Deferred Pay, Mergers and Acquisitions and Sectoral Deflation, Frame Deconstructions: Emails from 2011 Through 2013

By Andreas Daniel Fogg

A few corrections to these pieces have been made. For the most part I have left them as they were sent out. Some or many of these pieces, it has been suggested to me, have been posted on a bulletin board at the Harvard Law School. Whether or not anyone pays any attention to them, I cannot say. Most have been sent to various members of the Harvard, Yale and other university faculty. There has been little or no direct feedback from these recipients, as to even whether the emails were opened. Occasionally, perhaps twice, I was asked to stop sending the emails.
My methodology has been to follow the news and news analysis of various journalists and social scientists; to build my analyses upon those of others, hopefully leading to a set of prescriptions which, if taken seriously, might better the overall conditions of the United States as well as that of the world at large.
What I am urging is a shift in the SEC's and DOJ criteria for approving M and A;s away from intra sectoral approvals, justified apparently if not always nominally, by economies of scale and abilities to control the markets and pricing, toward cross sectoral actions justified by the increased ability to lower prices and raise wages.
Other parts of the book deal with the subject of deferred or not fully distributed corporate or other forms of institutional pay on the grounds that initial recipients might not be mature enough for immediate receipt, or now, in hindsight, that the potential recipient would find herself or himself in some crucial senses compromised or otherwise hampered by full receipt of accurately earned rewards.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493165698

Andreas Daniel Fogg

Andreas Daniel Fogg was voluntarily admitted into psychiatric hospital shortly after entering graduate school in Anthropology, in an attempt to, through participant observation research, ascertain more about the nature of the psychological roots of human self destructiveness, which understanding he hoped might help humanity avoid large scale self destructive disasters. He currently lives alone in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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Deferred Pay, Mergers and Acquisitions and Sectoral Deflation;

FRAME DECONSTRUCTIONS

EMAILS FROM 2011 THROUGH 2013

ANDREAS DANIEL FOGG

Copyright © 2014 by Andreas Daniel Fogg.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014902575

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4931-6568-1

Softcover   978-1-4931-6567-4

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Rev. date: 02/11/2014

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Partial Acknowledgements

Fall

Winter

2012

Spring

Summer

Fall

Winter

2013

Spring

Summer

Fall

for Lucille

I went down to the sacred store, where I’d heard the music played years before, but the man there said the music wouldn’t play! Don Mclean

The music still won’t play because we have taped ourselves inside a box sealed shut with inadequate definitions, which we are afraid to challenge…

FOREWORD

January 2, 2014

A few corrections to these pieces have been made. For the most part I have left them as they were sent out. Some or many of them, it has been suggested to me, have been posted on a bulletin board at the Harvard Law School. Whether or not anyone pays them any attention, I cannot say. Most have been sent to various members of the Harvard, Yale and other university faculty. There has been little or no direct feedback from these recipients, as to even whether the emails were opened. Occasionally, perhaps twice, I was asked to stop sending the emails. Once I argued successfully with Robert Reich to send them to his assistant, for screening. My methodology has been to follow the news and news analysis of various journalists and social scientists; to build my analyses upon those of others, hopefully leading to a set of prescriptions which, if taken seriously, might better the overall conditions of the United States as well as that of the world at large.

On the subject of mergers and acquisitions, I have started reading a book called A Giant Cow Tipping by Savages by John Weir Close, which starts at least focussing on the merger mania of the 1980’s, and seems to suggest that much of that activity was fueled by avaricious outsiders at least some of whom were Jews. I am not expert on the subject of mergers and acquisitions, neither as they occurred in the 1980’s nor as at present. What I am urging is a shift in the SEC’s and DOJ criteria for approving M and A’s away from intra sectoral approvals, justified apparently if not always nominally, by economies of scale and abilities to control the markets and pricing, toward cross sectoral actions justified by the increased ability to lower prices and raise wages.

Other parts of the book deal with the subject of deferred or not fully distributed corporate or other forms of institutional pay on the grounds that initial recipients might not be mature enough for immediate receipt, or now, in hindsight, that the potential recipient would find herself or himself in some crucial senses compromised or otherwise hampered by full receipt of accurately earned rewards. This deferred pay mechanism, however, then would seem to allow for some indirect control of those assets by the deferred (non) recipient. Various other pieces were either presented at various sociological conferences, or in a few cases proffered for but not accepted by such conferences. There is also some material elicited by my having viewed the film 12 Years a Slave.

Sociology, it seems to me, tends to be characterized at present by foci on the meticulous often emprical study of what is, what can be readily measured, and what was. It appears to me that questions about what will be and what should be, what might be, tend to be too often shunned by the field too often as too controversial (and as a result likely unfundable). Perhaps that is one reason why I have not received too much direct encouragement. Or perhaps a decision was taken to simply let me write at will. I suppose I should be grateful for such a decision, if it was indeed taken.

The data I most need, for example, at this point is a chart comparing the numbers of M and A’s in the last 3 or 4 decades which were intra versus cross sectoral, I have been unable to find. My thinking that I at least see the need for such data allows me to fancy myself a social scientist, rather than a mere philosopher or more likely philosopher.

