Defining "Labor" as the aggregate of human effort — physical and mental — that produces something of value ... then ... what is wrong with "Labor" that we withhold our labor as human effort from ourselves when the larger economy in which we live and work cannot employ us? "Labor" needs to form something like a "collaborative labor corporation" to employ Labor when the larger economy doesn't ... for whatever reason. Why do we only work to create wealth for others, and consider this — a form of slavery — the primary legitimate or substantive economic structure to use in harnessing the wealth creating potential of human effort? Isn't time we learned from communities like the Amish and the Mormons on how to generate wealth for the common good?
I propose that we explore the development of economic organizing structures that I call "collaborative labor corporations" (CLC) — both profit-making and nonprofit — to create the economic environment where everyone able and willing to work can find work that creates value for which they are fairly rewarded.
All wealth has been produced by human effort — our labor, physical and mental.
That is the underlying fact of any economy.
Human labor is the synergy of our creative imaginations — ideas — and the physical ability to produce the concrete embodiment — products — of our ideas in the time and space continuum of our reality.
The machines and energy that we use to replicate the products of our ideas are also products of human labor. Energy is our product in the sense of our inventing ways to harness it to our directed use.
The organizations, tribes, natons, societies cultures that maximize the output of human labor, the integration of our creative imaginations — think cerebral cortex — and our physical ability — think hands with thumbs — will win the economic race, not as a zero-sum game, but as a collaborative engagement.
The American ideal is (was?) to reward individual effort fairly, relative to the wealth that person's effort creates, regardless of the social status of the individual. Our collective effort then creates our progress. Whenever our progress is guided by liberty in individual choice in a well-regulated market that maximizes the efficiency in transactions derived from trust and transparency, the American economy outpaces anything else known to us and we benefit — not equally, but collectively — if each of us is rewarded for his or her labor fairly. The maximization of human labor collectively is due to the maximization of motivation individually. That is the basic tenet supporting freedom and fairness.
What I call the British Imperialist Model (BIM ... and it's adherents, BIM-bos) is built on the concept that human labor produces wealth for an elite class of individuals who are then free to create the progress of the world. However, when this elite class is allowed to impose its sense of entitlement — its greed — on a society, extracting the wealth of labor to its own purposes — what worked in a feudal society or a slave-based society for some period of time— in a modern economy cycles through boom and bust. Its limitations in maximizing human labor collectively and, hence, the creation of wealth are obvious. However, because it maximizes the wealth of the elite for a time, if they usurp economic power through strategies like the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, they can and will use their economic power to impose their model.
The only antidote to BIM is democracy, wherein the people can gain a countervailing political power to an elite's economic power. However, democracy devolved into mob rule is the precursor of socioeconomic chaos by being able to disrupt orderly markets.
Again the U.S. has created the most rational form of government yet known to us with the constitutionally guaranteed rights of the individual in a form of federal government with its power divided between the three branches — executive, legislative and judicial — with additional checks and balances in the conduct of elections to elective office.
Addendum: The key to getting us out of the current economic mess the BIM-bos have gotten us into, is not to get the banks working, but to get the American people working. With Americans at work we will once again benefit from the tremendous wealth creation of our human labor. The mantra should be: Every person willing and able to work will be given a job to do, a job that creates value in a market economy.
And this time, let's make sure that those who create the wealth through their human labor, get their fair share of the wealth they help create.
And finally, it is the responsibility of the larger society to actively pursue fairness in the distribution of the wealth our human labor creates. AND it is the responsibility of the individual to participate in the larger society in determining that distribution BUT TO ALSO creatively explore ways to contribute his or her individual human labor to the benefit of the common good.
The reward follows labor. Where we might withhold our human labor from a given organization, we have no right to withhold it from our communiy. We can clean the common areas in our neighborhood. We can volunteer at our local church, synagogue, temple, mosque, food bank or homeless shelter. Whatever we can do to improve the socioeconomic environment benefits the common good of our community. It is only when those of us who are able to perform human labor don't, that we go downhill.
Our mantra requires us to participate in providing work for each and every individual whereby that individual can perform his or her human labor to the benefit of the common good of our community. We then must participate is providing a fair reward for the human labor thus performed. However, the fact that there is a lag at times between performance and receiving the reward, should not deter us from doing the work. We are, after all, embedded in our community, and our human labor benefits our community. It gives us the dignity of doing our part for the common good.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
The bailout is a bust!
With a "$2.9 trillion gap between what the economy could produce and what it will actually produce. And $800 billion, while it sounds like a lot of money, isn’t nearly enough to bridge that chasm." -Paul Krugman, Failure to Rise, Published: February 12, 2009, NY Times OpEd.
