But more to your point that China is simply capturing the entire vertical supply chain and all manufacturing and the United States plain gave it all away in 9 short years is behind belief.
On top of it China holds the U.S. by the short hairs through debt.
there's a real catch coming with the Volt, but it's a issue for all hybrid production.
95% of the raw material for producing rare earth magnets comes from China.
The source of the material is in Western and Northern China.
Remember Magnuequench?
The Indiana firm used to produce the magnets used in hybrid motors, but a Chinese firm bought it an shifted production to China. It's an example of the Chinese being able to consolidate vertically.
US firms are going to be at a disadvantage because these parts are going to have to be imported, at least in the short term. There used to be a source in California, but that was shut down when Chinese sources opened up.
Even if production in California is restarted, there's no domestic permanent magnet industry because we sold all these firms to the Chinese.
Great post middle! One thing on the employment graphs is they use the same colors, but for different unemployment percentage bins....
So, people reading the maps, look at the color code to the right for it is different per map.
On the Stimulus plan and the autos, well, GM is planning on offshore outsourcing 98% of production. We had 22k green jobs created....in India.
So, I wrote about the current Stimulus jobs earlier and frankly I do not see the point if they refuse to tie the money to U.S. citizens, to U.S. workers, to domestic activity.
They will scream protectionism or some absurdity when the point of public expenditure is to generate income for it's own citizens to stimulate a domestic economy...
So, unless we get a major shift I just do not really see what giving outsourcers G.E., IBM, etc. is going to do for the U.S. middle class and auto workers who are really getting the shaft at this point.
Your ideas are common sense, practical, efficient, sane, but how to get Congress or the Obama administration to do something as practical as retooling GM and forming an alliance with G.E. with the added caveat of domestic production AND hiring only from the U.S. workforce?
Always change the title and the first paragraph slightly and yes, adding a link back to your blog on EP in the first part not only brings readers to other posts on EP, it has the dual purpose of changing the post slightly. This helps with SEO. i.e. they punish sites with duplicate content post by post so changing the post when cross posting helps.
Wouldn't it be nice to just focus in on writing and expressing your thoughts and views instead of the rest of this?
We have been asked to bank roll the banks, pony up to save floundering states and prop up “to large to fail business’s” and the top of the pile stand by while the unions are treated as secured stock holders over the risk takers who have been maligned as being speculators. These actions of strong armed management to discard the goodwill that it has taken many dealerships years to develop and reward the remaining with the results of others sweat and toil. http://www.allbusiness.com/economy-economic-indicators/economic-conditio...
We no longer see good management practice to encourage, business not to disable them. In the present our energy must be focused on disclosure and not be ashamed to admit our failures (learning points) and pick up and re envigurate the electorate to a stronger economy.
Let us not continue using of “Rules for Radicals”
Saul Alinsky provides a collection of rules to guide the process that is being used in the Obama administration. .He emphasizes these rules must be translated into real-life tactics that are fluid and responsive to the situation at hand.
Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.
Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.
The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.
Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”
Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.
Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”
Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.
We must consider all not few, energize our prospective partys but only after our house is in order.
Though a lot of this information is helpful and usable we must be vigilant of the goal of what is being done. There in lies the true prize.
Information expressed in part is from Rules for Radicals
"Unemployment is rising. All this should be massively deflationary. Interest rates should be falling or at least not rising. But a funny thing is happening. In the past two months, the yield on the ten-year bond has risen by 1%. It has moved 0.38% or almost "4 big handles" in just two weeks. Look at the chart below. What is happening?"
--John Mauldin
Kirk: "What is happening? Scotty, do you have a read for us?"
Scott: "Quite simply, Captain, the cost of [borrowing]ever fewer 'real' dollars is becoming more dear. There's a downward spiral happening. Yield rising, unemployment rising...less real dollars being put back into the system.
Lots of fake dollars being injected at the high-ends. The circulatory system isn't working!"
Kirk: "Bones, any input?"
Bones: "Damn it, Jim! I'm a proctologist...not a colonic therapist!"
Kirk: "So much for that 25 year old corn flake lodged at the end of the Volker era."
