Category: economy

Sita Sings the Blues:

A Free Culture Success Story.

Why I insisted on authentic songs, what is and is not property, how software is culture, the difference between Share Alike (copyleft) and other Creative Commons licenses, why I paid to legally license the old songs, how noncommercial copyright infringement is still illegal, legal costs, benefits of audience sharing & decentralized distribution, the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire (sitasingstheblues.com/store), open-licensed merch, audience goodwill, how fans support artists, rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous goods, the Creator Endorsed Mark, migrating Flash files to open formats, gift income, commerce without monopolies, why I encourage legal sharing, and more.

For those with longer attention spans, click here.
Or meet Nina Paley here.

very hip: rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous goods

Screen captured from Wall Street Journal.

ey wot?

In the last forty years, Americans have gone from citizens to consumers, from consumers to consumables. Thus no human being has any worth who is not a member of the wealth tribe. There is a treatment for this condition, which means that there is hope. For their own health and well-being we must take away as much of the ill-gotten gains of the rich as we can, leaving them only a fraction of their former stashes. $$$ is just as addicting a drug as crack but it affects a great many more people, not just those immediately surrounding the addict.

pic posted here 09/16

Were America not myopic.

The 717 emerging-cities market – cities with populations of more than 500,000 plus 371 cities that will reach this size in 25 years – is the largest commercial opportunity in the world. The report is titled Winning in Emerging-Market Cities: A Guide to the World’s Largest Growth Opportunity.

Emerging-market cities will need housing and infrastructure—most urgently, transportation, water, sanitation, and electricity. Meeting these needs will require an estimated $30 trillion to $40 trillion by 2030—the equivalent of 60% to 70% of the total global investment in infrastructure.

The strongest driver of infrastructure demand will be population growth.

Emerging markets will require an estimated $13.8 trillion in new housing investment from 2010 to 2030, with a huge portion of the demand coming from Brazil, China, India, and Mexico.

Emerging-market cities will reach 30% of all global private consumption by 2015.

h/t Next Big Future

Jobs. You want jobs? You can’t handle jobs.

One-third of the world’s population—2.6 billion people—live in emerging-market cities, and by 2030 that number will increase by 1.3 billion. In contrast, cities in developed markets will add only 100 million new residents in the next 20 years.

Republicans say ‘climate change’ is a four-letter word, JOKE. But China’s Communists turned it into another four-letter word, JOBS. —Thomas Friedman

Green in China “is a practical discussion on health and wealth.”

“There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.”

New ways to do more with less.

It’s a three-for-one shot for them. By becoming more energy efficient, China saves money, takes the lead in the next great global industry and earns credit with the world for mitigating climate change.

While Republicans were turning climate change into a wedge issue, the Chinese Communists were turning it into a work issue.

If you want to find real political rage you’ll find it among the very privileged who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.

Paul Krugman:

These days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case.

People making $400,000 or $500,000 a year aren’t rich?

I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class — the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on. Why, they can barely make ends meet.

And billionaires are outright belligerent?

A sense of entitlement has taken hold: it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it.

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes — but that was a long time ago.

With $17.5 billion, David Koch is the second-richest man in New York City, behind Michael Bloomberg, and the $$$ in puppet ma$$$ter.

Government debt is not the debt story. The sector that caused the crisis, that financed speculation rather than genuine investment, is most heavily in debt.

Very, very few examine Wall Street’s massive debt nor it’s relentless capture of American homeowners’ cash and lifetime earning power. Now that’s debt!

The finance sector exists to create debt, and the only way it can do that is by encouraging the rest of the economy to take it on.

If they were funding productive investments with this money, there wouldn’t be a crisis in the first place. —Steve Keen

Debt growth in America is Wall Street and their encumbered customers, us.

Wall Street’s frenzy of bond, equity and mortgage securities falls in a mess of derivatives and over-rated packaging.

Real estate hammered consumers. Government steps in while  business retreats.

Blame Obama of all things. Scream about a stimulus and unemployment checks.

