Buddhism is an educational movement.A system that trains the mind and tries to help an individual overcome unsatisfactory periods.The practice is difficult and great effort is needed because our mind has developed habits that generate the same unsatisfactory periods.We tend to believe our thinking even if it might be debilitating to our contentment.How we view the world and our intentions are paramount in overcoming anxiety,discomfort and fear.Buddhists believe,through direct experience,that humans are part of nature and function due to conditions and causes.Just as plants,trees and animals function with the conditions presented to them. The main problem of an unsatisfactory period is our reaction to the present moment.If we cling to a desired outcome,expect pleasure without pain,control our experience in any way,we condition ourselves to cause anxiety.Our reactions to experience are keys that open or close doors to satisfaction.The educational movement is internal, sees the external as sacred,and accepts experience completely, without identification.Being aware,mindful without aversion,brings a peaceful state because one's personality,ego,isn't involved.All humans are mindful,experiencing the world before self generated thoughts.That mindfulness is non-judgemental and doesn't identify good and bad,pleasure or pain.Once we start to identify and desire certain outcomes,unsatisfactory periods begin.We create the unsatisfactory experience through our thinking.Attachment to outcome develops and our mind remembers our reactions and wants to satisfy the personality that created them.These attachments grow and become stronger if one doesn't practice the antidotes.
According to Buddhist beliefs,there is no permanent self.Everything is impermanent,in flux,moving like a river.Just look at nature,our bodies, to see birth,decay and everything between.Our thoughts are the same,they come and go.We change every day ,even every moment.Nothing is permanent.Even if it is in flux,it is a good world,a sacred one with humans who have the potential,Buddha nature,to be happy and content all the time.Because the mind is impermanent,we have the ability to change the conditions we have created.The first precept of the Eightfold Path is Right View.It is a view to be part of something instead of a separate entity.It posits that humans are part of the body of life,parts of a whole.That we should see ourselves as equals with others on a quest to be happy and content.The impermanence of our lives supports the view that we are not permanent islands but interconnected with everyone on many levels.Our personalities keep telling us the world revolves around us and that we are the most important person in the world because of our experience trying to control the sensual world.But doesn't everyone have this similar experience.We share our desire for happiness,comfort and love.The more one looks to dissolve our personality,ego,the more one becomes one with the body of life.All religions support this concept but use other doctrines.The more our personality grows apart from the whole,unsatisfactory periods will last.Appreciation of life,the whole body of life,brings peace to the mind. The ego is diminished by acts of patience and kindness to oneself and others.The lose oneself is to gain insight into liberation,a freedom from a desire to have something or be somebody that you currently want to be.It is an acceptance of everyone as is, without judgement,knowing that humans are just natural conditions.
More to come.
Friday, April 18, 2014
Thursday, April 17, 2014
More From Rachel Maddow's" Drift"
Maddow created a to-do list in "Drift"
Going to war,being at war,should be painful for the entire country,from the start.When we ship troops off to battle,we should pay for it.Raise it through taxes and war bonds.
Lets do away with the secret military.The Air Force,not the CIA,should operate the use of drones and we should know about it.The same goes for the policy makers giving them the orders.The chain of command should never be obscured by state secrets.
Let's quit asking the military to do things best left to our State Department,or the Peace Corps or FEMA. Also stop military leaders from making judgments and decisions about policy.Presidents shouldn't defer to military commanders as whether or not to bomb Iran,etc.It's no favor to the military and it's an affront to the Constitution.
The life of the National Guardsman or Guardswoman should be mostly peacetime,civilian .When we ship these men and women off to war,civilian communities all over America should feel that loss.Today,they are really full time soldiers.
Let's wind back the privatization of the war and the military's dependence on contractors for what use to be military functions.Private contractors are not cheaper and should be held accountable for rape,murder or fraud and be prosecuted.Troops need to peel their own potatoes again,drive their own supply trucks,build their own barracks and guard their own generals.
Our military and weapons prowess is a fantastic and perfectly weighted hammer,but that doesn't make every international problem a nail.
Let's ensure that our nuclear infrastructure shrinks to fit our country's realistic nuclear mission.Let's decide exactly what we mean to deter with our nukes,and expend just exactly what we need to do that and nothing more.
Going to war is not one man's responsibility.The "imperial presidency" malarky that was invented to save Ronald Reagan's neck in the Iran-Contra,and that played as high art throughout the career of Richard Cheney,is a radical departure from previous views of presidential power,and it should be taught and understood that way.It isn't a partisan thing.Republicans and Democrats alike have options to vote people into Congress who are determined to stop with the chickenshittery and assert the legislature's constitutional prerogatives on war and peace.
