By Vince Carducci, December 29th, 2010 
Vince Carducci is a doctorial candidate in sociology at the New School. In his post, he highlights an important development in trade policies–one that was ignored by the mainstream Western press.
Brazil is fast setting the pace for both developed and developing nations by declaring itself the world’s first “Fair Trade” nation, an announcement that comes on the heels of the election of its first woman president. Scholars and advocates have taken note. But while Dilma Rousseff’s election has been reported, the Fair Trade story has gone unnoticed in the mainstream Western media.
On November 17, President Luis Ignacio “Lula” da Silva, whose tenure ends at the end of this year, signed a decree formally establishing a National System of Fair Trade. At the same time, he initiated a national business incubator network to encourage grassroots economic development. The actions continue the evolution begun in 2004 with the establishment within the Ministry of Work and Employment of the National Secretary of Solidarity Economics to liaise with federal government bureaus, local municipalities, and civil society organizations in developing policies and programs that foster economic and political equity and social inclusion in Brazil.
What is “Fair Trade?”
To better understand this event, one must distinguish between the concepts of Fair Trade and solidarity economics. Fair Trade is more commonly known to American consumers and entails a specific set of exchange practices. These include: pricing floors, living wages, long-term financing guarantees and purchasing agreements, profit sharing, community reinvestment, and the like, the costs of which account for the extra two bits or so one pays at the local coffeehouse for an “ethically sourced” cup of cappuccino.
Fair Trade is sometimes called alternative trade because it seeks to circumvent prevailing market transactions, especially those espoused under neo-liberalism and the process of globalization. For reformers like Joseph Stiglitz, Fair Trade is a viable model for international development in that it advances “trade not aid” as the solution to growing global inequality. Yet Fair Trade has also been criticized as a new form of dependency, tying the livelihoods of Third World producers . . .
Read more: Brazil Leads the Pack on “Fair Trade” Policies
By Rachel Sherman, December 9th, 2010
Rachel Sherman is a sociologist at the New School. Her specific field of study is social class and service work.
Last week, the legislation known as the “Domestic Workers Bill of Rights” took effect in New York State, having been signed on August 31 by Governor David Paterson. The existence and passage of this bill is due primarily to several years of organizing by Domestic Workers United (DWU), an organization of nannies and housecleaners in New York City.
 DWU offers computer literacy and child care training to its members, helps protect workers against abusive employers, and has produced a report on domestic employment, “Home is Where the Work Is,” based on original research. Their main policy effort, however, has been campaigning for the passage of this bill, which will affect over 200,000 workers in the state.
The law includes the following provisions: The right to overtime pay (at time-and-a-half) after 40 hours of work in a week, or 44 hours for workers who live in their employer’s home; a day of rest (24 hours) every seven days, or overtime pay if the worker agrees to work on that day; three paid days of rest each year after one year of work for the same employer; protection under New York State Human Rights Law, and the creation of a special cause of action for domestic workers who suffer sexual or racial harassment.
Although these demands are not especially radical (more controversial provisions, such as paid holidays and two weeks notice prior to termination, were removed from the final version), this law will materially influence the lives of many workers. Perhaps equally important, the law is symbolically significant, for a number of reasons. First, domestic workers have traditionally been excluded from labor legislation, beginning with the New Deal laws covering collective bargaining and minimum wage and hour regulations.
Although over the years some laws (such as those covering the minimum wage) have been extended to apply to domestic workers, their work remains largely unregulated. Thus the bill, which also mandated investigation into the feasibility of granting collective bargaining rights to these workers, is a step toward establishing nannies . . .
Read more: Domestic Workers Gain Visibility, Legitimacy
By William Milberg, November 22nd, 2010 
President Obama’s goal of “doubling exports over the next ten years” seems like a win-win in that it will boost employment and reduce the troubling U.S. trade deficit. At first glance, his position makes sense politically and economically. But there is a problem. Because of the globalization of production that U.S. companies have championed over the past 20 years, exports from sectors other than agriculture require a much higher level of imports than ever before. As a result, the job creation from expanding exports is much lower than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.
In economic terms, the President’s goal of doubling exports makes sense. Foreign demand is expected to be the fastest growing component of U.S. demand in the coming years. And other, domestic, sources of economic growth are less promising than they have been in the past.
