You know, I have yet to hear anyone talk about what you mentioned. Immigration, or at the very least those H1B visas, can in a way be sorta like wage arbing. And yes, there is nothing to stop these companies from, after giving them grants for green investments, moving the stuff overseas or even to Mexico! Also, good idea on moving this to general discussion. I'm dying to know what others think, as more speakers show up.
I did not see anything about these policies that Gov. Graham mentioned on his website and more importantly I am not seeing those investment numbers tied to US citizens, to US workers to jobs in the United States.
They are not doing the thing that most needs to be done, which is to renegotiate those trade agreements and come up with a division, like the CBO or GAO to analyze trade deficits, trade policy, agenda in detail and provide recommendations to Congress.
Where is the US citizens first for jobs in America promise?
Are you noticing no one in the audience is listening to these speakers? My God, a Republican coming along and endorsing a Democratic one would think would get some attention and of course these regular folk up speaking about being completely ignored.
I wrote a piece about the Green Collar Jobs pointing these problems.
They simply must address the arbitrage issue.
I mean this isn't like before, those jobs could be moved offshore in 6 months or if they get their way with comprehensive immigration reform and the massive increase in guest worker Visas...they can displace US workers that way as well.
(Johnny, I changed your post to more of an open thread in hopes we can get others to start discussing the Democratic platform and presentation in terms of policy).
That is a real story in your post here. Why were they overbuying at record high prices? What is that about? One thing one can say about China is these people (these 20 people running their economy) are not stupid and they aren't going to make a market mistake like that without some sort of alternative strategy.
I know. I was one of those anyone but Hillary people initially but as she went on the campaign, esp. after getting rid of Penn, I noticed policy positions that were amazingly Progressive/Populist. I don't know if she meant any of them had a change of heart, what....but it was quite pleasantly surprising.
Whether is was all a lie, trying to win, I don't know but at least it's known what people really want and need in terms of true policy objectives somewhere.
Anybody not aware, AT&T donated $1M to the convention, is prominently displayed on all items and right after Obama was declared the winner they passed FISA so AT&T could not be prosecuted for turning over voice records.
They are owning the media with this gigantic infomercial too! All that is happening with this convention in my mind is the inane, superficial drivel coming from all of the TV networks seems more obvious....my God, they are going to have to run sitcoms to fill the airwaves with more unless bits of nothing no information reporting. Is it just me or am I now inundated with vague sounding promises, problem description and absolute refusal, both parties to really present policy and solutions that are going to do a damn thing?
It does appear Obama beefed up his financial crisis policy but that's way down the line and millions will already be foreclosed upon by then.
The last I heard on hydrogen is it takes more energy to produce hydrogen than the result. In Iceland, they have volcanic steam, so there is makes sense because steam is not a fossil fuel but in the US, natural gas is used to make hydrogen.
I believe this is some sort of major, major taxpayer scam by the Bush administration in collusion with the gas and auto industries to make it seem like they were doing something.
I mean what hype when even then it was clearly not practical and so why would a particular technology be singled out and hyped like that....they received billions in funding from the taxpayer for hydrogen cars, infrastructure, research, studies.....
I don't track it enough to know what the latest is but info, but it sure seems also in implementation, the auto industry didn't take any of this seriously and it's more just for PR.
Since those promoting corporate wealth agreements along the lines of NAFTA as "Free Trade" agreements are only using the term as a marketing label, the arguments of individual economists quibbling about the details are of little import ... the arguments of economists are not being used to design the policy, but simply to provide a high status cover story.
I'm watching the talking heads on cable and they said like a mantra and have been for some time, how there are no policy differences between Clinton and Obama and it's all ego and personality
... it might be an exaggeration, in that there may be some policy differences between Clinton and Obama, but they are both by and large centrist Corporate Democrats, and the biggest differences are clearly in the brand-marketing side of the campaign ... "New and Improved!", "A Name You Can Trust!" ... rather than in their ideological position, in that fuzzy middle ground that is center-left in the American politics of today and center-right in European politics.