Going to war,being at war,should be painful for the entire country,from the start.When we ship troops off to battle,we should pay for it.Raise it through taxes and war bonds.
Lets do away with the secret military.The Air Force,not the CIA,should operate the use of drones and we should know about it.The same goes for the policy makers giving them the orders.The chain of command should never be obscured by state secrets.
Let's quit asking the military to do things best left to our State Department,or the Peace Corps or FEMA. Also stop military leaders from making judgments and decisions about policy.Presidents shouldn't defer to military commanders as whether or not to bomb Iran,etc.It's no favor to the military and it's an affront to the Constitution.
The life of the National Guardsman or Guardswoman should be mostly peacetime,civilian .When we ship these men and women off to war,civilian communities all over America should feel that loss.Today,they are really full time soldiers.
Let's wind back the privatization of the war and the military's dependence on contractors for what use to be military functions.Private contractors are not cheaper and should be held accountable for rape,murder or fraud and be prosecuted.Troops need to peel their own potatoes again,drive their own supply trucks,build their own barracks and guard their own generals.
Our military and weapons prowess is a fantastic and perfectly weighted hammer,but that doesn't make every international problem a nail.
Let's ensure that our nuclear infrastructure shrinks to fit our country's realistic nuclear mission.Let's decide exactly what we mean to deter with our nukes,and expend just exactly what we need to do that and nothing more.
Going to war is not one man's responsibility.The "imperial presidency" malarky that was invented to save Ronald Reagan's neck in the Iran-Contra,and that played as high art throughout the career of Richard Cheney,is a radical departure from previous views of presidential power,and it should be taught and understood that way.It isn't a partisan thing.Republicans and Democrats alike have options to vote people into Congress who are determined to stop with the chickenshittery and assert the legislature's constitutional prerogatives on war and peace.
Executive Power,Privatization And Drifting Into War(Drift/Rachel Maddow)
Maddow dedicates her new book"Drift" to Dick Cheney who refuses to be interviewed by Rachel.9/11 has led us into Kabul at a rate of $5 billion a month over ten years and counting.It is still one of the four poorest countries on earth.In Kabul,there is a rich neighborhood(Wazir Akbar Khan) built by the Afghan elite with profits from the international influx of cash that accompanied the mostly American influx of war that is used to house Western aid agencies,journalists,politicians,diplocrats and private contractors who need a place to stay.You'll find properties renting for $7,000 to $25,000 a month.Of course,the elite who built these mansions are absent landlords living in Dubai,U.S and Europe.
One could also consider the water treatment plant built in Fallujah by a South Carolina company with an initial $33 million contract that was completed for $108 million seven years after its start.The project only managed to support one fourth of the city as residents labeled it "the big stink".
In the U.S.,9/11 has produced the crown jewel of sprawling intelligopolis called Liberty Crossing that houses the National Counterterrorism Center.After 9/11,the annual intelligence budget of $30 billion was increased 250% that has info gathering from 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies coordinated by the Center.The Center is slated to double in the next decade.All this,with little or no debate.
Thomas Jefferson was against a standing army.He was guided by history.The Greeks and Romans didn't have standing armies the majority of the time.As President,he cut the army by a third and left the defense of the nation to militias under the control of municipalities.He understood armies were expensive and the country's resources could be easily exhausted.Jeffersonian prudence held sway for 150 years. The professional military was an institution of limited reach and power;in times of peace we kept the regulars busy building defense works,ports and bridges.When the country went to war,the entire U.S went to war.No nation's military demobilized faster when the fighting was over.
After WWI, Congress completely dismantled The American Expeditionary Forces and reduced the active-duty military from four million to pre-war numbers of less than three hundred thousand.In 1945,there were twelve million active duty soldiers;five years later there were one and a half million.Of the 535,000 troops in Vietnam,1% were national guard and reserves.A political decision by Johnson kept them home and away from danger.He increased the draft instead avoiding the clamour from congressmen and prominent constituents who didn't want their sons in the jungles of Southeast Asia.We went to war in Vietnam in a way that we'd never gone to war before and no one liked the way it turned out.Creighton Abrams,US commander from 1968-72, changed this direction with what is known as the Abrams Doctrine-The Total Force Policy-put American politicians in the position of being"designed out"of waging war in a way that was dislocated from the everyday experience of American families.The War Powers Resolution of 1973 would be an explicit reassertion of the prerogative spelled out under Article 1,Section 8,"to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States" that Congress-and Congress alone-had the power to declare war.The Congress had allowed Johnson to push more than a half million troops without taking the case through Congress and the American people.An incensed Nixon vetoed the War Powers Resolution,but the House and Senate overrode that veto with votes to spare.The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had to go the the next President in 1975,Gerald Ford,to rein his ambitions in and disallow the executive request for $722 million to continue supporting the war.Forty years later,Ford's chief of staff,Donald Rumsfeld,would still be complaining bitterly about that "congressional backlash" and the War Powers Resolution.
