As human beings, we’re quick to react to sudden and immediate dangers, from the mythical snapping twig that suggests an approaching predator to sirens or an ominous-looking individual. Often, we react too quickly and at times totally incorrectly.  But we react… to those kinds of dangers.  We also react to perceived threats on our “rights,” not so quickly, but at times even more violently.

What we don’t react well to, and slowly, and usually less than perfectly, are to those changes in our world that have turned perceived “good things” into indicators of dangers.  And the recent Department of Justice “victory” over Apple and the major publishers on ebook pricing is just one recent example of this.  Now… I’m not exactly an Apple fan.  I own no Apple products whatsoever, and I think that the I-Phone and its clones are harbingers of disaster [although in the interest of full disclosure, I will note that my wife does own a single IPad and that I am indeed an author whose income depends very much on the health of the book market.].  As I noted much earlier, the DOJ case against Apple and the publishers was based on the case that Amazon’s dominance of the ebook market [over 90% at the time] was essentially irrelevant because Amazon was charging lower prices than those Apple and the publishers were charging under the “agency model.”  And the letter of the anti-trust laws supported DOJ, as did the courts. 

The problem/danger here is the failure of Congress, the Judiciary, and the American people to recognize that “lower prices” aren’t always better, and in fact, they can be a symptom of great danger.  Lower prices are great, assuming that your income is stable or increasing.  But are lower prices so good if they cause the actual standard of living of the majority of Americans to decline?  Certainly, homebuilders and construction workers might well argue that the oversupply and cheap prices of existing housing was anything but good for them or the economy. What is important is the relationship between wages and prices, not just how low prices are.  If prices are down twenty percent, but your income is cut in half, you lose… maybe everything.  This tends to be overlooked in today’s economy and consumer culture.

And what is the relevance to law and the Apple decision?  Simply this – old style monopoly was the restriction of trade to raise prices and increase corporate profits.  Under the old-style [and current definition] of monopoly, lower prices are not a danger but a good thing.  The problem is that today we have a new kind of monopolist, as embodied in Amazon and Walmart.  These “new” monopolists use low prices to gain a dominant market share, and once they have that share, they use their power to force their suppliers to provide goods and services at lower prices, outsourcing overseas, doing whatever it takes.  This means those suppliers must cut their costs to stay in business, and that means lower wages.  It also means that manufacturing here in the United States either automates or outsources to lower wage areas.  In the end, the new monopolist still has large-scale profits which are not so high in percentage terms, but so much larger in scale that the percentage decline is acceptable.  This kind of “new” monopoly has taken over especially in consumer goods and retail industries, but it’s also appearing, if more slowly, in everything from finance to automaking…and, at the same time, Americans keep scrambling for bargains… without realizing exactly what the long-term cost of those “low prices” happens to be.

Happy shopping!

My wife the opera singer and university professor has been involved in pretty much all levels of public performance and voice and opera teaching, production, and administration over more than three decades…and one of the most appalling changes she [and I as well] has noticed is the shift from a standing ovation being an infrequent occurrence after a performance to it becoming apparently almost obligatory. She is certainly not the only one in the field who has noted this. Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, made the same observation, especially in regard to Broadway plays, several years ago.

There are doubtless numerous reasons for this shift, one certainly being the aging of generations taught to believe that everyone is “wonderful,” but there are two others that likely play an equal part in this decline of apparent ability, or unwillingness, to judge quality, particularly in the arts. The first is a growing belief that, in areas of society where qualitative excellence cannot be quantified or measured “objectively,” everyone’s opinion is equal, and that what one likes is always excellent, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is simply out of step.

The other contributing factor is an almost inchoate belief within current society that suggests that any judgment embodying negativity, or even a belief that competence is not excellence, is somehow “bad.”  This is evidenced implicitly by the shift in the word “discrimination” over the past fifty years.  At one time, to show discrimination meant the ability to distinguish between good and bad, to be able to distinguish between what was good, very good, or excellent.  Now, to discriminate means to show bias or prejudice, a totally negative meaning with unfavorable connotations as well.  At present, there does not exist a single word in the English language that conveys approvingly the idea of being able to make such judgments.  Because simple and direct words are the strongest, this lack effectively, if you will, denigrates the entire concept of constructive judgment or criticism.  By the same token, critical judgment now carries the connotation, if not the denotation, of severity or negativity.

