This gambling makes no product. You cannot wear, eat, drive, live in, or otherwise consume the fruits of the labors of the gamblers. Since the bailout, the gamblers have a new pile of poker chips and fresh glasses of scotch and are back at the poker table, ready to risk your grandchildren’s future in the form of national debt. And they will destroy value at a rate of 7-to-1 for every unit of their labor. Mr. Feinberg, you don’t really want to encourage this do you?

Maybe Mr Feinberg (and the whole Wall St crowd) should sign up for Gambler’s Anonymous

This NEF report should be considered to become and remain the permanent head of FDL until the revolution is won.

Those negative returns you refer to would be called clawbacks by financial institutions.

Hmmmmm….. Wondering what all our bosses would think were we to do a craptacular job and then turn around and insist that he/she reward us handsomely for it. Where do these people come from?

Nice comment on the negative return on innovation wrt financial (mis)management. That ‘fiduciary duty’ has become a touchstone for social irresponsibility. Consequently, the concept of fiduciary function needs expanding to a larger realm than simply stockholder returns, especially as the stockholders themselves are suffering from diminution of returns resulting from the vast consequences of financial manipulations that trickle up onto them.

The “sanitation engineer” is the new messiah. He takes away peoples’ sins religiously, every week.

God bless the garbage man.

another enlightening piece of the Chicago School cum Washington Consensus fraud is to be glimpsed in Bolivia.
(A major American Natural Resource is its people)

“Bolivia’s GDP growth has averaged 4.9 percent annually since the current administration took office in 2006. Projected GDP growth for 2009 is the highest in the hemisphere, and follows its peak growth rate in 2008. ”

““The Bolivian economy has done very well under President Evo Morales, and government policy has been key. These economic gains are a big part of the reason he is favored to win re-election by a wide margin.”

“None of this would have been possible without the government’s regaining control of the country’s natural resources,”

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/bolivias-economic-performance-over-last-four-years/

I dunno. I watched one of those “rich and famous” episodes, tracking the lives and homes of billionaire hedge fund managers. And what did they do with their money? They bought homes, and not just houses, but whole islands to put them on, and they employed servants, hundreds of them to keep up these mansions, do the gardening, clean the floors and furniture, etc. So you can think of these as personal stimulus programs, providing hundreds of jobs with great economic multiplier effects.

I have voluteered to become one of these, because my country needs me.

Rat bastards

Barclays investment bankers in line for 150% pay rises to ease bonus tax pain

Bankers at Barclays are being given massive pay rises to compensate for the 50 per cent bonus tax.

Up to 23,000 investment bankers have been awarded rises of as much as 150 per cent – apparently planned before the bonus tax was announced in Alastair Darling’s Pre-Budget report.

Link

So you can think of these as personal stimulus programs, providing hundreds of jobs with great economic multiplier effects.

true but they pay minimum wages what fucking good is that???

We need to start seizing the wealth they have stolen from our nation. They have already moved lots of it offshore. But we can get at their real estate and lots of the other wealth.

We need to do it soon, though.

Oh, and many of them should be in prison.

Book Salon upstairs with Marian Brannan’s Twenty Remarkable Women Seen Through Their Handwriting hosted by Lisa Derrick

Excellent post, Cynthia. For many years now I’ve been saying that the expression “making money” is a misnomer. The salary or wages a person receives should be referred to as “taking money”. And as you point out, people who work their asses off and are paid low wages are producing more than they take in, and they should be honored for that. And people who are highly paid just because they happen to be in a job with a high salary often are taking in more value than they produce, and they should not be honored.

Shit, looks like they stepped on your article. That’s the problem with the blog format, people tend to only read and comment on the most current post. I would like to see FDL change their format to something more like HuffPo (minus the fluff, of course).

Free room and board at further tax payer expense, even in a federal penitentiary, seems somehow unfair, don’t ya think?

But people would have to build and maintain the prisons, so by occupying prisons they would be creating jobs, right?

“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” -KM

In the context of 40 to 1 derivative losses & subsequent treasury bailouts, a few created jobs in the real economy isn’t even on the same reciprocity planet.

