Dearius Merritt & Also The NYCC Are My Heroes! YOU GO DEARIUS!!!

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Crossing that fateful line, back to morality.

Dearius Merritt, a striking Church’s Chicken assistant manager in Memphis, Tenn., .. described fast food workers in his city as “fed up.”

“They’re tired of coming to work and having to work eight hours, nine hours, and them coming home and they can barely provide for their kids,” he said. When asked whether he was afraid of retaliation from management, he shrugged the question off, saying, “It’s bigger than me and it’s bigger than the workers that are standing up. It’s not just going to help my generation, it’s going to help the next generation that’s going to come, and the generation after that.”

[Face it, you've NEVER heard Hank Paulson utter such words. Nothing's bigger than his ego ... or his pocketbook of illicit gains.]

.......

While the fast food movement has received some assistance from traditional union outfits - with the large Service Employees International Union acting as a particularly key supporter - it has never relied entirely on established channels for labor organizing. The very first fast food workers strike, which occurred in late November, was put together in large part by the community group New York Communities for Change. Subsequent strikes have received crucial support from grassroots progressive groups, churches, and other non-union institutions.


.......

ps: The 1% lobby is already at work here, getting in a dig at supposedly failed unions. However, a look at the AFL-CIO's site shows that they've been covering the strike efforts since their planning stages, and urging union members of all stripes to either boycott the targeted establishments and/or not cross picket lines.

ps: These efforts are all NECESSARY, but none will be SUFFICIENT, if they don't also co-tune all points of a culture's agility spectrum - tools, tactics, strategies, policies, goals and desired outcomes. At least we now have a beachhead.

ps: ps: ps: Note that "people did get together"
can others besides the most oppressed also "get together" ?
     when?

"Have Growing Team, Won't Use It" Produces "Have Group Fiat, Won't Use It"

Commentary by Roger Erickson

And people ridiculed William Vickrey! He was nearly the only sane one, for decades! Along with Warren Mosler, and JK Galbraith, and Lerner, and Kalecki, etc, etc - not to mention Marriner Eccles. These are all people who knew that economic policy was too important to be left to the economists - orthodox economists who flat out ignore real operations on the ground ... in their own training, education and ideological practice.

What went wrong? What are we still doing wrong?

Logic and awareness of operational reality is clearly never our main impediment. Some people in every aggregate always know what the group needs to attend to. Rather, our #1 problem seems to be stubbornness in refusing to listen to all of ourselves, refusing to acknowledge inter-dependencies outside our personal specialty, and - if we are forced to acknowledge them - calling them irrelevant "externalities" instead.

Can that hurdle be overcome? Of course it can. Homo Sapiens has been meeting and exceeding that task for ~200K years! It just takes preparation, training and constant practice - on a scale larger than anything we've done before. Yet that's what humans do. In fact, it's all we've ever done. Why stop now?  We need everyone to participate in calling everyone's attention to things they actively do NOT want to know, if left in isolation. Our chief hurdle is, at heart, a social recruitment task. Learning to organize on a larger scale, every year, every generation. The only alternative is suicide, and we've supposedly made that illegal. :(

How do we recruit and convince enough of ourselves to maintain an adequate rate of re-sampling the full - and always enlarging - spectrum of changing contexts, so as to maintain awareness of emerging options?

Many historical precedents are available for your evaluation. To avoid prejudicing further discussion any further, I'll mention only two, .

  Keep everyone busy exploring all options. (full employment)

  Provide everyone time to analyze & communicate, not just work. (30 hour work week?)

Our issue is not just "Have Group Fiat, Won't Use It." More accurately, that flaw flows from failure to address a deeper need: "Have Growing Team, Won't Use It."

Here's an example of transitioning from initial statement to a recruiting message.

“The great increase in longevity has produced a surge in the desire to accumulate assets for retirement. It has outpaced the ability of the private sector to produce assets, so we need a larger government debt.” - William Vickrey

Unfortunately, even Vickrey neglects the simple semantics that trip up Jane and Joe Sixpack, and slow their recruitment (~150 million in the USA alone!, and another 150 million students in training - there's no time to waste). He's stuck on initial statement in non-portable jargon.

However, if you replace the above with something like the text below, you have a potentially portable message, that ~150 million adults might follow. PLEASE! Feel free to suggest 1001 different ways to get everyone from 4th graders on down to economists to understand this dynamic systems issue. Whatever rephrasing you suggest, WE'LL NEED THEM ALL! Tomorrow. No, make that TODAY!! By COB. Certainly before COE (collapse of economy).

“The great increase in average lifespan has - initially - produced a surge in the desire of distributed individuals to accumulate personal assets for personal retirement. However, distributed hoarding is not what social species excel at. 