We love Naked Capitalism, especially the due diligence on the TARP, TALF. NC is a must read blog and why we have their article titles in the middle column.
For those NCs reading this comment, EP is a community blog and forum, which means we have many authors writing original economic analysis on EP. You have landed in our Instapopulist, which is our forum for shorter, more news or other blogs posts with some commentary. Check out the front page while you visit.
structural defect but this compounded by the fact the household earnings have been stagnate for a while.
Families who either wanted to maintain the standard of living that their parents had or wanted to "keep up with the Jones" had to go heavily into debt because their incomes did not support the standard of living.
Have we seen the death of the middle class standard of living - whatever that may be?
I have no idea who or what you are talking to, but may I just suggest you point the mirror to yourself. This post is seemingly a desire to insult someone (who is it is beyond me) yet offers nothing in terms of economic analysis or issue discussion.
Excellence? You might start with your own ability to articulate thought.
To other anonymous drive-bys. We do allow anonymous comments, but please, if you're going to take the time to leave one, have something specific and insightful to say.
I'm really going to moderate these more in the future.
Rewriting the constitution, the economic rulebook, whatever it is you think reindustrialisation means, isn't going to work. Look up Milton Friedman's speech to Phil Donahue about greed: the problem with the system isn't the rules, it's that we're flawed. And if you can't see the flaw of your own vision, it's no different than all the plans currently in place.
Everyone wants a fast solution, something drastic that'll shake up the way things are for the better. Most of these people have no appreciation for what that'll entail, but they've read Ayn Rand, or her wikipedia article at least.
Oil, food, and safety are going to be harder to come by every day for a very long time. Society might fall apart, but I doubt it. Things will just slowly change, day by day, and we'll all adjust. It's amazing that we can do this.
There is a solution here: excellence. You can demand excellence from the world, and I guarantee you it'll become a world worth living in, fighting for and believing in. But you have to be willing to give excellence. Every day, doing your best at everything you do with unflagging dilligence and dedication.
I think you're all right that it's a failing of excellence that led us here. Shortsighted vision, low standards and pure apathy.
So by all means, rage against the faltering of your empire and point out all the ways it could be better. I just think you should dedicate your life to being a role model of your beliefs, and going to bed confident you did your best every day.
Everybody click on that Real Household Debt graph. Tell me you did not say an explicative when it was enlarged.
On posts previous written on EP, we have a lot of great content, a lot of information and it's fairly fast moving.
So, I'm all for recycling, referencing older posts or even recycling information, quoting from posts. And if a few duplicates slip in, don't worry about it, especially if it was posted a month or more ago. You can try to find it with the search, or a site specific Google search to reference.
This is an issue with blogs that I try to improve on. Blog posts have a shelf life of a few days. On Agent Orange for example, posts have a shelf life of 24 hours.
So, on EP, I have a lot of technology to make these posts more permanent and more like articles or references...some of these are fantastic and they should not have a shelf life of a few days...they are a lot of work and are not written to have a short time period to be relevant.
Firstly the ones who had done it are the currently retired, enjoying their pensions, social security and Medicare.
The generation about to retire for the most part is not happy about what is going on and they are the 60's generation.
You have to realize it is corporate lobbyists who have gotten their agenda through Congress, not generations of Americans.
Then, claiming they didn't "take care of their bodies" is just a little blame the victim don't ya think?
One might do well to contemplate the phrase, there for the grace of God go I.
One might also realize there is massive age discrimination in the United States....so instead of looking at older people as some sort of burden to you, you might start looking at them as the ultimate labor and experience resource.
