[papabear]

http://entropicjournal.blogspot.com/2009/0...onsumption.html
Set aside conventional wisdom for a moment, and consider a possibility with ramifications so disturbing that America’s leading politicians, economic experts, and media talking heads refuse to acknowledge them in public. To wit: the present economic implosion really WAS caused by inadequate consumption rather than the usual suspects – inflation of the money supply, precipitous suppression of the prime rate, reckless expansion of credit, aggressive promotion of patently untenable mortgages by government, the repackaging of said toxic mortgages by a host of corporate accomplices, the viral spread of risk, astronomical increases in leverage, and computerized hyper-chicanery by our financial “creative class”. This isn’t to say these factors did not complicate or exacerbate matters, but they are not the root cause (indeed, some are symptoms). Rather, it was the beginning of the end of the age of the consumption that made the collapse inevitable.

Yes, despite Herculean efforts to consume faster than ever before, American shoppers just couldn’t keep pace with what was needed for “healthy” economic growth. Thanks to unprecedented levels of productivity, the output of McMansions and Escalades and ARMs overshot the abilities of our seemingly-insatiable markets to absorb them. Was it because too many consumers still cling to antiquated concepts like “frugality” and “modesty” and "thrift"? Certainly not! Having been incontrovertibly discredited by modern economic theory, such incendiary notions have been almost entirely expunged from our national consciousness, and fortunately no one listens to the handful of contrarians who profess them. So we must not let their censorious rantings about the evils of greed distract us from grasping the real catastrophe: in practice if not in spirit, Americans are falling ever further behind in the never-ending race to consume more than enough.

One can be forgiven for suspecting lack of money was the problem. Many years ago, when the economy managed to survive on a restricted diet of savings-based consumption, current levels of spending would have seemed ludicrous. But as mechanization and automation made goods and services cheaper and cheaper, saving before consuming wasn’t good enough to maintain profits or stave off unemployment. Thus, over time, more and more spending money had to be sucked out of the future, and the velocity of money in our globally-interconnected financial nervous system now routinely approaches the speed of light. And America’s creditors were more than willing to fund deficit consumption, right up to the collapse. No, the problem was not one of insufficient money supply.

With plenty of credit available to sop up surging output, why did Americans falter? Could it have been post traumatic shopping disorder? Not enough aisle-time in the day? Were precious hours wasted socializing at Starbucks rather than piling up savings at Target? Did skyrocketing obesity impede the vital flow of human traffic shuffling from parking lots to Big Boxes? Was it carpal tunnel from swiping credit cards? Did renting one more storage locker to stow surfeit stuff not seem worth the adrenalin rush of another 24 hour sale? Was it because auto designers ran out of room for more cup holders?

We may never know what made a once-proud nation of indefatigable shop-till-you-drop shoppers drop out. But even if we did, it’s probably too late to save America now.

[papabear]

http://www.counterpunch.org/browne02192009.html
February 19, 2009

Autopsy for the Celtic Tiger
How Ireland Went Bust
By HARRY BROWNE

DUBLIN.

The unemployment rolls in the Republic of Ireland are growing by more than 30,000 per month. It might not sound like a lot, but on a straight per-capita comparison, in a state of some four million people, that’s more than three times worse than what’s been afflicting the US.

This little country is going to hell in a turbo-charged handbasket.
In a country notorious for self-conscious postcolonial agonising about its essential national character, this precipitous collapse has come both as body-blow and fuel for nonsensical palaver. Pundits who would prefer not to dwell on the mechanics of the fall have wondered if perhaps we’re still the work-shy and law-averse rogues of ancient stereotype, if our brief transformation into the entrepreneurial engine of the new millennium wasn’t a mere chimera.

The rise and fall of the Irish economy have of course had more solid material and ideological causes, little to do with “who we are as a nation”. When I moved to Dublin in 1985 it was still common to hear speculation as to whether this were a First or Third World country. The “open economy” strategy that was launched in the 1960s only bore serious fruit a quarter-century later, when multinational growth industries such as tech and pharmaceuticals saw Ireland as a useful offshore haven, with low taxes, state grants, low rates of unionisation and a reasonably well educated, English-speaking workforce. Often companies cooked the international books to locate their profits here.

Ireland, in truth, has been something like a region of the US economy that had privileged access to European Union markets. In the 1990s, with help from a friendly White House deeply involved in the Northern ‘peace process’, we got rich by selling Intel chips, Dell laptops and Viagra tablets to our EU partners, while still benefitting from EU funds to improve our infrastructure. When that boom levelled out after 2001 we could still thrive on the new sources of cheap labour that the EU’s expansion to the east has offered. Dublin parishes offer masses in Polish; fishy Baltic delicacies hide behind obscure shopfronts; in some pubs vodka is more popular than Guinness. But much of the growth in this latter period, and much of the employment for our eastern friends, was fuelled by a mad property bubble, which saw government, developers and banks collude in a conspiracy that clearly bordered on criminal, and occasionally seems to have crossed the border, in order to build houses, apartments and offices that may never be occupied. Financial “innovation” also played its part: Dublin, with its low and lax approaches to taxation and regulation, became home, at least nominally to nearly a third of the world’s hedge funds.

Fortunes were made, to be sure: it was not unusual to see a house increase by five-fold in price in the space of seven or eight years. But now that the bubble has burst, the most criminal of the banks--Anglo-Irish Bank, which became a Ponzi-like scheme for a golden circle of developers who benefited from all sorts of state patronage and tax breaks--has become property of the State, and billions of public euro have been poured into the larger banks to keep them afloat. This week we learned that Anglo-Irish made “loans” totalling 300 million euro ($380 million) to its friends last year in return for the recipients buying shares in the bank to prop up its share-price. It’s not exactly a conspiracy that will restore faith in the cleverness of our ruling elites, since the share-price nonetheless slid quickly into oblivion. But hey, it wasn’t exactly risky: no one is going to being chased for the money, and now we all own the bank.

Twenty years of neoliberal policies, 15 of them accompanied by rapid economic growth, have left the country with an exceptionally low debt by international standards. For all the good it’s done us: now that Ireland needs to borrow, international lenders are loath to lend, fearing our banks’ unplumbed exposure to toxic property lending. Our government can borrow only at rates 2 per cent higher than what Germany faces, and insuring its loans entails an additional extra expense.

Not that the Irish government is very keen to borrow. In the face of the hope-filled Keynesian examples of Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, the Irish government is nonetheless inclined to cut, cut, cut--except for a few long-planned “development” projects that could aid its beloved and near-broke construction industry. Public sector employees (that includes college teachers like me) are facing pay-cuts of between 6 and 9 per cent. They’re calling it a “pension levy”--don’t even ask about how pension funds are faring here, home of the western world’s worst-performing stock-market over most of the last 18 months--but it applies even to employees without pension entitlements.

Why borrow, the politicians figure, when prosperity here has been founded on, first, multinational (largely US) investment and, then, bubblenomics. These are not only irretrievable and unsustainable, but they ensure that recovery cannot possibly be funded by a few hundred thousand public servants who retain the disposable income to go out to a restaurant. (Actually, many people with the cash to fill the car’s tank are shopping across the border in Northern Ireland, where lower sales tax and a favourable exchange rate with sterling mean there are deals to be found.) Neoliberalism has taken the economy well and truly out of our hands.

What did we get during the good years in exchange for our elites’ Faustian bargain with globalisation? Longer commutes, longer working hours, high prices, higher indirect taxes to make up for the low taxation on corporations and the rich; a lower share of the wealth for workers, as union leaders signed on for a shrinking piece of a growing pie in ‘social partnership’ negotiations that guaranteed industrial peace for the sake of ‘the economy’. And, yes, we did get better food, bigger cars, ever-more-exotic vacations…

A health service that was decimated by cuts in the first wave of Irish neoliberalism after 1987 is still a wreck, despite better funding in the last decade, because it has been dominated by corporate thinking and the government’s desire to help private developers to profit from healthcare provision. One thin thread of silver among the prevailing dark clouds is that much of that private investment is drying up; only the government’s least popular cabinet member, health minister Mary Harney (whose right-wing Progressive Democrat party has evaporated and who serves now as a non-party independent), stands in the way of a more egalitarian approach to health, but crucial years and billions of euro have been lost to her Americanized, profiteering two-tier system.

Another source of schadenfreude is the fate of the Green Party, who jettisoned a few barrels-full of core principles in order to join the government coalition in 2007, before the crisis hit. Their reward this year will be, at least, a spanking from the voters in local and European-parliament elections; the possibility of the government collapsing and that spanking being extended to a sudden general election looks less remote as the public-service unions, in particular, plot an aggressive season of industrial action. The Greens will, of course, be able to point to one piece of good news, of the only sort that seems to matter to them: a reduction in carbon emissions--massive contraction in the economy will do that for you. (The latest estimate is 6 per cent shrinkage in 2009, but no one is confident it won’t be considerably worse.)

Three-and-a-half years ago Tom Friedman came to Dublin for the New York Times to sing the praises of the Celtic Tiger. In an article headlined “The End of the Rainbow”, he wrote that Irish success was, as far as he was concerned, a tribute to the rules of sound globalization, including a little investment in education and social partnership, but mostly “make your corporate taxes low, simple and transparent; actively seek out global companies; open your economy to competition; speak English; keep your fiscal house in order”, that sort of thing.

At the time, in 2005, Friedman chose three particular heroes of the new Ireland to interview: Michael Dell of the US computer giant, Ireland’s largest exporter (last month Dell announced it was shutting its Limerick plant, putting 2,000 people out of work directly and devastating the region); James Jarrett, an Intel vice-president (this week Intel announced it was seeking up to 300 lay-offs at its Kildare ‘campus’); and Mary Harney (who is now desperately hoping for a plum job in the EU to rescue her from her failed programme and the collapse of her party). In a second article, “Follow the Leapin’ Leprechaun”, Friedman praised the way Ireland had made it easier to fire people, and said he was betting on Ireland’s new “social capitalism” against the “welfare capitalism” of France and Germany.

Sorry, Tom, you lose. If you were going to insist on adopting the clichéd and patronizing image of the leprechaun to tell the story of 21st-century Ireland, you might at least have realized that the little people tend to make fools of us mere mortals.

[papabear]

http://www.counterpunch.org/pace02272009.html
Weekend Edition
February 27 - March 1, 2009

Obama and the System
The Economy and the Big Picture
By FELICE PACE

None of the reporting I’ve seen on the “economic crisis” discloses to the American People what is at the core of the crisis. Also generally missing is an historical perspective that gets deeper than facile references to the Great Depression. This article aims to provide the missing analysis and perspective.

In 1948 George Kennan, one of the chief architects of post-war US foreign policy, famously stated the chief object of US policy in the post-war era: "We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. ... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.....” US foreign policy during the last half of the 20th Century conforms closely to Kennan’s statement of that policy’s core object.

Kennan and his colleagues knew that the task of maintaining US control of 50% of the world’s net worth would be neither easy nor permanent. At the end of WW2 productive capacity in Europe, Japan and a good part of the rest of the world was in ruins while US productive capacity – buoyed by wartime government spending - was robust. But Europe and Japan would rebuild and economic aspirations would grow around the world as nation after nation threw off the yoke of European-style colonialism.

Kennan et al knew that eventually Europe, Japan and what were then called “underdeveloped countries” would claim a significant share of the world’s wealth and that this would mean less wealth for the USA. They took their task as delaying this eventuality and minimizing the amount of wealth the US would eventually lose to rebuilding and developing nations. Meanwhile, in order to keep American factories humming, the US government was taking steps to dramatically increase domestic demand, i.e. the affluence of the American People.

The 60s and 70s conditioned Americans to expect a standard of living which Kennen and the ruling class knew could not be maintained over the long haul. They understood that world military dominance could only hope to delay the inevitable time of reckoning.

But military dominance required expenditure of vast sums. The problem became how to make these expenditures and at the same time maintain the consumption level of working Americans. The only solution was massive deficit spending funded by selling bonds overseas. As Europe and Japan reindustrialized we sold them our bonds; more recently emerging economies like China have been persuaded to finance the enterprise. Only by continuing to borrow heavily could the US maintain what was by then called “The American Standards of Living” while America’s share of real wealth was steadily falling. The imperative to hide economic reality from the American People and delay the time of reckoning explains why, rhetoric not withstanding, it is the Republicans who have been the primary deficit spenders in the post-WW2 era.

By the 1980s the chief concern of the ruling elite became making sure that when the reckoning finally came it would be working Americans – not the rich – who would bear the brunt of the adjustment. That required transferring wealth from working people to the rich in advance of the reckoning. This has been the main projects of the ruling class since the election of Ronald Regan.

Meanwhile the rulers have sought ways to minimize world wealth redistribution. The World Bank and IMF play their part but the main tool has been so-called “free trade” deals. If the US and Europe could persuade the rest of the world to allow us to be their banker, we could use banking dominance to maintain a hold on more of the world’s wealth.

This particular project has encountered significant snags. Emerging manufacturing powers lead by Brazil and India have demanded that in exchange for access to their financial markets the US will have to end policies which subsidized agriculture and other industries. These influential industries have resisted an end to subsidies and to date they have been successful for the most part. However, big agriculture believes that the bankers will eventually win and that direct crop subsidies will end. This helps explain why agricultural subsidies are shifting from crops to conservation. But that is another story for another time.

By the first election of Bush 2 the government had a sizable surplus – at least on paper. The rulers had become concerned that the free trade ploy would not work. The drive to assure that the working class – not the rich rulers – would bear the brunt of the income adjustment became urgent. Transforming the federal current accounts surplus into a massive deficit provided a means to this end.

In his February 24th address to Congress President Obama acknowledged that during the Presidency of George W. Bush “a surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future.”

Personal income data suggests that the wealth transfer project of the ruling class has been spectacularly successful. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, income for the bottom half of American households rose six percent since 1979 but, through 2005, the income of the top one percent skyrocketed by 228 percent. The Wall Street Journal reports that the top .01% of the population, or 14,000 families, hold 22.2% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 90%, or over 133 million families, have just 4%.

While the income and wealth gap between rich rulers and working Americans continued during the Clinton, Bush 1 and Reagan Administration, wealth transfer during the eight years of the Bush 2 presidency has been unprecedented in scope and audacity.

