• Non au « cadeau » de Jeff Koons - Libération
    http://www.liberation.fr/debats/2018/01/21/non-au-cadeau-de-jeff-koons_1624159

    Symboliquement, avant tout. Cette #sculpture a été proposée par l’artiste comme un « #symbole de #souvenir, d’optimisme et de rétablissement, afin de surmonter les terribles événements qui ont eu lieu à Paris », hommage aux victimes des attentats du 13 novembre 2015. Or le choix de l’œuvre, et surtout de son emplacement, sans aucun rapport avec les tragiques événements invoqués et leur localisation, apparaissent pour le moins surprenants, sinon opportunistes, voire cyniques.

    Démocratiquement en outre, si une œuvre d’une importance inédite devait être placée dans ce lieu culturellement et historiquement particulièrement prestigieux, ne faudrait-il pas procéder par appel à projets, comme c’est l’usage, en ouvrant cette opportunité aux acteurs de la scène française ? D’une formidable vitalité, la création de notre pays bénéficierait grandement d’une telle proposition.

    Architecturalement et patrimonialement, par son impact visuel, son gigantisme (12 mètres de hauteur, 8 de large et 10 de profondeur) et sa situation, cette sculpture bouleverserait l’harmonie actuelle entre les colonnades du Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris et le Palais de Tokyo, et la perspective sur la tour Eiffel.

    Artistiquement, créateur brillant et inventif dans les années 1980, #Jeff_Koons est depuis devenu l’emblème d’un #art_industriel, spectaculaire et spéculatif. Son atelier et ses marchands sont aujourd’hui des multinationales de l’hyperluxe, parmi d’autres. Leur offrir une si forte visibilité et reconnaissance ressortirait de la publicité ou du placement de produit, et serait particulièrement déplacé dans ce lieu très touristique, entre deux institutions culturelles majeures, dévolues notamment aux artistes émergents et à la scène artistique française.

    Financièrement enfin, cette installation serait coûteuse pour l’État, et donc pour l’ensemble des contribuables. Car l’artiste ne fait don que de son « idée », la construction et l’installation de la sculpture, estimées à 3,5 millions d’euros au minimum, étant financées par des mécènes, notamment français, qui bénéficieraient d’abattements fiscaux à hauteur de 66% de leur contribution. De plus, les travaux préalables, pour renforcer le sous-sol du #Palais_de_Tokyo, immobiliseraient longuement certains de ses espaces et entraîneraient pour le centre d’art un important manque à gagner.

    Techniquement en effet, placer 35 tonnes au-dessus des salles d’exposition du Palais de Tokyo est un défi important. Déjà incertaine, la sécurité d’une telle entreprise à long terme est impossible à garantir.

    Nous apprécions les cadeaux, mais gratuits, sans conditions et sans arrière-pensées.

    #art #commémoration #opportunisme

  • Why You’ve Never Heard of a Charter as Important as the Magna Carta | naked capitalism
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/11/youve-never-heard-charter-important-magna-carta.html

    It is scarcely surprising that the political Right want to ignore the Charter. It is about the economic rights of the property-less, limiting private property rights and rolling back the enclosure of land, returning vast expanses to the commons. It was remarkably subversive Sadly, whereas every school child is taught about the Magna Carta, few hear of the Charter.

    Yet for hundreds of years the Charter led the Magna Carta. It had to be read out in every church in England four times a year. It inspired struggles against enclosure and the plunder of the commons by the monarchy, aristocracy and emerging capitalist class, famously influencing the Diggers and Levellers in the 17th century, and protests against enclosure in the 18th and 19th.

    The Charter achieved a reversal, and forced the monarchy to recognise the right of free men and women to pursue their livelihoods in forests. The notion of forest was much broader than it is today, and included villages and areas with few trees, such as Dartmoor and Exmoor. The forest was where commoners lived and worked collaboratively.

    The Charter has 17 articles, which assert the eternal right of free men and women to work on their own volition in ways that would yield all elements of subsistence on the commons, including such basics as the right to pick fruit, the right to gather wood for buildings and other purposes, the right to dig and use clay for utensils and housing, the right to pasture animals, the right to fish, the right to take peat for fuel, the right to water, and even the right to take honey.