... of people to buy into the idea that hydrogen powered cars are among the most promising of R&D paths out there for transport.
On the one hand, the clear reason for the Bush administration to put such a heavy emphasis on hydrogen fuel-cell research was that it is so far from full roll-out, so that it posed no short term threat to gasoline and diesel markets.
And on the other hand, after almost eight years of that emphasis, they continue to lag far behind conventional battery electric cars in terms of energy efficiency ... and as we shift from the age of ultra-cheap energy, it is energy efficiency that is the name of the game.
I haven't read After Capitalism, if you want to recommend it I can add it to the reads list.
I agree, we need some sort of public funded, in the national interest, private equity (or public equity I guess) as a fund for these sorts of investments. I don't know how spain operates. I also don't know much about the SBA or how their investment structure works. I doubt buying out GM is something under their preview.
In terms of the unions, I feel they need to try new structures. For example, professionals are so often free agents in terms of negotiation of salary and so on plus move around and don't quite fit in terms of a traditional union plus their are areas of expertise and why they gravitate towards professional societies. Yet it's pretty obvious Professionals need some sort of organization, labor rights clout.
So, yeah an employee owned company might go against the traditional union structure.
I just did a read over at wikipedia on employee owned corporations and it appears there are structural issues in terms of making fast decisions.
That would be around $330,000 for each UAW member represented at GM.
More fundamentally, what role does the union have if the company is employee owned?
I agree that there needs to be a way to integrate employee owned entreprise into the labor movemement. You see a model for this in the role of hiring halls for skilled trades, but the problem is when you have large amounts of machine capital.
I've just finished After Capitalism, that deals with how you can move beyond capitalism as in finance capitalism with community capital trusts funded by a tax on capital. I think that the idea of creating something like the cajas, the Spanish banking institutions that take a controlling ownership interest in startups, providing capital, and later selling of this interest to private investors.
With Glass Steagall having been thrown out the window, what limits American credit unions from ding this?
Or even a social investment fund not associated with a bank?
I think that your dead on. The more I look at it, I think that the US government should simply nationalize GM, Ford, and Chrysler.
And the shocking thing is that the cost associated with this move is relatively low. Consider this:
There are roughly current market price of $10.13/share, that means that a 50% +1 controlling stake in the company can be purchased for $2.87 billion.
Ford and Chrysler are probably somewhat less. So for something in the neighborhood of $8-$9 billion the government could take control of American auto manufacturing, and force the companies to produce automobiles that match America's economic interest.
Considering what we've spent in Iraq, this seems like a small price to pay to take giant leaps towards energy independece.
This is not an alien concept, the German and French government retain large financial interests in their national industry. In fact DHL is largely owned by Deutsche Post the German government-owned postal service.
Better yet, I would propose that the government announce that after a 10 year transitional period, the government will issue stock ownership in the companies to a government agency that will have proxy rights for shares disbursed equally amongst all legal American citizens. And that half of the monetary proceeds from this will be used to defray tax bills in much the way that many states use lottery money to reduce car license costs.
While the other half are rolled into an economic development fund that provides startup capital in exchange for an ownership stake in companies, and buys up stocking in vital industries that are failing.
Economics: The science of providing sustainable amounts of food, clothing, shelter and entitlements to those within the domain of the nation state throughout the life time of each citizen.
What we have been enduring for the last 50 years is not economics it is a ponze scheme by, for and of the Global Elite. Off with their heads.
The big problem is that we are about to see ourselves force from one of exponential growth to that of static state. All forms of exponential growth are ponzi schemes: they are not sustainable. This represents the most drastic economic change since the invention of the wheel. We are in deep doo doo.
Is it fair, or smart, to expect that the America people should be expected to shoulder a complete reversal on everything that we have associated with "the American Dream?"
Two things need to happen immediately:
(1) The Neo-Cons need to be brought to the mat and forced to admit that they are responsible for this mess.
