Pete's reply may have triggered such a memory for you, Ray, and clearly
no one would disagree that hard earned wealth such as realized by your
ancestors should be no one's to steal, but I don't read his words as
anything other than a financial analysis of today's situation, in which
I would add that the ruling class accumulations are so unrealistically,
unethically and almost illegally acquired that they skewer general
representation. Then as a very practical observation of why such a
system actually fails, i.e. if capitalism is based on endless
consumerism, the the absence of consumers will bring it down.
I agree that these three reasons given by Bill Gross were only a small
part of the problem, but I don't expect much from the Washington Post
articles. Where he states:
/But while our debt crisis is real and promises to grow to Frankenstein
proportions in future years, debt is not the disease — it is a symptom.
Lack of aggregate demand or, to put it simply, insufficient consumption
and investment is the disease.
/
To say insufficient consumption is a disease is both inaccurate, since
it should be called a symptom, and beyond infantile, The system is the
disease, though one might argue that it too is a symptom of some rather
diseased public thought. A system that, particularly in the US, expends
40% of its treasury on wars staged by corporados, trillions more of tax
payer's money on corporate bailouts and banksters' criminal dealings,
yet nothing to bring Wall Street to justice, and certainly almost
nothing on infrastructure, education or the arts. A Federal Reserve that
throws $13 trillion more in secret at the elite group of
banks/corporations who compromised the public purse, the savings and
future of US citizens, rather than to alleviate any stressors directly
affecting those who made that pile of cash possible.
This becomes far too complicated and lengthy to discuss because the real
sums should include all that was stolen from the treasury, the peoples
earnings used for fighting unnecessary wars, for subsequently stolen war
zone restoration funds, for bail-outs, for oil and gas and other
industrial subsidies, etc. If the real treasury, without misspent funds
were ever to be calculated, the ultra-rich wouldn't be part of the
equation. In fact, far fewer would exist had they not been allowed,
thanks to deregulation, to steal and spend what was never theirs to misuse.
Natalia
On 8/14/2011 5:25 PM, Ray Harrell wrote:
That reminds me of a lot of the assumptions of the holocaust immigrants to
America who struggled to become rich in order not to have to belong to anyplace
that might eventually put them in a camp and kill them. I heard that on
several occasions from people who escaped Nazi Germany when I first came to
NYCity and they were still alive.
It was also an early belief and assumption of Native Peoples before the regular population took over their money and
made non-Indians legal guardians for the 1920 equivalent of Kuwait in Pawhuska, Oklahoma and the Osage Nation. They
did away with the Osage Nation through the Dawes Act and then appointed guardians to "protect the wealth"
from "drunk Indians" and then they killed over 300 of the richest people on the planet which set it up for
the current oil families to take it for themselves. (See the "Death of Sybil Burton" by former editor to
the Washington Post Dennis McAuliffe or "And Still the Water's Run" by Angie Debo.) My father lived through
that. Debo was censored by the state of Oklahoma and it took Princeton University to get her Oklahoma University
history dissertation released and to become a best seller. Now's she's a hero since she died and can't bother them
anymore.
Guilt? Fear of Karmic retribution? It could explain a lot of the theft and
murder metaphors we hear coming from the Right Wing when talking about the
wealthy paying taxes. However, I'm not sure how far what you are suggesting
is, from what the next step would be, which is the solution of Stalin with the
Kulaks. First, separate them and make them other and then you can feel
nothing when you kill them and their families as enemies.
That's not my sense of you Pete but it is the place my experience takes me with
what you proposed.
REH
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pete
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 8:01 PM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Reminescent of what we used to say on Futurework list.
I mean to discount them in their analysis, to treat the country as if they and
their money weren't a part of it. After all, that is what they themselves are
striving for - to live beyond the reach of the mundane world of the less
wealthy. And as they have such control of the political machine that they can
essentially make that happen, it would be best to treat it as fact. They don't
pay significant taxes, don't contribute to the economic life of the country,
all their dealings are international.
If an economic analyst includes all that money in his calculations, he gets
things like per capita incomes far in excess of reality, due to the skewing
from huge anomalous numbers at the top end. This makes the country look less
disfunctional than it really is.
It might be even more informative to take, say, the top 500 wealthiest, and
treat them as their own separate country, and compute what actual direct trade
this country has with the US. That might be quite revealing.
-Pete
On Sun, 14 Aug 2011, Ray Harrell wrote:
How would you delete the ultra-rich?
REH
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pete
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 1:48 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Reminescent of what we used to say on Futurework list.
Why does Germany continue to do well? It's current problems are just about
being the Euro purse responsible for propping up limping EU members, but on its
own, it is thriving. Why is Canada doing well?
Yes, smart legislation allowed us to dodge the sub-prime banking scams, and yes
we've got resources that people will buy, but that's hardly the whole story.
