Maybe McCain had some money on this one;

We all know that Intrade Political Futures got the Joe Biden pick right last week -- how well did it do with the GOP pick?

As it turns out, not so good. THEY COMPLETELY MISSED THE VEEP PICK.Not just off by a little, but off a ginormous amount.

As we have previously suggested, the political futures markets essentially follow the polls. There is very little wisdom amongst the crowd.

Here's how the Palin VP futures Traded. As of yesterday, you could have bought her VP futures for 4 cents on the dollar:

Posted at August 29, 2008 11:41 AM in response to AK Gov. Says Staffer Pressed for Trooper's Firing

The Republican convention looks like it will be a real soap opera.

Posted at August 29, 2008 11:28 AM in response to AK Gov. Says Staffer Pressed for Trooper's Firing

Keep in mind that when you knock Bush and Rove, that they didn't create the neo-Republican party, but they have been instrumental in destroying it.
"Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, first they make lucky."

Unfortunately one of Hercules' tasks was cleaning up the Sisyphean stables. Obama is going to have a similar task.

Posted at August 28, 2008 10:06 PM in response to Rove On Hurricanes In August: "The Republicans Can't Seem To Get A Break"

When I first heard Dole's campaign line, "We want you to keep more of your money in your pocket.", the first thought to cross my mind was, 'Thank God it isn't my money, or it would be worthless!'
Even though they license the to right to profit from it out to the private banking system, money is still a function of and property of the government. Remember, "Render unto Caesar."? As medium of exchange, it is a form of public utility, just like a public road system. As responsible citizens, we have the right to use it and as taxpayers we are responsible for supporting it, even if the bankers get most of the profits. It is both right and responsibility. So my question to Norquist is, If you hate the government so much, why do you love its currency so much? Are you really just that stupid, or assume your audience is?
Those are presidents on those bills and they haven't reached the point of putting Reagan on one yet. Though I would suggest that when inflation really starts getting completely out of hand, we could put Reagan on the million dollar bill and the two Bushes on the ten and hundred million dollar bills.

Posted at July 26, 2008 12:15 PM in response to Don Young is Like a "Rat Head in a Coke Bottle"

ct,

Pardon mistaking your name. The box comes up under the last comment, ie. ronbyers.

Posted at July 11, 2008 7:32 PM in response to How Much are You Willing to Work for Corporate Welfare?

Ron,

As I point out to Ellen, the current model is broken to an extent few people have been willing to contemplate. Even those currently losing tend to think in terms of righting the boat, not having to refloat it. I do think my various points are reasonably explanatory and it would be easier for me to expand on the thesis than to sum it up. Obviously though, they are not ideas that apply to the current situation, but are intended to make more sense after it crashes.

Posted at July 11, 2008 7:27 PM in response to How Much are You Willing to Work for Corporate Welfare?

Ellen,

Yes, I'm putting up some ideas of my own and it is a bit much to expect anyone to think through want I've spent years sifting through to arrive at these conclusions, so I accept your reprimand. The fact is that while Hoover sacrificed the economy in '29 to save the currency, since the '70's we have been doing the opposite, sacrificing the currency to save the economy, but we are going to lose both, since the currency is the foundation of the economy. The strong dollar was the foundation that made the New Deal, fighting WWII, the Marshall Plan, etc. possible. This time it's about to turn to quicksand. So what I'm writing really doesn't apply to today, but will start to make more sense a year from now and I'm just putting it out there to see whether it gains any traction by then.

Posted at July 11, 2008 7:16 PM in response to How Much are You Willing to Work for Corporate Welfare?

Ellen,

I'm not trying to win any popularity contest, just looking down the road. When the debt bubble does really burst, and commodities go through the roof as anyone with any amount of wealth tries to preserve it by buying tangibles, as wages fall through the floor as the economy seizes up, you will better understand the source of the fear underlaying your expression of anger. The bigger they come, the harder they fall.

Posted at July 11, 2008 6:37 PM in response to How Much are You Willing to Work for Corporate Welfare?

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/reverse-shock-doctrine/

After all these years of privatizing any and all possible public assets, the pendulum has the momentum to swing back the other way, but it has to do it as an effective step into the future and not just trying to reverse what has already happened. I think that as money has evolved from its origins as an accounting of private property to a public medium of exchange, this point should be introduced into the public conversation.