(2) The Legal American Working Class needs a major "stimulus check" and I'm not talking about $600 per wage earner.
If we don't do this we will be completely overtaken by foriegn carpet baggers. I've made an attempt to explain this in the following video but don't think my first attempt at a solution is as equitable is it needs to be. But this at least allows people to understand that what we have been enduring is not "free trade" but rather "corporate trade" -- and it is screwing the American Working Class.
How many times have we seen bailouts, subsidies, or tax credits, handed out in order to create jobs, or save jobs; and how often does it actually work?
Remember the billions of dollars given to the airlines after 9/11? The idea was to save the jobs of airline workers. The airlines took the money, gave big bonuses to airline execs, and fired the airline workers anyway.
How about tax credit for Neilsen to create jobs in Florida? Neilsen took the money, and hired offshore workers.
Now both Obama and McCain want to make the current R&D tax credit permanent. That means that both will give taxpayer money to corporations that are already so wealthy, those corporations barely know what to do with all the billions of dollars flooding in. This will insure huge bonuses for corporate execs.
And all of those high-tech corporations are on the front line when it comes to offshoring US jobs, or replacing US tech workers with guest workers. Both Obama and McCain support in increasing the numbers of H-1B workers.
Obama has put into place the Jason Furman, a Robert Rubin clone and involved with the Hamilton project as his head economic adviser.
What does this mean? Well, more bad trade deals and not a hell of a lot for working America.
To give a real life example, here is his paper on how Wal-mart, the notorious squeezer of other retailers, multiple class action lawsuits against it for unpaid wages and sex discrimination and our portal to China increasing their exports to the US...
You know, I have yet to hear anyone talk about what you mentioned. Immigration, or at the very least those H1B visas, can in a way be sorta like wage arbing. And yes, there is nothing to stop these companies from, after giving them grants for green investments, moving the stuff overseas or even to Mexico! Also, good idea on moving this to general discussion. I'm dying to know what others think, as more speakers show up.
I did not see anything about these policies that Gov. Graham mentioned on his website and more importantly I am not seeing those investment numbers tied to US citizens, to US workers to jobs in the United States.
They are not doing the thing that most needs to be done, which is to renegotiate those trade agreements and come up with a division, like the CBO or GAO to analyze trade deficits, trade policy, agenda in detail and provide recommendations to Congress.
Where is the US citizens first for jobs in America promise?
Are you noticing no one in the audience is listening to these speakers? My God, a Republican coming along and endorsing a Democratic one would think would get some attention and of course these regular folk up speaking about being completely ignored.
I wrote a piece about the Green Collar Jobs pointing these problems.
They simply must address the arbitrage issue.
I mean this isn't like before, those jobs could be moved offshore in 6 months or if they get their way with comprehensive immigration reform and the massive increase in guest worker Visas...they can displace US workers that way as well.
(Johnny, I changed your post to more of an open thread in hopes we can get others to start discussing the Democratic platform and presentation in terms of policy).
That is a real story in your post here. Why were they overbuying at record high prices? What is that about? One thing one can say about China is these people (these 20 people running their economy) are not stupid and they aren't going to make a market mistake like that without some sort of alternative strategy.
I know. I was one of those anyone but Hillary people initially but as she went on the campaign, esp. after getting rid of Penn, I noticed policy positions that were amazingly Progressive/Populist. I don't know if she meant any of them had a change of heart, what....but it was quite pleasantly surprising.
Whether is was all a lie, trying to win, I don't know but at least it's known what people really want and need in terms of true policy objectives somewhere.
Anybody not aware, AT&T donated $1M to the convention, is prominently displayed on all items and right after Obama was declared the winner they passed FISA so AT&T could not be prosecuted for turning over voice records.
They are owning the media with this gigantic infomercial too! All that is happening with this convention in my mind is the inane, superficial drivel coming from all of the TV networks seems more obvious....my God, they are going to have to run sitcoms to fill the airwaves with more unless bits of nothing no information reporting. Is it just me or am I now inundated with vague sounding promises, problem description and absolute refusal, both parties to really present policy and solutions that are going to do a damn thing?
