Plutonomy: A Hate Story

Worth the re-run after tonight's re-watch of Capitalism: A Love Story.
Plutonomy

As Goes Walmart ...

... so goes America.

August 17, 2010 - The New Normal
U.S. Profits UP & UP ; Sales & Jobs DOWN & DOWN

Hello? Are we reaching?

Attacking Social Security vs Adaptive Social Security

Attacking Social Security:

"It’s a lot easier to imagine working until you’re 70 if you have a comfortable office job than if you’re engaged in manual labor. America is becoming an increasingly unequal society — and the growing disparities extend to matters of life and death. Life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot at the top of the income distribution, but much less for lower-income workers. And remember, the retirement age is already scheduled to rise under current law.

So let’s beat back this unnecessary, unfair and — let’s not mince words — cruel attack on working Americans. Big cuts in Social Security should not be on the table." - Paul Krugman

Adaptive Social Security: When we implement the guaranteed U.S. Basic Income it will permanently fix all of this and make the costly means-tested and perpetually gamed welfare system obsolete, saving billions of dollars and improving both individual and institutional integrity of the entire system, because there is no longer any incentive to lie, cheat, or steal from a system which, as currently designed, encourages that kind of maladaptive behavior.

More Evidence that 20th Century Industrial Age Capitalism is Trapped in what's called an "Inverted Credibility Curve"

So, this Digg of a Network World article reports that:

Tech workers are trapped in what's called "an inverted wage curve," according to a report released this week by Yoh Services.

This rare trend occurs when demand for skilled workers is increasing, while wages are decreasing. Usually -- according to the economic law of supply and demand -- increased demand for a particular set of skilled workers results in rising wages.

Usually. Right. Sure. Rare trend my arse. It's all engineering, from stem to stern. 1,000 words worth of concatenated cliches passed off as a news article -- the going best practice for cost-cutting mass media, shipping commodity newswire mash-ups and clip-downs in lieu of what used to be journalism -- doesn't even serve as a band-aid, let alone providing direct pressure to the massive hemorrhaging of what used to be a U.S. labor market.

Feel free to read the rest of the blog to get up to speed on the details and why this whole jobs narrative is functionally obsolete. It isn't even wrong or stupid anymore. It just doesn't matter at all. It's simply, increasingly, irrelevant.