Who's Stupider?

“When I was a child, I thought as a child; when I became an adult, I put away childish things.”

 

Transcript Excerpt

>>the swaps market, which is where a lot of this leverage lives, has little to no capital requirements and exists in the off exchange with nobody clearing it. blaming greece for these problems is like blaming the subprime borrowers. greece stupid? yeah, you bet, they're real stupid. but they're also the size of dallas, texas. so who's stupider? greece, who was like, we'll take all the money, or the western bank regulators who said it was legal to give the greeks this kind of leverage?

 

>> well, look at the swaps market. the swaps market is anywhere between $300 trillion and $600 trillion (CORRECTED) -- and the whole global economy, you know, its capital value, is not that much. it’s a fraction of that much. which means if rhode island fails, just the swaps on rhode island's debt is enough to take down the entire u.s. banking system and ripple across the pond. and that's exactly the problem. greece is like rhode island failing.

 

>> that's the interconnectedness, and that's why you need not just financial reform in this country, but financial reform that has a global reach.

 

>> absolutely.

 

So, isn't it time to grow up out of our safe little fairy land and act like responsible grown ups? Isn’t it time to stop pretending that this bass-ackwards game of Railroad Tycoon that we call Vintage 19th Century America Industrial Capitalism is any more legit or inalienable than Tidily-winks or Parcheesi? Isn’t it long past time to fold up that tired old board game and get to work creating a scalable, adaptive world game that might be worth our kids inhabiting over the next couple of decades and long beyond?

 

Now, to be clear, nobody is suggesting some kind of expeditious transition to a global peaceful postscarcity scenario, here, right? I mean, who can afford the risk of a rational, diversified, mixed-economic model working in symbiosis with some kind of utterly pathetic socialist utopian crap? No, we simply MUST return to the conservative comfort of doing things the way we always have, bombing the living hell out of anything and anyone that we don’t understand or can’t utterly dominate and control, right?

 

Or not.

The Red, White, and Blue of Economic Inequality

David Brooks is a genius at finding a middle road that gently slopes right, tamping down hyperbole and histrionics. He’s long been a personal hero and role model for encouraging cooler heads to prevail. In the case of the occupy movement, however, he’s set up a brilliant, deceptively simply, and false dichotomy. David writes:

But the fact is that Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.
If your ultimate goal is to reduce inequality, then you should be furious at the doctors, bankers and C.E.O.’s. If your goal is to expand opportunity, then you have a much bigger and different agenda (NYT).

Wait? Furious at doctors? The people who cure us and care for us? Oops. Sometimes deadlines help us focus, other times they just make us rush. I’m fairly confident David would never want to utter the phrase, “society should be furious at doctors.”
Nevertheless, the article is an attempt to provoke current and potential new occupiers to question whether or not the cause justifies such sustained efforts, mobilized direct action, and relentless focus on Economic Inequality, which knows no color or other division.
Economic Inequality may manifest itself as Red and Blue in some cases, but it’s White all over. Relax, that’s not a racial slur, Caucasians.
Mr. Brooks and his 1% paymasters fear nothing more than the efficacy of the full 99%, unpartitioned by superficial politics, race, geography, culture; and that’s precisely what the #occupy movement is all about.
Beneath and within the Red and the Blue, the underlying White fabric of all economic injustice is woven of a frayed and decayed fabric, of 19th century industrial capitalism and cotton, dipped and striped a billion too many times in the dye of Any Rand’s sociopathological objectivism, and Made In America by Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, valuing humans as mere cogs to be optimized in the machine.
The 99% are not Red, White, or Blue. We are Human Beings of every hue, united against every stain of imbalance and injustice.
Setting up a false Red and Blue dichotomy seeks to drive a wedge into the 99%, encouraging the kind of polarization that Brooks claims to oppose every Sunday morning, on an issue that is entirely colorless at it’s core.

Bottom Line: the usual whipping posts of education and opportunity will not distract the public this time from the astronomical costs and hoarded profits that exacerbate All Inequality, consequent to the one corrupt economic OS this movement is properly focused on upgrading. It’s time for the full system reformat. Delete all partitions. Reboot. Restart.