For instance, while reading Ezra Vogel’s recent book Deng Xiaoping, the question arose, how and who ended Lenin’s NEP (New Economic Plan?) Was it Lenin himself or Stalin? Preliminary research suggests that Stalin ended the NEP. Clearly (to me) Schumpeter was if only implicitly assuming a crtical stance specifically toward this move. And probably Schumpeter would have approved of the retroactive moves that Deng Xioping made to resuscitate China’s market based economic characteristics! However the NEP reforms along with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms would seem to have been also predicated upon the widespread liquidation (dispossession and state justified collective murders) of all or those capitalists who refused to go along with the initial collectivization moves. So that what we see in hindsight under the NEP policies in the 1920’s and in Deng’s post Maoist China, represents a sort of version of liberal capitalism without the old capitalist class of entrepreneurs. Given a choice between total state collectivization a la post Bukharin, post Leninist NEP (that is Stalinism), and Deng’s socialist market reforms, Schumpeter would likely have opted for the NEP and Deng like reforms. That apparently is the current bias of US and Western foreign policies. Meanwhile the interests of post globalization American workers seem to have been sold down the river in the interests of securing mega scale returns on Western capital corporate investments in China, India and the Asian tigers. The media diverts the public’s attention with the promise that things will get better and better gadgets, coupled with sports all season diversionary circuses which help us forget about what actually is happening. A small group of corporate cowboys seem to be economically disenfranchising the American electorate.

Also, it should be noted that the current trend toward ever increasing unequal distributions of income, far from retarding entry onto the much feared slippery slope leading to socialism (with its liquidations of capitalists, which we tend to forget about lately (perhaps like Gerald Ford did during his debate with Jimmy Carter) given our collaborations with the market oriented Chinese), actually is more likely to lead to a murderously vindictive revolution, when and if the American people wake up to the con games that the system masters have been playing with them. This than would a more liberal, less individualistic distribution of rewards with production more calibrated to the fullfillment of social use needs than is the present manipulation of production in order to maximize profits the need for which is meticulously crafted by media productions; profits which are then disproportionately shared, in ultimate practice, only with a small group of elite about whom most Americans actually know little. Deferred seemingly forgiven credit card charges tend to eventually come due and fail to block the wolf from the door, unfortunately.

That prejudice against persons and groups considered to be subaltern or lower status, tends to be combined with the fear that actually the discriminated against group is or should be actually not subordinate but dominant or super ordinate. Evidence, any evidence of such superiorities, in this context needs to be deprecated, minimized and/or denied by the dominant group or groups. When far right authoritarian groups come to power these denials in the past and likely in the future have taken the forms of liquidations of these groups when they threaten the legitimacy of the dominant groups’ privileges. Thus the liquidation of the Jews by the Nazis. Thus the liquidation of opposing political parties by Leninist’s after the Bolshevik Revolution and the realization that the Leninist Bolshevik party had not won the first strictly democratic election after the Revolution. And of course the liquidation of Trotsky and Trotskyites by Stalin, followed by (his) expropriation of Trotsky’s ideas of collectivization and the rejection of the NEP. It is apparently easier to manipulate and institute unpopular ideas by consensus (under the fear of a secret police) than it is to do so by democratic ballot. We see the rule by consensus in modern Western corporations, wherein culture tends to diffuse the potential power of disparate shareholders at once a year annual stockholders meetings. These meetings also tend to crucially approve the wage compensation policies which send the huge disproportionate rewards to the corporate movers and shakers.

010314

Perhaps renewable energy should be provided as a service by the state!? This since the potential lack of a significant scarcity dimension would tend to make the possibility of profit taking difficult if not dubious. Or if renewable energy were sold at a loss, it, in the form of public private partnerships (p3), could function as profit losing tax writeoffs!? Renewable energy could be offered to ctizens either at or above cost, or it could be offered below cost—on a rising cost scale (w/increased use per occupant) (emphasis) as a human right and entitlement! After all Americans take police and fire protection for granted as a right which they finance with taxes. No one (at least in their right mind, except perhaps true believing followers of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, certainly no true conservative) would think of demanding that either the police or the firemen should make a profit, yet their functions clearly benefit society! Why not promote heat and cooling power and electricity as similar human rights? Perhaps the state would buy out the shares of energy coporations which would likely begin to lose market share and profitability in response to the new state backed competition!? In this respect it would be important to distinguish petroleum corporations from energy corporations (electric for example) which supplied heat, cooling and light! When there is a surfeit or supply glut of energy—numerous sources from which choices can be made, consumer demand tends to become more elastic and hence less capable of producing larger profits. Clearly competition tends to erode profit margins. Perhaps firms of a public nature which supply drinking water are a more appropriate model for light, heat and cooling companies, than for profit, public/private partnerships? In other words, in some sectors it is suggested that the state’s functions should actually be expanding rather than always contracting.

So how big might or should the subsidy for clean renewable energy be? Perhaps big enough to pay for the cost of renewable heat and light for one average sized room per member of the family. Costs above this level would have to be paid out of pocket and constitute a market for the for profit energy firms. But energy subsidies to fossil fuel firms could begin to be gradually reduced in an effort to appreciably reduce the US national dependence on fossil fuels. But the subsidies would continue to reward a minimal level of fossil fuel production. The fossil fuel energy companies would thus be encouraged to invest in renewable technologies and renewable energy production. A significant public/private partnership would be necessaary in order to finance what at first would be likely to be a losing business proposition! Such P3’s however, could only be trusted to keep costs to a minimum if at least 3 P3 firms competed in each geograhpic market for the consumers’ dollars! Otherwise you risk ENRON like price gouging debacles. Such debacles constitute a refutation of the Thatcher/Milton Friedman TINA paradigm! That the economic generator of rising economic inequality would seem to involve P3 subsidies (corporate welfare, see Michael Likofsky’s book Obama’s Bank (2010)) flourishing in an atmosphere relatively devoid of antitrust legislated enforcement. So you have P3’s with rising prices and falling wages. This confluence would seem fiarly clearly to be a recipe for rising inequality!

And there is some analysis of the normative economic roots of the mid and near eastern conflicts between the West and the Islamists; with concentrations on the West’s legal treatments of interest charging usury or in Arabic, riba.