Then David Brooks chimes in with: "Between 1990 and 2007, the total mortgage debt held by Americans rose from $2.5 trillion to $10.5 trillion." -The Worst-Case Scenario, Published: February 12, 2009, NY Times OpEd. That's $8 Trillion we have to absorb.
What the hell is going on?!
Do the Republicans also believe the bailout is a bust and are positioning themselves to be the political party of "I told you so!"?
And we wonder why the Taliban are willing to destroy the tranquility of their nation for an ideological belief?
Then David Brooks chimes in with: "Between 1990 and 2007, the total mortgage debt held by Americans rose from $2.5 trillion to $10.5 trillion." -The Worst-Case Scenario, Published: February 12, 2009, NY Times OpEd. That's $8 Trillion we have to absorb.
What the hell is going on?!
Do the Republicans also believe the bailout is a bust and are positioning themselves to be the political party of "I told you so!"?
And we wonder why the Taliban are willing to destroy the tranquility of their nation for an ideological belief?
THE TALIBAN WING OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.... From time to time in recent years, liberals have identified the "Taliban wing" of the Republican Party -- those conservatives who reject church-state separation, taking marching orders from James Dobson, and wonder why the government doesn't do more to promote and endorse their vision of Christianity.
The phrase is generally considered offensive by most Republicans, and it's easy to understand why. Indeed, no U.S. political contingent wants to be compared to the Taliban.
It came as something of a surprise, then, to see a leading House Republican make the comparison unprompted.
Frustrated by a lack of bipartisan outreach from House Democratic leaders, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said House Republicans -- who voted unanimously last week against the economic plan pushed by President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- will pitch a "positive, loyal opposition" to the proposal. The group, he added, should also "understand insurgency" in implementing efforts to offer alternatives.
"Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban," Sessions said during a meeting yesterday with Hotline editors. "And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes. And these Taliban -- I'm not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that's not what we're saying. I'm saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with."
He added that if Democrats don't give the minority party more "options or opportunities," Republicans "will then become an insurgency."
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Geithner is the fox in the henhouse!
From today's — Tuesday, February 10 — NY Times front page:
That says it all about the Obama team. They are in the control of the global financier mindset that got us into this economic mess.
Brilliant idiots like Secretary Geithner —running the Federal Reserve Bank of New York while we descended into economic chaos — value their financial acumen over the worth of a tool and die maker ... to the detriment of our modern economy.
It isn't the Republicans we the people have to worry about. They were defeated soundly in the last election. It's the global financial gurus embedded in the Obama administration ... and obviously calling the shots. Do I see feathers in Geithner's smile?
Geithner Said to Have Prevailed on the Bailout
By STEPHEN LABATON and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: February 9, 2009
WASHINGTON— The Obama administration’s new plan to bail out the nation’s banks was fashioned after a spirited internal debate that pitted the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, against some of the president’s top political hands.
In the end, Mr. Geithner largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, according to administration and Congressional officials.
Mr. Geithner, who will announce the broad outlines of the plan on Tuesday, successfully fought against more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid.
He resisted those who wanted to dictate how banks would spend their rescue money. And he prevailed over top administration aides who wanted to replace bank executives and wipe out shareholders at institutions receiving aid.
Because of the internal debate, some of the most contentious issues remain unresolved.
That says it all about the Obama team. They are in the control of the global financier mindset that got us into this economic mess.
Brilliant idiots like Secretary Geithner —running the Federal Reserve Bank of New York while we descended into economic chaos — value their financial acumen over the worth of a tool and die maker ... to the detriment of our modern economy.
It isn't the Republicans we the people have to worry about. They were defeated soundly in the last election. It's the global financial gurus embedded in the Obama administration ... and obviously calling the shots. Do I see feathers in Geithner's smile?
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Obama is screwing up the recovery bigtime
It's all over but the shouting. (See What the hell is going on?! below.)
Why? It's simple. Frank Rich lays it out in black and white in his column today, Slumdogs Unite!:
This is going to get ugly ... all because the major players are beholden to the global financial model that got us into this mess in the first place.
Note: I call this the British Imperialism Model or BIM ... and folks like Geithner, Summners, and Rubin (and their ilk) BIM-bos. (See The Republican's plantation mentality ... below.)
Monday, Feb 9, update: Paul Krugman writes in today's column on the NY Times OpEd page, The Destructive Center :
Why? It's simple. Frank Rich lays it out in black and white in his column today, Slumdogs Unite!:
The new president who vowed to change Washington’s culture will have to fight much harder to keep from being co-opted by it instead. There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe.-Frank Rich
Slumdogs Unite!
