David Benjamin is a Brooklyn-based journalist and novelist who writes on technology issues, usually from the Luddite point of view.
Among common arguments against almost any form of business regulation is that government shouldn't intrude in areas where “market forces” will more efficiently accomplish the same regulation. Among the cases that most obviously contradicts this laissez-faire belief in the self-regulating market is the shameful record of Big Tobacco. For generations, covering hundreds of thousands of…
As the US presidential campaign inches closer to Election Day, a few more people are paying attention, and listening to the alleged issues. Among the campaign's sillier questions is whether the ideal president ought to have a “business” background. On this point, Mitt Romney is always cited as potentially the first businessman-president since Herbert Hoover.…
I was barely awake this morning when I heard Joe Scarborough raving on TV about the teachers strike in Chicago. He argued that the teachers union was committing public relations suicide and alienating parents while Mayor Rahm Emmanuel cuts them to shreds. This is possibly all true, but not entirely relevant to the issues at…
It's Labor Day as I write this and ponder wistfully the state of organized labor in the United States. I've always been pro-labor, partly out of sheer genetics. My grandfather was a member of the International Brotherhood of Machinists for more than 50 years, and I'm an associate member of the United Steelworkers. Despite my…
One of the more fatuous stories to pop up lately in the New York Times hit the streets today. In the wake of Apple's $1 billion judgment against Samsung's (and many other companies') imitations of the iPhone, reporter Nick Wingfield uncovered, in the mobile phone industry, widespread pessimism about the future of “innovation.” (See: Apple…
With the possible election in November of Mitt Romney as America's first “businessman-president” since Herbert Hoover in 1928, we're forced to ask a philosophical question that comes around regularly on the guitar: Beyond its imperative to make profits, does business have any moral responsibility to society? Republicans, our traditional zealots for unregulated capitalism, usually inject…
In my capacity as a reporter, I've been to corporate headquarters all over the world. And I've found every one of them, without even a finicky exception, spotless. Nobody cleans house like DuPont, or GE, or Archer Daniels Midland's janitors. We all know the pleasure of entering a corporate HQ as the soothing tones of…
PARIS — They say the euro is coming apart at the seams. This, however, was not evident this morning when, with my wife, Hotlips, I made the involuntary rounds of several bank branches in this European capital. All we wanted was to deposit a few non-euros into our Paris euro account. We entered the neighborhood…
When EE Times' Junko Yoshida recently reported that Japanese consumer electronics companies will be scaling back their production of TV sets, shipping most or all of the manufacturing work offshore, I found myself waxing nostalgic. I harkened back to my college days in Beloit, Wis. To stay in school, I was working three part-time jobs.…
By now, you all know that Meg Whitman, the new CEO of {complink 2376|Hewlett-Packard Co.}, has decided to dump almost 30,000 US employees. She says she's able to do this without shedding any of HP's major businesses while increasing efficiency in the company's sales force and creating new products. To a layman like me, this…