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Deregulation, some say, is asking authorities to look the other way.
Bribery, others say, is paying authorities to look the other way.
…What is it when the Banking Lobby pays congress $1million per day?

Below is a transcript of this interview.
Original can be found at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04162010/transcript1.html.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL. With all due respect, we can only wish those tea party activists who gathered this week were not so single-minded about just who’s responsible for their troubles, real and imagined. They’re up in arms, so to speak, against big government, especially the Obama administration.

But if they thought this through, they’d be joining forces with other grassroots Americans who will soon be demonstrating in Washington and elsewhere against high finance, taking on Wall Street and the country’s biggest banks.

The original Tea Party, remember, wasn’t directed just against the British redcoats. Colonial patriots also took aim at the East India Company. That was the joint-stock enterprise originally chartered by the first Queen Elizabeth. Over the years, the government granted them special rights and privileges, which the owners turned into a monopoly over trade, including tea.

It may seem a stretch from tea to credit default swaps, but the principle is the same: when enormous private wealth goes unchecked, regular folks get hurt – badly. That’s what happened in 2008 when the monied interests led us up the garden path to the great collapse.

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In today’s 24-hour-news, short-attention-span, knee-jerk world, long term thinking is rare.
Dr. George Friedman is rare and right (in my opinion).

Listen to his predictions for The Next 100 Years… Tell me what you think!

Pranav Mistry of MIT Media Labs, called one of the 3 greatest minds on earth today, has created a new wearable device called SixthSense. Watch the video below, compliments of Ted.com, and be amazed. Then realize…

You can create this yourself for a few dollars in off-the-shelf parts, and free open-source software Pranav is making publicly available!

We grew up interacting with the physical objects around us. There is an enormous number of them that we use every day. Unlike most of our computing devices, these objects are much more fun to use. When you talk about objects, one other thing automatically comes attached to that thing, and that is gestures: how we manipulate these objects, how we use these objects in everyday life. We use gestures not only to interact with these objects, but we also use them to interact with each other. A gesture of “Namaste!”, maybe, to respect someone, or maybe — in India I don’t need to teach a kid that this means “four” in cricket. It comes as a part of our everyday learning.

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In this video, Barry Schwartz “…makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.”… Pay special attention to his explanation of why corporate incentives don’t work.

This video was recorded at the TED Conference in February 2009… [click to play]

Full Transcript from Ted.com:

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Brian Nunes and I do our version of Ocean’s 11.