"structural analysis" and "the functionality of unemployment in capitalist economies"

becomes the effective minimum wage."

add this :

"a perpetual condition of shortage when it comes to community services, public

goods, infrastructure revitalization, and the like"


"an infinitely-elastic demand curve for labor"


"

 ie performs the same " functionality  " unemployment performs

 " in capitalist economies "

"So making up the difference between the private sector level of activity and full employment with public service activity leaves the system some breathing room"

"Guaranteed income and the guaranteed job are not necessarily mutually exclusive,

 they can easily be complementary. Public Service Employment, with people able to pursue crafts and art and music and education and community gardens and working together in positive social activity, need not be perceived as “make-work.”

"People want to be doing good works, and Public Service Employment may be used

to redefine what constitutes meaningful productive activity. The Public Service job, by the way, can be used as a vehicle for progressive social policies. Put the basic public service wage above the minimum wage and it

 "Make sure the basic public service wage-benefits package

includes healthcare and childcare, and firms in the private sector will have to match it or compensate in

some other way. The Public Service job can serve as a benchmark for the rest of the economy."



lerner's solution  gets shorted (MAPS),

"Abba Lerner worked on market anti-inflation plans

due to problems he saw in industrial economies and theoretical problems with his earlier

functional finance approach based solely on aggregate demand stimulation."

 Pushing the private sector to full employment just will not work.

Effective demand analysis without structural analysis doesn’t show these problems, doesn’t understand the functionality of unemployment in capitalist economies

"NO MORE THAN ONE MAN IN EIGHT "

der link's optimum occupation status ratio
ie 7/8 ths self employed

tres yeomanite eh ??

so after the rapid changes in the "north"
   induced by four years of al out  intersectional combat .....

"...corporations have been enthroned"

" an era of corruption in high places will follow "

" the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign
 by working upon the prejudices of the people 
  until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands
                                    and the Republic is destroyed."

 

pugsley's guide to our bloated finance and insurance sector

"In 1950, finance and insurance in the United States accounted for 2.8% of GDP... Today, it is 8.4% of GDP, and it is not shrinking"

yikes ..eh ??

brad reviews the finance-insurance sectors social functions:

"First, people are less  vulnerable to the effects of fires, floods, medical disasters, unemployment, business collapses, sectoral shifts, and so forth,"

'
"unemployment " thats uncle

" business collapses "

what ???

" sectoral shifts "
what ???

ya ..."and so forth" ...indeed


" a well-working finance-insurance system diversifies and thus dissipates some risks, and deals with others by matching those who fear risk with those who can comfortably bear it. "
 hey just say a bigger pool with faster fuller and better interflow
cuts the social cost of risk or ...creates new surplus to scoop

brad suggests we aren't getting as much of this careful risk spreading and reducing  as we might..ahh do ya think ....

"... it is hard to see"   ".. how that could be the case, given the experience of investors in equities and housing over the past two decades."
two markets two big bubbles

if the same system that spreads risk concentrates risk  and whats more
by blowing bubbles that bust
  actually creats  ever more massive risk... ex nihilo...

"Second, well-functioning financial systems match large, illiquid investment projects with the relatively small pools of money contributed by individual savers who value liquidity highly. "
aggregators pooling funds
 that's costless
 if you have a fully integrated  electronic
 deposit and payments system

this should result in  lower rates and sector shrink not enlargement

"There has been one important innovation over the past two generations: businesses can now issue high-yield bonds"

securitization is indeed a positive innovation corporate debt  mortgages... whatever
but so far the gains have been scooped not past thru as lower costs of liquidity creation

then comes this curiosity

 " given the costs of the bankruptcy process, it has never been clear why a business would rather issue high-yield bonds (besides gaming the tax system)"
putting that last bit about gaming the tax system  to one side
what in hell is he talking about here ??

chapter 11 has become a regular option for on going outfits

" why would investors  rather buy bonds than take an equity stake."

can you imagine a dumber question ???
amazing when did he write this ??

demand for bonds irrational ??

not to mention the supply side
where a thin layer of equity generates huge returns thru leverage

leverage the raison d'etre of the debt market

hell   the  word leverage is  not even here ..amazing

"Third, improved opportunities to borrow allow one to spend more now "

this looked at from the household pov ie as old fashion usury
  sets delong off his pins

"  Households are certainly much more able to borrow, thanks to home-equity loans, credit-card balances, and payday loans. But what are they really buying?... Many appear to be buying postponement of the “unpleasant financial retrenchment” talk with the other members of their household. "

 a bigger credit line  or even a credit line where once there was no credit line
 is not a solid substitute for higher household wages


"Fourth, we have seen major improvements in the ease of transactions...
 ...electronic transactions have made a great deal of financial life much easier,but this should have been accompanied by a decrease, not an increase, in the finance share of GDP  just as automated switching in telecommunications led to a decrease...."

 where's the savings ?? again scooped by the sector
which though under 9% of gdp is over 20% of corporate profits

"fifth better finance should mean better corporate governance."
what ??
thrueasier acess to  buyout finance ??

"finance  has a potentially powerful role to play in ensuring that corporate managers work in the interest of shareholders."

" And a substantial change has indeed occurred over the past two generations: CEOs focus much more attention than they used to on pleasing the stock market, and this is likely to be a good thing"
likely ??
good thing for who ??

private equity outfits ??

unbelievable !!!!

there is so much slop flowing out of this piece
i really can't do it even rough justice

delong oughta face st peter with this  and only this in his hand

" The United Auto Workers union is staking its future on the kind of struggle it hasn't waged since the 1930s: a massive drive to organize hostile factories. "

"the union is going after U.S. plants owned by German manufacturers Volkswagen AG and Daimler AG, seen as easier nuts to crack
than the Japanese and South Koreans.....
  .....By failing to organize factories run by foreign automakers, the union has been a spectator to the only growth in the U.S. auto industry in the last 30 years."

uaw chief king kon's line
"If the UAW fails to crack the transplants, as it calls foreign car factories in the United States, the union has no future "

however
" naming a target would be seen as a hostile act and could undo the progress made behind the scenes with VW and Daimler"



note this:

"Key to winning is the backing of the German union IG Metall, 

IG Metall, wants to keep the United States from becoming a cheap-labor alternative to Germany, is also helping the United Steelworkers try to organize a ThyssenKrupp steel plant that opened in Alabama last year"

in other car news:

"At Smyrna, Nissan is expanding. It is opening a battery plant and adding production of the all-electric Leaf.

Many of the new jobs are lower-wage temporary positions working for contractor Yates Services. Those workers wear brown uniforms to distinguish them from Nissan's regular hires in blue or gray. In some parts of the Smyrna complex, temporary workers now account for up to 60 percent of the jobs"

if all you want is a reduction in "real wages "....

devalue the US  dollar ...eh ?

the blunt fact this is NOT corporate class policy
                      suggests we need to look at the present stag for features
  unreached by a deval


  higher employment levels at lower real wages ???  what's not to like
or more carefully what's so wrong with the method of deval
that is let's ask
  why  this easy route to an obvious "corporate class "  goal
 gets trumped by the present  higher  unemployment and frozen  wages  route ???

if we had the correctly constructed
   corporate bottom line centered fleet of analytic models
the answer would pop right out

i belabor the rebalance without revalue method embodied in the stag by ...err hunch

yes cui bono is the ONLY road to enlightenment here

but what is the bellissimo parade route for this capitalist progress we're on
  from the pov of the top pilgrims ???

i have no model that "shows" in a stylized toy market  earth
 how our hegemonic MNCs
get a better path forward with stag then  planet wide deval/reval
with maintaining the existing set of exchange rates
with the existing north/ south  arbitrage producing tilt..more or less
with  continuing  the sacrifice of  zillions in potential output
  opportunity cost free output

yes why blow aded  global production opportunity even as real wages get adjusted
toward a  more balanced set of national trade flows

rough dirty simple minded first cut task
match two diferent trade flow paths
with their respective profit flow paths

we aren't able to get at the  firm by firm  expetational specifics
     ie the causal specifics  of  chosen macro policy here

i suggest we not assume lack of co ordination
part whole corporate class myopia

that a earth wide production planner "could " find a set of price and forex moves that would be a pareto class on class improvement
seems obvious but what's attainable in a system constrained to corporate persepective generated  preferences


if i could show  simple  obvious trumping

 like

"hey look !!
 the stag generates a higher  multi national corporate profit path then a reval/deval "

then i'd have something ...right ?

