Loomio in Taiwan

Anyone who has read my series on how I think economies operates knows that I think large (national) economies organized in adherence to a particular economic system will always result in an imbalance of power and eventually collapse. To my mind, economies should emerge from local needs and skills to meet the wellbeing of all participants. The key to not allowing power to concentrate is information transparency; the degree and extent of which must evolve and change according to economic demands. The goal is to maximize transparency without inhibiting economic transactions.

In the second half of the April 21 podcast of Economic Update, Enabling Worker Co-ops, Richard Wolff interviews Richard Bartlett who started Loomio, a 'software worker-cooperative that is using groundbreaking collective decision-making strategies'. He describes how the citizens of Taiwan were able to use this type of decision making process to effect their will on government policy... and this is ongoing. This may be the best modern example of 'evolving' policy making to be had on a governing level.

Historian Warns About The Signs Of A Failing Republic

From Crooks & Liars. History professor Tim Snyder said this:

We are not so much wiser and more capable than the Germans in the 1930s. Things that happened to other people can also happen to us. The point is not that we are exactly the same; the point is we should be modest. We should be open to the possibility things can go very wrong and we should try to learn. If we see a warning sign like loyalty or like a private bodyguard taking over the function of the state...

He was very diplomatic in saying Americans should not be so arrogant to think we are uniquely immune to the state or empire failing. The Trump presidency has instigated actions that set of lots of alarms. Learn from history.

He's dead

I take no joy in the death of Roger Ailes but neither do I shed any grief.

Ding Dong The Dick is Dead

Pharma as a Public Utility?

Truthout asks if Pharma should be treated as a public utility. My comment:

No. The value of pharma is information (drug patents) which are already regulated. Making them public utilities just adds another layer of regulation over existing regulation. Drug prices are high because pharma has 'bought' influence over current regulations; they are more than capable of 'buying' any new regulators/regulations. The better solution is to publicly fund all drug research and have the information publicly available. Any manufacturer with the appropriate facilities can then make any drugs. Ensure high quality manufacturing practices can be insured by requiring that the public can observe/visit/examine facilities at any time. Transparency is a better way to drop drug prices without risking safety.

Energy is labor

Controlling/containing climate change is all about energy; all major greenhouse gasses are products of burning fossil fuels. Because economic activity is so dependent on fossil fuels, it has been claimed to keep the planet habitable, we need to shrink the economy. Whether this is true or not depends on the definition of economic activity...

Energy is a form of labor (or labor is a form of energy). Automation + energy = human labor. Easy examples are household appliances: vacuum + electricity = person sweeping with broom; automobile + fuel = human walking. So if energy becomes inaccessible due to climate issues, automation (or other powered machinery) is less available. For producers, the choice is to produce less (less energy) or produce the same or more by employing human labor. Although absolute productivity per worker drops, more people are employed which means more people have money to spend. in other words, economic productivity declines in the face of more economic trade - is that a growth or decline of economic activity?

Regardless, the way we currently consume fossil fuels is unsustainable. It's bad for the climate; it damages the environment when extracted, transported, and consumed.

Political consequences of ignorance

TRNN spoke with Robert English about the FBI leaking the Comey Memo, the one where he recounts DJT asking him to drop the Flynn investigation. I left a comment:

"let's not fall off the cliff here over Trump sharing some intel about terror attacks with the Russians..." 

After watching this *twice* over two days so this would not be a knee jerk response, I am not reacting to Trump's idiocy; that speaks for itself. I am very angry at my own ignorance of many of the events/actions described. This reflects a major failing of the American news media which I have consumed for decades and major efforts of the American state to keep its citizens ignorant of its actions. We are fed small simple good-guy/bad-guy stories by the media. Our ignorance is constantly manipulated by the state and media; we've become sheep in the face of propaganda. I'm angry and sad and I want *much* *much* more transparency.

When we are constantly lied to by the state and media, we get sham political parties with similar candidates from mock elections. The front people change but the power never changes hands; it's always the powerful elite who call the shots.

Update: It's getting worse, the rollback of net neutrality will further impede transparency.

Economic consequences of ignorance

Alex Tizon wrote about Lola who was was for all intents and purposes, a slave in his family and P.Z. Meyers points out that her ignorance and dependency kept in the state of slavery. Remember that when education funding is threatened.

Low taxes is bad economics

David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. This is his response when asked about DJT's intent to decrease the corporate tax rate at TRNN:

The point at which the U.S. did the most technological research and had the most productive corporations was when the tax rates were highest. The reason you had Bell Labs in the 50s was they had a 90% tax rate on the highest brackets of income, and they had a 60%, I can't remember what it was, corporate tax rate. It was very high. 

At a certain rate of profits, you're not going to keep it anyway, so people would say, "Okay, we'll give higher wages to our workers, make them happy. Why not give it to them instead of the government?" They'd say, "We'll invest in research, because you can write that off." There was a massive amount of internal research, and also just general improvement of productivity, because it paid to invest in that if you ended up having to give it in taxes anyway. The more that taxes go down, the more they just take that money and put it in financial stuff instead, basically trapping other people in debt, extracting rents of one kind or another. Lowering the tax rate is just going to cause them to invest even less in productivity and more in predatory activities.

I wonder about the role of being au courant or fashionable... 

