Exxon Profits Ironically Jump 41% While Our Government Snoozes Away

Posted on November 3, 2011 by admin

Raymond J. Learsy
Author, ‘Oil and Finance: The Epic Corruption’

Like many, I was a skeptic the first time I encountered the Occupy movement. I longed to see a populist movement for economic justice, but it was hard to believe a bunch of kids camping out in a park had much hope of posing a real challenge to the entrenched system of wealth and power.

It wasn’t until I heard Cornel West speak at the General Assembly that I understood the potential of the occupy movement. Using the people’s mic, Professor West implored us to build the movement of our dreams. “Don’t be afraid to say the word ‘revolution,’” he said, “This is the American Fall, inspired by the Arab Spring.” To the two hundred or so mostly young people in the park on that day the comparison seemed completely legitimate.

The explosive growth of the Occupy movement can be attributed to a widely shared sense that America’s political and economic systems are essentially bankrupt. Morally and economically, we cannot pay the debts we owe. We can’t afford our homes or our educations or our health care, but we can insure malefactors of great wealth against self-inflicted loses. The social contract that bound us together has fallen apart as a result of the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few.

I joined the occupation because I want to have a serious conversation about how to fix our broken system. In the months leading up to the occupation, Congress revealed it was a dysfunctional shell of a legislative body that was incapable of passing laws — and yet no one spoke of systemic political reform. The economy did not provide work for tens of millions of the unemployed and underemployed, overburdened is with debt and made no place for the young — and yet there was no real hope for relief.

Nor was this the first time my generation saw our system fail the test of history: our response to September 11th was belligerent, our response to climate change was negligible, our response to the financial collapse was corrupt and insufficient. As a result of these failures, and countless others, we lost our ability to imagine working together to solve our shared problems.

The greatest contribution the occupy movement has made thus far has been to inspire us to imagine solutions at the scale of our problems. This is a revolutionary concept. Instead of working towards what we believe is possible, it has called upon us to work backwards from what is necessary. The rapid growth of the occupations, the broad public support for the movement, and the incredible amount of media attention it has garnered suggest that we as a people recognize the need to revolutionize our political system and our economy.

The occupy movement is still in its infancy, but as my friend Michael Premo says it has already reawakened the radical imagination, especially for members of my generation by tapping into our surprisingly deep wells of sincerity and authenticity. The unbranded space of the occupation provides the canvas upon which we paint the outlines of our imagined future. In it, we are reminded us that we all depend upon each other for happiness and survival. In it, we are not consumers or clients; we are citizens in a consensual community that empowers each of us. In it, we are compelled to truly listen to each other.

While our elected officials and leaders of industry have wasted crisis after crisis, those of us who have already joined the occupy movement refuse to let this moment go to waste. The popular movement we are building is mobilizing students, workers, people of color, the unemployed, and the middle class to fight back against thirty years of deregulation and privatization.

We are building a world that has a place for all of us. The revolution we seek certainly has expressions in politics and economics, but at root it is what Martin Luther King referred to as a “true revolution of values.” I believe the Occupy movement is united by our shared desire to move from being a thing-oriented society to becoming a people-oriented society; to build a society based on love, instead of greed. It it is easy to feel daunted by such an audacious challenge and it will will certainly take longer than a season to bring about the revolution we seek. But, we know we are on the right side of history. We will not fade away for the winter or disappear if we are pushed out of our toehold in Liberty Square. We’re in this for the long haul.

We are the heirs to a long history of populist people’s movements for economic justice, from Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth movement of the ’30s to Martin Luther King’s later work for jobs and opportunity. Jesse Jackson recently attended one of our meetings to share his thoughts about how to turn this moment into a movement. He told us Martin Luther King’s last act was to plan an occupation for economic justice on the National Mall called “Resurrection City.”" “I was the mayor of Resurrection City,” Reverand Jackson told us, “The movement you are building today is a continuation of our movement.”

