Archive for the ‘Excess and Algorithms’ Category

Occupy Hope?

Posted: March 30, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms
Tags: , , , , ,
0

eanda logo

by @anarchyroll
10/19/2013

(I recently found this in my drafts section. Apparently I forgot to hit the send button last year.)

Ignorance is bliss says the ostrich with its head buried in the sand.  That is also a core principle of America’s middle class, don’t ask questions, just pay the mortgage.  This blind obedience and fear has bred generational conflict, the most obvious and colorful being the hippie revolution of the 1960s.  Occupy Wall Street hasn’t had the staying power as the hippies, mostly because the hippies grew up to be more selfish and greedy than their square parents could have ever imagined.  The infrastructure that the hippie turned yuppies put into place during the 1970s-80s were designed to suppress and silence rather than embolden and amplify the average person. The average person has in fact been rebranded as a second class citizen, in step with casino gambling being rebranded as the derivatives market.

During the Obama Hope era, another rebranding has occurred, journalism has been rebranded as espionage. More journalists have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 than every other previous president combined. Change we can believe in?  Well certainly for proponents of George Orwell’s 1984 becoming a nonfiction book it is.  People so blinded by red elephants and blue donkeys are so in the trenches of daily punditry that perspective and bigger picture of things has dissolved from their frames of reference.  Almost as if the job of pundits is to provoke the average person into debating with his/her peers rather than their superiors, elders, and elected officials.

The very reason that some people think the Occupy movement to be a failure is why it is a success.  Cynics I have talked to say they didn’t accomplish anything, often unaware there is an active branch still holding rallies and protests in their nearest major metropolitan city.  Occupy has connected the disenfranchised and given a worldwide platform to the voiceless.  Simply because the evening news doesn’t cover them, and the conspiracy theory forums tri labeled them, doesn’t mean the goals of the movement weren’t accomplished.

I could’ve swore that the initial goal of the people gathering in Zuccotti Park was to draw attention to inequality in terms of income and justice for those in the financial sector of America and its damaging effects at an unprecedented scale on the people, places, and things that make up 99% of the developed world.  Am I wrong?  Oh, they never stated an official, singular, vision or purpose? Well read between the fucking lines, or their blogs…whichever.

#Northwestern Winning Right to Unionize is a Game Changer

Posted: March 28, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
2

sportsroll

by @anarchyroll
3/28/2014

Whether you know it or not, college athletics changed forever this week.

Northwestern University’s football players were found to be employees of the school, not merely student athletes, by the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago. This means the players now have collective bargaining rights with the school. That means the players now have a say in terms of monetary compensation for their time and effort on the football field beyond an athletic scholarship. Why is this a big deal?

The student athlete paradigm has been crumbling over the past decade. EA Sports no longer puts out it’s NCAA Football or Basketball video game franchises. Why? Because former student athletes filed multiple class action lawsuits and won (one) because they were not being royalties (residual checks) for the use of their likenesses. EA settled but the NCAA is vowing to take the case(s) to the Supreme Court. The NCAA is also saying they will take the NU case to the highest possible court/governing body. Why? Money.

The NCAA is exposing itself for what it is, a money laundering operation. They exist solely to make money off the time, energy, effort, blood, sweat, and tears of 18-21 year old men and women at Division I universities in the United States of America. They care nothing about graduation rates of the players. They care nothing about their health and medical costs. They only care about how much money they can make off of television contracts for the Bowl Championship Series and March Madness.

By exposing themselves as money hungry pigs, the NCAA is losing it’s battle in the court of public opinion. Rather than evolving and paying the students who are making NCAA and the universities billions of dollars (with a B) each year, they are trying to keep them as scholarship slaves. Scholarships are fine for athletes and universities that aren’t on national television on a daily and/or weekly basis. Scholarships are fine for academics. But NCAA Division I athletics is about money, nothing more, nothing less. If it wasn’t then ESPN and CBS wouldn’t be allowed to make anything more than enough money to cover operational costs to broadcast the sporting events.

