'Woodford' Bigflower or Yellow Vetch in June 2011

Let's shorten the work week

It's not right to leave the unlucky jobless to starve on the side of the road, when we can just shorten the work week and spread the pain a bit. We could encourage four-day work weeks by starting time-and-a-quarter overtime after 32 hours in a week, with time-and-a-half overtime after 40 hours as usual. Accompanying this with underemployment insurance from the nation or state could help preserve our society from crimes of desperation by those people otherwise left behind. A similar 'Work-Sharing' approach has been implemented in Germany, and has been widely used.
If, as a result of such a law, a half of workers had their hours shortened by a day a week, this would create jobs for about an additional 7% of us. That alone could almost eliminate official unemployment, currently at 9.1%, and make a dent on actual unemployment, which is calculate to be quite a bit larger.
In addition, this could ease the burden on social service providers, as the newly employed could care for themselves. And it would ease discrimination against minorities, as fuller employment tends to do.

John Maynard Who? Wall Street shoots own foot while wounding Economic Recovery.

What part of 'insufficient demand' doesn't Wall Street greed understand? If stimulated into employing the one of five of us now out or short of work, the US economy could rebound, further enriching fat cats while saving the unluckiest of us from an uncertain fate, which is sure to drag all of society down with us on our way there. It could rebound because so many more of us would be actually producing things that we need - we'd have more goods to share and more pay to spend at Wall Street's businesses. If these jobs are green jobs, we might wisely prepare USA for our certain future of uncertain climate and fierce global economic competition.

Not to mention that tightening banking law to guide capital from speculation into producing real value would actually help people, as opposed to just changing the digits on the GDP.

Nah. Let's just suffer stupidly instead.

Vicia grandiflora - Bigflower or Yellow Vetch

Roads and jobs.

When we leave our homes physically we usually need roads, and we often provide them for each other via our governments. All the public roads aren't used all the time, so some might argue that we have too many roads, but they are there when we need them.

When we leave our homes economically we usually need jobs. We sometimes make these one by one, employing ourselves when it suits us, and sometimes some of us make jobs as private contractors. If it got really serious and widespread, we could create jobs through our government, the way we create roads.

Isn't it just common sense? Isn't it serious now?

How can we compete as a people when one of every six of our hands is tied behind our backs? There are that many of us un- or underemployed in the USA.

Henry George's Progress and Poverty

Henry George's _Progress and Poverty_ seems a valuable contribution to economics; an overlooked jewel.

It contains the intriguing discernment that perhaps capital and labor are united in their susceptibility to the landed, and share a common interest, instead of being set against each other. In support of this, George points out that when wages drop or unemployment grows, interest rates typically plunge as well, an interesting observation.

I quibble a bit with the postulated benefits of increased population on the quality of life, which seems to conflate the effects of better technology with simple increases in population at one point. This part of his two-pronged poke at Malthusianism seems off.

The book clearly and preciently explains a powerful analysis of industrial society, with an elegant remedy. Both mindful of the wisdom of markets and the unfairness of typical industrial cities, George first details the analysis, then passionately advocates for his thoughtful 'cure'.

Overall, a very important and well-written book.

Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry Into the Cause of Industrial Depression and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth; the Solution (Fiftieth Anniversary Edition) (Hardcover)

Tavis Smiley interviews Van Jones

It was a great discussion, but now(May1st2011) the link is dead.

Is I = P*A*T actually I = P*a/T*H? Global sustainability via corporate dominance?

This important Ray Anderson speech envisions curative capitalism. Highly recommended.

Greg Palast on Swiss Banks, the WTO and their effort to globalize CDOs, etc., that already brought down USA finance

Link

Van Jones: Why End Disposability.

A Boston Currency for fuller and sustainable employment?

Boston has suffered lately along with the nation and the world, as we adapt to financial recession. It seems clear that financial stimulus is the next step,, but Washington, D.C. and the state of Massachusetts seem unable or unwilling to step in.

Since Boston has property tax authority, perhaps there is a way for Boston government to stimulate the local economy in a way which ensures the return to the locale of the resulting benefit. I'm thinking of a municipal currency redeemable for Boston property taxes as they come due in the future. These notes would be accepted by Boston, and perhaps other participating municipalities here, toward yearly property accessments. Boston would print them now for acceptance in the coming years.

There are a number of ways they might be used. Boston could use them to pay otherwise furloughed state employees, and to pay otherwise-out-of-work contractors to do work. These bills would be exchangable, and people could exchange them, with Boston property owners accepting them as rent payments, with the incentive that they could pay future property taxes with them.

