The Digital Dispatch

From NOEBIE.net

Economics

Is This Just?

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Those of us who are comfortable – and by that, I mean we who live in a decent home, have enough to eat, have access to medical care when we need it, who can offer a good education to our children, who are kept relatively safe and have a sense of stability and continuity in our lives – are able to enjoy our comforts only because of a system that subjects millions of other people in our country and around the globe to violence, illness, poverty, hunger, insecurity and despair each and every day.

To acknowledge this is the beginning.

Today’s Must Read: A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse

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“Submitting oneself to labor discipline—supervision, control, even the self-control of the ambitious self-employed—does not make one a better person. In most really important ways, it probably makes one worse. To undergo it is a misfortune that at best is sometimes necessary. Yet it’s only when we reject the idea that such labor is virtuous in itself that we can start to ask what is virtuous about labor. To which the answer is obvious. Labor is virtuous if it helps others.”

Read the Full Article: A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse | David Graeber | The Baffler.

This Is No Time For Austerity

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Yesterday 350 prominent economists issued a statement urging our lawmakers and the Obama Administration to focus on jobs and economic growth, not the budget deficit. I suspect that their plea will be largely ignored, unless we, the people, take responsibility for our own future and rise up in opposition to austerity.

Here is part of what the economists wrote.

The U.S. economy, once in free-fall toward a new depression, has begun to recover. But we are still mired in a prolonged slump marked by mass unemployment, rising poverty, and declining wages. And the fragile recovery is threatened by obsessive concern with cutting deficits that has infected both parties.

As even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recognizes, it is long term unemployment, not excessive deficits or debt, that is now inflicting the greatest human toll and economic damage. Polls show that voters agree joblessness and a bad economy are much higher priorities than deficits.

Yet too many in Washington are fixated on cutting public spending to balance the budget, not on how to put people back to work and get our economy going. There is no theory of economics that explains how we can deflate our way to recovery. Businesses are not basing investment decisions on how much Congress cuts the debt in 2023. As Great Britain, Ireland, Spain and Greece have shown, inflicting austerity on a weak economy leads to deeper recession, rising unemployment and increasing misery.

Indeed, reports this morning indicate that a second recession has already hit the Eurozone.

Please share this information widely. I’ll continue to post more on what we’re facing (and how to resist) in the coming days and weeks. Please comment or email with your own ideas and links to share as well.

Read the Economists’ Full Statement: Jobs and Growth, Not Austerity – Campaign for America’s Future.

P.S. The image above depicts firefighters in protest over budget cuts at Thessalonika, Greece on September 8th, 2012.

The Super-Rich Have $32 Trillion in Offshore Tax Shelters

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The super-rich of The Earth had at least twenty-one trillion dollars hidden away in secret tax shelters at the end of 2010, according to a report just released by the Tax Justice Network. The number may be as high as $32 trillion – nearly half of the entire Gross World Product.

At least $21 trillion of unreported private financial wealth was owned by wealthy individuals via tax havens at the end of 2010. This sum is equivalent to the size of the United States and Japanese economies combined.

There may be as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets held offshore by high net worth individuals (HNWIs). according to our report The Price of Offshore Revisited, which is thought to be the most detailed and rigorous study ever made of financial assets held in offshore financial centres and secrecy structures.

We consider these numbers to be conservative. This is only financial wealth and excludes a welter of real estate, yachts and other non-fianncial assets owned via offshore structures.

This $32 trillion amounts to more than $4500 for every man, woman and child on the planet that has been squirreled away and not subject to taxation.

Less than 100,000 individuals accounted for nearly $10 trillion of the offshore wealth.

The report shows that when hidden wealth is taken into account, many so-called “debtor nations” are actually wealthy – but their wealth is being imprisoned offshore by the elites and bankers.

The Tax Justice Network is an independent organization launched in the British Houses of Parliament in March of 2003. It is dedicated to high-level research, analysis and advocacy in the field of tax and regulation.

Politics, Poverty, Full Employment and the Living Wage

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Poverty is Over—If We Want it. [Adam Lassila | The Occupied Wall Street Journal] – It’s unconscionable that more than 30 million full-time workers don’t earn enough to provide for their families. It’s also unacceptable that 22 million willing laborers don’t have access to full-time work. Every human being deserves a job that can provide for his or her family’s well-being. Full employment is possible, but the U.S. government has rejected it as a policy goal because it is not in the best interest of the elites who control Washington.

Read more.

Money, Power and Wall Street

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PBS Frontline has produced the authoritative report on the global financial crisis. Money, Power and Wall Street is a four hour special that lays out the origins and explains the implications of things like credit default obligations and derivative contracts. The report also covers our government’s involvement in the crisis in great detail and depth.

I would urge you to watch. The program presents the clearest picture yet of an economic and political nexus that is leading our world to ruin. It’s available for viewing online at the following url.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/money-power-wall-street

Debt Without End Amen

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Graduating into never-ending debt. [SocialistWorker.org] – Overwhelming student debt has become a source of worry and financial distress for many millions of people–and even worse for the one in five people with student loan debt who are classified as delinquent. And the problem will only get worse as a new generation of students and recent graduates, carrying a bigger loan burden than ever before, struggles to find work in an economy that, despite statistics showing job growth, still seems like the Great Recession, especially for young workers.