one can bang away at the soft left "explanation" piecemeal

we hear the left gible dee gooking away
  confident as a  flock of magpies

"  the executive suites want to grind down wage share etc etc"
and grinding requires  an artificial protraction of the presently  bloated reserve army
ie ultra scarcity of  net new job rations
that's what crushes  wage increases and accelerates one by one jobster class
self  recycling
   from tradeables production jobs as industrial operatives
  paid   high  unionized  wages  to  non tradeables sector jobs
 as low wage   mcshit servers

and of course  culivate such a job dirth helps
     the generation of  a new  "half price " industrial job force too

oh and use hard times to  shrink pub sec unionized payrolls too
with charter voucher  wipe outs
 take back  benefit slaughter  union busting  tactics ...

but hey that leads to resistence
is this trageted  resistence  socially less disturbing
then the disturbance a general rising trend  in the prices of tradeables
      might  generate  ???


yup
 we have to demonstrate how this grinding method works better
and err ....i haven't

   why is " the piigs stag and crunch crisis "
 better  for international corporate interests then an iceland  style deval

site familiar brings egg head cousin on board too

opportunity blown the great infra flub

are we in the hole to the ROW ???

:

so what if the future taxed cuts spending now

okay i get a temporary  tax cut i spend it because the debt it creates has a dedicated tax base i ain't in

but the folks in that base make an exact off set reduction in spending ???

why  ???

if the interest  stream at first is rolled over and the present tax  base dies

  infinite horizons finite tax payers


what if  tax cuts are  never spent
what if transfers become transfers become transfers without any real spending ???


"....I know of a pretty simple way to modify the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem so that it does imply Say's Law. All you have to do is assume that government spending, G, is handed out to people as lump-sum transfers (either today or in the future), instead of used to make purchases. With this modification, G just becomes negative taxation. And since taxes in the Ricardian Equivalence model are non-distortionary, government spending would be non-distortionary too. The level of G would not affect output "

we have 15 million missing jobs and that is the calibre of assumption worth volleying about ???

sid chapman ..sandy's hotest date among romances past

From S.J. Chapman's Hours of Labour (Economic Journal, September, 1909, footnote 1, pp. 363-365) new graphs added by Tom Walker, May 1999.

The argument in the more technical parts of this address, concerned with the determination of the length of the working day, may be conveniently summarized with the aid of the following figure[s]. In order to avoid the complexities arising from the redistribution of labour between the industries of a country, suppose that only one industry exists. Measure units of time in the working day along OX, and units of money along OY.

Consider first the unbroken lines which represent the influences governing employers. The curve P expresses the long-period variations with the length of the working day of the marginal value of a fixed quantity of labour: the opinion that these can be represented by a curve has been defended in the body of this address. If On hours are worked, this daily value of labour and the wage will ultimately be Onda; if Ob hours are worked, this value and wage rises to Oba; if Oe hours are worked, it falls to Oba - bef.
The meaning of the curve P will now be plain. The curve is supposed to rise in the first instance because increasing the daily hours of labour would at first raise the level of efficiency, and if it did not, the larger wage would. But P must begin to fall at some point, and eventually cross OX, as is demonstrated in the body of the address. Actually, of course, P could not start at OY, because a man when engaged for only a fraction of his time daily could not live on the proceeds of his work, but it has been so drawn in the figures to enable us to picture the value and wage of labour by the area between the curve P and the co-ordinates.

The curve ck represents the immediate variations of the marginal value of a fixed quantity of labour with the length of the working day on the assumption that the normal working day has been Ob. Hence the value of the normal product of the last minute of the working day Ob is bg. Ex hypothesi Obgc must equal Oba. If the working day is lengthened to Oe the product will at first be augmented by bekg, but finally by a gradual decline it will sink to Oba-bef.

The influences guiding the operatives are expressed in the dotted lines, the meaning of which must now be explained. Draw any vertical line dl to the left of b. Then dn is the addition made in the long run to the money income of the operative when the Onth increment of time is added to the working day. Let dm be the long-period value to the operative, when his income is Onda, of the leisure destroyed by the addition of the Onth increment of time to the working day. The curve I is the locus of the point m. Evidently, starting at a, it will lie throughout its length below P, increasingly departing from P (because leisure is subject to the law of diminishing utility and the value of leisure rises with income), and cut OX to the left of b.
Apart from the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of working, therefore, the far-sighted operative who took into account the value of leisure would choose a normal day Oi, which is less than Ob (the choice of far-sighted employers in combination). When the normal day is Oi the marginal value of leisure to an operative with a wage Oiha would be ih, which equals the long-period marginal earnings attributable to the Oith increment of time in the working day.

Now, let L indicate the long-period values to the operative of the effects of different lengths of working day on the absolute satisfaction or dissatisfaction involved in the labour itself, L being otherwise interpreted, when units of money are measured along OY' as well as along OY, and the parts of the curve below OX indicate the prices which would be paid to escape the dissatisfaction involved in working, and the parts above OX the money value of the satisfaction involved in working. As some of the time devoted to production will probably be pleasant to the operative when the length of the working day is most favourable to his enjoyment of work, we may assume that L need not lie throughout its length below OX. Then the working day which perfectly wise operatives would choose would be On, the point n being such that nm = nl, the attainment of which equation is the condition under which the operative's satisfaction is maximised. If, as is theoretically conceivable but practically impossible, L lay further above OX for the abscissa Ob than I lay below it, the length of day most advantageous to the operative would be greater than Ob.
If normal hours are On, the operative who lives for the day and is aware that more work, measured by results, means proportionately more pay, will obviously desire hours longer than On for the following reasons. The product attributable to the Onth increment of working time is greater than dn, since dn represents the gain resulting from the Onth. less the loss occasioned by the reduction which will ultimately take place in the productivity of the operative's earlier hours in consequence of the addition of the Onth increment of time to the working day. For similar reasons the short-period or immediate value of leisure might be less than dm. Again, the money measure of the disutility of the Onth increment of working time is less than nl, because nl measures the results from the fact that the Onth increment of working time diminishes capacity in earlier hours to enjoy labour or sustain fatigue.
It is evident, therefore, that a balance of gain accrues to the operative from the work of the Onth unit of time, when everything, including wages is taken into account, but the effect of the work on the Onth unit of time on the gain associated with the rest of the working day ignored; and, further, that the balance of gain attributable to the Onth hours will not disappear, though it may contract if the working day be slightly extended. Hence we must conclude that operatives who are not alive to the reactions of long hours on efficiency and capacity to enjoy life and work will tend to choose a longer working day than is wise from their point of view. However, to repeat, they will not approve such long hours as employers who are equally blind to future reactions, because the latter, if purely self-interested, make no allowance for the disutility of labour to the operative or the utility to him of leisure.
In the event of progress in methods of production the new position of P would be such that the area enclosed between it and the co-ordinate axes would be increased. P in its new position might cut OX at b, but in all probability the new intersection with OX would be to the left of b. It is not likely to fall to the right of b, since improvements in the mechanical aids of labour seldom mean that work is rendered less exhausting.
Even if the new curve P passed through b, the new position of I would practically mean its intersection with OX to the left of i because of the enhanced value of leisure. Further L, though it might rise higher than before, would probably descend sooner and at least as steeply. It is to be observed in addition that but for interest, rent and heavy depreciation charges, industrial progress would bring about movements of P involving more considerable augmentation of the area contained between P and the co-ordinate axes.
Improved education, apart from its effect on efficiency, would bring about a subsidence of the curve I, so that in its new position it would cut OX to the left of i. The effect wrought by progress on short-period forces need not be worked out in detail. The general conclusion is manifest that progress may be expected to be accompanied by a progressive curtailment of the working day.

ricardo stymie

imagine the higher "take home "  from a tax cut
is  precisely the funds used  to buy  the bonds
 floated  to cover the revenue loss

i think this is up earlier but it bares a double exposure

ps

boy is net  savings  a poor term

                            for income  minus  spending 

more basic stuff from dean the dream

"As a country we cannot impose huge debt burdens on our children. It is impossible, at least if we are referring to government debt."