Reagan increased the military budget by 20% in 1981(peacetime) and announced a strategy to double the defense budget in five years.He did so while reducing taxes by the largest amount in American history.That strategy increased the deficit by $62 billion and was sure to hit $112 billion in five years.According to Reagan,the 'evil empire"Russia,had to be stopped.
In Reagan's eight years in office,military expenditure doubled as projected from $150 billion to $300 billion which represented 30% of our overall annual budget( not counting health,medical injuries,previous debt and retirement benefits that pushed that percent towards 50%.).At the same time,Soviet general Secretary Leonid Brezhnev stated"It is dangerous madness to try to defeat each other in the arms race and to count on victory in nuclear war".Russia was already teetering badly by the time Reagan took office.Reagan ignored CIA reports that felt increasing threatened by the U.S. during this time period.Reagan's annual budget deficit ballooned from 2% to a record 6.3% of GDP in his first two years in office.His yearly budget shortfalls grew from $50 billion to $100 billion to $220 billion as the self-proclaimed conservatives just kept asking for and getting more dollars for more weapons.As a result, the country neglected its schools,cities,roads, bridges and health care system.From the world's greatest creditor nation to the world's greatest debtor nation.America during these years also imported twice the amount of oil than 1973(33% to 60%).They didn't listen to Jimmy Carter who wanted to reverse these percents.
More from Maddow soon.
One could also consider the water treatment plant built in Fallujah by a South Carolina company with an initial $33 million contract that was completed for $108 million seven years after its start.The project only managed to support one fourth of the city as residents labeled it "the big stink".
In the U.S.,9/11 has produced the crown jewel of sprawling intelligopolis called Liberty Crossing that houses the National Counterterrorism Center.After 9/11,the annual intelligence budget of $30 billion was increased 250% that has info gathering from 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies coordinated by the Center.The Center is slated to double in the next decade.All this,with little or no debate.
Thomas Jefferson was against a standing army.He was guided by history.The Greeks and Romans didn't have standing armies the majority of the time.As President,he cut the army by a third and left the defense of the nation to militias under the control of municipalities.He understood armies were expensive and the country's resources could be easily exhausted.Jeffersonian prudence held sway for 150 years. The professional military was an institution of limited reach and power;in times of peace we kept the regulars busy building defense works,ports and bridges.When the country went to war,the entire U.S went to war.No nation's military demobilized faster when the fighting was over.
After WWI, Congress completely dismantled The American Expeditionary Forces and reduced the active-duty military from four million to pre-war numbers of less than three hundred thousand.In 1945,there were twelve million active duty soldiers;five years later there were one and a half million.Of the 535,000 troops in Vietnam,1% were national guard and reserves.A political decision by Johnson kept them home and away from danger.He increased the draft instead avoiding the clamour from congressmen and prominent constituents who didn't want their sons in the jungles of Southeast Asia.We went to war in Vietnam in a way that we'd never gone to war before and no one liked the way it turned out.Creighton Abrams,US commander from 1968-72, changed this direction with what is known as the Abrams Doctrine-The Total Force Policy-put American politicians in the position of being"designed out"of waging war in a way that was dislocated from the everyday experience of American families.The War Powers Resolution of 1973 would be an explicit reassertion of the prerogative spelled out under Article 1,Section 8,"to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States" that Congress-and Congress alone-had the power to declare war.The Congress had allowed Johnson to push more than a half million troops without taking the case through Congress and the American people.An incensed Nixon vetoed the War Powers Resolution,but the House and Senate overrode that veto with votes to spare.The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had to go the the next President in 1975,Gerald Ford,to rein his ambitions in and disallow the executive request for $722 million to continue supporting the war.Forty years later,Ford's chief of staff,Donald Rumsfeld,would still be complaining bitterly about that "congressional backlash" and the War Powers Resolution.
Reagan increased the military budget by 20% in 1981(peacetime) and announced a strategy to double the defense budget in five years.He did so while reducing taxes by the largest amount in American history.That strategy increased the deficit by $62 billion and was sure to hit $112 billion in five years.According to Reagan,the 'evil empire"Russia,had to be stopped.