The so-called “mortgage crisis” represents some of the chickens coming home to roost. A good part of the consumption that was maintained by borrowing went into the housing market. The result was massively inflated prices.

The credit crisis which the mortgage crisis triggered is also an aspect of the reckoning. Fortunately for the ruling class, they had already used the two Bush, Clinton and Reagan Presidencies to make sure that the loss of wealth associated with the credit adjustment is born disproportionately by workers as opposed to rulers. True to form, however, the rulers’ greed caused them to overreach. Faced with the ascendancy of a new president whose allegiance to the ruling class was not fully known, they could not refrain from one more session at the public trough.

That feeding is known as the Bank Bailout. According to congressional investigators, the “preferred stock” which the government received from banks was worth only 69% of payments the banks received at the time transactions were finalized. This represents a transfer of $78 billion from taxpayers to rich bank owners. The market value of the preferred stock has since declined further.

That is where we are today.

Many Americans who voted for President Obama expect him to bring real change to America. These voters want economic as well as political justice. Early Obama Administration actions, however, are mixed in this regard. While he has indicated he will raise taxes on the rich, the President has ignored calls for a public audit of banks receiving bailout funds. Even the push for limits on “executive compensation” appears to be largely rhetorical. The bonus system, which encourages speculation by giving managers massive payouts when they take unwise risks, will apparently not be changed. The Obama Administration’s proposal for the continuing bailout is full of loopholes through which one could pilot a fleet of big new yachts.

If the voters had been less mesmerized by Barack Obama’s rhetoric they would have realized that the changes he favors are designed to buoy the existing economic system rather than to fundamentally reform it. The President subscribes to the proposition that these financial institutions are “too big to fail.” A real reformer would have concluded that institutions which are too big to fail need to be broken up.

Teddy Roosevelt harnessed the political tsunami of the Progressive Era to break up the trusts. The ruling class has worked tirelessly since then to build them back – albeit in new forms. We need TDR-type trust busting now while the ruling class is weakened and working Americans are impatient for change.

Will Barack Obama be our Teddy Roosevelt? So far the indications are that he will not.

[papabear]

http://www.groovygreen.com/groove/?p=2223
The 4 Day Work Week
By Aaron Newton in Green Living, How To | September 20, 2007

The notion of our standard work week here in America has remained largely the same since 1938. That was the year the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, standardizing the eight hour work day and the 40 hour work week. Each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday workers all over the country wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to work. But the notion that the majority of the workforce should keep these hours is based on nothing more than an idea put forth but the Federal government almost 70 years ago. To be sure it was an improvement in the lives of many Americans who were at the time forced to work 10+ hours a day, sometimes 6 days of the week. So a 40 hour work week was seen as an upgrade in the lives of many of U.S. citizens. 8 is a nice round number; one third of each 24 hour day. In theory it leaves 8 hours for sleep and 8 hours for other activities like eating, bathing, raising children and enjoying life. But the notion that we should work for 5 of these days in a row before taking 2 for ourselves is, as best I can tell, rather arbitrary.


The idea of a shorter work week is not a new one to anyone old enough to have lived through the energy shocks of the 1970’s. It should be fairly obvious to anyone interested in conserving oil that reducing the number of daily commutes per week would reduce the overall demand for oil. There are about 133 million workers in America. Around 80% of them get to work by driving alone in a car. The average commute covers about 16 miles each way. So let’s stop and do some math:

133,000,000 workers X 80% who drive alone = 106,400,000 single driver commuter cars each day.

106,400,000 X 32 miles round trip = 3,404,800,000 miles driven to work each day

3,404,800,000 / 21 mpg (average fuel efficiency) = 162,133,333 gallons of gasoline each day

Each barrel of crude oil produces, on average, 19.5 gallons of gas. (It is important to note that other products like kerosene and asphalt are produced from that same barrel)

162,133,333 / 19.5 = 8,314,530 barrels of oil each day.

What this shows is the impact a 4 day work week could have on crude oil imports. I’m talking about a 40% reduction in the amount of oil we need Monday through Friday simply by rearranging our work week. No wonder this idea was utilized in the 70’s.

But the clear fact that a 4 day work week would save such a precious non-renewable resource is just the first of 16 reasons why I think it’s time to revive the idea of reducing the numbers of days we work each week.

Reason #2 The 4 Day Work Week would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other air pollutants.

As you pull out of your driveway on your way to work your automobile has already begun to emit Carbon Monoxide, Carbon Dioxide, Sulphur Dioxide, Nitrogen Oxides, Hydrocarbons, Ozone, particulates, Lead and Chlorofluorcarbons. Some of these compounds are responsible for the greenhouse effect that is warming our planet and throwing our global climate system into increasing instability. Others of them contribute to air pollution that causes everything from dramatically rising rates of childhood asthma to cancers, heart disease and respiratory illnesses. Sometimes I drive to work too, so don’t think the whole thing is your fault. But it’s true that we’re playing fast and loose with our ecosystem and poisoning ourselves with our autos. 60 – 70% of urban air pollution is caused by cars. Taking 20% of them off the roads during the most heavily traveled time of the day would obviously reduce the overall amount of pollutants produced by our autos. And this is key, if a worker transitions to a 4 Day Work Week and then spends all day off driving around when he or she would have be at work, then the savings in terms of fuel and pollution will be lost. This is not a plan to provide everyone with more time to drive around but a plan to bring people back into their homes and their local communities. It’s an effort to give them more time with family, more time to exercise, more time to write the great American novel or learn to keep bees, or get another degree, or start a garden.

Reason #3 The 4 Day Work Week would reduce workers exposure to pollutants.

A recent study by the California EPA says “50% of a person’s daily exposure to ultra fine particles (the particles linked to cardiovascular disease and respiratory illnesses) can occur during a commute.” A report by the Clean Air Task Force in 2007 found diesel particle levels were between 4 to 8 times higher in commute vehicles than in the surrounding air. It makes sense when you think about it. The pollution coming from the tailpipe of a vehicle is mostly likely to affect you while you’re sitting directly behind it, especially if you’re stuck in slow moving traffic where the concentrations of such particles can build up.

Reason #4 The 4 Day Work Week would mean less traffic congestion.

Rush hour exists because everyone needs to get to work at about the same time. Anyone who’s lived in a city of size can tell you that early in the morning and late in the afternoon the roads fill up. The average 16 mile commutes takes 26 minutes each way. That’s 52 minutes a day traveling at roughly 35 miles per hour. Imagine if 1/5 of the cars suddenly disappeared? If the work week was staggered so that 1/5 of all workers took a different day off, the U.S. commuter would see a 20% reduction in rush hour congestion without building a single new road. Which leads nicely to the next reason…

Reason #5 The 4 Day Work Week would reduce money spent on new road construction and existing road maintenance.

With 1/5 few cars making the commute each day, fewer new road projects would be necessary and existing roads would last longer with less maintenance. This is not to say that we shouldn’t take advantage of this cost savings to invest in alternative transportation systems. In fact it’s the opposite. This could be a gift to the tax payer who would receive new and better options for travel without any rise in taxes.

Reason #6 The 4 Day Work Week would result in a reduction in personal expenses.

From www.ridetowork.org,

“2002 annual household private vehicle expense is $7,371. This is divided into $3,665 for vehicle purchases, $1,235 for gas and oil and $2,471 for insurance and misc.”

If workers used there cars 20% less often to drive to work, they would see a reduction in the frequency of oil changes, tune ups and the purchase of new tires just to name a few savings. The above numbers also reflect the price of gasoline in 2002. We all know it has increase since then and will continue to increase now that global oil production has peaked. Remember those 162,133,333 gallons of gas we’re going to save?

162,133,333 X $2.75 per gallon = $445,866,665.00

This would save US workers a lot of money! And because our cars would be driven less frequently, they wouldn’t need to be replaced as often. That’s not to say that would shouldn’t try to replace inefficient older cars with more efficient new ones, but this could give the auto manufactures time to wake up to the global peak in oil production and make changes in the types of vehicles they offer. It could also give communities time to respond with planning strategies that favor other types of transportation including walking, biking and mass transit.

Reason #7 The 4 Day Work Week would mean fewer auto accidents each year.

I don’t have statistics on the number of automobile related deaths and injuries that occur specifically during rush hour but almost every radio station on the dial offers a regular update of car crashes throughout each morning and evening commute. It seems safe to assume that fewer cars on the road during those periods of time would result in fewer accidents and the injuries that result from them.

Reason #8 The 4 Day Work Week would mean less time spent in VSC or Voluntary Solitary Confinement

Now some people tell me the time they spend alone in their car is relaxing. Personally I think if that’s true then what those people are really enjoying is time alone on uncongested roads. Rush hour on a busy street is not relaxing. Personal time away from other people can be a positive experience. But we don’t have to spend our time alone in a metal box burning nonrenewable resources that heat the planet. If less time was spent commuting each week, people would have more time for themselves to enjoy, even if they wanted to enjoy that time alone. It seems to me that as a nation we are experiencing an epidemic of disconnect. Ever see those people early in the morning on their way to work at 6:30am talking on their cell phones? Just who are they talking to? Maybe some of them are already working (before even arriving at work) but I bet many of them are talking to other friends and family who are, quite possibly, out in traffic too. How many of you have ever made a cell phone call because you were bored or lonely in your car? I have friends who will call me and announce that’s what they’re doing, calling me to get some company. The car is an insulator that keeps us from interacting and as naturally social creatures this isn’t a good practice. Less time spent in cars can mean more time spent with other human beings living life.

Reason #9 The 4 Day Work Week would mean a reduction in absenteeism

A recent survey found that 43% of respondents admitted to playing hooky last year. That is they stayed home from work even though they weren’t sick. Another day scheduled during the week to address the needs and wants of workers would give people more time to complete all sorts of activities. It could keep them from taking their own day off. It could also give people a day to schedule appointments like medical, dental, tax, attorney or other. A Four Day Work Week would mean fewer random interruptions when workers must leave the office to take care of these matters. Even the occasional summer day spent hiking with a child sounds like a good national exercise to me.

Reason #10 The 4 Day Work Week would increase productivity

Yes I said increase productivity.

In 1930 famed cereal maker W.K. Kellog had this to say about his decision to decrease his companies work week from 40 to 30 hours.

The efficiency and morale of our employees is so increased, the accident and insurance rates are so improved, and the unit cost of production is so lowered that we can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.

Peak oil and climate change could make for turbulent business waters ahead. This country needs more business leaders willing to navigate these waters not by burdening their workforce with limitations or restrictions but with a willingness to try new strategies. Ideas such as this one should be strongly considered by corporate America or maybe it’s time for the Federal government to revisit this issue through law. New ways of working really could benefit both businesses and employees. It’s important in the time ahead not to simply saddle the workers of America with the rising costs of energy and ecological destruction.

There are lots options concerning the number of hours a 4 Day Work Week could contain. Employees could work 10 hours a day and keep a 40 hour work week. Or they could simply eliminate an entire day and drop down to a 32 hour work week. In between is the idea of working 4 days a week, 9 hours a day. But regardless of how many hours people work, the important part to remember is that most tasks are going to get accomplished each week just as they did before. A recent survey by salary.com of over 10,000 American workers revealed that on average, we waste more than 2 hours each day surfing the web or making phone calls to friends. Might these distractions be activities that workers must be willing to trade for an entire extra day off to spend surfing on the Internet? I say that tongue in cheek as there are better ways to spend your new day off but the point is that the inbox is never empty and that important tasks could probably be completed in a shorter work week if time spent at work was all about work. A shorter work week would sharpen this focus and make the workplace more productive.

Reason #11 The 4 Day Work Week would give us more time for family

60% of Americans say they do not have enough time for family. To be sure we could change that statement to read, make time for family, because time is after all what you make it. It’s important to note that we work more hours than any other nation on the planet. But why? Why do we work? I think this question is at the heart of support for a shorter work week. We work so we can support our families right? But is more money and the always increasing amount of stuff that money buys really supporting our families? We have to pay bills but would your son rather have you at home or have a new flat screen television? 7 out of 10 teenage pregnancies are conceived at the home of the young girl between the hours of 3pm and 5pm. It is my view that what might be in my daughter’s best interest isn’t me working 50 hours a week so I can buy her a sweet sixteen car. It might be spending more time at home with my daughter talking to her about her future. A shorter work week would give this nation an opportunity to spend more time at home with our families.

Reason #12 The 4 Day Work Week would decrease labor costs

Long work hours increase the worker turnover rate which leads to more money spent on acquiring and training new employees. Employees who have almost as many days to spend on their own as days they spend working will be much happier and more loyal. These are employees who will work harder and stay longer at any given company.

Reason #13 The 4 Day Work Week would decrease operational costs

Depending on just how a company chooses to structure its 4 Day Work Week, any number of operational costs could be reduced. The energy savings from the climate control of unoccupied buildings could be enormous. Fewer security or maintenance issues could result from having a smaller number of people in the office each day. A shorter work week could mean more infrequent cleanings and less information technology service calls.

Reason #14 The 4 Day Work Week would mean a reduction in the cost of childcare

If a two parent household were to switch to a 4 Day Work Week then their childcare costs could be reduced by 40%. Childcare ranges in cost depending on the type care and the specific location in which a worker lives. Estimates range from $3,000 to $15,000 annually per child. A family spending $5,000 who could reduce the number of days their child is in care from 5 days to 3 could save $2,000 a year. This also means more of the child’s time spent with parents which fosters stronger families. It is important to note here that childcare that exceeds the normal 8 hour work day is more expensive. If both parents switched to 10 hour work days their childcare costs might not decrease.

Reason #15 The 4 Day Work Week would provide time for a transition into the informal economy

There are a lot of reasons why consumer culture is bad for us. It focuses not on people and their relationships to one another but instead on things, on stuff, on cheap plastic crap from Mal-Wart. It’s worth pointing out that not only is our habit of consuming mass quantities of junk toxifying our lives and our environment with all sorts of chemicals and pollution, it’s also using up a number of nonrenewable resources at an alarming rate. It seems reasonable to assume that we can’t continue on this ride of infinite growth for a whole lot longer. The coming era will be one of a decline in the availability of all sorts of resources we take for granted right now. Learning how to reshape and relocalize our lives will be an immense effort for both communities and the individuals living in them. Having an extra day each week to begin this process could prove invaluable. Need time to learn how to cook or garden? Have you always wanted to start a new cottage industry business from home? Maybe you’d like to be more activity in volunteer efforts in your community to address peak oil and climate change. This extra day could be our ticket as a nation to scaling back on our consumption while we reconnect to local life.

