France is veering left.

Who is leading this charge?

Why three women, bien sûr.

A socialist,a green and a communist .

There are more and more French speakers in the world, the International Organisation of La Francophonie - which represents the French-speaking world - said as it turns 40 this year. French is on the rise thanks to marked progress in African literacy.

AFP - The number of French speakers in the world is rising thanks to increasing literacy in Africa, the International Organisation of La Francophonie said ahead of its 40th birthday.
  
"The figures that we will release in September on French in the world ... will show a marked progress compared to 2007," said Alexandre Wolff of the 56-member IOF.
  
There are currently estimated to be 200 million French speakers in the world, making it the ninth most-spoken language.

charles hugh smith-The Stock Market As Propaganda

Since 91% of stocks are owned by the Plutocracy, the much-ballyhooed rise in the stock market as proof the recession is over is perception management/ propaganda.

The 75% rise in the stock market from its lows a year ago is ceaselessly offered as "proof" the economy is recovering. Too bad very few Americans are drawing any benefit from this stupendous rise. As I detail below, the Great Middle Class owns at best only 7% of all stocks and mutual funds.

So the constant, breathless heralding of the stock market's carefully manufactured ascent has only one purpose: to create perceptions of "recovery"and distract the populace from the fact that in terms of employment and tax revenues, the U.S. economy is still shrinking rapidly.

Let's begin with the facts presented in the Wealth, Income, and Power website (G. William Domhoff).

charles hugh smith-The Stock Market As Propaganda

According to the asset class breakdown on Wealth, Income, and Power, the bottom 90% owned 18.8% of all stocks and mutual funds in 2007. Since the bottom 60% own very little (only 22% of the bottom 60% own stock/mutual funds worth more than $10,000), and the bottom 80% own a mere 8.9% of all stocks/mutual funds, then the top 10% owns 81% of all stocks (of which the top 1% own 38%) and the "managerial/professional" slice between 80% and 90% owns about 10%.

Some 47% of the "middle class" (those between the bottom 40% with few financial assets and the top 20% with the vast majority of the assets) own stocks/mutual funds worth more than $10,000, but since the bottom 80% own a mere 8.9% of all stocks, it seems the Great American Middle Class owns about 7% of all the stocks and mutual funds in the U.S. (with the bottom 40% holding the remaining 2%).

According to BusinessWeek, the profits of the S&P 500 corporations rose in 2009 to over $500 billion--a vast sum presented as "yet more proof" that the recession is over.

Over for some perhaps, but not for the bottom 80%. It is no secret that the spurt in productivity which fueled those gargantuan profits was made by reducing headcounts and getting more work out of the remaining workforce. Bully for the S&P 500 managers and those who reap the profits.

Since there are about 130 million U.S. households and total corporate profits are around $1 trillion, we can do some simple math to see where all those profits flow.

If you dig through the BEA website and other sources, you find that Corporate profits were about 13 percent of GDP in 2007, their highest level in 40 years and significantly above the post-World War II average of 9.4 percent of GDP. Nonfinancial profits for 2006 were $1.08 trillion. Real GDP peaked in Q2 2008 at 13,415.3 billion; in Q3 2009 GDP was 12,973 billion (calculated annually).

Even assuming corporate profits have dropped back to 9% of GDP, we still get a number around $1 trillion in profit for 2009.

Based on the ownership of stock and mutual funds, we can estimate that 9% ($90 billion) of all that profit flowed to the bottom 80% of households (104 million), $100 billion flowed to the 13 million Managerial/Professional households (the 10% of all households between 80% and 90%), and $810 billion flowed to the top 10% (13 million households), of which $400 billion flowed to the top 1% (1.3 million households).

Since total household income runs about $9 trillion, then the $90 billion distributed among 104 million households doesn't really ring a lot of chimes when the estimated loss of wealth in the U.S. as the credit bubble popped has been estimated at $15 trillion.

