A non-binding referendum will do nothing to solve the problem. How about requiring compensation committees to develop three options for executive compensation and submit it to a shareholder binding vote?
I am not comfortable having government dictate compensation levels for executives (sounds strange coming from a progressive). This is clearly the responsibility of the shareholder who is the owner of the company. However, there are things that the government can do to encourage or discourage certain behavior.
There are several challenges, big challenges, for corporate governance reform:
1) Independent directors. Right now, the chairman and CEO control who gets nominated to board of directors. So shareholders who do care about accountability don't really have a choice. Open up the nomination process either through shareholder proposal (SEC or congress can make these changes) or some other means. The other means is constitutionally challenging because state law determines how directors are elected. States will not make these changes particularly Delaware because corporations will just "forum" shop for another state with very lenient, management-friendly laws.
2) Taxation. Right now, if you look at the holding periods of shareholders, particularly institutional shareholders, it is very short. It is less than a year not enough to even vote in the next annual meeting. Entrenched management truly understands this. So, if there is huge turnover of shareholders there is very little interest in holding entrenched management accountable. Entrenched management run the companies as they see fit all too often focusing on short-term profits. Suggestion: jack up the rate on short-term capital gains. Say 40% (John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Funds, suggest 50%).
Examine how executive compensation is taxed. If most of the compensation is in the form of stock options and stock then look at closing those loopholes by possible changing capital gains rules for compensation.
There's another group that's not being included in this green shoots propaganda: people who are being furloughed. My wife faces 27 such furlough days in the next 12 months, almost six weeks of pay cuts. While, arguably, she'll be picked up (in the aggregate) by U6 stats), the impact of these widespread furloughs are still undercounted, imo.
There are at least three companies I've dealt with as an IT/Network professional, who's CEOs were making buku dollars while my contract was cut short, or h-1b/L-1/L-2 visas were hired:
Com Ed/Excelon: John Rowe, CEO
JP Chase: Jaimie Dimon
Corliant: Indian management, sold Corliant to Accenture
United Health Care: Outgoing CEO was negotiating over $ 1 Billion retirement package while I couldn't afford my United Healthcare cobra payments
Cisco Systems: Running phony PERM/H-1B job ads, bypassing American citizens, while CEO and former CEO are worth over combined $3 - 4 Billion
OTHER DISHONORABLE MENTION:
Sen. Frank Lautenberg's company, ADP (Wilco) pimping in cheap visa labor (EVEN ON VISITOR's VISAS) while laying off American citizens I knew (congressional testimony on this in Feb. 2004)
Best Buy: American citizens laid off, and replaced by TATA visa workers while Richard Schultze, CEO Best Buy, worth over $3 Billion.
They need to calculate the drop in revenues, gross income, income for the self-employed and then track on citizenship as well as training vs. occupational area.
I don't have them on hand but I know I've seen Academic papers discussing BLS shortcomings, esp. with employment stats and proposals to improve it but don't have any offhand.
College when different schools compared enrollment not by the total number of students they had, but by the full time equivalent. (FTE)
Which meant that if a school had 20,000 students going half time, it had 10,000 FTE. A school that had 10,000 students going full time and another 5,000 going half time had 12,500 FTE.
Looking at raw enrollment would be misleading, because it was a bad metric for the amount of education going on.
Maybe it's time that we had a similar measure for work. If we take the purpose of work to be providing individuals the means to support themselves independent of external aid, then a good measure of work would discount underemployment.
How to create this? No idea, but it seems like the concept needs to be given a go of it. A rough measure would look income of the employed to get an idea of the number of good jobs.
thus are no longer counted in the statistics. They also do not count occupational "down grade", i.e. someone has a PhD in Chemical engineering yet is working at the Wal-mart. Then that person is counted as employed and is "unskilled labor".
They also count guest workers which artificially deflate the real unemployment rates of Americans. i.e. a division is fired and replaced with H-1Bs. Those H-1Bs are counted in the employment stats making the occupational employment rates of software engineers look less than what they really are.
