Rick's BLOG

The Death of American Capitalism:

2010-10-04T17:02:00.004-05:00

I am not at all sure these days what has become of American Capitalism. It certainly is “Not your Father’s Oldsmobile.” Today the American capitalist wants and gets huge flow of money from the American Government. This in the form of farm price supports for everything from corn to hogs. Add to this the unpardonable boon by failure to even include a clause compensating the federal government for royalty payments on oil removed from public lands. Now we are hearing a drum beat of tax reduction for the wealthy as part of the drive to extend the Bush tax cuts.

No ladies and gentlemen these are not the actions of Capitalists. These are the actions of hogs at the feeding trough; with their front paws in the feeding trough. When the federal government bailed out every single Wall Street bank including several investment banks these too became capitalists in name only. The days of JP Morgan attempting to single handedly staving off the specter of a market crash went up in a puff of smoke and like magic bankers as capitalists vanished.

Today we have large Wall Street banks that accepted truly vast amounts of taxpayer dollars throwing American citizens out of houses bought in the housing bubble financed risk free by the same federal government that bought bogus loans from these banks using Freddy Mack as a piggy bank. Enough is enough. I think it is high time for a roasting a few hogs. Firstly the inflated rate of pay for these male hogs needs to be reduced. Secondly charges need to be brought in federal court holding those responsible for the massive malfeasance accountable. Thirdly the average American citizen who suffered because of the recession and reduced market needs to be provided with bridging loans in order that their ownership rights are preserved in their homes. The funding for these loans would come from not renewing the Bush Era tax cuts.

There will be great outcry about socialism. And I expect that this outcry will come largely from the political right. What these folks fail to realize is their model of capitalism has somehow morphed into a pig grunting and squealing as he gorgeous himself on corn mash provided by the American taxpayer. Let the outcry begin because that way we will know the hogs have scattered and it only remains to capture them and then the barbeque can begin.

Republican Mistakes:

2010-09-07T14:17:00.005-05:00

While most of the pundits think the Republicans will do well in the upcoming elections it may be the last time that will be true. You may ask why I should say something that sounds so foolish. Let’s consider the basic facts about America. America is basically a democracy. With very few exceptions the party that gets the most votes wins the election. I admit that there can be slight irregularities such as happened in 2000 where the candidate with fewer votes was declared the winner.

The election of 2004 was largely fear driven. And Americans hate to changes horses in midstream. Recall the war in Iraq was only 18 months old and hopes were high that America would be viewed as coming to the aid of the Iraqis who had received such brutal treatment from their own leadership. So the Republican president was re-elected. What followed can only be described as a receipt for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

While there may have been no weapons of mass destruction there was no shortage of weapons of small group destruction. Rocket propelled grenades and AK-47s were everywhere. Sadly the war was well led by the generals but the peace that followed was totally botched. First we dismissed the entire army and had to start over from scratch. Then we mocked and tortured political prisoners. The century’s long animosity between Shiite and Sunni was used to leverage our position, the hope that we could play one group off against the other resulted in both groups hating America.

The astounding thing is that none of the leadership saw these errors for what they were. You can see that today with the brouhaha over the Islamic cultural site that will be built 2 blocks from where the Twin Towers once stool. Rather than saying America is the land where all religions are free to worship as they wish; protest marches have been held. Rather than defending our history of opportunity for all some on the political Right are now planning on burning copies of the Islamic holy book the Quran. Think how offended we Christians would be if the Bible were burned. But the malaise goes far deeper. Some on the right want to repeal the 14th Amendment that gives citizenship to all children born in America. Then there is the Arizona law giving the police the right to demand citizenship papers of those citizens stopped for whatever reason. Thoughts of Nazi Gestapo certainly went thru my mind.

America demographics are becoming obvious. The Hispanic part of our population is growing ever larger. If we continue to alienate sectors of America these errors in judgment will result in losses in elections. Unless the Republican Party can moderate and moderate quickly they may well become the minority party regardless of what happens in the upcoming elections.

The American Dream and Social Justice:

2010-08-28T04:02:00.003-05:00

Today marks 47 years since Martin Luther King said I have a dream. He said those words before the memorial to the president that had the power and the rectitude to actually free a race and by so doing make the words of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution mean exactly what they so clearly said. Martin Luther King sought social justice for all Americans. Think about that, for if injustice is permitted it does not harm just those who are unjustly treated. It in fact harms us all.

Some people will tell you that social justice is a myth. These people are wrong. While the law cannot make you love your fellow man the law damn well can tell you that you may not lynch your fellow man. I have for years heard the phrase you cannot legislate morality. Perhaps the spirit of justice cannot be imparted to the law. But what you may not do can be delineated. Those that would ignore this dual nature of the law are overlooking the true majesty of the law.

In some ways the law is a sewer in that it attempts to redress those things done by criminal elements against honest citizens. But more than that the law attempts to limit how far a powerful citizen may go when abusing a weaker citizen. That may sound like a shocking statement. And it is. The law does not say one citizen may not abuse another it says that abuse may not go beyond a certain point.

To better see these distinctions consider the payment of interest on borrowed money. Most Americans do not consider the charging of interest against the law. But most Americans would feel that an interest rate of 10% per month excessive. So it becomes a matter of degree not the thing itself. Interest is okay but excessive interest is not okay. The question becomes who says what is and what is not excessive. Those folks who are what I call raw capitalists would say that the folks making the loan have the right to charge any amount they wish. Those with more social scruples would argue that an external agency should regulate to insure the rate charged was not excessive.