Does Economic Expansion Require Growing Inequality?

Obviously, economic expansion does not require hoarding, quite the contrary. We're impressed to finally see Business Week taking the situation seriously and reporting the facts more accurately in Ms. Rand, Meet Singapore. Mr. Hayek, Meet Norway, including an occupy-wall-street tag: http://www.businessweek.com/finance/occupy-wall-street/ It's a great start.

"Is rising inequality the price of rapid economic growth? Advocates of deregulation often argue that the increasing concentration of wealth is driven by greater rewards going to innovators and entrepreneurs who drive the economy forward. But is this kind of trade-off really a given? Not really."

Thank you for demonstrating the integrity to present the data as it is, BW!

Conservative American Enterprise Institute Supports #BasicIncome

In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State:

"America's population is wealthier than any in history. Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for retirement, health care, and the alleviation of poverty. We still have millions of people without comfortable retirements, without adequate health care, and living in poverty. Only a government can spend so much money so ineffectually. The solution is to give the money to the people. This is the Plan, a radical new approach to social policy that defies any partisan label. Murray suggests eliminating all welfare transfer programs at the federal, state, and local levels and substituting an annual $10,000 (that was 2006, $15,000 more realistic) cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older. In Our Hands describes the financial feasibility of the Plan and its effects on retirement, health care, poverty, marriage and family, work, neighborhoods and civil society."

Current models indicate that $1,200/mo is much more realistic in U.S., today. The exact number is secondary to first educating the American public about this vital, fundamental, fiscally responsible overhaul of the costly, hopelessly fragmented, often duplicated, abused, and ineffective needs-based welfare programs.

H/T @Benjamin_Flex

Dig Deeper:

• Life after Jobs.
• What MLK said.
• Dr. Cornell West: don't be afraid to say Revolution.

Pension Funds Braced for Collapse of Capitalism

Carl Hess, Global Head of Investment, Towers Watson, on FTfm:

@ 00:40 "Well, 'may you live in interesting times' is the old curse, right? We are living in interesting times, indeed."

@ 04:20 "Gold represents a good hedge against some of the more extreme risks that could be out there, whether that's the collapse of capitalism, or just a major nation defaulting on it's debt."

Amazing how question #1 of economics, “compared to what?” plays out at this juncture. “Just” a major nation defaulting on it’s debt. Awesome.

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To speak actuality to denial; true light to false lights; to encourage readers to open eyes, hearts, minds; to learn, adapt, and thrive in the global Mixed Economy of the present and future.

It’s simply not breaking news to announce that we live today, right now, in the techno-utopian future envisioned by the enlightened founders. The 18th and 19th century agro-industrial capitalist transition worked. We beat that level. It took around 200 years, but we won. Achievement earned. Level up. We don’t need a singularity to #occupy the actuality of the here and now. We are finally free to:

• Celebrate and circulate, our astronomical prosperity with all humanity.
• Explore our unlimited potential, daring to imagine the unimaginable.
• Imagine the varieties of human experiences we’ll co-evolve, moving forward.

“Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” – Steve Jobs.

"This is the real news of our century. It is highly feasible to take care of all of humanity at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever experienced or dreamt of. To do so without having anybody profit at the expense of another so that everybody can enjoy the whole earth. And it can all be done by 1985." Buckminster Fuller, The World Game, 1971.

Michael Moore at #OccupyWallStreet

The crowd's repetition of what he says is not some sort of strange ritual -- it's an ingenious way of adapting to the no-amplified-sound-in-the-park law. When a speaker addresses the group in the park, they use the "people's mic" so that the hundreds around them who are outside of earshot can hear what the speaker is saying, as well. There are only 400 of them - the richest, greediest, pathologically hoarding, kleptomaniacs - and 250 MILLION or more of us. You don't have to be into sports to know the outcome of that game. They think their power is in their bank accounts, but we know our power is in the people. Follow @BasicIncome and teach yourself more about Basic Income as an equitable long term means of sustainable resource circulation in an advanced technological era of postscarcity.