Consequently, the initial, personal desire to ramp up distributed hoarding of static assets has outpaced the ability of distributed populations to both produce and hoard enough static assets.  

It is, however, quite simple - through accumulation of the dynamic asset of teamwork - for a growing population to meet and exceed all the emerging needs of a growing population of children, adults and elderly alike. It's the return on coordination that counts the most. That return is the only thing that exceeds all mounting costs, including the cost of coordination. 

To grow as a nation, we therefore need steadily increasing public investment - aka, "fiat," simply DENOMINATED as fiat currency numerals - to meet the steadily increasing demand for adequate personal income throughout a growing population executing increasingly more, better, faster and leaner economic transactions.
Calling that public investment in ourselves, our children & our later descendants a purely virtual "debt" to ourselves is not just broken semantics, it is useless and counterproductive sophistry."

The Triumphant Failure of Form Over Function: Formulaic Self-Assisted "Economic" Form vs Middle Class Adaptive Function

Commentary by Roger Erickson

How well are US citizens doing, in discriminating distributed form from net cultural function?

In our culture, the operations in various disciplines merge into the sum of Cultural Operations. Component parts of cultural operations include subdivisions such as currency operations, political operations, regulatory operations, etc, etc. To raise an electorate capable of making a functional whole greater than the sum of it's parts means preparing citizens able to adaptively discriminate the changing form of many operations from their changing local as well as global function.

Want to demonstrate to your kids a deep insight into the concept of FORM over FUNCTION? Just read past & current headlines to them, and explain the evolution of formulaic jargon so that they can translate between speech patterns of the varying eras.

Exhibit A, an example of function: 1934 Pecora Commission Report on banking fraud.

(We used to be able to get down to function. At least our grandparents could. It may look novel to you as well.)

Exhibit B, the re-emergence of Control Fraud form: 2011 REPORT By NATIONAL COMMISSION ON THE CAUSES OF THE US FINANCIAL Crisis
(Ah, the acrid smell of amplified volumes of decaying form. Sheesh! These commission members don't understand fiat currency "banking reserves" either? Either that, or they prefer that the public doesn't catch on just yet?)

Exhibit C, the latest Pyrrhic victory of form over function: The Incredible Con the Banksters Pulled on the FBI

1934 to 2013 - only change is that bank frauds moved upstairs into politics, so as to Control regulatory responses to their own self fraud?

Summary question. How does citizen fraud of nation differ from individual shooting of foot?

Answer: The two differ only in scale of action on the actors half-life. Distributed national half-life vs personal half-life?

ps: You might also want to introduce your kids to allegory. Ask them how many pinheads can dance on the gravestone of a democracy. Don't forget to mention all the rigorous yellen that can be packed into one summers of cultural decline ... into form over function.

JSTOR announces that SOME public articles will now be free to the public

commentary by Roger Erickson

Aaron Swartz died while being prosecuted - by the FBI - for the reckless crime of demanding JSTOR provide the public free access to public data. Why was he prosecuted? JSTOR is immersed in the CopyRight camp, which is in the Rentier camp, which is in the camp obsessed with hoarding liquidity ... all parts of the camp that don't understand currency operations, nor social liquidity, nor cultural operations.

***

Experts puzzled over the arrest and argued that the result of the actions Mr Swartz was accused of was the same as his PACER program: more information publicly available.

The prosecution "makes no sense," Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal said at the time. "It's like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library."

Mr Swartz faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture.

JSTOR announced this week that it would make more than 4.5 million articles publicly available for free.

Mr Swartz's funeral is scheduled for Tuesday in Highland Park, Illinois

***

Does JSTOR's belated response to the Aaron Swartz debacle constitute a Fast Transient? Or just another response that's a day late and another life short?

Pity it had to come to this.

FBI staff, DoJ staff, university faculty and Congresspeople, like those in all other bureaucracies, periodically find themselves ignoring what's right, when keeping their job depends on them assisting wrong.

Experiences similar to this - what the FBI/DoJ/Congress and their lobbies just did - will happen to everyone, at least once in their life. Success tracks our tempo in minimizing the net frequency and impact of such events in our culture. If not, then we lose trust in our institutions, our government, our nation, and ourselves. At that point we fail, become less American, and become more like Russian or other failed, totalitarian cultures.

When YOUR institution's momentum is in the wrong, then it's better for your country if you help change your institution's momentum - the sooner the better. If you can't, then consider joining the opposition!

Adaptive Rate tracks the appearance of Fast Transients (catalysts) that lower the barriers to early detection, early analysis and early intervention.

We have to do what's right because, in the end, what's wrong can't scale, even when "everyone is doing it."