The reason is simple:

"

at some  point we will all be dead.  the ownership of our debt will be passed on to our children."

" If we have some huge thousand trillion dollar debt that is owed to our children, then how have we imposed a burden on them? There is a distributional issue"

— Bill Gates’ children may own all the debt —

"but regardless  that is within generations, not between generations."

" One can make the point that much of the debt is owned by foreigners, but this is a result of our trade deficit, which is in turn caused by the over-valued dollar "

on this :

ie no really big whoop

notes on tax and debt burdens

pk fantasy:

"..everyone receives a large allotment of newly printed government bonds, adding up to 500 percent of GDP."

distributed per capita ??

"The government is now deeply in debt — but the nation has not directly gotten any poorer "


" the public, in its role as taxpayers, now owes 500 percent of GDP, but the public, in its role as investors, now owns new assets equal to 500 percent of GDP."

new and safe assets versus new taxes

 "It’s a wash."

no ...what's the household by household distribution of  new tax burden versus new  bond holdings ??




"the extra revenue is matched by the extra income people receive as bondholders."
but not at the household level there are many winners and losers
 in consumption

in production ??

well  what tax

and  here's pk's  half baked point:

" tax rates will have to go way up; and because lump-sum taxes don’t exist in the real world, this means that marginal tax rates will have to go way up."

marginal rates go up  ?? why ??

why not a value added tax ??  a flat tax on consumption

pattern of pay in per household  versus pattern of pay out

 "you don’t have to be a right-winger to acknowledge that yes, very high marginal tax rates act as a disincentive to productive activity."

wh not clear this up

by saying after the bond hand outs
now
assume a new  tax structure to pay for this huge issue
  with maximal disincentives to produce
sum sort of diamond mirlees anti ramsey tax

". real GDP may well fall significantly."

err by assumption


" the burden of debt is about incentives"

ya ya ya sure sure but that goes both ways  bub

but earlier he made a more complete generality

debt burden there is described as about
"problems of distribution and incentives"

so paul where's the distribution bit ??
leave it out and you play into the trickle downer's game plan

---------------------
imagine now a borrowing that is paid out to high marginal spender households
in a time of slack in the production platform

and assume the debt created is attached to a dedicated tax base put together
by various criteria
including interets only pay back and roll over of the debt total itself

"Private debt creates a different kind of problem it increases our macroeconomic vulnerability."


yikes what are we assuming here that is not necessary ??


but then he ends with a  " general point"

" the analogy with a family that owes too much is all wrong."
indeed
but pk  manages to craft a "thought experiment "
that produces a boringly  conventional cautionary tale

-------------------------------------

ricardian equivalence is one of the most contrived parables imaginable

piigs were not piigs

of course that narrative continues even as they get renamed the  gipsi gang

china way to go to catch japan on per capita value of production system

for get the valuation circularity and the forex tricks

the han need to accumlate  accumulate
this is the law of deng and his prophets

but how about household consumption:

rich advanced areas are now expanding household  spending faster then
local investment

as other regions join the boom similar changes
 in their  own regional  ratio
 of  these   two key  expansion rates  

"deficit obsession is mad, bad, and dangerous" pk

and just what the trans border corporation's personal doctor ordered

rule one

restrain oecd imports

method one

cut fiscal thrust by budget chopping

its everywhere ..if your sovereign borrows in Her own currency

sample:

compare to the euro zone : prison house of sovereigns

lookee here: the US private-sector financial surplus

 gross private saving minus gross private investment

bull shit sermonette de jour

 "But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage."


hardly a warning for the mass of todays job class

this asperger's anchorite sale of a better mess of pottage for a dubious leisure


behold florida's  desolate grizzled  army of the  retired
early birds clutching  till the feeding hour
 to a long  deep drooping telephone line

or the idle corner boys of harlem
like so many seals arfing away on a rock

this  is the  guts of the why
  riding around  inside the job ethic

battle front in the privatization voucherization wars : defend the post office ??

no defend the post office unions

that is the point here
defend these bastions of jobster power
just like the teacher unions and health care unions

what regulates the prole share of globalized humanity ???

   one oftem must review the first bold moment of marxist revisionism
as it emerged from the second international just a few deep breaths
   after the death of engels comes the bernstein/schmidt onslaught

one leg of their infernal stool

an unliquidated and  by hypothesis unliquidateble "large middle slab "
of non proles
  the persistence and prosperity of new type   petty  "stakeholders"
  in the modernest versions
of the  monopolistic corporation dominated
 limited liability market based society

call it the human capital class
this large slab of producers of goods and services
that like proles have only themselves to sell
but have cultivated selves able to command premium pay
even on occasion and in part free lance premium fees

 those elevated above the ground floor of the pyramid
with its  millions of mcshit " take it or leave it bub"  job-o-tunities

and even above  the huge  lower floors
 with their  more desired corporate  engagements
those e just a bit  but enough of a bit
  above a  base line ground floor pure mcshit job
   to induce an un natural addition to  effort


up shot this stacking and grading creates the material base
 for an internally  divided pollity

hence  unitary class based united fronts are folly as an electoral strategy

of course they are
                        but popular fronts can obviously prosper
    
the question becomes
when and how
 can a  VP break out
            its  class based articulations
like of course that boogeyman supreme
the future 
dictatorship of the prolecats

big sweat box : virtual retail outsources it's logistics

what's  up the far reaches of Amazon.com  ??

this shit:


"...many of the people actually loading and
unloading trucks, packing boxes, and pasting labels
work not for retailers, or for 3PLs, but for yet
another company: temporary staffing agencies. When an
online retailer (especially one that doesn't actually
make anything) wants to wring out the most profit
possible, it helps to have a labor pool that is on
demand, so it can order the exact number of humans it
needs to fill that day's number of orders if the humans
are working at top capacity. That way, workers can't
unionize or be legally entitled to decent benefits.
That way, the online retailer can give them outlandish
productivity goals, like hundreds of orders and
thousands of items per day apiece--and when workers
burn out, just replace them with the next temp, who can
join the rest of the ranks living in fear that they
won't make their numbers and might be incessantly
berated for it, or simply fired. Even if you meet the
outlandish goals, don't necessarily expect to be
rewarded by say, a real job. As with so many in the
industry, the warehouse in Ohio are mostly
"temps"--even though some of them have been working in
the same place for more than a year."

parallel parallax

Imagine the inner corporate "world" thru the eyes of its essential
 product, the CEO

now  weigh
 that "world's"   squalid cross-thieving, cornholing, limited liability, internal reality
 against
 this same corporate system's  nearly unified projected public vision   of itself
as a Galt-like Lego®  world.

 It's similar ...isn't it
to the view enjoyed by the Bishop of Rome
 the dean of  that miserable anti-sodomy holy hellhole church,
 looking around  himself at its queer priesthood

the sachs of shitberg

 "the Soviet economy was a deranged system that directed people and resources through state commands, threats, and the force of the Gulag"

" the rigidities and lies of the Soviet economic and political system proved to be largely impervious to change, culminating in the complete collapse of the Soviet state and economy in 1991. "

" Gorbachev relentlessly tried to reform the system not through commands but through persuasion and appeals to truth and cooperation. "

however

"Without the terror and threats, Soviet central planning collapsed and the economy descended into massive shortages, collapsed production, and by 1991 an extreme financial crisis. "

"The dire outcomes proved De Tocqueville's famous maxim that "the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform itself."