60 Minutes: Inside High Frequency Trading

"We're getting down to how fast can the electrons travel."
- Lawrence Leibowitz, COO, NYSE (60 Minutes)

The Next Leg Down, Up, Down, What, and Then What?

Revised 8/23/2011.

Good Morning, America:

• Only 58% of American adults are in your workforce, at all. If this isn't Marxian unemployment, the 100% predictable outcome of the massive success of the capital industrialization process, then nothing is.
  
• According to the most recent available Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, just 48.9% of your youth is employed (16-24 y.o.). This was the lowest July rate on record for the series, which began in 1948; and July is the BEST month for summer employment.
  
• The longer people stay unemployed, the less employable they become; your human resources are literally rotting on the vine.
  
• As youth are equally or more deleteriously impacted than mature Americans this time around, you can't just discard an inconvenient surplus of spent humans; dumped off on the corner to live as the next wave of invisible people, or euphemistically whisk them away into so-called retirement, living in silent poverty or near-poverty.
• This second recent major stock market correction, presently underway, coincides with record profits and consolidation for the wealthy; which literally makes no fundamental sense, right? If profits are the supposed definition of success, then rational markets would reward said success, not punish it. Think about it this way: what sane parent beats their child for bringing home straight A's? Yet this is precisely how dysfunctional markets behave.
• Having enjoyed a youthful 200 years of absolutely stratospheric success and wild popularity, Wall Street has today become a doped up sagging starlet in Las Vegas; maniacally addicted to a distorted permutation of casino capitalism, with you America, human beings as cardboard chips.
• This blog continues to be about encouraging enlightened, adaptive, non-Marxian (certainly non-violent) progress. Think of our global and national economic systems like software that ran well on the old machine, but is incompatible with the best of the new. Time to increment; hence, the '++.'

Moreover, bullshit make-work jobs are NOT the answer; nothing zaps human value, productivity, and  self-esteem faster than reporting to a bullshit location, answering to bullshit processes, to engage in bullshit behavior in the name of a so-called job. It's time to break the job trance: the concept of J.O.B. as sole or ultimate Justification Of Being for humans. Jobs are simply no longer sufficient nor scalable to adaptive progress, moving forward.

---

What could possibly ever replace, or at least complement jobs, as authentic, productive, identity-legitimizing human activity? Purpose, to begin with, along with some pretty damned impressive mathematics, lifelong learning, and highly laudable roles -- equal in scale to their achievements -- for emergent artificial intelligence, extended cognition, and augmented realities; once we get to specifics of implementation, below. Certainly, in everyday life, editing the invisible hand's implicit spin on the "what do you do" question at cocktail parties -- what's meant is what do you do, for money, of course -- will take a lot of time and positive cultural reinforcement. Nobody is pretending that altering the trajectory of human behavior isn't among the most challenging and complex hacks imaginable.

Perhaps your purpose is mastering a dozen languages (half of them computer languages). Perhaps bringing smiles to the faces of the elderly, or people in general, most builds your own sense of accomplishment and pride, while powerfully encouraging others to work hard to accomplish their goals. Did you notice what happened there? Work and Goals didn't go anywhere in a world without jobs. At least not in a world without jobs in the sense we've known them for the past couple of hundreds of years.

Maybe your favorite thing to do is smoke weed and stay drunk 90% of the time. Shocking, right? Obviously, our default reality has long complained that without jobs, people would all become lazy dope-head alcoholics. Closer to truth is that the people who are going to behave that way are already behaving that way; in fact, research suggests that we are causing significant increases in this undesirable behavior, due to the current regime of obliterating human dignity outside of the narrow context of slips of paper or digits on a spreadsheet exchanged for the valuable commodity in the known universe: human energy and attention.