But that’s not the way it is. It’s not 1960 anymore. Sports equals business in America. So pay the employees what they earn by destroying their bodies in the primes of their lives for the glory and admiration of their parents and peers. The times they are a changin’. You don’t want to pay students who are on national TV every week? Then;

  • Take the games off national TV.
  • Revoke all contracts outside of local public access.
  • Force all coaches to make the same as the professors.
  • Don’t allow schools to travel out of state to play away games.
  • Disperse all funding equally between all sports played at each school.

Don’t want to do any of those? That list is unrealistic and naive? Yeah, no shit. So pay the players. Don’t give them straight cash homey. Pay them in gift cards so they can buy;

  • food
  • clothes
  • tutors
  • laptops
  • plane tickets to go back home during breaks

If the students can afford these things themselves they won’t be dependent on their parents, boosters, or shady gamblers who get them into point shaving schemes. No one is saying pay the quarterback of Notre Dame $1 million a year. But how about you give the kids some money to have fun on the weekends so you can stop putting schools on probation, stripping wins, taking down banners, and expunging winning records?

Why is NU winning union rights important? It changes the face of college athletics forever. How? Because students will be looked as employees. The tide has turned on this issue. Much like gay rights and marijuana legalization, there is no going back, only forward. It is only a matter of time before all major universities are affected by this. That will affect scheduling, coaches contracts, television contracts, merchandise rights, and tuition costs. The college experience as a whole can and will be changed by this going forward. We have just witnessed the tip of the iceberg.

#MinimumWage Debate Shows Disdain for Humanity

Posted: March 26, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

eanda logoajclogo2

by @anarchyroll
3/25/2014

Very few issues in the last thirty years have been debated as much as the federal minimum wage. The debate is of course, a farce. The debate is bullshit. The debate is the economic equivalent of the debate over climate change/global warming. It is not a debate, it is an argument over power and control over resources and the monetary consequences thereof.
Somehow the minimum wage debate has been lumped in with the social safety net/ entitlements debate, as if recipients want something for nothing. Literally the opposite is true. We are talking about adult men and women who are not only willing to work, but show up for work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week or more. All they want in return for the more often than not, physical labor that they are give is for in return, the ability to pay all of their bills and have enough left over to have some fun AND save for the future.
Employees with more income are more productive. Employees who have higher wages are able to spend more money. Those are the reasons Henry Ford doubled the pay of his assembly line workers in 1914. The results were more productive grunts, but more importantly to Ford and to the country as a whole, more cars purchase, more money pumped into the economy. Ford’s workers were now able to buy the cars they put together on the assembly line in Detroit. This resulted not only in a boom in auto sales, but a boom to the economy in general, serving as a precursor to the Roaring Twenties.
Cost equals wage divided by productivity. Never forget that equation. Economists don’t, people with MBA’s don’t. Just like the dirty secret of fitness is you never need to do anything other than push-ups, sit ups, squats, pull ups, and jog the dirty secret of economic policy debate in regard to wages versus costs is that the effect of increased wages offsets the rise in costs due to an increase in productivity.
The minimum wage has remained essentially stagnant for almost twenty years while the consumer price index (the cost of the stuff we need to buy to survive) has gone up steadily over that time. Wages have not risen at all when adjusted for inflation, in fact, they have decreased.
Why are slave wages acceptable in our society? It’s 2014, not 1914. If people are willing to work, why should they not be paid enough to live off of their paycheck? Cause of the market? The people struggling the most are often working the hardest. How and why is the free market leaving them behind? These are people willing to work more than eight hours each day, more than forty hours each week. Do they not deserve to be able to have money for all their essential costs and still have some money for a little bit of fun here and there?
They perform the essential tasks. Hedge fund management is not essential, garbage pickup is. Bank vice presidents are not essential, food preparation is. Day traders are not essential, janitors are. Just because a group of workers doesn’t have an army of lobbyists doesn’t mean they don’t deserve their piece of the pie. Their piece of the pie they work for with their hands, feet, blood, sweat…and tears when they match their paychecks with their bills at the end of the month.
Remember these are human beings, not numbers on a spreadsheet. Lives, with families, not expenses on a report. Slavery has been abolished for quite some time. One of the consequences of that is if people are willing to do work, or hard labor, we pay them fairly for their time and effort. Fairly means a living wage. Living wage is $15 an hour. If we can’t afford to pay that, then we as a society must adjust before these hard-working people get a fourth job and learn to live on less than three hours of sleep per night with no vacation or retirement forever eva, forever eva, forever eva, until they are put six feet under in a pine wood box.