Debt is Republican. And bailouts too. They follow the financiers believing that a dollar borrowed is a dollar spent in the economy. But Wall Street has delivered only pennies on the dollar in GDP.

Imagined fears of deficits? Deficits? Real debt is seldom discussed. Do bankers fund these political charades?

Of course, government must now step in. Let’s hope correctly. It’s not had much practice after 30 years of laissez-faire and outright dismantling.

Problems on Wall Street are  systemic?

What has happened is that a very substantial fraction of the financial services industry has come to be outside the law, and as it has become increasingly powerful, it has attracted increasingly amoral people. Its behavior has become more and more dangerous to the financial system and to the American economy.

Cutting into the $1.4 trillion deficit left on Obama’s doorstep, where does government find revenue?

• Individual income taxes —42% of all receipts in 2009.
• Social security, unemployment insurance and other —43%.
• Corporate income taxes are only 6% of total federal income.

Bush Republicans cut government revenue 27%. Corporate taxes fell a staggering 66%. A crippling burden on business, no?

Thirty years stumping Reagan’s sloganeering of ‘Cut Taxes / Slash Spending’, from 1986 to 2009, total government outlays have increased 254%, national defense has grown 144%, entitlements have grown 321% and healthcare has grown a staggering 835%.

Lured to voting Republican?
Oh yes, the best way to lose weight is to eat more ice cream.

After quadrupling Federal debt, Republicans continue to hoot spending cuts.

The problem is that the amount of discretionary spending that is ripe for cutting is a relatively small portion of the pot.

Supply-Side Economics has been at the core of Republican economic philosophy. “Cutting taxes doesn’t add to the deficit, it’s how we fight the deficit!! Less is more, don’t you see?? Reagan proved it.”

That’s just junk —very sloppy junk that brought America to a $1.4 trillion deficit.

Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, never a burden in any case, have utterly failed. The truth is that there is virtually no evidence in support of the Bush tax cuts as an economic elixir.

It’s not Palin-Beck 2012 we want nor a revival of religion, but a robust and stimulated economy. And some smart tax increases because,

…wealthy Americans no longer invest in creating productive American businesses.

They primarily ‘protect’ the value of their money —financial speculation, the stock market, cherry-picking leverage.

With so much money at the top seeking yield, asset prices were driven higher and higher, until the point was reached where the only way to keep the bubble going was ‘securitize’ people who could not afford to pay it back. After all, derivatives must be derived from something.

Permanently plug nearly 3,500 abandoned oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico? Remove 650 abandoned production platforms?

There’s more than 27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf? What?

Interesting finding on Gulf spill dispersal.
Macondo’s proportion of spewing gas bloomed bacteria.
Radically nourished, microbe populations exploded.

The microbial communities in the four plumes first tackled easy-to-digest hydrocarbons, such as propane, butane and ethane, which were kept from bubbling quickly to the surface by deepwater high pressure and cold temperature.

After consuming these gases, which boosted the populations, the larger communities moved to harder-to-eat onger-chain hydrocarbons such as the alkanes that comprise oil.

Robert Rapier,
Misery essay of the day:

• I view a global oil production peak within the decade as a near-certainty.
• I think there is a small probability that the peak has already occurred, but we won’t know that until several years after the fact.
• I don’t believe that there is anything in the technology pipeline that can prevent a growing gap between supply and today’s demand.
• I believe that gap will be closed by price-induced rationing, which will be very hard on businesses and individuals.

We simply don’t have the money to use the oil that we have historically used. This will be a period of great economic difficulty, lasting for years.

At the same time that the economy is in great difficulty, oil companies will continue to reap big profits, causing an enormous amount of resentment and calls for higher taxation and greater regulation of the oil industry.

I simply do not believe it will ever be possible to replace major shortfalls in oil production with renewables. It may be possible to replace 20% of today’s oil production, but beyond that there will be increasing competition with arable land for food production — and pressure to turn forested land into arable land.

However, I also believe that humans are very resilient, and that we will eventually come through this.

As well as unbridled banksters, what other sector is regulated with the Republican voodoo of laissez-faire? Contract Animal Testing.