Reason #16 The 4 Day Work Week feels great!

I write this proposal not as an academic making a theoretical suggestion but as a participant in the new 4 Day Work Week movement. At the beginning of 2007 I renegotiated my contract with my employer and started staying home on Fridays. I now have more than a two day speed bump on the highway of American employment. I get to enjoy almost as many days at home each week as I spend working at my job. And it feels wonderful. Since making the change I have even taken a new job and was still able to continue with my shorter work week. 25% of U.S. companies already have some sort of policy towards alternative work schedules.

Telecommuting, cell phones and the Internet are just some of the other tools that can offer more flexibility to the outdated idea that we should all be at the office from 8 to 5 on Monday through Friday. I can tell you from experience that this feels great. I am able to spend time on projects that are important to me. I get to see my young daughter more. Lately it’s been a Friday bike ride together. And I have a chance to share my ideas with more time to write proposals like this one.

Changes require action. Our nation is at a point where we need change. Not politicians talking about change but an actual change in the way we live our lives. The 4 Day Work Week could be a catalyst for a change from a nation that lives to work into a nation that works to live. Come join me won’t you?

[papabear]

The Happy Minimalist by Peter Lawrence

[papabear]

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/48936

As you go out into the world…
by Sharon Astyk


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A reader of mine emailed me, informing me that she had been asked to do the commencement address at the college where she is employed, and then asked me what I would say, given the opportunity to address a graduating class. She also asked me to ask my readers what they would advise someone to tell a graduating class, and so, I have written my own commencement address here, and I invite you to either write one yourself and link to it, or offer suggestions in comments on the salient points to raise.

I admit, I feel particularly unqualified to do so, since not only have I never delivered a commencement address, but I’ve never actually listened carefully to one. I skipped both my college and Masters commencements, attending only the departmental degree ceremonies. I did sit through my husband’s Doctoral graduation, but I was mostly involved in attending to 3 month old Eli at the time, and remember little of it, although I did enjoy and at least partly understand the Latin address. I attended my high school graduation, but have no memory whatsoever of anything that was said. So I am perhaps the last person in the world who should give one. Perhaps it is just me, but my first reaction to this request was ”does anyone actually listen to these things?” And yet, the thought that I might be ignored has never stopped me yet. So here goes.


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It is, I believe, conventional at college graduations to begin from the premise that those graduating are about to embark upon life in the “real” world - a venture that is supposed to be radically different than their carefree college years. The assumption is that the institution in question has given you what you need to embark upon a meaningful and productive future - you are wiser than when you came in, and perhaps more ethical, certainly fitted to the world of work. Now, I have been chosen to give you your very last bit of wisdom, something to carry with you into the future. So here is the sum total of that wisdom

“Everything you have been taught to expect is wrong.”

Unfortunately, that isn’t a joke. You have been taken in by a host of assumptions that are not true, and if you walk out of here believing what you have been told and taught over the last four years, you will leave woefully unprepared for you. The consolation, I can offer you, however, is that while what you have been taught to expect is wrong, the things you have actually learned may be of more use than you think.

The first bad assumption here is that is that college is not the real world of work - it is true that those of you supported in totality by your parents are perhaps living a dream you will never experience again. But how many of you fall in that category? Most of you will have taken out substantial student loans, and worked many hours during summers and school years supporting your educational dream, in addition to whatever attention you gave your school work. For most of you, the real world will not be new because it involves hard work. In fact, what may be newest about it is the absence of such work.

In fact, even those who were lucky enough to have their way paid by others have probably worked hard all their lives. During your childhood, you were told to work hard at school, so you could go to a good college. And you did. You were told to work hard at your extra-curricular activities - soccer and violin, newspaper writing and dance are no longer pleasures, they are jobs for children. After school and during summers in your teenage years, you were told to work hard to save for college, ensure the right appearance, or make sure you had a car to transport you to your job.

In college, you were told to work hard to get a good job. Moreover, many of you were on workstudy or required to support your hobbies, or simply seeking betterment through internships and other unpaid work, so you worked even harder. Now, you have been told you will have the opportunity to get a starter job, which, if you work hard, will lead to another job, which, with luck will eventually lead to 45 years of employment and hard work, after which you can retire.

The problem with this model, of course, is that there is no job waiting for you. You probably know this already, and have already been making the rounds of job fairs and sending out resumes. But there are 2.1 million of you, and unless you’ve come out with a nursing or mining degree, odds are your contribution is not much needed. Some of you will take from this the lesson that you should go to graduate school, take out more loans and work harder to get a still better job.

Now I came out of college into a recession in 1994 as well, and going to graduate school was a time honored method of avoiding the “real world” for a while, one I chose myself. But what is different about this economic crisis is that it is an expression of a larger change - that is, the shift away from the global economy and affluent society that you were trained for. The economy you were trained to serve (and you were trained to serve it, the economy was not designed to serve you) does not really exist - even before the economic collapse of global trade, high energy prices were ending globalization. Even before the current crisis, it was not clear how a ”service economy” could exist in perpetuity without creating anything, or how indebted a nation could become before a crisis emerged.. The job you have trained for is very likely not to exist fairly soon into your career as a working person, while the retirement dangled at the end is almost certainly not going to exist.

In some ways, eventually, I think you may find this to be a blessing. Even were the retirement you were promised likely to come, subsidized by the government (and I suspect it is quite unlikely, actually), is it really worth it to have worked so very hard for 60+ years, only to be promised a fixed income, golf and the exclusive company of your now aged peers? That is, what you are being offered right now - a period of impoverished leisure, may be a better deal - but we will come back to that. The problem, of course, is that you may feel you have no option of indulging that leisure.

Most of you have entered into an economic contract for this education you recieved that amounts to debt slavery - you must work to pay it off. In many cases, the payment period covers the period in which you hoped to make some money, buy a house, find a mate and settle down into what leisure and pleasure your working life permitted. This was possible, despite heavy debts, in an era where credit was freely given - unfortunately, you do not come of age in that era. It will be difficult for you to pay your student loans, more difficult still to get a house, even if you credit rating isn’t trashed by said loans, and more difficult still to establish a household and family with two of you working to pay down your respective and collective debts.

I hope someone did explain to you before you took out your loans that student loans were the one form of debt that cannot be vacated by bankruptcy, and to which you can be perpetually enchained - they can and will garnish your wages, they can and will double, triple or quadruple your debt due to periods of personal insolvency. I do hope that someone told you how high a price you are paying for your education.

That is not to say that you have learned nothing of value - on the contrary, while college is an extremely expensive way of learning these things, you may well have learned some extremely useful things. It would be a mistake, seeing the high price, to imagine you got nothing for it.

Most obviously, I would hope that you have learned something that gave you pleasure, excited your mind, made you think critically or argue. The poetry and art, the music and mathematics, the history and ethics that you may have derived now and again from your classes remain in your head as long as you choose to keep them there. The odds are good that much of your working life will involve doing very dull things - having something to think about while you are doing them is enormously valuable.

But most of the lessons that you probably learned in college aren’t ones taught by your Professors. For example, you learned how to live closely with others, and share resources with them. This is an important lesson, since odds are very good that you will either share a small space with several housemates as you eke out your living, or that you will move back in with parents or other family in order to make ends meet. The skill of living closely with others, of deriving happiness from late night conversation and shared work in the kitchen, of taking turns to use the bathroom will stand you in excellent stead.

So too will making the food last, or finding more food when the meal points don’t meet the end of the month. Tasty things to do with ramen noodles, the making of a pot of soup to feed 15 hungry people, and the ability to scavenge will be of the utmost use. So will a willingness to drink cheap beer and to laugh about one’s circumstances.

So too will be contentment with the lot of a college student - building cinderblock bookcases, and picking furniture out of dumpsters is a useful skill. Insulating windows with old bits of bubble wrap, busking, intermittent work and sharing resources are useful skills. These are real, “real world” skills. It is a pity that 20, 50, 80K in debt was required for you to master them, but there is no point understating one’s gains.

If these constitute the beginnings of your skill set, it must be admitted - and perhaps best we admit it here, while your deans and college presidents, professors and administrators are present to answer your queries on this subject - much of what you need to know no one has taught you at all.

For example, the odds are good that your education has been for a globalized and parochial world, rather than a local and international one. By this I mean that you have been taught that America is unique and special - even if you have received critiques of this worldview, you have most likely been taught that it is specially invulnerable to hardship. You have also been taught that your work will enable the cause of a globalization that has already failed, a globalization that has also done enormous harm. Unfortunately, unless you are lucky, you have also never been taught to understand the world order without America fully at its center. You are not prepared for the international realities of energy depletion and climate change, and the language of the last two decades, in which you have been immersed, has placed America in the position of the sun, with the rest of the nations revolving around it. While some of you have managed to see more than this, many have not, and thus the implications of our global predicament are likely to be startling and painful.

You have been unfitted for a local future. The assumption has been from the moment of your birth that you will grow up and go away - away from your parents, away from your hometown, towards those globalized jobs, towards affluence. Sense of place, family ties - these are all assumed to be transient, and a good future is one in which you do not return home in any sense. Growing up, you have been taught, is about going out and away, about abjuring family ties, rather than supporting them. To go home, to support ties is to be perpetually adolescent, rather than mature, to be the butt of jokes about still living in your parents’ basement. Contempt for the local and familial has pushed you to disregard the real possibilities of returning to places where you in some measure belong, and where there are people you can throw your lot in with. At a minimum, you should decline to be ashamed to do so.

Even more derided is the idea of producing something useful - the thought that your work should be good and useful. Instead, you’ve grown up in the most affluent, and money-centered society in human history, where no other value system has had a hope of penetrating. You grew up in a world where shopping and wealth were everything, and now, that cannot be any more, and you would be less than human if you were not frustrated. But consider the merits of replacing consumption with production, bad work with good, an economy that serves your interests rather than an economy that does not. Consider the pleasures of actually making and doing something that matters in the world.

You may not know how to go about this. Few of you will have had Professors who spoke of practical applications for your knowlege. Few of you will have learned manual skills of any kind, except by accident. Even fewer will have learned the uses of unmediated experience. Few of you when you learned of Shakespeare’s eglantine will have wondered what it smelled like, or sought to see and touch an Eglantine rose. Few of you will have learned to identify the stars, not through a telescope, but through the naked eye, for pleasure or knowledge. Mediated experience is the norm - mediated through electronics, through books, through teachers, through drugs. Because you have only rarely known real leisure - even your play was work, because you have rarely known unstructured time, this transition to unmediated experience is likely to be shocking, scary, and painful.

The world is about to become radically less mediated. The lures of hard work in the interest of a good job and a someday leisure are likely to become less attractive, when the work is dull, the respite never comes and the dream of affluence is lost. The world is likely to require more people who can produce things, grow them, tend them, repair them. The world is likely to require more community, more extended family, more going home and more staying there.

My suggestion, then, would be to seek out unmediated experiences. Put a seed in some dirt, and watch it grow. Harvest something and eat it. Take a hammer and a nail and make something you need. Ask a friend to help you, rather than hiring someone. Share resources rather than purchasing anything. Talk to someone rather than texting them. Sit down with those you love - family or friends, and talk about how you can make use of your new time, your new delight in life unmediated, your hopes for the future in ways that are imaginative and human - how could you work together.

You began your lives with a set of promises that are likely to be unfulfilled. First, you were told to work hard, for an end that will not come. Then you were told your future would operate through devices, that direct contact was not needed. You were told that America was immune from dangers it now faces. You were told that the skills you picked up by accident were less valuable than the ones that you paid dearly for. All these things were wrong. I wish I could offer you better than this, but better the truth today than later.

But here is the reward. Instead of dreaming of someday leisure, you will be poorer longer, but you will have leisure sooner - enjoy it, use it, do good things with it. Instead of dreaming of serving the global economy, you have a chance to serve you friends and neighbors and people you love in communities. Instead of further and deeper levels of mediation, if you can get past the scariness of it, you have a chance the deep pleasures of unmediated contact with the world - with other people, with dirt, with tools, with animals, with life itself. You may yet have a chance to free yourself from your wage slavery - as more and more people struggle with debts that they cannot pay, solutions must be found, and combining your energies with others in the same boat gives you the power to negotiate a decent future for yourself.

Most of all, the pleasure that comes with pain of this shift is this - you have now the chance to ask, for perhaps the first time in your whole history “what do I actually care about” and do it. That is, it is very, very hard to live in the world and sort out one’s idealism from the place that the whole larger world has made for you. It was given to you to be a cog in a larger economic machine. But perhaps fortunately, the machine has broken, for most of you, your spot is no longer available. And this is a kind of freedom that few older adults have ever had - yes, we came of age in a world of growth and affluence, but ask your baby boomer parents whether even their attempts to say no were ever fully heeded - they may have dropped out for a short while, but they were drawn back, the economy could not spare them.

The world, the economy, the government, our industry, corporations, all of them are quite insistent that you are here for them. But they have no place for you, no matter how loudly they declare that it remains true. And in that is a kind of release - because if there is no place, you might begin to realize that you were never here for them, that you are not here to serve the economy, but perhaps your people, or your chosen place, or your chosen G-d, if you have one.

And in the best sense, you are here to serve yourself. By this I do not mean the endless chasing of pleasure, or living outside ethical guidelines. I simply mean that you now have a small measure of choice - not the choice of whether you will be affluent or not, not whether you will live in a world of declining resources - but you can choose how you view the world you walk into. You can choose what it means that you have this time, this chance, these seeds, this hope. You can choose who and what you will serve and support. It is not what you were promised, and for that, I am sorry - or maybe I’m not, because what you were promised wasn’t what it seemed. But it is what you have, and you have it right now, with both hands, and that is something. I wish for you that you hold on tight and go forward, in this new, this real world.

Sharon

[papabear]

http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=691
May 31, 2009

There is something problematic with advocating a 30-hour work week at the beginning of the 21st century: a 30 hour week is not short enough!


by Don Fitz

With millions of jobs lost during the first part of 2009, who is calling for a shorter work week to spread the work around? Not the Republicans. Not even the Democrats. But why is there nary a peep from unions?

