5 Utter Fictions of Money and 10 Solutions

When the tinfoil hat brigade says that our economy is a Ponzi pyramid, they're essentially right. After U.S. President Lincoln was assassinated (perhaps in part because he printed the Greenback; the people's currency), the banksters hijacked the system. "So it was a large fraud that was backstopped by a sort of over-fraud." - Ellen Brown. Cue the 20:25 mark to get the 30 seconds prior that provides context for that quotation. Where thinking people of conscience can legitimately differ is considering the matter of which form of social capitalism, or free market socialism, which mashup of an adaptive mixed economy to implement in order to address the resulting unsustainable resource skews, to provide sustainable currency circulation -- not distribution -- via a Basic Income, or similar program that ensures consistent, healthy, transpiration at the capillary level of the economic body.

Regardless of what you might have been told by an abusive parent or others, you're smart. Probably very smart, or you likely wouldn't be reading these words. So, instead of spoon feeding you yet another forgettable Top 10, the subject of this post is your assignment: watch the full video. Do the homework. Write your list of the the top 5 Utter Fictions of Money and 10 Solutions that you discover in the comments here. We can do this. We can increment the system, raise it to a more sustainable, adaptive level without throwing out the baby with the bath water. That's the '++' of Capitalism++.

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 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.

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.

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.

Live Images of the New Normal: Unemployment Extension Won’t Help 99ers - WSJ

SOURCE: Unemployment Extension Won’t Help 99ers - WSJ:

The extension for unemployment benefits that is part of the compromise tax deal is good news for many of the unemployed, but it won’t provide aid to anyone who’s been out of a job over 99 weeks.

That’s a concern because the number of 99ers may be increasing. The number of people who have received their final payments from extended-benefits programs this year through the end of October — the most recent month for which data are available — is over one million, and that number has been steadily increasing. Separately, the Labor Department reported that nearly 10% of the unemployed in the third quarter of 2010 — more than one million people — had been out of a job and looking for work for about two years or more. Meanwhile, initial claims for unemployment have been trending lower recently, but the biggest surge came in early 2009. The peak of 643,000 claims in a single week came in March of last year, 89 weeks ago. Anyone still unemployed since that peak is likely to run out of benefits soon, if they haven’t already.

The New York Times adds that amidst this mancession:

Misplaced confidence in market forces is making it virtually impossible for the unemployed to man up — or woman up.

None of these figures even begin to take into account those who fell off of the 99-week edge-of-the-economic-Earth, prior to this most recent capitalist extremist economic cleansing. A post-information, post-scarcity economy is by definition a public-private partnership. Neither side can be the supreme commander; each must do their part.

We need Free Markets to create new products, services, innovations, and the number of jobs possible. It's utterly absurd to mandate non-productive, make-work J.O.B's (Justifications Of Being). It's even worse to panic and claw back industrial jobs that are needed for development throughout the rest of the world.

We need Basic Income to provide for social stability and human dignity in a nation where nearly 20% U-6 Unemployment is already the norm; and it's heading to 30% because we keep becoming more and more labor efficient. We should not roll back those efficiency gains just because we've never encountered such breakthrough levels of achievement ever before in history. In the so-called advanced west, should look at the world as it is and make the adaptive changes required to show the way forward. If we do not, why would today's developing nations seek to emulate us at all, if widespread unemployment, poverty, and panic are the final outcomes of mastering the efficiencies of advanced industrialization?

It's time to increment our understanding, time to move forward. That's the PlusPlus in Capitalism++. BasicIncome.Org | USBig.Net

How Social Capitalism Can Hedge Market Capitalism

Daniel Robles, The Ingenesist Project:

Today, we have one of the most extraordinary opportunities in human history playing out before our eyes. Social Capitalism is no longer merely a band-aid for an amoral Market Capitalism, it is a new form of Capitalism in it’s own right. In the age of social media, many entrepreneurs no longer allocate land, labor, and financial capital as a primary means of production. Rather, they deploy social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital to the production of a vast amount of “value” that is stored and exchanged in communities.

A new financial instrument is described which can be capitalized and securitized to form the basis of a fungible social currency to hedge the dollar. The net result could create a condition where Wall Street priorities are subservient to social priorities rather than social priorities being subservient to Wall Street priorities.

Percentage of U.S. Adults at Work is Lower Now, Than Six Months Ago

NPR Marketplace Commentator David Frum: Old assumptions equal a stagnant economy:

Supposedly, the recession ended last summer. Yet the percentage of adult Americans at work is lower now than it was six months ago. Businesses continue to shed jobs faster than they create them.

