great article. I'm just confused on the first chart. How three different classes black, red and grey add up to 100%? They are stacked up by the bottom, middle and top third. Is it a pure coincidence or a diagram made to belive?
I am now in a position where BofA is ready to do me in. I to was trying to obtain a MHA package always being told that the investor would not allow a modification. I was stuck in a securitized sub-prime mortgage loan package and sold off to an investor. BofA does not know who the owner of my mortgage is and if they do, they will not tell me. I sent them a 'QWR' for any and all documents that pertained to my loanand they will not and did not comply. What state are you in. I am in Texas.
This is kind of depressing that a guy who has some solid positions and is campaigning on getting corporate money out of politics is getting less votes than people who dropped out, but he's cracking jokes about it. some here.
Don't miss it. At midnight, Mitt will turn into a corporation.#corporationsarepumpkins
Taking bets: Which candidate will be first to sign on for Season 8 of "Dancing With the Stars?" #onlyinamerica"
Hell man, the way the electorate is so damn lazy and media controls the election, Roemer should go on dancing with the stars and then run again. I'd bet he'd win if he did that..
They take the Stimulus and then try to claim Keynesian economics doesn't work. Well, well, I can tell them what doesn't work, these extreme "Austrian school" agenda items.
But that's why we're here, to separate the wheat from the shaft. We too railed on the "Stimulus" but that was because it was throwing good money out the window instead of really getting bang for the buck.
The "financial crisis" is truly where the waste has happened. I'm pretty sure one can give everyone in the U.S. a house and probably a good retirement fund for the kind of money blown.
"Keynesian economics works. The problem is the Stimulus was not Keynesian at all. It drives me crazy that people try to smear Keynes over that corrupt, tax cut laden bogus bloatware they passed called 'Stimulus'." -- Robert Oak
That's why I put "Keynesian" in quotes.
I'm sure not an expert on Keynes or on Batra, but I think Batra is decrying policies after about 1980, and probably real Keynesian economic thinking informed earlier economic policy.
I agree that the key fault line lies in the SCOTUS-imposed doctrine of "money is speech," which btw dates back, not from the recent Citizens United decision, but from Buckley v. Valeo (1976). Compare that with decline dating from 1980 per Batra's analysis. Of course, we probably don't have a real clear historical basis for comparisons because the predominance of WTO financial capitalism combined with corporate globalism has interposed so much into the workings of Keynesian (or pseudo-Keynesian) models, with the result that many or most approximately Keynesian experiments have taken place within national boundaries with tighter barriers to financial and labor flows than exist in much of the world today.
As you often point out, preconditions must be in place for any economic policy or theory to have any chance of working, and those necessary preconditions may include fundamentals of the political process and other under-appreciated cultural factors, generally invisible to economists (and others) except retrospectively. Then there are also resource and other physical environmental preconditions that may have been crucial to success of earlier or other Keynesian experiments but are critically missing in a particular case where policy-makers and the public are counting on Keynesian analysis and projections to work.
On the other hand, IMO, there's something to be said for the perspective of Henry C. Simons and proposals for systemic financial, monetary and economic reform, e.g., along the lines of Simons' Positive Program for Laissez Faire (1934) or the 'Chicago Plan' as outlined in 1933 by Henry Simons, Frank Knight and (later Senator) Paul Douglas. See, The Chicago Plan and New Deal banking reform by Ronnie J. Phillips (1995). See also, Monetary Policy and Politics: Rules versus Discretion by George Macesich (1992).
The feudal lord may prefer the discretionary approach, but over time the rules approach is probably what best endures. (I would suggest North Korea as an example of a feudal lord who chooses to retain complete discretion but Singapore as an example of a feudal lord who chooses to emphasize a stable system of rules.)
BTW: Have Keynesian theory or policies ever been tried in a 100%-reserve banking environment within a capitalist economy (with 100% publicly owned central bank currency issue)?
