Friday, December 28, 2012

#NotACliff #PoliMeme of the Day is True. It's Plain Old #PummelThePoor

The ‘fiscal cliff’ explained in charts (Washington Post).

It's #NotACliff. It's an anvil thrown off the cliff onto the heads of the poor.
Grateful for cleaned up graphics by Jon Peltier.

This is the opposite of #EndPoverty and the inverse of the #AbundanceAlgorithm.

#QE5: Quantitative easing for the people

REUTERS:
 Instead of giving newly created money to bond traders, central banks could distribute it directly to the public. Technically such cash handouts could be described as tax rebates or citizens’ dividends, and they would contribute to government deficits in national accounting. But these accounting deficits would not increase national debt burdens, since they would be financed by issuing new money, at zero cost to government or to future generations, instead of selling interest-bearing government bonds.
Giving away free money may sound too good to be true or wildly irresponsible, but it is exactly what the Fed and the BoE have been doing for bond traders and bankers since 2009. Directing QE to the general public would not only be much fairer but also more effective.
Exactly. It's 200 years past time to implement the #AbundanceAlgorithm

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

#GreatCompromise is to avoid #FiscalCliff by leaping into #EconomicAbyss

Mercifully, at least there's no more pain when you cease to exist altogether after years of fighting the inevitable decrepitude, right? NYTimes:
The truth is that both the president and House Republicans have agreed to shrink a critical part of the government to its smallest in at least half a century. This is regardless of which trillion-dollar proposal gains the upper hand. Without such spending, the government becomes little more than a heavily armed pension plan with a health insurer on the side. To put it in perspective, this would cut the government’s civilian discretionary budget to the smallest it has been as a share of the economy at least since the Eisenhower administration — when a quarter of the population lived under the poverty line, thousands of children still contracted polio each year and fewer than one in 12 Americans older than 25 had a college degree. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, even going over the so-called fiscal cliff would not cut it as deeply. We’ve had this debate several times before. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was based on the proposition that government should play a much bigger role to guarantee Americans’ economic security. In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson asserted the government’s responsibility to alleviate the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Three decades ago, President Ronald Reagan changed course, ushering in an era of government retrenchment that persisted pretty much unabated until we were walloped by the Great Recession.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Industrial Capitalism's #GreatDecoupling. #Jaws2013. No Signs of Closing. Ever.

For followers of this space, this is the best Christmas gift possible. Must reading at NYT by @erikbryn. Sadly, human on the whole haven't even reacted to climate change in any meaningful way; so we're not particularly any more enthusiastic about how the humans will respond to these facts, as to any others.
first drawn by the economist Jared Bernstein, productivity growth and employment growth started to become decoupled from each other. Bernstein calls the gap that’s opened up “the jaws of the snake.” They show no signs of closing.

As the jaws of the snake opened, wages suffered even more than job growth. Adjusted for inflation, the average U.S. household now has lower income than it did in 1997. Wages as a share of G.D.P. are now at an all-time low, even as corporate profits are at an all-time high. The implicit bargain that gave workers a steady share of the productivity gains has unraveled.

Digital labor, in short, substitutes for human labor. This happens first with more routine tasks, which is a big part of the reason why less-educated workers have seen their wages fall the most as we moved deeper into the computer age.

As we move ahead the Great Decoupling will only accelerate.

Digital progress lowers prices, improves quality, and brings us into a world where abundance becomes the norm.

But there is no economic law that says digital progress will benefit everyone evenly. As technology races ahead it can leave a lot of workers behind. In the short run we can improve their prospects greatly by investing in infrastructure, reforming education at all levels and encouraging entrepreneurs to invent the new products, services and industries that will create jobs.

While we’re doing this, however, we also need to start preparing for a technology-fueled economy that’s ever-more productive, but that just might not need a great deal of human labor. Designing a healthy society to go along with such an economy will be the great challenge, and the great opportunity, of the next generation.
While there is "no economic law that says digital progress will benefit everyone evenly," we live in an era that we are participating in the very process of biological evolution; amending natural laws and processes that humans had absolutely no hand in engineering. In contrast to the relatively immutable laws of physics, economics are completely man-made; these are not immutable laws by any stretch. We can and must re-make economics in the image of service to humanity; before the machines fully incorporate a contrary belief system. It's worth repeating tried and true reason statement of these principles and aims:
"Human progress is our Cause,
Liberty of thought our Supreme Wish,
Freedom of Conscience our Mission, and
The guarantee of Equal Rights To All People Everywhere,
Our Ultimate Goal."

Friday, December 7, 2012

Public Money is NOT Debt. It is Equity in the Commonwealth. All of us.

Michael Kumhof: The Chicago Plan Revisited - The Advantages of 100% Money (Quotation at 12:24)

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

People are not any company's greatest asset

Today, Citigroup announced that it is cutting 11,000 jobs worldwide, about 4 percent of its staff, to save as much as $1.1 billion a year in expenses.
People our not any company's greatest Asset. This is one of the most pernicious lies perpetuated by an inherently sociopathological system. Sociopathological in that it acts like Doris Day to the world, while psychologically battering her children behind closed doors. Sociopathological in that it speaks in terms of relationship, mutual concern, support, aid, teamwork, all the while acting exclusively in terms of control. Stark, infinitely self-absorbed, merciless, my-way-or-the-highway control. Econ101 teaches us that Assets are the opposite Liabilities. When times get tough, we cling to Assets, and cut Liabilities. Yet, employees and workers continue to swallow this "you are our greatest asset" bait, hook, line, and sinker, every day.

We don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this out. Every detective show in history teaches us the same lesson: "People say lots of things, I'm looking at behavior." Without any elaborate philosophizing or story telling, all we have to do is look at how the past 100 years of industrial capitalism has behaved. We have the outcomes, right in front of us. Overwhelming, empirical, even if seemingly inconceivable truths. The homeless children, the displaced, discarded, and demoralized adults doped up on anti-depressants to dampen the desperation that any normal, healthy human being experiences when the red carpet that was rolled out for them is yanked up with glee, sending lives tumbling, while the perpetrators of this sick, sick game ROTFL.

The Mayan calendar does not predict or promise that the Earth itself will cease to exist as of Dec 21, 2012. It does, however, turn out out to make very timely recommendation for the #EndOfTheWorld as we know it and a reboot to a new and virus-free #EarthOS.

Not only are we allowed to speak of alternatives, we must implement them, now. We know how the abundance algorithm works. It's time. Because human beings can be the Earth's greatest asset.