The thing we have in common with the northern europeans that has kept us in
better shape, is our smaller degree of income inequality across the society.
This means there is more available money to spend, and a middle class able to
spend it.
There's a lot of money in the US, but as long as it is sequestered by the ultra
rich, there will be no resurgence of consumerism.
You can't have a consumer society when you've obliterated the consuming class.
Gross's three points are not insignificant, but they are not the key point. Not
by far, and the absense of that recognition renders his article absurd. While
commentators like him ignore this fact, they are doomed to talk nonsense.
They would be far better off if they were to conduct their analyses by first
deleting the ultra rich, and all their money, from the problem, and looking at
the remainder as the nation in question.
They would then have a far more realistic basis from which to work. Money which
is more likely to travel the world without ever leaving any footprint of any
kind at home is best left out of calculations.
-Pete
On Sat, 13 Aug 2011, Ray Harrell wrote:
Pete, what are you conflicting with? Are you saying that robotics
and technology has nothing to do with it? How about the recording
industry in the Arts where one orchestra can do the work of hundreds?
How about a mine where automation can do the work of 3,000 miners and
replace them with less than a hundred mechanics for the machines.
What about dark factories with a few mechanics and no workers and
that work 24 hours a day?
I don’t' know what your rant was about? It's unclear to me what that
has to do with being American? On the other hand the hyper
individualism that makes everyone responsible when there is no
capital IS one of the problems. The question is whether the system
is using the three elements of the article or whether they are foundational.
This seems to be a problem that runs throughout systems design. We
destroy the Arts because they have no utility but they are human
infrastructure in the development of human psycho-physical
instruments and not mere evolutionary cheesecake. We move everything
off shore because a free market is the best system but the free
market destroys your consumers. We hear politicians comparing
national governments to households and then destroying them across
the world through the world bank.
Is this not an engineering flaw? Is this not the confusion of large
scale systems with small scale systems that have parallels but are in
truth vastly different in complexity and the necessary knowledge to
make them work? Is not the same "virus" true of the cultural systems
that make all cultures work? Are you saying that we do not, in the
West, set them off against each other rather than balancing them
sensibly?
China has a culture system's virus as a result of their inability to
deal with religion that is currently at one tenth of their national
population. Even the Communists are having trouble dealing with
large scale systems with 19th century systems ideas.
I'm not an engineer but I work with large scale art forms and the
rules are different based in scale. Orchestrating a string quartet
like a symphony just shows that you don't know anything about the
rules of symphonic orchestral form. There are parallels but a
trombone is not a violin even though the tuning requires the same
intonation for both with a wildly different tessitura.
Making wildly different groups, genders, cultures, professions, etc.
the "same" has been a Western cultural terminal provinciality for as
long as there has been a "Western" world. That reality is the root
of the word chauvinism from the French embodied by a particular
individual.
Have a good day.
REH
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pete
Sent: Saturday, August 13, 2011 12:59 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Reminescent of what we used to say on Futurework list.
On Thu, 11 Aug 2011, Ray Harrell wrote:
Opinions Washington Post
America’s debt is not its biggest problem
By Bill Gross, Published: August 10
[...]
But while our debt crisis is real and promises to grow to
Frankenstein proportions in future years, debt is not the disease —
it is a symptom. Lack of aggregate demand or, to put it simply,
insufficient consumption and investment is the disease. Debt has
been simply an abused sovereign and private market antidote to sustain it.
We and our global market competitors are and have been experiencing
a lack of aggregate demand for several decades. It is now only
visibly coming to a head, as the magic elixir of leverage is drained
and exhausted. This potentially fatal disease of capitalism is a
result of several long-term secular phenomena:
(1) Aging demographics, where boomers everywhere spend less, in
contrast to their youth, as they approach retirement; babies, houses
and second cars shift to the scrapbook of memories as opposed to
future spending power.
(2) Globalization, where 2 billion new competitive workers from Asia
and elsewhere take jobs and paychecks from complacent and
ill-trained 40-somethings in developed markets.
(3) Technological innovation, where machines and robots displace
human labor, resulting in corporate profits but declining wages.
The debt crisis as it crests ultimately gives way to these
growth-inhibiting, spending-contractionary secular forces.
What idiocy. A lack of consumption is a direct result of an absense of funds to
finance consumption. If you want the people to consume, you don't chisel away
their wages for forty years while concentrating all wealth at the tiny tip of
the top of the wealth distribution, which is no longer a pyramid, but more like
a trumpet bell. Globalization may have some effect in retarding wage growth,
but no where near enough to be responsible for the current situation, and
really there is nothing but willful venality preventing a far saner wealth
distribution which would inspire an exuberant economy. Strangle your society,
and you reap what you deserve.
Well, as Churchill said, the americans can always be relied upon...
-Pete
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