NOTE: The word 'Keynesian' is better defined than the word 'monetarist' because 'Keynesian' refers specifically to the work of Keynes. Herein, I put "monetarist" in quotes not to indicate that Simons' proposals are not really "monetarist" but because "monetarist" can be used or abused to point to very different ideas or to no well-defined ideas at all. Many who would call themselves "monetarist" (Austrian School) condemn Simons's proposals as flat-out socialism, even though IMO Simons is much more consistently anti-authoritarian than v. Mises or Hayek.
To really tackle the claim that uber-low labor participation rates are all because 18-24 year olds are in higher education, I need accurate, raw data going back for 20 years of ages and enrollment figures and a breakdown in all ages, not just 18-24. Why? Because while it's obvious the majority of students are between 18-24, to be accurate, one must adjust labor participation rates for all ages. So, in other words, I need to remove the 35 year olds from the equation who are in school, the retired from the older labor participate rates.
Additionally one needs a very accurate number, going back 20 years on who is a student and also working? They are part of the labor force.
The bottom line argument on this labor participation game is to refute the claim that the huge unemployment of 18-24's is just a data anomaly because they all went to school. It's just not accurate and we can see that from the massive drop in the labor participation rate in just 4 years while the overall percentage increases for entering higher education are not proportional.
Another very accurate, detailed statistic I'd like to find is the age break down of everyone locked up. I fear more kids are entering prison these days than college but I don't have accurate raw yearly data yet.
I didn't check his numbers but I can believe it. Keynesian economics works. The problem is the Stimulus was not Keynesian at all. It drives me crazy that people try to smear Keynes over that corrupt, tax cut laden bogus bloatware they passed called "Stimulus".
It did not have a direct jobs program, it did not require only U.S. goods and most importantly, U.S. citizen, perm residents were hired as workers. Money poured out of the country and into various executives pockets too.
I've got another one. How much in bank bailouts did it cost? I'll bet we could have given everyone in America a free house they spent so much.
But the problem here is people think Obama is a socialist, he's a corporatist. They blame Keynes and the theory when the actions, legislation is a bastardization, not even close to what the Keynes equations say.
Drives me nuts and worse because this gives cannon fodder to really bad economic "philosophies" that really do not work, unless of course you're King Midas or a Feudal lord, then they work great for you!
Batra distills down the current state of USA "Keynesian" economic policy and related political (campaign money) cycle as follows:
The trillion dollar question is this: where is it all going, when the annual average wage is no higher than $50,000? Obviously, it must be going to the so-called 1 percent group or what the Republican Party calls the job creators, i.e., the mostly male CEOs and other executives of large corporations. ....
We don't need higher government spending or tax cuts. We need fundamental economic reforms so that wages rise proportionately with ever-growing labor productivity. This is what used to happen in the United States until 1980 .... But at that time. we did not have trade deficits, outsourcing and merger manias .... ever since 1981, the official economic policy has been designed to keep wages stagnant even as people work hard and students take large loans to educate themselves to hone their skills. Consequently, almost the entire fruit of soaring productivity has gone to the 1 percent group, while millions of students are stuck with college loans. .... ever since [1981], inequality has been soaring, leading to a shrinking middle class. The culprits: huge federal deficits and faulty official policies. And how are we financing these deficits? We are borrowing money from China and other countries, which in effect means that the wealthy prosper as never before, while the nation becomes a beggar to the world. Unfortunately, this system will continue unless the masses, the 99 percenters, revolt and demand fundamental economic reforms. The Occupy Wall Street movement opposes the interest of the Big-Business-Big-Bonus CEO, and in its success lies the revival of America and the middle class.
All the economic policies adopted by various administrations since 1981 have to be abandoned to fix our comatose economy. The system needs an overhaul, not bigger government. We need free markets, not monopoly capitalism. We need to break up business conglomerates and generate competition among companies, especially in the oil and health care industries, in order to bring down the cost of their products. We need to get rid of the trade deficit and outsourcing and link the minimum wage with the cost of living. Hats off to the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Maybe I got a wrong impression, not what Daisey intended to convey.