Money is a medium of exchange, store of value and accounting device. The first two work at cross purposes because as a medium of exchange, money functions as a public utility, while as a store of value, it is a form of private property. By and large it is as private property that most people think of it, due to its historical origin as an accounting of assets, yet the reality is that modern monetary systems are fundamentally a medium of exchange and only as a function of that are they a store of value, as they have no real backing other than faith in the issuing institution and must be invested for the system to function and maintain value. If this understanding of money as a form of public utility, or commons, were to be broadly considered, it would have definite repercussions in the context of the current crisis.

The monetary system, with its broad connectivity, is similar to a road system. You own your car, house, business, etc., but not the roads connecting them. Money is in many ways identical to the road system. Money is not private property, since you cannot print what you want, as the government retains copyrights, but effectively loans this out to the private banking system. Its value is based entirely on public faith in the institution issuing it, so the taxpayer is ultimately responsible for guaranteeing its value. The result being private gains and public responsibility.

The concept of abstract wealth as a store of value has reached the point of being socially and environmentally destructive. Given the human tendency toward intellectual reductionism, that ability to distill out abstract wealth from ones social interactions and environmental situation is profoundly corrosive to both society and the environment. It is similar to processed sugars, and other forms of distilled ingredients which then must be diluted to be palatable.

Consider how society would function if money were to be considered entirely as a public medium of exchange, similar to a road system. For one thing, in most circumstances, it simply wouldn’t be a factor, as outside of the financial system, most money is in circulation and wealth is stored as tangible assets. Even in situations where one might be selling and buying a house, or a business, it functions as a medium of exchange. Similar to a road, where large vehicles need more space and pay more taxes, while smaller vehicles naturally give them more room.

Now consider the situation of storing value. The overwhelming problem with capitalism isn’t that there are poor people in the world without recourse to income, as poverty has always been a problem. No, the problem with Capitalism it that by focusing on money as a store of value, it has created a large surplus of capital. Since the demand for money is so large, as everyone thinks they must have enough to personally insure their own security and health, as well as viewing it as proof of success to accumulate as much as possible, a savings glut, as Bernanke put it, has been produced that cannot be effectively invested. This encouraged ever more lax lending standards as a way to absorb savings and sustain further growth of the money supply. Now that bubble is bursting and this evaporating wealth is panicking and driving up commodity prices, I think the very basic question of whether we should even have a system of stored abstract wealth needs to be re-examined. If people cannot suck value out of their social connections and environment to store in a bank as a form of ego gratification and social status, they would have to resort to putting their efforts and desires to increase status and build security directly back into restoring and strengthening their social and environmental health.

So I don’t think there needs to be currency for storing wealth, but only currency as a public utility for exchange. Not only are the enormous pools of personal wealth that it enables an excess the planet can no longer afford, but more importantly they provide an destructive role model for everyone else.

This isn’t socializing wealth, but understanding what money is in the first place. The effort to privatize Social Security is a good example of the disconnect between assumption and reality, since there is simply no place to invest this amount of additional personal savings and would only be a boon to the brokers given the responsibility for handling it. We invest in our old age by investing in our parents old age, so that our children might continue the practice. It is a clear example of investing in the larger community as a viable form of savings. It should also be noted that since the Federal Reserve controls the money supply by buying and selling government debt, the Treasury issuing large amounts of additional debt logically serves to support the value of the currency as well and this transfers value from taxpayers to bondholders, but that is a much larger topic.

Obviously we would have personal savings accounts, but what sets the amount of viable savings isn’t the cumulative desire for wealth, but what can be productively invested. So there has to be some regulatory method for distributing the potential to invest as broadly as possible. The logical method is to reinstate higher tax rates, but there might be a whole range of ways to encourage those able to accumulate large amounts of wealth productively to be able to invest in ways that benefit aspects of society and or the environment in ways they chose, much like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are currently doing. Wealth is a convective cycle of rising assets and precipitating benefits. Stopping this process only creates large storm clouds of marginally productive wealth hanging over a parched economy, much like we have now.