Maybe your purpose could be to compassionately foster new opportunities for people who's purpose is helping others find a purpose! Maybe you could be the one helping such people to find something that's more compelling and interesting than staying baked all day every day. Don't you think that would give your life more meaning than putting pot smokers in cages -- paying for their food, board, and healthcare -- while earning $8.00/hour to hold them hostage with guns?

---

Though by all means, let us please get back to lamenting about the impossibility of JOBS, JOBS, JOBS, particularly given the clinical reality of 50% actual unemployment. Even if we did create a massive 1930's style work projects administration, to function as a motorized wheel-chair for a paraplegic industrial economy, we can't put a nation of knowledge workers, physicians, lawyers, computer engineers, and software architects to work building dams and bridges; it's time to grow up, humans.

Recently, lamestream media commentators have remarked that markets have corrected as a vote of no confidence in government's ability to manage it's own affairs in the wake of the AA+ downgrade. This doesn't even pass the blush test, and epitomizes the ROTFLMAO test. 

To suggest that the same demented, delusional, crazed, schizophrenic markets -- which just got done running to government for $1.2 trillion and their own very existence on the cusp of 2008 to 2009 -- could cast such a vote with any credibility whatsoever, is not merely laughable, it's scary stupid. Idiotic. Reckless. Not funny or even sporting. Just plain wrong-headed.

Yes, a lot of these realities sting. I'm actually not nearly as pessimistic as much of this may sound. In fact, I wouldn't put the effort into these entries if I didn't deeply believe in the universal human potential to adapt and advance. Yet, like that dysfunctional drunken starlet, admitting to symptoms is only the beginning; getting to root causes is the only way to sustainable recovery and a flourishing future.

Moreover, it is exceedingly difficult to reach anything resembling a better place -- to get there from here -- if people can't agree where there is. A central proposition of this blog is that we already got there --  in terms of the material and economic goals envisioned by the architects of the American Experiment -- a decade or so prior to the bicentennial, and then we didn't know what to do with ourselves. Hence, the relatively drunken derivatives partying and reveling by a rapidly shrinking few, ever since.

Presently, the fact that there is still vastly more than enough supply of stuff on the shelves for everyone; as there will continue to be into the indefinite future -- with only 49% to 58% of people working, thanks to astronomical industrial efficiencies -- is a pretty fair measure of thereness, insofar as our forebears would have imagined any massively technologically advanced, postscarcity world, from their vantage point. This entire world game comes down to perspective, after all, doesn't it?

---

Since examples are a great way to illustrate a point, here's another. As a culture, we are so dysfunctionally addicted to scarcity thinking that government agencies must do battle with communications companies over who makes up the rules to the games for manifesting profits literally out of thin air; all by pretending that there is a shortage of freakin' radio waves and lightwaves that move ephemeral packets of information across the internet. To wit, "the Deregulators belief in a world of bandwidth scarcity, which justifies their tiered-pricing approach to [pricing and] services; and the Openists belief that a world of bandwidth surplus is upon us if we would but build it" (Educause). That is really stretching beyond credibility to create a scarcity-based game out of infinite photons and electromagnetic pulses.

Okay, I do admit that building more radio repeaters and connecting them with more fiber optic cables is one logical labor program for a post-information economy; though such works programs are hardly the solution to sustainable half-employment, moving forward. The one-time sunk cost and effort of such an infrastructure labor program only further proves the rule about the proliferation of non-material ways that people create and circulate information, knowledge, and social value in an advanced postscarcity context.

---

Overall, if we are to have any hope of getting through this global and domestic transition, there's a good chance that we must encourage continued education and development of an entire nation of futurists, everyday people who think carefully and critically about the kind of society we want to live in, so that we might stand a better chance of coming together for this next leg of history's journey. A journey that is far more likely than not to include some form of Mixed Economy. 

Now would be a good time to begin learning about any number of viable alternatives, some basic math, including domestic and international sustainable resource circulation research from the past four of five decades.