The rise in the stock market and corporate profits benefitted the relative few--yet is touted in the mainstream media as heralding the end of the recession for the entire nation. That is pure propaganda. How easy it's been to manufacture a rising stock market, compared to engineering a recovery in the economy.

Indeed, the biggest problem facing the manipulators is the lack of participation by the professional and middle classes which have steadfastly kept their cash in money-market funds ($3 trillion) and put money in "safe" bond funds (about $350 billion went into such funds in 2009) while they withdrew money from the stock mutual funds.

The Grand Game has always been to engineer a rising stock market, sell to the middle class suckers and then go short, making a fortune as the bubble pops and the middle class loses the "sure bet."

Now that the middle class isn't responding to the endless propaganda about how great the stock market is doing, then the Powers That Be are forced to trade between themselves--hence the low daily volume and high-frequency trading.

The stock market isn't about building middle class wealth, and the middle class seems to have finally figured that out. The equity market is all about concentrating wealth and managing perception: if the top 10% is doing well, then the bottom 90% are supposed to feel better about the whole thing, too, even if they are poorer by every financial metric.

San Francisco Water and Rail | Gregor.us

I can never decide which is sadder: the Obama Administration's token 12-15 billion dollars for national railways, or, the greenblogger, transportblogger, and mainstream media's belief we're pursuing a new rail policy. The United States has for years been piled high with unfunded rail projects, just waiting for a green light. But the 12-15 billion allocated so far will, at best, provide nothing more than seed money for mega projects like high-speed rail while neglecting the myriad smaller projects across the country. In the same way the Obama Administration has no energy policy, they have no transport policy.

San Francisco Water and Rail | Gregor.us

While it may take a while, eventually the country will bet once again on the railroads (did Warren Buffet read Stilgoe's Train Time?). The old line that comes down through Petaluma to San Rafael (seen on the first map) is a good example of the current revival in two ways. First, the formation of the new Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) shows strong community support for the project, and they've been successful in winning measures through balloting. Second, the difficulty that SMART has now run into is largely financial, and is pretty much courtesy of the recession. These twin influences, public interest in rail transport as oil prices resume their advance, and financial pressures, will likely define rail buildout in the years ahead. But regions rich in an existing rail footprint-especially near water-will have fewer hurdles to surmount.

By penning us (the labour) in, capital can maintain, for a while, the wage imbalances that maximize profit. (Take raw material. Process as cheaply as possible. Sell for as much as possible.) In the long term, it's unsustainable -- labour in the high-cost developed world is taking a hammering due to being uncompetitive, and wages will be forced down until it is competitive, while labour costs in the developing world are skyrocketing. It'll end when American and EU wages meet in the middle with Chinese and Indian wages ... unless American, EU, Chinese, and Indian wage-earners are forced to recalibrate their expectations against the DRC or Somalia.

f you don't think this affects you, if you don't think you're on the same side of the barricades as the sweatshop workers in Bangladesh and the marine biologists in Toronto, you're deluded; unless you've got a seven-digit trust fund to dine out on, the tidal flow of globalized capital is running against your class interests.

Welcome to the future that globalized capitalism has bought for us (and see also the vital, pressing need for election funding reform in the USA, which is the pivot on which this whole mess revolves). I'm beginning to think that, regardless of his prescription, Karl Marx's diagnosis of the crisis of capitalism was spot on the money. And crap like this is going to keep happening as long as we're workers first and citizens last.

Stross is a Scottish SF writer.

A 'centrist' is someone who's neither on the left, nor on the left.

then I transplanted the garlic that has been growing in the greenhouse since last november. Unfortunately the roots were all tangled up so the plants may struggle to re-establish themselves as I had to take most of the soil them.

tomorrow I plant a couple of rows of potatoes (earlies), then I'll be digging another plot at the end of the garden which will be entirely devoted to normal crop potatoes.

The rest of the plot will be courgettes, beans beetroot kale and chard. Photos later

keep to the Fen Causeway

(yuck)

Not only did she purchase one she bought the makings for another and is busily debrining one and brining the other.  