Re some gay and lesbian observations; that same sex attractions need to be acknowledged rather than totally repressed and denied! That the idea of being normal should not involve an ideologically driven exclusive insistance that intentionally only manifests what is taken as a stereotype of heterosexual demeanor! Cooperation between same sex persons depends upon the personal identification and susequent sublimation of same sex attractions. When the existence of these same sex attractions are denied to oneself and others and the world, then those attractions will almost certainly diminish from the effectiveness of same sex cooperation! The same could be said about opposite sex work oriented interactions and cooperations!

As a society and civilization human kind needs to decide that our evolving law guided normative order is not stuck in a mode that exclusively legitimates sex for procreation! At the same time it would seem to be a mistake to draw an equivalency between sex for procreation and polymorphous non procreative gay and lesbian sex and relationships. These legitimating marriages which by definition exclude procreative interactions as illegal adulteries, would seem to discourage so called gay and lesbian persons from actually naturally producing children. This would seem to constitute an unfortunate result, since the world needs more children who are the natural offspiring of people who are in touch with their natural but also polymorphous impulses! Note a recent Rene Almeling (a Yale based sociologist) op ed piece in the NY Times, which suggests that longitudinal data are not being kept or recorded re artificially inseminated children.

That the magnitude of corporate profits, whether P3 in nature or not, depends upon, significantly, the engenderment of less elastic demand and supply conditions. That is, the fewer choices the consumer has re products for which there is acute need, the greater the ability of firms to extract larger profits. The less elastic the situation the more profits the corporation is able to extract from the consuming public. So less elastic conditions contribute to greater degrees of economic income/wealth inequality i.e. the rich getting richer, the poor, poorer (including the old middle class)!

Andreas Daniel Fogg

Somerville, MA

January 8, 2014

PARTIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

July 25, 2013

In no particular order; thanks to Gerald Gerasimo, formerly of the Lake Forest College Sociology Department, for providing a seminal insight about media and totalitarian political organizations, an insight which I subsequently leveraged into an understanding of television’s functioning in this capacity. And also to Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi and Ann Greer all formerly professors at Lake Forest College in Sociology, and to David Krantz also at LFC in Psychology, who was acting chair of Sociology my senior year, who provided desperately needed support for my flagging self esteem at that time by calling my work at one point, lucid. And to Emily Caitlin, a sociology student and to William Gean, Rosalyn (then) Sherman (who taught Marx Wartofsky’s version of Philsophy of Science) and to Arthur Lessing (who pointed the way toward reading Merleau Ponty which I did after graduation) all of the then LFC philosophy department.

Thanks also more recently, to Kathy Edin and Chris Desan, of Harvard’s Sociology Department (and Kennedy School) and the HLS respectively, for taking the time to read parts of two of my already self published volumes, and conveying general support and appreciation. And for not turning away more recent as yet unpublished emails which I have shared with them and others who include, in no particular order: Robert Post, Christopher Jencks, William Julius Wilson, Bruce Western, Steven Miller, Larry Lessig, David Moss, Barry Bluestone, Herbert Kehlman and the leaders of the Harvard Mid East Seminar including Lenore Martin and Sara Roy, Baber Johannsen of the Harvard Divinity School, Sven Beckert and Charles Maier of the Harvard History Department and Robert Reich. Also a group of graduate students at Harvard who have included me in their reading group on the history and study of capitalism including especially Rudi Batzell, Eli Cook, now at Rutgers, Liat Spiro, Nathan Wilmers, Sean Nichols and Alexia Keyes, a post doc and others, again in no particular order. Thanks also to Ed Baptist of the Cornell History Department for sharing some unpubished work leading to my decision to see 12 Years a Slave. And to Norberto Ferreras a visitng post doc fellow at Harvard for sharing his work on the legal history of forced labor. And to Dr. Robert D. Benford of the University of South Florida, for refreshing and rejuvenating my long standing interest in frame analyses.

Thanks to Martha R. Bobruff, MD, my psychiatrist for a long time, who has kept asking me such questions as, If you’re so smart, how come nobody pays any attention to you? for invaluable support.

And more recently thanks to Ken Thomas, who dropped out of a community college in Florida, and also dropped out of the nuclear US Navy, who reads and thinks a lot and usually seems willing to compare insights. And to LM, who claims to have been in on the founding of the Students for a Democratic Society at Port Huron, who also tends to show up when I am feeling particularly depressed, tending to harangue me if only implicitly for having (unlike himself) sold out to a system which he often seems to claim is almost completely dominated by the CIA. And to Steve Witham, a buddy who claims to not have gone to college, perhaps, yet knows all sorts of stuff like about fractal geometry, who unfortunately is also a somewhat virulent libertarian, with whom I have had lots of arguments. And also ongoing thanks to the three Ritvo psychiatrists, with whom I grew up and share a sort of quasi sybling status, by age, Jonathan, David and Rachel; for their friendships and readiness to offer in some cases needed and always free, psychiatric and medical advice.

Also from the community, thanks are due to Phil Weiss, Dennis Fischman, Larry Miller and Marya Niedergang, Ruby Poltark, Ellen Stone. And to Louis Trotta, brothers Arthur and Robert Katis and all of the people working at Caesar’s Pizza on Somerville Avenue. It has been my practice for some time now to go to two Somerville coffee houses, The Diesel and The Bloc Eleven, often during the mornings, afternoons and evenings, to read and write by hand in my notebooks. Most of the barristas at these coffee houses are very nice and encouraging, perhaps because many of them are moonlighting from regular work, some of which it is said, often involves artistic endeavors. So thanks too to those various barristas who have provided emotional support.

Then there is the bridge group that I try to attend once a week, which has included at various times David Dahlbacka, Tony Marsh, Liz Rassweiler, Elaine Czesniuk and more recently, brothers William Lampert and John Lampert.