Our industrial capitalist republic has long been referred to as the American experiment; and it's been magnificently successful in countless ways. Like any good longitudinal science, perhaps today we're in the very process of falsifying some of the base assumptions of that experiment, in a manner that can begin moving us forward again, empowered by this liberating data -- data that demonstrates that a society can not only survive, but thrive, with only half-employment -- rather than disillusioned and derailed by it. Even if Roubini is right that Marx was right.

What to do with a bought Congress

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Ayn Rand's Ultimate Oligarch Central Planning Wet Dream Comes True

Via P2PFoundation (@mbauwens) and Global Guerrillas (@johnrobb):

The answer is that an extreme concentration of wealth at the center of our market economy has led to a form of central planning. The concentration of wealth is now in so few hands and is so extreme in degree, that the combined liquid financial power of all of those not in this small group is inconsequential to determining the direction of the economy. As a result, we now have the equivalent of centralized planning in global marketplaces. A few thousand extremely wealthy people making decisions on the allocation of our collective wealth. The result was inevitable: gross misallocation across all facets of the private economy.

NOT because of government or democracy or collectivist cooperation as Rand ranted; quite the contrary, all of this is because her very own beloved industrial era capitalism ran it's full course; and ran it quite well in bringing humanity out of the agrarian age, thank you very much. However, unchecked by democracy, and unbalanced by an adaptive mixed-economy model:

The result of [industrial market capitalism's] central planning in the US has finally hit the wall.  The list of problems is endless. The misallocations range from the dangerous $600 trillion derivatives market to the destruction of the US middle class.

It's not time to hate or blame. We were all complicit. It's time to admit we were wrong, misinformed, fooled, or just not paying attention. It's time to increment: Capitalism++

Economies are Circulatory Systems

Currencies go into and out of circulation, not distribution. It's not about redistribution at all, lunkheads, it's about sustainable global resource circulation. If you clot up 43% of your blood in 1% of your body, it doesn't matter where the clot is; the whole body is going down. People and societies are complex adaptive biological systems, not rigorous, reductionist mathematical formulations.

Basic Income (global | us) is not merely about the theoretical mathematics of economics. It's about acknowledging and addressing the everyday biological realities of human existence, lack, homelessness, hunger, and the persistent threat thereof, which strips economic agents -- American, and global citizens -- of anything even remotely resembling democratic, free market bargaining power.

Banks are now "Too Big to Fail, squared. Concentration has gotten worse, not better, since the 2008 crisis."

• "The top ten banks now control 77% of all bank assets."
• "There is no way to practice, in advance, [the Too Big To Fail legislation now enacted by Congress]."
• "I worry about [a second housing crash]. I don't want to tell you we're going to have a crash, crash; I think there is still a lot of pressure on the housing market."
• "I think it's a jobs story ... which I'm not very confident about at this moment."
• "What is the new normal around employment? Is 8% the new normal? Is 9% the new normal?

-- Andrew Ross Sorkin, full MTP interview, below.

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Poverty: Equal Opportunity Oppressor

Poverty cares not whether you're black, white, technicolor, 3D, American, African.



Read more at AlterNet ...

Economic Recovery / Reboot Complete!

Everything's great at Goldman-Sachs, and you're right back where you started, so I don't know what your whiny problem is all about:

Home price gains since spring 2009 vanish

The home price gains made after the housing market bottomed in spring 2009 have vanished, with 10 cities posting fresh lows in February, according to a closely watched index that tracks home prices in America's biggest metropolitan areas. The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index for 20 major U.S. cities, released Tuesday, came within a hair of its previous bottom hit in April 2009. The renewed drop in home prices indicates the nation's housing woes continue despite a recovery in the broader economy. "There is very little, if any, good news about housing. Prices continue to weaken, while trends in sales and construction are disappointing," said David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor's.

Jobs & Housing: No Easter Resurrection, Ascension, Redemption, or Return in Sight

Stimulus by Fed Is Disappointing, Economists Say

"[M]ost Americans are not feeling the difference, in part because those benefits have been surprisingly small. The latest estimates from economists, in fact, suggest that the pace of recovery from the global financial crisis has flagged since November, when the Fed started buying $600 billion in Treasury securities to push private dollars into investments that create jobs" (NYT).