    The Charter should be regarded as one of the most radical in our history, since it asserted the right of commoners to obtain raw materials and the means of production, and gave specific meaning to the right to work.

    Over the centuries, the ethos of the Charter has been under constant attack. The Tudors were the most egregious, with Henry VIII confiscating ten million acres and disbursing them to favourites, the descendants of whom still possess hundreds of thousands of acres. The enclosure act of 1845 was another mass landgrab, mocking the pretensions of private property rights. Between 1760 and 1870, over 4,000 acts of Parliament, instituted by a landowning elite, confiscated seven million acres of commons. It is no exaggeration to say that the land ownership structure of Britain today is the result of organised theft.

    #Communs #Charte_des_forêts #Angleterre

  • Remind Me Why We Have Troops in #Niger? | naked capitalism
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/10/remind-troops-niger.html

    Conclusion

    So far as I can tell, there are only two reasons for us to have a military presence in Niger:

    1) To help France hang on to its uranium supply, a vital national interest for them, and

    2) The self-licking ice cream of the Global War on Terror, or whatever we’re calling it these days.

    Since the political class seems to be lusting for war — whether with Russia or in North Korea — a war in Niger would have much to recommend it, since the only nuclear powers involved would be the United States and France (since its hard to see that China would have vital national interests involved; Niger’s uranium would constitute some fraction of one-third of China’s uranium supply).

    If the United States runs true to form (and at this point we have form) a war in Niger would:

    0) Never be declared;

    1) Last for many years;

    2) Not produce a victory (if victory be defined as parades and politicians claiming victory);

    3) Be extremely expensive;

    4) Cause enormous civilian suffering and many refugees;

    5) Destabilize West Africa;

    6) Strengthen the mercenary elements of the military-industrial complex;

    7) Produce blowback, should adversaries once again focus, as Bin-Laden did, on the “far enemy.” In this regard, it would be interesting to see the social effects if the blowback operatives were Africans, and not from the Middle East, as were Bin Laden’s.

    What could go wrong?

    #guerres #etats-unis

    • The U.S. military is conducting secret missions all over Africa – VICE News
      https://news.vice.com/story/us-military-secret-missions-africa

      “The huge increase in U.S. military missions in Africa over the past few years represents nothing less than a shadow war being waged on the continent,” said William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.

      These developments stand in stark contrast to early assurances that AFRICOM’s efforts would be focused on diplomacy and aid. In the opening days of the command, the assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, Theresa Whelan, said it would not “reflect a U.S. intent to engage kinetically in Africa.” #AFRICOM, she said, was not “about fighting wars.”

      But an increasing number of AFRICOM’s missions have the appearance of just that. The command has launched 500 airstrikes in Libya in the last year alone, and U.S. forces have regularly carried out drone attacks and commando raids in Somalia.

      “When push comes to shove training missions can easily cross the line into combat operations.”

      “This military-heavy policy,” said Hartung, “risks drawing the United States more deeply into local and regional conflicts in Africa and generating a backlash that could actually aid terrorist organizations in their recruitment.”

  • Is #Pollution Value Maximizing ?
    https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/10/17/is-pollution-value-maximizing

    Quand polluer « maximise les #profits », une entreprise décide de continuer à polluer en pleine connaissance de cause, même si l’affaire reste toujours rentable après avoir investi dans des appareils de dépollution...

    In February 2017, #DuPont settled a C8-related litigation for $670M. Thus, it may seem that the system works and legal liability should deter firms from polluting. However, by using evidence discovered during the C8-litigation we show that it was perfectly rational for DuPont to pollute ex ante, in spite of the costs it ended up paying ex post, and the costs it imposed on society.

    [...]

    The key decision point for DuPont came in 1984 , when alarming information about the potential consequences of C8 emissions caused the company to call a top-executives meeting. By 1984 DuPont was aware that C8 is toxic, associated with birth defects, does not break down in the environment, and accumulates in human blood over time. Essentially, by 1984 C8 could already be considered a perennial red flag. DuPont’s executives acknowledged that the legal and medical departments would recommend stopping the usage of C8 altogether in light of the new alarming information. Yet, the business side overruled these recommendations and opted to continue C8 emissions (in fact they doubled them). Importantly, DuPont’s decision-makers also opted against investing in abatement options that were on the table , such as building an incineration device that would greatly reduce C8 emissions.