To my mother, who taught me to read and whose bookshelf provided a copy of Erich Fromm’s crucial book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. To my father who has been a sounding board for many of my ideas, has provided references to books too numerous to mention and has also provided much needed ongoing financial support making him something like a cross between a friend, colleague, a mentor and a de facto patron. And to my sisters, their husbands and children who have provided a usually inspiring, albeit most often skeptical, support group. And my aunt and her late husband, an international corporate lawyer, both of whose somewhat oblique comments about corporate compensation may turn out to have been especially helpful.

Also to Wendell Bell whose book Foundations of Futures Studies v.1, has provided crucial orientation to a field which I abandoned for about twenty five years while working in various blue collar capacities; whose book thereby clued me to Thomas Kuhn’s additional work The Essential Tension about which I had been ignorant, and whose personal encouragment has been extremely helpful.

And to the those in the progressive democracy movement including Dave Lewit and Diana Licht, Geoff Dutton, Rachel Rosenbaum and other acquaintances and friends in the movement for justice and democracy. Judy Whipple, Suzanne Searle and others of the Somerville Coffee Party. Massachusetts State Senator Pat Jehlen, for whom I interned, Mark Niedergang, formerly of the Somerville School Board (now an alderman), Harris Gruman, Rebekah Gewirtz, Joe Beckmann, Doug Holder and Denise Provost all of Somerville and the latter of Mass. State politics (being a State Representative). And all of the many other individuals who I have failed to thank for their support and influences, including Nancy Murray and Carol Rose of the Massachusetts ACLU, I apologize for failing to mention you as well.

FALL

August 27, 2011

Re freedom, GDP, NDP, per capita wealth and income and it’s distribution;

These are some speculative ideas. The difference between GDP and NDP (net domestic product) according to Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi (in their book Mismeasuring Our Lives (2010)) is that usually NDP is markedly less than GDP because NDP includes subtractions from the GDP statistic due to costs incurred in the redress of harms created by the then operating GDP systems of production. These costs, added in the calculation of the GDP statistic, are subtracted in the generation of the NDP statistic. [ed. The following short discussion of a per capita wealth ratio appears at this point to be at best incorrect. Apologies to the reader. What was intended I believe was to divide population into both the GDP and NDP figures.] So then we could take the average and mean incomes, and accumulated wealth figures for any given society or nation, and divide those denominators into the both the GDP and NDP statistics. Such ratios would yield differing wealth figures per capita. Note per capita GDP, the usual statistic used for comparing international relative wealth, is different from the suggested ratios, which involve again, dividing by the average or median wealth per capita, into both the NDP and the GDP. These latter figures would seem to reflect better the ability of wealth per capita as distributed, to access the actual values of what a society produces in a given year. That is to say, instead of dividing by the absolute population of a country, it is suggested that a measure of wealth and income per individual be divided into wealth, goods and services produced, yielding a more realistic depiction of how much of the wealth generated is actually accessible to individuals specifically located in differing wealth and income quintiles.

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Another point, that has likely already been made, involves the idea that social science work, say sociology in particular, needs to decide whether it wants to be forward looking, pro active, or backward looking, retroactive. That is to say should the focus be exclusively on attempting to ‘explain’ either logically or statistically or both, what has happened in the far or recent past? Or should the focus be expanded to include attempts to explain and potentially alter what may or may not happen in the future? Or should the purview of sociology, if not the other social sciences and economics, not be both? To the extent that the purview involves influencing the future, then the sorts of explanations utilized need likely to include logical projected perhaps hypothetical explanations as well as extrapolated statistical descriptions and ‘explanations’ if it is indeed sensible and comprehensible to use the term statistical explanation.

September 2, 2011

Re the roles of domestic or internal debt in socialist and relatively capitalist states; the cultivation of inelastic demand in order to satisfy elite domestic political and personal power oriented rivalries;

It may help to step back from our current points of analytic entry, back to the year 1989 for example. Prior to the demise of the Soviet Union. Let us assume, for the sake of analytic perspective, that socialist states remain viable phenomenon. Thus Libya, Iraq, the Soviet Union, while no longer with us in socialist form, remain creatures of the past, which as has been observed, the past is not over, it is not even past. So that in socialist states, which include still, really, Venezuela, North Korea, and, to a much reduced degree, the People’s Republic of China, domestic debt, while not strictly speaking being a function of the market, remains a crucial factor in the generation of deleterious economic realities. We have the Reinhardt/Rogoff book This Time is Different to thank for this insight. And their book heretofore referred to as TTID, also asserts that domestically held debt within capitalist and corporate capitalist countries also plays a role in the generation of recessions. These insights are crucial in that the Libyan situation is currently up for resolution for better or worse. That is there is for Libya, and even still for Iraq, a watershed moment, during which the prospects for future developments will be opened up or retarded. Much as occurred after the breakup of the old Soviet Union.

However, the point I wanted to make had to do with the way in which domestic debt in general, in the EU and the US as well, tends to be resolved or not. The problem with Keynesian thinking re this matter, as it has come to be known in the US, is that the moment when the borrowed debt, utilized for anti recessionary stimulus, is decisively paid back, is continually pushed back into the future. That is, during a recession, Keynes would justify paying workers to do functionless tasks, which have no net impact in and of themselves on any of society’s tasks, other than to generate consumer demand. The problem is, at what point, in such a Keynesian schema, does it become necessary or incumbent on the government to cease paying such individuals? Answer, either when alternative more justified tasks become recognized as needed and unfulfilled, or, in practice, when recession and relatively high unemployment end. But in the US, under the previous administration, the Vice President Dick Cheney was famous for declaring, I believe on a large number of occasions, that deficits don’t matter. And arguably it was that attitude which set the stage for the current debt crisis and unemployment related recessionary economic stall out. For while the previous President George W. Bush, to his credit, said that we, the US nation, are addicted to oil. He didn’t really do anything about correcting and curing that addiction. There are whether we are talking about socialist or corporate capitalist states, internal socio economic and politically ensconced elites, which arguably attempt to manipulate and channel consumer demands in such a way as to cultivate inelastic demands for their products and services. Thus whether we are talking about the socialist Soviet Union, North Korea, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, the oil barons have an interest in assuring that no technologies which might appreciably reduce real demand and need for their products are allowed to see the light of production. So that the creation of more, more functional jobs in order to displace the ongoing funding of relatively non functional jobs, needs to be incorporated into any viable agenda which seeks, for example, to dispute the unfortunate GOP obsessive fixation on austerity and reduced spending.

