Episodes of Ethicast™ :
As a small boy, I grew up with a 1920s Louis Armstrong recording of W. C. Handy’s “Loveless Love.” In his trademark gravelly voice, the cornet player they called Satchmo delivered a pithy social commentary that has stuck with me through the years:
Last Friday, in the safely historical confines of a Broadway theater, my wife and I heard a potent dialogue about the deliberate killing of Polish Jews in World War II. Two days earlier, that topic had become brutally real with the murder of a Jewish student at Wesleyan University.
In 1979, as a foreign correspondent assigned to London, I covered the first 20 months of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s government. It was a tempestuous time, as her free-market principles slammed up against Britain’s entrenched labor movement.
By all accounts, the world’s financial institutions are surging toward reregulation. But unless the new rules are set in a context of corporate integrity, they could make things worse. Here’s why.
You’d think we would have foreseen it. Give a kid a cell-phone camera, and we know they’ll take pictures. Give them messaging capability, and we know they’ll start texting messages and sending photos of themselves to each other â alone or with friends, goofy or serious.
I write this column with some trepidation. After all, the markets have been rising, spring is coming, and I’m an implacable optimist â dangerous conditions for writing about the current economic crisis. But here’s a thought: Is it possible that this recession could end rather quickly?
