…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 you should see this, know this, feel this, do this.
Bobby McFerrin at TED, the natural appeal of the pentatonic scale.

“Please join Citizens United and me in our fight for the First Amendment rights of every American.” —Newt Gingrich

Wow!

Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth

It’s media doing media. Shaking hands. Dinner. Drinks. Profits.

“The Iowa Caucuses are presented as a news event, a mini-election with an informational outcome, a winner. But what they really are is a ritual, the gathering of a tribe, which affirms itself and its place in our political system by staging this thing every four years.”

Journalists are reporting on an event they have largely created…

“At the zoo that is the Iowa Caucus, the bar in the downtown Des Moines Marriott is like a communal watering hole where roving packs of reporters, political hacks, and even candidates assemble nightly to drain drinks and exchange political gossip.”

“They SAY they are bringing you news of what happened in Iowa. But what they’re really doing is maintaining their little society of insiders across yet another election cycle.”

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.

The Atlantic:

…solid pieces of evidence that Japan’s nuclear industry is a black hole of criminal malfeasance, incompetence, and corruption.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the monolithic corporation that controls all electric power in Greater Tokyo, and runs the Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant that experienced a triple meltdown following the March 11 earthquake, is on the brink of nationalization according to Japanese government sources.

The official reason is that the firm may not be able to handle the massive compensation payments it owes to victims of the meltdown without going bankrupt. Unofficially, the firm has such long-standing ties to anti-social forces, including the yakuza—that some members of the Diet, Japan’s national legislature, feel the firm is beyond salvation and needs to be taken over and cleaned up.

…in other words, “When a man is has to survive doing something, it’s the nuclear industry; for a woman, it’s the sex industry.”

The underling mechanism for inequality growth need not include deliberate actions by wealthy individuals.

Wealth is generated based upon the work of accumulated capital rather than labor. Wealthy investors are making bets with peers that have similar levels of wealth. Since neither side is actually creating wealth from raw goods, on average there are equal numbers of winners and losers.

Gary Rondeau:

There are good arguments that too much inequality is detrimental to social well-being. Without deliberate mechanisms to redistribute wealth downward, inequality will grow without bounds out of statistical necessity.

Managing inequality means introducing mechanisms that redistribute wealth more equitably which are at least as strong as the statistical effects which naturally concentrate wealth.

This is where greed comes in !

In practice, those that have attained wealth, even if by the throw of the dice, feel entitled to their fortune and resist any attempt at leveling the playing field.

Whether it is luck or skill that is involved in negotiating one’s bets, winners consistently attribute their success to skill, and with that comes a sense of entitlement to their winnings.

12 minutes of Sydney’s extraordinary fireworks of 2012

The rich pay on avg around 19% of income in fed income taxes. Plenty left over! Worry for yourself, not them !

:::click the pics:::

 
Boston Globe says make room for Buddy Roemer.

Roemer is capable of bringing fresh energy to the long-running GOP show.

It’s even possible to imagine him catching fire for at least a moment…

This is a necessary task, but the unusual roster of candidates this year has made it especially difficult - some heavily credentialed but inert, others capable of juicing up a crowd but poorly prepared to be president.

Public Money for Public Purpose !

Toward the End of Plutocracy and the Triumph of Democracy – Part V

In the end, we are dependent and social creatures, built by nature for social and community life, and for relationships based on love, fellowship and friendship.

The cravings for ever more personal freedom, and for ever more liberation from the responsibilities of democratic government, will only lead to the eventual dissolution of democratic government and the triumph of authoritarianism.

Dan Kervick:

The cause of genuine democracy will, of course, require steps that go well beyond reform of the monetary system.

If we seek a more democratic society, one in which decision-making power over our everyday lives and common futures is more evenly distributed among all of our people, it will be necessary for all of us to embrace the demanding responsibilities of democratic governance.

This can be hard to do in the face of so many decades of governmental failure, where government itself has sometimes seemed to have become nothing but a tool of the plutocracy.

Get some facts. Start here. Guideposts on the Road Back to Factville

Pew Research.

Nearly six-in-ten (57%) people believe the wealthy do not pay their fair share.

About three-quarters (73%) of Democrats say that what bothers them most is that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share; this compares to just 38% of Republicans who say the same. Independents side with the Democrats — 57% say the wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes.

However, Republicans are internally divided. About four-in-ten (43%) say that the complexity of the tax system is their biggest gripe, while 38% are bothered most by their perception that the wealthy don’t bear their fair share of the tax burden.

Just 14% of Republicans point to the amount of taxes they pay as what bothers them most.

There is unanimity among Tea party Republicans: 57% of this group point to the complexity of the tax system as the factor that bothers them most, compared to 22% who say the wealthy don’t pay their fair share.

Oh. One more thing: Voters believe that most members of Congress are corrupt (48%).