Category: U.S. Economy

Wage-for-Hire and the Pandemic

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The Covid-19 pandemic has become a classic case study in the shortcomings of wage-for-hire in America.

One-third of renters did not pay their rent for April.

The unemployment insurance system is deeply stressed.

Many, many companies ‘laid off’ their workforce when the pandemic hit and governments began to take appropriate steps to save lives.

Most of those workers were wage-for-hire employees. The fortunate ones had some benefits – many did not.

Most of those workers do not have any ownership in the companies that employ them – therefore no underlying personal asset attached to their work.

Most of them, because their wages are only adequate for their necessary expenses, do not have any savings.

I read where a majority of American workers cannot afford an $1000 emergency.

Wage-for-hire makes a good part of our economic disaster.

It’s a great system to concentrate wealth.

It’s a great system to specialize work in a manner that demeans vocation.

It promotes some old idea of economic efficiency that arose as a slightly more humane version of slavery.

I am not a fan.

The underpinnings of wage-for-hire and non-equity corporate structures are a gimmick.

If we really want a wealthy America we also want every worker to have a share of wealth.

If we really want to diversify risks in companies, we also want every worker to have a stake in ‘risk sharing’.

We just found out our economy does not adapt to system-wide adjustments for national health and safety emergencies.

I’d like to see us rethink how we financially work together.

A Troubled Economy

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For me, the most dramatic thing in our current ‘coronavirus political economy’ is how troubled we seem to be as a society.

There are a number of factors:

  1. It is a VERY contagious virus….so good reason to curtail activities outside the home.
  2. To curtail activities outside the home is hugely traumatic for our political economy.
  3. Local communities are extremely dependent on global logistics.
  4. Our economy is financially dominated by large corporations that depend on global logistics, cheap labor, and local residents going about purchasing their goods.
  5. The stability of financial markets depends on trust in large corporations. If investors no longer financially trust the corporations they are going to flee the market.
  6. Once investors begin to flee the markets all of the derivative financial instruments become suspect – even the derivative markets meant to protect certain industry segments (commodity futures, for example).

Add to that list:

  1. We have grown much more secular as a society; therefore our basis for faith and trust is now much more material.
  2. Our national government has grown extremely superficial and unable to collaborate on important issues.
  3. Our heroic figures are predominantly athletes…along with some media and film personalities.

All of those items are good reason to be troubled.

I would hope that we become more clearheaded on an economy that is locally sustainable while marketing local surplus.

Announcing my Desire to Run for President of the United States

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I’ve watched for my entire adult life the progressing ‘vanity operation’ that is the American Presidency…and think it time for substance over artificial tanning.

Therefore, I am announcing a desire to run for President of the United States.

First, to aid all the dirt mongers, trollers, and folks of bad character, I list the following as assistance in your investigations of things that might be used to demean:

  1. I was an anxious child, so was not a good hitter in Little League (I was, to my credit, excellent in the field).
  2. I did an extremely bad job as President of my high school honor society.
  3. In the last month of my senior year in college I copied the lab data of one of my friends for an engineering report.
  4. I was a conscientious objector to the military and served three years as a surgical technician rather than as a combatant.
  5. I, during my twenties, had three years of psychoanalysis at the Pritzker Hospital at the University of Chicago.
  6. During the last couple years of my marriage I was an irascible and bad husband.
  7. I was once arrested at an airport when a TSA accused me of ‘throwing’ a bag of cancer medication at them (I tossed it on the conveyor and it slid off and accidentally hit their leg).
  8. I was once accused by a bank of kiting checks (it was in the 80s and as I remember it was a couple checks for $100 ….you would need to talk to the bank…although they, like many banks, are no longer in existence).
  9. I occasionally get angry and curse.
  10. A female companion in 2016/17 asked for a restraining order saying she ‘feared for her life’ (you need to ask her …I have no idea…at the time she did it we had not seen one another in months).

My worst offense, by far, is that I have little interest in accruing money. I believe money is to use responsibly for societal good…so try to minimize what I personally use (and even then think I take too much). My tax filings, therefore, show minimal income.

I feel certain, given the current political atmosphere, you can find something else…although the list is thorough from my memory.

Also, I never saw myself running for President, so would undoubtedly have done a better job as President of my high school honor society.

I am serious about my desire.