Since when is NOT giving a standing ovation a measure of negativity?  Yet it appears that audiences have come to feel that “mere” applause is not enough. 

Then again, perhaps I’ve missed it all, and standing ovations are merely the supersized version of applause, the symptom of a society that always wants more, whether it’s useful or healthy.   

With the outcry over the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, rhetoric, charges, counter-charges, explanations, refutation of explanations have appeared everywhere, including comments on this website, but there’s one elephant in the room that has yet to be satisfactorily explained, an elephant, if you will, that lies at the heart of what occurred in Florida.  And that elephant, for once, isn’t the far right wing of the Republican party, but one that has been overlooked by those who ought to be most concerned for more than a generation.

Why do black youths commit homicides at rates four times as high as the average of all murders committed by youths? 

Typically, many answers are given, but the one most currently in favor is that poverty and single-parent homes create conditions that result in aliened youths more likely to join gangs and kill others.  But there are more than a few problems with this simplistic explanation.  First, the largest racial group of the poor still remains white;  nineteen million whites fall below the poverty level for a family of four, nearly twice as many whites as blacks. Second, the number of white-single-mother households has been increasing over the past decade so that single-white-mother households outnumber single-black-mother-households, as well as single-Hispanic-mother households.  During this period, youth homicide rates fell across the board, but the 2010 rate for black youth still remained nearly four times that of whites and Hispanics, despite the decline in the percentage of black children living in high-poverty neighborhoods and the increase in white and Hispanic children living in such neighborhoods.

While racial tensions remain, the vast majority of black youth killings are those of young black men killing other young black men, not black young men killing whites or other minorities, and most of the other criminal offenses committed by young blacks are against or within the black community. No matter what anyone claims, this is not an interracial issue, but an intra-racial problem, almost certainly a subcultural affect, which although exacerbated by a larger problems, is not primarily caused by such.

The answer isn’t likely to be that there is a greater genetic/racial predilection toward violence or “less civilization” by blacks, either, not given history, which has shown great civilizations raised by peoples of all colors, or even current events, in which it appears the greatest violence and killing at present appears to be that committed by white Islamists against other white Islamists, if of a different Islamic persuasion.

Like it or not, such statistics suggest that the reason for the high level of violence perpetrated by young black males doesn’t lie primarily in externally imposed conditions, even if those conditions — such as prejudice, bigotry, poverty, poor education, and police “profiling” – are debilitating and should continue to be addressed, and such conditions improved.  Both large numbers of whites and other minorities have suffered and continue to suffer these conditions and, at least so far, their young males do not murder each other at anywhere near the rate and frequency as do young black males.

Might there just be some facets of the urban black culture that contribute to this situation? Facets that cannot be remedied by outsiders, no matter how well-meaning, and well-intentioned?  Facets that outsiders risk being immediately attacked as racist for even suggesting? Facets that even notable black figures have been attacked for suggesting?  

The New York Times recently ran an expose of Goldman-Sachs’ venture into the commodities markets, and the result of the firm’s purchase of a company that effectively gave Goldman control over the spot market in aluminum.  The upshot of the Goldman purchase is that, as a result, the price of aluminum – that essential metal for both aircraft and soft-drink cans – has doubled, as have delivery times, and the additional cost to consumers is roughly $5 billion annually.

Now… I can see the argument for large business takeovers that benefit someone besides the company taking over, and I can see some benefits to at least someone in corporate behaviors such as those of  as Walmart that have driven out thousands of local stores through lower prices and lower wages to employees. The average consumer benefits by getting lower prices, even if the workers get screwed, and small store owners and employees lose their jobs. And there are cases where huge financial corporations do get caught for illegal manipulations, which appears to be the case in the recent charges by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that J.P. Morgan illegally manipulated the price of electricity.  The Goldman aluminum case is a bit different.  Prices are up, as are delivery times, and everyone gets screwed but Goldman.  The thing is… it’s perfectly legal under existing law.