The risk that employment will decline further as the Obama Administration's fiscal stimulus ends is very real. Consumers are not spending, because they feel poor -- and getting poorer. They borrowed a lot of money in the 1990s and 2000s. Their equity in their homes has shrunk or disappeared.

These wretched figures should force us to rethink old assumptions.

The 2007-2008 economic collapse was a really, really big calamity. Yet, we have not taken that calamity's big lessons. Yes, we've tightened bank regulation a little. It will be tougher in the future for banks to bet 30 times their capital that uncredit-worthy borrowers will somehow find the money to repay huge loans. But the idea that home ownership is for everybody? That capital gains from housing will compensate ordinary Americans for stagnant wages? That we can raise living standards while importing a million low-wage workers every year?

On those fundamentals, Albert Einstein's old lament still holds: Everything has changed -- except our thinking.

We are Victims of our own Success

What does it actually mean to vote for or against extending unemployment benefits? In the context of seeking sustainable solutions, I'm afraid to say, almost absolutely nothing.

In practice, these stop-gap measures are indeed wasteful, as opponents cry, but only from the perspective of institutional denial of the fact that we are in the process of transitioning to the post Job Trance era.

Less than 65% of Americans (and dropping fast, due to ever accelerating increases in efficiency) current provide at least 100% of required goods and services for the entire economy. That means, 40% of Americans CAN'T BE IN THE WORKFORCE at all ... EVER.

We simply cannot, as bald pragmatic matter, let 40% or more of the population drift further and further into poverty and despair simply because of a deprecated, dysfunctional, nineteenth century industrial delusion about how the world used to work 100 years ago.

We suggest that it is time to open the floor to discussion and debate about economies as Circulatory Systems rather than distribution systems. Only hoarders and oligarchs amplify and defend the narrative of distribution, because it is their unsustainable resource skews that have gradually been the paramount unintended consequence of efficiency-addicted hyper-industrialization, thusly destroying the proper circulation of currency throughout the system as a whole.

In everyday practice, sustainable economies are like the body's circulatory system. We talk about how much currency is in circulation, not in distribution. It's time to open public solutions dialog on a subject that has been under careful study and analysis for decades: universal Basic Income, the most sustainable and adaptive means of maintaining a healthy Circulatory System, one that maintains the health of the capillaries of the economy first and foremost, where the transpiration of the real world economy takes place in everyday lives.

Without the exchange of oxygen, nutrients, and waste at the very fringes of our body's circulatory system, the heart can do no good whatsoever. To date, the measures taken to stimulate the economy have all focused on the wrong problem: shocking the heart to do more work. The moral problems and failures may be at the heart of the system, but the functional failures are at the edges and fringes of the system. Right here, in our everyday lives.

Let's be clear: nobody is demonizing free markets here; rather, we acknowledge that in the west, we are today a victim of our own particular brand of frenetic, neurotic success. As any alcoholic or drug addict who "made it to the top" will tell you, just because that dysfunction seemed to fuel success, doesn't mean that it actually helped. In sad fact, too often the very things that we thought were our best support structures can turn out to be the underlying cause of our greatest miseries.

GOP: Decreasing Homelessness and Starvation Makes Economies Worse

Thankfully, it looks like we can still count on The Atlantic to provide a platform for intellectual honesty about such matters. Special thanks to Daniel Indiviglio for saying it plain:

... the official reported unemployment rate should be reflective of labor market turmoil. In that sense, the unemployment rate as currently calculated more likely underestimates the struggle so many Americans face. The broader measure of unemployment was 16.5% for June. There are a lot of Americans who are so discouraged they have temporarily given up on finding work or can't get anything full time. The government doesn't consider them unemployed, even though they certainly are ...

A Few Comment Excerpts:

Timothy: All I have to say is what is wrong with these people ?! Do they think that what unemployment is giving us to barely survive on is great living to the point that one wouldnt want to look for work ? Are you kidding me ? I am not even getting by ! I have lost 2 homes 2 cars and demolished my credit and everything i have worked for my entire life ! So No I am not overjoyed about being on u/i. People are starving while [politicians] went on break and I find that very sad !