Pledging industry self-regulation, Bayer, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Merck, Sergeant’s, Wellmark, and Meria are caught at one of the most cruel facilities on earth.

They yelled and cursed at cowering dogs and cats, calling them “asshole,” “motherfuckers,” and “bitch”; used pressure hoses to spray water—as well as bleach and other harsh chemicals—on them; and dragged dogs through the facility who were too frightened to walk.

In one test commissioned by a corporation whose products are sold in grocery and drug stores nationwide, a chemical was applied to the necks of 57 cats.

The cats immediately suffered seizures, foamed at the mouth, lost vision, and bled from their noses. Despite this, the substance was put on the cats a second time the very same day.

No USDA employees appear, but PETA’s volunteer went undercover for months.

The video shows laboratory employees discussing the use of sedatives that expired in 2007. “Maybe that’s why it doesn’t work,” says a voice on the video, shortly before the scene cuts to a dog twitching as its teeth are pulled with a pair of pliers. In another clip, one employee counsels another not to bother reporting a dog’s sores to the veterinarian. “If you have ten dogs that have the same problem, it’s not a problem,” she says. “It’s a living condition here.”

Shades of 500 million sick eggs! Many dogs had raw, oozing sores. The USDA finally inspected the lab last week, and has permanently shut down the company, Professional Laboratory and Research Service.

Sick. America. Sick all through.
And lazy.

What’s old and tired infrastructure, America?
• 2,840 significant gas pipeline accidents since 1990
• more than a third causing deaths and significant injuries

It took almost two hours to close the 30-inch-diameter pipeline that exploded in California!

Two valves a mile away were near the San Bruno disaster. Rush hour traffic? The government put the utility on notice regarding shut-off valves in 1981. We know about these problems.

I smell a trillion dollar jobs frontier. If only shareholders knew what to do with our money…

Never underestimate the power to defer.

Only since 2002 were utilities required to inspect but no rules impose repair. 3,000 unsafe sites discovered but unimproved. Lobbyists are currently pushing to relax inspections from once every ten years to once every fifteen.

Regulators arrive after the fact. Fail. Post-Reagan rule-makers rely on obviously unreliable incentives and deterrents, allowing the industry to police themselves. Fail. Utilities notoriously put off maintenance to boost earnings. Fail. Like BP’s drilling watchdogs, or eggs for that matter, is the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration not enforcing rules? There’s merely 100 inspectors for 2 million miles of pipeline. Fail.

Pipeline Safety advocates here.

GDP is a crude measure.
The big deal in this chart is human welfare, how we compare globally.

This is a ‘welfare metric’ combining data on consumption, leisure, inequality and mortality. It’s not a Happiness & Satisfaction GDP, but compares what we have that helps us get by.

[pdf] Beyond GDP? Welfare Across Countries and Time, the work of Peter Klenow with Chad Jones, September 2010.

Maybe we bellyache a wee bit much.

Barebones but progressing, here’s a terrific Mission Statement:

This blog is intended as a tool to identify the most powerful and influential people in the world — criminals, academics, politicians, and even possibly a well-regarded philanthropist or two. Will we end up with a pyramid? Concentric rings? Let’s find out. Those advocating lynch mobs are not welcome.

With any luck, we’ll be able to paint a picture of the true pecking order of society, and with that knowledge be able to prevent it from causing further catastrophic damage.

Existing lists of The 100 Most Influential are helpful and we should definitely link to them, but let’s dig deeper to find out the names behind the names; who marches to whose drum. Please provide valid arguments and evidence. Doesn’t have to be fancy and poetic, but please make it intelligible and informative.

 

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We know nothing about the rich. We have no idea what a $1,000,000,000 can do. For that matter, commas and zeros is a lost frontier in a world too unable.

Jobs. The IMF is warning governments that there will be no recovery until jobs restart. The IMF is urging governments to start factoring back-to-work policies into their overall equation for stoking growth. The IMF is warning governments that unemployment is fanning unrest.