As we spread from community to community, we begun the slow and steady work of forging a diverse and powerful movement to shake the system of its malaise. One day soon, we may too have our Resurrection City.

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What Does Wall Street Really Want?

Posted on October 12, 2011 by admin

Paul Brandeis Raushenbush
Senior Religion Editor for the Huffington Post

What does Occupy Wall Street want? This has been the continual question from the media, and the critique from skeptics. The question “what do they want?” has been used to dismiss the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement as ineffectual, aimless, or worse, a self indulgent spectacle.

Still, the question is legitimate; and as Occupy Wall Street continues, it will be come crucial. Asking what someone, or a group of people, wants is not really a question directed at policy or electoral politics, which seems to be the answer that outsiders are looking for. Rather, asking what someone wants tends go deeper into questions of vocation and underlying morality or principles that people are willing to commit their lives to and sacrifice for.

As the weather gets colder and occupying gets harder, and the media gets bored and turns away, the question of what those involved with Occupy Wall Street want will become very important. What kind of justice are they seeking for the 99 percent, and what kind of ethics will guide their actions to get it.

But this question begs another that nobody seems to be asking, which is:

What does Wall Street want?

Occupy Wall Street has turned the spotlight in the general vicinity of Wall Street, but unfortunately it has yet to force Wall Street to articulate its own reason for existence. And that is where our attention should be focused now. How do individuals on Wall Street, or Wall Street as a whole, answer the questions concerning vocation and underlying morality and principles? It comes down to the question: What moves Wall Street?

And the obvious, sad, simple answer is: money. More specifically, what moves Wall Street, and what Wall Street wants is not money for the middle class of America, and certainly not money for the poor of America — what moves Wall Street is money for themselves.

And this seems to me to be the problem. Most of us still are happy that we live in a capitalistic system, especially those of us who value freedom not guaranteed under the experiments with socialism we saw in the 20th century. A capitalistic system requires something like a Wall Street to exist. Yet, for a capitalistic system to work for all of society, we need a Wall Street that has what Cornel West calls “moral maturity.”

Moral maturity seems sorely lacking in Wall Street, largely in part because Wall Street does not understand its role in America and the world’s economy in a mature way. In 2009 I gave a talk on the Morality of Capitalism at the Chautauqua Institution in which I critiqued Wall Street for the 2008 financial meltdown. After the talk, a gentleman approached me from the Cato institute, who apparently was a spokes person for Wall Street and capitalism as a whole. He claimed that the financial problems were not Wall Street’s fault, but just “happened” and that it was not fair to blame the financial industry.

But Wall Street is responsible for what happens to the financial well-being of America. We have entrusted them with our economy, but they seem unwilling to truly grasp what that really means. Economy, like the terms ecology and ecumenism, has the root word oikos, a Greek word that translates as family or house. Any economic system should be judged on its ability to provide for the needs of the human family it serves. An economy should also have a sense of purpose in which success should be understood by its ability to provide for the entire family. And this is the vocation that Wall Street seems intentionally unwilling to claim. Instead, they settle for a small goal of making the most money they can for themselves in an atmosphere that most closely resembles the morality of the Lord of the Flies.

The fact that the financial industry continues to give enormous bonuses to its employees while Americans are hurting in so many ways shows that Wall Street does not care about the 99 percent of America, it cares about the 1 percent, which they themselves represent. For a vivid example of this, look to the Chicago financier who tossed out hundreds of pieces of paper with the proud message: “We Are the 1%.”

All of this is lamentable. Having worked at Princeton University for the last eight years, I know that some of the smartest, and well-intentioned students I worked with are now working on Wall Street. They are very smart, and very good people. Occupy Wall Street should inspire my students and all of those who work in the financial industry to really reflect on what they want.

Wall Street, are you willing to tie your bonuses to the well-being of the overall economy and not just the privatized bottom-line? What morals will guide the way you do your work? Will you sacrifice the quick buck to build an economy that will last and grow? Is it really your vocation to make so much for yourselves when so many people are hurting so much?