I think my character is sterling. At the least, I could return integrity and moral responsibility to the Office of President….and disconnect the Office from the influence of money.

My platform…. transition America from a nation built far to often on slavery and cheap labor to a nation that educates everyone on new forms of free enterprise that are skill based, promote shared ownership, create broad wealth, and respect the earth and the earth’s creatures.

Who Owns America?

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“When democracy goes down before monopoly capitalism,” Agar writes, “the result has been a greedy tyranny, preserving all the vices of capitalism and extinguishing its virtues.”

Russell Mokhiber, editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter, and Robert Weissman, editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor in 2000 wrote the following about the 1936 published book Who Owns America?

The other day, at our local bookstore, we passed a book. And then doubled back.The book is titled Who Owns America?: A Declaration of Independence. Sounded like it was written by people we should know. But on further investigation, we recognized none of the names on the cover.Who Owns America? was written by 21 “conservative” decentralists. And it was first published in 1936.Re-released this year, with a new introduction by Seton Hall University History Professor Edward S. Shapiro, Who Owns America? (ISI Books, Wilmington, Delaware, 1999), is highly critical of large corporate institutions that controlled the political economy in 1930s America. Its publisher believes the book is as relevant today as the day it was published.Edited by Pulitizer Prize winning Louisville Courier-Journal columnist Herbert Agar and southern poet Allen Tate, Who Owns America? puts forth the type of scathing critique that you just can’t find in today’s political debates.Like today’s corporatist conservatives — George Will, James Glassman and Charles Krauthammer — the conservatives who wrote Who Owns America? believed that the specter of big government threatened individual freedom and the ideal America.But unlike the corporatists of today, Agar, Tate and their colleagues understood that public authority was the only antidote to the excesses of big corporate power.Agar, Tate and their colleagues argued that to attain the conservative goal of less government, you’d first have to limit the size and power of the large corporate institutions that were roaming the land. Typical of the 1930s conservatives writing in this volume is the pro-decentralist economist Richard Ransom.”The permanent lease on life which corporations possess tends more and more to concentrate within a few hands the ownership and control of general property,” wrote Ransom in a chapter titled Corporate and Individual Persons. “The disproportionate distribution of the national wealth is very evidently due in large part to the corporate tendency to mass larger and larger aggregates of ownership which are held together by corporate permanence and corporate inertia. …”Ransom’s solution to the problem of corporate control of the national wealth? Federal chartering of corporations doing interstate business.And what should the states do about excessive corporate power? The states should limit the “profitable business life of the corporations which they charter.”And how could the states accomplish this end?”This could perhaps be done by means of heavy selective inheritance taxation on the transfer of corporate shares or assets,” Ransom answers. And what would this achieve?”Such a shorter term of corporate life, either accomplished indirectly as suggested here or accomplished by more immediate means, will produce a more direct personal responsibility in corporate managements,” Ransom says. Once interstate corporations are federally chartered, Ransom proposes that the personal liability of stockholders should be extended to an amount at least equal to twice the proportionate investment of each stockholder (currently, you can only lose what you put in.)  Can you imagine Will or Krauthammer contemplating these thoughts? Lyle Lanier, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, wrote a chapter titled “Big Business in the Property State,” in which he observed that “the American people have long recognized the danger to democracy of economic power concentrated in the hands of big corporations.”Lawmakers passed the antitrust laws at the turn of the century, “but these laws have been impotent to stem the rising tide of big business organization,” Lanier wrote. Industrial capitalism, Lanier wrote, “has followed a course of development which is both self-destructive and dangerous to democratic institutions.”Lanier, like his co-authors, finds hope in a Jeffersonian ideal of small business and small farmers. The publication of this volume today makes George Will, James Glassman and their conservative contemporaries look like empty suits compared those who wrote Who Owns America?. Big corporations still roam the land and still threaten a fragile democracy. But there is no Agar on the right to challenge them. Needless to say, we cannot and do not agree with everything written by these 21 self-proclaimed “conservatives” of the 1930s. We do agree with the conservative sentiment put forth in the book, as summarized by Agar, that corporate concentration and democracy are at odds.”When democracy goes down before monopoly capitalism,” Agar writes, “the result has been a greedy tyranny, preserving all the vices of capitalism and extinguishing its virtues.”

This is remarkable, very relevant to our current economy/society.