So, I read his post and I found that a good way of looking at it. For example, in engineering, one would see a very low unemployment rate, yet the total number of jobs in that field dropped by a good 500k. Well, what happened is those jobs were offshore outsourced and people were forced out of their career areas...
So, I think it's valid to look at the different stats to get a more complete picture.
They were worth the watch and Thomas Palley is a treasure for getting to the heart plus the nuts and bolts of what has gone wrong. Charts & Figures.... Where has this guy been all my life!
Both videos are worth the watch, because you won't see any coverage like this about America's "Financial Implosion" anywhere else, particularly in our Mainstream Media.
this, but I wasn't 100% sure that I fully understood it, of believed it.
It certainly sounds interesting though.
But, the length was extended. So, rather than 100 people becoming unemployed 6 months ago, that number is more in the neighborhood of 85 becoming unemployed 12 months ago (the number of those becoming unemployed has grown) AND unfortunately the 50 people receiving their final payment is correct, but it was after 12 months of collections.
So that ugly 49% exhaustion rate figure? It's more likely at 56% and I can only guess where June will come in at.
Instead, write to Harvard University, the unions involved and surrounding it, and every news outlet there concerning the distinguished Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who is presently enjoying much news and press adulation and recently proclaimed he feels the pain of the poor Black man.
Why him? Because he is in the news and because he put himself out there as supporting one or another group of Americans, while having his name on that Bretton Woods Committee letter (addressed to Pelosi & Reid, US Congress, dated Feb. 11, 2009) which watered down (i.e., completely destroyed) the "Buy American" clause in the federal stimulus package.
This international lobby group for the ultra-rich is also the most anti-worker, anti-union group in creation.
Time to embarrass those who are most deserving of being shamed (assuming they actually can experience such).
I would do all of the bills that are being ignored and I believe you just listed them, HR 676, Sanders, I think Wyden's is being ignored, although to me Wyden is a classic corporate Dem with that liberal lemon twist so I don't know what's in his bill.
But these are statistic for now because of course they are not being considered, so making people aware they exist, their cost estimates, their limitations, their problems or their advantages as well as why they are not being considered should be a stable post.
Whereas if you write up on legislation right now, you know it will dramatically change which will mislead people trying to find out what is in the latest bill (because they will read something out of date unless you update that exact blog post - which you can do on EP, you can update posts, create revisions and change the time stamp so they are visible again).
2) Massive disinformation by media and politicians in order to prevent civil unrest.
3) People are in denial about how bad the situation is.
I believe a case can be made for all three.
There are two things that are absolutely frustrating to me:
1)Look at a headline story such as the one on Bloomberg right now: "Economy in U.S. Probably Shrank at a Slower Pace, Signaling Recession Abated". Most people read headlines and not the whole story.
2) Our economy and society as a whole is not prepared for the long-term structural unemployment that we are heading for and the time is now to start preparing for that. Unfortunately, we don't have the political leadership or will to make the necessary changes.
Those Bonddad diaries at the Big Orange drive me up the wall. People that don't understand the numbers, or that don't spend the time breaking the numbers down like I do, are taken in by his charts.
In fact what is going on is a f*ckin disaster, and people need to know. The sooner the better.
I have to wonder why people aren't out in the street with torches and pitchforks already.
I was surprised by the frankness of the reporter. Did you notice the disclaimer at the top of the post about "the following is strictly the opinion of the writer" business?
Maybe when people realize that upward mobility has become the exception and not the norm we will have significant changes.
You have a point about Congressmen and Senators. How many of them are financial/economical literate? These are the people who are setting policy for the rest of us and many of them may actually be pretty illiterate. It is sad that the standard for being elected to public office is so low.
one thing and frankly I have not done it because it's clear health care is such a mess, reading and writing about a 1000 page bill where those clauses, provisions will probably be struck out is such an exercise in adding to confusion...
but as this starts to gel, we might want to start analyzing bills. So, for example, one could do a post on all of the great bills that are completely ignored and post cost analysis, features, bullet points on those.
