A) Noticing that under the current EI structure, full-time workers subsidize seasonal workers; or

B) Noticing that some parts of Canada have more seasonal workers than others; or

C) Having the nerve to report on A) or B), as applicable?

As it is indeed, a whole lot more profitable to focus on the technology of products intended for consumers with more disposable income- and as we have seen with the growth of marketing and the conspicuous of consumption forces, merchandisers such as Wal-Mart, Nike, Ikea, etc, have usurped the flows of these profits from production capital to mechandizing capital. So it seems to me, a lot of innovation in the here and now of a developing 3rd industrial revolution has a far less egalitarian outcome than previous. That was my preliminary thinking, however, potentially it is mitigated somewhat with the notion that you mention- i.e. developments intended for one particular implementation, can indeed grow to take on new meanings and developments can usurp their host.

This of course has happened with many previous technologies- applications into newly discovered and monetized areas- i.e. war time r&d served as a catalyst for many years forward for innovation after WW2 . I wonder however, when it comes to such advances- how much does profit maximization come into the fold- to actually materialize these innovations and developments. With the recent move by the tories to transform the NRC and basic scientific research it does bring to light where does motivation for research come from and to what areas will we see its outcomes advanced and hence how may we expect future advances in technology whether to be more or less egalitarian in nature.

UNLESS the plan is bring in foreign temporary workers on an as-needed basis, pay them rubbish wages, make them ineligible for EI and ship them off when they’re not needed. That sounds about right, in the current political climate.

China, the fate of the world lay in its hands, 400 ppm co2 and climbing and a brand new massive economic machine being built. Have you see the size of the Chinese steel industry? I guess we had our period of economic growth, and the question is can we get ours to evolve to a green ubiquitousness and allow the Chinese to jump past the fossil fuel phase. Maybe they will pass us by with clean tech, the dimensions of local pollution may have entered new concentrations and thresholds.

I am still unsure about the designers. Unlike the cotton industry, where much of the innovation in the production process was fashioned and designed by the individuals with some collaboration, These new emerging industries and technologies are seemingly tied to universities, as well as to many open source initiatives, that allow hundreds if not thousands of collaborators and designers to work and share information. Seemingly once a tech is swallowed privately and ownership issues arise through copyright, it closes the door for some parts of the development, which seems to either further commodity the tech.

The networks that develop in usage of the various tech ad production processes almost becomes iconic within the industry. It is a spectacle, but I do wonder how much of this is merely for speculative purposes, and cheerleading by the orthodoxy looking for a third industrial revolution or at least holding out the prospects that things will be better soon we just need to wait for this economic development to take hold.

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/05/niall-fergusons-latest-gay-bashing-is-the-least-of-his-problems.html#more-5436

Prominent Embarassing Economists at Harvard:
1 and 2 -Reinhart and Rogoff of the shoddy and amateurish “This Time is Different” study,
3-Larry Summers a main driver of financial deregulation in the US, and who shamelessly underlined his involvement until a few years ago
4-Alesina of the completely discredited and fact-defying fiscal contraction expansion view
5-Barro of the completely absurd Ricardian Equivalence
6-Feldstein, apologist for deregulation of finance and whose arrogance was nicely displayed in the seminal film on the financial crisis (forget the name).
7-Mankiw whose students walked out of his class because it just regurgitated misleading and simplistic neo-liberal nostrums

FYI Ferguson’s apology re Keynes is at:
http://www.niallferguson.com/blog/an-unqualified-apology

> In his obituary of Keynes the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had written: “He was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy.”

http://www.skidelskyr.com/site/article/a-writer-at-large-confessions-of-a-long-distance-biographer/

> Keynes’s penchant for iconoclastic utterance has been grist to the mill of anti-Keynesians. His most famous remark, ‘In the long run we are all dead’, was interpreted by Schumpeter as a ‘childless’ – he might have added godless – perspective.[xxi] Childless became homosexual in William Rees-Mogg’s suggestion that Keynes’s rejection of moral rules led him to reject the gold standard ‘which provided an automatic control of monetary inflation’.[xxii] This view of Keynes’s economics as product of the closet rather than the cloister is profoundly false.

http://www.cauxroundtable.org/newsmaster.cfm?&menuid=99&action=view&retrieveid=45

Those public services are from a distributional consumption based aspect favour those with less income. In a privatized world, those with higher income could easily afford to pay. So I do find that what is missing in the public psyche is that connection between public service provision and the amount of taxes paid. Imagine if all these services were all privatized what the costs would be for individuals?