In the US, auto sets the pace for organized labor. The only discussion at the top levels of the UAW (United Auto Workers) is how quickly the gains won during the last 50 years can be given back. Does the UAW have no memory of the 1930s and 40s when a shorter work week was at center of organizing demands?

The gross domestic product (GDP) is plummeting at the same time that jobs are disappearing. Why should there be any connection between the two? If society produces 10% less, why don’t we all just work 10% less? Didn’t things work like that for hundreds of thousands of years of human existence? When people figured out easier ways to get what they needed, they spent less time doing it.

It’s called “leisure.” Leisure is essential for a democratic society involving people in all aspects of self-government. Instead of working frenetically to produce “stuff” that we don’t have the time to enjoy, wouldn’t we be better off with less “stuff” and more time of our own? Research repeatedly shows that, once important needs are met, additional belongings bring no additional happiness. [1] Yet work is strongly related to stress. [2]

A labor-environment connection?

It’s more than stress to the human nervous system. Manufacturing too much stuff stresses every aspect of the environment. The voracious appetite of corporate growth destroys homes of the wolf and bear in North America. Swiftly disappearing are the last refuges of chimpanzees in Africa and orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra. Mangrove forests give way to beach resorts as long line fishing kills 100 sea animals for every fish eaten by a human.

Vastly more creatures fall prey to the 80-100,000 chemicals spewed into the air, water and land. Countless molecules of chlorine and fluorine go into pesticides and plastics that destroy immune and reproductive systems. Elemental structures of lead, mercury and, of course, radioactive particles are Thanatos to living systems.

The most frequent building block of toxins is oil. With more than 40 hours of labor contained in each gallon, oil is the closest thing to free energy that humanity has ever discovered. [3] A substance that should be used sparingly so that many future generations could use if for medical and other essential products, oil is being squandered at an exponential rate by a corporate culture determined that its descendants will despise it.

The only way that corporate America knows to shield itself from loathing by its progeny is working overtime to prevent those generations from existing. As climate change changes from “if/when” to “How rapidly is it increasing?” corporations befuddle our senses with a dazzling array of green gadgets, each of which pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere during its manufacture and distribution.

Nevertheless, corporate media propagandizes non-stop that we must be unhappy from the economic downturn and pray for a quick return to the normal rate of planetary extermination. So it’s time to ask why another set of voices is not demanding a shorter work week: Why do the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Federation and a host of other Washington lobby groups fail to point out that an economic slowdown with a fair distribution of jobs would be the treatment of choice for a sick environment?

Centuries of struggle for the working day

Some of the most insightful writing on hours of labor is in Karl Marx’s Capital. While most of it reflects the analytical style of 19th century economic writing, Chapter X on “The Working-Day” reveals Marx’s passionate outrage at what long hours do to workers’ health. The problem started as infant capitalism found the hours of labor under feudalism to be insufficient to satisfy its urges for expansion.

In response to a shortage of labor due to the plague, England’s 1349 “Statute of Laborers” sought to ensure that the working day was sufficiently long. An Elizabethan statute of 1562 lengthened the working day by reducing the time for meals. Emphasizing that it took capitalism centuries to lengthen the working day to 12 hours, Marx noted that one of the milestones was the elimination of church holidays by Protestantism. [4]

By the nineteenth century, some had work weeks of 15 hours per day for 6 days per week plus 8-10 hours on Sunday. [5] At the same time that many were organizing to reduce their hours to 12 per day, the Chartist movement made the 10 hour day “their political, election cry.” [6, 7]

The high point of US labor organizing during the 19th century was on May 1, 1886 when 300,000 workers went on strike for the eight hour day. The brutal repression that came down in Chicago with the Haymarket arrests and executions sparked the international celebration of May Day. [8]

In his classic description of the fervor for an eight hour day that began in 1884 and increased in pitch through 1886, Jeremy Brecher made observations that are still relevant.

First, the leadership of the dominant labor organization of the day, the Knights of Labor, attempted to put brakes on the 8-hour movement. It was often the grassroots that pushed forward, dragging the leaders behind them in city after city.

Second, the 1886 strike wave, far more than previous labor actions, “became above all strikes for power.” [9] The 1886 demands were for control over work hours, hiring and firing, and the organization of work.

Third, and most important, the struggle for the 8-hour day did not wait until the 10-hour day had been won. Unbelievably long hours were still common. Successful strikes meant that, in many industries, workers “of all kinds have reduced their hours of labor from 15 to 12 and 10.” [10] Workers who only a few years earlier had 12-15 hour per day jobs were now demanding the 8-hour day. Marx similarly wrote that the Chartist movement for the 10 hour day was popular amongst those with a work week of up to 100 hours.

Does anyone work for less than 40 hours?

While interviewing Spanish longshoremen in 1989, I spent hours talking to Juan Madrid in Barcelona. Every summer he and his wife had the problem of making sure that they had the same month for vacation. “Do American workers really get off less than a month?” he asked me incredulously.

“Two weeks is the most common; some only get one week; and, many get no paid vacation at all,” I let him know. Factoring in longer vacations, he had an average work week considerably shorter than the typical US worker. This is the rule, and not the exception, in Europe.

Reducing the work week below 40 hours has preoccupied many labor organizations. In the 1930s, the American Federation of Labor lobbied for a 6-hour day. [11] In 1990 BMWs plant in Regensburg adopted a 36 hour week. German Volkswagen employees accepted a 10% pay cut to achieve a 28.8 hour work week. The Digital corporation had 530 employees who opted for a 4-day week with a 7% pay cut so that 90 jobs could be saved. [12]

Victories for shorter work weeks may only be temporary. Tim Kaminski told me that he loved the extra free time he gained from winning a 7-hour day (with no loss in pay) at the St. Louis Chrysler minivan plant in 1992. But the contract stipulated that it would last only until another plant reopened, which happened two years later. [13]

It is not unknown for politicians to champion the cause of fewer hours. Before joining the Supreme Court, as a US Senator Hugo Black introduced legislation for a 30 hour work week in 1933. [14] More recently, the French Senate looked into a 33-hour week. [15]

One of the least known flirtations with the 30-hour work week was by the cereal giant, W.K. Kellogg Company. In 1930, the company announced that most of its 1500 employees would go from an 8-hour to a 6-hour work day, which would provide 300 new jobs in Battle Creek. Though the shorter work week involved a pay cut, the overwhelming majority of workers preferred having increased leisure time to spend with their families and community. [16]

New managers who began running Kellogg had no enthusiasm for the shorter work day. They polled workers in 1946 and found that 77% of men and 87% of women would choose a 30-hour week even if it meant lower wages. Disappointed, management began examining which work groups liked money more than leisure and began offering the 40-hour week on a department-by-department basis.

How long did it take them to get rid of the 30-hour week? Almost 40 years! The desire to have more time to themselves was so strong that it was not until 1985 that Kellogg was able to eliminate the 30-hour work week in the last department.

The experience at Kellogg indicates that it is absolutely false to say that all workers all of the time crave more stuff and will sacrifice anything to get it. Karl Marx made a similar observation when writing about “The Working-Day.” Quoting results of a poll of those who had labored excruciating hours at a Lancashire factory, “They would much prefer working 10 hours for less wages…” [17]

Why would any progressive criticize a 30 hour work week?

Despite all of this, there is something problematic with advocating a 30-hour work week at the beginning of the 21st century: a 30 hour week is not short enough! There is mushrooming unemployment amidst mountains of useless products. An hour of labor now produces more goods than has ever been the case in the history of humanity. Combining these means that there is no reason for anyone to work more than 20 hours per week.

Every year, clever folks figure out how to churn out more stuff with fewer hours of labor. Jeffrey Kaplan observed that “By 1991, the amount for goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948.” [18] This was a doubling of labor productivity in only 43 years. Jon Bekken calculates a more rapid rate: “Automation and other innovations result in our productivity (output per work hour) doubling every 25 years or so.” [19]

In other words, the amount that people produce during an hour of labor doubles every 33 years [give or take 10 years]. We have the ability to produce twice as much during the work day or cut the work day in half and produce the same amount.

Arthur Dahlberg, a consultant to both the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, wrote that capitalism was already capable of satisfying basic human needs with a 4-hour work day. [20] He maintained that such a drastic cut in working hours “was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic.” [21]

The issue was revisited in 1991 by Harvard economist Juliet Schor, who concluded that it would be possible to have a 4-hour work day with no decline in the standard of living. [22] Similarly, J.W. Smith argued that “over 50% of our industrial capacity has nothing to do with producing for consumer needs.” [23] Years before issues of climate change and peak oil grabbed the public, Smith forecast:

We’re facing an ecological nightmare as we push to the brink the earth’s ability to support us. We could eliminate much industrial pollution and conserve our precious, dwindling resources by eliminating the 50% of industry that is producing nothing useful for society. [24]

In a more recent analysis, Smith sifts through the US economy sector by sector to conclude that “we could all work 2.3 days per week with no drop in our living standard.” [25]

It’s a rare economist who is capable of realizing that there is no reason to constantly scramble for the possession of more objects that fall apart more rapidly. British philosopher Bertrand Russell also thought that four hours of work per day should be plenty to supply the necessities of life. [26]

Russell was thinking similarly to Benjamin Franklin, who wrote over 200 years ago:

…if every Man and Woman would work for four Hours each Day on something useful, that Labour would produce sufficient to procure all the Necessities and Comforts of Life, Want and Misery would be banished out of the World, and the rest of the 24 hours might be Leisure and Pleasure. [27]

Labor has become vastly more productive since Ben Franklin contemplated the work day. However, total output grows even faster than labor productivity. By including population growth and people seeking to live the lifestyle of the English-speaking rich, Ted Trainer ciphers that “by 2070 given 3% economic growth, total world economic output every year would then be 60 times as great as it is now [28].

This would be a 6000% increase in stuff in 63 years - not exactly healthy for forests, oceans, wildlife and humans. If we want our children to be able to live on this planet, the single most important environmental legislation may be restricting people from working more than 20 hours per week.

What’s stopping a shorter work week?

One factor which is not standing in the way of fewer work hours is “human nature.” Marshall Sahlins estimated that hunter and gatherer societies probably spent 15-20 hours per week obtaining the necessities to survive. [29] Each of us can look inside of ourselves to see the real obstacles to cutting the work week in half: fear that we will lose medical care, pensions, and related survival necessities.

Virtually every working family in American is one medical catastrophe away from bankruptcy. Countless Americans would gleefully shift to a 20-hour work week if it would not cause them to lose their health insurance.

Pensions pose a similar roadblock. As they approach retirement, millions of Americans become acutely aware that pensions are based on factors like the average salary of the last three years. Working part time would cut pension payments during uncertain years.

It is not a well kept secret that employers often give workers less than 40 hours to deny them benefits. A similar effect occurs from forced overtime. Even though there may be a higher rate of pay for overtime, a company may save money if it does not pay for the health care and pensions that putting more people on the payroll would require.

Every environmentalist who wants to stop coal companies from blowing the top off of sacred mountains should be on those mountains screaming that private health insurance and pension plans must be replaced by single payer health care and a social security system with at least a four-fold expansion of payments. In case the environmental significance is not clear…

Halting the cancerous growth of useless fall-apart junk production requires a drastic shortening of the work week; and,
Cutting the work week can only happen if people are not terrified that fewer hours means they will lose health insurance and pension plans.
These are called “social wages.” Social wages also include mass transportation, clean water, breathable air, uncontaminated land and something which is becoming increasingly rare: the right to quality free public education which is coordinated by representatives directly elected by citizens. These social wages are as important environmentally as medical care and pensions.

The right to a home with electricity and heat is part of the same pattern. People who are not fearful of being thrown out of their home or losing their utilities have much less incentive to work long hours.

There remains an enormous problem that permeates every other barrier to shortening the working day. As long as production is based on the maximization of profit, each corporation is pushed to extend working hours as long as possible for fear the competition will do it first. As Marx described with Lugosian clarity:

The prolongation of the working-day, beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, … quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour. To appropriate labour during all 24 hours of the day is, therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist production. [30]

In the 21st century, we should update this to say that capital feeds with two fangs: one to suck the blood of labor and the other fang to drain life from Mother Earth. Can the 20 hour work week become a wooden stake held by the environmental movement as it is pounded by labor? Maybe; but not necessarily. A stake that is driven too shallow will allow the demon to awaken with renewed strength.

When US workers struck for the eight hour day in 1886, they were going beyond pay issues and demanding that labor have a role in controlling the process of production. Today, we need a progressive alliance to challenge not only how many hours we work, but the quality, durability and even the necessity of goods we produce. Drastically cutting the hours we work will help save the Earth’s ecology only if it is part of an overarching goal to improve the quality of our lives while reducing the grand mass of manufactured objects.

Don Fitz has been surviving on less than 20 hours work per week since he was forced to retire in 2006. He is editor of Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, which is published for members of The Greens/Green Party USA and can be reached at fitzdon[at]aol[dot]com

Notes

1. Diener, E., & Seligman,M.E.P. (2004). Beyond money: Toward an economy of well-being. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5, 1-31.

2. Holmes, T.H., & Rahe, R.H. (1967). The Social Readjustment Rating Scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11, 213-218.

3. Heinberg, R. (2003). The party’s over: Oil, war and the fate of industrial societies. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 272.

4. Marx, K. (1974). Capital: A critical analysis of capitalist production, Volume 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers (first published in 1887), 264.

5. Capital, 252.

6. Capital, 267.

7. According to labor activist David Macaray, parallel efforts happened in the US, with an 1835 textile strike to shorten the work week to 6 days of 11 hours and a Boston carpenter strike for a 10 hour day. Personal communication. April 25, 2009.

8. Roediger, D. (1998). Haymarket incident. In M.J. Buhle, P. Buhle & D Georgakas (Eds.) Encyclopedia of the American Left (296-297). New York: Oxford University Press.

9. Brecher, J. (1972). Strike! Boston: South End Press, 32.

10. Strike! 42.

11. Jon Bekken (2000, Arguments for a four-hour day. Also notes that New York City electricians won a 25-hour work week (with obligatory overtime) in 1962; in the 1980s German metal workers struck for a 35-hour week; and Danish “private sector” workers went on strike in 1998 for a 6-hour day.