Oh, and many of them should be in prison.

Oh Joy Oh Joy!! Personally I think at least half of them need to be in prison. We should also go back to the highest tax rate of 90% of gross income and none of this capital gains breaks crap.

Hi Teddy hope your holidays were great!!

A new paradigm for these criminals, Dante’s Inferno.

Societal value, eh. Wow. What a concept! Who defines it?

Right now societal value is defined by the people who the employee is contracted to. For executives, that is the compensation committee of his board of directors, which he is careful to stack with people who will put him on the compensation committee of their board of directors. Call that circle-jerk patronage.

For folks lower in the hierarchy, the person who is patron is the immediate manager or the immediate two levels of of management (senior manager & manager).

For entrepreneurs, patrons are customers. In business-to-business markets, the customers are the same managers that ordinary employees deal with. The difference is that they have to deal with more of them with diverse demands for patronage.

No wonder the “value” of work is so crazy.

So to have work compensated based on its social value, you have to have a way of measuring that social value, a means of auditing those measures, a way of incentivizing performance to those values through reward, punishment, or both, and a bureaucracy to run the whole thing. Now, who determines the social value of the bureaucracy that runs the whole thing?

Or you can have a labor market in which prices are actually posted.

Truth be told the most well compensated employees in middle management are those who can endure the rites of sycophancy the best.

Another example: Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician, has long maintained that the pay for doctors and teachers should be swapped.
she argues that doctors are litlle more than glorified mechanics or repairmen, while teachers shape our future.

Hospital cleaners on the other hand were estimated to produce £10 of social value for every £1 they are paid; mostly because their work helps to stop the spread of disease and provide for better (less expensive) outcomes for hospital patients. Waste Recycling workers were estimated at 12-to-1.

this to me is one of the most important posts at the lake ever, I sure wish I was here to contribute while it was top center

Another example: Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician, has long maintained that the pay for doctors and teachers should be swapped.
she argues that doctors are litlle more than glorified mechanics or repairmen, while teachers shape our future.

this person sounds like my soul mate, I have made this argument all too many times, I tell all;

“teachers are the most important profession in our country, they shape our future, doctors protect the present and the past

Cynthia,

Have you been listening to the Wendell Potter interviews? His pointing out the relationship between MLR% and health care investment banking has been quite interesting.

Now, I wonder if those pay raises are being based on the new revenues coming in from the projected stimulus to health care investment banking through mandated, government enforced, health insurance?

Boy, based on Marcy’s numbers, the rate of bankruptcies has probably been computed by investment models to the year and % and by market region. This could make CDS gambling quite easy. It’s like the House is showing their hand to the betters.

I think this is a phenomenal theme for the new decade we should constantly apply.

Next time I sit down with some venture capitalists I’ll be sure to raise it when they ask us to pitch some useless social networking gadget instead highly valuable (but economically risky due to uncertain development time) medical device.

Sorry I’m late this is a very interesting line of thought please return to this subject again soon and often. The only thing Bush was ever right about is that you have to keep repeating things to catapult the propaganda. The same goes for the truth.
I think 6 to 9 months worth of rants at least once every two weeks or few daily rants when circumstances make the topic hot is what it takes to get the MSM interested.
The other blogs however not so long. Please keep the Meme Bankers Yield Negative Returns going! We need that to Counter Geithner, Summers and Helicopter Ben we need that Meme to help demand a Federal Reserve Audit.
We need that meme to oppose the healthcare bill bailout of the insurance industry and Obama’s bailout/cover up of Freddie and Fannie

Any numbers on negative returns to society if tax cuts lead to spending cuts in social services, education, snowplows ( Minnesota ), police, firemen (California Wildfires)

The comment threads remaion open for 24 hours. I tend to surf the front page an look for a post that intersts me and then join the thread, even if I am late tothe party. Some other folks do that, too

I think both teachers and doctors have value, but I wouldn’t swap all 1;1.