[ATinNM's Crystal Ball of Doom™ Technology]


No one could have predicted

I think I need to lie down after that.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

(Dodo dobi dobi dodo dobi dobi do ...)

No one could have predicted

"The Life and Philosophy of George Tucker" author of The laws of wages, profits and rent, investigated (1837), The theory of money and banks investigated (1839), Progress of the United States in population and wealth for fifty years, as exhibited by the decennial census (1843), Political economy of the people (1859) among others titles (pdf, 126pp)

Robert Fogel, author Time on the Cross, "Academic Economics and the Triumph of the Welfare State," (pdf, 19 pp)

Academic economists had little impact on the economic policies of federal and state governments during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. This absence of influence is not explained merely by the prevalence of laissez-faire doctrine. Nor is it explained by the lack of involvement of government in economic matters or the lack of instruments through which federal and state governments might have intervened in economic affairs. Quite the contrary, economic policy was central to politics throughout the nineteenth century. Among the issues debated and acted upon were tariffs; taxes on property, sales, and income; banking policy; the promotion of internal improvements (roads, railroads, and waterways); government action to ameliorate business cycles; reduction of the labor supply through control of immigration; pensions for veterans; land distribution; the subsidization of education; and the alleviation of poverty.

The theorists and experts on these issues were not academics but politicians, merchants, bankers, planters, journalists, artisans, and theologians, some of whom had little or no college education (Dorfman 1946, v.2). This is not to say that academic economists did not sometimes write books and articles or collect and analyze statistical data. In 1843 George Tucker, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia, published an estimate of U.S. national income based on the decennial census of 1840. Prophet of industrialization and population growth, Tucker was involved in politics and served a term in the House of Representatives (Studenski 1958). The academy also produced a few writers of textbooks in economics. The most widely used text during the three decades before the Civil War was written by Reverend Francis Wayland, president of Brown University, a principal leader of the Northern Baptist Church, and an advocate of laissez faire. The objective of his textbook, The Elements of Political Economy (1837), he wrote, was to set forth God's laws, so far discovered, regarding the production and distribution of those products that constitute the wealth of a nation.

irony overload... Ch. 9 "The pervading characteristic of the trade-union animus is the denial of the received natural-rights dogmas wherever the mechanical standardization of modern industry traverses the working of these received natural rights. Recent court decisions in America, as well as decisions in analogous cases in England at that earlier period when the British development was at about the same stage of maturity as the current American situation, testify unequivocally that the common run of trade-union action is at mvariance with the natural-rights foundation of the common law. Trade-unionism denies individual freedom of contract to the workman, as well as free discretion to the employer to carry on his business as may suit his own ends. Many pious phrases have been invented to disguise this iconoclastic trend of trade-union aims and endeavors; but the courts, standing on a secure and familiar natural-rights footing, have commonly made short work of the shifty sophistications which trade-union advocates have offered for their consideration.... When unionism takes an attitude of overt hostility to the natural-rights institutions of property and free contract, it ceases to be unionism simply and passes over into something else, which may be called socialism for want of a better term. Such an extreme iconoclastic position, which would overtly assert the mechanical standardization of industry as against the common-law standardization of business... " PNG!

Property, he argued, was founded on the "will of God," and it was acquired directly as his immediate gift (as with land) or by labor. As for labor, Wayland accepted the general validity of the Malthusian doctrine that laborers' excessive fertility tended to increase their numbers and reduce their wages to the point of starvation and death. But that tendency was kept in abeyance in the United States because capital increased faster than the population. Hence, distressing poverty was rare except when precipitated by intemperance, indolence, and similar vices. The favorable demand for labor and the lagging supply made it possible for industrious workers to accumulate capital in a relatively short period of time. It followed that combinations of labor [trade unions] were not only counterproductive but also unjust because they deprived laborers of the right to dispose of their labor and, as with legislative interference, they were destructive of industry (Dorfman 1946, v. 2).

w00t

Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology - Trends, Sources, Problems

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.