What do you really want, Wall Street?

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Bankers’ Salaries vs. Everyone Else’s

Posted on October 12, 2011 by admin

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

Why are the Occupy Wall Streeters so angry at bankers? This chart might give you some idea:

Via New York State Comptroller report.

That chart is from a new report from the New York State Comptroller’s office on the securities industry in New York City.

It shows that the average salary in the industry in 2010 was $361,330 — five and a half times the average salary in the rest of the private sector in the city ($66,120). By contrast, 30 years ago such salaries were only twice as high as in the rest of the private sector.

Last year helped contribute to the widening of that gap, too.

That’s not to say that bankers have job security.

The overall financial services sector was disproportionately hit by the financial crisis. The sector employs just 12 percent of the city’s work force, but accounted for one out of every three jobs lost in the recession. Some (not all) of those jobs were regained, but the comptroller’s office says the industry “is likely to experience significant job losses over the course of the next year.”

In particular, the securities sub-sector of financial services “could lose an additional 10,000 jobs by the end of 2012, which would bring total job losses in the industry to 32,000 since January 2008,” the report said.

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A Letter to the #Occup(iers): The principle of Non-contradiction

Posted on October 12, 2011 by admin

Lawrence Lessig
Author, ‘Republic, Lost’; Founder, Rootstrikers

Like a fever, revolutions come in waves. And if this is a revolution, then it broke first on November 4, 2008, with the election of Barack Obama, second, on February 19, 2009, with the explosion of anger by Rick Santelli, giving birth to the Tea Party, and third, on September 10, 2011 with the #Occupy movements that are now spreading across the United States.

The souls in these movements must now decide whether this third peak will have any meaningful effect — whether it will unite a radically divided America, and bring about real change, or whether it will be boxed up by a polarized media, labeled in predictable ways, and sent off to the dust bins of cultural history.

In the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., championed a strategy of non-violence: that in the face of state sponsored and tolerated aggression, the strongest response was a promise not to respond in kind.

In this movement, we need a similar strategy. Of course a commitment to non-violence. But also a commitment to non-contradiction: We need to build and define this movement not by contradicting the loudest and clearest anger on the Right, but instead, by finding the common ground in our demands for reform.

So when Ron Paul criticizes the “Wall Street bailouts,” and attacks government support for “special businesses” with special access, we should say, “that’s right, Congressman Paul.” Bailouts for the rich is not the American way.

And when Rick Santelli launches a Tea Party movement, by attacking the government’s subsidies “to the losers,” we should ask in reply, what about the subsidies “to the winners” — to the banks who engineered the dumbest form of socialism ever invented by man: socialized risk with privatized benefits. What, we should ask Mr. Santelli, about that subsidy?

Or when Republican Senator Richard Shelby tells NBC’s Meet the Press that the message in bank reform “should be, unambiguously, that nothing’s too big to fail,” we should say that’s right, Senator, and it’s about time our Congress recognized it.

Or when Sarah Palin calls GE the “poster child of crony capitalism,” we should say “Amen, Mamma Grisly”: For whether or not we are all believers in “capitalism,” we should all be opponents of “crony capitalism,” the form of capitalism that is increasingly dominating Washington, and that was partly responsible for the catastrophe on Wall Street in 2008, and hence the catastrophes throughout America since.

We should practice “non-contradiction,” not because we have no differences with the Right. We do. We on the Left, we Liberals, or as some prefer, we Progressives, have fundamental differences with people on the Right. Our vision of that “shining city on the hill” is different from theirs. Our hopes for “We, the People,” are more aspirational. More egalitarian. More ideal.

But even though our substantive views are different, we should recognize that we have not yet convinced a majority of America of at least some of our fundamental views. And that in a democracy, no faction has the right to hold a nation hostage to its extreme views, whether right or not. We should fight in the political system to win support for our Liberal views. But we should reject the idea that protest, or violence, or blackmail are legitimate political techniques for advancing views that have not yet prevailed in a democratic system.