12. Bush, K. (1994). Work less and everyone works. In Context: A Journal of Humane Sustainable Culture, 37, 42.

13. Kaminski, T. Personal communication. May 16, 2009.

14. Kaplan, J. (May/June, 2008). The gospel of consumption: And the better future we left behind. Orion Magazine.

15. Bush, 42.

16. Kaplan’s description of the Kellogg experience is based on Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt’s (1996) Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

17. Capital, 270. This was in response to owners violating a 10 hour statute by forcing a 12 to 15 hour day with higher pay.

18. Kaplan, 4.

19. Bekken.

20. A.O. Dahlberg, 91, Economist and Inventor. New York Times (October 2, 1989), D12.

21. Kaplan, 3.

22. Schor, J.B. (1991). The overworked American: The unexpected decline of leisure. New York: Basic Books.

23. Smith, J.W. (1989). The world’s wasted wealth. Kalispell, MT: New Worlds Press, xv.

24. Smith (1989) Book jacket.

25. Smith, J.W. (1994). Wasted time, wasted wealth. In Context: A Journal of Humane Sustainable Culture, 37, 18.

26. Russell, B. (1959). The prospects of industrial civilization, 2nd edition. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 40.

27. Benjamin Franklin, Quoted in Campbell, J. (1999). Recovering Benjamin Franklin. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 228.

28. Trainer, T. (2007). Renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society. The Netherlands: Springer, 2.

29. Sahlins, M. (1974). Stone age economics. London: Tavistock Publications.

30. Capital, 245.

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http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2009/6/Gre...Seeds-of-Change

Seeds of Change
Complementary Currencies Are Ushering In a Vibrant Local Economy
by Carl Frankel and illustrations by Jason Cring, May 26, 2009



These are, to put it gently, unsettling times. A triple whammy confronts us: climate change, peak oil, and a global economy in a possible death spiral. With things spinning so badly out of control, it’s easy to feel daunted.

A century ago, the poet William Butler Yeats described chaos’s onset this way: “The center cannot hold.” While his words still resonate, they don’t quite capture the current crisis, whose cause lies precisely in this: The global economy has no center. It’s a system in which capital sloshes from money center to tax haven, and corporations, in the words of writer David Ehrenfeld, are “everywhere and nowhere.” The result: From the Hudson Valley to Hong Kong, people are plugged into an economic matrix that has no face and is indifferent to yours. Talk about your primal helplessness! Here we are, attached to the same global teat, the milk is slowing to a trickle, and Mama’s on crank and doesn’t care.

Is it end-game time? Yes, if we’re referring to the era of plentiful, cheap oil. But don’t assume a high-tech Dark Ages is upon us. Out of the rubble of the old, a new, postglobal economic arrangement is emerging.
This is bracing in and of itself, and there’s more good news chugging along behind it. Though still very early-stage, this transformation is picking up momentum rapidly, and it has the potential to deliver deep renewal, not just marginal survival. Raise your hands if you prefer community to consumerism, empowerment to infantilization, autonomy to anonymity! I thought so.

The seeds of this next economy are sprouting in the Hudson Valley and a thousand other places, too. Though the particulars vary from region to region, the underlying principles are the same. Focus on local—local businesses, local agriculture, and local energy. Bring heart into the economy by strengthening the networks of connection among people. Do it on a grassroots level—people power!—and do it structurally, through institutions that keep the local system thriving and resilient.

Time = Money
One such institution is the Time Bank. The concept, which was invented by lawyer Edgar Cahn close to three decades ago, is as simple as it is innovative. People volunteer their time, but instead of just giving, they also receive. For every hour of service they provide, they get an hour back. Throw a couple hundred people with a wide variety of skills into the pot, and you can get anything you want at the Time Bank restaurant, maybe including Alice.

For Woodstock resident Kristine Flones, the Time Bank was love at first listen. She first heard about the concept in late 2006 at a Newburgh presentation by Edgar Cahn. “I had an instant connection with what I heard,” she says. “Time Banks offer a paradigm shift to a different, heart-based way of living. They can take us beyond our scarcity-based money system to a culture of abundance, sustainability and, dare I say it, happiness.”

Flones was so taken by the concept that she decided to launch a Time Bank in her hometown. The rest, as they say, is history. In the roughly two years since its founding, the Woodstock Time Bank has blossomed into a thriving and rapidly-growing community of over 200 members. “We’re one of the wunderkinds of the Time Bank world,” says Flones.

Woodstock resident Harriet Kazansky speaks glowingly of the Time Bank. She has tapped into it to have (deep breath, now!) the outside of her house stained, her new kitchen plumbed, electrical work performed, rooms painted, gardening done, furniture moved, fixtures hung, a skylight repaired, and an outside water spigot installed. “Pretty much anything you can imagine, I’ve used the Time Bank for,” says Kazansky.

Heidi Washburn is another booster. A year ago, a significant birthday was approaching for the Bearsville resident. Her daughter kept pushing her to throw a big party, but it felt like too much work. Then a light went off: the Time Bank! Volunteers prepared the house—no small matter, by Washburn’s account—and cooked for and photographed the event. A nonevent became a grand success.

In addition to networking volunteers, Time Banks build community. The Woodstock Time Bank hosts regular social events, and what’s more, participating in an informal “gift economy” has its own special magic. Reports Washburn, “Volunteers helped out with my birthday party with a wonderful, generous spirit you rarely get when you’re simply hiring people.”

Time Banks are also a great resource for nonprofits. This is because charitable organizations often rely on volunteers—more so than ever during these cash-strapped times—and it’s much easier to recruit people when they know they’ll get something back, even if it’s not a paycheck. Family of Woodstock is one of several nonprofits that are partnering with the Woodstock Time Bank. “It’s been a very positive experience,” says Family’s Jess Robie.

In their own quiet way, Time Banks are powerfully subversive. Culturally we are steeped in hierarchy. Brain surgeons earn more than plumbers who earn more than house cleaners. We tend to view this as a law of nature, but it’s not. It’s a social custom that’s gotten embedded in our heads, and it can be dislodged where there’s a will and a way. Time Banks value hours equally, whether you’re snaking a drain or saving a brain. They’re the Great Flattener. In fact, they’re almost, dare I say it, socialist!

But what about the IRS, you ask? Aren’t these transactions taxable? The surprising answer is: no. Because volunteers aren’t guaranteed a quid for their quo, timebanking transactions are no more taxable than your usual one-way volunteering.

Technically, timebanking is what is known as a “complementary currency.” This is because, like the currency we all know called the dollar, it’s a medium of exchange. But it isn’t only hours that can stand in for Treasury issue. Local forms of money can, too. This is perfectly legal, and it’s been happening for a long time. In Wörgl, Austria, in 1932, the city issued scrip that had a sort of financial entropy built into it: it became less valuable over time. Because people didn’t want to pay what amounted to a hoarding fee, the scrip circulated rapidly. The result, during the height of the Great Depression, was a surge in employment and the completion of local government projects such as new houses, a reservoir, a ski jump, and a bridge.

Fair Shares
Complementary financial currencies like the Wörgl scrip generate local economic resiliency because they decouple the communities they serve from the global economy: They release them, so to speak, from the global teat. If a currency isn’t accepted in Bentonville, Arkansas—which just happens to be where Wal-Mart is headquartered—the company will shun it.



About 2,500 local currencies are currently in use worldwide. A compelling nearby example can be found in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where people can swap dollars for BerkShares at five local banks. For every 95 US dollars, they get 100 BerkShares, giving them a built-in financial incentive to go local. Since their launch in mid-2006, $2.4 million in BerkShares have circulated through the community. Some 375 businesses, from acupuncturists to wineries, accept the currency.

At this point, BerkShares are used by 10–15 percent of the greater Great Barrington population. Higher participation would be better. “We underestimated the extent to which a full-fledged educational campaign would be necessary,” says Sarah Hearn, the office manager for the Great Barrington-based
E. F. Schumacher Society, the organization behind the endeavor.

The long-term goal is for BerkShares to take root through the Berkshire mountain area that inspired their name. “The greater Great Barrington area has a population of 19,000. Our total target area has 139,000 residents,” Hearn says. “We already have 20 businesses in Pittsfield and are looking for more.”
The Schumacher Society’s ambitions extend beyond the region. According to Hearn, the organization hopes to “expand the currency nationwide, as a model to be replicated by communities everywhere.”

When that happens—and we’re into long-term visioning now—additional programs will be tacked onto the initiative. One example: the currency, says Hearn, “will be issued as productive loans to new or expanding import-replacing industries.”

Getting BerkShares launched has had its challenges. Start-up costs have been considerable, creating an ongoing need to drum up foundation support. To a significant degree, reports Hearn, this is because the Schumacher Society “is conducting research and development into best practices and procedures, so other communities can take these steps more easily and affordably.”

The number of BerkShares in circulation has tailed off lately due to the economic downturn. Hearn remains optimistic, though. “Interest has been spiking in the concept.”

Indeed it has, and in Time Banks, too. Local currency initiatives are underway in Rhinebeck, where the currency is called Rhinebucks, and in Kingston, where Uptown resident Sean Griffin is putting together plans for a Hudson Valley-wide currency called the Hudson Valley Current. (Clever names seem to be de rigeur). Time Banks are in development in the Red Hook/Rhinebeck area and Great Barrington.

Why this flurry of activity? For one thing, it’s part of the natural flow of things. These concepts have been around for a while; it takes time for them to travel from the margin to the mainstream. This evolutionary process is being aided and abetted by the current economic implosion, which is transforming perceptions—what once seemed radical now seems practical and necessary—and lighting a fire under creative economic alternatives.

So pause for a moment, if you will, and imagine what it would be like to live in a Hudson Valley with its own robust and resilient economy. It would still be connected to the world beyond—the global village isn’t going away—but we’d all be leaning on one another more (cue the Rolling Stones) instead of scrabbling to get to the shriveling global teat. Lots of us would be using a local currency and giving (and getting) at the Time Bank.

Banking On It
The resilient local economy of the future would receive additional bolstering from institutions that haven’t made it to the Hudson Valley yet. Imagine a financial institution that takes the locally owned bank concept one step further by providing innovative services like free local credit-card processing for local businesses and microloans for new businesses and community projects—and that also dedicates all profits to schools and other nonprofits. If you find this hard to do, then wait a bit. If Kingston resident Sean Griffin has his way, a Common Good Bank designed along precisely these lines will be available to local residents before the year’s end.

Of course, there’s still the wee challenge of getting from where we are now to the vibrant local economy of our imagination. How to do it? First: Keep the faith. This promised transformation is getting more real by the day. Second: Make it happen. If we’re going to be weaned from the global teat, the only people who can do it are…that’s right, us. Nothing comes for free. Empowerment and autonomy bear a price: responsibility.
Is this a burden? A little, maybe. But it’s also an opportunity, and an upbeat one at that. Creating a resilient local economy isn’t a dour, solitary, Sisyphean exercise. It’s about working alongside our friends and neighbors to create a better future. It’s about connecting more, and better.

Sounds like fun to me.

For more information
Woodstock Time Bank www.timebanks.org
BerkShares www.berkshares.org
Common Good Bank www.commongoodbank.com

[papabear]

Slow Movement

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http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49456
Pediatrician sees three-year-old on cell phone
by Shepherd Bliss

“The three-year-old just walked right past me,” the Santa Rosa, CA, pediatrician reported, “talking into a cell phone.” That stark image of toddler attached to machine has troubled me. “I was amused at first,” the physician continued. “Then I felt sad. She was learning how to relate to people through a machine. It was so mechanical. Cell phones can connect people, but they also speed things up.” Must we rush even toddlers into machines?

Shepherd BlissShepherd Bliss“Half of British children aged 5 to 9 own a mobile phone. Some Experts are Unhappy,” headlines a June 23, 2009 article in the UK’s daily “The Times.” It reports that “Lawrie Challies, an emeritus professor of physics who has led the Government’s mobile-phone safety research, says that parents should not give children phones before secondary school.” (Mobile phones for children: a boon or a peril? Times Online – UK) University of Melbourne pediatrics professor Michael Carr-Gregg, a leading Australian psychologist, “is worried about the power of mobile phones to distract and overexcite” and “says that no children should be allowed a mobile phone until the age of 12.” The French Government bans sales of mobile phones to children under 6.

The long-term consequences of young children already taking their gaze away from living people and constantly-changing nature to look down into and be captured by static machines concerns me. Who benefits and what is lost? What is appropriate technology use? What induces obsessive/compulsive/addictive behavior?

The addiction to technological progress has heightened in recent years, especially with respect to telecommunications and cybernetics. This growth further exhausts fossil fuels. The development, manufacture and maintenance of high technology tools and weapons depend upon ample cheap energy from fossil fuels. As oil supplies decline and the pace of life quickens even more rapidly, the demand for more coal extraction will increase, which will heighten pollution and speed-up global climate chaos.

“Every single machine in the nation runs on lubrication,” notes David Frindley, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This includes electrical and wireless tools that require crude oil byproducts. He was quoted in a recent article about Transition Towns in the weekly “North Bay Bohemian,” where he purchased a small farm in Sonoma County. Frindley is a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, based in small town Sebastopol, Northern California.

Though I sometimes use a cell phones, with moderation, I am concerned about the unconscious and excessive use of them, like while driving or talking so loud in a restaurant that one disturbs the peaceful meals of others. The issue is how we use technology, rather than abuse it. Some people seem always on call, slaves to their cell phones, willing to drop a live person in favor of talking into that tiny machine. The disadvantages of cell phones, including texting, warrant attention, including unintended consequences and collateral damage.

At issue is when and where and what the consequences might be at certain ages and in certain situations. What might be appropriate cell phone and texting etiquette for young people at different ages? My goal is to encourage people to engage in critical thinking about consequences before placing pulsating plastic to hand then ear, rather than using more primitive and holistic communication methods, like face-to-face.

Cell phones can be good for emergencies, convenient, functional, practical, and have some advantages, as demonstrated by the global communication from the recent twittering from Iran. They can enable even a young person to speak to a distant relative or a parent who is out of town. However, walking around in the streets texting while looking down is sometimes dangerous and at least rude.

As with Petaluma, CA, artist Sally Krah, I am concerned about “the health risks of cell phones.” She uses hers “carefully and infrequently,” so that “it doesn’t rule my life. It’s a blessing if used in moderation.”