And don’t think for a moment the wealthy and the foreign based multinationals that pay little taxes, do not know this- the have the discourse firmly shaped and the political culture ground to exact specifications into delusional tea party angst and tax backlash.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/canadians-consumer-tax-burden-is-not-as-onerous-as-it-sounds/article11641644/#dashboard/follows/

The two measures are totally irrelevant to each other. But trotting them out right next to each other without context or much impression what they apply to, it does give the impression, if you’re thinking little enough to be impressed by the 1700% figure, that somehow in those halcyon days of 1961, we must have only paid like 2-3% of income on our taxes. Stupid propaganda tactics.

Also, I know this stuff is not news to many, but for me it is the dimensions of how far we have let the various forms of capital to flow in a manner that seems quite destructive. Cycle through the circuitry of these flows and it keeps coming back to declining demand that i would argue is the missing component, yet to politically assess the solution space being put forward in any trading zone be it the EU with its austerity and structural adjustments medicine for the southern countries, to Asia with China slowing after such a massive expansion, not sure how they were expected to keep that pace, to Japan and its lost decade, and the taming of the Asian tigers, to north America with its financialized, too big to fail but busted housing market and the push to austerity and anti worker pro business low tax policy- no where do we see consumption get it due mention. Check that, France announced today it might start thinking about it, and Spain may pull back some austerity targets.

Anyway, so much talk in the policy circles but none that seem to focus on the addressing the problem.

Pt

Also, many economists paint the regional model of globalization, my point is we have that, but I think the degree and mix of investment has not been regional balanced.

So now onto my second focus of my research and this with the nature of what has transpired within China in the last 20 years. It is just sheer gargantuan the mount of productive capital I t terms of means of production that has been
invested into china. It is not just the labour that was the attraction, the special economic zones around the pearl river delta at equivalent to the manufacturing capacity of at least the EU. And a majority of it was export based. I am still early I to this research but the level of economic development and the standard of living rise in china is severely discounted in mainstream economics of the west.

So my thesis, a good portion of the investment within many developing countries has been of the wrong variety and hence has caused increasingly stagnant and declining economic outcomes for consumption. That is, investment focused on first financialization of the economy and second and potentially not talked about enough, the merchantilist portion of capital, I.e. retail and wholesale trade, marketing, merchandising and the whole commercial space. It is no coincidence that commercialized capitalists has usurped the commanding heights of a majority of productive capitalists, I.e. the wal marts, the ideas, Nike, Dell, etc.

I would call this the rejection of the fit planet mentality. I am not arguing against globalization, however I am pointing a finger at the distributional aspects of Capital and the motors of change. Do we really have a regional global economy? Just look at some basic statistics on growth and trade flows over the past 20 years and you would have to say no, domestic economies within the regional trade zones and the investment patterns of productive capital I am sure would warrant another look. A couple of examples, steel consumption, and production in the world economy, China was at one point over half the world consumption, and the same holds in several other areas of consumption and production.

The question that gets back to me, given that consumption is mainly driven by consumers, and those consumers are part of an increasingly globalism under several varieties of capitalism, where do we go when financialization of the economy is a spent force, I.e. housing bubbles have proved unstable and a poor surrogate to waged income. Do we now start raising wages of the commercialized sectors of the economy in west? Or will there be a retrenchment of productive capital back to the more developed economies? I am not sure more developed is actually a solid footing anymore, after my month studying china, albeit from a distance and it is a massively complicated economy. However, capitalism has been a runaway succes, if you count merely production GDP statistics. On some other fronts, like wealth polarization, pollution, And a few others, not sure about the outcomes or the longevity. But there are some massive productive economic engines that have been built in
China.