Builders of New Homes Seeing No Sign of Recovery

"The recession hurt a lot of industries, but it knocked the residential construction market to the mat and has kept it there, even as the broader economy has started to fitfully recover.

Sales of new single-family homes in February were down more than 80 percent from the 2005 peak, far exceeding the 28 percent drop in existing home sales. New single-family sales are now lower than at any point since the data was first collected in 1963, when the nation had 120 million fewer residents.

Builders and analysts say a long-term shift in behavior seems to be under way. Instead of wanting the biggest and the newest, even if it requires a long commute, buyers now demand something smaller, cheaper and, thanks to $4-a-gallon gas, as close to their jobs as possible. That often means buying a home out of foreclosure from a bank.

Four out of 10 sales of existing homes are foreclosures or otherwise distressed properties. Builders like Mr. Meier who specialize in putting up entire neighborhoods on a city’s outskirts — Richmond is some 50 miles northwest of downtown Chicago — cannot compete despite chopping prices" (NYT).

Taxation Misrepresentation: @WSJ Earns Tufte Tsk-Tsk-Tsk

Edward Tufte would have just three words for the Wall Street Journal: "Where the Tax Money Is." Tsk, tsk, tsk. WSJ carves up IRS data into a False Middle Class:

The chart above is intended to impress and scare seventh grade educated newspaper readers into opposing any and all means of responsibly addressing the astronomical war debts incurred by the bi-partisan military industrial complex, just as Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower promised, 50 years ago.¹

What's worth dwelling on for just a moment is the fact that these pictures all depend upon how one stacks the kindergarten blocks. In everyday America, the following is vastly closer to the True Middle Class we experience IRL. Take those blocks conveniently tossed aside to the right, by the right, and stack them up proper and you get a dramatically different picture.

But let's keep this real. We promise long ago that this was eventually going to get uncomfortably personal. My wife and I may not "feel" well off by working two jobs and "barely" grossing $70K annual income for two in the Bay Area; yet the fact of the matter is we are quite well off compared to most Americans; even as we literally live dirt poor on rice and beans living next door to Atherton and Los Altos Hills.  I've been out there in the highways and byways and know first hand how financially fecked average people are in America. Rather than feel offended for "calling us well off," or jumping on the defensive when someone says, "you make $140K? you're rich!" We should get off of our high horses and  respond with some modicum of empathy for others. "Holy crap! Most people are really that poor?! This is totally unacceptable!"

The entire premise of this vital civic conversation must be turned on it's head, because we're completely  upside down in debt thanks to the system that drove us off this debt cliff in the first place.

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1. Although Eisenhower is from the same era, the military industrial complex is not to be confused with tinfoil hat Kennedy UFO conspiracy theory fictions. This is just a snippet of plain old boring, factual American history; business as usual. Nothing new here, move along.

"I'm cool with that." - Zuckerberg to Obama on Raising His Taxes at Town Hall

Still streaming live right now at WhiteHouseLive.

Conflicted over Classroom Capitalism

I don't even know where to begin in teasing apart the mishmash of motivations and behavioral acculturations around teaching children what money is all about in this context. Supposedly, money was once about a means of exchange, it had something to do with allocating and managing scarcity; increasingly today, money appears to be more about behavioral compliance. This may not be an entirely bad thing, if the behaviors rewarded and encouraged directly and proportionally benefit the individuals in question. It's complicated.

Amplify’d from www.firstgradebrain.com

New Behavior Reward in my Classroom

I use a Behavior Ladder (basically a clip chart) in my classroom to manage student behavior. Students earn dollars (Star Bucks) when they move up and lose dollars if they have to move down. They can use their dollars to buy items from the treasure box or pay to eat lunch in the classroom. This system has worked well for me. I've been slacking off on treasure box lately. I'm tired of having to buy things for it, and parents aren't always consistent in sending things in.