It's just that Daisey definitely indicated that when he managed to talk to assembly-line workers outside the Foxconn facility, he described them as never having seen an iPhone in use by an actual iPhone user.
Daisey did indicate that he had been able to contact people, and I suppose that must have usually been by cell phone, now that I think about it (extrapolating from your remarks).
Anyway, I think it's much more sustainable for an economy when manufacturing workers can earn enough to purchase manufactured products.
we have cloned iPhones in China, in masse and yes they do indeed have cell service, phones there, much more than landlines. There have been counterfeit Apple stores popping up all over China.
None of the assembly-line workers interviewed by Daisey had ever seen an actual iPhone user, let alone actually owned an iPhone. Probably, none of them could ever afford a cell phone or cell phone service of any kind.
Believe this or not, it was raved and praised and the new CEO is the one who architected the entire global supply chain and moved manufacturing to China. Foxconn employs 1 million people. That's a hell of a lot of jobs. I don't know the labor costs (slave labor costs) are that great, but electronics, tech has dropped in price dramatically.
Of course if manufacturing was in the U.S., people would make enough to afford $1k priced iPhones. Now people cannot afford $600 and how they are playing these fleecing cell phone plans is beyond me. $30 bucks for 2GB data is just as bad to me as payday loans.
Mike Daisey performs an excerpt that was adapted for radio from his one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." A lifelong Apple superfan, Daisey sees some photos online from the inside of a factory that makes iPhones, starts to wonder about the people working there, and flies to China to meet them.
So you may ask, "What does some tech fan's investigative reporting in China have to do with American life?" And you could also ask, "What do working conditions in Shenzhen China have to do with Steve Jobs?"
Rest assured, it's all very well connected up, although the connections are never made by, probably, 99.9% of American consumers of electronics. I respectfully suggest that if you are an American consumer of electronics at all, the story really does connect to YOU, and once you get it, you'll never forget it. The story isn't limited to China -- it's about unnecessarily horrendous working conditions created in many countries by the world system of corporate globalism and finance capitalism. Shenxhen in China may well be the location of the biggest and most efficient sweatshop operations in the world, but China is, IMHO, probably not the worst of the offenders.
Following Mike Daisey's presentation, Ira Glass interviews a couple of people qualified to speak about the questions. Ira Glass also notes that the companies involved, including Apple, were invited to respond on the show, but declined.
Everyone really should take a listen to the podcast, IMHO (all of it). It may just be audio, but it's an eye-opener! (Second part of the podcast deals fairly well with whatever methodological objections you might have left over from the first part.)
Mike Daisey (paraphrased) sums it up nicely in the interview by Ira Glass --
"We fought for labor rights and protections for a hundred years in the USA and then we exported the jobs ... and we didn't send the protections with them." -- Mike Daisey (on This American Life, 7/8 January 2012).
Beyond the free publicity gift, more they get to present pure fiction, I mean some of these "positions" are just that and ad some more sound bytes to make them sound like fact. They go unchallenged or even perpetuated by some in the MSM.
While this post is assuredly a rant, positively disgusted by this spectacle which shows we have no real choice, I had a funny feeling others were perceiving it all as I am.
I could have titled this post as "Why am I paying over $100 bucks a month cable bill for 25 minutes per 60 of commercials (ignoring the ad placement in content) and propaganda and noise?"
The free publicity (the weekly drip torture) received by the republicans via the MSM - PRICELESS! Has anyone put a pen to the value of all that free tv via their debates they have received and will continue to receive until June 2012?
Well.
Who can really say; the PTB will scrap like hell to keep "it" afloat, we can be assured of that.
The chaos that comes from even a small fulfillment will alert the Small Millionaires as they see their asset values declining even more. Panic will ensue, no doubt but full on collapse?
Perhaps.
The Little People are/will be cast aside to fend for anything resembling a normal life.