Another way to use these bills would be to arrange that all unions, employees and contractors currently used by Boston accept part of their payments in these bills.

Either of these would accomplish two things: It would employ those Bostonians otherwise unemployed, ( it would tend to steer its economic activity eventually toward involvement of Boston tenants and property owners ). It would also, as these bills flowed through the economy, draw attention to those economic opportunities that 'close the local loop'.

For example, off Boston are many mackerel, which used to be a staple, and still are in Europe. Underutilized locally now, these plentiful fish could be caught with local labor and eaten in town. Sailing sloops called 'Boston Hookers' used to sail out of our harbor to hook these, for sale on our piers, and could again, without imported oil use , if fresh mackerel were to find their earlier favor here.

As a flavorful oil-rich fish, mackerel's flesh probably would supply vitamin D to us, a vitamin who's health impacts have been lately researched, and which could help us, especially those of us with more pigment in our skin, in these long winters, to get the nutrition we need, as the sun with which our skin might make vitamin D is dim inn winter, and on the other side of our warm winter clothes.

It would take a business-labor-government-civil alliance to establish such a municipal currency, but there's a chance it could help us who most need help now, while helping in the longer term to draw attention and business to our options for local self reliance.

Brian Cady

Bet Your Life? Planning career and retirement in a changing climate.

Are your career and retirement climate-ready? The fortunate of us have made elaborate plans for our career and retirement, yet aren't these generally made based on outdated expectations of stability of our earth's climate? Climate change will affect stability of the economic systems, which are inevitably based on use of agricultural land and other resources within that changing climate.

Perhaps we can do better for ourselves. Perhaps there are great personal financial and risk-aversion opportunities here for those who understand climatic reality and who plan ahead.

Perhaps, in doing better for ourselves, we will also do better for others, in that, while this recent election shows that the U.S. House has just lost even more of its grasp of climatic reality, individual efforts to sensibly prepare for likely futures will help the system of as a whole prepare. Indeed, these may be the only sytematic preparations possible for us.

For retirement, integrating forecasts (used in planning) that are actually based on the best possible climate-corrected projections of investment and commodity prices and transacted volumes may influence both investment planning directly, and anticipated withdrawals for living expenses. This integration may also influence the extent of risk inherent in these projections, which may well also influence withdrawal planning (e.g. planning for wider margins of error in what you'll need).

For career planning, climate-corrected employment forecasts could yield more security, and/or higher realized income, as well as better projections of the ethical implications of various possible careers. You might not want to be a sheriff if all you'll do is evict the mortgage-frauded innocent, suffering an economic collapse not of their making. Similarly, positions that are involved with supplying ecosystem services, when such services are made climatically impossible, might well be miserable. You wouldn't want to be invested in supplying water from desertifying watersheds to customers who, through no fault of their own, can no longer pay.
Similarly, property insurance firms that have essentially bet that weather will continue as it has will lose their shirts. Seaside flood insurance providers will lose out in two ways - more weather extremes will occur while sea levels rise.

These are simple forecasts; more intricate and more accurate forecasts are possible, and are probably being done for a few far-sighted folks already.

To sum up, there may be great personal financial and moral possibilities in integrating the best current science into one's career and retirement planning.

Worksharing, One State At A Time, or How to Make Jobs

Worksharing, as done in Germany, is the practice of shortening the forty hour work week to thirty two hours for as long as the recession holds, and making up most of the difference in take-home pay by issuing under-employment insurance. This would create jobs, especially for minorities, and help ease the load on welfare, etc., while protecting our communities from the desperate attempts at survival at other's cost that the unemployed will be forced to without help during this recession.
Worksharing can be done on a state-by-state basis, legislatively, and could be paid for in Massachusetts by merely extending the sales tax to real estate sales, which is only fair anyhow.
With more people able to afford staying in their homes, home values won't fall as much, which will benefit every homeowner, and less people will be stuck in overcrowded homeless shelters.

Vetch emergence rate low

Most of the Bigflower Vetch seed has not emerged. Emergence:#sown is very low, less than 1:10.
I don't know whether this is due to seedling death, poor germination or germination delay due to seed dormancy. Maybe I'll do a little digging in the sown rows and see what I find.
If this is due to inherited dormancy, I could select for no dormancy by just saving seed from these early sprouters - If recessive, then all their offspring will be early sprouters, if dominant, then some percentage of intercrossed offspring would also be early sprouters.