While many of your comments are spot on, I feel that the US Republic is simply to far gone. The levels of debt held by the US federal, state, and cities (not to mention consumers or private businesses) is so large the no combonation of higher growth or productivity will avert a fiscal disaster. Worse still is that the right now, relatively speaking the US is in calm water, with a large working age population, a smaller pool of recieving benefits and people still living on average until their 70-73. Soon the babyboomers will begin retiring on mass with little to no safety net(very few will have anything moe then the equity in their house and govt benefits) or health insurance, and a smaller tax base to draw their benefits from. This is complicated by the fact that most babyboomers have taken horrible care of their bodies (which will force the state to take on greater cost in keeping them alive) and the finances (and will therefore have to live off the state by raisng taxes on young, or simply move in with younger working family members). Balance this with the fact that it seem impossible for individuals to understand that they may have to infact pay for their government services (rather then cut taxes for themselves and pass the buck onto my generation). Worse, old people do vote on mass and will comporise such a staggering % of the population that by vote alone the young will be unable democratically to modify this structure, unless americans begin voting to cut their benefits and raise their taxes, which i highly doubt. If this gerentocracy thinks that we are going to tolerate 70% rates, 2nd world infastructure, failing schools and mountains of debt in order subsidize their lifestyle I feel that next civil war will not be between liberals and conservatives, but the young and the old.
Day by day the evidence gathers of the absolutely hopeless nature of the circumstance we're in yet all hopes are pinned on some action or series of actions arising from the very system that created this tragedy to fix it! And I assure you that there will be no fixing this mess via parliamentary means, so utterly corrupt are the filth that lead it, so utterly for sale to the highest bidder, that only direct action - mass demonstrations and the general strike - offer any promise of a remedy.
Yes, we need to focus on reindustrialization - hell, we need a kind of Five Year Plan - and to protect workers rights and the like, but won't as long as our financial system, our foreign policy, and our health care system are under the supervision of political bacteria that act solely in the interests of the lobbies whose contributions make their "service" possible. You've got the cart before the horse. Step 1: Remove every politician - bodily if necessary - from office, confining them together behind barbed wire in large concentrations away from major population centers so as to prevent their contaminating anyone but themselves with their visions of "democracy". Step 2: Hold enormous and speedy public trials for them in sports stadium environments with immediate sentencing. Step 3: Draw up a new Constitution to replace the one now so grotesquely disfigured by the very people charged with protecting it, making certain that it excludes from public office anyone "serving" under the earlier document and their forebears and progeny for four generations retrospectively and prospectively. Then your hopes have a chance of realization. It is naive and pointless to embrace hope for your proposals under the umbrella of present structures.
evidence that we don't need financial conglomerates. I am glad that a professor from a fine institution like Roosevelt University was cited.
Financial conglomerates failed in many regards but were rewarded for their failures. They failed to manage risk and the failed to help small businesses (especially with their mortgage craze). Professor Edmund Phelps has suggested that financial conglomerates certainly have not fostered "economic dynamism and inclusion". I agree.
So what purpose do they serve that is so worthy of trillions of dollars?
"Fed staff separately estimated what size and type of unconventional operations, including asset purchases, might provide this level of stimulus. They suggested that the Fed should expand its asset purchases by even more than the $1,150bn"
I dont know if i understand this but is that saying that the Fed (a private company) is 'printing' money at a rate of 5% and buying stuff with.
But does economic prosperity, or allow me to be more specific, does financial allocation be mandated to be invested in "real" capital. What is the true definition of real capital? Is it tangible items like factories and such?
The reason why I'm bringing this up, is reading the piece again, it occured to me that it may not take into account the rise of non-tangible assets. Inttellectual property, software, methods, financial transaction vehicles (even those infamous credit default swaps).
The U.S. must increase the manufacturing base for organic growth.
We should have greater protection for workers rights.
We should have stable pensions that do not implode.
Workers need a real increase in wages and a reduction discrepancy between the wages at the top of a company and those at the bottom.
In fact, Retail employees have some of the least worker protections. Most employees are part-time and do not qualify for any benefits.
However, commerce has been a part of the economy throughout the ages. Some facets of retail are beneficial to the consumer. Malls are just an extension of the former "Market Place".
Somewhere along the line, consumers began to internalize "things" with self-worth. (I attribute this to Edward Bernays ) Spending compulsion emerged.
Readjusting the collective paradigm shift and the required lifestyle changes will not be painless - for the consumer or the local economy.
Lithium and more S. America.
But more to your point that China is simply capturing the entire vertical supply chain and all manufacturing and the United States plain gave it all away in 9 short years is behind belief.
On top of it China holds the U.S. by the short hairs through debt.
there's a real catch coming with the Volt, but it's a issue for all hybrid production.