The immediacy of cell phones and their push-button control can increase impatience with slower things, like the development of deep human relationships, lasting love, growing plants, and caring for animals. Cybertime creates unnatural time pressures, heightening stress and anxiety. The tools and technologies that we use are not neutral; they help shape who we become.

CAUGHT IN THE CELL PHONE SNARE

Alas, I have also been caught in the cell phone snare. While speaking to my Sonoma State University students one day, mine went off, much to their delight, giggles, and snickers, as well as my embarrassment.

We may have a social epidemic on our hands. Studies reveal that American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages a month in the fourth quarter of 2008. One person reported that his 13-year-old exchanged 14,528 texts in one month.
The number of text messages rose to about 75 billion earlier this year and is going up. Downsides include declines in spelling, word choice and writing complexit and an inability to focus. Text-bullying and sending naked photos have become problematic, resulting in at least one documented suicide.

I invited a SSU freshman class off-campus for a film and dinner. The first thing that some of these teens did at the restaurant was to put their cell phones on the dinner table. Some of their little gadgets promptly vibrated, buzzed, and made a variety of demanding sounds.

My dinner guests were soon miles away texting, having what sounded like one-way conversations intruding into our dinner, and playing phone games, ignoring the rest of us at the table in front of them. What happened to old-fashioned connective meal-time conversations? When the primary relationship becomes with a talking machine, rather than with a multi-dimensional person with whom to have spontaneous, life-deepening and life-changing dialogue, something is lost.

As they multi-tasked on so-called “smartphones,” I felt annoyed and alone—a slow dinosaur at a table with fast-moving butterflies with short attention spans flickering away into cyberspace, their consciousnesses split. They are masters at quick scans of screens, rather than reading entire books. I must admit that I am old-fashioned and prefer home-made music and food to the factory-made stuff. I prefer live story-telling and the oral tradition of recited poetry to television. I resist being drawn into the need-it-yesterday world.

But I didn’t say anything to my students, though I did later circulate an article on the downsides of texting to initiate discussion. The students were defensive, but it was a good experience in critical thinking, which is what I teach and seek to practice here.

One of the students in that class, Sally-Anne Petit, helped me understand the use of cell phones from the perspective of her generation as follows: “Changes in our world have made us feel uncomfortable. Or even in danger of being without a mobile technological device. We use these devices to hide us from scary things in this world. It provides shelter, or even a friend. This is important because part of growing up is defending yourself and learning how to act in awkward, or uncomfortable, perhaps even dangerous situations.”

“Its not about the technology so much as it is how the technology is used,” added one of my Teaching Assistants, social worker Victoria Fleming, M.S.W. “It calls for a new etiquette. It is harder for us as we get older to find relevance in young technology and this creates a rift between generations. This is hardly a new phenomenon, but it is accelerated by the pace of emerging technology.”

I later walked on SSU’s beautiful redwood-lined campus. Many students had their faces buried in that consumptive machine, missing the redwoods and other humans passing by, as well as the birds above calling to them. I’ve even seen two people walking along talking to each other—on their cells phones. Those with bluetooths in their ears reminded me of the part-machine, part-human race called Borgs in “Star Trek.”

Some SSU students understand the downsides of texting and related phenomenon. “Digital Communication: The Death of Verbal Communication in our Society” was recently published by the campus newspaper. Brian Evans contends that “we as a society have been spoiled by the luxuries of Internet, cellular communication, iPhones, Blackberries, etc.” He laments that they have “diminished the personalization of communicating” and “texting has limited our laughter to Lol.”

The sound-bite, minimalist approach that texting and twittering employ can contract the soul and imagination, rather than expand them; they narrow the range of emotions that can be expressed. The frequency with which some fiddle with their phones, eyes down, makes it more difficult to make eye contact with them.

“TECHNO-ADDICTION”

“Techo-addiction” is how some psychologists describe this phenomenon, which includes other recent developments, such as Facebook, My Space, You Tube, and Twitter. An indication that addiction is an appropriate description is when you see someone walk across a busy street, not in the crosswalk, texting, instead of looking, thus risking their life. Texting and twittering also seem to shorten the attention span and heighten one’s vulnerability to distraction, rather than focus and concentration.

New technologies can promise a lot, and then entangle users in a growing web of products, often quite expensive. Cell phones expand the consumer culture of instant messaging and instant gratification, thus reducing the time for embodied human relations and dialogue that leads beyond data and information to depth and textured wisdom.

It is illegal to hold cell phones to one’s ear while driving in California, though I notice many violators, who thus threaten the rest of us with more accidents. Plane, train, and ship accidents have been documented to have happened while or just after pilots’ attentions were diverted while texting.

In contrast to the three-year-old with cell phone, I recently visited friends with a five-month-old bundled onto her mother’s chest, eyes locked, occasionally smiling at the rest of us, returning to absorb her mother’s warm intimacy. It comforted me. I have also been delighted to hang out with a neighbor’s seventeen-month-old, so full of vitality, splashing in water, beginning to form words. He inspires me. I worry about what is in store for these children in this high-tech, sped-up digital world.

I watch with delight as youngsters interact with chickens on my small farm, look up with awe into the giant redwoods, feel their powerful dance partner the wind, and see the birds above. My seventeen-month-old friend eagerly stuffs his mouth with berries, whose purple color ring his wide smile.

At a library I recently also saw a small girl, probably under three, fixated on a computer screen. She skillfully moved the “mouse” around and watched the machine respond promptly. Screens radiate light, which looking at directly can be harmful, especially to young eyes and brains. Sonoma State University psychology graduate student Julie Perkins is writing her thesis partly on “the gaze” and reports that she “is concerned with the use of machines and the deleterious effect of gazing on a screen in the digital world.” This trend of children absorbed by machines rather than living beings or even picture books concerns me.

On the other hand, I’ve heard of toddlers who throw cell phones into toilets. Good for them! This could be a direct way of communicating “Pay attention to me!” Such spontaneous play is a healthy alternative to the beginning of consumerism. Technophiles seek to protect their expensive hand-held devices, whereas I am more concerned to protect children from pre-mature technology and the addiction to a cell phone culture that is not age appropriate. One toddler’s mother explained that cell phones can have a candy-like appeal, which can lead to a child wanting to consume too much, unless appropriate limits are discerned and established.

“THE FLICKERING MIND”

“The Flickering Mind” titles a book by award-winning journalist Todd Oppenheimer, sub-titled “The False Promises of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved.” Though published what some now consider long ago, 2003, its nearly 500 pages document the downsides of computers in education long before texting became so popular and disruptive. His chapters include “Hidden Troubles,” “Bulldozing the Imagination,” and “The Human Touch.”

“Time poverty is now a recognized psychological and social stressor,” according to psychotherapist Linda Buzzell, co-editor of the new Sierra Club Book’s “Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind.” She adds, “We struggle with diminishing success to adapt to the strange mechanical and disembodied world we have created,” including “endless 24/7 online communications… constantly rushing to keep up as we inevitably fall further behind.” In that machine-driven process “we find ourselves destroying not only our own health, but our habitat and the habitat of the people, plants and animals with whom we share the planet.”

My college students tend to be sweet and open-hearted. They also have more trouble reading entire books and sustaining attention than they did even a few years ago; they appear more distant and distracted. Their emails have gotten briefer and are not always in standard English; they employ abbreviations that I do not understand. They seem to have less patience for ambiguity and paradox, preferring a machine-like yes and no and making overstatements like “always” and “never.”

I do not allow cell phones to be on during class. The tapping while texting can be as annoying as cross-talking and insulting to whoever is speaking. However, I still sometimes hear them vibrate and know that some students are so addicted that they are adept at concealing these tools—which can become almost like armor or weapons--under their clothes and desks the way earlier generations of youth would carefully conceal cigarette smoking.

It took a long time to make cigarette smoking illegal in certain public places, though the dangers had been clearly documented for decades. I hope that it does not take as long to make cell phones illegal in some places, especially moving vehicles, as well as elsewhere. Cell phones can be powerful forces in expanding the consumer culture and reducing embodied human relations and deep communication with others that involves texture, emotion, and nuances.

The critique of soulless machines implicit in this article echoes a tradition reaching back more than a century that includes British novelist D.H. Lawrence, German-speaking poet Rilke, German-American psychologist Erich Fromm, American gardeners Scott and Helen Nearing, and French sociologist Jacques Ellul. Contemporary American advocates of this tradition include psychotherapist Chellis Glendinning (“When Technology Wounds”), public relations expert Jerry Mander (“In the Absence of the Sacred”), and farmer Wendell Berry (“In the Presence of Fear.”)

The three-year-old witnessed by the pediatrician was being conditioned for an adult life of consumption with an early onset cell phone addiction. Instead of speeding up to follow the commands of goal-oriented machines such as cell phones, we humans could benefit from slowing down to nature’s meandering pace, especially here in the gorgeous Redwood Empire.

(Dr. Shepherd Bliss teaches part-time at Sonoma State University and runs the organic Kokopelli Farm in Northern California. He has contributed to two dozen books, most recently to the Sierra Club Book’s “Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind.” He can be reached at sbliss@hawaii.edu.)

[papabear]

http://www.postcarbon.org/invest_locally
Invest Locally: Put Your Money Where Your Life Is
By Michael Shuman · Jul 13 2009

Americans want to invest locally: here’s how.

The Obama Administration believes that the best way to repair our financial system after the Great Crash of 2008 is to improve the performance and oversight of global banks and investment firms. A growing number of Americans, however, would prefer to pull their retirement savings out of these high financial fliers altogether. They would rather invest in their communities. The problem is, they can’t. Outdated federal securities laws have left Main Street dangerously dependent on Wall Street, and overhauling these regulations turns out to be a hidden key to economic revitalization.

There are two reasons Americans increasingly wish to invest in locally owned businesses. First, they understand that these businesses are the real pillars of a prosperous, sustainable economy. A growing body of evidence suggests that every dollar spent at a locally owned business generates two to four times more economic benefit—measured in income, wealth, jobs, and tax revenue—than a dollar spent at a globally owned business. That’s because locally owned businesses spend more of their money locally and thereby pump up the so-called economic multiplier. Other studies suggest that local businesses are critical for tourism, walkable communities, entrepreneurship, social equality, civil society, charitable giving, revitalized downtowns, and even political participation.

Second, many Americans no longer believe Wall Street’s assertions that a global, publicly traded corporation is the safest place to invest their savings. According to data in Statistical Abstract, sole proprietorships (the legal structures chosen by most first-stage small businesses) are nearly three times more profitable than C-corporations (the structures of choice for global businesses). Moreover, a bunch of global trends, like rising energy prices and the falling dollar, are making local businesses increasingly competitive. Meanwhile, Americans are shifting their spending from goods to services, a trend that promises to expand the local business sector, since most services depend on direct, personal, and, ultimately, local relationships.

Locally owned businesses currently generate half of the private economy, in terms of output and jobs. Add in other place-based institutions—nonprofits, co-ops, and the public secto—and we’re talking about 58 percent of all economic activity. So in a well-functioning financial system, weï’d invest roughly 58 percent of our retirement funds in place-based enterprises.

Yet local businesses receive none of our pension savings. Nor do they receive any investment capital from mutual, venture, or hedge funds. The result is that all of us, even stalwart advocates of community development, overinvest in the Fortune 500 companies we distrust and underinvest in the local businesses we know are essential for local vitality. This situation represents a colossal market failure.

The good news is that much of the problem could be solved by modernizing securities laws. Today these laws place huge restrictions on the investment choices of small, “unaccredited”investors—a category in Securities and Exchange Commission vernacular that includes all but the richest 2 percent of Americans. The regulations prohibit the average American from investing in any small business, unless the business is willing to spend $50,000 to $100,000 on lawyers to prepare private placement memoranda or public offerings—thick documents with microscopic, all-caps print that no human being has ever actually been observed reading.

Were these reforms enacted nationally, literally trillions of investment dollars could begin to move into the local business economy.

One easy reform would be for the SEC to allow low-risk public ownership of locally owned microbusinesses. By low-risk, I mean that no person can hold more than $100 worth of any one stock—which means that we’re freeing up people to engage in the risk equivalent of a nice dinner for two. By local ownership, I mean that stock shares can only be bought, held, and sold by residents within a state. And by microbusinesses, I mean any business with a total stock valuation on issuance of under $250,000.

This legal reform would be even more effective if supported by a few others:

* Micro-investment funds.
Let’s allow small investors to pool their money in backyard investment funds (again, up to $100 per person) that in turn create diverse portfolios of local stocks. (Only the rich can invest in such funds now.)
* Co-op investment funds.
Let’s allow cooperatives, most of which are owned by workers or consumers in a single community, to set up investment funds empowered to make local investments on behalf of their members. (Currently, they can only invest members’ capital in businesses owned and run by the co-op itself.)
* Local stock exchanges.
Letï’s allow private companies to facilitate local trading of microbusiness stock electronically, like Prosper.com and Kiva.org do for microloans. (The SEC now bans small, electronic exchanges like these from trading equities.)
* Pension fund participation.
Let’s allow any pension fund that places as much as 5 percent in local securities, either directly or through microbusiness investment funds, to meet legal standards of “fiduciary responsibility.” (Current regulations define the term in a way that directs virtually all such investments to global companies.)

These new community-based funds and investments, of course, need to be overseen to prevent fraud and ensure accountability. But since all these activities are intrastate, these new rules can be left to the existing securities departments in the 50 states. Once state-level laws are put into practice, many of the absurd requirements of the SEC—like expensive audits and lengthy legal filings; may finally disappear.

Were these reforms enacted nationally, literally trillions of investment dollars could begin to move into the local business economy. Entrepreneurs, hungry for new capital in the post-meltdown credit crunch, will begin to restructure their businesses to receive microcapital. Investors terrified of betting all their money in the global casino will start shifting their investments to local businesses they know, trust, and can visit and “ground-truth” with tough questions.

The result will be a nation of stronger local economies, with American investors placing more and more of their money into backyard businesses rather than into the untrustworthy hands of distant speculators.

Finally, there are two other compelling features about these ideas. First, they cost nothing. And second, the experimentation opened up at the state level will invite all kinds of grassroots engagement and inventions. Instead of spending billions more in federal taxpayer dollars to prop up dubious big financial institutions, why not create a system that’s more stable, safe, lucrative, and democratic—for free?

