Capitalism++

Calories, Joules, Watts vs. Dollar, Euro, Yen

2012-11-26T16:27:00.001-08:00

"We have to begin regarding Calories, Joules and Watts as the key currencies rather than the Dollar, Euro and Yen."

"At present, economics is the study of how people transform nature to meet their needs and it treats the exploitation of finite natural resources including energy, water, air, forests, arable land and oceans as externalities, which they are not. For example, we cannot pollute and damage natural ecosystems and their local communities ad infinitum without severe repercussions to their underlying sustainability."

"The current model of the disposable economy operates as a system for transforming low-entropy raw materials and energy into high-entropy toxic waste and unavailable energy, while providing society with interim goods and services and the temporary satisfaction that most deliver. Any such transformations in the economy mean that there will be less low-entropy materials and energy available for natural ecosystems. Mounting evidence of this conflict demonstrates the limits to our national, regional and global growth!"

50% U.S. Unemployment? Not in 20 years. Right Now.

2012-09-16T21:50:00.001-07:00

Note: You say we exaggerated? Your 2014 BLS Update is below.

#IncomprehensibleTruth is still truth. This is only the very beginning of the kinds of breathtaking wake up calls and cataclysmic shifts we'll discover amidst accelerating #BigData in the coming decade.

The first tenant of economics is, "compared to what?" What do we mean by #Unemployment? How many ways has that word been laundered, spun, and compared to false and misleading metrics, to date? This chart begins to pull back the curtain; but you should get the data for yourself and press #OpenData into service of both illuminating our current predicament and forging new ways forward.

Fig 1. -- Total U.S. Labor Non-Participant Rate.

LEGEND
totnonpart (top purple line) = Total U.S. Labor Non-Participant Rate. Number of Americans displaced, discarded, disabled, dropped out of the count and completely off the Workforce Map.
civnonpart (orange/yellow line) = Civilian Labor Force Non-Participation Rate (100-civpart).
u6rate (green line) = True Total #Unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons.
unrate (bottom blue line) = MSM Consensus Crowd-Control #Unemployment Story

Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED mobile)

Don't like that slice on The Data? Try the direct BLS view on for size:

2014 BLS Update

Still don't like The Data? Think it's out of context? Try this compared to what view, vs. GDP & Profits:

What will really bake your post-scarcity noodle is that right now, in 2013, we've created the first 3D printed food, straight from the Star Trek replicator. Got change for a paradigm?

Wall Street Psycho Inmates Still Running the Asylum

2012-03-04T21:16:00.000-08:00

Oh, you thought the worst was over? They're already trying to bury the bodies again. "Now, citing competitive concerns, bankers are pressing the Fed to limit its release of information—expected as early as next week—to what was published after the first test of big banks in 2009" (Lenders Stress Over Test Results, WSJ). So much for sunlight, transparency, and truth.

"Capitalism has shortfalls," says Richest Man in the World, Bill Gates.

2012-01-28T09:18:00.001-08:00

“Capitalism has worked phenomenally. Look at North Korea versus South Korea, or China before and after 1979. Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t ... take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that. We don’t have to [ask] whether capitalism is wrong.” - Bill Gates: 'I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed’ - Telegraph

This is precisely the premise of our work in these pages. It's not about whether an abstract system is right or wrong, but whether or not it's accomplishing all of our human objectives. Industrial capitalism worked for the stage of civilization that the so-called advanced west traversed over the past 150 years; it's simply not adequate for the next leg of the journey. We can and should immediately offset poverty and homelessness with Basic Income and continue to evolve toward maximum human flourishing.

Core issue that killed #MLK was #EconomicInequality #ItsNotAboutRace It's about #BasicIncome Sustainable #Postscarcity #EndPoverty

2012-01-16T10:45:00.001-08:00

It's so not about race. The core issue that killed #MLK was moving beyond superficial distinctions of color and creed, taking on the core malignancy of the human condition: escalating and unsustainable economic inequality.

King's evolving political advocacy in his later years ... paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with whom King was affiliated. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Towards the time of his murder, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."

Of course, the word distribution has long since become an emotionally hijacked firestarter keyword of the fundamentalist tinfoil hat lexicon; and actually, it's perhaps not the most accurate word to describe the challenges of a sustainable postscarcity circulatory system. Notwithstanding, a preponderance of economic scholarship over the most recent half dozen decades or so has gradually converged on the most logical first step, variously described as Basic Income, Universal Basic Income (UBI), Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), and similar language-specific nomenclature that crosses virtually all ephemeral cultural and language boundaries.

Follow, learn, and join the rapidly rising global #BasicIncome trend on twitter:

And if all that is still not enough to bring you up to warp speed, here's Captain Picard: Make it So.

Quants: "If people don't complain now, then it serves them right when the next financial crisis happens."

2012-01-15T17:11:00.000-08:00

Captain Picard on the Fate of Capitalism

2012-01-15T15:06:00.001-08:00

Maybe all the data on this site is too mind numbing. Let's try something different.

Explore more about how "the economics of the are future somewhat different."

5 Utter Fictions of Money and 10 Solutions

2012-01-03T08:07:00.001-08:00

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?

2011-11-05T17:48:00.001-07:00

“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

2011-11-01T05:45:00.001-07:00

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?

2011-10-24T16:02:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-09T21:07:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-07T14:49:00.001-07:00

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.

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

2011-09-27T00:29:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-27T09:19:00.001-07:00

"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?

2011-08-22T03:44:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-10T21:59:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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

2011-08-08T23:45:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-02T19:22:00.000-07:00

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."

2011-05-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

"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.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Poverty: Equal Opportunity Oppressor

2011-05-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

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

Read more at AlterNet ...

Economic Recovery / Reboot Complete!

2011-04-26T19:26:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-21T15:22:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2011-04-20T14:19:00.000-07:00

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