Jessica: The people that they are talking about, that left the work force, are those that have exhausted all their benefits. The real, live, unadjusted unemployment rate is well above 14-15%. They keep adjusting the numbers to see fit... but the people know differently. I think that it is great that all these people think that living on the unemployment benefits, are just living high on the hog.... wow the stupidity continues to amaze me...

KCSam: Now I've heard it all. Unemployment benefits boosting the unemployment rate? Aren't we blaming the victim here?

3 Biggest Lies about U.S. Economy

From The three biggest lies about the U.S. economy Brett Arends ROI - MarketWatch.

1. Myth 1: Unemployment is below 10% - There are 79 million men in America between the ages of 25 and 65. And nearly 18 million of them, or 22%, are out of work completely. (The rate in the 1950s was less than 10%.)
2. Myth 2: The markets are panicking about the deficit - Rates on U.S. bonds have been plummeting recently. The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond down to just 4%. By historic standards that's chickenfeed. Panicked? The bond markets are practically snoring.
3. Myth 3: The U.S. is sliding into "socialism" - Corporate profit margins rocketed to 36% in the first quarter [of 2010]. Since records began in 1947 they have never been this high. The highest they got under Ronald Reagan was 30%.

For further consideration:

• You Don't Count - Is 2010 U.S. Structural Unemployment really 40.6%?
• Postscarcity Spawns from Overwhelming Cognitive Surplus

From the CEO's Blog: Creating High Trust Organizations

By adopting and extending these principles, we simultaneously create high trust institutions and societies.

Whole Foods (WFMI) CEO John Mackey on Creating the High Trust Organization:

"We have the opportunity to create more conscious and higher trust organizations in the 21st century. To do so will require three major changes.

• First, the organization must become conscious of its higher purposes. Without consciousness of higher purposes, organizations will not reach their fullest potential because the creative energy within the organization will not be fully expressed.
• Second, we’ll need our leaders to evolve to higher levels of consciousness and trust. We will not be able to create high trust organizations without more conscious and high trust leaders. Less conscious leaders will tend to hold their organizations back.
• Third, we will need to evolve the cultures of our organization in ways that create processes, strategies, and structures that encourage higher levels of trust. These will necessarily include the important ideals of teams, empowerment, transparency, authentic communication, fairness, love and care."

WFMI's Shared Fate Policy
"We recognize there is a community of interest among all of our stakeholders. There are no entitlements; we share together in our collective fate. To that end we have a salary cap that limits the compensation (wages plus profit incentive bonuses) of any Team Member to nineteen times the average total compensation of all full-time Team Members in the company."

Salary Caps Work. Authenticity and Transparency Work. The neuroeconomics of Neurosociety awakens.

Not only can we chart a more adaptive future beyond the unsustainable resource skews born of fundamentalist 19th century industrial capitalism, we must do so. It is a simply matter of sustainability and survival. And so, we are doing so, as demonstrated by WFMI and other progressive companies like Nika Water, "by donating 100% of our profits to support clean water projects in impoverished countries, NIKA will provide the basic tools and critical assistance to help thousands of families improve their lives in a meaningful way and end the cycle of poverty. Mindful of our duties as stewards of the Earth, NIKA has been certified as CarbonFree by Carbonfund.org through our investment in carbon offsetting program."

Why do the Poor Protect the Ultra Rich from Taxes?

It's inexplicable.

Why would any thinking entity do that? Do you really think that the majority of the people in the top 1%, 2%, 5%, 10% are sitting around thinking:

"Gee, I wonder how I could create new jobs for my fellow patriots in the bottom 90%?"

Really? Do you really believe that? Because, with every Tea Party you attend, you are voting to keep things exactly like this:

Image: UCSC

Quick poll: Raise your hand if you think this situation has improved, since 2007. Let's see, I count ... um ... let's look way back to the back for the room ... yeah ... there ... I count exactly ZERO hands.

One volley on Digg put it this way:

sleepwalker:

"Without extended unemployment, I guarantee that a hard worker like yourself would have a job right now. You would move into a smaller place (bunk beds if necessary), work two crappy jobs, do whatever it takes to put food on the table. I know I would to save my family."

That's exactly what the pie bakers above want you to believe.

seeker:

"That's what most people outside the situation believe dude but it's a lot fuzzier when you're in it up to your neck. Fact is, I've said the same thing myself, but have never seen this rate of unemployment nor have I ever been this directly affected."

More and more Americans are finding similar wage-slave capitalist repentance.

How many more have to be so directly affected -- directly destroyed -- before we wake from the Job Trance, and move into the next evolution of the greatest experiment in democracy that the world has ever seen?