,"A logical start for the point of recognition – the moment when everyone realizes the system cannot be saved – is 2012." -- Numerian
American Monetary Institute (AMI) announced today that Stephen Zarlenga is giving, or has given, a talk to an Occupy Chicago group at Roosevelt University. This talk is specifically intended to protest the 2012 annual meeting of the American Economic Association (AEA), which opened yesterday or today (Friday) in Chicago. The AEA meeting is just one part of a huge Allied Social Sciences Associations (ASSA) super-meeting scheduled for January 5 through 8, requiring both the Hyatt Regency and the Swissotel venues. (Think: "cast of thousands" -- some real job creation, albeit temporary, for hotel workers!)
Apparently, the big opening was a presentation by Bengt Holmstrom (MIT) under the timely topic, "The Nature of Liquidity Provision: When Ignorance is Bliss". Today, there was a big seminar (or whatever) titled "Incomplete Information in Macroeconomics and Finance". Hmmmm. (I couldn't make this stuff up!)
Paul Krugman posted yesterday (Thursday) that he was going and that he and his staff will be presenting his work on Saturday. Today (Friday), he posted something (in transit, 3:42 PM) about the jobs report. In his Thursday post, he suggests that he is looking forward to Saturday evening for Yoram Bauman’s 'humor in economics session'. Again, hmmmm.
_________
Back to Zarlenga and the people out there in the cold. About 60 days ago, Zarlenga gave a brief talk (5 minutes) to Occupy Chicago, which appeared to be well received.
OccupyChi has declared 'Occupy the AEA', and it seems that Zarlenga's talk at Roosevelt University is associated with that. I don't know if Zarlenga at Roosevelt is intended to draw #Occupy people towards, or guide them away from, a physical crowd protest at the Hyatt Regency. I'm guessing the latter, considering that Chicago isn't known for its hospitality toward people protesting conventions. (The Roosevelt University event is, or will be, the whole of 'Occupy the AEA' ... or not.)
_________
Perhaps one of the more important benefits of the financial collapse and the economic depression is that it is forcing economists to re-examine their profession. Well, OK, some economists. And maybe not so much "examine" as just plain old internecine warfare.
At the annual (2009) meeting of American Economists [sic: AEA], most everyone refused to admit their failures to prepare or warn about the second worst crisis of the century.
These two related blogs (from the EP archives ) attracted a total of about 40 comments and more than 3,000 reads.
If one really digs, there are more than a few real economists who do understand the economy and get it right.
The problem is they are buried, come to light with a few papers and then are buried again by those who spew the corporate lobbyist agenda or plain don't have a clue.
Also, if you don't understand the money system, as it exists, well, this site is in part to educate people. You cannot blast something you do not understand.
Apparently, criticism in 2009 attracted the attention of economists in 2010. See, Economist article or editorial (6 January 2011), "Dismal ethics: An intensifying debate about the case for a professional code of ethics for economists".
The humor in economics guy shouldn't have any problem developing his material. I really could not make this stuff up. People out on the streets of Chicago (or standing packed into El stations through the wee hours of the morning, trying to keep warm) might not find it so funny, though.
The "never ending desire to control women" does seem to be a persistent characteristic of people who want to legislate morality. Maybe what happened to Bachmann is that such people don't trust any woman to be doing the 'necessary' legislation
(Home schooling is whole 'nuther issue. It all depends. I certainly know public school teachers, and former public school teachers, who have decided in favor of home schooling for at least some of their own children, at least for some substantial portion of the K-12 years.)
BTW: Thanks for pointing to Chinn's EOY blog again. I clicked on the links, and found myself LOL.
The reason I mention this is this never ending desire to control women makes economic issues secondary. Additionally, I just have to wonder if these "voters" can even add. It's like Santorum just has to mention keyword manufacturing and people somehow believe he has policy positions that would actually help, which is false. Same with a host of policy positions.
I guess as this goes on (I expect Santorum to be a one hit wonder here), we'll have to delve into some of these positions in statistical detail.
I wrote this simply because I'm already disgusted by this "election". Ratigan rightly calls it an auction, to the highest corporate bidder and I have to agree.