It does appear Obama beefed up his financial crisis policy but that's way down the line and millions will already be foreclosed upon by then.
Treehugger and Climate Progress are two blogs which cover alternative technologies extensively.
The last I heard on hydrogen is it takes more energy to produce hydrogen than the result. In Iceland, they have volcanic steam, so there is makes sense because steam is not a fossil fuel but in the US, natural gas is used to make hydrogen.
I believe this is some sort of major, major taxpayer scam by the Bush administration in collusion with the gas and auto industries to make it seem like they were doing something.
I mean what hype when even then it was clearly not practical and so why would a particular technology be singled out and hyped like that....they received billions in funding from the taxpayer for hydrogen cars, infrastructure, research, studies.....
I don't track it enough to know what the latest is but info, but it sure seems also in implementation, the auto industry didn't take any of this seriously and it's more just for PR.
... is in support of free trade in principle.
Since those promoting corporate wealth agreements along the lines of NAFTA as "Free Trade" agreements are only using the term as a marketing label, the arguments of individual economists quibbling about the details are of little import ... the arguments of economists are not being used to design the policy, but simply to provide a high status cover story.
... it might be an exaggeration, in that there may be some policy differences between Clinton and Obama, but they are both by and large centrist Corporate Democrats, and the biggest differences are clearly in the brand-marketing side of the campaign ... "New and Improved!", "A Name You Can Trust!" ... rather than in their ideological position, in that fuzzy middle ground that is center-left in the American politics of today and center-right in European politics.
... of people to buy into the idea that hydrogen powered cars are among the most promising of R&D paths out there for transport.
On the one hand, the clear reason for the Bush administration to put such a heavy emphasis on hydrogen fuel-cell research was that it is so far from full roll-out, so that it posed no short term threat to gasoline and diesel markets.
And on the other hand, after almost eight years of that emphasis, they continue to lag far behind conventional battery electric cars in terms of energy efficiency ... and as we shift from the age of ultra-cheap energy, it is energy efficiency that is the name of the game.
somebody would have to agree to cooperate. I don't think Russia is in the mood. After Iraq, who would be.
I'm learning how to work this site, but it is a challenge.
kos wrote this diary and the thing to note is the increasing percentage of Democrats getting lobbyist money.
I haven't read After Capitalism, if you want to recommend it I can add it to the reads list.
I agree, we need some sort of public funded, in the national interest, private equity (or public equity I guess) as a fund for these sorts of investments. I don't know how spain operates. I also don't know much about the SBA or how their investment structure works. I doubt buying out GM is something under their preview.
In terms of the unions, I feel they need to try new structures. For example, professionals are so often free agents in terms of negotiation of salary and so on plus move around and don't quite fit in terms of a traditional union plus their are areas of expertise and why they gravitate towards professional societies. Yet it's pretty obvious Professionals need some sort of organization, labor rights clout.
So, yeah an employee owned company might go against the traditional union structure.
I just did a read over at wikipedia on employee owned corporations and it appears there are structural issues in terms of making fast decisions.
That would be around $330,000 for each UAW member represented at GM.
More fundamentally, what role does the union have if the company is employee owned?
I agree that there needs to be a way to integrate employee owned entreprise into the labor movemement. You see a model for this in the role of hiring halls for skilled trades, but the problem is when you have large amounts of machine capital.
I've just finished After Capitalism, that deals with how you can move beyond capitalism as in finance capitalism with community capital trusts funded by a tax on capital. I think that the idea of creating something like the cajas, the Spanish banking institutions that take a controlling ownership interest in startups, providing capital, and later selling of this interest to private investors.
With Glass Steagall having been thrown out the window, what limits American credit unions from ding this?
Or even a social investment fund not associated with a bank?
How come the UAW doesn't just buy it. I mean they are always fighting with these executives, why not turn it into employee owned with that price?