I also find their notion of limiting the lifespan of corporations extremely insightful (and, by the way, a very Christ-like perspective on society).

Fake News, Internet and Communication Tech Companies, and American Society

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This post diverges from agriculture and food…but not really

…and excuse the following generalizations (there are good folk in all the places I criticize).

Apple’s CEO made a recent statement on Fake News.

Article on the Statement

Apple has more historical credibility here than the others…but…

He states the need to create methods to ‘find’ fake news without stepping on freedom of speech.

Excuse my frankness, but if Google and Facebook and Twitter and all these other social media entities had – in the beginning – collaborated with publishers and newspapers (rather than intellectually and economically demeaning them for a buck to be the hot new technology) …this entire episode would not have happened….

AND Facebook and Google and Twitter..etc. would today have had a much better business model.

Watch what happens now….

It’s a huge mess…I disagree with Cook that it is going away quickly…will NOT go away without better business models for Internet companies. The advertising model has all the integrity …and ‘spendability’…of a wooden nickel.

I’d even suggest Google is only marginally on firm financial ground.

Facebook, Twitter…even certain aspects of Amazon….are in the bulls-eye of the coming information reformation.

The peripheral companies like Yahoo are already seeing their ephemeral balance sheets crash.

Google and others (like Bezos and Musk) also constantly scramble to get into other businesses…I wonder if this is just ‘expansionist’ capital… or fear of the fragility of the core business financial model?

I was, for 20 + years, in publishing …loved it and was extremely good professionally (information graphics and descriptive communications at the most sophisticated and intelligent levels of the industry….sorry for the ‘personal back-slapping’…but I was pretty darn successful).

In 1994 I left the field because I no longer saw a route to practicing with an ethic similar to my practice at The University of Chicago Press and Scientific American. Fortunately The University of Chicago Press is still robust (do not know about Scientific American).

In many ways the industries of publishing and journalism (and the integrity of those industries) were ‘stolen’ by the Internet’s ephemeral models.

Our society had also…for the previous 30 years (60s through 80s) evolved a culture and law of hyper-individualism….where personal rights in law supercede the rights of family, community.

It is also the period where ‘individual rights’, ‘rights to aggregate’ and  ‘rights to be corporate’ superceded traditional ideals of justice for all….even superceded BASIC rights enumerated in the U.S. Constitution. We now have an entire set of inane laws that are fundamentally and profoundly contradictory.

We are now seeing the results of the changes in law and culture from the 60s to the present:

  1. We have a PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES who has built a career (since the 60s) on the manipulation of information/communication for his own “individual’ gain (and his need for attention). He does not see any moral, ethical, or cultural connection/contradiction with his severely dishonest actions. I am not a psychiatrist and do not know what his diagnosis would be…but am certain he is not healthy.
  2. We have forty years of law based upon the idea that an individual is more important than a community or a family. The political dialogue seldom even acknowledges the complexity of the laws created…the ultimate absurdity being the public discussion and laws related to abortion, sexual rights, etc.
  3. We have forty years of financial corporations and financial professionals whose goal is the personal acquisition of money (not wealth in the traditional sense). Not that America was ever without sin (remember the American Indian, the African slave)…but we originally created law – with our country’s formation – meant to alleviate oppression, respect one another, and allow for the pursuit of happiness (I would have used the word ‘health’ rather than ‘happiness’…but the intentions were sterling). Those formation documents are simple, straightforward, understandable, and consistent with my understanding of human behavior.
  4. We have also created an agriculture economy based upon the aggregation of ownership and money at the expense of farming integrity…an agriculture that has deteriorated the fundamental means of production (the soil and the reproduction of animals) based upon someone’s or some corporation’s ‘individual rights’.
  5. We have created food that reflects the aggregation of money by debasing ingredients and quality of raw materials.

Fortunately, a more and more robust sector of our society sees the problem, understands the problem, and has some pretty spectacular start-up suggestions on how to reform our culture.

A subset of that group also has amazingly high moral, ethical, and religious values at a young age – remarkable in our current economy.

They are going to need a strong stomach and sturdy limbs…prophetic action will be resisted.

 

The Decline of Family Farms

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There are certain days where the ‘best I can do’ is to sort out some ethical guidance for chaotic situations.

Nothing else, just sort out societal ‘messes’ and hopefully give folks some religious and ethical perspective on action.

