Economy

The rich and corporations win even during a global pandemic.

Perhaps the ceaseless clamoring for our attention by marketers is reaching its final stage of saturation in which our brains simply shut down and go on attention strike.

Essay explores the grim reality of life in one small corner of America within the broader landscape of the bottom 90%.

In an area with dozens of empty store fronts and several hundred thousand sq ft of empty space, a new strip mall is approved for construction. A rational market??

Nobel Prize winners Duflo and Bannerjee take on idealized views of markets. They target the role of financial incentives, markets as self-correcting, efficient and ethically sound.

The Visual Capitalist added another graphic exampl —>> read more –>>

Robert Reich is continuing his series of brief You —>> read more –>>

It’s Time to Break Up Facebook, by Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook is very thorough in describing the current monopoly behavior of Facebook, the deleterious effects on competition and vigor in the economy of monopolies, and a great introduction to the history of anti-trust movements and legislation in the US.

Robert Reich provides us with an accessible, brief analysis of why the rich and corporations are feasting while the rest of us experience the rigors, oppression, and discipline of the capitalist marketplace. Only a bit over 4 minutes long.

The Dalio Critique of Capitalism – Part One Ray Da —>> read more –>>

In our continuing effort to find varied sources to —>> read more –>>

We have written earlier (for example our article T —>> read more –>>

“Women are almost half of the workforce. They are the sole or co-breadwinner in half of American families with children. They receive more college and graduate degrees than men. Yet, on average, women continue to earn considerably less than men. In 2017, female full-time, year-round workers made only 80.5 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of 20 percent.”

The nearly continuous puffing up of Silicon Valley —>> read more –>>

Adam Smith discussed the harms caused by monopolie —>> read more –>>

Corporate concentration of income and wealth are core features of capitalism. From its earliest cheerleaders like Adam Smith, the drive for corporations to get ever larger and in the doing drive their competitors out of the market was noted and warned against. John Oliver provides a thorough and amusing introduction.

The new digital economy is displaying the same drive to concentration, monopolies and oligopolies, that capitalism has always displayed. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are just a new face of the predatory monopolists of the Rockefeller Standard Oil age.

Shifts to contract work, losses in jobs due to automation and robots, growth in poorly paid occupations, low participation rates, healthcare and retirement tied to full-time jobs, and extremely unequal gains in income for the top 10% characterize jobs in our economy. Something radical needs to be done. Republicans are trickling, Democrats cautious, neither addresses the big changes underway.

UPDATE: IBM does blockchain….Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies are subject to the same control by the rich and corporations as our existing financial and business sectors. These technologies are embedded in the socio-economic structures of capitalism. Concentrations of power dominate the existing capitalist world and they will dominate these new “disruptive” technology entrants.

A Note on Jobs & Unemployment Original publica —>> read more –>>

At a time when the Republicans are transferring income and wealth to the rich and corporations over 40 million Americans fall below the official poverty line.

Republicans Create Bigger Deficits Then Blame The Entitled Poor. Cuts to social programs coming to fix the Republican created deficit problem.