95% of the raw material for producing rare earth magnets comes from China.
The source of the material is in Western and Northern China.
Remember Magnuequench?
The Indiana firm used to produce the magnets used in hybrid motors, but a Chinese firm bought it an shifted production to China. It's an example of the Chinese being able to consolidate vertically.
US firms are going to be at a disadvantage because these parts are going to have to be imported, at least in the short term. There used to be a source in California, but that was shut down when Chinese sources opened up.
Even if production in California is restarted, there's no domestic permanent magnet industry because we sold all these firms to the Chinese.
would be nice if we could concentrate on writing.
I will have to tweak the intro paragraph.
Eek.
Great post middle! One thing on the employment graphs is they use the same colors, but for different unemployment percentage bins....
So, people reading the maps, look at the color code to the right for it is different per map.
On the Stimulus plan and the autos, well, GM is planning on offshore outsourcing 98% of production. We had 22k green jobs created....in India.
So, I wrote about the current Stimulus jobs earlier and frankly I do not see the point if they refuse to tie the money to U.S. citizens, to U.S. workers, to domestic activity.
They will scream protectionism or some absurdity when the point of public expenditure is to generate income for it's own citizens to stimulate a domestic economy...
So, unless we get a major shift I just do not really see what giving outsourcers G.E., IBM, etc. is going to do for the U.S. middle class and auto workers who are really getting the shaft at this point.
Your ideas are common sense, practical, efficient, sane, but how to get Congress or the Obama administration to do something as practical as retooling GM and forming an alliance with G.E. with the added caveat of domestic production AND hiring only from the U.S. workforce?
Seems like next to nil!
Hence, our cat is dead!@ @&*)#&@*)!!!
Always change the title and the first paragraph slightly and yes, adding a link back to your blog on EP in the first part not only brings readers to other posts on EP, it has the dual purpose of changing the post slightly. This helps with SEO. i.e. they punish sites with duplicate content post by post so changing the post when cross posting helps.
Wouldn't it be nice to just focus in on writing and expressing your thoughts and views instead of the rest of this?
at around 3 EST on Daily Kos.
I'm going to start putting the title EconPop Series before whatever title I use here when I crosspost to Big Orange.
We have been asked to bank roll the banks, pony up to save floundering states and prop up “to large to fail business’s” and the top of the pile stand by while the unions are treated as secured stock holders over the risk takers who have been maligned as being speculators. These actions of strong armed management to discard the goodwill that it has taken many dealerships years to develop and reward the remaining with the results of others sweat and toil. http://www.allbusiness.com/economy-economic-indicators/economic-conditio...
We no longer see good management practice to encourage, business not to disable them. In the present our energy must be focused on disclosure and not be ashamed to admit our failures (learning points) and pick up and re envigurate the electorate to a stronger economy.
Let us not continue using of “Rules for Radicals”
Saul Alinsky provides a collection of rules to guide the process that is being used in the Obama administration. .He emphasizes these rules must be translated into real-life tactics that are fluid and responsive to the situation at hand.
Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.
Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.
The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.
Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”
Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.
Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”
Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.
We must consider all not few, energize our prospective partys but only after our house is in order.
Though a lot of this information is helpful and usable we must be vigilant of the goal of what is being done. There in lies the true prize.
Information expressed in part is from Rules for Radicals
In 1971, Saul Alinsky
"Unemployment is rising. All this should be massively deflationary. Interest rates should be falling or at least not rising. But a funny thing is happening. In the past two months, the yield on the ten-year bond has risen by 1%. It has moved 0.38% or almost "4 big handles" in just two weeks. Look at the chart below. What is happening?"
--John Mauldin
Kirk: "What is happening? Scotty, do you have a read for us?"
Scott: "Quite simply, Captain, the cost of [borrowing]ever fewer 'real' dollars is becoming more dear. There's a downward spiral happening. Yield rising, unemployment rising...less real dollars being put back into the system.
Lots of fake dollars being injected at the high-ends. The circulatory system isn't working!"
Kirk: "Bones, any input?"
Bones: "Damn it, Jim! I'm a proctologist...not a colonic therapist!"