Instead, we should use the energy and anger of this extraordinary movement to find the common ground that would justify this revolution for all Americans, and not just us. And when we find that common ground, we should scream it, and yell it, and chant it, again, and again, and again.

For there is a common ground between the anger of the Left and the anger of the Right: That common ground is a political system that does not work. A government that is not responsive, or — in the words of the Framers, the favorite source of insight for our brothers on the Right — a government that is not, as Federalist 52 puts it, “dependent upon the People alone.”

Because this government is not dependent upon “the People alone.” This government is dependent upon the Funders of campaigns. 1% of America funds almost 99% of the cost of political campaigns in America. Is it therefore any surprise that the government is responsive first to the needs of that 1%, and not to the 99%?

This government, we must chant, is corrupt. We can say that clearly and loudly from the Left. They can say that clearly and loudly from the Right. And we then must teach America that this corruption is the core problem — it is the root problem — that we as Americans must be fighting.

There could be no better place to name that root than on Wall Street, New York. For no place in America better symbolizes the sickness that is our government than Wall Street, New York. For it is there that the largest amount of campaign cash of any industry in America was collected; and it was there that that campaign cash was used to buy the policies that created “too big to fail”; and it was there that that campaign cash was used to buy the get-out-of-jail free card, which Obama and the Congress have now given to Wall Street in the form of a promise of no real regulatory change, and an assurance of “forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness” — not of the mortgages that are now underwater. The foreclosures against them continue. “Forgiveness” — not even of the sins now confessed by Wall Street bankers, for our President has instructed us, no crimes were committed. “Forgiveness” — just enough to allow candidates once again to race to Wall Street to beg for the funds they need to finance their campaigns. The dinner parties continue. The afternoons at the golf course are the same. It’s not personal. It’s just business. It is the business of government corrupted.

There is no liberal, or libertarian, or conservative who should defend these policies. There is no liberal, or libertarian, or conservative who should defend this corruption. The single problem we all should be able to agree about is a political system that has lost is moral foundation: For no American went to war to defend a democracy “dependent upon the Funders alone.” No mother sacrificed her son or daughter to the cause of a system that effectively allows the law to be sold to the highest bidder.

We are Americans, all of us, whether citizens or not. We are Americans, all of us, because we all believe in the ideal of a government responsive to “the People alone.” And we all, as Americans, regardless of the diversity of our views, need to stand on this common ground and shout as loudly as we can: End this corruption now. Get the money out of government. Or at least get the special interest money out of government. And put back in its place a government dependent upon, and responsive too, the people. Alone.

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil” — Thoreau, 1846, On Walden — “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root.”

If this fever is to have its effect, if this revolution is to have any meaning, if this struggle — and the carnival notwithstanding, it is an obvious struggle to sleep on the streets — is to have real consequence, then we all, Left and Right, must strike first at that root.

“It is the duty of youth,” they say Kurt Cobain said, “to challenge corruption.” He may have meant a different corruption, if indeed he uttered this poetry too. But whatever he meant, embrace his words. It is your duty to challenge this corruption. And once you have ended it — once we have restored a government that cares about what its people care about first, and not just its funders — then let us get back to the hard and important work of convincing our fellow citizens of the right in everything that is left.

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Corporate Citizenship: How Public Dissent In Paris Sparked Creation Of The Corporate Person

Posted on October 12, 2011 by admin

Ryan Grim & Mike Sacks

WASHINGTON — Of all the Occupy Wall Street refrains, one of the most memorable is, “I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.” But, clever as it is, the quip looks to the wrong end of the life cycle: The only thing more corrupt than the legal concept of corporate personhood is the way a Gilded Age judge birthed it.

The discontented have been occupying the streets for a long time. But the convulsions with which the ruling class in America reacted to the Paris Commune of 1871 make Fox News’ coverage of Occupy Wall Street sound fawning.