How for example, do we seek to retard more weather related catastrophes like the hurricane’s Irene and Katrina? We could seriously seek to build more efficient anti green house gas emitting vehicles. We could begin to do this now, knowing that the auto companies as presently constituted are involved with the needs of the oil complex to as a matter of course maintain the demand for oil at as close to current levels as possible. So that if we could replace the current car making paradigm with one of an order of magnitude more efficiency and green house cleanliness, that would constitute a Net Domestic Product absolute good, whether it resulted in a temporary reduction of GDP due to reduced oil sales or not. As previously noted, contrary to garden variety economic thinking, additional considerations of need could and arguably would allow for the price of oil to rise in the face of diminishing demand. However, such a price rise would only occur through the workings of facilitating government regulation or through simple oligopolistic price setting collusions, tolerated as a matter of necessity by the government. The GOP ideology of in all cases reduced government functioning and funding/cost reductions, would have in this case, to be treated pragmatically. America always used to be above all a pragmatic country, a country where we got things right, got them to work. Did not blindly recite dogma in the face of adaptational challenges.

Re the need for an income/wealth equality/inequality equilibrium;

With too much legally enforced equality, you get a stultifying dearth of ambition. Thus the unions reputedly have allowed ‘no merit pay.’ With too much inequality you get despair and societal distantiation, distrust and lack of identification with humanity and the larger human enterprise, which includes pursuing all sorts of ethical enterprises such as endangered species protection. In the presence of a desperate need to break into the elite status of wealth holders, all other altruistic priorities tend to be left to languish by the wayside. Who can afford to worry about endangered species when we or many are so desperately trying to assure the security and authority and untouchability of our wealthiest groups? This need to shelter the ultra rich bespeaks unacceptably high real levels of insecurity which beset the middle and working classes. As well as those of the ultra rich themselves, who incorrectly perceive their afflictions’ cure as lying in the yet further accumulation of more wealth. It is highly likely that these high levels of personal insecurity have been deliberately raised, often through media cultivation, in order to increase the social distance between ordinary persons in such a way as to disempower non corporate actors and anti corporate human and environmental priorities in favor of for profit only obliquely anti environmental corporate goals.

But meanwhile, lost in the shouting between the Dems and the GOP, is the real option of funding public sector and works and physical and human infrastructure maintenance job creating projects at reduced wage levels. There is in fact a middle ground between union busting and union mediating and critiquing measures. Those who serve government are performing real services to society, despite what Grover Nordquist may believe. They may, in today’s markets, be receiving more pay than the GOP will allow. In that case, the option exists between now and the elections in 2012, to discover in fact what those wage levels are, and to publicize the truth, and in the interrum, fund at reduced levels. We appear to be in the throes of adjustment between the high wages we were used to receiving in the past, and the current realities in which we must compete with 3rd world low wage rate bases, and adjust to the fact that many of our products no longer dominate world markets. Meanwhile the GOP spokespersons and candidates compete to deliver the message that we are still number one, if only the government would stifle itself. But they are grossly mistaken. And the size of the national debt is largely the fault of the previous administration, which operated under the dictum of the then Vice President that the deficit doesn’t matter. And which was largely responsibly for the deregulation of the mortgage market (on the same ideological grounds that gov’t needs to be reduced) and subprime debt crisis whose fixing required so much elevation of the national debt.

One reason why our solar and renewable energy companies tend to be failing must have something to do with the fact that they tend to be directly competitive with the non renewable highly subsidized American oil, coal and natural gas energy enterprises. The renewable companies are the way of the future. If we want them to succeed, and in succeeding begin to reduce the physical and monetary harms associated with the mega hurricanes and tornadoes, flooding and droughts we have been experiencing, which the tax payers, FEMA and the insurance companies (and not the oil, coal and gas companies) have been paying for, then we need to reduce the non renewable energy subsidies in order to make the renewable companies and their jobs, more competitive. We could aid in this endeavor also by subsidizing the renewable corporations at higher levels. Doing so would involve challenging the economic hegemony and profitability of the oil, coal and natural gas sectors and their lobbies and lobbyists.

090211

November 1, 2011

Re the dangers of reification, social science jargon and the need for more public discourse;

Vincent Mor or Mors, speaking at the KSG in Cambridge re nursing homes, warned if only implicitly against the dangers of reification. Presumably reification can be avoided or whose avoidance it is hoped will occur as a result of social scientists’ utilization of jargon such that their work is explicitly incomprehensible to the public. Because if the public cannot understand what the social scientist is talking about, then the problem, presumably of the knower and the known, of the act of knowing impacting upon and changing the phenomenon subject to examination can be hopefully avoided. By avoiding change through reifications induced through public discourse, some social scientists may, arguably, hope to discover forever applicable universal laws whose understanding will allow technocratically informed individuals (or even artificial intelligences) to manipulate social problems. Herein perhaps lies some of the onus for the widening income inequality gap? The utilization of a fear of reification (turning living phenomena into ‘dead’ things, literally turning spontaneously occurring interactions into inanimate, non spontaneous things or events or interactions) appears to be a justification for social scientists recoiling from instead of embracing the need for non jargon based public discourses such as have been called for by John Rawls and Amartya Sen.

