It has been a long summer, and a long break from writing anything here. On the other hand, having this break – for any number of reasons, up to and including being a lazy bum – spared me from having to comment on all kinds of events that I had little new to add to anyway. But I did find a few noteworthy things that I shall no longer hesitate to share with you:
A matter of life and death:
Intoxicated by the beauty of the Greek star-lit night and by not a little of the cheap draught wine, it is easy to feel the privilege of life. Yet that is what an emancipatory politics is about, life over death. Even though we will all succumb one day, the time that we are granted should be a heaven on earth and not a living hell.
Helmut Schmidt on Deutsche Bank:
Investment banker is a nothing more than a synonym for the type of financial manager who dragged all of us – practically the entire world – into the shit and now is in the process of repeating exactly what he was doing up to 2007.
Mainstream Economist: Marx Was Right. Capitalism May Be Destroying Itself:
Karl Marx had it right. At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That’s what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They’re not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else’s income and consumption. That’s why it’s a self-destructive process.
The mega-rich have been ‘coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.’:
No, that’s not some tax-the-rich liberal speaking. It’s mega-investor Warren Buffett. Worth $50bn, Buffet called for higher rates for those who earn $1 billion or more in the US, said that it was wrong that the middle and lower classes paid a far higher proportion of their incomes than the rich. “While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks…These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places,” he wrote. “Our leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.”
He went on to say “I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off.”
The Food Casino:
More than 150 nations run a deficit on their food trade – they import more food than export it. The food deficit is worse than the oil deficit, measured by global food import dependence. No Einstein is needed to point out , it is not possible to have a world made up of countries all of which are net food importers. By 2017 on current trends, the USA will be running a net trade deficit on food and agricultural products.
Global agribusiness is very comparable to, and dependent on global banking. Through massive corporate consolidation in agriculture, food and farming, coordinated and convergent global food regulations, and chaff dollars euro and yen thrown on the gaming play tables of unrestrained food commodity speculation, agribusiness creates food shortage, and has a vested interest in food price explosions. Commodity-oriented agribusiness is a corporate profit tool, but farmers net few or no gains from this. Farmers are low-tech debt-serfs in the low income countries, and are high-tech debt-serfs in the high income countries.
UK riots were product of consumerism and will hit economy, says City broker:
“We conclude that the rioting reflects a deeply flawed economic and social ethos… recklessly borrowed consumption, the breakdown both of top-end accountability and of trust in institutions, and severe failings by governments over more than two decades.”
On the Wonders of Globalization:
I recently finished reading Dani Rodrik’s The Globalization Paradox: Democracy & the Future of the World Economy (W.W. Norton, 2011) and highly recommend it. Rodrik argues that one cannot simultaneously have national sovereignty, democracy and “deep globalization.” He does so via a brief for institutional pluralism and economic experimentation. Not surprisingly, I find his argument pretty persuasive. Today in the papers there are two reports that highlight the sorts of tension Rodrik identifies in particular contexts: the first is here at The Guardian, the second here at The New York Times. If deep globalization means that labor is un-free with regard to collective action (i.e., unions) we end up with the sorts of situaitons reported in the news today. What we need instead is the sort of “sane globalization” that Rodrik recommends, that is political-economic arrangements will allow democratically enacted and systematically enforced restraints on labor markets.
On the utter fatuity of rational man:
Education is a public good. It is best supplied and paid for by the group as a whole, because no individual or small collective can produce the overall social benefit that the nation can provision collectively.
Education doesn’t respond well to market forces because many of the social goods that arise from education—socialization, a grounding in civics, historical context, rational and systematic reasoning—are not goods or services demanded by a market, but rather they are the underlying substrate that allows people to intelligently conduct transactions in a marketplace as well as establishing and maintaining good governance.
There is a long and wide body of evidence that people with wide, solid educational foundations that transcend mere vocational skills produce societies that are more prosperous, more transparent, healthier, more democratic—that attain, in short, all the things we hope markets will attain for us.
… But functional democracies require that all people—not just those who are already wealthy—are given the foundational knowledge that allows them to prosper and participate in the full range of social activities that make nations great.
Hunter, fisherman, shepherd, critic: Karl Marx’s vision of the free individual:
We should now be in a position to answer the charge of hypocrisy with which we began this essay. Is there, in any of the writings of Marx and Engels, any moralising commentary on what individuals living within capitalist society should do with their lives? Do they have anything to say, for example, about what kind of jobs workers should take? What the rich should do with their money? What capitalists should do with their capital? Whether or not it’s acceptable for individuals to set up in business, for workers to join communes? What the state should do about the problems capitalism throws up? Do they tell us what kind of relationships we can enter into and with whom, what kind of food to eat, what it is acceptable to drink? Should socialists renounce all worldly goods and live a monkish existence of poverty, charity, duty, and brotherhood? No. Not a word. The laughter of the scoffers stands revealed as the laughter of fools who cannot distinguish between Marx’s social theory and Christianity.
Running out of excuses:
The latest data on US incomes make for grim reading, both as regards the bottom of the income distribution where the number in (absolute) poverty is at an all-time high (the proportion of the population was the highest since 1993), and in the middle, where median household incomes have fallen back to the 1997 level. For some groups, such as male wage earners without college education, real incomes haven’t risen since around 1970
Having Lots Of People Work For Small Firms Is A Sign Your Economy Is Dysfunctional:
If you’re talking about an economic indicator in which the U.S., U.K., Germany, Finland, and Denmark are at the bottom and Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Hungary are at the top, then you’re looking at an economic indicator in which you want to be at the bottom. The economically more successful countries are less dominated by small firms. That shows us, I think, that the link between entrepreneurship and small businesses is much weaker than is often posited. There’s nothing particularly entrepreneurial about taking over the pharmacy from your father, then finding that the good news is that other pharmacists are legally prohibited from competing with you while the bad news is that you can’t legally compete with other pharmacists. Nor is there anything particularly small about an entrepreneurial business like Google (or, for that matter, CVS). Successful firms start small, but then get big and often put a lot of smaller rivals out of business. The existence of a huge quantity of small business probably implies that you have relatively few very successful firms, not that tons of people started entrepreneurial new businesses.
Inside Amazon’s warehouse:
During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn’t quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.
This makes this paragraph – culled from some web site – sound rather … rather something. Naïve, perhaps:
“We all rememebr great stores that used to have great service, but got cheap and crappy. Wonder where the new top-service store is? It’s Amazon — for everything. It has nothing to do with the price; it’s all about superior service and superior selection.”
That’s that. In no particular order.
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Rango
Twinkle, twinkle
