Dean Baker - A Competitive Dollar: The Missing Link in President Obama’s Manufacturing Agenda

In his State of the Union Address last week, President Obama announced a renewed commitment to manufacturing in the United States. While the commitment to rebuilding the country’s manufacturing base is welcome – manufacturing has historically been a source of good-paying jobs for workers without college degrees – he unfortunately left the most important item on the list off the agenda.

President Obama failed to commit himself to restoring the competitiveness of dollar as part of his agenda for bringing back manufacturing jobs. The value of the dollar really has to be front and central in any effort to restore U.S. competitiveness since it is by far the most important factor determining the relative cost of U.S. goods compared with goods produced elsewhere.

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http://www.nationofchange.org/competitive-dollar-missing-link-president-obama-s-manufacturing-agenda-1328028595

Richard Heinberg - What We Are For

By Richard Heinberg

19 November, 2011

Post Carbon Institute

http://countercurrents.org/heinberg191111.htm

Every activist engaged in combating human-caused climate change or specific elements of the current energy economy knows that the work is primarily oppositional. It could hardly be otherwise; for citizens who care about ecological integrity, a sustainable economy, and the health of nature and people, there is plenty to oppose—biomass logging in Massachusetts, mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia, natural gas drilling in Wyoming, poorly sited solar developments in California, river-killing dams in Chile and Brazil, and new nuclear and coal plants around the globe.

These and many other fights against destructive energy projects are crucial, but they can be draining and tend to focus the conversation in negative terms. Sometimes it’s useful to reframe the discourse about ecological limits and economic restructuring in positive terms, that is, about what we’re for. The following list is not comprehensive, but beauty and biodiversity are fundamentals that the energy economy must not diminish. And energy literacy, conservation, relocalization of economic systems, and family planning are necessary tools to achieve our vision of a day when resilient human communities are imbedded in healthy ecosystems, and all members of the land community have space enough to flourish.

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Jeff Madrick - It’s Wages, Stupid

Thursday 17 November 2011

by: Jeff Madrick, New Deal 2.0

http://www.truth-out.org/its-wages-stupid/1321561873

By focusing on supply, economists and policymakers have lost sight of the fact that driving down wages destroys demand.

For a few decades now, American economic policy has focused on keeping inflation low, assuming that the natural rate of unemployment is fairly high. In general, that has led to stagnating wages. Family income today is at 1990s levels. Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages are at levels they last reached in the 1960s. The wage share has been falling.

Some economists claim inequality is the bigger issue due to runaway income at the top. My own view is that a better way to understand America’s dilemma to focus on stagnation for the broad middle and bottom. As I note in my latest piece [4] for the New York Review of Books, the incomes at the top, which account for most of the inequality, are made in finance — much of which is a game Wall Street plays with itself. For this brief piece, I will put that issue aside.

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