Ny Times OpEd
Sunday, February 8, 2009
This is going to get ugly ... all because the major players are beholden to the global financial model that got us into this mess in the first place.
Note: I call this the British Imperialism Model or BIM ... and folks like Geithner, Summners, and Rubin (and their ilk) BIM-bos. (See The Republican's plantation mentality ... below.)
Monday, Feb 9, update: Paul Krugman writes in today's column on the NY Times OpEd page, The Destructive Center :
So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.
For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”
No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Religion as the ground for growing the individual
Some background first ... I attend the West Village Salon Conversation Group. Last Tuesday — the discussion was about the selfishness of being unselfish — to paraphrase from my point of view.
During the discussion two of the members brought up two examples of how small individual contributions to the collective good can keep a "community" functioning for the benefit of the individual. One example was theoretical. The other was a concrete example. Though the concrete example came second in the discussion, I will start with it first.
The coffee serving area at the woman's office was in constant disarray until she set up the "rule" that each person do at least one housekeeping chore whenever they entered the coffee serving area: clean the coffeemaker, make coffee, put any trash in the wastebasket, empty the wastebasket, wipe down the serving area, etc.
They haven't had a problem since.
In the second example, the salon member told how a friend of his — a graduate student in complex systems at a West Coast university — had built a model relating to the mess of dirty dishes that accumulated in the kitchen sink in the students' living area.
In his model he worked out how often each person would have to clean up a given number of extra dishes than their own, to keep the area clean.
As these examples were laid out, I had an epiphany. This was the core value of religion: giving us the rules to keep a community not only from descending into chaos, but establishing the "ground" out of which the individual grows a productive life.
Even as we get our sustenance from our community — the ground of our existence — we have to fertilize/nurture — give back to — the ground. Our basic set of rules not for only giving back but for our expectations of receiving is our religion.
Is a basic rule of the Christian to give without consideration of receiving something in return directly in the reciprocity of the transaction? That I should not give to the powerful and wealthy, expecting favor, but give to "the least of these", as in "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me." -Matthew 25:45 KJV
I think it a basic rule. It is why I call myself a Christian existentialist.
I believe life itself has established an order in the cosmos that dictates that nurturing the ground out of which I grow benefits me in ways that are not — necessarily — directly related to my immediate act. Is this not also the concept of karma?
This concept completes the mind wrap that we expect the reward from our "God", so it is a selfish act.
In this we define ourselves by whom or what we believe to be our "God".
After thought: Those who believe the sole pursuit of self-interest brings the greatest collective good have chosen greed as their "God". Existence repeatedly proves them wrong. It is a short-term illusion.
During the discussion two of the members brought up two examples of how small individual contributions to the collective good can keep a "community" functioning for the benefit of the individual. One example was theoretical. The other was a concrete example. Though the concrete example came second in the discussion, I will start with it first.
The coffee serving area at the woman's office was in constant disarray until she set up the "rule" that each person do at least one housekeeping chore whenever they entered the coffee serving area: clean the coffeemaker, make coffee, put any trash in the wastebasket, empty the wastebasket, wipe down the serving area, etc.
They haven't had a problem since.
In the second example, the salon member told how a friend of his — a graduate student in complex systems at a West Coast university — had built a model relating to the mess of dirty dishes that accumulated in the kitchen sink in the students' living area.
In his model he worked out how often each person would have to clean up a given number of extra dishes than their own, to keep the area clean.
As these examples were laid out, I had an epiphany. This was the core value of religion: giving us the rules to keep a community not only from descending into chaos, but establishing the "ground" out of which the individual grows a productive life.
Even as we get our sustenance from our community — the ground of our existence — we have to fertilize/nurture — give back to — the ground. Our basic set of rules not for only giving back but for our expectations of receiving is our religion.
Is a basic rule of the Christian to give without consideration of receiving something in return directly in the reciprocity of the transaction? That I should not give to the powerful and wealthy, expecting favor, but give to "the least of these", as in "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me." -Matthew 25:45 KJV
I think it a basic rule. It is why I call myself a Christian existentialist.
I believe life itself has established an order in the cosmos that dictates that nurturing the ground out of which I grow benefits me in ways that are not — necessarily — directly related to my immediate act. Is this not also the concept of karma?
This concept completes the mind wrap that we expect the reward from our "God", so it is a selfish act.
In this we define ourselves by whom or what we believe to be our "God".
After thought: Those who believe the sole pursuit of self-interest brings the greatest collective good have chosen greed as their "God". Existence repeatedly proves them wrong. It is a short-term illusion.
Friday, February 06, 2009
The Republican's plantation mentality ...