The machine takes quarters, and one night in bed I found myself re-thinking my Star Bucks. Money is such a hard concept for first graders to master. Why am I making them count fake money when they could be counting REAL money? I decided that after Spring Break I am getting ride of the Star Bucks. Star Bucks will be replaced with REAL pennies which they will trade in for REAL nickels, dimes, and quarters. I'm so excited about this! Since next year I will be using this system from the beginning of the year I think it will really improve their counting money skills! Read more at www.firstgradebrain.com

 

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/hriIWq

"Companies that operate in a free market generally work as hard as they can to make that market not free"

That's Seth Godin on The Free Market.

It's Not About Pie - It's About Fostering Sustainable Human Flourishing

SOURCE: Investors.com

Comment Posted By: InCincy(2940) on 4/5/2011 | 3:41 PM ET

"That is one impressive image. This should be on the US Currency replacing the pictures of the Presidents & Statemen who are probably unrecognized by many anyhow. many by using pictures, we could make up for the lack of learning in Civics and Math classes."

How Much Cocaine Backs Global Currency?

This is a bit of an editorial diversion from the usual curation algorithm, so if it's your first time visiting the blog, I hope you'll dig a little deeper.

In this video, scroll to the 4:00 mark to skip the meandering segue. Like any television content, the facts presented should be double checked. In this case, the delivery was just too entertaining to withhold, even if it does wax a bit Foxish, hyperbolic.

The Keiser Report may qualify as O'Reilly Report, Left Edition. Because Max also makes fun of Obama and the current administration, it would be funny to insert some of these pieces into the Fox broadcast stream, just to see how soon that audience can be turned on a dime; independent of message or independent thinking, solely attributable to message delivery method. Pay the network enough and you could probably run the experiment. Come on, surely we've got just one billionaire reader out there with nothing better to do this year. Have some fun! Life's too short! How long would it take to invert Fox's message and audience mindset? Five years? One year? 3 months? How vapid are the monkey minds, really? See you on the other side. ;-)

Economic Security Beyond Reach of Many Americans

Source: NYTimes.com

"A separate report being released Friday tries to go beyond traditional measurements like the poverty line and minimum wage to show what people need to earn to achieve a basic standard of living."

The study, commissioned by Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit group, builds on an analysis the group and some state and local partners have been conducting since 1995 on how much income it takes to meet basic needs without relying on public subsidies. The new study aims to set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies.

“We wanted to recognize that there was a cumulative impact that would affect one’s lifelong economic security,” said Joan A. Kuriansky, executive director of Wider Opportunities, whose report is called “The Basic Economic Security Tables for the United States.” “And we’ve all seen how often we have emergencies that we are unprepared for,” she said, especially during the recession. Layoffs or other health crises “can definitely begin to draw us into poverty.”

According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year — or just above $14 an hour — to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

Evolution

"But here’s the crucial element: it looks very likely that we’re in a period where the large patterns we’ve seen before aren’t working right.

Instead, we’re in an environment that will force swift and sometimes frightening evolution.

Businesses, communities, social institutions of all kinds, will find themselves facing a need to simultaneously experiment rapidly and keep hold of a longer-term perspective. You simply can’t expect that the world to which you’ve become adapted will look in any way the same – economically, environmentally, politically – in another decade.

As a result, you simply can’t expect that you will look in any way the same, either.

The asteroid strikes. The era of evolution is upon us. It’s now time to watch the dinosaurs take flight" (IEET).

Economic Democracy is a precondition for Political Democracy

Clip 1: Economic Democracy and Political Democracy.

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Clip 2: Wider Context. Peace is an Economic Issue.

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Footnote for MSNBC: The hard pre-rolls aren't going to cut it here; especially with multiple clips on a page. I'll leave this here this time, but if I don't get a share -- a significant revenue share -- of the pre-roll ad revenue for which I alone am the proximate cause and courier, I'm not going to distribute your advertising for free.

Educated, Unemployed, Frustrated: Not just the over 40 crowd any more

New York Times on America's new normal:

About one-fourth of Egyptian workers under 25 are unemployed, a statistic that is often cited as a reason for the revolution there. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in January an official unemployment rate of 21 percent for workers ages 16 to 24.