I think that your dead on. The more I look at it, I think that the US government should simply nationalize GM, Ford, and Chrysler.
And the shocking thing is that the cost associated with this move is relatively low. Consider this:
There are roughly current market price of $10.13/share, that means that a 50% +1 controlling stake in the company can be purchased for $2.87 billion.
Ford and Chrysler are probably somewhat less. So for something in the neighborhood of $8-$9 billion the government could take control of American auto manufacturing, and force the companies to produce automobiles that match America's economic interest.
Considering what we've spent in Iraq, this seems like a small price to pay to take giant leaps towards energy independece.
This is not an alien concept, the German and French government retain large financial interests in their national industry. In fact DHL is largely owned by Deutsche Post the German government-owned postal service.
Better yet, I would propose that the government announce that after a 10 year transitional period, the government will issue stock ownership in the companies to a government agency that will have proxy rights for shares disbursed equally amongst all legal American citizens. And that half of the monetary proceeds from this will be used to defray tax bills in much the way that many states use lottery money to reduce car license costs.
While the other half are rolled into an economic development fund that provides startup capital in exchange for an ownership stake in companies, and buys up stocking in vital industries that are failing.
I agree with you.
Economics: The science of providing sustainable amounts of food, clothing, shelter and entitlements to those within the domain of the nation state throughout the life time of each citizen.
What we have been enduring for the last 50 years is not economics it is a ponze scheme by, for and of the Global Elite. Off with their heads.
The "New Agenda for America" and the 2008 Presidency
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdEtFEzyShM
The big problem is that we are about to see ourselves force from one of exponential growth to that of static state. All forms of exponential growth are ponzi schemes: they are not sustainable. This represents the most drastic economic change since the invention of the wheel. We are in deep doo doo.
Is it fair, or smart, to expect that the America people should be expected to shoulder a complete reversal on everything that we have associated with "the American Dream?"
Two things need to happen immediately:
(1) The Neo-Cons need to be brought to the mat and forced to admit that they are responsible for this mess.
(2) The Legal American Working Class needs a major "stimulus check" and I'm not talking about $600 per wage earner.
If we don't do this we will be completely overtaken by foriegn carpet baggers. I've made an attempt to explain this in the following video but don't think my first attempt at a solution is as equitable is it needs to be. But this at least allows people to understand that what we have been enduring is not "free trade" but rather "corporate trade" -- and it is screwing the American Working Class.
Challenge for Obama to Stop Home Foreclosures
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j57qdQi8Qg
Yes, Northwest took their 911 money and bought Airbuses
The Chrysler bailout did work
and so did Conrail
They don't work.
How many times have we seen bailouts, subsidies, or tax credits, handed out in order to create jobs, or save jobs; and how often does it actually work?
Remember the billions of dollars given to the airlines after 9/11? The idea was to save the jobs of airline workers. The airlines took the money, gave big bonuses to airline execs, and fired the airline workers anyway.
How about tax credit for Neilsen to create jobs in Florida? Neilsen took the money, and hired offshore workers.
Now both Obama and McCain want to make the current R&D tax credit permanent. That means that both will give taxpayer money to corporations that are already so wealthy, those corporations barely know what to do with all the billions of dollars flooding in. This will insure huge bonuses for corporate execs.
And all of those high-tech corporations are on the front line when it comes to offshoring US jobs, or replacing US tech workers with guest workers. Both Obama and McCain support in increasing the numbers of H-1B workers.
Please see McCain, Obama put out tech agendas
Obama has put into place the Jason Furman, a Robert Rubin clone and involved with the Hamilton project as his head economic adviser.
What does this mean? Well, more bad trade deals and not a hell of a lot for working America.
To give a real life example, here is his paper on how Wal-mart, the notorious squeezer of other retailers, multiple class action lawsuits against it for unpaid wages and sex discrimination and our portal to China increasing their exports to the US...
he thinks all of that is just fine and daddy.
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