Thanks for staying upbeat, Douglas! Hey, we miss your podcast around my house… (when) is it coming back?

Couldn’t agree more. I have several informal wagers with friends about precisely when the other shoe drops. I say mid-to-late August. Hope I’m wrong.

But, as you seem to imply, maybe it’ll be an opportunity for us as a culture to get our heads screwed on right. Let’s face it, as a culture, intellectually we’ve let ourselves go to pot in a bad way. Too much time shopping or following the “I Can Haz Cheeseburger” blogs.

My sense is that the guys who will have the most success in moving the zeitgeist in a more sane direction are writers who can present the public with concrete, visceral illustrations of the current sick dynamic. Somehow it doesn’t seem enough to talk in abstract terms about financial capital’s malign over-influence–after all, capital does have very legitimate, necessary functions. Provided it’s not taken too far.

I think it should become clear even to the thickest chucklehead that the forces ruining America’s most cherished heritage are not faceless. Our cultural traditions of individual dignity, independence and the integrity of its Enlightenment Era governing institutions are being destroyed by the very people we spend most of our time with.

There’s reason to believe that AT LEAST half of us are directly on the payrolls of the corporate behemoths running roughshod over our most beloved ideals. Who knows what other percentage get paid less directly through the patronage they control?

http://dyslexinomicon.blogspot.com/2010/04/business-community.html

Ironically, as that Ewing Marion Kaufmann report hinted at, though the large corps have a perversely outsized influence on the overall labour market–they are actually the LEAST productive segment for new positions.

So the impression grows of a dysfunctional concentration of capital, financial, industrial and political. Gets worse when you consider that over 50 pct of all corp shares are owned by the wealthiest 20 pct of society. Of course the actual situation is FAR worse–voting shares are far MORE concentrated, either in the hands of the plutocrats themselves or the proxy officers in their holding companies.

http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html. (Table 5a especially)

So much for the notion of voting with our dollars.

There’s the face of the guy working to destroy our democracy–the very guy signing our paychecks. And we work for HIM. It’s like Chomsky’s aphorism made flesh. You know, the one about anyone, in the right circumstances, capable of being either a hero or a gas chamber attendant.

But for me, personally, the real clincher vis-a-vis the immorality of the system is the way it’s fundamentally divorced from our most basic notions of community–bonds of affection and cooperation between neighbours. For example, despite their name, BP is NOT a “British” company: At lest 39 pct of their shareholders are supposed to be U.S. Citizens. These companies have loyalty to no one beyond their largest voting shareholders–not neighbour, constitution or country.

So, more power to you Mr. Rushkoff. Better times to come.

i hear you on this–this real innovation is growing economic development through education. we never invest in human capital development like we should. check out http://www.sandboxnetwork.org for more details on how an NCAA-like model of engaged scholarship could call together a league of outliers to set this tone, this pace, this enterprise in motion.

best, bob bradley rbradley {at} tnstate(.)edu

Douglas,

I recently listened to some talks on Marx and noticed a lot of parallels between Life inc. and Kapital. In Marx’s historical analysis of capital, he remarks on the length of the working day and the eventual legislation decreasing it in England to 10 hours (I believe). That legislation was followed by an economic boom.

I hope that you are right and that we are at the beginning of a new era. However, could it be that we just need to tweak the system to get it moving again?

It seems to me that the problem since the 1970′s has been that capital has accumulated with a smaller and smaller population. Once accumulated, the capital flows through our economy more slowly, and as Marx points out, the whole basis of capitalism is the movement of money. Once it stops is when we experience a recession. Therefore, what if we tweaked the system to redistribute that accumulated capital back down to the people that would get it flowing again (ie, poor and middle class).

Seeing as progressive taxation is so unpopular, I think we should promote a massive increase in the minimum wage and decrease in the hours of the working week. Let’s say $14.00 an hour and a 35 hour work week.

I’d like to hear your opinion.

Social Credit now! I’d say.

http://douglassocialcredit.com/douglas.php

Ray,

Sorry to butt in, but wanted to say I think I totally agree with your basic analysis. Which, looking from my superficial level, may be surprising because I come from a business background. The core problem is the impaired CIRCULATION of captial throughout the economy.

Higher minimum wages are probably part of the total solution. But the scale of the problem is so massive that any one measure alone could not be successful. For example, rises in the minimum wage can also expect to meet fierce opposition–there are reasonable cases to be made that they would result in at least some level of inflation and reduced levels of employment.

The natural solution for the employer would be to intimidate employees into signing away overtime rights or just plain not report them. Wallmart got busted for this on a HUGE scale a few years back. No reason to suspect they wouldn’t try it again, though.

In my opinion, moderate rises in the minimum wage stand a reasonable chance of being enacted, but not so high or so strict that it would be completely effective.

I think taxation has a huge role to play. In fact, I can’t imagine a scenario where our economic circulation is brought to an acceptable state without serious, serious tax reform.