Yesterday was one of those days.

I went to bed with dog Lucille at 8:30 pm after reading a few pages of an historical novel about rural life in America.

I awoke at 2 am.

The decline of the family farm in America was much more than a change in the ‘way we farm’.

It was a profound change in the way we think.

It was a profound change in our cultural values.

It was a profound change in our ABILITY to think.

Without the insights and intuitions of daily meaningful work with plants and animals we lose our intelligence.

Science cannot replace the intelligence that grows from daily work caring for plants, animals, and other humans.

We Americans have been lost.

I see lovely signs that we are beginning to – again – be found.

Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Mary Berry in Conversation

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A video from December 2016:

Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Mary Berry in Conversation

Some phrases:

With regard to our traditional energy economy…The party is over! (Wes)

With regard to our economy…we accept no limits…an economy built on explosives and toxins. (Wendell)

With regard to the local food movement…it has been going on for 40 years and the divide between urban and rural has grown greater. (Mary)

With regard to a future economy…Developing an economy as a way of taking proper care. (Wendell)

Lastly, Wendell had a very nice thought on ‘natural integrity’.

Solving for Pattern in Agriculture

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  • A good solution accepts given limits, using so far as possible what is at hand. The farther-fetched the solution, the less it should be trusted. Granted that a farm can be too small, it is nevertheless true that enlarging scale is a deceptive solution; it solves one problem by acquiring another or several others.
  • A good solution accepts the limitation of discipline. Agricultural problems should receive solutions that are agricultural, not technological or economic.
  • A good solution improves the balances, symmetries, or harmonies within a pattern – it is a qualitative solution – rather than enlarging or complicating some part of a pattern at the expense or in neglect of the rest.
  • A good solution solves more than one problem, and it does not make new problems. I am talking about health as opposed to almost any cure, coherence of pattern as opposed to almost any solution produced piecemeal or in isolation. The return of organic waste to the soil may, at first glance, appear to be a good solution per se. But that is not invariably or necessarily true. It is true only if the wastes are returned to the right place at the right time in the pattern of the farm, if the waste does not contain toxic material, if the quantity is not too great, and if not too much energy or money is expended in transporting it.
  • A good solution will satisfy a whole range of criteria; it will be good in all respects. A farm that has found correct agricultural solutions to its problems will be fertile, productive, healthful, conservative, beautiful, pleasant to live on.
  • A good solution embodies a clear distinction between biological order and mechanical order, between farming and industry. Farmers who fail to make this distinction are ideal customers of the equipment companies, but they often fail to understand that the real strength of a farm is in the soil.
  • Good solutions have wide margins, so that the failure of one solution does not imply the impossibility of another. Industrial agriculture tends to put all its eggs in fewer and fewer baskets, and to make ‘going for broke’ its only way of going. But to grow grain should not make it impossible to pasture livestock, and to have a lot of power should not make it impossible to use a little.
  • A good solution always answers the question, How much is enough? Industrial solutions have always rested on the assumption that enough is all you can get. But that destroys agriculture, as it destroys nature and culture. The good health of the farm implies a limit of scale, because it implies a limit of attention, and because such a limit is invariable implied by any pattern….a healthy farm incorporates a pattern that a single human mind can comprehend, make, maintain, vary in response to circumstances, and pay steady attention to. That this limit is obviously variable from one farmer and farm to another does not mean that it does not exist.
  • A good solution should be cheap, and it should not enrich one person by the distress or impoverishment of another. In agriculture, so called ‘inputs’ are, from a different point of view, outputs – expenses. In all things, I think, but especially in an agriculture struggling to survive in an industrial economy, any solution that calls for an expenditure to a manufacturer should be held in suspicion – not rejected necessarily, but as a rule mistrusted.
  • Good solutions exist only in proof, and are not to be expected from absentee owners or absentee experts. Problems must be solved in work and in place, with particular knowledge, fidelity, and care, by people who will suffer the consequences of their mistakes. There is no theoretical or ideal practice. Practical advice or direction from people who have no practice may have some value, but its value is questionable and is limited. The division of capital, management, and labor, characteristic of an industrial system, are therefore utterly alien to the health of farming – as they probably also are to the health of manufacturing. The good health of a farm depends on the farmer’s mind; the good health of the mind has its dependence, and its proof, in physical work. The good farmer’s mind and his body – his management and his labor – work together as intimately as his heart and lungs. And the capital of a well-farmed farm by definition includes the farmer, mind and body both. Farm and farmer are one thing, an organism.
  • Once the farmer’s mind, his body, and his farm are understood as a single organism, and once it is understood that the question of endurance of this organism is a question about the sufficiency and integrity of a pattern, then the word organic can be usefully admitted into this series of standards. It is a word that I have been defining all along, though I have not used it. An organic farm, properly speaking, is not one that uses certain methods and substances and avoids others; it is a farm whose structure is formed in imitation of the structure of natural systems; it has the integrity, the independence, and the benign dependence of an organism. Sir Albert Howard said that a good farm is an analogue of the forest that ‘manures itself.’ A farm that imports too much fertility, even as feed or manure, is in this sense as inorganic as a farm that exports too much or that imports chemical fertilizer.
  • …In an organism, what is good for one part is good for another. What is good for the mind is good for the body, what is good for the arm is good for the heart. We know that sometimes a part may be sacrificed for the whole; a life may be saved by the amputation of an arm. But we also know that such remedies are desperate, irreversible, and destructive; it is impossible to improve the body by amputation. And such remedies do not imply a safe logic. As tendencies they are fatal: you cannot save your arm but sacrifice your life. Perhaps most of us who know local histories of agriculture know of fields that in hard times have been sacrificed to save a farm, and we know that though such a thing is possible it is dangerous. The danger is worse when topsoil is sacrificed for the sake of a crop. And if we understand the farm as an organism, we see that it is impossible to sacrifice the health of the soil to improve the health of plants, or to sacrifice the health of plants to improve the health of animals, or to sacrifice the health of animals to improve the health of people.
  • It is the nature of any organic pattern to be contained within a larger one. And so a good solution in one pattern preserves the integrity of the pattern that contains it. A good agricultural solution, for example, would not pollute or erode a watershed. What is good for the water is good for the ground, what is good for the ground is good for the plants, what is good for the plants is good for the animals, what is good for the animals is good for people, what is good for people is good for the air, what is good for the air is good for the water. And vice versa.
  • But we must not forget that those human solutions that we may call organic are not natural. We are talking about organic artifacts, organic only by imitation or analogy. Our ability to make such artifacts depends on virtues that are specifically human: accurate memory, observation, insight, imagination, inventiveness, reverence, devotion, fidelity, restraint. Restraint –for us, now – above all: the ability to accept and live within limits, to resist changes that are merely novel or fashionable; to resist greed and pride; to resist the temptation to ‘solve’ problems by ignoring them, accepting them as ‘tradeoffs,’ or bequeathing them to posterity. A good solution, then, must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.

