"US job openings fell in April to the lowest level since 2021. But they remained at historically strong levels despite high interest rates and signs the economy is slowing.
"The Labor Department reported Tuesday that employers posted 8.1 million vacancies in April..
"Layoffs fell, and the number of Americans quitting their jobs rose in April.
"Nowhere is this [innovation by petit bourgeoisie] more evident than in the modern software industry, where virtually all the novel ideas have been created by individuals or small partnerships"
"The competitive advantage of large firms lies largely in their capitalization, marketing muscle, lobbying power, and vertical integration, not in their original ideas and innovation."
Capitalism is that system of relationships in which human beings want other human beings to do the work so that they can enjoy the profits without doing the work.
Is there any downside to taking say the 99.5th percentile of wealth, and requiring anyone over that value to sell say 5% of their holdings of each stock or fund they own and pay the proceeds as tax?
You'll be unsurprised to see that the UK's standard of living has improved (on average) less than many developed countries (exceptions being we're doing better than France, Greece & Spain).... so while over the period 2007-2019 living standards have risen (just) other countries have done better.
And real (average) earnings were only 3.5% higher than 2009 in 2023.
More evidence of the lack of economic rewards the country has gained from voting in a Tory Govt.
If you're interested in feminist economics, you might want to check out the Women's Budget Group's new website which offers an excellent resource for economists & is an easy way to access their research & policy papers.
50 years ago, economists claimed capitalism is the font of freedom and prosperity. They advocated everything be privatized. Universities were one target.
It's time to compare claims made then with today's reality. If you're in academia, you probably know where this is going. I am not gentle with Friedman.. ;)
BREAKING: President Biden is calling on Congress to give middle-class first-time homebuyers a $10,000 tax credit to help lower their monthly mortgage costs.
Fewer than 5% of New York City apartments were affordable for the average local worker last year. per Bloomberg.
New Yorkers earned on average $89,000 last year, meaning they could afford up to $2,216 per month on housing without spending more than 30% of their income.
The Office for National Statistics has been having some trouble with its key reports (such as the Labour Force Survey) & aside from dealing with budget cuts, it has also confronted (under-reported) strike action on the removal of flexible working for staff as well as a (linked?) growing exodus of staff (many in high-expertise middle level positions have left for the private sector); less than half as many people joined the ONS as left in 2023.
2/ Snip "“The idea of growth #economics is about to be phased out whether we like it or not. The economic model behind materialism, consumerism, & the social constructs associated with that, will have to go. We’ve got no choice there… The purpose of this work is to show the shortcomings of the existing paradigm. What will happen is we’ve got to make a better plan: once we understand our true boundary conditions, what will we really do?” Dr Simon Michaux of the Finnish
geological survey #permaculture#design
"Though I have been interested in ecological economics ever since I read The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Randers, and Meadows 1972), E.F. Schumacher (Schumacher 1973, 1979) and Hermann Daly (Daly 1974) in the early 1970s, and I have been a critic of Neoclassical economics for just as long, I didn't start critiquing the Neoclassical approach to climate change until 2019."
I'm sitting in Urgent Care yet AGAIN. I'm tired of this. I don't want to survive. I want to live. But instead, I'm slowly dying inside.
Because that’s what it feels like to be a millennial. We’re a generation that uses alcohol & anti-depressants & mood stabilizers & beta blockers & psychedelics & porn & street drugs to cope with the terminally corporatized wasteland that has been left for us.
We're a generation that has seen parents panic over TV, movies, & video games that aren’t spiritual. We were told to recycle & we still litter. We've seen two teens shoot up a school & yet parents blame the same kind of machines that gave us Tetris. We've seen three planes take down three buildings. We've gone through lots of economic recessions. We watched a de-ranged billionaire become leader of the world in 2016. We've pushed through a pandemic & as a result continue to get more sick & more selfish five years later. We've seen our neighbors & friends strike & fight for their right to live & all we can do is cheer them on hoping for the best. And even in our sickness, trying to heal, trying to get better, just trying to speak up for what is truly right, we're called virtue signalers because apparently we're "lazy" but "healthy enough" not to be a "slacktivist" to show how "self-righteous" we are.
We’re a generation that is encouraged to monetize every thought or hobby we have in order to afford living in closets. Unless, of course, we’re willing or even able to move out to the middle of nowhere & live vicariously through the internet, or insert ourselves into tight-knit fundamentalist cults, an online self-help movement, or MLMs.