---------------
 "During 1989-91, I was a senior economic advisor to several post-communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe"

once safely beyond arms reach
 the scoundrel impudence  of some two legged rodents in the face of their own monstrous actions is nearly limitless

----------------------

Al  has a comment :

" Jeffrey has chutzpah, I'll grant him that much, the miserable rodent.
The Soviet economy functioned in spite of itself, and in spite of
willful external sabotage, thanks almost entirely to the good nature
and competence of the same kind of people he climbed over to become a
destroyer of nations and a safely tenured hack"

"you can make a strong case that slow growth caused high debt" pk

we all know kenny jagoff's 90 % danger  line
    for  a rising pub-debt/gdp 

pk suggests   since 46 in the g7
causation runs the other way
and
since we've had  kalecki- keynes models
all these same years
even that isn't an iron law

market segmentation and pill inc's system-wide hyper- profiteering

site familiar's great relation

what's a Casey Mulligan ???

world turns around the sun ....after a few turns my gosh it starts to look different

CEBR World Economic League Table
Rank	2011	2020 (forecast)
1	US	US
2	China	China
3	Japan	Japan
4	Germany	Russia
5	France	India
6	Brazil	Brazil
7	UK	Germany
8	Italy	UK
9	Russia	France
10	India	Italy

dean does it in two charts

just read a piece that fucked with my head ....

http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/tale-two-systems

the guy's speaking of today's germany :

 "against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals.
We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems,
we have high wages. ... if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing,
we would have to be bankrupt, but
apparently this is not the case. Despite high
wages.despite our possibility to influence companies,
the economy is working well in Germany."



this blather  goes on and on

 all the  while contrasting
these  lovely german plants
filled with  german waged paid auto makers on the one hand

and
 the  "fast tank " follies of the US located  satanic mills  of these same
                                                                           german auto makers

then after showing the wage and bene differentials per hour for assembly line opertatives


the fucker   fails to mention  productivity per hour in all this

yup fails to  tie  together  compensation per hour with value added per hour

then he jumps to show us
the german producers are profitable
despite  producing the majority of their autos "at home "

how so
is  "real "  per hour va that much higher

hey  if   not
then if
net margins are maintained anyhow
despite far higher compensation cost  at home
its gotta be market by market  price discrimination pal

german produced cars commanding higher prices
in euro-asian   markets then US produced cars in notre amigo markets etc etc

but that isn't noticed one way or the other either

what are german car prices for  same  autos in different markets ???



not only that
but  over all corporate profits could
be coming  in higher proportion
 from sales of units out of the bastards low wage foreign ops
 like here in the USA

oh well

worthless goo goo dip shit like this

nattering on and on
  about  how much better
a class collaboration model like germany's
"works" for everyone involved
then the yankee class adversarial model

while completely   UN -CLOSING THE LOOP
by failing  to place  each production platform's contribution
    to over all "profits"
this total outcome comes  within  an over arching global corporate structure  ie MNC
both in production AND markets

we need a model that forces us to fill in these howling lacunae
 in the accepted narratives

antinomic stages of thought tumble over each other

"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist " hawking

 "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain what set the planets in motion," newton

let there be "a law of gravity " ???

or

 "there is a law of gravity ???

cosmos  other generated   or self  generated  ???

boundary  between self and other ??

err isaac said "who"  not "what "
but there again we have
an antinomy :

personal / impersonal

"of all possibles just like this" versus "couldn't be otherwise "

tiresome tail chasing here

out of all possibles why this cosmos goes thru stages of " had to be thus" consolidation followed by a bursting of the closed paradigm
followed by ....
its like pi some "things  "are transcendental the circlle can't be squared
but that proved to be the wrong task

a personal god search is a similar wrong task

i prefer attacking the personalization fallacy
to origins debates that simply cucle around even as "each next digit" proces "unpredictable" so to speak

 maybe head way can be made on the godhead front

basis for mass party ??

 As we
gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice,
we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that
all people who feel wronged by the corporate force...s of the world
can know that we are your allies. As one people, united, we
acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires
the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our
rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the
individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors;
that a democratic government derives its just power from the people,
but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people
and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the
process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when
corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over
justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have
peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be
known. They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure
process, despite not having the original mortgage. They have taken
bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives
exorbitant bonuses. They have perpetuated inequality and
discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin,
sex, gender identity and sexual orientation. They have poisoned the
food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system
through monopolization. They have profited off of the torture,
confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively
hide these practices. They have continuously sought to strip employees
of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of
debt on education, which is itself a human right. They have
consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to
cut workers’ healthcare and pay. They have influenced the courts to
achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or
responsibility. They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams
that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health
insurance. They have sold our privacy as a commodity. They have used
the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They
have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives
in pursuit of profit. They determine economic policy, despite the
catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to
produce. They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are
responsible for regulating them. They continue to block alternate
forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil. They continue to block
generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide
relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a
substantial profit. They have purposely covered up oil spills,
accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of
profit. They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through
their control of the media. They have accepted private contracts to
murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their
guilt. They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have
participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to
receive government contracts. * To the people of the world, We, the
New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty
Square, urge you to assert your power. Exercise your right to
peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address
the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of
direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the
resources at our disposal. Join us and make your voices heard! *These
grievances are not all-inclusive.

the fed's own calculation of it's crisis interval ......" emergency " peak " lines of credit" to the big private hi fi-ers: $6.8 trillion !!!!!

yup
"$6.8 trillion --

"The potential amount the Fed might have lent if

“all eligible program applicants request assistance at once to the maximum permitted under the program guidelines,”

this "according to a July 21, 2009, report by the Treasury Department’s Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP."



more numbers:




" $1.5 trillion -- The Fed’s for moment of  peak lending. ..

"$7.77 trillion -- The amount the Fed pledged to rescue the financial industry"

 "Most of the difference between the TARP watchdog’s tally and Bloomberg’s involves one program, TALF. The inspector general attributed its $900 billion capacity to the Treasury, which was guaranteeing some of its lending. Bloomberg grouped TALF with the Fed, which created the program."


"$16 trillion -- The “total transaction amounts” for Fed lending included in a July 21, 2011, study by the Government Accountability Office"

.

"$13 billion -- An estimate of the income that 190 banks could have made from investing the Fed loans they took."

did the fed charge Penalty Rates ???

case for  such is bad !!! looking at these fed loans
one can "see"  a clear net margin
between lending rates
and  borrowing &s transaction costs
but 13 bills ???
chicken feed
the real deal is the immotality lines made availible
they established the de facto socialization of default risk at the core of the banking system

.

make bad laws unenforceable

progressive change ??

well if its the reform of the state superstructure
progressive change  will only happen
 if  efforts by the state to enforce the bad  law provoke even more lawlessness

and this goes triple for laws and rulings
that create or protect  the  key "E- class "    instruments
              exploiting
 " the socially productive classes"

progressive reform of a  class dictatorship can only come
if the alternative  to reform
              is the break down of law abidence on a massive scale

that is
on a scale so pervasive
                            persistent and diverse
the flow of sharp outlaw  events
rises  well  beyond
 the state's security system's capacity
          to "put down"  the lawlessness
                           and "put away " its core outlaw elements

"Private companies have increased their investments in equipment and software since the end of the recession. In fact, the pace of investments have exceeded the last three recoveries"

service sector and back office automation ???

beveridge ratio suggests extent of job famine

site chooses new familiar

high life happy days for the exploiting class

Real After-Tax Corporate Profits Per Employee, 1980-2011
1980 ( 6,124) *
1981 ( 5,247)
1982 ( 4,175)
1983 ( 4,663)
1984 ( 4,722)
1985 ( 4,079)
1986 ( 3,380) (Low)
1987 ( 4,489)
1988 ( 5,375)
1989 ( 4,921)
1990 ( 5,031)
1991 ( 5,270)
1992 ( 5,802)
1993 ( 5,895)
1994 ( 6,479)
1995 ( 7,032)
1996 ( 7,287)
1997 ( 7,556)
1998 ( 6,173)
1999 ( 6,478)
2000 ( 5,968)
2001 ( 5,843)
2002 ( 6,580)
2003 ( 7,434)
2004 ( 10,007)
2005 ( 12,633)
2006 ( 13,189)
2007 ( 12,151)
2008 ( 9,604)
2009 ( 11,456)
2010 ( 13,526)

2011 01 ( 13,580)
2011 04 ( 13,515)
2011 07 ( 13,653) (High)


* 1982 - 1984 dollars

tale of two crises

SWEDEN  1990  USA 2007

difference ??? 
yup we were warned
and this swede moment twenty years ago
 was only one harbinger


so as pk suggests
who couldn't "imagine " as a hard possibility
  what has indeed transpired in america these past few years 

the light dawns on pk..sort of ...