Sorry for going on nd hijacking your post a bit, but it was on my mind.

See Michael Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/boardDocs/speeches/2002/20021121/default.htm

This summary of my economic theory traces how industrial capitalism has turned into finance capitalism. The finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector has emerged to create “balance sheet wealth” not by new tangible investment and employment, but financially in the form of debt leveraging and rent-extraction. This rentier overhead is overpowering the economy’s ability to produce a large enough surplus to carry its debts. As in a radioactive decay process, we are passing through a short-lived and unstable phase of “casino capitalism,” which now threatens to settle into leaden austerity and debt deflation.

“As a result of this tsunami of workers, the Canadian labour force grew more than 200 per cent over the past 50 years. The chief economic challenge was where to put all these workers. We did pretty well, all things considered, in getting them into work, but the numbers were so overwhelming that even in the face of strong employment growth, we still ended up with big unemployment numbers.”

OK, I’m not a fan of markets, but my understanding was that they currently exist. Surely that’s not how it works. An economy is an interdependent thing; if there are more people with needs who are consuming, there will be more jobs available serving those needs and producing for that consumption. Adding more people does not equal adding more unemployment, creating a need to stuff people into jobs somehow. Rather, you reach some new equilibrium surely. If the structure of your economy was set up for 5% unemployment with fewer people, it will all else equal be set up for 5% unemployment with more people. Trade could complicate that picture, but just how depends on the specifics of the trade patterns.
(This is also why I’m generally skeptical of claims that the economic sky has to fall anywhere the population is declining)

Thx A.

Just adding related links:

Mario Seccareccia via Mosler Economics:
http://moslereconomics.com/2013/04/17/super-seccareccia-on-rr/

Bill Mitchell:
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=23467

Lars Syll:
http://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/lessons-from-the-reinhart-rogoff-debacle/

Media Maters : Major Errors Undermine Key Argument For Austerity Frequently Cited By Media.
http://bit.ly/ZsnEW6

Re: ANTHONY FUREY, Stimulus packages become new norm, March 23rd, 2013
http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/straighttalk/archives/2013/03/20130323-071910.html

There’s a good reason stimulus packages are becoming the new norm. Households are indebted so can’t spend; businesses are sitting on cash because of the bleak economic outlook, and our country has a trade deficit. When this conjunction happens, purchasing power is drained from the economy, and if the government does not make up the difference, our economy goes into a downward spiral. This is what is happening to certain countries in the Eurozone which does not have mandatory fiscal transfers from rich regions to poor regions as we have in Canada. Anthony Furey thinks it unfortunate that government takes ameliorative action, but does he really want Canada to be the next Greece?

Larry Kazdan,
620 E. 23 Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.
(604) 874-9982

Footnote:

Australian economist Bill Mitchell explains:

At last count there were two broad macroeconomic sectors – the government and the non-government. The non-government sector can be decomposed into the private domestic sector and the external sector. The private domestic sector can be further decomposed into households who consume and firms who invest (in productive capital).

Macroeconomics is easy – thats it! 2 broad spending sectors and then some more detail.

What do we know about these sectors in the US?

1. Households are not spending enough on consumption – and why should they given they have to reduce their unsustainable debt levels and are saving to generate buffers just in case they are next to join the unemployment queue.

2. Business firms are not spending enough on investment – and why should they given they have to reduce their unsustainable debt levels and that household spending is not pushing production levels beyond existing capacity (by a long margin).

3. The external sector is deteriorating – that is, spending is contracting because the Europeans and the Brits are killing growth in their economies.

How many more spending sectors are left in the US?

The most basic macroeconomic rule – spending equals income. When someone spends another gains income. When a sector increases spending, other sectors enjoy the rise in income.