We already know Obama won't do what is needed and here comes worser in so many words.
Still, we'll have to pull apart each issue, one by one, and show the theory, data.
I love Economist Chinn (in the 2011 best of posts), who does go through some of this rhetoric and shows how economically insane it is. That said, if one has people who cannot add up 1 + 1 but think somehow their ideas of cells in a Petri dish should override everything else, well, there is no much hope here.
(Makes me wonder about "home schooling" too, seems so many are basic math addition disabled).
The cycle of rolling over debts, and using collateral multiple times, has reached a level where finance is the business of America (purportedly generating 40% of American "profits" in a recent year).
This frothy economic activity (financial trading) is going to continue to consume resources with no productive results (unless one counts changes to a firm's perceived financial health).
The shadow banking system is growing to a size that the "too big to fail" banks only dreamed of, I suspect.
great article. I'm just confused on the first chart. How three different classes black, red and grey add up to 100%? They are stacked up by the bottom, middle and top third. Is it a pure coincidence or a diagram made to belive?
I am now in a position where BofA is ready to do me in. I to was trying to obtain a MHA package always being told that the investor would not allow a modification. I was stuck in a securitized sub-prime mortgage loan package and sold off to an investor. BofA does not know who the owner of my mortgage is and if they do, they will not tell me. I sent them a 'QWR' for any and all documents that pertained to my loanand they will not and did not comply. What state are you in. I am in Texas.
This is kind of depressing that a guy who has some solid positions and is campaigning on getting corporate money out of politics is getting less votes than people who dropped out, but he's cracking jokes about it. some here.
Hell man, the way the electorate is so damn lazy and media controls the election, Roemer should go on dancing with the stars and then run again. I'd bet he'd win if he did that..
so messed up.
They take the Stimulus and then try to claim Keynesian economics doesn't work. Well, well, I can tell them what doesn't work, these extreme "Austrian school" agenda items.
But that's why we're here, to separate the wheat from the shaft. We too railed on the "Stimulus" but that was because it was throwing good money out the window instead of really getting bang for the buck.
The "financial crisis" is truly where the waste has happened. I'm pretty sure one can give everyone in the U.S. a house and probably a good retirement fund for the kind of money blown.
"Keynesian economics works. The problem is the Stimulus was not Keynesian at all. It drives me crazy that people try to smear Keynes over that corrupt, tax cut laden bogus bloatware they passed called 'Stimulus'." -- Robert Oak
That's why I put "Keynesian" in quotes.
I'm sure not an expert on Keynes or on Batra, but I think Batra is decrying policies after about 1980, and probably real Keynesian economic thinking informed earlier economic policy.
I agree that the key fault line lies in the SCOTUS-imposed doctrine of "money is speech," which btw dates back, not from the recent Citizens United decision, but from Buckley v. Valeo (1976). Compare that with decline dating from 1980 per Batra's analysis. Of course, we probably don't have a real clear historical basis for comparisons because the predominance of WTO financial capitalism combined with corporate globalism has interposed so much into the workings of Keynesian (or pseudo-Keynesian) models, with the result that many or most approximately Keynesian experiments have taken place within national boundaries with tighter barriers to financial and labor flows than exist in much of the world today.
As you often point out, preconditions must be in place for any economic policy or theory to have any chance of working, and those necessary preconditions may include fundamentals of the political process and other under-appreciated cultural factors, generally invisible to economists (and others) except retrospectively. Then there are also resource and other physical environmental preconditions that may have been crucial to success of earlier or other Keynesian experiments but are critically missing in a particular case where policy-makers and the public are counting on Keynesian analysis and projections to work.
On the other hand, IMO, there's something to be said for the perspective of Henry C. Simons and proposals for systemic financial, monetary and economic reform, e.g., along the lines of Simons' Positive Program for Laissez Faire (1934) or the 'Chicago Plan' as outlined in 1933 by Henry Simons, Frank Knight and (later Senator) Paul Douglas. See, The Chicago Plan and New Deal banking reform by Ronnie J. Phillips (1995). See also, Monetary Policy and Politics: Rules versus Discretion by George Macesich (1992).
