Make free 1Mbps broadband for every citizen.

Or, we will be corporate forever.

Semper Fee.

The dark, dirty secret you learn when you run the program at Davos is that the vast majority of CEOs have nothing to say.

Changes in the Wealth and Income of Those at the Bottom Over the Past 30 Years

illicit is damn common

For General Electric Co., hawking subprime mortgages was a long way from making light bulbs and jet engines.

That didn’t stop the industrial giant from jumping into the subprime business in 2004, lending blue-chip respectability to the market for risky home loans by paying roughly half a billion dollars to buy California-based WMC Mortgage Corp.

What GE got in the bargain, former WMC employees say, was a place where erstwhile shoe salesmen, ex-strippers and even a former porn actress could sign on as sales reps and make big money pushing home loans.

Americans should know that people in the UK have a greater chance than we do of improving their financial circumstances – 42% of Americans never escape the lowest income bracket, compared to 30% of Brits.

The reality is that America is more class-bound than other advanced nations.

If you really want to achieve the American Dream, move to Denmark. A child born into the bottom fifth on the income scale in Denmark will almost certainly better his economic situation: only one quarter of those at the economic thin end stay there. The same is true of other Scandinavian countries.

American income inequality is becoming positively third world, with some of the richest US states having the largest populations of poor people. In California, 22% live in poverty. In Florida, it’s 20%.

When will success not merely be viewed in terms of ‘more’, but in terms of ‘better’?

Gross Domestic Product “measures everything… except that which makes life worthwhile.” —1968 speech by Robert Kennedy

Do Unions Kill Prosperity?

Not So Much.

Sarah Palin’s Socialist Utopia of Alaska is second only to the Evil Empire New York in union representation.

Compare union representation to GDP per capita, by state:

…in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick.

What I Think About Atlas Shrugged – Whatever.

1) Reporting has had one clear beneficiary: news organizations themselves.

2) We have crossed over into a new media era, one in which the rules, norms, forms, and whole institutions are in flux. There’s reason for both hope and despair.

3) But the question is not whether a reporter is either skeptical or cynical; the question is, About what?

The 1980s or 1990s economy will *never* miraculously reappear.

Total Credit Market Debt Owed

Food Price Volatility Hits the World

Why Oil Prices Are Killing the Economy

The OECD created a tower of debt, but no longer has the cheap natural resources to pay it back through growth. So, we’ll pay it with paper. —Gregor Macdonald

Reducing corporate taxes reduces re-investment. Period.

…stark fact of electronics manufacturing !

Electronics Makers Have Worst Labor Practices of Any Industry

…excess hours, low wages, unhealthy conditions for millions.

“If you think about it, it’s mind boggling that we can buy Fair Trade coffee, tea and chocolate, “conflict-free” diamonds and clothing manufactured by companies happy to trumpet their labor practices, but no electronics manufacturer seems to have taken the slightest (public) notice of the conditions under which their goods are manufactured.”

“It’s hard not to look at the situation and wonder why companies like Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorola (now owned by Google) and Microsoft can’t figure out a way to direct just a small portion of their margins toward making working conditions more humane.”

There’s much commentary.

Nouriel Roubini:

Recent popular demonstrations, from the Middle East to Israel to the UK, and rising popular anger in China – and soon enough in other advanced economies and emerging markets – are all driven by the same issues and tensions: growing inequality, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness. Even the world’s middle classes are feeling the squeeze of falling incomes and opportunities.

To enable market-oriented economies to operate as they should and can, we need to return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of laissez-faire and voodoo economics and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Both are broken.

The right balance today requires creating jobs partly through additional fiscal stimulus aimed at productive infrastructure investment. It also requires more progressive taxation; more short-term fiscal stimulus with medium- and long-term fiscal discipline; lender-of-last-resort support by monetary authorities to prevent ruinous runs on banks; reduction of the debt burden for insolvent households and other distressed economic agents; and stricter supervision and regulation of a financial system run amok; breaking up too-big-to-fail banks and oligopolistic trusts.

Over time, advanced economies will need to invest in human capital, skills and social safety nets to increase productivity and enable workers to compete, be flexible and thrive in a globalized economy. The alternative is – like in the 1930s – unending stagnation, depression, currency and trade wars, capital controls, financial crisis, sovereign insolvencies, and massive social and political instability.

Lawrence Summers:

This brings us to the charge that the governments of industrial market capitalist societies are bankrupt.

Even as market outcomes seem increasingly unsatisfactory, budget pressures have constrained the ability of the public sector to respond. How and when – not whether – basic programmes of social protection will be cut back is now back on the table.

The basic solvency of too many capitalist states seems in question.

Yes! Magazine:

When communities try to keep corporations from engaging in activities they don’t want, they often find they don’t have the legal power to say “no.” Why? Because our current legal structure too often protects the “rights” of corporations over the rights of actual human beings.

If we are to elevate our rights and the rights of our communities above those of a corporate few, we, too, need to transform the way laws work.

We’re offering the model Community Bill of Rights template, a legislative template for communities that want to protect their own rights.

It’s based on real laws already passed from the municipal to the national level…

Nominee for the chart of the year.

We’re lying to ourselves about what we’re putting into our country.

Pilfering our pockets is popular. Real investment is not.

Standard thinking is that since the early 1980s capital spending has been booming and despite cyclical swings real business fixed investment has moved up to record levels…

Yes, that statement is baloney. We’ve abandoned real investment.

IT has accounted for virtually all the growth in real investment since 1980…

The IT share of total capital spending has been steadily increasing and now accounts for 45%.

Virtually all investment in capital goods and productive plant is flat or fallen to ~1%.

Sloppy. Sloppy. Sloppy. Shame. Shame. Shame.