Global Capitalism: December 2014 Monthly Update

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1. Oh man, is this really the country I live it? Fuckin' christ, I don't wanna be on this planet anymore...
2. Another reason people aren't spending money: retirement & retirement uncertainty in the Boomer generation.
   
   Despite what the news would have you believe - most of us don't have a huge pot of gold. While there are purchases we could make (remodel the kitchen and bathrooms to see us through our golden years or buy that last car) - we aren't because who knows if Congress will succeed in privatizing Social Security and cutting the safety net further,
3. There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
4. And EU made the inventor of the Luxembourg ploy the new chairman of the commission.  Is`nt that great. Putting the criminals in charge.
5. Capitalism or objectification is the use of people (or indeed anything animate and inanimate) as objects for one’s own purposes without regard for their well-being. Exploitation is defined in a similar way. This principle appears in Neohumanism as the distinction between utility value and existential value. To recognize the existential value of a person is to recognize that their joys and sorrows are as important to them as my joys and sorrows are to me. We may therefore describe non-objectification as the empathic principle. It requires an ability to put oneself into the mind of another – to
   expand one’s consciousness beyond its limited ego boundary.
6. this is very good program thank to prof wolff ,he really telling you as it is ,,,WAKE UP AMERICA..
7. Here is what Marx thought of the middle class:
   "...from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.
   You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. this person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible."
   
   Karl Marx - Communist Manifesto, chapter 2.
   
   I would say that Marxism has, indeed, been a success in eliminating the middle class, wherever it has been implemented.
   
   This message has been brought to you by the RRW. The thoughts and opinions of the RRW in no way reflect the views of the host of this video(even though they should).
   We now continue with our regularly scheduled programing of Marxist propaganda.
8. What is your primary news sources? As you are one of mine, I'd like to keep informed more than once a month. Thanks
9. Love you Wolffie.   Great presentation.  I'll be using the Luxembourg section with my students. 
10. The employees' sad refrain:  We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. - Old Communist saying.  We work just hard enough so that they don't fire us.  They pay us just enough so that we don't quit.  - Old Capitalist saying.
11. And while the giant corporations maintain tax havens overseas, the American people pay billions in taxes that is siphoned through the Federal Reserve Bank straight to international bankers and multi-national corporations.
12. Most U.S. jobs are "Hell-pit" jobs, i.e. slave wages, nasty supervisors and inevitable termination months, weeks, days, or even hours into the job.  The money earned by the employees is surrendered by the office cashier to the employers who then place it into armored cars which drive this cash to banks where the bank divides it up as follows: 90% to the CEO's, board of directors and principal stockholders, 5% for overhead (making sure the place of business doesn't fall to pieces like that one did in Bangladesh in 2013) and 5% for the employees' wages.
13. Even if you get hired, the typical U.S. job pays slave wages ranging from 1/3 down to 1/5 of what you need to support yourself and your family at a lower middle class level.  Moreover, the buying power of U.S. job wages has not gone up since 1968.  That's FORTY-SIX years ago! 
14. Excellent. Always enjoy these.
15. Actually. Only the only time average of discouraged workers was above 1 Million was (for obvious reasons) on 2009... and it was around 1.12 Millions.
    www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-03/drop-in-u-s-labor-force-difficult-to-pin-on-discouraged-workers.html
16. This is ridiculous. ¿Where does this numbers on discouraged workers come from?
    I can also assume there's also millions of jobless free-lancers that are looking for a stable position. And make-up things are actually quite rad
17. http://rwer.wordpress.com/2014/12/29/blogging-the-assa-conference-cooperatives-and-employee-ownership/ Real-World Economics Review Blog
     ASSA conference: cooperatives and employee ownership
    
    December 29, 2014 Merijn Knibbe
    For a long time, Goldman Sachs was an employee owned company. Many lawyer and accountant firms are. A good thing? It seems that, in the case of Goldman Sachs, things – i.e.: long term relations with customers – started to unravel after the employee owners cashed in by selling shares… The point: there are many different kinds of companies and production organisations: listed companies, family owned companies, ‘Mom and pop companies’, companies of the truly self-employed, government owned companies (like, in my country, the excellent water companies with their exemplary long term strategy), government companies and production organisations (large chunks of the education system), cooperatives, employee owned companies, whatever. ‘There are more things in supply and demand systems, textbook writers, than are dreamt of in your neoclassical philosophy’. At the ASSA conference in Boston there are a few sessions dedicated to parts of what in fact is the majority of companies and production organisations: non-listed ones. Excerpts:
    