Then, as the legislation starts geling one might do an analysis of the legislation via thomas.gov.
It's a real job to do this, I have done it on immigration bills and others so we can help dig around.
But the rhetoric vs. what is in a bill so often are completely opposite as it was in the Stimulus bill. I actually went through the actual bill text (as I will and we need to get more people to read these actual bills, esp. because Congress does not) anyway, there were a host of clauses in the Stimulus that were clearly not Keynesian and it was by analyzing the actual bill text could one see that...if one relied on reporters, just shit, it was and still is distortion city. You had GOP talking about Pelosi's pet mouse and others pretending the bill was Keynesian or some other distortion per their political agendas.
So, at some point I think we need to get the focus on what is actually being passed in Congress to cut through the noise. (at on health care, the noise is at 140db!) and I find that requires reading the legislation text as well as pointing to others reviewing the actual legislation text and most of all, pointing the public to the Congressional record instead of yet another pundit.
it should be "determining a bottom" but in my view they cannot call this a recovery until GDP grows past what is needed to maintain the status quo, which is roughly (and this is another issue I plan on writing about, the components of GDP) but for now, roughly about 1.5%.
So, my argument has been a bottom is not recovery. A slower contraction is not growth.
But, midtowng, you are going to feel very validated.
The Atlanta Fed (who run a very cool blog, so let's not blast all of the Fed for it's really outstanding frankly) post from today shows this time the unemployment rate is an anomaly from past recessions. So, using past predictors isn't quite working.
See the actual post, it's very good but here is their graph (click to enlarge):
they are planning on turning our university system into an automatic green card machine? They are claiming there is a worker shortage?
That does two things. It squeezes out U.S. citizens from opportunities in higher education and it makes it even worse for U.S. citizens to get a job upon graduation.
I should also note that HuffPo seemingly isn't allowing references to the original blog, so you might post something about EP in the comments.
Still, this is very good for midtowng because the readership at the Huffington Post has to be larger than EP, even per post and will expand the audience mulling some of our issues!
A non-binding referendum will do nothing to solve the problem. How about requiring compensation committees to develop three options for executive compensation and submit it to a shareholder binding vote?
I am not comfortable having government dictate compensation levels for executives (sounds strange coming from a progressive). This is clearly the responsibility of the shareholder who is the owner of the company. However, there are things that the government can do to encourage or discourage certain behavior.
There are several challenges, big challenges, for corporate governance reform:
1) Independent directors. Right now, the chairman and CEO control who gets nominated to board of directors. So shareholders who do care about accountability don't really have a choice. Open up the nomination process either through shareholder proposal (SEC or congress can make these changes) or some other means. The other means is constitutionally challenging because state law determines how directors are elected. States will not make these changes particularly Delaware because corporations will just "forum" shop for another state with very lenient, management-friendly laws.
2) Taxation. Right now, if you look at the holding periods of shareholders, particularly institutional shareholders, it is very short. It is less than a year not enough to even vote in the next annual meeting. Entrenched management truly understands this. So, if there is huge turnover of shareholders there is very little interest in holding entrenched management accountable. Entrenched management run the companies as they see fit all too often focusing on short-term profits.
Suggestion: jack up the rate on short-term capital gains. Say 40% (John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Funds, suggest 50%).
Examine how executive compensation is taxed. If most of the compensation is in the form of stock options and stock then look at closing those loopholes by possible changing capital gains rules for compensation.
...midtowng.
There's another group that's not being included in this green shoots propaganda: people who are being furloughed. My wife faces 27 such furlough days in the next 12 months, almost six weeks of pay cuts. While, arguably, she'll be picked up (in the aggregate) by U6 stats), the impact of these widespread furloughs are still undercounted, imo.