There are many inspiring teachers whose pay should increase to that of doctors, but unfortunately, not enough of them. Perhaps if teaching higher pay we could attract overall better quality.

This is a GREAT post!

There’s been much talk in the blogosphere lately about what happens to unemployment levels when the minimum wage is increased (the consensus is that there is no consensus), but what happens to the people who see their wages go up?

Nobel-winning theory from Milton Friedman says that when a person knows his income will increase, he’ll spread out those gains over the rest of his life and not spend it all at once. In the case of a $1 minimum wage hike, annual spending should increase by about $400.
But that grossly understates what actually goes on, write economists Daniel Aaronson, Sumit Agarwal, and Eric French in a new Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago working paper.

The trio examined what happened to the consumption and debt levels of households that experienced either a federal or state minimum wage hike.

First, they found that spending didn’t increase when the legislation was passed, but when it went into effect. This goes against Friedman’s theory, which assumes that a person will change spending as soon as he learns of his future income stream.

Second, spending increased by a whopping $800- to $1,000-per-quarter compared with a $250 increase in pay as a result of a minimum wage hike. This means that debt levels also rose.

“If households were spreading the income gain over their entire lifespan, the spending increases should be far smaller than what we observe in the data,” the researchers write.

On the other hand, past research has shown that consumers spent about two-thirds of their stimulus checks back in 2001. This time around, that would translate into an additional $80 billion in spending. So, what’s better, spending $120 billion to stimulate $80 billion in consumption, or $2.8 billion to stimulate $11.2 billion?

http://seekingalpha.com/article/81634-minimum-wage-hikes-vs-tax-rebates-what-s-more-effective?source=headline1

Cynthia I hope the link above helps the GOP will push tax cuts for the rich in return for Job Stimulus. They will say that its insane to raise taxes to create more jobs in a recession.
They will say its insane to raise wages during a recession. Yet they have no problem with spending more money and dropping the value of the Dollar.

Is the Fed actively trying to destroy the dollar?

Well yes, of course they are. Americans had done something that was unforgivable to Republicans by the end of the Clinton administration – they had attained a decent standard of living. Median net worth had climbed from $57,800 under Reagan/Bush in 1992 to $78,400 in 2001, a 35% rise in the wealth in the middle of the middle class. People with zero or negative net worth were also at all-time lows with just 17.6% of the population in debt.

Although the wealth of the nation increased dramatically in the 90s, the percentage of wealth held by the top 1% of the the country FELL from 37.2% in 1992 to 33.4% in 2001 but the Bush tax cuts quickly reversed that and sent the top 1%’s wealth back to 34.3% by 2004.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/82848-dollar-destruction-my-wealth-inequality-manifesto

I wonder if there are any recent numbers for how Obama is doing sure everyone’s wealth dropped under Bush
But I bet the super rich are recovering just fine.
But who is getting hurt the most under this recovery the poor were already poor. So that leaves the (non Super) rich and the middle class as those most likely to have lost the most in this *cough* recovery.

Yes, you should google her up. I expect you will find agreement on other topics, as well. I forget the titles of her other books at the moment, but one that sticks in my mind is “Missile Envy”; she’s been giving bastards (PTB) hell for years.

And they will destroy value at a rate of 7-to-1 for every unit of their labor. Mr. Feinberg, you don’t really want to encourage this do you?

All the Lefty blogs should rant nonstop for weeks on that point alone. We need to organize, coordinate and pick our targets!

Nice post, but why the random attack on hip-hop? Advocating violence police or a critique of the criminal justice system? Putting hip hop artists you don’t like in the same group as drug kingpins and mafia bosses is just unfortunate.

Take it upstairs, – it’s essential, because it makes sense and is easy to relate to a working person’s experience.

The last dozen hip hop songs I have heard (played by my teenagers or their friends) did not involve a critique of the criminal justice system. They invovled calling women whores and bitches and offering to rape them. They involved threats of violence and murder. They extolled the “virtues” of drug possesion, sale and use.

I realize sex and violence and drugs SELL, but how do these “songs” produce a value to society?