In Reagan's eight years in office,military expenditure doubled as projected from $150 billion to $300 billion which represented 30% of our overall annual budget( not counting health,medical injuries,previous debt and retirement benefits that pushed that percent towards 50%.).At the same time,Soviet general Secretary Leonid Brezhnev stated"It is dangerous madness to try to defeat each other in the arms race and to count on victory in nuclear war".Russia was already teetering badly by the time Reagan took office.Reagan ignored CIA reports that felt increasing threatened by the U.S. during this time period.Reagan's annual budget deficit ballooned from 2% to a record 6.3% of GDP in his first two years in office.His yearly budget shortfalls grew from $50 billion to $100 billion to $220 billion as the self-proclaimed conservatives just kept asking for and getting more dollars for more weapons.As a result, the country neglected its schools,cities,roads, bridges and health care system.From the world's greatest creditor nation to the world's greatest debtor nation.America during these years also imported twice the amount of oil than 1973(33% to 60%).They didn't listen to Jimmy Carter who wanted to reverse these percents.
More from Maddow soon.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Selflessness
If one conceives of 'self', then one must also conceive of 'other'. Attachment and aversion arise as a result of these two conceptions-
of self and other. As a result of relationships accompanied by feelings of attachment and aversion, all faults are generated. It should be understood that the root of all those faults is this view- that the transitory aggregation called I and mine has an inherent existence."
Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen, from the Pramanavarttika, quoted in 'Garland of Mahamudra Practices'
of self and other. As a result of relationships accompanied by feelings of attachment and aversion, all faults are generated. It should be understood that the root of all those faults is this view- that the transitory aggregation called I and mine has an inherent existence."
Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen, from the Pramanavarttika, quoted in 'Garland of Mahamudra Practices'
In Buddha's Words
The thought manifests as the word
The word manifests as the deed
The deed develops into habit
And habit hardens into character
So watch the thought and its ways with care
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings.
We are what we think
All that we are arises with our thoughts
With our thoughts,we make the world
Speak or act with an impure mind
And trouble will follow you
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart
Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
As your shadow,unshakable
The word manifests as the deed
The deed develops into habit
And habit hardens into character
So watch the thought and its ways with care
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings.
We are what we think
All that we are arises with our thoughts
With our thoughts,we make the world
Speak or act with an impure mind
And trouble will follow you
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart
Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
As your shadow,unshakable
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Notes:Back To Full Employment..Robert Pollin
Do you want full employment,with decent pay, for all our citizens? Robert Pollin has some strategies in his book"Back To Full Employment" that might help us along the way to reach this goal.Creating full employment was a national goal coming out of the Great Depression and WWII until the neo-liberal revolution that was more concerned with inflation than jobs for all.This revolution included macroeconomic policies focused on maintaining low inflation,reducing the public sector(including welfare state programs),eliminating or weakening pro-worker labor laws,eliminating barriers to international trade and deregulating financial markets.It has brought with it an income inequality that increased two and a half times for the top 1% since 1946 and a 17% growth for the top 10% since 1970(50% of all income), 25 million citizens unemployed after the Great Recession of 2008 with 71% of the our families making under $50,000 a year.
A decent job,living wage job,according to Lawrence Gillman, is one that pays a wage level that offers workers the ability to support families,to maintain self-respect,and to have both the means and leisure to participate in the civic life of the nation.In addition to paying living wages,the job must include workplaces that are safe and healthy.Workers also need to be able to participate meaningfully in the decisions that affect their working lives(democracy in the workplace,work councils...German model).This is going beyond the union/management bargaining(union membership around 8% today,down from 33% in the 60's and early seventies) to a shared workplace where councils are real partners with management to bring stability and health to their business.
The first theorist of unemployment was Karl Marx((1867).One of his theories is that a "reserve army"of unemployed is the instrument capitalists use to prevent significant wage increases and thereby maintain profitability.Like Marx,John Maynard Keynes(1936) understood clearly that the operations of capitalist economies could easily generate mass involuntary unemployment.For Keynes,mass unemployment resulted because of insufficiency in total spending(aggregate demand)When expectations of future profits are low,investment contracts which eventually produces involuntary unemployment.He felt is was government's responsibility to counteract this by increasing its own spending,borrowing money itself, and running fiscal deficits as needed,in order to support overall spending in the economy.Adjusting interest rates and providing available credit(monetary policy) was also a part of his theory.Lastly,he wanted financial regulation that curtailed excessive speculation.
One of the major precept of neoliberalism is that government policies to promote full employment are doomed to failure and that the free market policies are themselves the most effective means for producing the fairest possible employment conditions for everyone.The most powerful voice in advancing this perspective was the late Milton Friedman(1967).He believed that if businesses pay workers more than they are worth,the business will see their profits disappear,and will eventually fold.
