The Ends of a Means

What happens when one country crosses the tape first in the global race to the bottom. One can only wonder how many other disasters await out there thru corner cutting...




Link from WSJ.

"More with Less"

The theme of the fifth season of the Wire (or one of them anyway) as an oft repeated rallying cry uttered by the corporate stooges as their institutions failed around them. I have no illusions. Point being, that I apologize if content is lacking lately (despite visitorship being up - perhaps I'm getting more entertaining?), but my responsibility level at my job has been increasing exponentially lately.

New quote for today:

George Monbiot says "Every pound we spend on driving is a pound withheld from the alternatives, many of which (such as buses and trains) employ far more people for the same amount of money."

Wow. Into the Mind of the Pirates Raiding Wall Street

Question. What is on the mind of the interviewer?

A. Holy shit! This guy is breaking the effing law and is telling me this on camera. (nope)

B. Holy shit! I'm so stupid that I believe this guy is some sort of genius and I am going to take what he's telling me and try to spend the rest of my career fleecing the world as well, and then I'll be rich and score copious amounts of tail...and nobody would find out even if the economy crashed in the mean time b/c of it. (nope)

C. What the Eff is he saying? I'm just thinking about this weekend's keg party and securing some rohypnol from my frat buddies, brah! (ding ding ding!)




For more...
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/3/5/16720/74815/703/705113

Kraft Food vs. Craft Food

TreeHugger. This table tells the story of what needs to and is happening in more industries than just food production:

Features	Old ‘Industrial Food’ Economy	New ‘Creative Food’ Economy
Prototypical company	Kraft - cheese products	Craft/artisanal cheese
Sources of economic power	Economic power is centralized National/international production, processing and marketing Concentrated farms and control of land, resources and capital	Economic power is diffused and decentralized from owners or controllers of means of production to individual, highly creative knowledge-workers and extra-firm institutions
Sources of quality and innovation	Quality is a measure of added value in highly-processed environments or incremental innovation in packaging and marketing of existing food products (e.g., 27 different kinds of Oreo cookies)	Quality is a measure of taste, terroir, and talent of entrepreneurs making new and innovative products
Enterprises’ attitudes towards place	Firm or company located close to traditional production inputs like raw land, and transportation networks. Little relationship between place and product making. Preferences for place are subordinate to traditional company inputs.	Traditional production dimension important, but place becomes central to quality food making, marketing and consuming

The Real Issue with Wall Street (and your 401K)

On HuffPuff, Ann Pettitfor writes about Wall Street holding the U.S. for ransom.

JHK suggests something similar regarding the "too big to fail" myth.

The "ahha" moment I had this weekend whilst walking the mutt on another warm but blustery Downtown Dallas day, was what Wall Street's deeper issue is, beyond the credit default swaps, the ARM loans, greed, etc. All of the companies on the DOW or S&P 500 are huge corporations. They can't physically or economically get any bigger, which is what Wall Street, investors, and your 401K demand, so in turn, they all need to, and are currently shrinking (my publicly traded company included - love those stock options!)

This is the problem with growth. It was touched upon on this week's Bill Maher show with guest Cory Booker. Except that nobody really put 2 and 2 together to realize that there are different types of growth. I have mentioned exhaustively qualitative over quantitative models of growth, but I also touched upon it here:

Let me be the first to say (with thoughts for the other side of this bottoming), that instead of saving dinosaurs, how about we start thinking about saving that money to help startups on the other side of this bottoming that will be smaller, nimble, and more able to meet the needs of the 21st century.

Harvard economist Howard Glaeser echoed my sentiment:

That is how innovation works: small companies competing like crazy and trying out new things. Across cities, there is a strong connection between an abundance of small firms and local growth. The last thing that the government should be doing is propping up big declining firms. Real innovations are far more likely to come from someone’s garage, which is where Chester Carlson came up with the Xerox machine during the Great Depression.

The advantage of Wall Street and Globalization (and I'm one to point out its failings as well) is to deliver capital to companies in need of it for their own growth and economic development for all of us. Nay, this is the POINT.

Instead, it has devolved into a guessing game of who is gonna buy out whom, who will report the best 4Q sales figures, or simply who is the best at hiding their illegal ponzi schemes. Another dinosaur, a construct built entirely to pick the horse that will be standing at the end when only the biggest corporate fish is left. What then? How will our 401K improve at that point?

Well, we're essentially there already. We know that in order to maintain "growth" figures, that these corporations can now only cut costs while trying to provide the same or similar product, which has had disastrous effects on the health of our economies and our physical health.

Wall Street to have a real purpose and contribute to the rebuilding of a real economy is to find a way to deliver the engine of capital that only they can provide to the innovators of the 21st century, the inventors, the biologists, the "green" technicians.

Only then will your 401K begin to shed its sickly sallow look.