The Paris Commune was the first international incident followed daily in the United States. While President Barack Obama complains about the 24-hour news cycle today, its roots stretch back to Cyrus Field’s transcontinental telegraph cable, which allowed the elites of America to focus intently on the two-month uprising and ultimate slaughter of thousands of Parisians. Cyrus Field’s brother and his family were in Paris at the time, and a third brother, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, obsessively tracked the news back in the states. It was the Paris uprising that transformed Stephen Field from a mundanely corrupt judge in the paid service of the railroads to a zealous crusader for all corporations, with the aim of suppressing what he and other leaders saw as the threat of democracy from below.

For much of the first U.S. century, it was an accepted fact that the people, through their legislators, had the power to pass laws that businesses were required to obey. After the Civil War, Reconstruction-era statutes and constitutional amendments — particularly the 14th Amendment — strictly limited the ability of legislators to restrict the rights of the recently freed African Americans.

In a historic irony, it was the protections contained in those Reconstruction laws that corporations sought to grab for their own. Justice Field was the hand they used.

The common understanding of how the corporation became a legal person says that a Supreme Court reporter of decisions erroneously said as much in a case summary and that error became an unremovable stain, coloring every decision after. But that reading of history whitewashes what was, in fact, a coordinated effort to win citizenship for corporations.

The idea of corporate personhood was once viewed as nonsense. A corporation was formed to limit the financial liability of its owners in pursuing their business: If the corporation went broke, debtors couldn’t come after its owners. That such a company might also have all the rights of citizens was a concept on the fringes. Yet by force of judicial will, Field pulled it right into the mainstream.

He began with his dissenting opinion in the 1873 Slaughter-House cases, decided by the Supreme Court on a 5-4 vote. Writing for the minority, Field asserted that the freedom of a corporation to pursue its business interests was “the distinguishing privilege of all citizens of the United States.”

The Louisiana Legislature, then controlled by a majority coalition of African Americans and white Reconstructionists known as “Radical Republicans,” had passed a law insisting that all butchers move their business south of New Orleans, so the butchers’ entrails didn’t pollute the city’s water supply. The Court upheld the law, and the city’s pattern of repeated cholera outbreaks stopped cold. Field argued, however, that it was a corporation’s God-given right to dump pig intestines wherever it saw fit, regardless of the public health consequences or laws on the books.

Field was as much concerned with protecting business investments as he was with working the Lord’s will. He was heavily invested in railroads and other industries that came before the Court, so much so that the chief justice at the time pressed him not to weigh in on certain cases. “There was no doubt of your intimate personal relations with the managers of the Central Pacific, and it would tend to discredit the opinion if it came from someone known as the personal friend of the parties representing these railroad interests,” the chief justice warned Field, according to Jack Beatty’s “Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900.”

Field didn’t have the votes of his high court colleagues to directly insert corporate personhood into law, so he exploited another aspect of the Reconstruction-era legal system to work the railroads’ will. Congress had forbidden the Court from reviewing certain cases, (presciently) concerned that the justices would undermine the work legislators was doing, even the new constitutional amendments. As a compromise, Congress allowed justices to continue to sit occasionally on the circuit courts. When sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in California, Field repeatedly wrote into his decisions that corporations were persons. Those decisions became precedents in the 9th Circuit, but nowhere else.

In a dispute over taxation of the Southern Pacific Railroad Co., Field cited his own “Ninth Circuit law” to declare that the “defendant, being a corporation, a person within the meaning of the 14th Amendment,” is “entitled, with respect to its property, to equal protection of the laws.” San Mateo County appealed to the Supreme Court, but the case dragged on. (Following oral arguments in Washington, Field adjourned with the railroad’s lawyers to a dinner party thrown by railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, a close friend of Field’s who had previously appointed him to run the school Stanford set up in his son’s name.) In desperate need of the taxes the railroad refused to pay — citing its freedom to do business under the same protections granted any other citizen — the county settled with the company.