Re the anti reification impulse appearing to have anti democratic implications;

The whole notion of discovering social evolutionary or sociological laws and not sharing that knowledge with the public directly or easily is among other things, anti democratic. The question also arises, however, whether it is in fact effective or if you will, affective? (I have trouble using the word affect as a verb, for some reason. To affect might mean to influence, I suppose, but it also means to project an attitude or pose, as in he affected or displayed an affectation of an attitude of nonchalance or fearlessness or moral purity Whereas my preference is to use to effect in order to unambiguously convey the meaning to impact upon or influence.)

Such a notion appears to be somewhat Platonic or Hegelian (perhaps also ‘historicist’) in nature, hearkening after a pure philosopher king or in Hegel’s case, sovereign or a Marxian ‘dictator’ who will be above petty human motivations and so, when put in possession of the ultimate laws of society and human nature and social change will be able to rule (much) more effectively. Presumably there would be one such philosopher king or sovereign at a time, giving rise to all sorts of problems when more than one contender arose as would almost certainly always be the case. Thus Sen’s objections to Rawls apparent use of a single empirically useful or empiricist original position. There are almost surely likely to be a wide variety of original positions (as I believe Rawls always understood and intended see for example his Law of Peoples) and their occupants. Thereby giving rise to a variety of prescriptions deriving from original positions, which accounts likely would be in competition with each other for public and professional credibility and reliability and favor. Such a state of affairs would be compatible with a public discourse fueled democratically oriented political scenario. But it would not particularly facilitate an empiricist based technocratic or otherwise centralized one party regime, whether of the right or the left. How would this all knowing technocratic dictator know so much as to choose between competing prescriptions. Most likely he would choose in such a way as to consolidate his or her own power and wealth, thereby exacerbating the inequality phenomenon.

November 2, 2011

Re an attempt to get the ECB to try quantitative easings;

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(see also this week’s Economist  briefing section;)

Yet another try at getting the ECB to try quantitative easing. Assume for the sake of argument but also correctly, that productive capacity due to vastly increased and improved computerized robots, is order of magnitude increasing. Given a stable unchanging supply of cash paper, such a scenario would seem to imply a larger or sector related deflationary trend or at least anticipated danger. (Remember that in finance buy on the rumor is a cardinal rule.) In such circumstances, a strategy for reversing the deflation would seem to involve printing more money through ECB quantitative easing, this would include buying endangered EU states’ national bond issues (with the newly printed ECB cash). Also then loaning said new money to the banks and EU governments to either lend out at cheap rates, and/or to distribute through contingent based transfer payments, especially to the EU and more especially to the Greek consumer demand base, thereby allowing the banks to lend out, and implicitly safeguarding their deposits from both deflation and any resulting likelihood of subsequently ensuing bank runs. All this assumes the lack of political national wills to raise some of the needed offsetting monies through imposing one or more new higher income tax brackets, which move would be equally or more effective, given levels of current unequal income distribution, and the prefer ability of raising money through taxation as over and above outright printing. Because money in the banks, for which there is no market, is effectively a drag on GDP or NGDP growth, as well as posing a danger to bank’s solvencies.

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M.,

Why pick a fight with the Fed, why demonstrate against the Fed at this point? Probably not a good idea. Bernanke has said repeatedly that other fiscal measures are needed. In the US, if not in the EU, Macro policy alone will not be sufficient. He means that higher taxes on the rich are called for, especially higher brackets on millionaires and billionaires. A Krugman blog graph had it that, as of recent data, the top .1 percent had the same income as the rest of the top 1 percentile. So there is an extremely high concentration of wealth in that billionaire category I repeat the Fed is not the enemy. It is rather, I am thinking, most directly the recent onset of machined intelligent technologies which have been sapping the strength of the labor wage market, and thereby also sapping the magnitude of consumer and consumption demand. The GOP has yet to come to grips with this qualitative historical shift. So there is gridlock in Congress and in the supercommittee. It is not the fault of the Fed. The banking financial crisis, I am thinking, was largely motivated by increased reserve banking requirements and the poor aggregate demand factor, which combined to induce the reckless investing practices, the faux triple A subprime ratings that were seen. That is, I am arguing that the reckless banking gambling practices, the credit default swaps which sought to ensure against securitized investment failures, were motivated more by structural contingencies than solely by mendacious, greedy motives. Banks were awash in cash, with insufficient available lenders, due to the poor consumer demand factor. Better to focus attention than to inflame scorn particularly against a relatively innocent villain. If there is a need to focus blame on the Fed, it would be on the former chair, Greenspan, who failed to opine against the unregulated gambling like practices, rather than upon Bernanke’s current Fed.

Note: a demo is planned against the Boston Fed for today, according to the Metro newspaper.