A plantation mentality has taken hold in the Republican Party. It is all about keeping labor costs low. Slave wages (like having a mule) are best, and indentured servitude is next. Note: Is it any wonder the GOP has such a strong base among Southern whites?
This is the carry-over of the British Imperialist Model (BIM) with Lords of Castles and their fiefdoms as the optimum socioeconomic arrangement ... thereby allowing an elite to focus on enriching the culture ... supported in their efforts by the masses producing the wealth the parasitic elite (bim-bos?) feed on.
The American model is the antithesis of both this — the BIM — and the communist model where the "state" dictates the distribution of wealth. We hold to the right of the individual on an equal opportunity basis to receive a fair return for his/her contribution to producing the wealth of our socioeconomic arrangement that includes a basic safety-net for all. We understand this to be the energy/motivation behind our — the greatest ever known to the human race — richly productive economy.
For some reason the currant crop of Republican leaders simply doesn't get it. I think it is because they are caught up in the Biblical model of God rewarding the righteous, so if they have been rewarded then it is their divine right to keep it ... no matter how they got it.
This is the carry-over of the British Imperialist Model (BIM) with Lords of Castles and their fiefdoms as the optimum socioeconomic arrangement ... thereby allowing an elite to focus on enriching the culture ... supported in their efforts by the masses producing the wealth the parasitic elite (bim-bos?) feed on.
The American model is the antithesis of both this — the BIM — and the communist model where the "state" dictates the distribution of wealth. We hold to the right of the individual on an equal opportunity basis to receive a fair return for his/her contribution to producing the wealth of our socioeconomic arrangement that includes a basic safety-net for all. We understand this to be the energy/motivation behind our — the greatest ever known to the human race — richly productive economy.
For some reason the currant crop of Republican leaders simply doesn't get it. I think it is because they are caught up in the Biblical model of God rewarding the righteous, so if they have been rewarded then it is their divine right to keep it ... no matter how they got it.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
What the hell is going on?!
We all know what we have to do to turn this economy around for the United States. WWII showed us.
Get on a "war" footing and rebuild our infrastructure and start building the next generation of energy producing technology. And just like "weaponry", keep improving it.
But we are not doing it, are we. Why? In my humble opinion, it is because our closet elitists — the British-American Imperialists and their lackeys — are still trying desperately to emasculate labor, reducing wages to the cost of keeping a mule alive: water, food, harness, stall, and medical care for breeding stock.
These greedy one-world bastards — of the lord in the castle surrounded by their doting indentured servants ilk, whose concept of the optimum society is an elite supported in their lifestyle by the labor of an underclass — were orchestrating their version of globalization when their economic house of cards aka Ponzi scheme came crashing down.
Whereas the American ideal — IMHO — is that of equal opportunity and fairness in distributing the wealth we all help create.
The British-American Imperialists — my label — are now desperately trying to stave off the return of fair wages for labor which would mark the end of their one world dreams. They are willing to sacrifice the future of our nation on the alter of their insane lust for power and wealth.
Addendum 8:40 AM Monday, February 16, 2009:
Get on a "war" footing and rebuild our infrastructure and start building the next generation of energy producing technology. And just like "weaponry", keep improving it.
But we are not doing it, are we. Why? In my humble opinion, it is because our closet elitists — the British-American Imperialists and their lackeys — are still trying desperately to emasculate labor, reducing wages to the cost of keeping a mule alive: water, food, harness, stall, and medical care for breeding stock.
These greedy one-world bastards — of the lord in the castle surrounded by their doting indentured servants ilk, whose concept of the optimum society is an elite supported in their lifestyle by the labor of an underclass — were orchestrating their version of globalization when their economic house of cards aka Ponzi scheme came crashing down.
Whereas the American ideal — IMHO — is that of equal opportunity and fairness in distributing the wealth we all help create.
The British-American Imperialists — my label — are now desperately trying to stave off the return of fair wages for labor which would mark the end of their one world dreams. They are willing to sacrifice the future of our nation on the alter of their insane lust for power and wealth.
Addendum 8:40 AM Monday, February 16, 2009:
If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression. The war didn’t just lead to full employment. It also led to rapidly rising incomes and substantial inflation, all with virtually no borrowing by the private sector. By 1945 the government’s debt had soared, but the ratio of private-sector debt to G.D.P. was only half what it had been in 1940. And this low level of private debt helped set the stage for the great postwar boom.
Since nothing like that is on the table, or seems likely to get on the table any time soon, it will take years for families and firms to work off the debt they ran up so blithely. The odds are that the legacy of our time of illusion — our decade at Bernie’s — will be a long, painful slump.— NY Times Op-Ed Column
Decade at Bernie’s
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 15, 2009
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