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'
Friday, March 28, 2014
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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