You Don't Count - Is 2010 U.S. Structural Unemployment really 40.6% ?

No, actually, it's apparently 42.1% because I missed the incarcerated population in my copy/paste to spreadsheet, below.

Please, somebody, anybody, show me where I'm double counting ... if I'm double counting. I don't think so, but all source data is linked for your loyal relentless scrutiny.

• Incarcerated?
• You don't count.
• 1.5% (Incarceration in the U.S.)
• Retired?
• You don't count.
• 14.4% (Beneficiaries / U.S. Adult Population)
• Differently Abled?
• You don't count.
• 1.9% (SSI Recipients over 18 / U.S. Adult Population)
• Discouraged, disillusioned, disenfranchised, day trading drop out?
• You don't count in U3.
• Lowball total guesstimate of 0.5% in U4.
• Working 14 hours a day raising your children?
• You don't count.
• Mothers 2.2%. Fathers 0.001% (2009 Census Data / U.S. Adult Population)
• Fathers, you REALLY, REALLY don't count. Can it really be that low, or have you been shamed into never, never, ever reporting such a horrendously despicable, worthless status?
• Self-employed, scrambling, and screwed?
• You don't count.
• 4.3% (Ag + NonAg / U.S. Adult Population)

The rest of you losers do count, sort of. You're the currently "official" 17.3% unemployed.

In Sum: 1.5 + 14.4 + 1.9 + 0.5 + 2.2 + (nevermind those 0.001% lazy dads) + 4.3 + 17.3 = 42.1%

News Flash: At best, this is going to remain steady for the foreseeable future.

Upshot: If these numbers are even anywhere near accurate, it means that we are already way into Structural Unemployment land, boys and girls. Yes, it means that 19th Century Industrial Capitalism worked. We are so astronomically technologically enhanced, roboticized, computerized, and insanely efficient, that just 60% of able bodied, educated adults are more than capable of providing 100% of market demand for our domestic and export economies.

And we're getting even more efficient, every day, as nearly all recent projections call for ever increasing corporate growth with perpetually anemic demand for workers.

How to Properly Manage Material Abundance: TEAR IT DOWN

Hilarious! This morning on CNBC Rick Santelli issued another famous parenthetical recommendation to restore the economy:

TEAR DOWN ALL UNOCCUPIED HOUSES so we can create jobs by building them all over again.

Wow, really?

I should really be a bigger fan of Mr. Santelli's because he continues to provide some of the most clear and compelling analogies that illustrate the sheer absurdity of the Job Trance gripping America. A Job Trance crippling progress, even as we hobble and wobble in our current self-inflicted state of socioeconomic anomie, the 100% accurately forecasted result of 19th century industrial era capitalism's centuries of success.

Such absurd suggestions to TEAR IT ALL DOWN should actually encourage us, for they provide additional empirical glimpses of a tragically misguided consensus reality crumbling before our very eyes. Crumbling, finally, despite the decades of institutional denial that refused to acknowledge the obvious manifestations of an emerging postscarcity society. Crumbling, despite the academic procrastination in noodling our way through sustainable new ways to circulate resources in a manner that continues to foster breakthrough innovation and sustainable technological progress.

The parenthetical Santelli Solution is to smash it all down so we can build it back up again. Wow. Really? Last I checked, most healthy children outgrew that stage of build it, smash it, build it, smash it, self-discovery and development by about age ten or twelve at the very latest. Grown ups realize that once you have built an asset, you employ and maintain that asset in a manner that maximizes its useful life.

As a society, if you've created so much abundance and surplus that all your old assumptions are proven wrong, the solution is not to DESTROY YOUR ENTIRE LIFE in order to prove you can build the same suboptimal life from scratch, all over again. Maybe that makes sense in some bizarre Any Rand fantasy where the hero architect turns noble ditch digger, but it's just plain ridiculous in the real world. Even the bible counsels that there is no nobility in a dog that repeatedly returns to it's own vomit.

As written here time and again, the problem is not that capitalism is evil or wrong or failed (in material terms). Rather, it's a victim of it's own one-trick pony variety of success and hobbled by genetic defects that include severely crash-prone short-sightedness and manufacturing myopia. It only knows it's own perspective. It only sees it's way to the next bend in the road. It's great at transporting societies from Point A to Point B -- agrarian to industrial -- with incomparable speed and efficiency; yet, then it stands utterly stunned and dumbfounded, paralyzed by the discovery of a Point C, beyond. "Now what?" panics capitalism. "Quick, back to Point A so we can show how awesome we are at getting to Point B!"