Kirk: "So much for that 25 year old corn flake lodged at the end of the Volker era."
We love Naked Capitalism, especially the due diligence on the TARP, TALF. NC is a must read blog and why we have their article titles in the middle column.
For those NCs reading this comment, EP is a community blog and forum, which means we have many authors writing original economic analysis on EP. You have landed in our Instapopulist, which is our forum for shorter, more news or other blogs posts with some commentary. Check out the front page while you visit.
Thanks for the link NC!
structural defect but this compounded by the fact the household earnings have been stagnate for a while.
Families who either wanted to maintain the standard of living that their parents had or wanted to "keep up with the Jones" had to go heavily into debt because their incomes did not support the standard of living.
Have we seen the death of the middle class standard of living - whatever that may be?
I have no idea who or what you are talking to, but may I just suggest you point the mirror to yourself. This post is seemingly a desire to insult someone (who is it is beyond me) yet offers nothing in terms of economic analysis or issue discussion.
Excellence? You might start with your own ability to articulate thought.
To other anonymous drive-bys. We do allow anonymous comments, but please, if you're going to take the time to leave one, have something specific and insightful to say.
I'm really going to moderate these more in the future.
Three posts, and yet nothing to say.
Rewriting the constitution, the economic rulebook, whatever it is you think reindustrialisation means, isn't going to work. Look up Milton Friedman's speech to Phil Donahue about greed: the problem with the system isn't the rules, it's that we're flawed. And if you can't see the flaw of your own vision, it's no different than all the plans currently in place.
Everyone wants a fast solution, something drastic that'll shake up the way things are for the better. Most of these people have no appreciation for what that'll entail, but they've read Ayn Rand, or her wikipedia article at least.
Oil, food, and safety are going to be harder to come by every day for a very long time. Society might fall apart, but I doubt it. Things will just slowly change, day by day, and we'll all adjust. It's amazing that we can do this.
There is a solution here: excellence. You can demand excellence from the world, and I guarantee you it'll become a world worth living in, fighting for and believing in. But you have to be willing to give excellence. Every day, doing your best at everything you do with unflagging dilligence and dedication.
I think you're all right that it's a failing of excellence that led us here. Shortsighted vision, low standards and pure apathy.
So by all means, rage against the faltering of your empire and point out all the ways it could be better. I just think you should dedicate your life to being a role model of your beliefs, and going to bed confident you did your best every day.
Everybody click on that Real Household Debt graph. Tell me you did not say an explicative when it was enlarged.
On posts previous written on EP, we have a lot of great content, a lot of information and it's fairly fast moving.
So, I'm all for recycling, referencing older posts or even recycling information, quoting from posts. And if a few duplicates slip in, don't worry about it, especially if it was posted a month or more ago. You can try to find it with the search, or a site specific Google search to reference.
This is an issue with blogs that I try to improve on. Blog posts have a shelf life of a few days. On Agent Orange for example, posts have a shelf life of 24 hours.
So, on EP, I have a lot of technology to make these posts more permanent and more like articles or references...some of these are fantastic and they should not have a shelf life of a few days...they are a lot of work and are not written to have a short time period to be relevant.
Firstly the ones who had done it are the currently retired, enjoying their pensions, social security and Medicare.
The generation about to retire for the most part is not happy about what is going on and they are the 60's generation.
You have to realize it is corporate lobbyists who have gotten their agenda through Congress, not generations of Americans.
Then, claiming they didn't "take care of their bodies" is just a little blame the victim don't ya think?
One might do well to contemplate the phrase, there for the grace of God go I.
One might also realize there is massive age discrimination in the United States....so instead of looking at older people as some sort of burden to you, you might start looking at them as the ultimate labor and experience resource.