In fact, as Americans are slowly realizing, a great deal of the financial machinations that led to the financial crisis, from whose results which we are hopefully finally beginning to emerge, were also perfectly legal.  It turns out that it wasn’t illegal to lend money to borrowers who could not repay those loans, at least so long as the documents weren’t fraudulent.  It wasn’t illegal to collateralize and securitize those bad investments, and it wasn’t illegal to create such a mess than the government had to bail out those institutions in order to keep the banking sector from collapsing. These are facts hammered at me by more than a few legal, financial, and mortgage types over the past several years.

All this brings up a more fundamental question.  Just because something is “legal,” does that make it right?  Should you engage in legal but unethical behavior?  All too many business types do this every day, and such behavior illustrates a basic change in American as well as other societies that has occurred gradually but inexorably over the past century or so.  Once upon a time, much of the law was merely a limited codification that outlawed what society viewed as the worst excesses of human behavior. Human social codes and behaviors also exerted a certain pressure on individuals and businesses to be more ethical.

But as laws have swelled and become more complex and prescriptive, those social conventions have eroded, more and more people seem to have come to believe that, if the law doesn’t forbid something, it’s all right to do it.  In turn, in the United States, and elsewhere around the world, people have reacted by attempting to put their own parochial religious and moral beliefs into the law… which generates more and more conflict of the type that the Founding Fathers wished to avoid by separating church and state.

Years ago, a political science professor I studied under observed that when people used power excessively and irresponsibly, society always eventually reacted to reduce or eliminate that power.  We’re beginning to see that reaction… and the result is most likely to be something that few of us will enjoy. All because we’ve decided, as a society, that if it’s not illegal, we can do it… whether we really should or not.

In a recent column, Bill O’Reilly made the observation that while Trayvon Martin’s death was a tragedy, it was also an example of the dangers of confrontation, in that Zimmerman was told by the 911 dispatcher not to follow Martin and not to confront him.  While we don’t know exactly what happened between the two, what we do know is that Zimmerman did not avoid Martin, nor Martin Zimmerman… and the result was fatal. O’Reilly went on to point out that he often has to back away from confronting stupidity or error, simply because doing so would be far too dangerous, either physically or legally.

On the surface, this is simple wisdom. Don’t get into confrontational situations because they can escalate into dangerous or even potentially fatal incidents… or result in huge lawsuits, if not both.  But, the truer that advice may be, the more it suggests how violent and/or litigation-happy our society has become… as well as how intransigent all too many people have become. I’ve seen and experienced the absolute arrogance displayed by all manner of Americans, from the anti-abortionists, the gun-rights-absolutists to militant feminists who declare that every act of heterosexual intercourse is an act of rape, to the arrogance of minority youth whose speech and attitudes show no understanding or respect of anyone clearly not able to flatten them, and that range of arrogance and intransigence also includes professors and politicians, red-necks, students and professionals… and a whole lot of others.

A great deal of this I attribute to a society-wide attitude that anyone has the right to do anything in public short of actual physical violence to another [and sometimes even that] and say anything to anyone, regardless of how hurtful, how hateful, or how anger-provoking it may be.  Or for that matter, how disruptive it may be.  Hate speech may be a “right,” but it’s neither ethical nor wise. Allowing screaming children running through the supermarket is not only unpleasant but disruptive and can be dangerous… but you risk physical damage if you suggest curtailing hate speech or someone’s unruly offspring… and that’s just the beginning.

Now… I’m scarcely arguing for confrontation, because I’m not, but whatever happened to such things as moderate behavior, in both expressing an opinion and in reacting to it?

Violent confrontation shouldn’t be socially acceptable, and neither should unruly, anti-social, or disruptive public conduct.