We can’t consume our way out of our problems. Consumption demand is going through a long-term adjustment from the build up of consumer debt over the past ten years. Private investment also is not a likely singular basis for recovery. It stopped being the most dynamic source of U.S. economic growth years ago. With fear of a double-dip recession, lots of built-up excess capacity and still inexplicably tight credit, private investment spending is unlikely to be a driver of US economic growth. Government spending has been politically excluded by the bi-elections. Federal spending has grown rapidly over the period of economic crisis, but calls for deficit reduction mean that the kinds of increases we have seen in government spending over the last few years may not be politically feasible in the future.
That leaves the export sector. With the dramatic growth rates of the emerging markets — most prominently Brazil, India and China, — the potential for growth in U.S. exports is considerable.
A rapid doubling of exports also makes sense politically, since it relies on the spending power of foreigners not the U.S. government, and in this sense is a “free lunch.” Moreover, if export growth is blocked by tariffs or exchange rate manipulation, the source of the failure lies outside U.S. . . .
Read more: Will Increased Exports Lift the Economy?
By William Milberg, November 18th, 2010 
While January 2009 marked the inauguration of a new President of the United States, it was also a virtual coronation of John Maynard Keynes as the king of modern economics.
For decades, the economics profession attacked Keynesianism, first for lacking a theory of inflation and then for an insufficient appreciation of individual rationality in decisions by investors and employers. Robert Lucas, Thomas Sargent, and other radical conservatives ruled the roost, arguing that markets work best when fully deregulated, that labor market protections reduce employment, and that economic growth is driven by a series of exogenous shocks. Milton Friedman’s influence was felt more than that of Keynes.
But for the past two years Keynesianism has served as the scientific foundation for the ideas of today’s most celebrated economists, both conservative and liberal. From Martin Feldstein to Joseph Stiglitz, from Glen Hubbard to Paul Krugman, all major economists have supported Keynesian demand management in the form of large fiscal stimulus to reverse our economic decline. Even today, it is only the far right of the economics profession that has backed away from this view in preference to the politically popular notion that deficits should be eliminated in the short run. The embrace of Keynes is a welcome development. He brought deep insight about the nature of capitalism and especially the need for adequate demand (as opposed simply to downwardly flexible wages) to generate fully employment.
The Keynesian concern is the short-run stabilization of employment and income. The current situation poses a longer-term set of challenges, rooted in the structural changes that have plagued the economy both during and prior to the crisis in 2008: stagnant wages and a huge buildup of household debt, the disappearance of manufacturing jobs and a persistent trade deficit, a bloated and destabilizing role for finance, a reduced rate of private sector innovation, and heightened economic insecurity. A progressive response to these problems is likely to be more informed by another great social thinker of the 20th century, Karl Polanyi, than by Keynesianism.
![]( "The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi, Amereon </i></strong></em></b>. . .
<p>Read more: <a href=") Making Sense of the Economic Mess
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 15th, 2010 
 I had to make a decision about this blog early on.
Would it be DeliberatelyConsidered.org or DeliberatelyConsidered.com, non-commercial or commercial? I chose the commercial route in the hopes that the blog would be self-sustaining and self-defining as much as possible from the start, and if it grew, if I needed more support in providing a space for serious reflections and exchanges about pressing issues of the day, it wouldn’t cost me and I wouldn’t need to raise funds.
For many people, this decision would be straightforward. For those who are sure that capitalism is the root of all evil, who imagine a systemic alternative to capitalism, in socialism, it’s clear, “.org” is clearly the way to go. For those who see the free market as the answer to all problems, the decision is equally clear. But I am more ambivalent, less sure than such true believers, as I wrote about in an earlier post.
In going commercial, I had in mind an observation Russell Jacoby made in his book, The Last Intellectuals. He mourned the substitution of academic life for the culture of urbane intellectuals, the culture of university cafeterias for café culture, academic journals for the small magazines that sustained such intellectuals as Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy and others like them.
Jacoby celebrated a world in which people actually could make a living from critical writing. They had a freedom and independence that supported a style of intellectual life that appears to be a thing of the past, a lost golden age as Jacoby sees it.
While I am not so nostalgic, I thought that a commercial blog may provide a space for a revival of the sort of critical culture he and I admire. I would create a space for critical reflection that was not dependent on academic priorities but upon public concerns, of everyday, in the Kitchen Table, of interdisciplinary scholarly concern, in the Scholars’ Lounge, of general intellectual and public concern, at Joe’s Café, and in the emerging but not completely formed world of global public discussion, in Global Perspectives. The spontaneity and flexibility of the market and . . .
Read more: “.Org” or “.Com”?
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