The settlement ended the Supreme Court case and denied Field one chance to enshrine personhood into law, but he was soon given another. In 1886, Santa Clara County sued Southern Pacific Railroad in a similar case, and the company again asserted its personhood. In fact, whether Southern Pacific was a citizen was irrelevant to the particular dispute, which was decided on technical issues of tax law that applied equally to a business or a person. But the Court reporter, John Chandler Bancroft Davis, who was himself financially intertwined with the railroads, wrote the following in his summary of the decision: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section I of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny to any person equal protection of the laws.”

Nothing like that was contained in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. itself, so where did Davis get such language? The most likely answer lies with Field, who made a habit of micromanaging Davis’ summaries. And Davis himself had plenty of reason to play along: In an earlier case that came before the Court, Davis had been accused of acting as an attorney and trustee of a railroad company, only to wind up with much of that company’s assets in his own hands.

As merely part of a reporter’s summary, Davis’ statement of corporate personhood carried no legal weight. But in a 1888 decision, Field enshrined the error. Citing the Santa Clara case, he wrote, completely out of the blue and not in reaction to any facts in the new case, that a “private corporation is included under the designation of ‘person’ in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Section I.” That a corporation was a person had — presto — become settled law.

More than a century later, in the 5-4 decision of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Chief Justice John Roberts would rely on this nonsensical and corrupt ruling to enshrine into law the equally perverse notion that a corporation is a person entitled to all the liberties of the First Amendment and therefore, in another leap of logic, free to spend as much of its money as it pleases to influence elections, regardless of any laws passed to the contrary.

But it didn’t take a century for Field’s coup to begin influencing public policy. Even before the Santa Clara case, corporations were asserting that a God-given “liberty to contract” allowed them to ignore laws regulating the workplace. When legendary labor leader Samuel Gompers persuaded New York to ban the making of cigars in tenement sweatshops, the Supreme Court overturned the law in a landmark 1885 ruling, In re Jacobs, saying it violated the cigar makers’ freedom. A similar 1899 case struck down a law granting an eight-hour workday to employees of city contractors, and the majority specifically cited Field’s original dissent in the Slaughter-House cases.

In short, corporations did not become citizens by accident. It took roughly a decade to usurp the liberty given to freed slaves and apply it instead to businesses.

Field’s complete vision, fortunately, has not yet come to pass. The principle of “liberty of contract,” despite libertarian efforts over the last two decades, has not been brought back in from the cold where the New Deal Court banished it over 70 years ago. Corporations still cannot vote even if they may now spend infinite amounts of money to influence an election. And the Second Amendment, which so far protects only the individual right to keep loaded handguns in the home for self-defense, does not give corporations the right to stockpile weapons in the workplace in case actual “class warfare” breaks out.

Nor, crucially, do corporations enjoy the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Such a privilege, the Supreme Court has long held, “is essentially a personal one, applying only to natural individuals.” And the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures “at the most guards against abuse only by way of too much indefiniteness or breadth,” according to a 1946 Supreme Court decision. Corporations and their officers, then, can be subpoenaed to produce their records and papers without running afoul of the Fourth Amendment and cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment to escape such a court order.

But for these gaps in corporate personhood to be even small comfort in our new Gilded Age, one of those bad-acting “artificial persons” must first be charged with a crime. That’s something rarely seen in today’s era of corporate unaccountability, thanks largely to the influence of business over politics — the legacy, in a twisted way, of the Paris Commune.

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Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Posted on October 6, 2011 by admin

Steve Jobs has been an important figure in my life for the past 30 years. I worked on Apple computers as a teacher and taught other teachers how to use them in science classes in the early 80′s. When I first saw the Mac in 1985, I had to have one and went into debt to buy my first of many. I still use a mac at home today.

Steve saw further than most. I will miss the innovative mind that knew that the computer was more than a tool for number crunching. It’s sad to see him go so young.

Bye, Steve.