We were told to be nice to each other, to eat lunch with the kid that no one loves, to agree to disagree, to live in harmony & unity, to give our change or sandwich to the homeless man who can't afford to eat at Subway. Now, we're losing good people we cared about deeply to an "us VS them" virus while trying to get them to talk about something without conspiracy or trying to connect with their "old-self" in a healthier way at the dinner table. And now, if we say certain "impure" groups of people deserve an abundant life, it’s career or social media suicide.
Some of us work 2, sometimes 3 jobs to make ends meet (and some of us are stuck volunteering because no one will hire us) while baby boomers and yet simps for billionaires call us lazy because they live in an alternate dimension where the median price of a house is $20K. We're told that we're blessed and that we'll be fortunate and "to be envied" if we're rich hard workers who sacrifice our dreams and our mental health, or worse, we're sinners deserving our own living hell if we make less than $30K a year or do whatever we can to actually find freedom through sacrifice. And we're told we, the poor, who continue to dig looking for life, who are treading water in a sea of the so-called "developing world," deserve our exclusion, wage, sickness, or other issues we struggle with simply because we're disabled or intellectually challenged.
We’re forced to watch while many of these baby boomers and some of their Gen-X counterparts may usher in a US dominated Christian autocracy later this year as some warped act of revenge against the generations they raised. It is messed up the way older generations act towards us just for simply existing, just for simply being. They want revenge on us because we can actually articulate our feelings, our despair, and our on-going pain.
We’re dying prematurely, while they insist on living forever just to hold us hostage while we struggle and pour out blood, sweat, tears, and urine just to make it to tomorrow.
Meanwhile, we’re forced to listen to the ubiquitous, insipid droning on & on about “staying positive” or being "blessed" or "all things working together for good" from people who’ve never suffered in any real way. We're cogs in a giant machine toiling for a whole culture who loves anti-Christs and false prophets spewing false promises & gaslighting; a "thriving" economy of ableist grifters selling hyper-individualistic New Age, New Thought, human potential manifested Protestant work ethic gospel mysticism in the form of lower-case T'ed multi-tiered "answers."
Today, we're told "put family or church first / celebrate our health-workers / donate to charity / help the poor." Tomorrow, we're told "be yourself / let it rip / buy the latest thing for yourself / don't support welfare queens." WHICH IS IT? PICK A FUCKING LANE! Our values and boundaries are constantly being pushed, tested, and tossed in the way of cognitive dissonance! Now we don't know who to trust or what to believe anymore!
I'm one of the many whose life expectancy is declining, & I watch while the suicide rate became the highest it has been since World War II. But we just have to “realign our thinking” while we might soon start testing positive for bird flu, right? We just need to keep putting our faith in that promise that there are "plans where we'll prosper, & have a hope & a future" even if we suffer from Long Covid, right? I don't know. I don't know because the mantra of “accepting the things we cannot change” has led us to accepting the unacceptable.
We’re surviving on bad advice in bad material circumstances. We’re told to save for a retirement we won’t live to see because the sun will cook us alive before 2100. We’re told to focus on building “careers” to support an economic model based on infinite growth on a finite planet, because none of the people telling us these things can see past their own quarterly profits. They can’t see the burning forest through the trees while they’re bulldozing them with fossil-fueled vehicles to build condos no one can afford or bunkers they can shelter in so they survive post-Rapture "events of Revelation."
But hey, with any luck, maybe they’ll invent a drug that cures us of the human condition, reducing our nervous systems to a series of computations while the artificial intelligence we’re developing paints and writes songs and makes movies as we watch them from our phones while looking for food people in suits throw away on the street corners.
Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, & George Orwell were more prescient in their books than the ancient ones we use to justify the never-ending wars we pay for unwillingly with our tax dollars that are supposed to go toward making our lives tolerable. But they won’t, because war is the only thing North America exports. Thanks to Arthur Finkelstein, moral panics have now become the ultimate distraction from real issues affecting our livelihoods.
And if, somehow, "they" made it this far reading this, "they" only reply: Stop being woke. Take personal responsibility. Stop playing the victim. Be a rebel. Grow up. Buy guns. Buy land. Think for yourself. Take your mask off. Stay married. Start a family, a large family who will bring "herd immunity." It's the immigrants making our country impure. It's Justin. It's Joe (Biden). It's Bernie. It's the boy or girl choosing a made-up gender killing the binary. It's the colored people making everything about race (which it actually is). It's the lazy people who pretend to be disabled to get welfare! And then in twisted irony they'll be like, turn off the news, love Straight White American Jesus Christ, and stop living in fear.
And so, each day, I strive to live laugh and love, I strive to thrive and not just survive, and yet, I only find myself continuing to die inside.
We need a new way to live.
We need a new system.
We need it soon.
Tear it all down.
Because American exceptionalism and the American dream has become the worst nightmare that is killing us all.