There are at least three companies I've dealt with as an IT/Network professional, who's CEOs were making buku dollars while my contract was cut short, or h-1b/L-1/L-2 visas were hired:
Com Ed/Excelon: John Rowe, CEO
JP Chase: Jaimie Dimon
Corliant: Indian management, sold Corliant to Accenture
United Health Care: Outgoing CEO was negotiating over $ 1 Billion retirement package while I couldn't afford my United Healthcare cobra payments
Cisco Systems: Running phony PERM/H-1B job ads, bypassing American citizens, while CEO and former CEO are worth over combined $3 - 4 Billion
OTHER DISHONORABLE MENTION:
Sen. Frank Lautenberg's company, ADP (Wilco) pimping in cheap visa labor (EVEN ON VISITOR's VISAS) while laying off American citizens I knew (congressional testimony on this in Feb. 2004)
Best Buy: American citizens laid off, and replaced by TATA visa workers while Richard Schultze, CEO Best Buy, worth over $3 Billion.
They need to calculate the drop in revenues, gross income, income for the self-employed and then track on citizenship as well as training vs. occupational area.
I don't have them on hand but I know I've seen Academic papers discussing BLS shortcomings, esp. with employment stats and proposals to improve it but don't have any offhand.
College when different schools compared enrollment not by the total number of students they had, but by the full time equivalent. (FTE)
Which meant that if a school had 20,000 students going half time, it had 10,000 FTE. A school that had 10,000 students going full time and another 5,000 going half time had 12,500 FTE.
Looking at raw enrollment would be misleading, because it was a bad metric for the amount of education going on.
Maybe it's time that we had a similar measure for work. If we take the purpose of work to be providing individuals the means to support themselves independent of external aid, then a good measure of work would discount underemployment.
How to create this? No idea, but it seems like the concept needs to be given a go of it. A rough measure would look income of the employed to get an idea of the number of good jobs.
thus are no longer counted in the statistics. They also do not count occupational "down grade", i.e. someone has a PhD in Chemical engineering yet is working at the Wal-mart. Then that person is counted as employed and is "unskilled labor".
They also count guest workers which artificially deflate the real unemployment rates of Americans. i.e. a division is fired and replaced with H-1Bs. Those H-1Bs are counted in the employment stats making the occupational employment rates of software engineers look less than what they really are.
So, I read his post and I found that a good way of looking at it. For example, in engineering, one would see a very low unemployment rate, yet the total number of jobs in that field dropped by a good 500k. Well, what happened is those jobs were offshore outsourced and people were forced out of their career areas...
So, I think it's valid to look at the different stats to get a more complete picture.
They were worth the watch and Thomas Palley is a treasure for getting to the heart plus the nuts and bolts of what has gone wrong. Charts & Figures.... Where has this guy been all my life!
Both videos are worth the watch, because you won't see any coverage like this about America's "Financial Implosion" anywhere else, particularly in our Mainstream Media.
this, but I wasn't 100% sure that I fully understood it, of believed it.
It certainly sounds interesting though.
A lot of good that will do, sir.
Instead, write to Harvard University, the unions involved and surrounding it, and every news outlet there concerning the distinguished Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who is presently enjoying much news and press adulation and recently proclaimed he feels the pain of the poor Black man.
Why him? Because he is in the news and because he put himself out there as supporting one or another group of Americans, while having his name on that Bretton Woods Committee letter (addressed to Pelosi & Reid, US Congress, dated Feb. 11, 2009) which watered down (i.e., completely destroyed) the "Buy American" clause in the federal stimulus package.
This international lobby group for the ultra-rich is also the most anti-worker, anti-union group in creation.
Time to embarrass those who are most deserving of being shamed (assuming they actually can experience such).
Chairman Bernanke,
Is the federal government, or any related entity, in the process of buying back the US Treasury from Goldman Sachs?
I would do all of the bills that are being ignored and I believe you just listed them, HR 676, Sanders, I think Wyden's is being ignored, although to me Wyden is a classic corporate Dem with that liberal lemon twist so I don't know what's in his bill.
But these are statistic for now because of course they are not being considered, so making people aware they exist, their cost estimates, their limitations, their problems or their advantages as well as why they are not being considered should be a stable post.