Currency did originate as a store of wealth, because it started as a accounting of specific assets, but political power also started as a projection of individual influence and evolved into a very complex corporatization of personal power called monarchism before the inherent instability and corruption drove society to devise methods for making political power a public trust. It has come time to make economic power a public trust as well. Money lubricates the economy, rather than fuels it. Ideas, labor and resources are the real economic fuel.

An effective financial system must express the dichotomy of bottom up process and top down structure that is the basis of nature, from ecosystems and the organisms which inhabit them to the political model of the democratic process constantly revitalizing the republican state. How to do this is to make the currency a national function to provide broad stability and accountability, based on the Treasury, or make the Fed a unit within it, while the banking system would be a function of local and regional government, with the necessary profit, generated by interest rates required to make investment decisions be based on viability, a form of public income to support the healthy social infrastructure necessary for a healthy economy.

Since money would be considered a form of public utility, the desire to accumulate large quantities would be curtailed, since it would be viewed as infringing on the health of the society in which one exists and this wouldn’t have the desired effect of raising ones social status, or even ones economic position, as it couldn’t be used to generate the increasing returns which wealth currently aspires. If hoarding currency lost its civic standing, inflation wouldn’t be necessary to maintain circulation of currency, so accounting values would be more stable. So rather then trying to re-regulate the entire economy and society, just start with nationalizing a banking system that will have to be bailed out anyway. Government might be slower than the private sector, but that might be more healthy, since its perspective is longer term.

Posted at July 11, 2008 11:35 AM in response to How Much are You Willing to Work for Corporate Welfare?

I'm no economist, but some of the larger truths about how the world runs are hiding in plain sight. Money is primarily a medium of exchange and only as a function of that is it a store of value, as most of it must be invested in order for the system to function.
What this means is that money is a form of public utility, similar to a road system. Currently it is treated as a form of private property, but this assumes it is primarily a store of value and the problem with that is that there is insufficient opportunities for investment to satisfy everyone's desire for personal wealth. That is the central cause of the current credit crisis. On one side it motivates everyone to squeeze as much money out of the system as possible, thus starving those who don't fight for every dollar of sufficient income and requiring them to go into debt in order to survive, not just to get ahead. The problem here is that they are not generating the additional wealth to pay this debt back and will eventually renege on it. On the other side, it tends to generate amounts of money beyond what can be effectively invested and increasingly risky forms of credit must be extended in order to invest it. The over all result are reoccurring credit bubbles and collapses. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but fewer and fewer people would be able to travel, as most roads would belong to a small proportion of the population.
On the other hand, if we were to understand that money is primarily a medium of exchange and thus a form of public utility, then the social motivation for accumulating huge amounts is reduced and the capacity for investment is distributed more widely. Money is not private property in the first place. You cannot print what you want, because the government retains copyrights. Its value is based entirely on the general faith in the institution issuing it. The taxpayer is ultimately responsible for guaranteeing its value. The primary institution responsible for issuing the currency is the Federal Reserve Bank and any profits from its operation are turned over to the Treasury. What if we were to extend this model to the entire banking system? Make local banks a function of local government and use their profits as community income? The main argument used against this is that it would give government too much power and government is inefficient. For one thing, it would likely be ecologically and sociologically healthy to reduce the level of dependence on a primary monetary system and allow other forms of local currencies and barter systems to develop. I think we all realize the frenetic level of economic activity is unsustainable for much longer. If it was socially repellent to hoard currency, just as it isn't acceptable to be a total road hog, then people would have to put their efforts to build and invest in their situations by strengthening their social and environmental health and not just suck out wealth to put in a bank. The current banking system has proven greed cannot function without being regulated, as if that needs to be learned. Yes, it would take time to iron out the details, but by the time the current mess is over, the government is going to effectively own large sectors of the banking community and returning it to a system of private profit would require investing in a large regulatory system, etc. If the public is responsible for the risks, it should retain the profits as well.

Originally politics was primarily privatized, it was called monarchy. We learned that political power can be a public function. It's time to make economic power a public function as well.

Here is an earlier essay I wrote;

Revolution Happens

Posted at April 18, 2008 7:02 PM in response to The Crisis of American Finance