• Countries that have so far avoided the harsh judgment of financial markets could afford a small increase in debt to ward off persistent joblessness…

• Such a move could pay for itself in the form of increased economic activity…

• Rising long-term unemployment is a crisis…

• the United States, too, should consider subsidies to help the long-term unemployed…

• Countries that need to rebuild credibility should first reallocate spending to get the long-term unemployed and young people back into the labor market.

Countries need to rebuild credibility? There’s a thump on the head to deliver to Congress!

Republicans holler that taxes and regulations bridle business. Oh do they holler. But is that true?

If it is true that lower taxes = lower unemployment, why do facts show otherwise? Nearly all apolitical economists see this clearly.

Congressional tweaking has been sorry leadership for decades. Lazy and brain dead tax cuts do not lead to more hiring.

Stumping Busting: revealing the lies of politicians. Not good television but gee whiz we are mired in baloney.

Comment snippet: “The fear of social unrest is the only thing that might work. There sure is no response to the pain and suffering of others.”

A world’s top utility. What can it do when old pipe explodes?

Julio has 3rd degree burns on his ear and second degree burns on his hand and his back. He’s signing papers saying he’ll pay the medical bills “if no one else would”. The clinic made him sign. Richard is also filling out forms. He’s offered cookies. Loretta was burned fleeing her home. She’s in an auditorium filling out forms. She’s offered a box of chicken. Les is 78. He’s outdoors on the sidewalk waiting.

With everyone else, the utility is here to help.

Oh. The utility arranged to have clothes on hand too. Good of them. No?

Here’s the problem as economist Edward Harrison puts it:

1. The private sector (particularly households) is overly indebted. The level of debt households now carry cannot be supported by income at the present levels of consumption. The natural tendency, therefore, is toward more saving and less spending in the private sector (although asset price appreciation can attenuate this through the Wealth Effect). That necessarily means the public sector must run a deficit or the import-export sector must run a surplus.

2. Most countries are in a state of economic weakness. That means consumption demand is constrained globally. There is no chance that the U.S. can export its way out of recession

3. without a collapse in the value of the U.S. dollar. That leaves the government as the sole way to pick up the slack.

4. Since state and local governments are constrained by falling tax revenue and the inability to print money, only the Federal Government can run large deficits. 5. Deficit spending on this scale is politically unacceptable and will come to an end as soon as the economy shows any signs of life (say 2 to 3% growth for one year).

Therefore, at the first sign of economic strength, the Federal Government must raise taxes and/or cut spending. The result will be a deep recession with higher unemployment and lower stock prices.

Slog. Accept it. Shortfall, however sloppy, will be made up by the federal government.

We will not return to what failed. We will slowly reduce the bleeding of energy overhead and carve a new horizon of services and trade. Watch for it. Patiently.

Surveys show that the underwater plume of Deepwater’s oil is being degraded and diluted, now at low concentrations, but a ‘marine snow’ of oily sediment coats the seafloor.

Wellhead region and near shore sediments made up of grayish muddy clay and a thin layer of orange-brown oil of varying thickness. Dead worms, shrimp and other bottom-dwelling organisms in the samples.  (nm – nautical miles)

The internet was a wide-open space, a new frontier.

For the first time, anyone could communicate electronically with anyone else—globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to create a website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in the world using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking anyone else for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce by governments—or big companies, for that matter—indeed appeared to be a thing of the past. “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” Mr Barlow wrote.

Was?!

The Economist summarizes what’s ahead as firms carve up customers in order to price content and shape broadband.

Big companies are building their own digital territories.

Fifteen years after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network, it has entered its second phase: it appears to be balkanizing, torn apart by three separate, but related forces.

It is still too early to say that the internet has fragmented into ‘internets’, but there is a danger that it may splinter….

Here’s a project of Communications Workers of America:

The sooner we pass legislation, the sooner we can be sure everyone can reap the benefits of a fast and open internet. Take a moment to email your member of Congress with this easy-to-use tool, and do your part to bring broadband home.

http://action.cwa-union.org/action/speed-matters-broadband-home

Competition removed any real benefit of deregulation for bank shareholders.

Re-regulation—opposed by most bankers—might be surprisingly good for banks over the long run.