" I and others were adamant that it was essential for the ECB to step in and buy the debt of troubled governments, to head off what looked very much like self-fulfilling panic. The ECB refused to do that, and many of us took that refusal at face value"



"... in reality it did the functional equivalent, lending very large sums to banks with sovereign debt as collateral, so that it was in effect doing the purchases we wanted, but laundering those purchases through banks."

so when the market rallies the private banks get the big cap gains ....lovely double hit that

first the pressure isn't withdrawn to clamp the fiscal budgets and sell public assets
 but the system is kept shy of panic by indirect interventions

 

site operator wins fuzz egg contest

okay you got your general strike goin'...then what ???

"....One fine morning all the workers in all the industries of a country, or even of the whole world, stop work, thus forcing the propertied classes either humbly to submit within four weeks at the most, or to attack the workers, who would then have the right to defend themselves and use this opportunity to pull down the entire old society. "


The idea is far from new; this horse was since 1848 hard ridden by French, and later Belgian socialists; it is originally, however, an English breed. "

During the rapid and vigorous growth of Chartism among the English workers following the crisis of 1837, the "holy month", a strike on a national scale was advocated as early as 1839 and this had such a strong appeal that in July 1842 the industrial workers in northern England tried to put it into practice. "


" Great importance was also attached to the general STRIKE at the Geneva Congress of the Alliance held on September 1, 1873,  although it was universally admitted that this required a well-formed organisation of the working class and plentiful funds."

" And there's the rub."

 On the one hand the governments, especially if encouraged by political abstention, will never allow the organisation or the funds of the workers to reach such a level; on the other hand, political events and oppressive acts by the ruling classes will lead to the liberation of the workers long before the proletariat is able to set up such an ideal organisation and this colossal reserve fund. But if it had them, there would be no need to use the roundabout way of a general STRIKE to achieve its goal."

"At quiet times, when the proletariat knows beforehand that at best it can get only a few representatives to parliament and have no chance whatever of winning a parliamentary majority, the workers may sometimes be made to believe that it is a great revolutionary action to sit out the elections at home, and in general, not to attack the State in which they live and which oppresses them, but to attack the State as such which exists nowhere and which accordingly cannot defend itself. This is a splendid way of behaving in a revolutionary manner, especially for people who lose heart easily"

MAM: MARKET ANTINFLATION MECHANISM

  the prometheus project

the secret to the  control the social  of inflation

WWII as department one boom

too much time is spent on the destructiveness and wasteful end products of the War boom
not enough on the built infra structure here

whatis the trot  need  for invoking the iron necessity of  destruction btw

the old that needed destroying was not the physical production facility  basis
of the old society let alone its physical infrstructure and building stock
but merely the historic legacy of its  onerous debt jacket
the old world's  bomb survivable nominal  obligations grid

------------------
alternative to a seond arsenal of democracy and freedom :

a phony war ??

well we could make a kold war  11 not a hot war III eh ??

that first kold war was a clear improvement
of course it was only a real "jstified " stimulator for the first 20 years or so
  after the turn into 1950 and b4 the nixon-mao pact

the chinese intervention in the korean war proved  a perfect pretext
for a massive building of  armadas and highways
--and btw for ending the negative real rate of interets on the debt grid ---

these new age armadas unlike say the british flet pre 1860
 in many details went obsolescent b4 they could   "see action"
and in fact even the final updates never did see action anyway
thanx gorby !!!!


but  now our corporate guardian class if they choose
  may  go one step further and actually opt for the moral equivalent of war
called for by billy james
we could have a green tech department one boom

plus a nice negative real rate
thru soaring nominal wages  and prices
what would be easier then this route
  if "they" want to wipe out
the "real value" of the crippling  chain  web of existing debt obligations

so much for theold battle cry
" its  war or revolution"
that  fork has another tine
 now it's
 transform and relieve or war or  revolution

the greater irrationality of capitalism comes if  truly transformative  and relieving action
 can only come about  thru a global  great power war

of course we have even there two great twentieth century intervals

contrast post '18 with post '45

does capitalism not only need war on the grand scale but a fuckin  mulligan too
  at the outset of each new  world historical stage ???

are the class struggles too intense to tamper with ??

and yet if they don't tamper one way or other

MAM or GREAT WAR

"Trade unions enable the proletariat to utilise at each instant, the conjuncture of the market. But these conjunctures – (1) the labour demand determined by the state of production, (2) the labour supply created by the proletarianisation of the middle strata of society and the natural reproduction of the working classes, and (3) the momentary degree of productivity of labour – these remain outside of the sphere of influence of the trade unions. Trade unions cannot suppress the law of wages. Under the most favourable circumstances, the best they can do is to impose on capitalist exploitation the “normal” limit of the moment. They have not, however, the power to suppress exploitation itself, not even gradually"

rosa put that on paper 110 plus years ago 

  the last 30 years of union developments
         suggest  she had this  particular problematic by the balls



she goes on at some length
including this which might well  serve to headline the ast 30 years in the oecd countries :

" if we examine the large factors of social development
 we see that we are not moving toward an epoch marked by
 a victorious development of trade unions
 but rather toward a time when the hardships of labour unions will increase."

analysis ???
she calls this
the second stage of union development and it is exactly opposed to the first stage in
the direction of its motions

ie unlike schmidt who saw the first stage as the only stage and a stage producing
 ever better results t for union growth and prosperity
till labor's share of total VA
  threatens to completely crowd  out the exploiter share

" Once industrial development has attained its highest possible point and capitalism has entered its descending phase on the world market "
that is" highest possible point"
as in reached the existing edge of  that moments   universal technical production frontier

--- UTPF is a concept she implies  not  here of course but above
in her  wage law outline ---

and  "highest possible point" i think oughta be limited to
any one  particular commodity producing region
with its inevitable incompleteness and uneven ness

here   we are better off  in my estimation
 to avoid  vague gestures
 toward some universal "capitalism" going thru unrepeatable world historical stages
so .....
 i would read this passage like this :
 where she has the word "capitalism"
   insert something like :
       any one legally  bounded state centered  but economically ever more open 
market region
--nice and graceful eh ??--
qualifier
a region  dominated by a locally situated advanced system of  inter connected productive capitals


for "descending phase "

i might inject as a for instance

today's  "declining " US  rust belt
vis a vis the han boom belt
as weighed  on the   fixed forex scales mediating world markets (heh heh heh)

-- i'm fairly certain this transgresses  the limits of the simple  underconsumptionist  model in rosa's head ---

now her prophecy :

" the trade union struggle will become doubly difficult."

she was right more then once and wrong a few times in between because of the repeats and "world historical new beginnings "--think post 1939 --

" In the first place, the objective conjuncture of the market will be less favourable to the sellers of labour power, because the demand for labour power will increase at a slower rate and labour supply more rapidly than at present."

demand side
think ever spreading and deepening import competition like post 73 here in the states
ie chronic trade deficits
supply side
immigration and increased rate of  recycling of the job force
 thru gains in productivity per hour
 innovation driven de skilling and  specific sectoral/locational  trade job displacement

" In the second place, the capitalists themselves, in order to make up for losses suffered on the world market, will make even greater efforts than at present to reduce the part of the total product going to the workers (in the form of wages). "

intensified assaults on labor costs  as profit  margins get squeezed by import competition
-- not sure this is adding anything to point one really if point ones logic is worked all the way thru --


" The situation in England already offers us a picture of the beginning of the second stage of trade union development."

indeed it was for  certain future intervals

and for other capitalist  national market systems as well
----------------

roas concludes:


" Trade union action is reduced of necessity to the simple defence of already realised gains, and even that is becoming more and more difficult."

sound like the  rust belt blues to U ???


