At least twice during Thom Hartmann’s show today, the a few seconds of the theme music, if you will, of the Workers’ Independent News (WIN) broadcasts were clearly audible at various points of the broadcast. If I were paranoid I’d say the traffic managers at Clear Channel station WDTW were deliberately allowing these snippets of the feed to leak onto the airwaves, for the express purpose of rubbing in the fact that the bu$iness model of for-profit radio requires overwriting WIN content with inanities like CNN Radio “News,” the V-roll “news” stories of Marketwatch.com and of course the mini-infomercials with their voice-roll mannerisms.

“In a Grand Rapids Press interview Betsy DeVos said, ‘We just viewed this as a really powerful way to leverage creative talents for the benefit and enjoyment of all of us.’ Do we as artists want a future where we are looked at as primarily entrepreneurs? A world where creativity becomes something more valuable when it is thought of as good business? Do we want local [arts] organizations, locally funded, providing programming selected ultimately by local boards trained to look at the arts as a commodity to be ‘leveraged’?”—Richard Kooyman, quoted by Jeff Smith

“Idealistoj neniam maljuniĝos.”—Bonulo

“If you think believing man is innately good is as destructive as believing man is innately evil, then I really have nothing to add to that. That’s your opinion, but I don’t see how it’s tenable. At any rate, are you aware of the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy? That’s what you want to be looking for.”—François Tremblay

“It isn’t about intellectual property you disingenuous fuck, it’s about sticking to a historical and intellectual tradition that existed for near a goddamn century before Murray Rothbard came along and pissed all over the work of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tucker, et. al.”—Cory Moloney

“Corporate influence over the state extends far, far beyond the mere financing if campaigns. Energy corporations write our energy policy. Insurers write our health care laws. Paying for campy tv spots is such a minor aspect of the system. Campaign Finance Reform is just another distraction.”—matt

“See, how much happy the Ken and Dennis are working on a machine which has (IIRC, 1 MB of RAM) and look at todays kids (both 12 years olds and 35 years old idiots) how much they are in pain when they work on computers with 3.0 GHZ of CPU, 7200 RPM of HDD and 2 GB of RAM, while 10 times smaller than PDP-11. Reason: UNIX way (love) and Windows way (Idiotic).”—Arnuld Uttre

“When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: ‘Whose?’”—Don Marquis, quoted by Jack Saturday

“Remember kids, you can’t have crucifixion without fiction!”—CultOfDusty

“If we can’t make a dime on the street, will Big Brother leave us alone if we just putz putz around in our own backyard? Not so fast. In Michigan, House Bill 6458, introduced by two Democrats, Gabe Leland and Mike Huckleberry, will prohibit farming in any city with a population of 900,000 or more. Why didn’t they name Detroit outright, since it’s the only one that qualifies? And what’s going on here, exactly?”—Linh Dinh

“The state can never be replaced or transcended by private for-profit logics only, but only if civil society develops its own collective regulation mechanisms.”—Michel Bauwens

“A hobbyist and student of the economy, I’m no economist. I got a B.A. in Math in 1970, and promptly went to work in construction. A few years later New York City nearly went bankrupt. I couldn’t understand that. A year or two later the news reported that local farmers were plowing their crop into the soil, as it would cost them less than bringing the crop to market. That’s when I signed up for a semester of economics. About the first thing I noticed was that hardly any of the graphs in the textbook were based on actual numbers. So I started going through Statistical Abstracts at the library, gathering data, doing calculations (at first with a slide rule, later with a Radio Shack PC-1 Pocket Computer with 1K of memory!) and drawing graphs by hand. I’ve been into it ever since.”—Arthur Shipman

“When information management successfully over whelms the prospect for …an ‘educated electorate,’ we’re playing solitaire with a deck where every card is a joker.”—Chad Hall

“Dark chocolate is one of my favorite snacks, but if you told me ‘you have no other choice, you must eat this dark chocolate’, I’d be unable to swallow it.”—Ettina

“The elephant in the room: The validity of currency has been separated from its… primary function; labor compensation utilized as a universal bartering tool for trade, goods and services. The religion of economics has subverted it into a measurement independent of its original blueprint.”—mary dohm

Big Phone and Big Cable know that about 1% of the people out there, like you and me, are in the bottom percentile among movie/TV viewers. For this segment, so much for their so-called Triple Play. The introduction of VoIP makes it so internet access is equivalent to home phone plus internet access. Now all Big Phone and Big Cable have to agree on is that there is to be no such thing as ‘standalone broadband,’ at least at a rate that is palatable. So VoIP is making it worse. Apple and Amazon purvey their iPad and Kindle wares which need wireless internet access and not much else, so there is another truckload of customers who wish there were such a thing as standalone mobile broadband. Maybe Apple and Amazon are making it worse.

I’ve long been an advocate of replacing the word ‘immigration’ with ‘migration’ in popular discourse, and the blog entry US Emigration Rates… at Blended Purple illustrates one example of why; namely the ‘brain drain’ factor. Nobody thought Ireland would go from emigration central to immigration central. It’s hardly inconceivable that the United States can’t flip in the other direction.

