-glimpsed lives unlike our
own, and a yarn as traditional in its design as a fairy tale, will
forever be at odds,” he writes."



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Sam Rose
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