Good Morning Friends,

You know, you can simply Google the terms 'grade inflation,' and 'Harvard,' and you will be referred to numerous articles about the matter. Go through some of them and one thing you find is that - among those that accept that grade inflation exists and is a problem - they all identify the starting period of this issue as the 1970s. This is important because the late seventies is commonly identified as the period when neoliberalism (which is simply the resumption of pre-New Deal capitalism, modernized; and neoliberalism has many more techniques of 'virtual' capitalism at its disposal).

Roughly, the New Deal (Roosevelt), Fair Deal (Truman), Great Society (Johnson) period went from the late 1930s to 1974. Remember, even Nixon (1968-1974) signed a whole raft of anti-corporate legislation (such as the Environmental Protection Agency, instituting wage and price controls and so forth; but he did so with a sigh, saying "I guess we're all Keynsians now."

Neoliberalism is about the elite shaping reality by decree. Remember we talked about the documentary movie, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. A central feature of Enron's operations in the 1990s was "mark-to-market" accounting. Bethany Mclean, a writer for Fortune magazine, co-authorof the book, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, showed up on camera to explain the term.

Mark-to-market was an approach brought to the company by Jeff Skilling. Being able to "write his own ticket," it was one of the conditions he set for agreeing to come to work for Ken Lay. Mclean said that Skilling really believed that one should be able to come up with an idea and immediately "book" the future anticipated profits from that idea. Otherwise, some "lesser" man could potentially profit from an idea that a "greater" man had had in the past. Mclean said that Skilling really believed the idea was everything.

That is mark-to-market accounting in a nutshell. Mclean said that Arthur Andersen, Enron's accounting firm, "signed off" on it and the SEC approved it. Yes, young divinity, we confirm your powers.

As you know, neoliberalism is very touchy about intellectual property rights. Its my idea and you can't have it! I thought of it first! See Nobel-prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz's discussion of this point (not quite in our language, of course) at Authors@Google: Joseph Stiglitz. You want to go to about the twenty-five minute mark.

The most disturbing manifestation of the God-drive is the desire of neoliberalism to patent genes.

You see, not only do corporations want gods of culture, as we discussed. Not only do they want to be gods of war with the privatized military. They want to be gods of learning with privatized schools and charter schools. They want to be elemental gods. And they want to be thought of as life-bringing gods.

Bechtel tried to compel the nation of Bolivia that they were a water divinity.*

One more piece about Bernie Madoff. There is a documentary piece about his Ponzi scheme scandal. It's a report done by Frontline. You can go to PBS.org to view it. Its called "The Madoff Affair."

Madoff had gone on, doing his thing, for at least forty years. From time to time eyebrows were raised but nothing ever came of it. There was a wonderful recollected moment when the correspondent interviewed a business writer, who had interviewed Madoff . This business writer had recalled Madoff as having been cool, too cool.

There were scattered remarks floating around about his returns being "Too Good to be True," and so forth. But the sheer amount of money he had under management was news in itself. At one point in the interview the business writer said that Madoff said, "Give me some credit for having been in business for forty years..." for having developed solid relationships, having access to proprietary information, having built a reputation for trust and so forth. You should go to the documentary to check it out.

The remark, as the business writer recalls it, is revealing. On one hand its was a plea: Please believe me! On the other hand it was a command: Don't you know who I am, you plebian?! Reality is what I say it is!

We can look at this, in retrospect, as Madoff's desperate attempts to invoke his waning powers. Some of them are luckier, for they become the Old Money.

wingedcentaur

* www.cbc.ca/news/features/water/bolivia.html