Naked Capitalism has the post Google, Apple, and Other Tech Titans’ Wage-Suppression Conspiracy Estimated to Cover One Million Workers by Yves Smith.  Here is a quote of a quote from the post.

What’s more important is the political predicament that low-paid fast food workers share with well-paid hi-tech workers: the loss of power over their lives and their futures to the growing mass of concentrated power in Silicon Valley, whose tentacles are so strong now and so great, that hundreds of thousands of workers around the globe—public relations and cable company employees in the British Isles, programmers and tech engineers in Russia and China (according to other documents which I’ll write about soon)—have their lives controlled and their wages and opportunities stolen from them without ever knowing about it, all the while being bombarded with cultural cant about the wisdom of the free market, about the efficiency of free knowledge, about the need to take personal responsibility and to blame no one but yourself for everything that happens in your life and your career.

I had seen the headline a number of times and had not followed the link to read the article.  After all, I had never worked for Google nor Apple.  However, what they did probably affected me and all the people I have ever worked with in the industry.  I knew that there were industry salary surveys that companies used to set salaries in ways that skirted the anti-trust laws.  It never occurred to me that companies were blatantly breaking these laws, and that the breakage was being carried out at the highest corporate management levels possible.

Reader MardyS provided this link to an excellent lecture George F.R. Ellis, On the Nature of Cosmology Today (2012 Copernicus Center Lecture). It fills in some more about the history of the universe (multiverse) than I had previously understood.  If I watch enough of these videos, I’ll understand all of what we know about the universe today by the time I am 170.

There is the following introduction on the YouTube site.

Cosmology is today a precision science with masses of high quality data every increasing our understanding of the physical universe, but paradoxically theoretical cosmology is simultaneously increasingly proposing theories based on ever more hypothetical physics, or concepts that are untestable even in principle (such as the multiverse). We are also seeing ever more dogmatic claims about how scientific cosmology can solve philosophical problems that have been with us for millenia. This talk comments in these trends, carefully distinguishing what is and what is not testable in scientific cosmology, and relating this solid scientific background to some of the recent philosophical claims made about how scientific cosmology relates to issues of meaning.

The fourth Copernicus Center Lecture – “On the Nature of Cosmology Today” – was delivered by Professor George Ellis, a famous cosmologist, mathematician, philosopher of science as well as researcher of the relationship between science and religion, currently Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The 2012 Copernicus Center Lecture was part of the 16th Kraków Methodological Conference – “The Causal Universe”, which was co-organized by the Copenicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

The history of how Mardy came to provide this link originates from my posting on Facebook of the previous post Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science, Religion and the Universe | Moyers & Company.

Naked Capitalism has the article These Charts Show What is Wrong With American Capitalism by Yves Smith.

… the stock market for a very long time has not served mainly (or lately, much at all) as a vehicle for companies to raise funds to expand their business. Instead, it serves as a machine for manipulating stock prices.

As I read this article, I was thinking that these charts are a measure of the symptom, but what has changed in the world to make this happen now.  In other words, what is the cause?

I then followed a link in the article to a previous article Our New York Times Op Ed on the Corporate Savings Glut.  This doesn’t so much answer the question of what is the cause, but it does provide some possible actions to help fix the problem.

Rather than blindly marching to Austeria, we need to set fiscal policy to the task of incentivizing the reinvestment of corporate profits in business operations rather than games at the casino.

Possible measures to achieve these aims include:

1) an aggressive tax on retained earnings that are not reinvested with a 24 month period after they have been booked (this provision needs to be designed carefully to defeat efforts to circumvent it through artful accounting);

2) a financial asset turnover tax that raises the cost to management (and others) of speculating rather than reinvesting profits in productive capital investment;

3) a reinvigorated public or public/private investment program that helps speed up the shift to new energy technologies (as scaling up usually induces a drop in unit costs of production).

Ultimately, I think the cause has to do with automation and job outsourcing to lower wage countries.  This  has made it more attractive for companies to try to economize their way to greater profits rather than grow their businesses. This is now how companies compete with each other.  They race to out economize their competition. This is the same reinforcing cycle that causes and perpetuates depressions. As business shrinks its costs, it also shrinks its customer base. As customer demand falls, it makes less sense to invest in more production and makes more sense to cut costs further.

Since the result of all these companies reacting in the same way to a common set of circumstances is this self-reinforcing cycle, no single company behaving differently is enough to change the circumstances. Moreover, no single company is strong enough to fight the trend for long.

The only solution to change things quickly is for governments that have the resources and abilities to change the environment, to use those abilities to tilt the balance in a better direction. The resources that governments have to stay the course of making these changes without fear of running out of money is being sovereign in their own currencies and only borrowing in their own currencies. Not every country has this ability, but the US, Japan, China, Russia, the UK, and perhaps the EU can definitely do this

Picture a balance scale with two large and nearly equal weights on opposite sides. The amount of effort that the governments need to put in is on the order of magnitude of the size of the imbalance, not the size of either of the two weights. The longer we wait, the more likely that the imbalance starts to grow in size to match one of the two weights.  This applies to the three items mentioned in the excerpt above.