 

Source: Solving for Pattern, Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: North Point Press, 1981, pp. 134-145)

Note: This list – directed at the farm – has much broader cultural meaning given the state of our current American economy and government.Movie All Is Lost (2013)

The Latest on the Collapse of Human Civilization

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Rapid population growth — combined with our highly unbalanced distribution of wealth — and its obvious need for more resources (water, energy, food) may lead to a breaking point beyond which civilization becomes unsustainable.

Simply put, if you don’t have any water to drink or food to eat but your neighbors do and won’t share, you and your buddies are going to yank it away from them. Social unrest is not a joke.

The NPR Report with links to the Study

EVERYTHING around me indicates humanity needs to make rapid changes in their cultural and economic values.

A Changing Agricultural Land Economy

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An estimated 400 million acres of farmland in the United States will likely change hands over the coming two decades as older farmers retire, even as new evidence indicates this land is being strongly pursued by private equity investors.

Mirroring a trend being experienced across the globe, this strengthening focus on agriculture-related investment by the private sector is already leading to a spike in U.S. farmland prices. Coupled with relatively weak federal policies, these rising prices are barring many young farmers from continuing or starting up small-scale agricultural operations of their own.

In the long term, critics say, this dynamic could speed up the already fast-consolidating U.S. food industry, with broad ramifications for both human and environmental health.

“When non-operators own farms, they tend to source out the oversight to management companies, leading in part to horrific conditions around labor and how we treat the land,” Anuradha Mittal, the executive director of the Oakland Institute, a U.S. watchdog group focusing on global large-scale land acquisitions, told IPS.

The Report