Whereas if you write up on legislation right now, you know it will dramatically change which will mislead people trying to find out what is in the latest bill (because they will read something out of date unless you update that exact blog post - which you can do on EP, you can update posts, create revisions and change the time stamp so they are visible again).
1) People don't understand what is going on.
2) Massive disinformation by media and politicians in order to prevent civil unrest.
3) People are in denial about how bad the situation is.
I believe a case can be made for all three.
There are two things that are absolutely frustrating to me:
1)Look at a headline story such as the one on Bloomberg right now: "Economy in U.S. Probably Shrank at a Slower Pace, Signaling Recession Abated". Most people read headlines and not the whole story.
2) Our economy and society as a whole is not prepared for the long-term structural unemployment that we are heading for and the time is now to start preparing for that. Unfortunately, we don't have the political leadership or will to make the necessary changes.
Those Bonddad diaries at the Big Orange drive me up the wall. People that don't understand the numbers, or that don't spend the time breaking the numbers down like I do, are taken in by his charts.
In fact what is going on is a f*ckin disaster, and people need to know. The sooner the better.
I have to wonder why people aren't out in the street with torches and pitchforks already.
I was surprised by the frankness of the reporter. Did you notice the disclaimer at the top of the post about "the following is strictly the opinion of the writer" business?
Maybe when people realize that upward mobility has become the exception and not the norm we will have significant changes.
You have a point about Congressmen and Senators. How many of them are financial/economical literate? These are the people who are setting policy for the rest of us and many of them may actually be pretty illiterate. It is sad that the standard for being elected to public office is so low.
Feel free to suggest any pieces of legislation you would like reviewed. There is a lot of stuff out there so more eyes the better.
one thing and frankly I have not done it because it's clear health care is such a mess, reading and writing about a 1000 page bill where those clauses, provisions will probably be struck out is such an exercise in adding to confusion...
but as this starts to gel, we might want to start analyzing bills. So, for example, one could do a post on all of the great bills that are completely ignored and post cost analysis, features, bullet points on those.
Then, as the legislation starts geling one might do an analysis of the legislation via thomas.gov.
It's a real job to do this, I have done it on immigration bills and others so we can help dig around.
But the rhetoric vs. what is in a bill so often are completely opposite as it was in the Stimulus bill. I actually went through the actual bill text (as I will and we need to get more people to read these actual bills, esp. because Congress does not) anyway, there were a host of clauses in the Stimulus that were clearly not Keynesian and it was by analyzing the actual bill text could one see that...if one relied on reporters, just shit, it was and still is distortion city. You had GOP talking about Pelosi's pet mouse and others pretending the bill was Keynesian or some other distortion per their political agendas.
So, at some point I think we need to get the focus on what is actually being passed in Congress to cut through the noise. (at on health care, the noise is at 140db!) and I find that requires reading the legislation text as well as pointing to others reviewing the actual legislation text and most of all, pointing the public to the Congressional record instead of yet another pundit.
it should be "determining a bottom" but in my view they cannot call this a recovery until GDP grows past what is needed to maintain the status quo, which is roughly (and this is another issue I plan on writing about, the components of GDP) but for now, roughly about 1.5%.
So, my argument has been a bottom is not recovery. A slower contraction is not growth.
But, midtowng, you are going to feel very validated.
The Atlanta Fed (who run a very cool blog, so let's not blast all of the Fed for it's really outstanding frankly) post from today shows this time the unemployment rate is an anomaly from past recessions. So, using past predictors isn't quite working.
See the actual post, it's very good but here is their graph (click to enlarge):
they are planning on turning our university system into an automatic green card machine? They are claiming there is a worker shortage?
That does two things. It squeezes out U.S. citizens from opportunities in higher education and it makes it even worse for U.S. citizens to get a job upon graduation.
Congratulations to midtowng.
I should also note that HuffPo seemingly isn't allowing references to the original blog, so you might post something about EP in the comments.
Still, this is very good for midtowng because the readership at the Huffington Post has to be larger than EP, even per post and will expand the audience mulling some of our issues!
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