The feudal lord may prefer the discretionary approach, but over time the rules approach is probably what best endures. (I would suggest North Korea as an example of a feudal lord who chooses to retain complete discretion but Singapore as an example of a feudal lord who chooses to emphasize a stable system of rules.)
BTW: Have Keynesian theory or policies ever been tried in a 100%-reserve banking environment within a capitalist economy (with 100% publicly owned central bank currency issue)?
NOTE: The word 'Keynesian' is better defined than the word 'monetarist' because 'Keynesian' refers specifically to the work of Keynes. Herein, I put "monetarist" in quotes not to indicate that Simons' proposals are not really "monetarist" but because "monetarist" can be used or abused to point to very different ideas or to no well-defined ideas at all. Many who would call themselves "monetarist" (Austrian School) condemn Simons's proposals as flat-out socialism, even though IMO Simons is much more consistently anti-authoritarian than v. Mises or Hayek.
To really tackle the claim that uber-low labor participation rates are all because 18-24 year olds are in higher education, I need accurate, raw data going back for 20 years of ages and enrollment figures and a breakdown in all ages, not just 18-24. Why? Because while it's obvious the majority of students are between 18-24, to be accurate, one must adjust labor participation rates for all ages. So, in other words, I need to remove the 35 year olds from the equation who are in school, the retired from the older labor participate rates.
Additionally one needs a very accurate number, going back 20 years on who is a student and also working? They are part of the labor force.
The bottom line argument on this labor participation game is to refute the claim that the huge unemployment of 18-24's is just a data anomaly because they all went to school. It's just not accurate and we can see that from the massive drop in the labor participation rate in just 4 years while the overall percentage increases for entering higher education are not proportional.
Another very accurate, detailed statistic I'd like to find is the age break down of everyone locked up. I fear more kids are entering prison these days than college but I don't have accurate raw yearly data yet.
I didn't check his numbers but I can believe it. Keynesian economics works. The problem is the Stimulus was not Keynesian at all. It drives me crazy that people try to smear Keynes over that corrupt, tax cut laden bogus bloatware they passed called "Stimulus".
It did not have a direct jobs program, it did not require only U.S. goods and most importantly, U.S. citizen, perm residents were hired as workers. Money poured out of the country and into various executives pockets too.
I've got another one. How much in bank bailouts did it cost? I'll bet we could have given everyone in America a free house they spent so much.
But the problem here is people think Obama is a socialist, he's a corporatist. They blame Keynes and the theory when the actions, legislation is a bastardization, not even close to what the Keynes equations say.
Drives me nuts and worse because this gives cannon fodder to really bad economic "philosophies" that really do not work, unless of course you're King Midas or a Feudal lord, then they work great for you!
This is a Sunday read, dated 8 January 2012.
Check this out from Ravi Batra published at truthout.org (under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License) -- The Cost of Trickle-Down Job Creation: $1.5 Million per worker (8 January 2012)
Batra distills down the current state of USA "Keynesian" economic policy and related political (campaign money) cycle as follows:
Hats off to Ravi Batra, telling it like it is!
Maybe I got a wrong impression, not what Daisey intended to convey.
It's just that Daisey definitely indicated that when he managed to talk to assembly-line workers outside the Foxconn facility, he described them as never having seen an iPhone in use by an actual iPhone user.
Daisey did indicate that he had been able to contact people, and I suppose that must have usually been by cell phone, now that I think about it (extrapolating from your remarks).
Anyway, I think it's much more sustainable for an economy when manufacturing workers can earn enough to purchase manufactured products.
we have cloned iPhones in China, in masse and yes they do indeed have cell service, phones there, much more than landlines. There have been counterfeit Apple stores popping up all over China.
None of the assembly-line workers interviewed by Daisey had ever seen an actual iPhone user, let alone actually owned an iPhone. Probably, none of them could ever afford a cell phone or cell phone service of any kind.