So if all these non-government sector spenders are being cautious and the private domestic sector is attempting to save overall – and – the world economy is not going to drive US exports very hard – where is the deficit spending going to come from to drive growth?

There is only one source – government budget deficits.

More of A veritable pot pourri of lies, deception and self-serving bluster at http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=20782

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Margaret+Thatcher+economic+legacy+disputed/8239171/story.html

Margaret Thatcher\’s economic legacy disputed

Re: Thatcher inspired because she led from principle, Column, April 8

Despite her noble intentions and principles, the legacies of Margaret Thatcher include a deregulated financial sector prone to criminality and instability, and giveaway privatizations that have made Britain the highest-priced economy in the world with an enormous financial and real estate overhead.

The 99 per cent in Britain may be experiencing higher prices, a higher poverty rate and greater unemployment, but at least all can agree that Thatcher broke the unions and improved the quality of life for the rest of the population.

Larry Kazdan Vancouver
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Also wanted to say that given the losses occurring in the commodity sell off yesterday, we again see the crisis prone raw neo liberal approach to financialization that has pervaded the economy in the replacement of Keynesianism, which is producing far more instability than what ever occurred under the post war Keynesian period.

It is amazing watching all that surplus value stored away in gold melt into nothing yesterday. Imagine if our governments would have instead decided to raise taxes on all that dead money instead of letting it chase such risk in these very unstable times. Society would have been much better off with expending that surplus on some new schools, healthcare etc, instead of just watching all that value melt in a negative sum game of financialization of the economic surplus. It truly is a brutish way to run the economy.

By the way, I am embarking on a new project with my studies. I am embedding myself within the Chinese economy forthe next few months. I think it is time to slay his unknown dragon within my economic thoughts. I have to say after spending a couple weeks collecting all things to do with the China economy, there is so much massive change ongoing with the Chinese economy as it wrestles with its future. A new Variety of capitalism (VOC) is on the rise and given that this experiment in a Polanyi and Marxian extent has the potential to become quite destructive, I have concluded one thing so far about China, this grand experiment unfolding has the fate of the world wrapped up in China. Truly the planet is at stake here in this grand experiment, as stated yesterday by the PRC representative, China has gone to far too fast, and some of the experiments, especially in growth have been unstable from many perspectives.

The is no doubt some many gains for china, a new fast growing and burgeoning middle class estimated at over 200 million. Some new quite productive cities such as Shenzhen and the Guangdong proviince with its spill overs from Hong Kong. Some the highest counts of PHDs in the world in ShenZhen and a very high standard of living for many of its urban dwellers, in fact one could argue higher than most Canadians. But there is a whole lot of polarization and the poverty that that wealth is embedded within, is truly unstable, especially with a seeming lack of voice and effe give means for change. Hard to say where the politics are heading and how much neo liberalism embeds itself. It is fascinating though and quite the massive labour markets. Unfreaking real the size of the statistics, I am blown away but invigorated by the challenge.

Paul

Good article though I am just tending more towards the Baran and Sweezy approach these days.

Lets not kid ourselves, big oil must know that climate change is coming, they cannot be all that idiotic, so it comes down to greed and investments. With the continuing tech invasion into developing the inventory of more economically accessible fossil fuel reserves- I still stand by my prediction that you will see a whole lot of rusty pipes strewn about in northern Alberta within a few years. The question now is timing- how long before big oil figures out that Northern Alberta was a strategic mistake- economically- and then politically as the backlash matures.

Yet I still hear Canadians talking about how Brazil must respect the amazon and prevent logging, farming and other resource related issues, yet here in wealthy Canadian spheres, its just fine to push the tar sand mantra- the worst was Prentice pushing the tar sands as the green alternative for USA, if that does not go down in history as one of the most dangerous statements.

Maybe Harper should say we should share Nuclear War heads with North Korea, and a few other apparent enemies of the western world. It is actually a bit more saner than Prentice saying the tar sands are the green alternative- truly it is.