When taxes were high, what was the fashion amongst the 1%? What did they did they want to show off and compete amongst themselves? The wellbeing/wages of their workers? The innovative products/ideas they funded? Today, taxes are low and the 1% seemingly compete to cheat their workers of more and more of their wages/labor so they can claim to have made more profits. Just contrast the views of high tax George Romney, father, to those of low tax Mitt Romney, son.

Foundations

This is something Fox News analyst Erick Erickson wrote in response to reports that DJT leaked classified information received from an important ally to Russian officials when they met him in the White House at his invitation:

What sets this story apart for me, at least, is that I know one of the sources. And the source is solidly supportive of President Trump, or at least has been and was during Campaign 2016. But the President will not take any internal criticism, no matter how politely it is given. He does not want advice, cannot be corrected, and is too insecure to see any constructive feedback as anything other than an attack.

So some of the sources are left with no other option but to go to the media, leak the story, and hope that the intense blowback gives the President a swift kick in the butt. Perhaps then he will recognize he screwed up. The President cares vastly more about what the press says than what his advisers say. That is a real problem and one his advisers are having to recognize and use, even if it causes messy stories to get outside the White House perimeter.

I am told that what the President did is actually far worse than what is being reported. The President does not seem to realize or appreciate that his bragging can undermine relationships with our allies and with human intelligence sources. He also does not seem to appreciate that his loose lips can get valuable assets in the field killed.

Aside from the known fact that I don't think DJT is capable of being POTUS and should be impeached for any number of ethics violations prior to taking office, I have nothing to add to the actual scandal. What I find interesting is Erickson's faith in the truthfulness of the 'source'. His source is someone he knows and trusts on a personal level. This sounds a lot like the indoctrination of religion & faith. From a young age, the people children trust the most - their parents - indoctrinate them into belief in 'God'. For church attendees, the circle of trusted people grows from parents to those deemed trustworthy by parents - often clergy and their officialdom. It becomes an insular trustworthy in-group (church community) and the untrustworthy out-group (all others). Trustworthiness is subjectively determined by knowledge of someone on a personal level. Contrast this to trust in a process such as science or law. People who trust processes are less influenced by personal knowledge; the objective conclusions/knowledge gained by the process is accepted even when the person conducting the exercise is unknown. For example, even when we don't agree with a Supreme Court Decision, there is generally belief that it will be corrected at some later time.

At the moment, the Republican rank and file are more rabidly inclined towards subjective attachment that Democrats. If Fox News is anything to go by, they are still sticking to DJT despite the many reports of highly questionable judgement. Many Democrats also have a cult of personality; to some them, Hilary can do no wrong; to another group, Bernie is the 'one'. If science has any lessons to offer, it's that predictions based on objective reasoning have proven to be more accurate than those base on religion.

Patterns within

Audio interview at Truthout with two activists addressing economic issues in relation to race. It's curious that while they can see the policy of wealth from black communities, they never apply that same dynamic on a larger scale... other social divisions and economies as a whole. My comment:

"the actual function of how these companies operate is built on the extraction of wealth from people of color" is a microcosm of all economies; economies are hierarchical structures (think pyramid) where everyone in the higher tiers feed off the labor of workers who produce the goods (base). The agriculture sector is an example where farmers, harvesters and food processors/packers literally produce the goods from which workers in all other sectors feed. Based on size alone, workers should have the most power in any economy. Unfortunately, workers are susceptible to division by any number of classifications including color (black, brown, tan, white), sexuality (LGBT, feminism), religion (abortion/prayer/anti-semitism/Islam), and legal status. In the U.S., both major political parties actively incite division amongst workers to counter organized resistance - the 'great' Democratic-Republican political battles are mere puppet shows behind which the same operators pull all the strings.

The reform efforts of your guests are laudable but considering the systemic corruption at the bedrock of the economic/political system, they are only relieving the symptoms, not rooting out the cause.

The power of the 1%

Leo Panitch was interviewed at TRNN about inequality and its effect on society: 

makes inequality important, and how does it affect society? 

you don't have a society at all. What you have is a class system, where, if anything, you have two societies, or sometimes more, rather than anything you can properly call a society. 

Why is this [mitigation of inequality] not happening?

it was about the power of the 1%, which makes doing anything about this inequality almost impossible, unless you remove their power

So far as I know, this is the first media account that attributes the economic and political inequality to the imbalance of power. It's worth listening to. My comment:

Economic inequality is “… about the power of the 1%, which makes doing anything about this inequality almost impossible, unless you remove their power.” 

There are two possible solutions: (1) Minimize information control [intellectual property] and maximize institutional transparency [all information]. Concentration of power is only possible when information is tightly controlled, often with the full engagement of public policy. (2) Power concentration goes hand-in-hand with concentration of capital. Capital in the form of currency and real estate is readily regulated. Small capital – small goods and personal services – are easier to shield. An informal barter economy of small capital may be able to compete against corporate capital. This is more a tax argument than solution – Corporations have lots of tax loopholes which workers can’t use. In a barter economy, workers pay taxes on what they report; if workers don’t report income, they don’t pay taxes. The lack of government income (in taxes) should/may force the government to correct the imbalance of financial & political power. 

Solution 1 is the better choice because is completely alters the status quo and opens more opportunities to more people. Solution 2 maintains current institutions and allows the power imbalance to be re-established at some future date.