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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.