Of course competition was good for borrowers, at least for a while. Lower spreads meant cheaper finance, but not dramatically cheaper. Spreads of 150bps on mortgages levered 15 times is about as profitable as spreads of 40bps levered 60 times… at the risk to the whole banking system.

Re-regulation will a) reduce taxpayer risk, b) increase spreads, and c) reduce excess leverage.

And while we’re at it, what’s to be done with sloppy media? In 2005, TIME was beside itself promoting home ownership. Exposing terrific error in 2010 is no mea culpa.

I have long had this instinct that it is the interests of big corporations that determine government policy in the United States.

Economist James Kwak:

I don’t claim to know how to fix our educational system. But I have an idea about why it hasn’t been fixed, which I’m sure someone can write up as a cute two-period economic model.

Assume that society is divided into the capitalists and everyone else, and the capitalists make investment decisions for society as a whole. Until 1980, if the capitalists wanted to make more money, they needed to invest in technology, which meant they needed an increasingly educated workforce, and therefore they were willing to invest some of their profits (via taxes and public schools) in education. And, according to Goldin and Katz, from 1930 to 1980 the average educational level of Americans increased by 4.7 years.

But since 1980, and especially since 1990, the world has become more open. If the American capitalists want to make more money, they still have to invest in new technology, and they still need an increasingly educated workforce. But now, because of globalization, they can get that workforce anywhere in the world.

And an appropriate roar from the Volatility blog:

We can reply that we spit upon your lies and your claims to the mantle of America. We can refuse them, reject them and renounce them. They’re not citizens. They’re nothing to us.

Even though we know this is not our government, not our system, not our polity, we can, by the act of articulating our demands, lay bare the fraudulence of this whole usurping bastard system.

Since it’s Labor Day, we can start here: We demand of this government a jobs program. What else is this government good for if it doesn’t coordinate the economy to create sufficient jobs for all? What could capitalism be good for if it doesn’t create living wage jobs for all? What are the corporations good for if they don’t create fulfilling jobs for all? What are the rich good for if all their stolen wealth doesn’t trickle down in the form of real jobs for all?

Today the Earth has been fenced off by thieves, and the produce of our hard work is stolen every day. And now, in accordance with the new feudal war upon us, more and more of us, already almost 20% of the work force, are permanently excluded from even subsistence labor, as the jobs themselves are liquidated.

All this is nothing but crime.

“Democrats are bad enough, but Republicans block anything that will help the American people and this economy at every turn”, says Robert Oak.

How does our money become the money in others peoples’ pockets? The Economist hints at data mining. Massive-scale market demography.

If your phone records reveal quick callbacks, you do not worry about calling other people late at night, you tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organized, such as Friday afternoons, you make long calls while the calls you take are generally short, you are a commercial target.

Criminal or enterprise if you see differences, firms are pleased to operate within the ‘spectrum of you’ because there is coin there.

JP Rangaswami:

There’s a new game in town, where the surveillance is all digital. Where everything we do is monitored and recorded and analyzed and used, ostensibly to help us. Ostensibly.

Many of the things we do are recorded, and we know about it.

Many of the things we do are recorded, and we give permission for that recording to take place.

Some of the things we do are recorded with our permission and we don’t understand enough about it.

So we need to know more about all of this.

Image of the infamous Macondo well head waiting for the new Blow Out Preventer.

The new BOP has been installed.

“The next step in the process is to ensure that the new BOP is working properly and then the relief well will be completed at the beginning of next week.”

Gregor Macdonald:

What’s concerning about the pressures on the global food system that have bubbled up in the past five years is that they are accompanied by the crossing of certain thresholds.

While we cannot know for certain how resilient global agricultural will be in responding to either a rise in temperature volatility, or, demand pressure on yields in a time of higher cost energy inputs, the fact that the world has already positioned itself for highly optimized food production is worrisome.

Add to this juncture the fact that regions, at a time when oil is forcing the restoration of distance, are choosing to extend and lengthen distance between themselves and their food supply, and we can start to build a better case for a food problem that is not temporary but structural.