Office of Budget and Management figures suggest to me that corps have evaded AT LEAST half of their rightful tax burden between 1965 and 2007. http://thegreatamateurhour.blogspot.com/2010/05/inaugural-entry-dad29.html

Undeniably, there has been a worsening of the ratio between CEO/lineworker wages.
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html. (Table 6 Especially)

But the pseudo-populist reactionary leash-holders of the Tea Party movement would likely brush off those legitimate concerns by appealing to the widely-held (but false) belief that the unprecedented “apparent” productivity of the corps during the boom years justified the shift in CEO compensation. You, me and most analytical thinkers may have trouble accepting that nowadays, but in a contest between a Tea Party’s misconceptions of economic morality and the facts, the misconceptions win out almost every time.

Which is not to say that the Tea Partiers don’t have reason to be angry. There are some severe injustices in the current tax regime. The problem is that they’re being conditioned to support a programme totally counterproductive to their interests.

To me the clearest illustration of the scale and structural nature of the inequity is the way corps, who are forever innovating ways of shoving their medical and retirement obligations onto the federal government, are dodging their fair share of social burden. How could there not be a deep structural injustice when corps demand twice as many services and pay half as much? What possible jiujutsu trick could Frank Luntz invoke to make THAT look right? Especially when marginal corp rates were 70% in 1965 (compared to 35% today), a year when unemployment was only 4.5%.

Liam,

I enjoyed reading your comments. I agree with you that what we need to do is completely unrealistic in the given political climate, however I think it is worth the effort to imagine ourselves as “philosopher-kings” for a day.

On the point of taxes, I think we do need reform. I would like to see corporate taxes eliminated in favor of hiking up the progressive aspect of income tax and taxing capital gains at the same rate as labor wages. I think this would streamline the system, make it easier to comprehend for the person in the street and reverse the trend in disparity of income between rich and middle class.

Probably another strong starting point would be repealing Taft-Hartley, thus allowing labor to organize again. This would equalize the bullying corps that you pointed out.

However, all of this is far from Rushkoff’s thinking, which is create a new system. I would prefer that, but seeing as Marx had such limited success…I wonder how it is possible.

-Ray

Ray,

Wow. Lots of areas of agreement.

1. We should set a higher estate tax.
2. Income tax rate schedules should be much more progressive than they are now.
3. Capital gains transactions should be taxed at more progressive rates.
4. Economic mobility and a strong middle class are absolute must-haves for a healthy society.
5. Encouraging union activity could be one key to restoring some balance. I was recently looking at some stats that suggest that Union membership in 2009 may have sunk to only 1/3 of what it had been in what some are pleased to call the economic glory days of 1965.
(i.e., http://www.publicpurpose.com/lm-unn2000.html table data from US Department of Labor Burea of Labor Statistics for 1965 data and http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.html for 2009 data)

Also wholeheartedly agree that there needs to be more room for open, blue sky discussions. Those discussions probably need to be clearly distinguished from narrower discussions of implementation strategies. Implementation needs to confront political realities that might otherwise choke off creativity before it gets a chance to really mature.

In fact, I kinda interpret a lot of what Mr. Rushkoff has written as encouraging those blue-skies discussions. My guess, based on painful lessons during my business and writing careers (such as they are), is that he may view a big part of his job as introducing core concepts and facilitating discussion, rather than producing a detailed implementation programme. Though I have to catch up on a lot of his prior works, my interpretation so far is that he believes there is a fundamental reordering of social priorities that needs to change–not necessarily a mass scale scrapping of existing forms themselves.

I say that hands-down, bar-none, the U.S. has the single best social/political system in the world. Those core institutions of Enlightenment Age non-sectarian government with checks and balances, universal sufferage and guarantees of private property and freedom of speech are awesome. Let’s not kid our selves into thinking our flaws, serious as they may be, render us the moral equivalent of the Taliban.

But those awesome institutions cannot exist, let alone function adequately without an informed populace. If this is to be a real nation governed for the people and by the people, those people need to know what the H*ll they’re talking about. Sadly, there’s some reason to believe that, as a whole, we don’t. In my opinion that’s where the real value of writing like Mr. Rushkoff’s may lie–giving us our remedial education, not a detailed program.

So while I have some specific observations about implemention of some ideas, this problably isn’t the forum for going into them in detail.

I have considered setting up a shared website to moderate blue-sky and implementation strategies among a diverse group of creative, progress people. I know it can be done relatively quickly and for free or almost free. But I don’t know yet whether it’s worth the trouble, given the potential site security issues or the possible existence of better established fora already. Oh yeah, and the fact that the average internet reader seems to have the attention span of a sugar-addled preteen going through Ritalin(tm) withdrawal.

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=102412

(See especially the bizzarre exchange between myself and another guy in the comment section below Mr. Ruskhoff’s article)

Douglas,

you write the word “stocks” in quotation marks. What exactly does that mean?

I don’t want to convey the impression that the people who purchase most of those securities actually have stock or a stake in the company. I think it’s a bastardization of the word.

Corporate capitalism is dead. Any state or shareholder insane enough to bend over and check it’s pulse is just going to get bit in the neck.

Sell (being the title of this thread) or be sold. Our confidence and even anxiety for capital as it is now is just so many feathers trying to give the terminal beast wing.

So long as the illusion of value persists in the dollar or any currency we should be spending, spending, spending on the infrastructure of the new: Green technology & Bottom up networks and communities.

Why listen to the news speculating about the future of BP knob Anthony Bryan “Tony” Hayward?

“O can’t you hear that wind howl?”
http://tinyurl.com/246emld

-mason