Michael Shuman wrote this article as part of The New Economy, the Summer 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Michael is director of research and public policy for the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (livingeconomies.org.) and author of The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition (Berrett-Koehler, 2007).

[supa'Wanki]

I love how dramatic the news are of the Fed signaling vote of confidence of the economy, and how the stocks are going up, even when we know it's going to drop in a couple months.

[papabear]

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08192009.html

August 19, 2009
Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

“In a little time [there will be] no middling sort. We shall have a few, and but a very few Lords, and all the rest beggars.” R.L. Bushman

“Rapidly you are dividing into two classes--extreme rich and extreme poor.” “Brutus”

Americans think that they have “freedom and democracy” and that politicians are held accountable by elections. The fact of the matter is that the US is ruled by powerful interest groups who control politicians with campaign contributions. Our real rulers are an oligarchy of financial and military/security interests and AIPAC, which influences US foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.

Have a look at economic policy. It is being run for the benefit of large financial concerns, such as Goldman Sachs.

It was the banks, not the millions of Americans who have lost homes, jobs, health insurance, and pensions, that received $700 billion in TARP funds. The banks used this gift of capital to make more profits. In the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Goldman Sachs announced record second quarter profits and large six-figure bonuses for every employee.

The Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy is another gift to the banks. It lowers their cost of funds and increases their profits. With the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, banks became high-risk investment houses that trade financial instruments such as interest rate derivatives and mortgage backed securities. With abundant funds supplied virtually free by the Federal Reserve, banks are paying depositors virtually nothing on their savings.

Despite the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy, beginning October 1 banks are raising the annual percentage rate (APR) on credit card purchases and cash advances and on balances that have a penalty rate because of late payment. Banks are also raising the late fee. In the midst of the worst economy since the 1930s, heavily indebted Americans, who are losing their jobs and their homes, are to be bled into bankruptcy by the very banks that are being subsidized with TARP funds and low interest rates.

Moreover, it is the American public that is on the hook for the TARP money and the low interest rates. As the US government’s budget is 50 per cent or more in the red, the TARP money has to be borrowed from abroad or monetized by the Fed. This means more pressure on the US dollar’s exchange value and a rise in import prices and also domestic inflation.

Americans will thus pay for the TARP and low interest rate subsidies to their financial rulers with erosion in the purchasing power of the dollar. What we are experiencing is a massive redistribution of income from the American public to the financial sector.

And this is occurring during a Democratic administration headed by America’s first black president, with a Democratic majority in the House and Senate.

Is there a government anywhere that less represents its citizens than the US government?

Consider America’s wars. As of the moment of writing, the out-of-pocket cost of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is $900,000,000,000. When you add in the already incurred future costs of veterans benefits, interest on the debt, the forgone use of the resources for productive purposes, and such other costs as computed by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expert Linda Bilmes, “our” government has wasted $3,000,000,000,000--three thousand billion dollars--on two wars that have no benefit whatsoever for any American whose income does not derive from the military/security complex, about which five-star general President Eisenhower warned us.

It is now a proven fact that the US invasion of Iraq was based on lies and deception of the American public. The only beneficiaries were the armaments industries, Blackwater, Halliburton, military officers who enjoy higher rates of promotion during war, and Muslim extremists whose case the US government proved by its unprovoked aggression against Muslims. No one else benefitted. Iraq was a threat to no one, and finding Saddam Hussein and executing him after a kangaroo trial had no effect whatsoever on ending the war or preventing the start of others.

The cost of America’s wars is a huge burden on a bankrupt country, but the cost incurred by veterans might be even higher. Homelessness is a prevalent condition of veterans, as is post-traumatic stress. American soldiers, who naively fought for the munitions industry’s wars, for high compensation for the munitions CEOs, and for dividends and capital gains for the munitions shareholders, paid not only with lives and lost limbs, but also with broken marriages, ruined careers, psychiatric disorders, and prison sentences for failing to make child support payments.

What did Americans gain from an unaffordable war in Iraq that lasted far longer than World War II and that put into power Shi’ites allied with Iran?

The answer is obvious: nothing whatsoever.

What did the armaments industry gain? Billions of dollars in profits.

Obama is the presidential candidate who promised to end the war in Iraq. He hasn’t. But he has escalated the war in Afghanistan, started a new war in Pakistan, intends to repeat the Yugoslav scenario in the Caucasus, and appears determined to start a war in South America. In response to the acceptance by US puppet president of Columbia, Alvaro Uribe, of seven US military bases in Columbia, Venezuela warned South American countries that the “winds or war are beginning to blow.”

Here we have the US government, totally dependent on the generosity of foreigners to finance its red ink, which extends in large quantities as far as the eye can see, completely under the thumb of the military/security complex, which will destroy us all in order to meet Wall Street share price expectations.

Why does any American care who rules Afghanistan? The country has nothing to do with us.

Did the armed services committees of the House and Senate calculate the risk of destabilizing nuclear armed Pakistan when they acquiesced to Obama’s new war there, a war that has already displaced two million Pakistanis?

No, of course not. The whores took their orders from the same military/security oligarchy that instructed Obama.

The great American superpower and its 300 million people are being driven straight into the ground by the narrow interest of the big banks and the munitions industry. People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars.

Will Americans, smashed and destroyed by “their” government’s policy, which always puts Americans last, ever understand who their real enemies are?

Will Americans realize that they are not ruled by elected representatives but by an oligarchy that owns the Washington whorehouse?

Will Americans ever understand that they are impotent serfs?

[papabear]

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49970
The New Gilded Age
Dave Cohen, ASPO-USA

My subject today is the grotesque wealth & income inequality that exists in the United States. I have dubbed our times the new Gilded Age, which was Mark Twain’s name for the post-Civil War period when “the rich wore diamonds and many others wore rags.” I could also have called it the “last” Gilded Age because our slowly disappearing Middle Class will never exist again as it once did.

[papabear]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KI04Dj02.html
More jobs on the scrap heap
By Peter Morici

The US Labor Department employment figures for August, to be released on Friday, are likely to report another 200,000 jobs lost, according to the consensus forecast, following the 247,000 lost to the economy in July.

Unemployment was 9.4% in July, and professional forecasters expect it to surge to 9.6% for August. My forecast indicates it will pierce 10% by year end. Factoring in adults that have left the labor force and those who work part time but would prefer full-time jobs, the unemployment rate is greater than 17%.

From December 2007 through July 2009, the economy lost 6.7 million jobs. The recession has wiped out all the jobs created in the private sector over the past decade.

Construction and manufacturing shed 1.4 million and 2.0 million jobs, respectively, as the credit market meltdown and trade deficit wrecked havoc on residential construction and manufacturing. Layoffs then spread to commercial construction, finance, retail sales, and other sectors.

The economy contracted in the second quarter at a modest 1.0%, but should register positive gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the second half in the range of 2%.

Consumer spending, residential construction and technology sales are gaining. Both the technology sectors and materials should benefit from stronger demand powered by growth in Asia.

The stimulus package should raise GDP by about 2.5 percentage points in 2010 and 2011 and add about 3 million jobs. Most of those jobs will be temporary and 3 million and not be enough to replace the more than 7 million that will be lost before the recession ends.

With productivity growing at least 2% a year and the working aged population increasing 1% a year, GDP growth must exceed 3% to bring down unemployment.

Unless the Barack Obama administration addresses the structural problems that caused the recession - management issues at the banks and huge trade deficits on oil and with China - the recovery will not generate strong enough growth to bring down the unemployment rate.

Regional banks are now laboring under the weight of commercial real estate failures. Unable to effectively access money center capital markets, regional banks are short on funds to lend to small and medium sized businesses.

As the stimulus package pushes up government and consumer spending, the trade deficits on oil and with China will grow. This will tax aggregate demand for US made goods and services and limit job gains.

Consequently, as the economy expands, businesses will struggle to find enough capital, and the trade deficits will create a shortage of demand for US goods and services and new layoffs will begin once the stimulus spending ends.

President Obama's near-term energy policies address mostly the more efficient use of domestic coal and natural gas and alternative energy sources to generate electricity, and will do little to quickly reduce oil imports. Increased mileage standards for cars and trucks will not have a meaningful impact on the value of oil imports for several years.

Obama, like George Bush, emphasizes diplomacy to persuade China to stop subsidizing exports, undervaluing its currency through currency market manipulation and blocking imports. It remains to be seen whether he will get serious about China's biggest unfair trade practice - its undervaluation of the yuan by some 40%.

In Friday's jobs report, the key variables to watch are:
Jobs creation - On August 7, the Labor Department reported the economy lost 247,000 payroll jobs in July. The government sector added 7,000 jobs, and the private sector lost 252,000.

With a slowly accelerating economic expansion, job losses will continue for several more months, and total losses will exceed 7 million before the hemorrhaging ends.

Unemployment - In July, the unemployment rate, as computed by the Labor Department, was 9.4%, and is expected to rise to at least 9.6% for June. According to my forecast, unemployment will peak at 10.3% late in 2010 or early 2011.

Since 2001, more adults have chosen not to seek employment owing to worsening labor market conditions. If labor force participation today were at the same level as when president George W Bush took the helm, the unemployment rate would be about 12%. The difference is that discouraged workers who have quit looking for work are not counted by Labor Department when computing the unemployment rate. Add in part-time workers who would prefer full-time employment, and the hidden unemployment rate is above 17%.

Business vs government payrolls - In July, government employment rose 7,000, and since the recession began in December 2007, it is up by 195,000.

Importantly, state and local government employment has risen by 110,000 since the recession began. The emphasis in Obama administration stimulus spending on shoring up state and local government employment is misplaced, and the money would be better spent encouraging private-sector employment through infrastructure projections and incentives for private spending on domestic manufacturers.

Construction - In July, construction lost 76,000 jobs. Since construction employment peaked in October 2006, the sector has lost 1.4 million jobs.

Retailing - The retail trade has shed 843,000 jobs since November 2007, and lost 44,000 jobs in July.

Finance and insurance - During the economic expansion finance and insurance, along with technology sectors, offered some of the best new job opportunities, outside of healthcare and technology-related activities. Since December 2007, finance and insurance has shed 332,000 jobs, and 13,000 in July alone.

Manufacturing - In July, manufacturing lost 52,000 jobs. The dollar remains overvalued against the yuan and other Asian currencies, and the large trade deficit with China and other Asian exporters is a key factor pushing down US manufacturing employment.

Peter Morici is a professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, and former chief economist at the United States International Trade Commission.

[papabear]

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff09292009.html
September 29, 2009
Looking Under the TARP
Why They Call It Fall

By DAVE LINDORFF

So now it turns out that the whole Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was a flop or more likely a scam. Remember Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson telling us last September that credit markets had locked up, and then, after half of the $750 billion that he extorted out of Congress was handed out to Wall Street firms, new President Barack Obama justifying the spending of the second half of the money because we needed to “get the banks lending again”?

Well, now Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP, is telling us that all that money, and another more than $2 trillion in loans, accomplished nothing. In an interview with Lagan Sebert, published in Huffington Post, Barofsky says, “We were told by Treasury that the purpose of the TARP fund was to increase lending. But we haven’t increased lending.”

Well yeah, that’s true. Just ask any ordinary working stiff. My little bank, the Harleysville National Bank here in eastern Pennsylvania, far from expanding lending, has been shutting down customer credit lines. As a bank manager told me, they were “reviewing all our equity lines” in light of declining property values (actually, property values in our area north of Philadelphia have remained pretty stable). In general, banks across the country have been canceling credit lines, closing credit card accounts on customers deemed risky—including small businesses—and making it very hard to get a new mortgage. (They’ve also been raising all kinds of fees, ripping customers off in other ways, but that’s another story.)

And that goes for the biggest banks that got billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout funds.

Barofsky has been trying doggedly to find out whatever happened to all that money of ours that was shoveled out to the banks, and as he reports, he’s been working not just without any help from the Treasury Department, but actually against the active resistance of Treasury, which he accuses of having tried to dissuade him from even looking into it.

“My biggest surprise,” he says, “is when we announced an audit (of TARP), Treasury went out of their way to say…it would be a big waste of time.” He says Treasury officials including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, claimed that it would be impossible to find out where the money went, on the argument that money is “fungible”—that is to say all money is the same. Of course this is a cynical and ridiculous assertion. If it were true, there would be no job for auditors, since all auditors do is look to find out where money went. (Imagine telling an IRS auditor that it is a waste of time auditing your books, because money is fungible!)

In any event, Barofsky has gone about his work, with or without the backing of the Obama Treasury Department, and what he found is that instead of lending out the money that they were provided with by taxpayers, the banks have been “acquiring other institutions, sitting on it, paying down credit lines,” and, of course, paying out obscene bonuses to executives.

The one thing the banks are not doing is lending.

But then, as I wrote last February, it was silly to think that by shoveling money into banks during a record recession, the banks would then lend it out. First of all, there was the awkward reality that good companies were and still are not looking to borrow money. Rather, they are trying to pay down debt and get their balance sheets on more solid ground to survive a period of low or declining sales and earnings. The only companies that would be trying to borrow right now would be the ones that were on the rocks, and wanted money just to stay afloat. And what banker would lend to them? And second, if the banks could make more money by investing their new cash instead of making risky loans with it, why would they lend? So most of them just used the money to invest in Treasury Bonds.

The long and the short of it is that we’ve been taken for a very big and costly ride by banks that created a huge crisis and that then got the government to bail them out of it with our money, and by two administrations, one Republican and now one Democratic, that have been submissive and willing servants of the big banks.

The big surprise to me has been Paul Volcker, who I mistakenly took to be an over-the-hill relic and Wall Street patsy. The former Carter and Reagan-era Federal Reserve Board chairman, currently chair of President Obama’s economic advisory panel, is publicly warning that the president’s bank policies are preserving a system of giant banks that are “too big to fail,” and are risking further, even larger bailouts.

Barofsky agrees, saying that since the bailout, under Obama’s bank policies, big banks already deemed “too big to fail” have become even bigger, and he concludes, “We may be in a far more dangerous place today than we were in a year ago,” for having told certain financial companies that we will not let them fail.