My generation was taught that all we needed to succeed was an education and hard work. Tell that to my friend from high school who studied Chinese and international relations at a top-tier college. He had the misfortune to graduate in the class of 2009, and could find paid work only as a lifeguard and a personal trainer. Unpaid internships at research institutes led to nothing. After more than a year he moved back in with his parents.

Head of World’s Largest Asset Manager: “Markets Like Totalitarian Governments”

Head of World's Largest Asset Manager: "Markets Like Totalitarian Governments"
THE BIG PICTURE | MARCH 05, 2011
http://pulsene.ws/143s8

"If instead they preferred democracy, democracy would flourish."

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Massive wealth redistribution as richest shirk responsibilities

Via TruthOut:

One conclusion is clear and obvious: the richest Americans have dramatically lowered their income tax burden since 1945, both absolutely and relative to the tax burdens of the middle income groups and the poor.

Consider two further points based on this graph: first, if the highest income earners today were required to pay the same rate that they paid for many years after 1945, the federal government would need far lower deficits to support the private economy through its current crisis; and second, those tax-the-rich years after 1945 experienced far lower unemployment and far faster economic growth than we have had for years.

What we think vs. What we'd like vs. What is

Courtesy of Discover Magazine's Cosmic Variance:

What does it imply that most Americans think the distribution of wealth is much more even than it really is, and would like it to be more even still? By itself, nothing at all. These are just data — descriptions of the world — and science doesn’t imply morality. The data are just useful to keep in mind when we do think about how a just society should be ordered, and what strategies (“share the pain!”) might be most appropriate when thinking about how to recover from our recent economic pratfall.

"How many comments do you think we’ll get before someone claims that taxation = slavery? I’m guessing five." - Sean Carroll

Why real, permanent, structural unemployment is closer to 20%

"If you ask people how an unemployed person stops being unemployed, they'll probably say that the person gets a job. But that's not the only answer: A person can stop being counted as unemployed if she gives up looking for a job. That's the worst of all worlds, of course. Giving up on working when you want a job is bad for income, for skills, and even for health and happiness. But as this graph from Mike Konczal shows, it's become increasingly common" (Washington Post).

SOURCE: Washington Post

If we've explained this once, we've explained it a thousand times. The definitions are all there for anyone to read. This isn't hyperbole, it's reality, whether you choose not to believe in it, or not. The true rate of unemployment that we all feel is called U-6 Total Unemployment, it's defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as follows:

"U-6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.

NOTE: Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule. Updated population controls are introduced annually with the release of January data."

The real numbers go like this:

Not Seasonally Adjusted

Jan 2010	Dec 2010	Jan 2011
18.0	16.6	17.3

If you believe these numbers aren't also understated, you have far greater faith than I do.

The fact that these numbers are "coming down" overall is ZERO aid or comfort to the millions of humans living in distress, despair, and depression due to these numbers. This isn't because they are sick people, it's because humans can only take a certain amount of stress and dire economic conditions are a major cause of depression. You'd develop clinical depression pretty quickly, too, if you were among these millions. Also, given the evolution of market economies, it's very highly likely that these numbers are the New Normal. They'll plateau here, and then get worse again with the next "correction."

We can't afford to keep stalling. It's time for a U.S. Basic Income and Global Basic Income.

The myth of 'American exceptionalism' implodes

Richard Wolff, Guardian.co.uk: "Until the 1970s, US capitalism shared its spoils with American workers. But since 2008, it has made them pay for its failures."

The Future of Money & Technology Summit

Finally. The step function to the next increment (the ++) may be nearing readiness for implementation with The Future of Money and Technology Summit, February 28, 2011.

Billionaires Gone Wild. It Doesn't Work. Isn't Sustainable.

"There's a model of the economy in which the rich create the growth that sustains everyone else ... but I see no evidence in either graph that that's how the economy actually works." - Ezra Klein