Paul

Also a shout out to that awesome crew in the Alberta Federation of Labour for all their excellent work on this issue- Tony and Shannon and their couple dozen support staff! (they must have a couple dozen workers given all the awesome work that comes out of that place- they both tell me they do not even have a half dozen support staff!)

One last point on this months LFS manufacturing has entered into a definite declining medium term trend. This does not bode well for any notion of sustain recovery in the economy. That said, there is some new activity in the forestry sector, the price of lumber has hit some post recession highs and a good chunk of downstream forestry value adding is classified as manufacturing so we should start seeing a bit of relief in terms of jobs. Lets just hope we get more value adding to lumber exports and not just sawn logs for export. And lets hope that the seemingly growing green efforts in forestry are finding their way to some new found market truths. There is a lot of potential innovation and change that encapsulate the forestry and forestry products industry lets move this forward.

Also, lets also hope that BC starts up some kind of massive effort to deal with the pine bug outbreak. Replanting, scarification and whatever else can be done to help recovery efforts in those communities and the forest.

During the WCB Royal Commission in the 90′s, one of the interesting pieces of research was a report on the actual supply of work, calculated in ‘average labour units” which quantified the amount of work rather than the numbers of persons in each category. This showed that the supply of work was not really growing much in BC, but only being distributed more broadly.

You wrote in this article that ”there are many other lesson plans from credible institutions”. Do you have a list of such resources or know of peole or groups that do?

I work as a community organizer in Montreal and am
interested in developing a popular education workshop on climate change and otherr ecological crises.

Thanks. (much appreciate PEF)

John Bradley

So while the $750 is also a bad idea, it is only a one-time payment. The slight change in interest rates is many times more important over the course of a mortgage.

Re: Flaherty says balanced budget prepares country for another crisis, March 22

Sovereign countries like Canada and the U.S. cannot run out of their own money. U.S. Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke has stated, “the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”

Those who say federal coffers are bare or ask where federal money will come from are simply misinformed. Greece and Cyprus may have surrendered their monetary sovereignty to a foreign central bank, but Canada has not.

The rational debate is over the effects of an injection of fiat money into the economy. A reminder that during World War II, our budget deficit rose above 42 per cent of GDP, and our debt-to-GDP ratio was over three times what it is today. The results were a rapid increase in production from the Depression years, unemployment was driven down to 1 per cent, and a military victory was followed by years of prosperity, all with limited inflation.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty says his proposed balanced budget prepares our country for another potential crisis. However, the main effect of failing to stimulate the economy now will be to keep over a million Canadians unemployed and to keep many families heavily indebted. This will not protect us from a future crisis; in fact, it will more likely help precipitate one.

Larry Kazdan, Vancouver

Brand managers now eclipse the input of sound policy advice. An upside down world. Potentially that is the way to get to Harper, Branding him as a power seeking opportunist very disconnected from Canadians.

Damien Campbell is actually a survival qualified that has put in many years learning
survival matters including long-term foods storage, drinking
water purification approaches, choice sources of electric power, crisis medication, and backyard gardening.
When he began scripting this manual, he started off
by developing a list of food items to inventory up on.
The issue was that listing was fairly very long, and a few of the meals ended up complicated to
retail store. In the interest of maintaining his guide so simple as feasible, he
narrowed the last right down to 37 vital meals merchandise that
everybody order now just before it’s also late.

Regrettably, the typical American has no concept how bad details seriously
are. The media would like to fake almost everything is alright, but the truth is,
we are facing a lot more hazard now than we have now in a long time.
Farmers are operating away from acreage, old sources of ingesting h2o
are drying up, terrorists tend to be more prevalent than
in the past, and deficit paying out is draining our financial system and
will conveniently bring about hyperinflation.

Which is why it is so crucial to become organized.
Should you hold out until the crisis is at the doorstep, it’s going to be too late due to the fact by then, the public may have emptied the merchants. A great deal of individuals do not know this, but grocery shops only hold 3-4 days really worth of foodstuff readily available. And when disasters strike, that food items is absent in just 3-4 hours! It is transpired many times in advance of.