Another major thinker on this subject was Michal Kalecki(1943) who tried to synthesize the perspectives of Marx along with Keynes.He held that full employment could be beneficial to profits,because the economy will be operating with buoyant markets,at a high level of overall demand for products.Business profits could well be squeezed by high wage demands but they could compensate through a higher volume of sales combined with smaller,but still positive,profit margins.Despite the fact that businesses could benefit from full employment in this way,Kalecki reasoned they still would not support full employment as a goal because it would embolden workers excessively.Full employment could threaten the capitalists' control over the workplace,the pace and direction of economic activity,and even a society's political institutions.
British economist A.W.Phillips observed a long-term relationship between unemployment and inflation in 1958.Inflation goes up when unemployment goes down(Phillips Curve).Phillips suggested that business profits need not be squeezed by high employment.Rather,business could pass on higher labor costs to customers through price increases that causes a wage-price spiral.In the late seventies,economic policymakers worldwide became convinced that inflation resulting from low unemployment had become severe and uncontrollable.This perspective(Milton Friedman's natural rate of unemployment) eclipsed the full employment goals after WWII. Unfortunately,according to Pollin, inflation was caused at this period by two oil price shocks,not by low unemployment.
Rudolf Meidner and Gosta Rehn(Sweden 1960's) supported macroeconomic policies to stimulate demand and thereby expand the number of decent paying jobs but also favored a targeted rate of 3% unemployment to manage the wage-price spiral.Sweden's main unions accepted restrictions on macroeconomic stimulus policies and their own wage bargaining demands in order to help fight excessive inflationary pressures as full employment approached.Sweden succeeded at maintaining unemployment at an average rate of 2.1% between 1960 and 1989.Today,according to Pollin,the representatives of U.S. workers could bring significant new voices to the debate over inflation as well as employment,rather than giving free rein over the management of inflation to the Federal Reserve and Wall Street.Unfortunately,between 1993-2006,unemployment in Sweden rose to an average of 7.6%,while inflation fell to an average of 1.5%.Helen Ginsburg and Marguirite Rosenthal attribute the shift to the growing power of Swedish business,pressures from globalization and the race to join the EU,with its requirements for low budget deficits and inflation but none for low unemployment.
In the U.S. labor market,the neoliberal policy framework has exposed working people to increased competition from workers in poor countries.It has meant an expansion of the reserve army of labor (Marx) for jobs done by U.S workers.Wages have stagnated for forty years while average labor productivity has rose 111%.The services that the average U.S.workers produced in 2011 is more than double what they could manage in 1972.Their reward has been a 7% pay cut.The combination of falling real wages and rising productivity is a primary contributor to rising U.S. inequality over the past thirty years.30-40 million jobs in today's labor market can be performed in poor countries.Employers have gained leverage on these 40 million workers because their power to make credible threats to outsource will grow.
The late 90's were a time for successful economic growth where wages rose and unemployment fell below 4%.It was spurred by an overheated speculative stock market.This bubble created large scale spending as wealthy people borrowed unprecedented large amounts of money for consumption and investment.This bubble was unsustainable and the rise of wages ended and hasn't improved since.Pollin suggests that we shouldn't blame immigration for low wages or hinder the goal of decent jobs for all countries.The weight of evidence(David Card) supports that immigrants,including undocumented workers,are not hurting job opportunities or wages for native U.S.workers.One key factor is that immigrants do not just increase the supply of labor,but also increase overall market demand.
The U.S has a $700 billion annual gap between the imports we purchase and the exports we sell on global markets.According to Pollin,tariffs and dollar depreciation are weak policy tools.He also believes the U.S. economy can create a growth engine other than some type of asset bubble and that we have the means to reach near full employment even while carrying a large trade deficit.Public investment and the development of industrial policies(research and development) to support technical innovations,cheap credit,tax benefits and guaranteed markets will enhance global competitiveness of U.S businesses.We need a full employment agenda that takes into account the challenges presented by globalization.
John Taylor(Stanford economist) has argued that the Obama stimulus(ARRA) of 2009 had too much support for tax cuts or to ease the burden of state and local governments experiencing severe budgetary crises.It didn't inject new spending into the economy.The collapse of household wealth, the breakdown of credit flowing for productive investments and job creation were two large obstacles that also hindered recovery.Household wealth declined by 25%(17.6 trillion dollars) which reduced spending by $525 billion.At the same time,non-financial corporate borrowing fell from $871 billion to $4.3 billion between 2007 and 2009.It improved the following years for corporate borrowing but small businesses patterns of borrowing have been more severe. Small businesses borrowing fell from $526 billion in 2007 to negative$346 billion in 2009.This was a $900 billion reversal of financial flows,equal to 6% of GNP.Money that had been coming in for new investment,flowed out for debt repayments.Bankers were rejecting 60% of loan applications even while 95% of business owners wanted top execute a growth strategy.The commercial banks at this time could borrow from the Fed at a rate close to zero but were charging the small business owners 5.3% interest.As of 2012,commercial banks were hoarding cash and other liquid assets at an unprecedented $1.6 trillion while nonfinancial corporations were holding $2 trillion in liquid assets.They used their cash to buy back their own stocks instead of investing in new productive equipment and expanding their operations.