    (J3) The employee ownership aproach to shared posperity session
    Fidan Ana Kurtulus (University of Massachusetts-Amherst) and Douglas L. Kruse (Rutgers University):
    
    “We examine the relationship between employee ownership and firm survival in the United States … We examine how firms with employee ownership programs weathered the recessions of 2001 and 2008 in terms of firm survival relative to firms without employee ownership programs… we use a rich array of measures of employee ownership at firms, including the presence of employee ownership stock in pension plans, the presence of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), the value of employee ownership stock per employee, the share of the firm owned by employees, the share of workers at the firm participating in employee ownership, and the share of workers at the firm participating in ESOPs. Our findings indicate that employee ownership firms had significantly higher survival rates during 1999-2010.“
    
    Erik K. Olsen (University of Missouri-Kansas City):
    
    “This paper presents a new way to assess the effect of employee ownership (EO) on employee behavior… Contrary to existing theoretical literature, which holds that EO is either inconsequential or detrimental to employee performance, this model predicts increased employee effort in EO firms relative to conventionally-owned ones. It also indicates that a profit-maximizing EO firm will respond to this increased effort by using fewer supervisory inputs…  test … supervisory ratios are determined using firm filings …. This has important implications for economic theory and policy, not least of which is that conventional ownership may be pareto inferior to EO.”
    
    Edward J. Carberry (University of Massachusetts-Boston) and Joan S.M. Meyers (University of the Pacific):
    
    “Popular claims that a workplace is good for its employees may overlook gender, ethnoracial, and class variation in employee reactions and experiences. … Our analysis focuses on the effects of gender, race/ethnicity, and occupational level on perceptions of trust, empowerment, and justice, and whether working for a BCTW firm or for a firm with employee ownership results in different perceptions. Our findings reveal that 1) BCTW firm employees from historically marginalized groups (white women, nonwhite men and women, and working-class employees) perceive their firms as more just than similar employees of non-BCTWF firms; 2) hourly workers react most positively to BCTWF firms; and 3) employee ownership has mixed effects on employees from marginalized groups.”
    
    (P1) theory and practice of cooperatives session
    
    Mark Klinedinst (University of Southern Mississippi)
    
    “Credit union cooperatives are the most common financial institution in the U.S. … The “natural experiment” created by Hurricane Katrina will be the micro area examined, using the national data on all institutions as a comparison. Ten years after one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history is also a good time to report on the continued success of the relatively little known struggle for democratic financial institutions.”
    
    Jonathan Jenner (University of Massachusetts-Amherst)
    
    “Those who work for an economy wherein worker-owned and operated firms figure prominently need to understand why, in our current context, there are so few of them. In this paper, I arrange the theories on the scarcity of worker-ownership and management, which are found through a vast but disparate literature, into a taxonomy of three different genera, namely: 1. Structural deficiencies particular and internal to worker-owned firms 2. Limiting institutional arrangements between worker-owned firms and their networks 3. Structural deficiencies of capitalism. I then attempt to evaluate these genera, while also exploring reasons why evaluation may be limited. Finally, I examine what the various groups of theories imply for strategy that seeks to grow worker-ownership in our economy.”
18. I hope Prof. Wolff comes to Phoenix. He explains exactly what is happening in this country (and the world, economically) and why, in words that all of us can comprehend without a 'rocket science' degree.
    
    Ummm,,Todd - I saw you asking a question in a video he recorded up at the Elliot Bay bookstore. THAT too was an awesome presentation. I have never heard things explained to explicitly before, and I LOVE his teaching.
19. People who complain that New Deal type work programs would be "too expensive" are the same idiots who defend our for profit deathcare system by saying that socialized medicine would be "too expensive"...as if we don't pay large sums of money for inferior healthcare compared to many countries who have socialized medicine the way things are now.  As if people who are sick or dying can be expected to act as savvy consumers of anything.  So frustrating.
20. the oil price is being manipulated