This really bites. (She says while working at 2:00 a.m.) Back to work. Got to be productive.... er, more productive.

CSPAN junkies visit http://spannerbackup.ipbhost.com

Attention US workers:
You are now directed to compare your current wages and benefits with the new global statistics. All comparisons with previous US wages and benefits no longer apply. As you can see, your wages and benefits now fall into the upper 10%, far above the average. So, suck it up, be happy and keep increasing your productivity or you will soon be training your replacement in India.
Thank you.
Your global management team.
PS. Keep flying the flag and supporting the war. You still pay US taxes but we are working with the Republicans to make your share more fair.

Maybe this does not directly address what I wrote but as I was doing my run through the variosu sources I found this quote from Vonnegut on Digby. It certainly addresses at least a little the nature of the defectives we have in our country and in power:

"I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with any doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In these Times, and kiss my ass!"

Stirling, you're right about the value from increased productivity not going to the wages.  It is going to the  corporate executives and shareholders instead of to labor or wage earners. 

To get some of that "profit", labor has to negotiate a wage that anticipates demand for the product they produce.  As the NYTimes correctly points out, wage negotiation has been nonexistent  for the last long while. 

You can't expect management in the Bush Dickensian administration to give labor it's fair share, can you?

...you could cut taxes, all taxes, on workers to zero, and they would still be behind.

Sure, due to the payroll taxes (FICA) that never go away.

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them?

Am I the only one, or does it gall you to see these people, holding hands with their loyal spouses, smiling gloriously into the camera as they go into or out of court?

The only celebrity who seemed to take it all seriously was Martha Stewart. At least she truly looked worried; not happy.

Jan Knaus

You mean the living wage has gone down? We have to work harder and more to get less in return? What a revelation!!!
PS I was very productive at my first job until I had to get a sceond, and then a third one just to pay the bills-then my productivity slid a bit!!!

We need to find better ways to encourage corporate owners to spend.

Here's an idea: Let's take their money away and spend it for them! Oops, I forgot, this is America. Maybe we could pay them to spend it?

You raise two basic questions: why seek wealth and how much is enough?

The tricky part is that the answers are different for the individual and for the group. For the individual the absolute quantity isn't the important factor, it's whether you have more than the other guy. When hurricanes and wars happen those resources matter, and like the two guys running from the bear, when one stops to change shoes and the other wonders why the answer is "I only have to run faster than you."

The proper balance between individual freedom and group needs can't be fixed (or easily measured). It must be free to wander a bit, but certainly there should always be a balance, and much of politics, from Socrates and Pericles to the present, is about this issue.

So we can definitely say that there are, in principle, reasonable limits to individual wealth that will adequately reward the individual while acknowledging the fact that wealth only has meaning by the assent of the community.

If we accept the evolutionary explanation for the desire for wealth then absolute wealth is irrelevant. Even with steeply progressive taxation the wealthiest have an advantage over the rest, so there is no logical argument against some leveling of the field.

The benefit of redistribution (or wealth limitation if one wants a less loaded term) is that by limiting the financial distance between the worker and the owner it increases the worker's hope (while limiting the owner's leverage). This should encourage the civic loyalty of the worker, which is good because there are a lot of them.

The extreme case, a full communal society, fails in practice at large scale because the group can't decide resource allocation as efficiently as a market.

The extreme case, in the other direction, fails in practice because revolutions tend to occur when you have a Louis XVI.

"The tricky part is that the answers are different for the individual and for the group." I would also add that the answers are or at least used to be different for the two political parties in the US. The Republicans press the accelerator while the Democrats can't find the brake. Growth is the common mantra regardless of where or how the growth occurs.

"The extreme case, in the other direction, fails in practice because revolutions tend to occur when you have a Louis XVI." The topic of this post and many other signs suggest that capitalism might be reaching a similar extreme as communism once did. I would argue that globalization may be removing the feedback mechanisms that once maintained some kind of balance between individual and group needs. The state seems to have lost all power to help maintain any semblence of balance.

Conservatives love to tout rising productivity as synonymous with prosperity. Why then would they advocate that one of the largest engines of productivity be “regulated” by a handful of US companies?

I’m talking about the internet and Net Neutrality.

The "net" is the one means of communication that Democrats or the Left has used to greater advantage than the Republican'ts or the Right.  The Right would like nothing better than to strangle the baby in its crib to keep the Left from continuing to best them via the Internet. 

Net Neutrality is another "Clear Skies" "Healthy Forests" "No Child Left Behind" euphemistic nomenclature for the Right's effort to control and diminish access to the net by giving it to  the major phone and cable companies.

The prophet defines the word "median" taking all of two paragraphs to perform this service. Then he imparts demographic wisdom. I am overwhelmed. Even before the verse.

You know it's possible that many of the value voters are actually in good shape economically and so can afford to fret about less vital matters like gay marriage and creationism. Statistics can hide a lot of deviations, and not everyone has done poorly dring this decade. Things got rough for me in 2001 but in the past three years my salary has increased by a whopping 44%. (Though like most other people, my health benefits have eroded rather seriously). I'm not saying that all's well with the world based on my own experience-- even for somewhat sucessful people like myself, the benefits are becoming a problem, and job security is non-existent. I'm just cautioning that there are lot of people still doing OK and even more than OK (heck, that was true even in the Great Depression) so don't expect the economy alone to defeat the GOP.