More or Less: The Luxury of Enough

While our global leaders figure out how to make all those swell twisty charts in the news go away, we rely on our news sources to make sense of what is essentially senseless. Jared Bernstein argues that the nifty chart in the Sunday NYT isn't quite accurate because it is not gross debt that's the issue, but debt that's held by the public. Who is the public? You and me. EU meets on Wednesday. They were supposed to meet on Sunday, but nobody could agree on who gets to stuff the debt down their throats, so it's back to trying to make Italy do it. Or Germany. Or us. High school home economics teaches what you owe cannot exceed what you bring in. The world has been ignoring that simple accounting rule for decades. We always want more. Shareholders want more profit, so the marketeers shove more consumables at us. And we consume. But we still want more. Upgrade your phone, cable, wardrobe, car with a free trial offer. Buying an ecofriendly tshirt is not responsible consumerism; self-abnegation is. Government and corporations aren't people, despite what the coneheads on the U.S. Supreme Court may believe. Governments and corporations have been free trial offering us into this precarious global economy. But we are the global market; we live in the global marketplace. Unscramble those twisty charts in the newspapers and on the internet, and it comes down to us. We drank the MORE cocktails, as my father says. On the rocks.

Secretary of State Clinton APEC Speeches

The U.S. hosted, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chaired, the first APEC High Level Policy Dialogue on Women and the Economy in San Francisco this past weekend. A transcript of her speech is here. In March, 2011, Clinton spoke at the first Senior Officials Meeting for the APEC Forum. That speech is here. Both speeches are chockablock with words like productivity, workers, capital, economies. Both are about wealth accumulation. "Ensuring that economic engagement delivers results to the American people is our top domestic priority. It is a top foreign policy priority as well, as well as a personal priority." Whether trade agreements forged in the last decades meet this triumvirate priority is debatable. Will KORUS add 70,000 new jobs in the U.S.A.? To be fair, I clouded both speeches separately: women the most used word in Friday's speech, but absent completely in the March speech. Economies, economic, growth, productivity were equally represented in both speeches however, noting that the speech on Friday was about women and the global economy pertinent to APEC. I understand these are economic speeches, but women are not measured by their productivity, which is the core message of the Friday speech: engage women and increase global output. What are the priorities of women globally? I doubt economies, trade, businesses and nations would be penultimate. Perhaps clean water, education, safety, freedom, healthcare would be. Clinton has said before that we must include women leaders and women activists to succeed. How we measure success in a global paradigm that is not primarily gauged on wealth and earth-ravaging growth for no reason other than to accumulate is up to the women of the world.