The discussion of this subject also reminds me of Reagan’s trite slogan about ‘voting with one’s feet.’ This type of voting is of course not an equal opportunity franchise. Within the USA it’s pretty obvious that there’s a middle class whose housing arrangements are a matter of at least some choice, and an underclass whose choice is made for them by economic constraints, and turns out to be the so-called ‘low rent district.’ It’s inevitable this pattern will globalize. Blended Purple is talking about “educated potential immigrants” who are “dropping the U.S[.] from their list…”

I wonder whether we may be looking at a future in which working class people are also looking at emigration, most plausibly to less developed countries, specifically those in which their particular occupational skills are still cheap enough to be competitive with capital. Most such countries, it seems, already have high unemployment rates, but the low-income ‘first world’ population may also be forced to emigrate to the ‘third world’ for an affordable cost of living. There might be more likelihood of a place for them there is it’s understood they’re to spend money. Seemingly for some time now the tacit understanding has been that the role of average Americans in the world economy is that of consumers. Maybe ‘offshoring’ these consumers has the potential to extend the potential of this particular form of running on the fumes of the postwar American economy, even beyond the credit bubble.

Another possible emigrant population is elderly people with long-term care needs. Long-term care is one of the few truly labor-intensive industries left, and is also one of the most staggeringly expensive ongoing financial burdens a typical American is likely to have to deal with. Already there is a ‘medical tourism’ industry, and already that industry is expanding from clearly elective services to such staples as major dental work. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if nursing home patients at some point become medical tourists with one-way tickets.

It’s no accident that the ‘free world’ consists of the top tier of countries in terms of GDP. Globalizing the already-apparent economic reality that mobility and habitational choice are determined by income and career potential, begs even harder the question of whether political freedom itself is an economic good, to be enjoyed by those who can afford it.

Sometimes I wonder whether I should be using and promoting ClustrMaps, given that about 90% of their ad sponsorship is from far-right websites, but it’s pretty useful for something free-as-in-beer.

The following ClustrMaps ad grabbed my attention:

I couldn’t help but think: Is the real problem unsustainable pensions or unattainable pensions? One side-effect of the pervasive trend toward two-tier payrolls is that the tier with the actually livable jobs, the jobs with bennies, is getting smaller and smaller, soon to be completely phased out, I’m sure. Americans, to their disgrace, have largely been cowed into submission. Instead of mobilizing against the fact that private sector workers are underpaid, they have successfully been conned into griping about ‘overpaid’ civil servants.

The trouble with the idea of “free markets,” including the idea of free markets, is that the market finds a price for everything, including people.

The trouble with the idea of “self ownership” is that it sets a precedent for the self as ownable. Particularly, if property rights include the right of transfer, and self ownership is the foundation on which property rights are built, the implications are staggering.

At the risk of being labeled a mystic, or worse, a religious person, I hold that personhood transcends commerce.

To quote (pdf) Republican State House candidate Marc Goodson:

What is the inherent value of a man? What should be the limit of public subsidy for each? According to Democrats, there is no limit, our inherent value is priceless. This belief is anti-social, inhumane, and unjust; we are not priceless.

The candor is certainly refreshing. It’s always interesting when conservatism reveals its true colors. At least free market advocates, unlike “free market” advocates such as Goodson, understand that the path to a subsidy-free society must start by kicking away the supports at or near the top of the food chain, not the kick-em-when-they’re-down variety of self-righteousness to which some are apparently addicted.

The following is my comment on Best and Worst Jobs for Aspergers Adults at My Asptergers Child. As has become habitual for me, it resulted in a

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It is of course debatable whether the incidence of Aspergers/autism is anywhere near 1:110, or whether the incidence is higher among current children than current adults, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it is true. In that case there will be 1% of the adult population plus their parents, let's say 3% of the adult population, plus an unknown number of allies and supporters, forming a voting bloc or whatever you want to call it, that will demand a more introvert-friendly labor market, which is to say, a world in which what you know is actually worth something; maybe even as much as who you know. Large numbers of the 'subclinical' element, say people suffering only 'social anxiety,' will also affiliate and identify with this growing movement. What should we demand? I propose the following:

What I think is needed is a return to a large or at least economically significant civil service, with provisions that the existence of job openings is part of the public record, signed applications and not resumes are used as documents of first contact, and interviews (i.e. introvert filters) are a late stage in the selection process, after application processing and competitive examinations. I’m not above advocating holding private sector human resources practices to similar standards. If that makes me a commie, so be it. I also advocate a database of public record for announcements of vacancies, public and private, or at least a proof-of-publication requirement when new employees are added to quarterly withholding tax returns. These reforms would still leave de facto employees who are de jure “independent contractors” as a loophole. Perhaps you can think of a policy strategy for de-gaming that aspect of it.

“Who would have thought that it would be easier to produce by toil and skill all the most necessary or desirable commodities than it is to find consumers for them?”—Winston Churchill, quoted by Jack Saturday

“When you vote for a centre-right candidate to keep a right-wing candidate from getting in, you help move the centre further to the right. And every time the centre moves rightward, so does the right wing. And progressive thought becomes ever more marginalized, and more people say the progressive candidate has no chance of winning, and so they vote centre-right, and on it goes.”—laura k

“Can you keep calling for Freedom and yet tolerate control of your credit and other economic rights by hidden and arbitrary credit ratings and credit scores? What Freedom do you have when you have to sign industry-wide fine print one-sided ‘contracts’ with your banks, insurance companies, car dealers, and credit card companies? Many of these contracts even block your Constitutional access to the courthouse.”—Ralph Nader

“Rick Michigan’s belief that picking winners and losers is wrong is the same thing as saying that we shouldn’t apply vision to our collective future. A visionless future isn’t a future of prosperity. It’s a future where things happen because of luck, and if you aren’t gaming luck then most of what you get will be bad.”—Eric B.

“It would be cool to see Jared graduate from high school next year, but you know what? It would be a lot cooler to see Christ come back in five minutes.”—Clay Brown, quoted by Jen

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