Pollin proposes a short-term agenda for job creation.His policy approach included further federal stimulus initiatives,measures to reduce the existing debt burden of homeowners,taxing the excess reserves of banks, and extending federal loan guarantees for small businesses.His long run plan to create a sustainable full employment focuses on four areas.First,dramatically increase investments in the areas of clean energy and education and correspondingly reduce spending on conventional energy sources and the military.Second,have industrial policies to undergird the clean energy transformation and promote innovative U.S. manufacturing sector.Third,have financial regulatory policies that direct the financial system toward promoting productive investments,the green economy,job creation and financial stability instead of hyper-speculative practices. Fourth,fiscal policies that can maintain the long-term federal government deficit within reasonable range without imposing austerity.
By a significant margin,education is the most effective source of job creation per $1 million in spending at a 27 job rate.Clean energy is second at 16.8 jobs,military at 11.2 and fossil fuels last at 5.2 jobs per million dollars.Clean energy investment utilizes far more of its budget to hire people than to acquire machines,supplies,land or energy itself.The relative domestic content per overall spending amount is the amount of work done in the U.S. Clean energy relies much more than the fossil fuel sector on economic activity taking place within the U.S. such as retrofitting homes or upgrading the electrical grid system.Consider the agenda in which we transfer about 25% of total spending in both the military($690 billion) and fossil fuel($635 billion) --about $330 billion a year in equal shares into education and clean energy.That would reduce class sizes immediately from 23 to 19,increase financial aid by $1500 for college and increase school building improvement/construction.This transfer would create about 4.8 million jobs and reduce the unemployment rate from 9% to 6%.Addition jobs would be created yearly to bring the rate down to 3.9 % as the transfers continue.Our industrial policies would be to build manufacturing capacity around clean energy technologies,including green buses, rail cars and automobiles.U.S industrial policies have operated as what Fred Block(2008) terms a "hidden developmental state",under the umbrella of the Pentagon's national security agenda,not as an open public policy effort to advance technical innovation,productivity,competitiveness, and jobs.
Pollin,like Keynes,wants financial regulation to end Wall Street dominance.He supports the Dodd-Frank legislation and taming of the banks' proprietary trading through the Volcker Rule.He also supports a progressive agenda for deficit control.If unemployment could be driven downward to around 4%,the U.S. fiscal deficit could be cut by $500-600 billion.If the economy is operating at or near full employment,there is no longer any need to finance current expenditures through deficit spending.Running large structural deficits on operating budgets will likely be regressive.(tax revenues coming from the middle class and going to wealthy bondholders in New York,Tokyo,London or Beijing.Controlling health costs will help cut the deficit.The Medicare Trustees Report(2010) estimated that the ACA will generate savings of $90 billion a year by 2020 in Medicare and slash up to 40% of Medicaid by 2080.
Lastly,Pollin states that the national minimum wage should be raised and set at the highest possible level without threatening to raise unemployment.This wage is around$12/hr. and would improve conditions for about 60 million working people and families(40% of the labor market).Creating decent employment opportunities for everyone is too fundamental a project to be left to the vagaries either of markets or governments.It is rather the task of an engaged citizenry to figure out how best to combine what is valuable both with markets and governments to create high standards of well being,fairness and a commitment to morality for the greater good of all.
A decent job,living wage job,according to Lawrence Gillman, is one that pays a wage level that offers workers the ability to support families,to maintain self-respect,and to have both the means and leisure to participate in the civic life of the nation.In addition to paying living wages,the job must include workplaces that are safe and healthy.Workers also need to be able to participate meaningfully in the decisions that affect their working lives(democracy in the workplace,work councils...German model).This is going beyond the union/management bargaining(union membership around 8% today,down from 33% in the 60's and early seventies) to a shared workplace where councils are real partners with management to bring stability and health to their business.