Believe this or not, it was raved and praised and the new CEO is the one who architected the entire global supply chain and moved manufacturing to China. Foxconn employs 1 million people. That's a hell of a lot of jobs. I don't know the labor costs (slave labor costs) are that great, but electronics, tech has dropped in price dramatically.
Of course if manufacturing was in the U.S., people would make enough to afford $1k priced iPhones. Now people cannot afford $600 and how they are playing these fleecing cell phone plans is beyond me. $30 bucks for 2GB data is just as bad to me as payday loans.
This is a review and recommendation of a radio show and podcast in the series This American Life (produced by WBEZ and Chicago Public Media, with host Ira Glass). The show this weekend features Mike Daisey, an Apple superfan turned people's reporter and independent investigative journalist. Here's from the webpage as archived at thisamericanlife.org --
And embedded here is the link to the podcast webpage of This American Life, which will include the Mr. Daisy show as of this coming Monday.
So you may ask, "What does some tech fan's investigative reporting in China have to do with American life?" And you could also ask, "What do working conditions in Shenzhen China have to do with Steve Jobs?"
Rest assured, it's all very well connected up, although the connections are never made by, probably, 99.9% of American consumers of electronics. I respectfully suggest that if you are an American consumer of electronics at all, the story really does connect to YOU, and once you get it, you'll never forget it. The story isn't limited to China -- it's about unnecessarily horrendous working conditions created in many countries by the world system of corporate globalism and finance capitalism. Shenxhen in China may well be the location of the biggest and most efficient sweatshop operations in the world, but China is, IMHO, probably not the worst of the offenders.
Following Mike Daisey's presentation, Ira Glass interviews a couple of people qualified to speak about the questions. Ira Glass also notes that the companies involved, including Apple, were invited to respond on the show, but declined.
Everyone really should take a listen to the podcast, IMHO (all of it). It may just be audio, but it's an eye-opener! (Second part of the podcast deals fairly well with whatever methodological objections you might have left over from the first part.)
Mike Daisey (paraphrased) sums it up nicely in the interview by Ira Glass --
Beyond the free publicity gift, more they get to present pure fiction, I mean some of these "positions" are just that and ad some more sound bytes to make them sound like fact. They go unchallenged or even perpetuated by some in the MSM.
While this post is assuredly a rant, positively disgusted by this spectacle which shows we have no real choice, I had a funny feeling others were perceiving it all as I am.
I could have titled this post as "Why am I paying over $100 bucks a month cable bill for 25 minutes per 60 of commercials (ignoring the ad placement in content) and propaganda and noise?"
The free publicity (the weekly drip torture) received by the republicans via the MSM - PRICELESS! Has anyone put a pen to the value of all that free tv via their debates they have received and will continue to receive until June 2012?
Interesting defensible Analysis.
Conclusion?
Well.
Who can really say; the PTB will scrap like hell to keep "it" afloat, we can be assured of that.
The chaos that comes from even a small fulfillment will alert the Small Millionaires as they see their asset values declining even more. Panic will ensue, no doubt but full on collapse?
Perhaps.
The Little People are/will be cast aside to fend for anything resembling a normal life.
Breton
,"A logical start for the point of recognition – the moment when everyone realizes the system cannot be saved – is 2012." -- Numerian
American Monetary Institute (AMI) announced today that Stephen Zarlenga is giving, or has given, a talk to an Occupy Chicago group at Roosevelt University. This talk is specifically intended to protest the 2012 annual meeting of the American Economic Association (AEA), which opened yesterday or today (Friday) in Chicago. The AEA meeting is just one part of a huge Allied Social Sciences Associations (ASSA) super-meeting scheduled for January 5 through 8, requiring both the Hyatt Regency and the Swissotel venues. (Think: "cast of thousands" -- some real job creation, albeit temporary, for hotel workers!)