-wizzard

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The Uniqueness of Steve Jobs

Posted on October 6, 2011 by admin

Diana Nyad
Long distance swimmer

With millions of others today, I am both burdened with sadness and lifted with inspiration as we stand in awe and applaud the uniqueness of Steve Jobs. Like the other geniuses and visionaries of various eras… Aristotle, Einstein… Jobs was a Thinker of grand magnitude who could then impart that magic to us, the lay public.

As a non-techie, I surprised myself by tuning into every Steve Jobs keynote that was web-broadcast. His sense of delight, his boyish twinkle of the eye, as he lovingly handled and introduced the first iPhone was the stuff of Walt Disney many decades ago, mesmerizing us with the fairy dust of his new animation technology.

I sat spellbound to hear Jobs explain so simply how remedial the homo sapien is, as an athlete moving on the Earth… until he got onto a bicycle. With a bicycle, the human evolves into an efficient specimen. Then Jobs takes a beat, grins that boyish grin, and you can feel the palpable joy within him when he says “the computer is the bicycle for our minds.”

Steve Jobs will be associated forever with the cultural icons who stepped outside the establishment. The “Think Different” Apple ads feature Dylan and Hitchcock and Picasso and Gandhi and Ali but the understated message is that Steve Jobs lives on that same unique pedestal. The words of that ad could well serve as today’s eulogy to Mr. Jobs:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. They’re not fond of rules and they hold no respect for the status quo…. They push the human race forward…. The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

The beloved, iconic, captivating symbol of the Apple, tiny bite taken, will remind us every day for the rest of our lives, and then through many generations beyond us, that a gentle genius created technology that went so far as to beguile us. Steve Jobs’ mind has blown our collective mind. Rest in peace, Steve, as we fondly and passionately remember your urging us all to “Think Different.”

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President Obama on the Passing of Steve Jobs

Posted on October 6, 2011 by admin

Following the loss of visionary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, President Obama released this statement:

Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.
By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun. And by turning his talents to storytelling, he has brought joy to millions of children and grownups alike. Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last. Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.
The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Steve’s wife Laurene, his family, and all those who loved him.

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Steve Jobs’ Legacy: Think Different

Posted on October 6, 2011 by admin

Pierre Omidyar
CEO and publisher of Honolulu Civil Beat, Founder of eBay

When I was an eighth-grader in 1980, living here in Honolulu, I used to beg my mother to let me spend Saturdays at a neighborhood computer store, so I could play with (and learn about) the Apple II computers they were selling.

When VisiCalc came out, one of the original spreadsheet programs, I taught myself how to use it and demonstrated its features and usefulness to the occasional customer. Frankly, most seemed more curious about what the heck a boy was doing with a computer that was supposed to be an office tool than what the Apple could actually do.

Four years later, now in high school in Washington, D.C., I attended an Apple Users’ Group meeting featuring members of the original Macintosh team, demonstrating an entirely new home computer. I remember being in awe of the ease with which a mouse click changed the margins on a word-processing document which then reflowed instantly. The designers talked about having built a computer that they themselves wanted to use, rather than what customers were telling them they wanted. I didn’t understand it then, but what they were talking about was how you create a new market, rather than limit yourself to the definition of an existing market. It requires a leap of faith, thinking differently. The Mac’s screen was white, not black, so it would look and feel more natural, like paper. It was “user-friendly,” and it had a unique “look and feel.” Even the vocabulary used to describe this tool was new.

With Steve Jobs at the helm, Apple always went its own way. He built products that he thought “the rest of us” would want to use, and he built them with utter confidence that we would. Steve was comfortable with leaps of faith. He urged us to “think different,” and in the process he fundamentally changed the way we thought about technology.

Before Steve, computer technology was considered by most people to be an office tool: nothing more than the next generation of adding machines. Or maybe a hobbyists’ plaything, something to tinker around with in the garage. With his historic George Orwell “1984″ Super Bowl ad, he challenged us to reject the status quo, and embrace a new vision. With the design of the Macintosh, he understood that the aesthetics of a tool were as important as — or more than — its functionality.