The first theorist of unemployment was Karl Marx((1867).One of his theories is that a "reserve army"of unemployed is the instrument capitalists use to prevent significant wage increases and thereby maintain profitability.Like Marx,John Maynard Keynes(1936) understood clearly that the operations of capitalist economies could easily generate mass involuntary unemployment.For Keynes,mass unemployment resulted because of insufficiency in total spending(aggregate demand)When expectations of future profits are low,investment contracts which eventually produces involuntary unemployment.He felt is was government's responsibility to counteract this by increasing its own spending,borrowing money itself, and running fiscal deficits as needed,in order to support overall spending in the economy.Adjusting interest rates and providing available credit(monetary policy) was also a part of his theory.Lastly,he wanted financial regulation that curtailed excessive speculation.
One of the major precept of neoliberalism is that government policies to promote full employment are doomed to failure and that the free market policies are themselves the most effective means for producing the fairest possible employment conditions for everyone.The most powerful voice in advancing this perspective was the late Milton Friedman(1967).He believed that if businesses pay workers more than they are worth,the business will see their profits disappear,and will eventually fold.
Another major thinker on this subject was Michal Kalecki(1943) who tried to synthesize the perspectives of Marx along with Keynes.He held that full employment could be beneficial to profits,because the economy will be operating with buoyant markets,at a high level of overall demand for products.Business profits could well be squeezed by high wage demands but they could compensate through a higher volume of sales combined with smaller,but still positive,profit margins.Despite the fact that businesses could benefit from full employment in this way,Kalecki reasoned they still would not support full employment as a goal because it would embolden workers excessively.Full employment could threaten the capitalists' control over the workplace,the pace and direction of economic activity,and even a society's political institutions.
British economist A.W.Phillips observed a long-term relationship between unemployment and inflation in 1958.Inflation goes up when unemployment goes down(Phillips Curve).Phillips suggested that business profits need not be squeezed by high employment.Rather,business could pass on higher labor costs to customers through price increases that causes a wage-price spiral.In the late seventies,economic policymakers worldwide became convinced that inflation resulting from low unemployment had become severe and uncontrollable.This perspective(Milton Friedman's natural rate of unemployment) eclipsed the full employment goals after WWII. Unfortunately,according to Pollin, inflation was caused at this period by two oil price shocks,not by low unemployment.
Rudolf Meidner and Gosta Rehn(Sweden 1960's) supported macroeconomic policies to stimulate demand and thereby expand the number of decent paying jobs but also favored a targeted rate of 3% unemployment to manage the wage-price spiral.Sweden's main unions accepted restrictions on macroeconomic stimulus policies and their own wage bargaining demands in order to help fight excessive inflationary pressures as full employment approached.Sweden succeeded at maintaining unemployment at an average rate of 2.1% between 1960 and 1989.Today,according to Pollin,the representatives of U.S. workers could bring significant new voices to the debate over inflation as well as employment,rather than giving free rein over the management of inflation to the Federal Reserve and Wall Street.Unfortunately,between 1993-2006,unemployment in Sweden rose to an average of 7.6%,while inflation fell to an average of 1.5%.Helen Ginsburg and Marguirite Rosenthal attribute the shift to the growing power of Swedish business,pressures from globalization and the race to join the EU,with its requirements for low budget deficits and inflation but none for low unemployment.
In the U.S. labor market,the neoliberal policy framework has exposed working people to increased competition from workers in poor countries.It has meant an expansion of the reserve army of labor (Marx) for jobs done by U.S workers.Wages have stagnated for forty years while average labor productivity has rose 111%.The services that the average U.S.workers produced in 2011 is more than double what they could manage in 1972.Their reward has been a 7% pay cut.The combination of falling real wages and rising productivity is a primary contributor to rising U.S. inequality over the past thirty years.30-40 million jobs in today's labor market can be performed in poor countries.Employers have gained leverage on these 40 million workers because their power to make credible threats to outsource will grow.
The late 90's were a time for successful economic growth where wages rose and unemployment fell below 4%.It was spurred by an overheated speculative stock market.This bubble created large scale spending as wealthy people borrowed unprecedented large amounts of money for consumption and investment.This bubble was unsustainable and the rise of wages ended and hasn't improved since.Pollin suggests that we shouldn't blame immigration for low wages or hinder the goal of decent jobs for all countries.The weight of evidence(David Card) supports that immigrants,including undocumented workers,are not hurting job opportunities or wages for native U.S.workers.One key factor is that immigrants do not just increase the supply of labor,but also increase overall market demand.
The U.S has a $700 billion annual gap between the imports we purchase and the exports we sell on global markets.According to Pollin,tariffs and dollar depreciation are weak policy tools.He also believes the U.S. economy can create a growth engine other than some type of asset bubble and that we have the means to reach near full employment even while carrying a large trade deficit.Public investment and the development of industrial policies(research and development) to support technical innovations,cheap credit,tax benefits and guaranteed markets will enhance global competitiveness of U.S businesses.We need a full employment agenda that takes into account the challenges presented by globalization.