" Such is the general trend of things in our society."

hmm gotta watch you keep that prophecy specifically locate and finite in duration

" The counterpart of this tendency should be the development of the political side of the class struggle"

 rosa hoped to move the spontaneous radical capitalist  state challenging syndicalism
 of existing militant wage class elements
 with the inevitable  vision that conjures up
of  a general strike final conflict
into a mass based  rev  party building project

its in the air

the ever cyclical world oil supply narrative
is about to go into
a 'watch for the coming glut ' plot line twist

not only that but captain amerika's norte amigo free market club
is but ten  ..tops fifteen years from regaining energy self reliance

a nice U turn there for sure
and obviously in consequence
the oily mideast 
gets shoved  out of  the world historical center ring 
back to one of many side ring ......where it belongs

Conn job exposes latest uncle gambit

What's the U.S. Up to in the Pacific?

By Conn Hallinan

   "On his recent trip to Asia Pacific, the president made it clear that the centerpiece of this strategy includes an intensified American role in this vital region," Financial Times, Nov. 28, 2011 - Tom Donilon, President Barak Obama's national security advisor.

   "An Indo-Pacific without a strong U.S. military presence would mean the Finlandisation by China of countries in the South China Sea, such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore," Financial Times, Nov. 30, 2011 - Robert Kaplan, senior fellow, Center for a New American Security and author of Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power.

   Donilon is a long-time Democratic Party operative and former lobbyist for Fannie Mae, and also a key figure in the Clinton administration's attack on Yugoslavia and the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. Kaplan is a Harvard Business School professor and advisor on the Mujahedeen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, as well as current U.S. military intervention in the Horn of Africa. 

Something is afoot.

   Indeed, it is. The Obama administration is in the middle of a major shift in foreign policy - a "strategic pivot," in the words of the White House - in two regions of the world: Asia and Africa. In both cases, a substantial buildup of military forces and a gloves-off use of force lie at the heart of the new approach.

   The U.S.A. now has a permanent military force deployed in the Horn of Africa, a continent-wide military command - AFRICOM - and it has played a key role in overthrowing the Libyan government. It also has Special Forces active in Uganda, Somalia, and most of the countries that border the Sahara. But it is in Asia that the administration is making its major push, nor is it coy about which country is the target. "We are asserting our presence in the Pacific. We are a Pacific power," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at the National Defense University in August, "we know we face some long-term challenges about how we are going to cope with what the rise of China means."

   There is whiff to all this of old-fashioned Cold War hype, when the U.S.A. pumped up the Russian military as a world-swallowing force panting to pour through the Fulda Gap and overrun Western Europe: the Chinese are building a navy to challenge the U.S.; the Chinese are designing special missiles to neutralize American aircraft carriers; the Chinese are bullying nations throughout the region.

   Common to Clinton's address and to Kaplan's and Donilon's opinion pieces are pleas not to cut military spending in the Pacific. In fact, it appears the White House is already committed to that program. "Reduction in defense spending will not come at the expense of the Asia Pacific," Donilon wrote, "There will be no diminution of our military presence or capabilities in the region."

   The spin the White House is putting on all this is that the U.S.A. has been bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, allowing China to throw its weight around in Asia. Donilon's opinion piece was titled "America is back in the Pacific and will uphold the rules." 

It is hard to know where to begin to address a statement like that other than with the observation that irony is dead. 

   Asia and the Pacific have been a major focus for the U.S. since it seized the Philippines in the 1899 Spanish-American War. The U.S.A. has fought four major wars in the region over the past century and, not counting the Chinese People's Liberation Army, it deploys more military personnel in the Pacific than any other nation. It dominates the region through a network of bases in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, the Marshall Islands, and island fortresses like Guam and Wake. The White House just announced the deployment of 2,500 Marines to Australia.

   The American Seventh Fleet - created in 1943 and currently based in Yokosuka, Japan - is the largest of the U.S.'s naval fleets, and the one most heavily armed with nuclear weapons. 

We aren't "back," we never went anywhere.

   But the argument fits into the fable that U.S. military force keeps the peace in Asia. Kaplan even argues, "A world without U.S. naval and air dominance will be one where powers such as China, Russia, India, Japan and others act more aggressively toward each other than they do now, because they will all be far more insecure than they are now." In short, the kiddies will get into fights unless Uncle Sam is around to teach them manners. And, right now, China is threatening to upend "the rules" through an aggressive expansion of its navy. 

   China is, indeed, upgrading its navy, in large part because of what the Seventh Fleet did during the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis. In the middle of tensions between Taipei and Beijing, the Clinton administration deployed two aircraft carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Straits. Since there was never any danger that China was going to invade Taiwan, the carriers were just a gratuitous slap in the face. China had little choice but to back down, but vowed it would never again be humiliated in its home waters. Beijing's naval buildup dates from that crisis.

   And "buildup" is a relative term. The U.S.A. has made much of China acquiring an aircraft carrier, but the "new" ship is a 1990 vintage Russian carrier, less than half the size of the standard American Nimitz flattop (of which the U.S. has 10). The "new" carrier-killer Chinese missile has yet to be tested, let alone deployed. Only in submarines can China say it is finally closing the gap with the U.S. And keep in mind that China's military budget is about one-eighth that of the U.S.A.

   If the Chinese are paranoid about their sea routes and home waters, it is not without cause. Most invasions of China have come via the Yellow Sea, and 80 per cent of China's energy supplies come by sea. China ships much of its gas and oil through the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. With major suppliers based on the west coast of Africa, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, it has little choice. Those sea lanes are controlled by the U.S.A., whose Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain and the Seventh in Japan.

   China is also building friendly ports for its tankers - the so-called string of pearls. Hence, Beijing's suspicions about the sudden thaw in U.S.-Myanmar relations. China plans to build "a pearl" also in Myanmar.

   Indeed, a major reason why China is building pipelines from Russia and Central Asia is to bypass the series of choke points through which its energy supplies pass, including the strait of Hormuz and the Malacca Strait. The Turkmenistan-Xingjian and Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean pipelines are already up and running, but their volume is not nearly enough to feed China's 11 billion barrels of oil a day appetite. 

   In spite of China's protests, the U.S.A. recently carried out major naval operations in the Yellow Sea, and Washington has injected itself into tensions between Beijing and some of its neighbors over the South China Sea. In part, China has exacerbated those tensions by its own high-handed attitude toward other nations with claims on the Yellow Sea. In responding to protests over China's claims, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi remarked, "China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that is just a fact."

   China's initial arrogance on the issue has allowed the U.S.A. to wedge itself into the dispute and portray itself as the "protector" of small nations. Less than 40 years ago, it was trying to bomb several of those nations back into the Stone Age, and Vietnam just recorded its 100,000th casualty since 1975, from explosives left over by the American war.  

Beijing has since cooled its tone on the South China Sea and is backing away from defining it as a "core" Chinese area. 

   In sum, why the "strategic pivot"? Undoubtedly, some of it is posturing for the run-up to the 2012 elections. Being "tough" on China trumps Republican charges that Obama is "soft" on foreign policy. But this "pivot" is more than cynical electioneering. First, China does not pose any military threat to the U.S.A. or its allies in Asia, and the last thing China wants is a war. Beijing has not forgotten its 1979 invasion of Vietnam that ended up derailing its "four modernizations" drive and deeply damaging its economy. 

   Part of this "China threat" nonsense has to do with the power of the U.S. armaments industry to keep the money spigots open. When it comes to "big ticket" spending items, navies and air forces top the list. An aircraft costs in excess of $5 billion, and the single most expensive weapons program in U.S. history is the F-35 stealth fighter.

   But there is more than an appetite for pork at work here. China is the number two economy in the world, and in sharp competition with the U.S.A. and its allies for raw materials and human resources. It is hard to see the aggressive U.S. posture in Asia as anything other than an application of the old Cold War formula of economic pressure, military force, and diplomatic coercion. From Washington's point of view, it worked to destabilize the Soviet Union, so, why shouldn't it work on China?

