Archive for January, 2011
Saturday, January 15th, 2011
Yunus the Loon
In 1983, I founded Grameen Bank to provide small loans that people, especially poor women, could use to bring themselves out of poverty. At that time, I never imagined that one day microcredit would give rise to its own breed of loan sharks.
So said Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus in yesterday’s edition of The New York Times.
Like Major Strasser, he is shocked to discover that this is exactly what has happened. Capitalism, it seems, is not charity, despite the dishonest (or negligently naive) assurances of deluded creeps like Yunus and the Nobel clown committee.
Friday, January 14th, 2011
Al Gore Manifesto
Stuart Staniford, who tracks peak energy problems, today suggests that those of us who hope to help engineer soft landings ought to abandon socialism in favor of Al Gore. Speaking of human history, Staniford proposes that, “at least until we decide to engineer better human beings, a decent society will have an economic elite.” To try to combat elites, in Staniford’s view, is to deny human nature. The best we can do, he suggests, is to accept and nurture our overclass, in hopes of convincing “them, like Al Gore, to use a portion of their undoubted economic privilege in an attempt to move society in a direction of lower impact and less emissions.”
FWIW, I replied thusly:
If you are going to appeal to big history, I would suggest you stick with it. 5,500 years ago, permanent elites figured out how to keep surplus wealth for themselves as “property.” That, as you note, was the beginning of the end for egalitarian kinship societies.
Fair enough.
But when did anybody start making a serious attempt to check ruling classes and their stories of biological superiority? 1776/1789. Less than 250 years ago, on a 5,500-year timeline.
And when did socialists start trying to extend democracy to economic affairs? 150 years ago. And they also did so while making the mistake of dismissing existing democracy as mere bourgeois illusion. So, socialism 2.0 has barely started, here in the latest 20 years on that 5,500-year timeline.
And here you are, talking about the naturalness of elites? I don’t buy it, either as history or strategy.
The point of leftism is not absolute monetary equality. It is the extension of democracy over macro-economic choices.
Of course, the impending energy/eco crash is going to make modern wealth levels and our range of macro-economic options a lot smaller.
Capitalists, meanwhile, are militant ostriches and obstacles, like it or not, because they are trying to retain what is utterly unkeepable. Al Gore thinks electric cars are a sufficient answer.
Monday, January 10th, 2011
The Fruits of Private Taxation
Structurally and historically, big business marketing is a substitute for unrestrained, Adam-Smithian price competition, which capitalists have always hated and moved to suppress. By co-respectively avoiding price war and competing instead via marketing, big businesses essentially gain a power their own dogma denies they seek or have: the power to levy private taxes.
And big business marketing is precisely this: an activity funded by a tax levied by corporate shareholders upon those who comprise their targets, the sea of prospective buyers. The funds expended on big business marketing come from the marked-up prices of purchased corporate products. As I explained in The Consumer Trap book, in the aggregate, big business marketing is an activity that rivals total public government spending in scale.
The wastefulness of the spending this private tax embodies dwarfs most government programs.
Take the case of cellular telephone marketing in the USA, a topic we here at TCT have discussed before. Here you have an industry that is not only a natural monopoly (and therefore inherently easily run by the public), but one in which the private corporations who control it provide entirely unremarkable service at the world’s highest prices.
I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that, not only does saturation-level advertising accompany and largely cause this pointless (except to shareholders, of course) economic disaster, but the advertising in question, in the guise of “humor,” almost always depicts reasons not to use or “upgrade” cellular telephones!
Consider this particular ad, currently in heavy rotation on U.S. television, from AT&T:
Not only does this scene depict unattractive and shallow people using cell phones for a patently moronic and pointless activity within a setting — a moving automobile — that makes the depicted activity deadly, but what is the proffered benefit being suggested by the ad? To be five seconds ahead of your friends in receiving trivia. And the presentation? A threat: “Don’t be left behind!”
Our grandchildren will look back in horror that such were the priorities of our society and the nature of our “rethinking the possible” in the early 21st century. Should we somehow manage to dethrone our massively decrepit and shameless corporate overclass and pass future generations a world still capable to looking back, our “entrepreneurial” masters will be compared to Nero and Caligula.
Friday, January 7th, 2011
Small Business History
Here is a table listing the U.S. unemployment rate for three different years:
| 1940 | 14.6% |
| 1942 | 4.7% |
| 1944 | 1.2% |
___
Here, meanwhile, is today’s “analysis” from William C. Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, as quoted in a New York Times story explaining why “at least through the rest of President [Zer]Obama’s four-year term” it is entirely unreasonable to expect current unemployment levels to drop much:
“You can’t recover quickly from a disaster like we’ve been through.”
Yes, clearly impossible.
ROFLMFAO.
Thursday, January 6th, 2011
Strummer’s Lament
“A car in the fridge. Or a fridge in the car? Like cowboys do in TV land…”
Such was the late Joe Strummer‘s apt diagnosis of capitalism’s inherent pursuit of trivialities/limitation of society’s available macro-choices.
30 years and a month later, what are the great, bailout-taking entrepreneurs up to? Serious answers to Peak Oil? Poverty? Armageddon?
Not quite.
Holographic birthday cakes, as we’ve seen, for one thing.
The latest “cutting edge” advance?
Yes, imagine! Will wonders never cease? How thrilled will your grandkids be to learn that this was the sort of thing that received massive public subsidy in the early 21st century?
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011
Ford’s Latest Finger of Death
Consumer Reports calls the Ford Motor Company’s new MyFord Touch system, by which automobile operators use computer-video touchpads rather than old-school knobs and switches to perform various mostly extraneous tasks while driving, “complex and buggy” and “a complicated distraction while driving.”
Translation from the polite punch-pulling language of Consumer Reports: This latest case of marketing-driven product elaboration, which Ford propaganda shamelessly paints as being “all about making the driver’s experience connect with technology in the car, and their digital lifestyle safer and simpler,” is, as the Ford Motor Company certainly knows full well, going to kill thousands of people a year.
Of course, this won’t stop this precisely planned corporate marketing tactic from working. MyFord Touch, Ford tells Reuters, “is helping make Edge and MKX [the models in which it has been launched) among the best sellers on dealer showroom floors.”
All in a day’s overclass entrepreneurship…using people’s “digital lifestyles” to boost the profits of an outdated corporation’s shareholders, via a deadly, cynical gimmick.
And they say trickle-down economics might be outdated…
