Ribbonfarm has the article The Locust Economy.

The war between the 1% and 99% seems to play out with the 1% and the 90% collaborating to prey on the 9% in the middle — the Jeffersonian middle class.

The article is rather long, but I found the writing entertaining enough to keep me interested. It is also very educational.

Ironically, my sharing this post with you is participating in the locust horde.

I don’t want to be a locust on the internet. I keep promoting the idea of how people can defend themselves from locusts like me, but they don’t seem to catch on. Perhaps one day they will wake up to how things have to change. See my previous post Monetizing Internet Content – A Working Example.

Thanks to João Geada for sharing this locust article on his Facebook page.

The Daily Kos has published the Tom Tomorrow cartoon Press conference.

I repost this cartoon because I believe the cartoonist expressed what I think better than I ever could have.

The cartoonist has a subscription page, Sparky’s List, where you can help support the cartoonist.

Read my previous post Monetizing Internet Content – Refresher Course to see my suggestion for how authors on the internet could be paid for their efforts.

New Economic Perspectives has the article MODERN MONEY THEORY: THE BASICS by L. Randall Wray.  This is not a reprint of any earlier article, but a retelling of the story.  When I need to learn something complicated, I find that the more times I read about it, the better I understand it, even if the reading goes over much of the material I have read before.  Given this style of learning, I do not fret too much about reading the first article I read on a subject and trying to study it in such depth that I understand it all.  That is not the way depth of understanding comes to me.  Of course your style of learning is almost certainly different from mine in some aspect.  We all learn in different ways.

Here are some quotes to whet your appetite.

The problem is not the “thin air” nature of the creation, but rather the quantities of “money” created and the purposes for which it was created. Government spending for the public purpose is beneficial, at least up to the point of full employment of the nation’s resources. Bank lending for public and private purposes that are beneficial publicly and privately is also generally desirable.
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While our governments are large, they are not big enough to provide all the monetary IOUs we need for the scale of economic activity we desire. And we—at least we Americans—are skeptical of putting all monetized economic activity in the hands of a much bigger government. I cannot see any possibility of running a modern, monetized, capitalist economy without private financial institutions that create the monetary IOUs needed to initiate economic activity.

Apparently, even Paul Krugman is having trouble digesting this, and he already has his Nobel Prize in Economics.  I am lucky enough to know that my understanding is limited, so I do not insist that new ideas conform to everything I think I already know.

The New York Times has the article Why Bitcoin Matters by Marc Andreessen.  It is hard to pick just one of the reasons to quote here from all the reasons that Andreessen makes clear in his article.  Here is one that I thought might get your interest.

In addition, merchants are highly attracted to Bitcoin because it eliminates the risk of credit card fraud. This is the form of fraud that motivates so many criminals to put so much work into stealing personal customer information and credit card numbers.

You have to read the article for many more reasons why Bitcoin matters.  One that particularly interests me because I have talked about it on this blog a number of times is:

A third fascinating use case for Bitcoin is micropayments, or ultrasmall payments. Micropayments have never been feasible, despite 20 years of attempts, because it is not cost effective to run small payments (think $1 and below, down to pennies or fractions of a penny) through the existing credit/debit and banking systems. The fee structure of those systems makes that nonviable.

My first discussion of micropayments was in my proposal in the post Monetizing Internet Content.  I then tried another post to get alternative news media to consider micropayments instead of begging for subscriptions in Alternative News, Please Stop Your Pathetic Begging.

Bitcoin can be a major component in my proposed solution for monetizing internet content.  The “Publisher’s Clearing House”, “Google”, “Amazon”, or “PayPal” type of company could create a business using Bitcoin internally to offer the service to small operations trying to monetize their internet content.  With Bitcoin, a small startup could make a business providing this service before the big guys even figure it out.  For all I know Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm may already be funding such a startup, since he already mentions this use in his article.

For all you people who are having trouble getting your mind around fiat money, Bitcoin ought to boggle your mind.  Marc Andreessen’s article make take a little of the boggle out.

Other previous posts that have touched on Bitcoin are The Behavioral Economics of Bitcoin and The One Crucial Detail That Could Sink Legal Pot in Colorado.

This Andreessen article may dispel a myth that might have come to mind in the legal pot article.  That is that Bitcoin makes these transactions anonymous and untraceable.  In that one way, it makes Bitcoin unlike a $20 bill.  Oh by the way, the traceability also does not make it like a credit card transaction either.

Thanks to Cedric Flower for posting a link to this article on his Facebook page.

Some of the alternative news sources are really getting pathetic with their begging and pleading for support.  I tried to send the following message to one such source, but they are not accepting responses to their pleas.

Seriously, people, you just do not know how to monetize your content in the digital age. You just can’t seem to figure out why your readers are unwilling to make even the smallest monthly payment for a subscription.

Some people choose from hundreds of sources over a month. If they had to pay $1, $3, or $10 for a monthly subscription to each one, that would be anywhere from $100 to $1,000 per month.

I have a blog post  Monetizing Internet Content that explains how to solve the problem while recognizing what the real roadblock is.

Basically, all you alternate media folk, The Daily Kos, The Real News Network, Reader Supported News, Consortium News, Truth-Out, etc. need to get together and create a clearing house that will take in a monthly subscription and provide the subscriber with access to thousands of news sites.