    Was this a myopic managerial decision? An agency problem? The internal documents allow us to conduct a cost-benefit analysis, showing that even a shareholder-value-maximizing manager would have chosen to pollute. Our calculation shows that even if DuPont managers could have forecasted all future legal liabilities, they would have preferred to pollute as long as they thought that the probability of getting caught was less than 19%. Given the extreme set of unlikely events that led to the payment of heavy legal fines, and given the fact that other C8 users (like 3M) have escaped such heavy legal liability, we conclude that at that time polluting without abating was a reasonable bet by DuPont’s decision makers. Thus, it was value-maximizing for DuPont to pollute, in spite of the fact that—as we show—the costs C8 pollution imposed on society greatly exceeded DuPont’s own estimates of abatement costs.

    Via naked capitalism, qui critiquent les remèdes proposés par les auteurs de l’étude :

    Quelle Surprise ! Pollution Pays ! | naked capitalism
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/10/quelle-surprise-pollution-pays.html

    Given the large power imbalance when companies misbehave, Shapira’s and Zingales’ remedies are insufficient. They incorrectly frame the problem as in informational, as opposed to about incentives.

    They call for bounties for whistleblowers plus a large tax on gag settlements in environmental cases. But it is hardly a secret, save maybe in academia, that whistleblowers ruin their careers and often their marriages, and pay a big psychological price, when the financial payoff is far from certain. Economists of the caliber of Shapira and Zingales should know that people are risk averse, and for good reason: there’s no reason to think you have more than one life. Why throw it away on a fight, even a righteous fight, which parties with much deeper pockets and staying power than you have who will do everything they can to pound you into the ground?

    Similarly, the idea of a tax on gag settlements is just silly. The incremental cost of the tax will be too small to change behavior. Shapira’s and Zingales’ objective is to more disclosure, which would help regulators and parties considering litigation, when the companies will just pay the tax.

    The obvious solution is to make executives accountable, by at a minimum forcing the payment of any large fines to come out of deferred comp and to require executives above a certain level to have a significant portion of their compensation be deferred. Only by hitting the executives where it hurts, in their wallets, and to enough of a degree to affect their standard of living, do you start to have a chance of changing behavior.

    #impunité #complicité

  • Data Scientist Cathy O’Neil : « Algorithms Are #Opinions Embedded in #Code » | naked capitalism
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/data-scientist-cathy-oneil-algorithms-opinions-embedded-code.html

    Actually, everyone uses algorithms. They just don’t formalize them in written code. Let me give you an example. I use an algorithm every day to make a meal for my family. The data I use is the ingredients in my kitchen, the time I have, the ambition I have, and I curate that data. I don’t count those little packages of ramen noodles as food.

    (Laughter)

    My definition of success is: a meal is successful if my kids eat vegetables. It’s very different from if my youngest son were in charge. He’d say success is if he gets to eat lots of Nutella. But I get to choose success. I am in charge. My opinion matters. That’s the first rule of algorithms.

    Algorithms are opinions embedded in code. It’s really different from what you think most people think of algorithms. They think algorithms are objective and true and scientific. That’s a marketing trick. It’s also a #marketing trick to intimidate you with algorithms, to make you trust and fear algorithms because you trust and fear mathematics. A lot can go wrong when we put blind faith in big data.

    #algorithmes #biais #intimidation #données

  • Neoliberalism Booster #New_York_Times Egregiously Misrepresents French Labor Laws | naked capitalism
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/neoliberalism-booster-new-york-times-egregiously-misrepresents-fren

    The August 4th New York Times article Macron Takes On France’s Labor Code, 100 Years in the Making by Adam Nossiter is misleading and erroneous in its description of the Labor Code – – “a mind-numbing 3,324 pages long and growing” – from his first sentence .

    Nossiter’s article is curious, infuriating and filled with hoary but totally false statements that support the neoliberal argument that France needs to dismantle its worker protections to make it more “competitive” and “flexible” – despite the fact that French workers are more productive than just about any other workforce in the Developed World ($108/hour worked versus G7 average $102).

    #code_du_travail #France