Further News of Leguminous Winter Cover Crops

Here are 'Woodford' Bigflower Vetch and 'Hope' White Lupin on Oct. 3rd.
The penny is for scale.

Leguminous Winter Cover Crops Fix Nitrogen and Hold Soil

This is 'Hope' White Lupin, winter-hardy to -10F, emerging on Sept. 25th 2010 at 50 Atherton street, Jamaica Plain, MA. I expect it to survive winter, fix nitrogen, hold soil and yield seed in late spring, at this USDA zone 6-7 site.

How equal are we financially? USers imagine current US wealth distribution

Note. Pie charts depict the percentage of wealth possessed by each quintile; for instance, in the bottom one, the top wealth quintile owns 84% of the total wealth, the second highest 11%, and so on. IF you want to, you can choose which would be the best wealth distribution for USA, and which is the real USA wealth distribution, then check by going to the source paper linked below.

This graph is modified from this paper.

How are we going to compete internationally...

with 2/5ths of our hands tied behind our back? Less than 60% of us are working!

http://www.businessinsider.com/david-rosenberg-forget-the-unemployment-rate-the-real-nightmare-is-the-employment-rate-2010-1

Isn't full employment economic national security? Can you imagine the effect on Social Security if there were too many jobs available? If immigration wasn't seen as a problem,, but an opportunity?

Why have the feds allow R & D deductions that replace workers with machines, then have to pay idled worker support? What's the hurry? Why not allow technological development to proceed at its own pace, without subsidy?

Perhaps new employers could be encouraged instead, by giving them credits toward future payroll taxes for each new position created that lasts through the year.

Labor is a different type of resource than oil or coal - what isn't used now isn't lying in the ground to be used later. That opportunity to get work done is just gone, and we are all suffering more without it being done.
------------------------------------------------------------------
There is plenty that needs doing, and is worth doing - for example, every dollar spent on public agricultural R & D yields more than ten dollars of increased value to society, and much of that within a bond's lifetime. The average rate of return per annum for public ag. R & D is over 50% per year:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eb10/eb10.pdf

There is an opportunity to sell bonds, fund agricultural research and development, and pay for the bond yields out of generally increased federal revenues due to the investment.

There is not an absence of work worth doing, there is only an absence of private work worth doing in this 'recession'. This is why the effort to shrink public expenditure is wrong - we need more investment in public goods, not less, to seed a financial recovery. Not taking care of bridges while the richest profit four times more than they ever did before means that structural changes in the economy due to technology have inordinately favored those already favored by fate. Taxing the rich, too, to fix bridges and develop the crops that can feed us through this climate crisis only makes sense.

Haiti is lying in ruins and 2/5ths of us are sitting around with nothing to do, not to mention that portion of the 'working' who are merely parasitical - witness the recent year's world food price peak now known to be due to the 'work' of speculators:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8844
---------------------------------------------------------------
The world can no longer afford weapons 'investments' when there is so much green infrastructure needed, and needed now, to avoid further Russian wildfires and wheat yield depression, further flooding death and destruction in Pakistan and China. If these weapons are used, other investments will be destroyed, and more people will suffer. Even if the weapons are merely stockpiled, the effort and resources that could have gone to a productive use are wasted. Weapons are attacks on the best of capitalism. We don't have wars between US states to settle differences, and we thrive as a result, compared to the Middle East and such.

Dump Gibbs - An open letter to President Obama

Gibbs has a federal right to speak his slander of the liberal basis of Western Civilization, but it is inappropriate for him to hold the press secretary position while doing so. I will judge you by his speech while he holds the office.

This nation has often suffered for its irrational hatred of anything seen as left. We entered Vietnam after McCathy purges left our foreign service without a left eye. Mossedek of Iran was murdered by US forces, and the hated and hateful Shah imposed, when the alternative was a third way between USSR totalitarianism and USA hegemony, which threatened no one. The perfectly predictable result is the current stand-off with Iran, and hundreds of thousands of innocent's lives lost.

We can and must tolerate Mosques near ground zero, and embrace the great USA history of left leadership and values, not because it has a monopoly on truth, but because at times it offers needed perspective, and because to surrender to such intolerance is as unAmerican and totalitarian as McCarthy was.

This 'DFH' trash talk has gone too far. If you do not sack Gibbs, I will not vote for you again.

USA needs jobs.

US economic stimulus via USA metrification, slavery reparations and restitution to Native Americans for stolen fossil fuel and mining rights could stimulate the economy to create needed jobs, prepare the USA for this century's manufacturing, as well as put a new, more solid moral foundation under the edifice of Western Culture.