Apparently, the big opening was a presentation by Bengt Holmstrom (MIT) under the timely topic, "The Nature of Liquidity Provision: When Ignorance is Bliss". Today, there was a big seminar (or whatever) titled "Incomplete Information in Macroeconomics and Finance". Hmmmm. (I couldn't make this stuff up!)
Paul Krugman posted yesterday (Thursday) that he was going and that he and his staff will be presenting his work on Saturday. Today (Friday), he posted something (in transit, 3:42 PM) about the jobs report. In his Thursday post, he suggests that he is looking forward to Saturday evening for Yoram Bauman’s 'humor in economics session'. Again, hmmmm.
_________
Back to Zarlenga and the people out there in the cold. About 60 days ago, Zarlenga gave a brief talk (5 minutes) to Occupy Chicago, which appeared to be well received.
Link to video at the American Monetary Institute's YouTube channel
OccupyChi has declared 'Occupy the AEA', and it seems that Zarlenga's talk at Roosevelt University is associated with that. I don't know if Zarlenga at Roosevelt is intended to draw #Occupy people towards, or guide them away from, a physical crowd protest at the Hyatt Regency. I'm guessing the latter, considering that Chicago isn't known for its hospitality toward people protesting conventions. (The Roosevelt University event is, or will be, the whole of 'Occupy the AEA' ... or not.)
_________
BTW:
from Tony Wikrent at EP two years ago --
That was from Wikrent's Part 2. Before that, in original blog-post, Wikrent quoted Jeff Madrick (The Daily Beast) --
These two related blogs (from the EP archives ) attracted a total of about 40 comments and more than 3,000 reads.
Then, about a year ago (late 2010), there was a blog by 'scotus in the potus' (almost 30,000 reads!) asking "Are Non-Economists Entitled To An Opinion On the Economy?"
Robert Oak commented there (in part) --
Apparently, criticism in 2009 attracted the attention of economists in 2010. See, Economist article or editorial (6 January 2011), "Dismal ethics: An intensifying debate about the case for a professional code of ethics for economists".
The humor in economics guy shouldn't have any problem developing his material. I really could not make this stuff up. People out on the streets of Chicago (or standing packed into El stations through the wee hours of the morning, trying to keep warm) might not find it so funny, though.
The "never ending desire to control women" does seem to be a persistent characteristic of people who want to legislate morality. Maybe what happened to Bachmann is that such people don't trust any woman to be doing the 'necessary' legislation
(Home schooling is whole 'nuther issue. It all depends. I certainly know public school teachers, and former public school teachers, who have decided in favor of home schooling for at least some of their own children, at least for some substantial portion of the K-12 years.)
BTW: Thanks for pointing to Chinn's EOY blog again. I clicked on the links, and found myself LOL.
The reason I mention this is this never ending desire to control women makes economic issues secondary. Additionally, I just have to wonder if these "voters" can even add. It's like Santorum just has to mention keyword manufacturing and people somehow believe he has policy positions that would actually help, which is false. Same with a host of policy positions.
I guess as this goes on (I expect Santorum to be a one hit wonder here), we'll have to delve into some of these positions in statistical detail.
I wrote this simply because I'm already disgusted by this "election". Ratigan rightly calls it an auction, to the highest corporate bidder and I have to agree.
We already know Obama won't do what is needed and here comes worser in so many words.
Still, we'll have to pull apart each issue, one by one, and show the theory, data.
I love Economist Chinn (in the 2011 best of posts), who does go through some of this rhetoric and shows how economically insane it is. That said, if one has people who cannot add up 1 + 1 but think somehow their ideas of cells in a Petri dish should override everything else, well, there is no much hope here.
(Makes me wonder about "home schooling" too, seems so many are basic math addition disabled).
The cycle of rolling over debts, and using collateral multiple times, has reached a level where finance is the business of America (purportedly generating 40% of American "profits" in a recent year).
This frothy economic activity (financial trading) is going to continue to consume resources with no productive results (unless one counts changes to a firm's perceived financial health).
The shadow banking system is growing to a size that the "too big to fail" banks only dreamed of, I suspect.
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