A to B, A to B, A to B. Boom, bust; Boom, Bust; boom, BUST. That's the best we can do with our best and brightest minds? Really? I don't buy it.

I don't buy it because I can't imagine a more pessimistic view of the world or of humanity, than one that believes that build it, smash it, build it, smash it, build it, smash it permanently manufactured scarcity industrial era capitalism is the permanent state for an ever accelerating technoprogressive society.

Meet your Closet Communist Central Planning Controllers?

Has the U.S. actually been a Closet Communist economy, all this time? Would implementation of Free Market Socialism actually be a conservative movement? Goldman Sachs PR effort begins:

"The danger is that it comes off like propaganda." -- Fierce Finance

Trust us, we've been centrally controlling things for decades. We decide the winners and losers. We Win. You Lose. We do this For Your Own Good, to make sure you have just enough gadgets to keep you sedated and just enough cash to keep you one month from homelessness. Slavery built American and wage slavery grows America. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Here's the full story from Fortune where, "Facing jeers over outlandish pay, the CEO of Goldman Sachs stresses the social goods of his firm's business."

My only question is, what do you call the third tranche on the second derivative of irony?

Salary Caps Already Work, Upgrade the CFR & Recompile Corporate Culture

So, you say that you like Whole Foods Markets? Maybe you're even long a small slice of WFMI in your fully balanced, non-speculative portfolio? Well, in either event, you already believe in and support Salary Caps that Work. Every time you shop, every share you hold, you are already voting for salary caps and Shared Fate:

Shared Fate
"We recognize there is a community of interest among all of our stakeholders. There are no entitlements; we share together in our collective fate. To that end we have a salary cap that limits the compensation (wages plus profit incentive bonuses) of any Team Member to nineteen times the average total compensation of all full-time Team Members in the company."

Yes, I've written on this topic before, but it's a fundamental message that requires periodic reinforcement.

The efficacy of Shared Fate in the Corporate Context is just one of many proven, empirical, objective justifications for serious consideration toward amending the U.S Code of Federal Regulations to include Salary Cap Ratios that ensure the benefits of corporate, collective human effort are reasonably circulated throughout the corporate body which created those benefits.

In short, it should be permanently illegal to see total compensation multiples of 400x or even 100x between a janitor and and genius trader. Sorry, genius trader, but in empirical existential terms, your 98% water, bloated sack of protoplasm, is of no more intrinsic value than anyone else's. You're made of the same sack of chemicals, knitted and knotted DNA, as anyone else. Your right to pathologically hoard ends at every other human's right to a roof, clothes, and 2,000 measly calories per day.

Oh, and in the ever so special case that you're among the Townhall Tantrum Tinfoil Hat brigade, just remember this instruction about any corporate body, from your own sanctified brainwashing:

"And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you" (ICor1:21).

So, do the right thing because of your brainwashing, or do it because it's the only socioeconomically sustainable solution, moving forward; in either case, it appears that the current U.S. Code governing Corporations Improperly Accumulating Surplus is far too reactive in timing, subjective in application, and wasteful in attempting to track down perpetrators and holding corporations accountable for engaging in destructive multi-generational abuses after the fact. It is not only just too damned hard to be Robin Hood all the time; it's actually not necessary if we get the basic rules and principles right, in the first place.

Shared Fate is foundational to that objective.

When Will The Recovery Begin? Never.

Robert Reich's Blog:

My prediction, then? Not a V, not a U. But an X. This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.

The X marks a brand new track -- a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can't "recover" because it can't go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin. More on this to come.

Capitalism 1.0's Dirty Little Secret

The Financial Times FT.com writes:

Capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite.

Illustration by Victor Juhasz, RollingStone.com

The amount by which the elite has benefited is startling, and illustrates the problem with lightly regulated free markets: the rich get much richer while the rest do not get richer at all.

For much more detail and salient analysis, please read, repost, retweet, resend, and repeat P2P Foundation's Michel Bauwens's Updating our insights on the deepening meltdown. SOURCE: @stuarthenshall.

Modern Work is Mostly a Lie

Modern work is mostly a lie.