Little wonder that the smart money—that would be the insiders in corporate boardrooms and executive suites—is reportedly selling shares as fast as they can be sold, with the experts reporting that insider sales of company stock are running 31:1 on the sell side. The explanation: with layoffs still running at over 500,000 a month, and nobody hiring, these executives don’t see anything in the year ahead or even longer that is likely to put the economy on a renewed growth path.

Putting these bits of news together doesn’t paint a pretty picture: We’ve got an economy that appears headed for at best a long period of stagnation and, more likely, for a second downturn, once the effect of last March’s stimulus package wears off. We’ve got a financial system that has been propped up artificially, its balance sheets soggy with underwater mortgages and worthless derivatives, and its executives holding assurances that they can count on the government bailing them out no matter what stupid or self-serving decisions they make. We’ve got an economy that is 70% based upon consumer spending, in which one in five people is unemployed or involuntarily underemployed. We’ve got a nation that hardly makes anything, at the same time that its currency is sinking like a stone, making imports increasingly expensive, And we have a stock market that has been inflated into a giant bubble, just waiting to pop.

October should be an interesting month this year.

[papabear]

Economic growth has let us down. What's the alternative?
Tim Jackson, the ecologist

[papabear]

Bailouts for dummies
Dave Pollard, how to save the world blog
Lately I've been reading more about economics, in self-defence against all the corporatist-government thievery and lies going on out there. I'm aware that most people find what is happening in our economy and financial systems unfathomable, so I thought I'd try to simplify the complex.

[papabear]

Slow Money: Bringing Money Down to Earth
by Brooke Jarvis
Woody Tasch has thought a lot about money: what it does, how it moves, and how to connect people who have it with people who need it. He's been a venture capitalist, a treasurer and advisor to foundations, and the chairman of a network of angel investors. He even helped found a field of investing with the rather surprising name "community development venture capital."
But he found that even socially responsible investing couldn't do much to fix an economy that focused too much on extraction and consumption and too little on preservation and restoration.
In 2008, Tasch wrote Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. Soon after, he founded the Slow Money Alliance, an NGO devoted to the principles of slowing money down, reconnecting it to the Earth, and respecting carrying capacity, the commons, sense of place, and nonviolence. Tasch calls it the transition from "Making A Killing" to "Making a Living."

Click on the link to read more.

[papabear]

http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/loo...lt-of-yesterday

Looking Backward: Economics and the Cult of Yesterday
GDP and productivity don't measure what's really going on in the economy—or in people's lives. Jonathan Rowe on measuring what matters.

by Jonathan Rowe
posted Dec 01, 2009


Street art in London.

Photo by Antony Robbins for Overseas Development Institute
One reason that the nation has not made more progress toward an economic “recovery” is that the people in charge really don’t know what one would look like. The top economists in Washington don’t appear to have asked the obvious question, “Recovery of what—and for what?” Instead they have followed the old drill, tried to rekindle the old flame, and remained wedded to the old guideposts that leave them looking at yesterday and trying to see tomorrow.

Just recently, the president of France realized the stupidity. He has decided that his nation’s measures of economic health need to change to account for today’s challenges instead of yesterday’s. As Washington gears up to spend billions in more “stimulus,” it would help to ask exactly what it is trying to stimulate—and most importantly, exactly what would constitute success.

Economic indicators are our national psyche's main gauges, the mirror into which we look to see how things are going. In a market culture—which is to say, a money culture—the prospects for money become the prospects for ourselves. Such metrics as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) have an oracular status; reporters watch them obsessively, policy experts steer by them, and politicians march to their command.

Yet for the most part the indicators are a crock and testimony to the grip of yesterday upon the expert economic mind. The prime example is the GDP, the anachronism of which is a secret, it seems, only within the media and policy establishments that invoke it constantly. Any measure that portrays an increase in car crashes, cancer, marital breakdown, kinky mortgages, oil use, and gambling as evidence of advance—as the GDP does—simply because they occasion the expenditure of money has a tenuous claim to being reality-based discourse.

Metrics are silent rulers, in both senses of the word. In defining the task, they also define the steps we must take to carry it out.Yet whenever a policy expert or news analyst intones about the need for “growth,” more GDP is what they mean. The two are the same. Is it really surprising that most of these experts didn’t see the crash coming, when they were steering largely by a compass that portrays rising debt payments as additions to the GDP—and therefore as beneficial growth?

Another example is “productivity,” which, if anything, is even more totemic. An increase in output per hour worked—which is the reigning definition—is deemed the stairway to economic heaven, and the goal most devoutly to be sought, no further questions asked. Thus the excitement recently when the Commerce Department reported that productivity had increased at an annual rate of 9.5 percent during the third quarter of 2009.

But exactly why is this such good news? “Generally, when U.S. workers are more productive that’s a really good thing for the economy,” observed a writer on the Atlantic's website. “It means a higher GDP will result.” The statement is standard issue, and remarkable only in its circularity (and that the ratio of fallacy to sentence is one to one).

The Economics of Happiness
In France, a commission of leading economists suggests that nations look beyond GDP.
Take first the part about the “higher GDP” that rising productivity betokens. To say it’s a good thing for “the economy” is redundant. The GDP is the economy, as economists define it. It is the part of life that operates through the transaction of money. The question is whether a rising GDP is necessarily a good thing for the people who comprise the economy, and for whom it is supposed to exist.

The Atlantic ought to know the answer. Back in the 90s, I co-authored an article for that magazine called “If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?” which laid out the fallacies of that indicator in all their perverse splendor. We showed in detail why, increasingly, a rising GDP suggests that lives are getting worse, not better. If interest on your credit card debt doubles this year, it’s a boost for the GDP. Is it a boost for you? Likewise, sickness and the consequent medical treatment is good for the GDP. Health is not. (Another take is here.)

Yet now that same magazine was repeating the very fallacy that it itself had debunked. This is common. No matter how many articles appear on the imbecility of the GDP as a gauge of well-being—the New York Times alone has run at least a couple over the past year or so—those same publications are back to reciting the GDP mantra the very next day. (Sometimes it’s the same day.)

It is as though in economics, evidence doesn’t matter where underlying assumptions are concerned. Belief trumps actuality. As Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist, once put it, in economics, “all doctrines persist.” In real sciences, theories change constantly to accommodate new information. In economics, the basic model hasn’t changed in more than 200 years. Which suggests that economics isn’t really science, but rather religion in mathematical disguise.

But back to productivity. The Atlantic post also asserts that rising productivity figures mean that “workers are being more productive.” This, too, is rote formulation: We Americans are working harder and smarter and therefore are turning out more stuff per hour. The thought appeals to our sense of virtue, but is it really what is going on?

Let’s leave aside technical issues, such as the way the data attributes parts made cheaply abroad to the productivity of American workers who assemble those parts into finished products here in the U.S. Leave aside too the obvious conundrum—doesn’t the quest to eliminate work eventually lead to less work to go around? (Economists say it bestirs more work, not less. We’ll see.)

Let’s leave aside as well the way the benefits of increased productivity have been going to executives and shareholders in recent years, rather than to workers in the form of higher wages or more time off.

The question here is more specific—namely, is productivity really what the term suggests? Or is it another case of language that sounds technical and scientific, but that is disconnected from reality? Consider the computer, which was hyped as the ultimate productivity machine. Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Board chairman, was practically rhapsodic on the subject. Yet the impact of computers in the workplace has been somewhat ambiguous. Increases in output have been canceled to varying degrees by the overhead the things entail: burgeoning IT departments, crashes and lost data, constant security measures, and a fortune in software updates and printer cartridges.

Sickness and the consequent medical treatment is good for the GDP. Health is not.But in another way computers have been an unambiguous success, because they have enabled corporations to shift a substantial portion of their workload onto their customers. If you ever have made an airline reservation online, or tried to get your credit score, or filled out an application for insurance, you have spent many minutes and even hours doing data entry that company employees used to do. If you have sought help with a computer problem, you likely have been directed to an online forum in which you must rely on other customers, rather than company employees. (I rarely get a good answer; usually I can’t even find my question. Plus it can take hours—on my clock, not theirs.)

Seen through the euphemistic lens of the productivity metrics, this is a minor miracle. The corporation is spending less on labor than it was before, but is making more money. But that’s not because its employees are working harder or smarter. It is because they’ve been laid off and we customers are doing the work they once did. The cause of corporate production has been boosted by an unpaid labor force—namely ourselves. The same thing happens offline at self-service gas pumps and big box stores where few employees walk the floor so that we have to search the aisles on our own.

Yet the metrics portray the resulting hours of unpaid labor as an advance in productivity. And that’s just one disconnect between the word and the reality. Take the tricky question of services and the productivity of those that provide them. How exactly to determine the productivity of a mortgage banker—by the dollar value of the subprime mortgages he or she churns out? Or how about a teacher? A while back, a prominent economist at Harvard proposed that the productivity of education be determined by the incomes of those who receive it. (The money fixation of the economic mind can lead it to strange shifts.)

By that standard, Bernard Madoff’s teachers were many times more productive than yours or mine. Look at how much more money he made, at least while the game lasted. But then, much of what is called productivity has little to do with work effort to begin with. As oil wells and mines get tapped out, for example, it takes more effort to pull out what remains. “Productivity” declines, but not from a lack of industry among the workers. Rather, the extractive machinery has run up against a geological fact.


The Story of Stuff
Annie Leonard examines the real costs of so much stuff.
As with the GDP, however, the basic problem is the underlying premise. Where the GDP assumes that more expenditure of money equals a better quality of life, so the productivity dogma assumes that more output is always better than less—that work is always bad and stuff always good. That assumption might have seemed valid centuries ago, when stuff was scarce, toil grueling, and human needs could seem as infinite as the resources available to meet them were presumed to be.

But yesterday is not forever. Can we really say in 2009 that it is necessarily better to produce, say, more cigarettes with less labor? Or violent video games? Or subprime mortgages? Or gas-gorging Hummers? Might we not be better off with less such stuff and more of the work that goes into it—or even better, into something else? At the very least, don’t we have to say, “It depends?" If that's the case, the iron syllogisms that underlie the GDP and “productivity” go out the window.

Then there’s the question of work itself. The syllogism assumes that work is a “disutility,” a nasty and distasteful thing, engaged in only for the consumption it makes possible. Yet today, many people get more satisfaction from their work than they would from the next item that they might buy with the remuneration from that work. Work can provide meaning, dignity, and self-respect. (It is odd that our friends on the free-market right preach the importance of work, and then embrace an economic theology that applauds the continual elimination of that work.)

Some people are actually paying to work—on archeological digs, for example. They pay hefty fees at “health clubs” to make the kind of physical exertion that productivity-enhancing machinery has rid from daily life. People burn gas to drive to the club and then burn electricity to exert on an elliptical trainer or treadmill. Through the alchemy of the corporate market, production has become consumption, and something that was free has become something that we have to pay for. The market creates a scarcity of physical exertion, and then sells us commoditized substitutes for money.

The assumption on which the GDP is based—that more expenditure of money always betokens an advance—is an egregious “value judgment” in itself.If metrics are to guide us to solutions, then they have to start from an awareness of the problems. Today, for most Americans, the problem is not a lack of stuff, but rather a lack of well-being. It is not an excess of reliance upon human work—if it were, unemployment would not be over 10 percent. Rather, the problem is an excess of reliance upon fossil fuels, land, and other finite resources, along with the waste of capital in arcane financial schemes.

So, why do we still obsess over the productivity of labor, and let energy resources, raw materials, capital, and land loaf on the job? Should we not track—and then prod—the productivity of those, especially when the result could be more of the human employment that we need? Conserving energy provides more work than does wasting it; intensive use of urban land provides more work than does the sprawling wasteful use of it; and so on down the line.

Imagine what would happen if next week, the major news outlets relegated the GDP figures to a News In Brief box, and focused instead on the health and well being that this expenditure betokened—or didn’t. What if the policy establishment worried less about the productivity of labor, which is abundant, and more about the productivity of resources that are scarce? (It would be good, too, if workers got a fair share of the return from increases in their own productivity, in the form of higher pay or more time off.)

The effect would be galvanic. Metrics are silent rulers, in both senses of the word. In defining the task, they also define the steps we must take to carry it out. If we Americans heard about the nation’s lagging energy productivity every day, public pressure would grow to do something about it. As with the gas mileage gauge on a Prius, feedback prompts concern and action.

So again, why don't we hear about it? Entrenched interest is part of the answer. It is not accidental that a corporate economy would embrace metrics that assume that more stuff is always better, and that workers are to be flogged continually while land and resources can be wasted. That script is tailored for those who do the selling, flogging, and wasting.

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There is not much reason, within the existing framework of economic belief, that economists could not shift emphasis from the productivity of labor to that of energy and land. The GDP is a tougher nut. The crude quantitative thinking it embodies is the basis of the profession’s claim to science. Once you acknowledge the need to make distinctions—that is, once you realize that not all “goods” are good and not all “services” actually serve, and that price and value are not always the same—you are beyond the focal plane of the profession's cognitive capacities, and of its ability to turn experience into forbidding math.

Instead, you are in the realm of what economists typically dismiss as “value judgment”. That's as though there is any other kind of judgment, and as though the assumption on which the GDP is based—that more expenditure of money always betokens an advance—is not an egregious “value judgment” in itself.

Not for the first time, those who claim the mantle of science are hung up on an outdated version of it. I do feel for these folks. They have large amounts of intellectual capital sunk in the old faith, and prestige tied up in high positions and awards. But then, they’ve been scolding the rest of us for decades on the need to adjust to new realities. If steel workers have to be retrained as computer technicians, then why shouldn’t the economics establishment take a dose of its own medicine?

At least a few could see it coming. In the past, the likes of Thorsten Veblen, Kenneth Boulding, and John Kenneth Galbraith have challenged the assumptions of their field. (Galbraith’s name still can evoke sneers at meetings of the American Economics Association.) Just recently, a couple of American Nobel winners—Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen—advised the French government to update its national metrics to take more account of economic reality, as opposed to the hoary model embedded in the GDP. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has embraced their report.

The wheels have started to turn. If Old Europe can get out of the rut, then shouldn’t the U.S. be able to do it too? There is no reason to wait for the experts. We can create new measures that include dimensions of life that the conventional ones leave out. We can track well-being instead of just monetary transactions, and the efficiency of our use of land and energy—rather than just that of work.

It doesn’t take a PhD to do this, just clear eyes. The experts will catch up eventually.