November 6, 2011

Re the notion and problem of inequality in Israel Palestine;

At an off the record seminar somewhere near here, which is Somerville, Massachusetts, a group which is devoted to documenting and remediating the phenomenon of social and economic inequality in Israel Palestine made its presentation. I can’t tell you the name of the group, because the seminar was off the record. But I will violate the rules just enough to indicate my thinking about the presentation and the one most salient fact which, by my thinking, was uncovered. First in general critiques of and thinkings about inequality generally can be divided into two approaches. Are there equal rights and are there equal results. This group is concerned about and tends to pack together, both approaches. That is they seek to assure not merely equal rights, which appear not to be present, but also if not equal results at least more equal results or outcomes. To me it appears that the major obstacle to achieving equal rights in Israel Palestine involves the gross ethnocentric approaches of the two most dominant religions in the area. Both Islam and Judaism involve ultra high levels of ethnocentrism, that is to say the beliefs that their religion and coreligionists, are better and deserve more consideration, more and better rights, than those of other religious affiliations. Indeed this state of affairs is probably true of most religions, including the varieties of Christianity. But in Islam at least in the most fundamentalist versions, which are currently at the heart of challenges to the world civic order, persons who are neither Muslims nor people of the book, that is Christians and Jews, need to be converted to Islam upon pain of death, and people of the aforementioned book (except according to the views of some extreme fanatics) are to be allowed to live under their current belief format, but as second class citizens that is as second class citizens compared to believing Muslims. In fundamentalist Judaism, such as the justifiers of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin believed or continue to believe in, Jews are or should be, at the center of the world; charging monetary interest to non Jewish borrowers is or better was allowed, but charging monetary interest to fellow Jews (was) prohibited. So that demanding equal (secular) rights for all religious groups in Israel Palestine in so far as it is organized and significantly justified as a religious and theocratic state would be difficult. This would be the case whether the religious theocratic justification were Christian, Islamic or as at present Judaic. Indeed one of the socio economic inhibitors to progress in much of the as it were Islamic world may have something to do with the fact that many if not most of the political states therein, define themselves in their constitutions as being of an Islamic nature. But it should be possible, even in a religiously dedicated state, to isolate and define exactly which religious rights and privileges are to be operant in such a state, and which are to be disregarded as neither operant nor relevant. But such an effort does not seem to be a priority in present day Israel or Palestine, as currently constituted.

The harms associated with gross inequalities of outcome and result are the other focus of this group. It might be the case that if the differences in human rights attributed to religious differences were shrunk and delimited, that the gross inequalities found in both Israel and Palestine could be dramatically reduced, particularly by raising the floors under the levels of poverty for both Israelis and Palestinians, in whichever state they resided. Indeed it would seem to be the case that reducing the magnitude of the spread between the levels of poverty and the levels of extreme wealth needs to be the objective of this group. Eliminating inequality of outcome entirely seems to be too much to ask, particularly since doing so would seem to tend to stifle individual competitive efforts of either cultural or economic natures.

However, on the shrinking and delimitation of differing religious rights in the region, it would be well to point out that according to an Israeli leader of the presentation, there are only 4 or 5 large religiously integrated public schools or high schools in either Israel or Palestine at this time. This apparent fact seems to me to go a long way toward describing the lack of progress toward a more ethnically and religiously harmonious state of being in the area. In the US no one is arguing for an end to either public schools or to sectarian parochial schools. We have both varieties. In Israel they have yeshivas and madrassas, and secular schools for Israeli Jews but what about allowing or encouraging Palestinians to study in those same secular Israeli schools? Particularly if prospective matriculants believed in equal (religious) rights for all and in distinguishing between the need for religious values and the lack of need for a theocratic focus.

The case has been made and documented that certainly gross extreme inequality of result tends to result in higher levels of unhappiness amongst citizens. The opposite case, that no inequality may also cause unhappiness has not been studied, because it has not been significantly substantiated except in places like North Korea and Cuba at present. But even therein, the old Orwellian criticisms found in his novel Animal Farm continue perhaps to annoy advocates for perfect equality as the solution to humanity’s problems. On the Animal Farm of course, all animals are equal, except the pigs who have all sorts of special privileges.

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Umar Oseni spoke at the HLS. I am not under the impression that this talk was off the record or even not for attribution. If I am wrong and that talk was off the record, Umar please asap inform the entire address list by clicking reply all and asking them not to distribute this piece any further.

There are currently ADR or alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, including a variety of Islamic Advisory Councils, one of which is in Cairo. Such might be enlisted in mediating the Israeli Palestinian dispute toward a resolution that would have a greater legitimacy in the Islamic world, as a result of its having achieved or acquired the approval of a major Sharia Advocacy Council (SAC),

SAC’s would or also could gain international legitimacy to the extent that they shared and subjected their currently approved and also disallowed rules, laws and legal mechanisms, to the scrutiny of representative western, legal adjudicating bodies such as the ICJ in the Hague or the ICC the International Criminal Court or the office of the Chief Rabbi of Israel and the Israeli Supreme Court. Oseni noted the existence of bodies which specialize in cross national alternative dispute resolutions including or pertaining most generally to financial disputes. Note that financial dispute resolution might well, if systematically incorporated into the Israeli Palestinian peace process, yield possible new progress toward either peace or a more effective degree of dispute management.

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Re at a presumably off the record presentation re democracy and the Arab Spring, peopled by about six luminaries from this general field of study;

Obs(mine): Why do people choose democracy? On the surface, for freedom of choice (of leadership)! Beneath the surface,: to achieve group and individual economic especially interests. (So socio economic class interests.) What are the class interests in a predominantly non industrial, post modern agrarian societies? The mere redistribution of unequally distributed indigenous natural resource oil derived wealth. Can this impulse to redistribute wealth be justified by Islamic principles and laws? And if so, which?

Is post enlightenment democracy as commonly presently known, basically a creature or creation of industrialization, i.e. designed for coping with industrial socio economic conditions and distributions of wealth and capital? Democracy in Islamic dominated countries would seem to work or not work, depending upon whether it was understood to provide legal legitimate mechanisms (transcending the terrors of the Hudud) for challenging de facto distributions of wealth. Such mechanisms might allow for the conversion of wealth accumulations into more usable and accessible capital which could then be transformed into ongoing economic progress generating institutions which would function for the benefit of all the people of local societies and for the benefit of world society.