Especially in the so-called knowledge, information, or entertainment sectors, work has all too often become little more than an arbitrary hierarchy of stupidity fees, ignorance fines, influence peddling, and pathetic popularity plays. It's increasingly an unjustifiable waste of time to set up such pointless and counterproductive relationships in the first place. It's no wonder that increasingly, many of the most intelligent, creative, and educated simply opt out.

Forget value judgments about whether this is Good, Bad, Indifferent, a vast Right-wing or Left-wing conspiracy; the fact that more and more modern work is mostly a lie -- tens of millions of make-work duck-n-shuffle experts at looking busy -- is simply a primary symptom of the overwhelming success of 18th and 19th century industrial era capitalism and the attendant cultural anomie typical of the evolution toward postscarcity.

Take a typical knowledge work case: a consultant just upgraded six Wordpress blogs to version 2.8.1 in a total of about 20 seconds, thanks to automation, and billed clients for six hours. Why? Because the client has no idea of the level of automation available since the relationship was forged, years ago. The last the client knew, these updates could be "very risky" -- OMG! the website could go down! -- and "take a long time" to make sure hell doesn't accidentally freeze over.

Multiply such norms by some X-hundred million similar seemingly insignificantly tiny transactions per day. Each time we engage in these behaviors, believing we are the only ones doing it -- okay, maybe a few others do the same, we exponentially understate to ourselves -- we simply fail to conceive of the aggregate effect.

This is standard operating procedure for so-called service providers everywhere: find a client who doesn't know how easy you've made your work, convince them it's even more complicated than they imagined, and start the meter running. We've all seen this a thousand times. It's defended as monetizing the marginal value of efficiency. The thinking goes, "Hey, if the client needs something done and it's of X value to them, who cares HOW we get it done, right? If we're really efficient, that's our paycheck."

Well, yeah, sort of. On the other hand, that's a complete make-work sham, isn't it? This is why so much of modern work is mostly a lie, perpetrated by small cliques who myopically believe they are the only ones getting away with this game, who are collectively addicted to and fearful of any change from the status quo, and who implicitly agree to cover for one another's fiddling about in cubicles all in the name of keeping the job trance intact.

The job trance holds that a Calvinist industrial era hourly wage slave J.O.B. is the only conceivable moral Justification Of Being.

This is not an indictment of the hapless humans enshrouded in this stultifying, anachronistic systemic miasma; rather, this is an indictment of a systemic group think that has failed to declare and deploy the productivity dividends born of the past two centuries of accelerating progress. This is to expose the obsolete, old world Centralized Capitalist organizing principle that is failing to serve us all as humans, as a community, as a nation, moving forward.

In the entertainment industry case, everyone knows that the job or the part seldom goes to the best qualified or most talented applicant or audition. That's not An Efficient Market Objectively Allocating Resources, that's a popularity pecking order that is arbitrarily -- and often capriciously -- allocating resources that reinforce the dominant Central Capitalist Party Monarchy. Those who think that they see that game and can one day become king themselves, fully buy in and defend the monarchy, even though it's strictly against their own best self interest.

Modern work is mostly a lie. That's why more and more of the brightest and best qualified people opt out. It's one of several off-balance-sheet explanations of why U6 total unemployment is already above 16.5% and empirically indicative of the growing Structural Unemployment that has steadily, relentlessly overtaken us in recent decades.

Still need convincing? Maybe conjuring the Bloomberg brand will reopen a singed synapse or two:

“We are going to have a huge pool of unemployed, second only to the Great Depression,” said Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics in New York. “It will be a big public-policy problem.”

We're clueless about how to handle surpluses -- the most dangerous of which is cognitive surplus -- and the Old World Centralized Capitalist Party Bosses began embezzling our exponential productivity dividends long ago by providing myriad creative ways to soak up the first hints of the sociologically volatile stuff.

But change kept accelerating faster and faster and faster and faster. Faster than ever dared imaginable by my very own great grandparent share croppers.

So Industrial Era capitalism worked. It succeeded. It blew the doors off of history. It will continue to work and succeed for other civilizations that need to make that phase state transition from agrarian to industrialized. But it's utterly obsolete for America and today it is our existential obligation to define what comes next -- Postscarcity Agalmics. If we fail, then one industrial locomotive after another will simply run off the end of the same iron rails of fear and inertia we've run off.

As a recent New Scientist article put it

So will we cling to scarcity just so that we can keep capitalism? Or will capitalism have to evolve into some new kind of digital economics? The question underlines many things - from music piracy to the woes of the newspaper industry to Google's efforts to scan all the books in the world. (via @agalmacist)