   "If you are a strategic thinker in China," says Simon Tay, chair of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, "you do not have to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to think that the U.S. is trying to bandwagon Asia against China."

   Because U.S. foreign policy is almost always an extension of corporate interests, squeezing China in Asia and Africa helps create openings for American investments. And if such a policy also protects the multibillion-dollar military budget, including the likes of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman, so much the better.

   It is a dangerous game, however. First, because military tension can lead to war, and, while that is an unlikely event, mistakes happen. "If we keep this up, then we are going to leave the impression with China that we are drawing battle lines," Douglas Paal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the Financial Times. In fact, the Obama administration has drawn up a plan called Air-Sea Battle to deny China control of the Taiwan Straits.

   The consequences for those caught in the middle will be severe. China has pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, but it still has a very long way to go. An arms race will delay that. At the same time, for the average American, racked by double-digit unemployment, a vanishing safety net, and the collapse of everything from education to infrastructure, it will be no less of a tragedy. CP

  

their back !!!!

han menace headlines always come in waves

the  latest  big horizon media fad is china as threat to its peaceful little neighbors

and of course the han have their zani side kicks

"When events move very fast and possible worlds swing around them, something happens to the quality of thinking. Some men repeat formulae; some men become reporters. To time observation with thought so as to mate a decent level of abstraction with crucial happenings is a difficult problem. "

c wright mills



want a bit more ???

how about mr C Wright  on the mandarinate

" Their academic reputations rest, quite largely, upon their academic power: they are the members of the committee; they are on the directing board; they can get you the job, the trip, the research grant. They are a strange new kind of bureaucrat. They are executives of the mind. . . . They could set up a research project or even a school, but I would be surprised, if, now after twenty years of research and teaching and observing and thinking, they could produce a book which told you what they thought was going on in the world, what they thought were the major problems for men of this historical epoch. "

this from a hitchens piece linked to by father Smithers

is it A or THE van guard party ????

new terror

 finger on the button

nick rowe : fools fox hound

"Joseph Stiglitz is a great economist. A great microeconomist. But this is really bad macroeconomics. God it's depressing."

i like that he exists
i like his pussy anal retentional 2d  toylands

i like that  sloppy narratives about 3d social reality
 cause  him
librarian's  hemroiding

but close our factories and the streets of lower manhattan ...

is there an echo of bryan here

in stigs call to arms ???


no

he is all for allowing the rust bowl to crumble into iron filings

he wants something better
a new basis for national economic sustainability

post industrial vision ??  ....yup !!!

let the manufactures disapear
...but stig how will  we "pay for " our imports of convenient  products
and  necessary  inputs ???

well we might... i guess... create a balance
in raw inputs and resource extractions
after all despite its now  small  labor force
ag and extract still might produce adequate exchange value
 to allow aquisition of our necessary outside imputs at global prices

but can intellectual property licenses
and high tech post industrial global services alone
---you know stuff like  the securities industry provides ---
 really "pay for " our imported wide screens   golf balls and t shirts ???

far better we assume industrial balance
 by striving to equal the exchange value of our  industrial exports
to  the exchange value of our  industrial imports

and let  trade and payments flow for global IP  go and come from  where they may

--------------

oh ya and then there's the migrations of various qualities of "labor capital"

ya ya
we'll need to frig around with the forex too

and stig seems to want that subject left to wonder the aisles of Target
 like an abandoned child  three days b4 xmas

assume a closed system

assume credit is rationed by interest  rate
assume there is only internal credit
assume no defaults
assume adjustments are only made to prices
not quantities

etc etc etc

thus might one launch
 a just so story for the chattering herd

of course whatever the list of pre requisites

 leave them  strictly implicit
so the monks at the local econ con  monastery
can chase each others tales and tails

endlessly providing
the necessary excavations of hidden assumptions

chime the terrors of tiny town

trigger the ceaseless gibber of toyland  cross talk

more on stigs just so story of the stag ...alibi ike department

two words
open and closed
two nominal quantities
output value debt service value
final ponder
credit is rationed like spots in the columbia college freshman class
not like oranges at the korean fruit and veg stand on broadway and 111 st
price of orange <=> price of money
nope interest is not the price of credit
like orange prices
unless the fuit and veg guy decides if you are qualified to buy her oranges
stig is trying to tell the chattering literate class a story
a vague underlying parallel between great D and great R
its a just so story
that is not a logic boxed story
just a slap together
so stig can offer his grand Rx

the usual liberal cosmo humanist blither list
edumactio
 laputa skunk works expansion
eco concious george jetson infrastructure  etc etc
and for his tight rope types in search of some daring do

with a mildly toxic  transgressive stinger
a  norman thomas esque  hortation implication
as elite confirmation
of the    vox populi
"fuck the for profit  banks "
translation into ivy league-ese:
"... A banking system ...to serve society, not the other way around."

secret motive revealed !!!!

"insurers profit not by providing the most cost-effective care,
 but by trying to insure people who won’t need care."

pk
reverse face
   carve out the care needers

the driver: “chronic” large BOP deficits emerged among the PIGS "only after .... the euro caused huge flows from Germany to the periphery"

that's el PK

graphication :




euro introduced
 pigs collective BOP  slides
slide picks up speed
 reverses
reverse stalls
pigs still well short of balance


CRISIS !!!!!

more pugsley gloss

here our boy wonder has wrestled with the latest stiglitz out piece

"....it goes like this:

" Rapid technological progress in a very large economic sector (agriculture then, manufacturing now) leads to oversupply and steep declines in the sector's prices"

very large or composite
wouldn't any large sector show these dynamics as productivity outraces demand ?
is there really easily demarcated intervals of fast and slow job kill thru innovations in technique
at such an aggregate level

" Poorer producers have less income. They come under pressure to cut back their spending."

automation hardly lowers wages all by themselves even as they thin out job forces or in the case of family farms  ..family farms

" Others--consumers--are now richer because they are paying less for their food (or their manufactures), but their propensity to spend is lower than that of the stressed farmers or ex-manufacturing workers."

this is injected pablum where is the "reason for this " why are the new jobs not of equal va per hour ??

"Moreover, the oversupply of agricultural commodities (or manufactured goods) means that only an idiot would invest at their normal pace in those sectors. To the shortfall in consumption spending is added a shortfall in investment spending as well."

what ?? if each production unit is now more heavily mechanized why assume dloining investment unless demand elastcity is low
is that the case for all manufactures or does the analogy with crop farming break down here ??

"Thus we have systematic pressures pushing spending down below economy-wide income. These aren't going to go away until the declining sector (agriculture then, manufacturing now) is no longer large enough to be macroeconomically significant."

again a story that requires certain hidden assumptions that need excavation

"Macroeconomic balance requires that the economy generate offsetting pressures pushing spending up."

indeed

"For a while, those receiving the income that farmers (or ex-manufacturing workers) have lost and those who use to invest in the declining sectors can lend it to the farmers (or ex-manufacturing workers) so that they can keep up with the Joneses. But lending more and more to poorer and poorer debtors is, like lawn darts, only all fun-and-games until somebody loses an eye."

cute way of talking about the uses of household credit expansion even as the human capital value is stagnating for the bulk of the job force for ..well undisclsed reasons

some way or other service jobs must pay less then manufacturing jobs

hey paine we're just tryin' to give the folks a narrative here !!!!

"An alternative possibility is to switch investment away from the farm value-chain complex (or the manufacturing value-chain complex) to something else. But what? Nobody really knows. The future is uncertain."
that strikes me as a constant til proven otherwise

is this an age of acclerating uncertainty ???