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November 6, 2011

Re some remarks about agency in the modern or post modern eras;

The speaker, who is a sociologist, at an off the record seminar, suggested that agency in current contemporary modern societies has become vastly less individual and more relational or positional within institutional or corporate contexts. Indeed it would seem to have been her implication that individual actions or speeches, that do not bear the imprimatur of a larger legitimating institution or corporation, tend to be regarded even with a sort of suspicion. For example, I heard one person remark critically of a peace groups that it is a one man operation. As if the an individual writer in this modern or perhaps post modern cultural era were somehow someone or something to be regarded with skepticism and derision. And then we complain about the phenomenon of group think.

On the other hand the notion of modernity goes well back into the first half of the twentieth century or even earlier, at least by some usages. For example, my grandparents set up their home in the late nineteen twenties or early thirties in a suburb or NYC. And they kept their furniture which included a coffee table which I found duplicated in a Museum of Fine Arts exhibit about the Napoleonic era. So by inference, I am guessing that the notion of modern goes back to Napoleonic, post French Revolutionary ideas about government, the state and the idea of the mandate for individual action. Thus Napoleon was representative of an idea of right somehow justified more by science and enlightenment than by the previous divine right of monarchy. Napoleon thought he was spreading the norms of the enlightenment though military force. So modernity, by this reasoning, for whatever it may be worth, involves humanistic anti monarchical and non religious more scientifically justified and therefore heroic in that sense, action. Instead today in the contemporary (modern) or post modern post industrial age, we discover that scientific actions have in fact, arguably been subordinated to corporate economic interests. The scientific hero’s message is often suppressed in the mass media, in favor of corporate interests when their scientific interests conflict with or stymy corporate profits.

One possible indication that a normative shift from the modern more individualistic and therefore heroic orientation to the post modern positional individualism, lies in possible generally differing attitudes toward heroism during World War II and the subsequent Vietnam War or police action. Certain remarks made by or attributed to combatants in those conflicts suggest that heroism was an operant value during WW2, whereas some remarks suggest that this might not have been the case so much during the Vietnam War. Perhaps this was because the justifications of the two conflicts were differing in their unanimity. WW2 was seen in hindsight as much more necessary and just, whereas the need for fighting in Vietnam was regularly challenged on the home front. So that heroic ultimate sacrifices in the first conflict were seen, in religious terms, as much more likely to get one into Heaven than perhaps was the case in general, in the subsequent Vietnam conflict. Or it may have been that in the interuum the US had shifted into a qualitatively more corporatist, positional norm or way of thinking about individual actions, or some combination of the above.

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Re historical placements of Hammurabic code, Abraham and Moses;

Dad,

This web site contains a pertinent discussion of the historical placements of Abraham, Moses and Hammurabi. It reviews the literature and suggests that Hammurabi lived at about the time, actually, of Moses. Which suggests by implication, that after Moses leaves the Israelites in Canaan, and by some accounts his body was never found, he proceeded to travel eastward, perhaps influencing Hammurabi. By the way, the article also deals with the question of whether Moses actually wrote the Pentateuch. For example, it suggests that one of the reasons why Spinoza was excommunicated from Judaism, was that he denied that Moses had written the Pentateuch. This interpretation was new to me. The article, however, also deals with denials that Moses wrote the books on the grounds that writing did not exist at that time, referring to archaeological evidence that indicates that actually writing did exist at that time.

www.apologeticspress.org/articles/13

November 10, 2011

Re some remarks about differences between capital and money, re the creation and destruction of capital;

Tentatively, money, paper or specie, stuffed into your mattress, is not capital. Money, paper or specie, removed from your mattress and put into some form of work or made subject to demand, becomes capital. Capital is capital because it is useful, contributing to the true sum of the world’s wealth. Money not subject to demand does not contribute to the useful goods and services available in the world. So money, in a bank earning approaching no interest, in a liquidity trap, has decreasing value as capital, one would think.

So that the creation of capital out of money is an inherently useful activity; it is, if you will, a form of legitimate work. This fact is true whether one lives in a democratic market, free or otherwise, state, or in a socialist state wherein the market is controlled by the state and/or forced into the black illegal underground level.

It may well be the case that capital is better or well created by the private for profit sector than exclusively by an allegedly not for profit governmental sector. Or better, the private for profit sector, with the collusion of the government, is likely to be better situated to create capital than if the government were taking no role in the formulation of markets or marketability. That being said, since the magnitude of capital created was and is partially dependent upon certain facilitating governmental actions, then it makes sense for the government to be able to tax the private capital creators for the benefit of the taxpayers, so that the created capital does not remain exclusively in the hands of its creators wherein there is a grave danger that it will effectively lie dormant, unavailable to prospective users, instead serving as a security mechanism for the wealthy. Thus we have the 2 trillion dollar corporate slush fund that is currently not being invested. In such circumstances it seems fair to say that corporate profits are being converted from capital backwards, back into mere money, effectively subject to no real need or accessibility, neither by the government neither by the private citizenry, neither by the billion people who continue to subsist on a single dollar a day real income.

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Comment posted to Paul Krugman’s oped of today;

regards. I spoke with a French central banker associated with the ECB on Wednesday last, and he said that most of the Europeans associated with the bank think that quantitative easing is a crazy idea. So they won’t let themselves print or borrow in either their own currencies, which are now obsolete, or in their own currency, the euro. This since QE involves as I understand it, borrowing newly printed euros or in our case dollars, in exchange for in our case Treasury issues, in their case the equivalent of eurobonds? So maybe a major difference between our so far relative success in dealing with the deflationary sector specific sic subprime crisis, and theirs’, lies in the fact that we have allowed ourselves to indulge in quantitative easings, and they haven’t? If the crisis is at bottom, a matter of deflating prices caused by a surge in