While many of your comments are spot on, I feel that the US Republic is simply to far gone. The levels of debt held by the US federal, state, and cities (not to mention consumers or private businesses) is so large the no combonation of higher growth or productivity will avert a fiscal disaster. Worse still is that the right now, relatively speaking the US is in calm water, with a large working age population, a smaller pool of recieving benefits and people still living on average until their 70-73. Soon the babyboomers will begin retiring on mass with little to no safety net(very few will have anything moe then the equity in their house and govt benefits) or health insurance, and a smaller tax base to draw their benefits from. This is complicated by the fact that most babyboomers have taken horrible care of their bodies (which will force the state to take on greater cost in keeping them alive) and the finances (and will therefore have to live off the state by raisng taxes on young, or simply move in with younger working family members). Balance this with the fact that it seem impossible for individuals to understand that they may have to infact pay for their government services (rather then cut taxes for themselves and pass the buck onto my generation). Worse, old people do vote on mass and will comporise such a staggering % of the population that by vote alone the young will be unable democratically to modify this structure, unless americans begin voting to cut their benefits and raise their taxes, which i highly doubt. If this gerentocracy thinks that we are going to tolerate 70% rates, 2nd world infastructure, failing schools and mountains of debt in order subsidize their lifestyle I feel that next civil war will not be between liberals and conservatives, but the young and the old.
Day by day the evidence gathers of the absolutely hopeless nature of the circumstance we're in yet all hopes are pinned on some action or series of actions arising from the very system that created this tragedy to fix it! And I assure you that there will be no fixing this mess via parliamentary means, so utterly corrupt are the filth that lead it, so utterly for sale to the highest bidder, that only direct action - mass demonstrations and the general strike - offer any promise of a remedy.
Yes, we need to focus on reindustrialization - hell, we need a kind of Five Year Plan - and to protect workers rights and the like, but won't as long as our financial system, our foreign policy, and our health care system are under the supervision of political bacteria that act solely in the interests of the lobbies whose contributions make their "service" possible. You've got the cart before the horse. Step 1: Remove every politician - bodily if necessary - from office, confining them together behind barbed wire in large concentrations away from major population centers so as to prevent their contaminating anyone but themselves with their visions of "democracy". Step 2: Hold enormous and speedy public trials for them in sports stadium environments with immediate sentencing. Step 3: Draw up a new Constitution to replace the one now so grotesquely disfigured by the very people charged with protecting it, making certain that it excludes from public office anyone "serving" under the earlier document and their forebears and progeny for four generations retrospectively and prospectively. Then your hopes have a chance of realization. It is naive and pointless to embrace hope for your proposals under the umbrella of present structures.
evidence that we don't need financial conglomerates. I am glad that a professor from a fine institution like Roosevelt University was cited.
Financial conglomerates failed in many regards but were rewarded for their failures. They failed to manage risk and the failed to help small businesses (especially with their mortgage craze). Professor Edmund Phelps has suggested that financial conglomerates certainly have not fostered "economic dynamism and inclusion". I agree.
So what purpose do they serve that is so worthy of trillions of dollars?
The financial times report:
"Fed staff separately estimated what size and type of unconventional operations, including asset purchases, might provide this level of stimulus. They suggested that the Fed should expand its asset purchases by even more than the $1,150bn"
I dont know if i understand this but is that saying that the Fed (a private company) is 'printing' money at a rate of 5% and buying stuff with.
Would that not cause alot of inflation
But does economic prosperity, or allow me to be more specific, does financial allocation be mandated to be invested in "real" capital. What is the true definition of real capital? Is it tangible items like factories and such?
The reason why I'm bringing this up, is reading the piece again, it occured to me that it may not take into account the rise of non-tangible assets. Inttellectual property, software, methods, financial transaction vehicles (even those infamous credit default swaps).
I agree with you on several points:
The U.S. must increase the manufacturing base for organic growth.
We should have greater protection for workers rights.
We should have stable pensions that do not implode.
Workers need a real increase in wages and a reduction discrepancy between the wages at the top of a company and those at the bottom.
In fact, Retail employees have some of the least worker protections. Most employees are part-time and do not qualify for any benefits.
However, commerce has been a part of the economy throughout the ages. Some facets of retail are beneficial to the consumer. Malls are just an extension of the former "Market Place".
Somewhere along the line, consumers began to internalize "things" with self-worth. (I attribute this to Edward Bernays ) Spending compulsion emerged.
Readjusting the collective paradigm shift and the required lifestyle changes will not be painless - for the consumer or the local economy.
Pages