John Taylor(Stanford economist) has argued that the Obama stimulus(ARRA) of 2009 had too much support for tax cuts or to ease the burden of state and local governments experiencing severe budgetary crises.It didn't inject new spending into the economy.The collapse of household wealth, the breakdown of credit flowing for productive investments and job creation were two large obstacles that also hindered recovery.Household wealth declined by 25%(17.6 trillion dollars) which reduced spending by $525 billion.At the same time,non-financial corporate borrowing fell from $871 billion to $4.3 billion between 2007 and 2009.It improved the following years for corporate borrowing but small businesses patterns of borrowing have been more severe. Small businesses borrowing fell from $526 billion in 2007 to negative$346 billion in 2009.This was a $900 billion reversal of financial flows,equal to 6% of GNP.Money that had been coming in for new investment,flowed out for debt repayments.Bankers were rejecting 60% of loan applications even while 95% of business owners wanted top execute a growth strategy.The commercial banks at this time could borrow from the Fed at a rate close to zero but were charging the small business owners 5.3% interest.As of 2012,commercial banks were hoarding cash and other liquid assets at an unprecedented $1.6 trillion while nonfinancial corporations were holding $2 trillion in liquid assets.They used their cash to buy back their own stocks instead of investing in new productive equipment and expanding their operations.
Pollin proposes a short-term agenda for job creation.His policy approach included further federal stimulus initiatives,measures to reduce the existing debt burden of homeowners,taxing the excess reserves of banks, and extending federal loan guarantees for small businesses.His long run plan to create a sustainable full employment focuses on four areas.First,dramatically increase investments in the areas of clean energy and education and correspondingly reduce spending on conventional energy sources and the military.Second,have industrial policies to undergird the clean energy transformation and promote innovative U.S. manufacturing sector.Third,have financial regulatory policies that direct the financial system toward promoting productive investments,the green economy,job creation and financial stability instead of hyper-speculative practices. Fourth,fiscal policies that can maintain the long-term federal government deficit within reasonable range without imposing austerity.
By a significant margin,education is the most effective source of job creation per $1 million in spending at a 27 job rate.Clean energy is second at 16.8 jobs,military at 11.2 and fossil fuels last at 5.2 jobs per million dollars.Clean energy investment utilizes far more of its budget to hire people than to acquire machines,supplies,land or energy itself.The relative domestic content per overall spending amount is the amount of work done in the U.S. Clean energy relies much more than the fossil fuel sector on economic activity taking place within the U.S. such as retrofitting homes or upgrading the electrical grid system.Consider the agenda in which we transfer about 25% of total spending in both the military($690 billion) and fossil fuel($635 billion) --about $330 billion a year in equal shares into education and clean energy.That would reduce class sizes immediately from 23 to 19,increase financial aid by $1500 for college and increase school building improvement/construction.This transfer would create about 4.8 million jobs and reduce the unemployment rate from 9% to 6%.Addition jobs would be created yearly to bring the rate down to 3.9 % as the transfers continue.Our industrial policies would be to build manufacturing capacity around clean energy technologies,including green buses, rail cars and automobiles.U.S industrial policies have operated as what Fred Block(2008) terms a "hidden developmental state",under the umbrella of the Pentagon's national security agenda,not as an open public policy effort to advance technical innovation,productivity,competitiveness, and jobs.
Pollin,like Keynes,wants financial regulation to end Wall Street dominance.He supports the Dodd-Frank legislation and taming of the banks' proprietary trading through the Volcker Rule.He also supports a progressive agenda for deficit control.If unemployment could be driven downward to around 4%,the U.S. fiscal deficit could be cut by $500-600 billion.If the economy is operating at or near full employment,there is no longer any need to finance current expenditures through deficit spending.Running large structural deficits on operating budgets will likely be regressive.(tax revenues coming from the middle class and going to wealthy bondholders in New York,Tokyo,London or Beijing.Controlling health costs will help cut the deficit.The Medicare Trustees Report(2010) estimated that the ACA will generate savings of $90 billion a year by 2020 in Medicare and slash up to 40% of Medicaid by 2080.
Lastly,Pollin states that the national minimum wage should be raised and set at the highest possible level without threatening to raise unemployment.This wage is around$12/hr. and would improve conditions for about 60 million working people and families(40% of the labor market).Creating decent employment opportunities for everyone is too fundamental a project to be left to the vagaries either of markets or governments.It is rather the task of an engaged citizenry to figure out how best to combine what is valuable both with markets and governments to create high standards of well being,fairness and a commitment to morality for the greater good of all.
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