The clearing house distributes micro-payments to all news sources in their service for each article that a subscriber reads.

This distributes the subscriber’s payment in a way that represents the value that the subscriber actually gets from the articles that she or he reads.

Hundreds of times more readers would be willing to pay a substantial monthly fee to get access to an unlimited number of sources than would be willing to pay a very small fee to get access to only one source.

I offer this idea to you, gratis. I want nothing more out of this than a way for me to fairly pay for the value you provide.

It is so frustrating to have the solution to a problem, but no means to get the sufferers of the problem to hear about the solution.  If any of you readers know how to tell internet content providers how to solve their funding problem, I would be really grateful to you for passing this idea along.

The Washington Post has the article Bezos could use Amazon model of customer targeting to reboot the newspaper industry.

The article starts with the following:

Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post promises not just an ownership change for the 135-year-old institution, but a potential transformation of the fusty mechanics of the newspaper business.

It remains to be seen whether the experiences of an Internet behemoth can be successfully applied to a legacy newspaper — and whether Amazon-style customer targeting would be palatable at a news organization.

I was thinking that the author of this article, coming from a traditional newspaper background, was missing the point a little bit.

My whole purpose for reading this article was the thought that Bezos would put into action the idea I posted in my 2010 post, Monetizing Internet Content. Toward then end of The Washington Post article came these paragraphs:

One move that Bezos might take at the outset is to end the paper’s new online subscription program, which limits how many stories readers can access without paying for a subscription, according to Stone, a journalist who has covered Amazon for more than 14 years.

“What is less customer-focused than a pay wall?” he asked. “You’re making it harder for people to read your story at the same time that there’s an abundance of competition.”

Now, I think they are on to something.  Of course, these paragraphs still haven’t contemplated the use of my idea exactly, but they do comprehend what is the problem with paywalls.  I expected Google would be the one to implement my ideas, but I see that Amazon is another company that has all the necessary technology.

It will be exciting to see whether or not The Washington Post company or Amazon will become a major seller of micropayment subscription plans that give the reader access to a wide assortment of articles from many newspapers and magazines.

This article and video from Time, How Silicon Valley is Hollowing Out the Economy (And Stealing From You To Boot), is more important than the silly headline might indicate.  You get a small sense of the import from the video below.

You get a little different perspective from the written article. Here is a key snippet.

But Lanier is asking us to stop and examine the economy we’re allowing to be created around us. If automation will subsume most of what we consider to be work, how will we spend our days, and how will we divy the resources created by the machines? [emphasis added] It’s likely too early to come up with the solutions to such problems yet, but it will almost certainly involve the government. Government is the tool through which we set the rules and boundaries of markets. In a world where the most valuable assets are virtual, politics will play an increasingly important role.

Ultimately, Lanier envisages a future where we would retain ownership of our virtual selves, the content we produce online, and the incremental improvements we make — passively or actively — to the products created by powerful companies. Some sort of universal micropayment infrastructure would be necessary to allow capital to flow to and from each player in the economy. Setting up this infrastructure will be a monumental undertaking for sure, but as Lanier points out, no more monumental than the infrastructures that have already been created.

I never imagined how the concept I proposed in my previous post, Monetizing Internet Content could be extended to cover this grander societal issue. Of course, there is much more than just micropayments that has to be invented to turn this problem into a grand opportunity.

The article by Matt Taibbi Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital is the one mentioned in my previous post Matt Taibbi: The Secret to Mitt Romney’s Fortune? Greed, Debt and Forcing Others to Foot the Bill.

Sometimes it is hard to find a quote that really captures the essence of the article so that the reader will be enticed to follow the link to the article.  In this case, Matt Taibbi has provided just what I am looking for.

But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

I know that the real Romney fans will not be able to process this information.  I just hope that there are enough voters whose minds are still open.

Perhaps we can turn Mitt Romney’s prominence on the political stage to good use.  If people start to understand how he made his fortune, there might be a great enough outcry to make these practices illegal.   It seems to me that it is against the law already for a person to declare bankruptcy just after taking steps to hide assets from the bankruptcy judge.  Since Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, I don’t understand how he gets away with stripping assets from a company, raiding pension funds, borrowing money in the company’s name, and then putting the company into bankruptcy.  Certainly any bankruptcy judge should be able to see the fraud that was committed and insist that the stolen assets should be reclaimed for the benefit of the people from whom the money was stolen.

Maybe instead of going to the White House, Mitt Romney will go to jail. If any of the Republican favorite “Three strikes and you are out” laws get applied, Romney could get a life sentence as a habitual criminal.

I hadn’t finished reading the article when I picked out the quote above. I am still making my way through the article and the quotable paragraphs keep piling up. I hardly know which one to choose. Here is another, and I am not sure either of these are the best ones.

This business model wasn’t really “helping,” of course – and it wasn’t new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what’s known as the “bust-out,” in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company’s credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. “It’s the bust-out,” one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. “That’s all it is.”

Ok, Ifinally finished all 5 pages of the article, and I will leave you with the concluding paragraph.

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

Of course it is up to you to decide whether or not to pay to support this particular news organization. As I have stated on this blog before (see Monetizing Internet Content), I would prefer a micropayment model.