“Bring on the populist battle we have been waiting for. The 1% vs the 99%.”
Jonathan Taplin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The quote is from Jon Taplin. Everyone who’s serious about the 2012 election and the continuing economic crisis would probably appreciate his blog at http://jontaplin.com. I know his savvy essays have helped me understand what a political and economic predicament we’re in.
Human Trafficking Clip From NPR
Today on NPR’s “Tell Me More,” a brief but informative discussion about “human trafficking” — more accurately, “modern slavery” — throughout the world today, and also in the U.S. Please click below to hear the 11-minute conversation.
http://www.npr.org/v2/?i=155431942&m=155431935&t=audio
(Photo credit: 401K 2012)
Slavery is the oldest economic system in the world, and the most persistent. Just as surely as accounting and lawyering were not the first professions, capitalism and communism were not the first economic systems.
Slavery is also, I believe, one of the oldest forms of social structure. I imagine the tribe was the first social structure, closely followed by enslavement, but it might have been the other way around.
It is said that Satan goes by many names, and I believe that slavery also goes by many names.
The world has hardly ever been secretive about slavery. It’s been openly practiced from Biblical times to modern times. Continue reading
Sunflowers in Traill County, North Dakota. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
North Dakota landscape (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
North Dakota is a happening place. I wish I had time to write a full update to my 2009 post on the geography of frugal living in North Dakota, which continues to attract readers every day. Clearly, frugal living is not the central issue in 2012.
Much has happened in the past three years, and I imagine the changes in North Dakota must be fascinating. This week’s news that North Dakotans will vote on whether to eliminate property taxes gives a hint of what’s going on. While most states struggle with unmanageable budgeting problems, and some totter on the edge of insolvency, North Dakota is apparently flush with revenue.
North Dakota’s prosperity seems entirely connected to the booming energy industry. The state has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation. I imagine that workers are flocking to the state, and housing must be in short supply.
The Northern Plains: Big sky, flat prairie. It’s easy to forget that people live and work here, too.(Photo credit: Matthew Bietz)
Any comments from folks on the scene in North Dakota would be welcome. All the positive news raises a few questions:
Anyone with answers or opinions is welcome to comment.
You want to know more about North Dakota? Of course you do. You can go right to the source.
— John Hayden
Map of North Dakota (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
North Dakota state population density map based on Census 2000 data. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.”
— from “Forget Shorter Showers: Why personal change does not equal political change,” by Derrick Jensen in “Onion” Magazine. Profound and eye-opening! To read the full article, click here.
There used to be a Walmart right here. But it was too small. Continue reading
From That Used To Be Us, by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum; Chapter 13, “Devaluation:”
THOMAS FRIEDMAN, Wikimedia Commons
“. . . something else that happened with the end of the Cold War and the passing of the baton from the Greatest Generation to the baby boom generation: an erosion of important, traditional American values that long underpinned our public and commercial life. . . .
“A well-functioning political system must be rooted in something deeper than itself: Continue reading
It’s possible that we’re on the brink of historic collapse. Maybe not the Dark Age that Jane Jacobs suggests in her final book. Maybe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is not an apt comparison. Maybe it will be more like the decline and fall of the British Empire. Or the breakup of the Soviet Union. Maybe only partial collapse, failure of some systems, here and there.
You can trace the demise of the factory to decisions made in the 1950s. The actual dismantling of American industry began in the 1970s. By 1982, the process was so advanced that we spoke of the industrial heartland as the “rust belt.”
The remaining labor-intensive parts of American industry were taken apart and exported during the globalization of the 1980s and 1990s. After the manufacturing base was hollowed out to a shell, the next labor-intensive sector to collapse was the construction industry.
Capitalism remains strong. But for the first time, capitalism doesn’t need many workers, at least not in America and Europe. What about the knowledge industry? Won’t that provide jobs? Google is big, but its workforce, not so much. Yes, there will be jobs for the lucky, the talented, the highly educated. But ask a recent college grad how easy it is to find a job.
We have what’s left of retailing. Count the vacant stores at your local mall. Walmart thrives. We have fast food. Many jobs, minimum wage.
The new capitalism is technology-intensive and finance-intensive. And coming soon, computers that “think,” to compete with slow, old-fashioned humans.
As manufacturing jobs slipped away, the financial sector created an illusion of growth and wealth.
The workings of the financial sector are a mystery to me. But the events of the past few years have caused me to view banking and finance with fear and loathing. Based on what little I know, the world financial system — many currencies and fluctuating values, with competing central banks and regulators — is dysfunctional and completely irrational. Finance is a crazy system, more likely to create chaos than order. It’s FUBAR (go ahead, look it up).
The institutions of finance have no soul or conscience to oppose corruption. American banks, corporations and wealthy individuals are awash in money, while average Americans, especially underwater “homeowners,” are awash in debt. For whatever reasons, the wizards of finance refuse to spend or invest.
If high-tech, high-finance, American and European capitalism can profit without much labor input, what happens to the surplus workers?
Economic, political and social systems will have to adapt rapidly, or risk collapse. The European Union looks kind of unstable. In the U.S., some states are financial basket cases. Maybe collapse is happening now.
— John Hayden
Related articles
Economic trouble often leads to political and social trouble. Prolonged economic recession has taken a heavy toll on political tranquility in the U.S. At the local level, disagreements can be particularly disagreeable. Here’s a view from my little part of America, as reported in my other blog.
via Ocean City Blog
CAN ANY PRESIDENT REALLY "CREATE JOBS?" Public domain photo, Wikimedia Commons
See if you can find any cause-and-effect relationship in this repartee from Wednesday’s televised debate among Republican presidential candidates:
Moderator Brian Williams: “Gov. Romney . . . Massachusetts ranked only 47th in job creation during your tenure as governor . . .”
MITT ROMNEY
Gov. Mitt Romney: “We created more jobs in Massachusetts than this president (Barack Obama) has created in the entire country . . .”
Gov. Richard Perry: “We created more jobs in the last three months in Texas than he created in four years in Massachusetts . . .”
Perry: “. . . Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt.”
RICK PERRY
Romney: “Well, as a matter of fact, George Bush and his predecessor created jobs at a faster rate than you did, Governor.”
We are doomed if we base our debate about the economic crisis on a fallacy. The fallacy is that a governor or a president can create jobs, or fail to create jobs.
Truth is, the president of the U.S. and the governors of the states can not and do not directly create jobs, nor do they have any but the most ephemeral impact on economic conditions and events that affect jobs in the private sector.
If a governor decided by himself to add an employee to his executive staff, then I suppose you could give the governor credit for creating one job. If a governor decides to add a new bureaucratic agency, consisting of 100 state employees, then I suppose you could credit him with creating 100 jobs.
But the president and the governors do not have it within their power to add or subtract a single job from the private economy. Even the Federal Reserve Board has only feeble power to affect the economy, through manipulation of interest rates and money supply, and the FED is independent of the president and Congress.
Congress has limited power to indirectly stimulate the economy by increasing government spending. But just now, spending is out of favor, and many politicians and voters support cutting government spending and debt.
The only way government can directly impact private job creation is by funding a project or a program that must hire workers in the private sector. For example, the government could decide to build a bridge, or a water system. The government would contract with private business to build the bridge, and the business would hire workers.
Presto! New jobs are really created to build the bridge! That’s a direct cause and effect between the bridge and new jobs. Plus, the bridge project and its workers have a ripple effect, adding more jobs in the community, and perhaps opening up the property on the other side of the bridge to new economic development. Simple, no?
— John Hayden
Living Simply And Still On The Grid 