A decade or so later, Steve made a crucial breakthrough with the iPod and the beginning of the digital revolution in media. The iPod and the iTunes Store began to change the computer from a tool into something personal, something that we became attached to because it reflected who we were, or wanted to be.

And then, he changed the world again with the iPhone. Instead of simply being a phone, he envisioned a tool with no buttons, and a natural user interface that we would interact with using our fingers on smooth glass, as if we were directly touching whatever was displayed on the screen. A phone with no buttons — another leap of faith. He taught us to stretch and rotate photos with our fingers. He also taught us the Zen of touch-screen auto-correction typing, something which admittedly some of us do better than others.

In hindsight, the iPad seems a natural evolution from the iPhone, but at the time it was another leap. There is a sense of contact and physicalness that its apps provide, and in the process the iPad has become much more than a simple tool.

From the very beginning of Apple, Steve had a vision of the positive impact technology could have on people’s lives. He was unique among most technologists, because he constantly innovated on both the hardware and the software, humanizing technology more and more with each new product. And in the process, the technology he created went from being just an occasional tool to being a constant companion.

With Steve’s passing, we’ve lost someone who had a historic impact not only on how we use technology, but on how we think about it. Losing him at such a young age makes me wonder what other breakthroughs and leaps of faith he would have made in the coming decades.

For me, Steve’s legacy won’t be limited to these breakthrough products, however. More important than the products themselves, he changed the way we think — and how we think about something is often the hardest thing to change. This makes Steve’s successes all that much more remarkable.

Steve challenged the world to “think different,” and he didn’t limit that to his company’s products. In a very real sense, thinking differently has the effect of expanding our world and our reach — our view of what we can accomplish.

Steve expanded our world with technology, but he also showed us that thinking differently is indeed how we can change the world. And for that, I am truly thankful for his passion, his example and his inspiration.

This post first appeared at CivilBeat.com.

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Jobs Added Art to STEM to Create Steam

Posted on October 6, 2011 by admin

John Maeda
President, Rhode Island School of Design

I’m one of many nerds who started programming with an Apple II. I bought the first Mac in 1984, right before I got on a plane to go to MIT. When I got there, I saw all the upperclassmen had PCs — the “macho computer” — and thought I was a sissy with the “pansy computer.” But I loved it because it could draw circles so much faster than anything else, and it let me play with the images that were dancing in my head.

Growing up, I found I was good at two things, Art and Math. To hear my parents say it, though, it was only “John is good at Math.” They saw a life for me like the one most of my classmates had after graduating in the 1980s, developing software for Oracle or Microsoft (which worked out quite well for most of them, to be sure). My formative years were spent steeped in STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math). Were it not for Jobs’ influence, I may not have come to believe — as I do so fervently today – that you need the “A” for Art to turn STEM to STEAM.

Jobs fueled my career as a technologist, artist, designer, and now as a leader of the art and design school by which all others are measured in the world. All of my artistic work — like the five works that went into MoMA’s permanent collection — was written on a Mac. I even had my own personal ode to Jobs two years ago in London, where I had a show at the Riflemaker Gallery where I made multimedia sculptures out of iPods.

Jobs foresaw that innovation now extends beyond smaller, faster and cheaper technology — that technology didn’t have to be a rational thing. The MP3 player wasn’t a new thing when the iPod came out, nor was the iPhone the first smart phone. But they were the ones that made you give a damn. In his own words, the reason why the Macintosh was so successful was that it was created by artists, musicians, poets and zoologists. Jobs saw that artists and designers could make the technology emotional, desirable, human.

In his 2005 Stanford Commencement address, Jobs, then on the mend, adjured the graduates, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” By introducing me to design so many years before, he had already given me this wisdom. On a grander scale, I thank Jobs and Apple for proving that art and design are poised to transform our economy in the 21st century, like science and technology did in the last century. It is this realization that will keep America competitive; the next Apple will be born if America invests in turning “STEM to STEAM” in its research and education.

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