" Other investments are clearly riskier then funneling money into the old channels of boosting the capital of the farm value-chain complex (or the manufacturing value-chain complex) had been. "

really ??? or is this once again the cry of risk taker to cover the profit takers reach for the max
risk taker job maker ,...nice names for asocial profiteer

"Given the extra risks, this pressure can only manifest itself if the cost of capital falls"
and wages as swell one must suppose
both petty rentierrs and other savers plus the job force must sacrfice for the risk takers
to get em to take the risks

". But here we hit the zero lower bound on interest rates. And we are off to the secular liquidity-trap races. This won't work either."

fair enough if fashion friendly these days

"Now at this point I disagree with ...Stiglitz. I see three plausible ways to fix the unemployment-generating aggregate demand shortfall"
here comes the voodoo the levitation the magic tricks

"(a) This could be fixed by expectations of inflation
 that push your (risk takers) sustainable real cost of capital
down below zero far enough that savings no longer exceeds planned investment at full employment. "
yes the ben-krugman recipe for the nippon doldrums of the late 90's

"(b) This could be fixed by government loan- or bank-guarantee programs that transfer the risk of new and untried investments away from entrepreneurs and investors onto taxpayers, so that even without expected inflation planned investment at full employment no longer falls short of saving when the cost of capital is at the zero nominal lower bound. so that you don't need a cost of capital less then be expected rate of deflation. "
 yikes socialize the risk brad ?? sure you want to advocate  that
if the gub becomes in one stroke both risk taker and job maker
what for the hi fi sector privateer profiteers ??

this is effectively a bypass op
and that brings up the question why do we need the hi fiers in the first place then ??





"c) This could be fixed by having the government borrow and spend on a large scale."

ie keynesian shlock

and  Stiglitz onlly likes letter c his conclusions:

"Two conclusions…. The first is that the economy will not bounce back on its own, at least not in a time frame that matters to ordinary people."

the economy here is on its own if we leave the recovery to the corporate privateers

" Yes, all those foreclosed homes will eventually find someone to live in them, or be torn down. Prices will at some point stabilize and even start to rise. Americans will also adjust to a lower standard of living—not just living within their means but living beneath their means as they struggle to pay off a mountain of debt. But the damage will be enormous."

booo hooo

more stig

" America’s conception of itself as a land of opportunity is already badly eroded. Unemployed young people are alienated. It will be harder and harder to get some large proportion of them onto a productive track. They will be scarred for life by what is happening today. Drive through the industrial river valleys of the Midwest or the small towns of the Plains or the factory hubs of the South, and you will see a picture of irreversible decay."

what about A and B stig ??

on A ??

"Monetary policy is not going to help us out of this mess…. [A]nyone who believes that monetary policy is going to resuscitate the economy will be sorely disappointed. That idea is a distraction, and a dangerous one."

but brad wants a why here and doesn't get one from stig
why won't voodood expexterations work
why can't the fed put a future risin inflation zoots into the rivate risk undertakers minds??



and  B ?? why stig never even suggests brad's great risk rush avenue only

"What we need to do instead is embark on a massive investment program—as we did, virtually by accident, 80 years ago—that will increase our productivity for years to come, and will also increase employment now. This public investment, and the resultant restoration in G.D.P., increases the returns to private investment. Public investments could be directed at improving the quality of life and real productivity—unlike the private-sector investments in financial innovations, which turned out to be more akin to financial weapons of mass destruction."

 yup a five year plan
not even a harrod -kalecki style transfer system based super injector

so brad mind reads :

"I think that if I asked him Stiglitz would say that (a)--zero interest rates and expected inflation--would help if you could get there, but that you cannot get there through monetary policy. Only if people expect full employment will there be enough inflation to sustain a full employment equilibrium. And since they don't expect full employment there isn't enough expected inflation no matter how easy monetary policy is."

and he's wrong brad ??
only if agents see effective demand rising before their eyes
rising beyond the old peaks will they invest in new capacity
and then ..of course ...why here ??? why not off shore ???

" I think he would say that (b) might work in the sense of restoring full employment in the short run, but it would be an unfair upward redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to financiers "

what ???

"and would not help resolve the underlying structural problems that created the shortfall between savings and planned investment at full employment in the first place."
ya but isn't that always the case with pure effective demand increases
the point is return to full E now
b4 we build the new national production  platform out of the fully running old platform
or are we simply keeping zombies here by making bad loans ???

Stiglitz does say that (c) is best:

The private sector by itself won’t, and can’t, undertake structural transformation of the magnitude needed—even if the Fed were to keep interest rates at zero for years to come. The only way it will happen is through a government stimulus designed not to preserve the old economy but to focus instead on creating a new one… out of manufacturing and into services that people want—into productive activities that increase living standards, not those that increase risk and inequality…. Education…. [B]asic research. Government investment in earlier decades—for instance, to develop the Internet and biotechnology—helped fuel economic growth…. Meanwhile, the states could certainly use federal help in closing budget shortfalls…. [C]leaner and more efficient energy production…. [O]ur decaying infrastructure, from roads and railroads to levees and power plants, is a prime target for profitable investment.

And once we have both restored full employment and accelerated the structural transformation needed then we can return to normality. But in order to get there:

we must fix the financial system. As noted, the implosion of the financial sector may not have been the underlying cause of our current crisis—but it has made it worse, and it’s an obstacle to long-term recovery…. What’s needed is to get banks out of the dangerous business of speculating and back into the boring business of lending. But we have not fixed the financial system. Rather, we have poured money into the banks…. We have, in a phrase, confused ends with means. A banking system is supposed to serve society, not the other way around…

I'm not sure that I buy Stiglitz's argument that massive government borrow-and-spend is the only, or even the best, way out of our current mess. And I agree that Stiglitz's piece could have used a couple more paragraphs about life at the zero nominal interest rate lower bound explaining why Stiglitz thinks the belief "that monetary policy is going to resuscitate the economy will be sorely disappointed. That idea is a distraction, and a dangerous one".
Perhaps I have seen so much really bad macroeconomics over the past four years that I now suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations. But this does not seem to me to be, as Nick Rowe calls it:

really bad macroeconomics. God it's depressing. If you want to talk about a deficiency of aggregate demand, and why Say's Law sometimes fails, you really do need to talk about monetary exchange economies and an excess demand for money at the aggregate level. You can't just do partial equilibrium analysis and cobble it all together.

So then why does Nick have such an adverse reaction to Stiglitz?
I think it is because Stiglitz is at bottom a Wicksellian and Rowe is a Fisherian. A Wicksellian is a believer that the key equation in macro is the flow-of-funds equation S = I + (G-T), savings S equals planned investment I plus government borrowing (G-T), and that the money market exists to feed the flow-of-funds an interest rate that has a (limited) influence on planned investment I. A Fisherian is a believer that the key equation in macro is the money market's quantity theory equation PY = MV(i), and that the flow-of-funds exists to feed the quantity theory an interest rate that has a (limited) influence on velocity V.
Thus they have a hard time communicating. From the Fisherian viewpoint, the Wicksellians are talking nonsense because they spend their time on things that have a minor impact on velocity while ignoring the obvious shortage of money. From the Wicksellian viewpoint, the Fisherians are talking nonsense by ignoring the obvious fact that movements in money induce offsetting effects in velocity unless they somehow alter the savings-investment balance.
And it is we Hicksians, of course, synthesize both positions into a single unified and coherent whole…"


i'm too bored right now to tackle this minder grinder
i'll preview though

first stig has to show an acceleration in job kill here

i can't a priori see why the internal shifts of employment
required to meet industrial innovation kill jobs more slowly then the reshifting of job shares between manufacturing and services
ie with services absorbing the freed up "labor power "

or to get to stigs parallel
the shift from ag to industry

----------------------

next

the shrinking size of the ag sector workforce is one thing the shrinking
of the share of domestically produced ag products another

our present industrial shrink is jobs and...AND product share

stig skips the impact of accelerated off shoring of manufacturing these past 50 years

how much would we employ in manufacturing if that sector was in trade balance
seems the proper base line

if we have a structural problem i'd say this should be its resolving target
balanced trade in manufactures looked at in isolation
as we look at ag and energy and extractive ie other basic natrual resource based
 commodity trade balances
food feed fiber and fuel versus steel cloth plastics chemicals etc

blah blah blah ....

lesson
don't let their fuckin muddle escape with only a blast of contempt
we need to run the film backwards on any mish mash
---like this stig  mish mash --
with a pro MNC result

we need to show where the MNC  off shoring arbitrage  poison
has been dupe -ishly  "mixed"
into the various inevitabilities of social production's  glorious and faustian
march to full automation