 

 

#QE Continues to Taper

Posted: March 23, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

eanda logoajclogo2

by @anarchyroll
3/22/2014

Janet Yellen chaired her first Fed meeting this past week. Afterwards she announced Fed policy going forward regarding her baby, quantitative easing. She helped construct QE at the height of the economic downturn several years ago, a topic written about repeatedly on this website. Yellen announced that QE will continue to taper down at a rate of $10 billion per month until the end of the year.

That is good, QE needs to end, the sooner the better. The problem is the economy has become somewhat dependant on it. The markets took a small but sudden dive at just the announcement about anything QE related. Yellen also said that QE coming to a total end will depend partially on unemployment numbers.

If you haven’t noticed the unemployment problem is a deeper wound in the economy and in the country not seen since the Great Depression. Not only are a huge number of people out of work, but even more are underemployed and wages have been stagnant for over a decade. When the  markets react negatively to even the mention of QE ending, which it does every time there is an official announcement on the subject, employment numbers are likely to take a hit.

Why? Because the 1% who employ the other 99 have their assets all up in the casino stock market. So if/when those numbers go down unemployment goes up, underemployment goes up, wages stay stagnant or go down. So tying QE to the employment numbers is an out to keep QE going indefinitely since the unemployment crisis could be indefinite. What will the effect of a possible government mandated rise of the minimum wage? All these moving parts will affect whether QE ultimately comes to an end.

The minimum wage debate will be the subject of the next Excess and Algorithms article.

#China’s Great Wall of Recession

Posted: March 15, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
Tags: , , , , ,
0

eanda logoajclogo2

by @anarchyroll
3/14/2014

China’s influence on the global economy is well documented. If you don’t know what it is; since the mid 1990s China has basically become the straw that stirs the drink that is the global economy. Why? After all Europe as a whole and the United States are technically bigger players with more liquidity in the markets.

The reasons are how much money has been moving into China because of their precedent busting annual economic growth rates, in addition to their purchasing of US government debt. All major international economic players have been investing in China two decades, and they basically own the United States the way a bank owns your mortgage or your credit card debt. China is the world economic HBIC whether people like to admit it or not, and they don’t.

They don’t like admitting it, but they’ll put their money there. Manufacturing, real estate, consumer goods purchases, GDP, and every economic indicator in China has been going one direction since the Clinton administration, up…until now.

To maintain their status of belles of the ball in addition to maintain what has appeared to be unmaintainable growth rates, China’s government has essentially been cooking the books to make their economy look stronger than it actually is. Ironically their downfall may be identical to the downfall of the US economy circa 2008, real estate.

Last season on VICE on HBO, the ghost cities of China were explored and showcased in crystal clear high-definition for the world to see. The Chicago Tribune recently did a feature on Chicago architecture firms building skyscraper after skyscraper in an architectural arms race in the new metropolises of China. The very well researched and written article showed the highlights and low lights of the urban migration of the Chinese population. Some of those low lights included more ghost buildings, ghost towns, unemployment, and environmental problems.

The economic numbers on paper aren’t matching up with the physical reality of the external world. Wow, I guess China is becoming more like the US every day. I kid, I kid, they are actually becoming more like Japan every day by taking steps very similar to that of the Lost Decade.

The other economic catastrophe shoe may be getting ready to drop. Although GDP growth grew, it is at its slowest pace in 15 years. Manufacturing and trade are both down, two cornerstones of China’s economic darling status. The only things that are sharply moving up are industrial bankruptcies and inflation.

If you’re still reading you’re probably wondering why you should give a shit. The answer to that is simple. If China goes into a recession or depression, so does the rest of the first world because anyone who invests has money tied up in China.  If a run on the bank occurs in China, what is to stop them from doing a margin call on the US debt they’ve been purchasing since the 90s? And if that happens, what exactly happens?

It may not be time to move all of your money into canned tomato soup and shotguns…yet. But it looks more and more like buying American may not just be for cars and furniture anymore. It might be time for anyone with a mutual fund to make sure their assets aren’t being remedied with any eastern medicine.

Older Entries
Newer Entries