The stated purpose of the American system of government is to insure to all citizens equality of opportunity to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These general statements are implemented by a series of statutes that regulate how citizens may treat each other. The most basic of the statutes governing citizen and government interaction is of course the Bill of Rights. Think of the Bill of Rights in the same way you think of the Ten Commandments. The major difference being the Ten Commandments came 3,000 years earlier.

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Immigration and Mosque Building:

2010-08-23T09:16:00.004-05:00

I have watched two major issues in this silly season of politics. Yes the month of August is referred to by me and by many as the political silly season. There are serious issues to consider even though they are being raised by people that I consider not all that serious. Let’s turn this discussion on its head and see if that puts a different perspective on it.

Let us assume that the state of New Mexico tomorrow passes a law that forbids the construction of a house of worship by any religion that is not Christian. I wonder if there would be marches in support of the governor of New Mexico? I rather think not. Or at least I hope the silliness of such a law would be readily perceived. You see federal law over-rides state law. Further a state statute must not conflict with the basic tenants and sprit of our federal constitution. You do not need a Supreme Court decision to decide if a law is constitutional. Any federal judge can strike down a statute passed by any state legislature. Free expression of any religion is guaranteed by the federal constitution, no if’s ands or butts.

Control of America’s international borders and enforcement of America’s citizenship requirements has always been a federal responsibility. When certain American companies chartered busses to bring Mexican citizens illegally across America’s southern border I heard nary a whimper of protest. When drug dealers shipped American arms to their suppliers in Mexico once again the silence was such that you could have heard a shell casing or a pin drop.

Now however 22,000,000 American’s are out of work. Now a minimum wage job seems far more attractive than it did 30 months ago. Now the arms and bullets we have been shipping south to support America’s drug habit are being used to kill law enforcement agents in towns and cities with in rifle shot range of American citizens. We are not talking rockets such as are used in Gaza by Hamas to attack peaceful Israelis. Here we are talking about small arms fire that has the potential of killing innocent Americans. Why is there no protest march decrying the sale and shipment of arms to Mexican drug kingpins.

All of this is happening against a backdrop of members of congress decrying the president’s action to restrict unsafe drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico following the most massive oil spill since Saddam Hussein set fire to the oil wells in Kuwait. In fact the corporation responsible for this latest oil related disaster has been previously found to be negligent in the operation of their chemical plant in Texas as well as negligent in their operation of the Alaska pipeline. Yet the fact that a 20 mile wide section of the Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida devoted to fishing and tourism has been effectively demolished goes largely ignored.

Now do you understand why it is called the silly season?

Green Energy and VAT:

2010-08-10T23:05:00.009-05:00

I have for some time been advocating that America pursue a stronger green energy policy. I am adding a new leg to the stool. That leg is a value added tax (VAT).

Basically a value added tax is a tax that is levied only when a manufacturer increased the value of a product and then sells that product. This is in contrast to the current system of not collecting a tax until the item is sold to the consumer. The nice part of a value added tax is that all other nations tax this way. Because America does not use a value added tax foreign goods enter America essentially tax free. However goods made in America are taxed when imported into the country where we wish to sell that good.

The result is that American goods cost more in say China than Chinese goods of equal value cost in America due only to difference in tax systems. This is not a level playing field and means that America continues to be at a competitive disadvantage. We must change the largely ineffective corporate tax structure where for example large oil companies pay no taxes on billions of dollars of profits. The fairest way to do this is to collect taxes on the value added to a product such as gasoline as it moves thru the refining process that changes it from crude oil to gasoline. Value has been added and that value should be taxed.

Collecting taxes in this way will cause industry to pay their fair share of the cost of maintaining America’s infrastructure as well as funding items of nation concern such as national defense and national security. But more to the point it will permit America to tax imports in the same way that other nations tax American goods entering their markets. No longer will goods made in China or Japan enjoy an advantage in price due to an imbalanced system of taxation.

If America can develop low cost energy sources and a balanced taxation system who knows how many manufacturing jobs will flow back to America. We almost surely can reverse the trend of the past 20 years where jobs were lost to manufacturing in places other than America. Once again the American worker could be proud of his job and his country and even his company. Once again American’s would have jobs doing things other than making Subway sandwiches and MacDonald’s hamburgers.

Creating Jobs | The Jobs Crisis

Water Water Everywhere:

2010-08-02T18:27:00.010-05:00

... And not a drop fit to drink, so goes the old doggerel I learned as a child. Today it was better said by William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

For truly these days much that passes as political comment is nothing more than sound and fury and signifies nothing. I for one am sick and tired of facile lies told by self-serving political leaders who can see no further than the next election. Or the next attempt by them to cover their asses or feather their nest at the expense of their fellow Americans who are suffering.

Yes I am tired of the dictatorship of wealth and privilege riding rough-shod over the working men and women of America. Every single statistic I read points to the fact that the rich are getting richer and the middle class is being decimated while the poor in America daily slip further and further behind. Folks let me tell you the rich are getting rich at a vastly more rapid pace than the rest of American. For most, life is not improving to any measureable extent and is indeed declining in almost every aspect of quality of life.

The first task of a problem solver is to realize that there is a problem. Trust me my friends this is not another false alarm. America and our way of life is being threatened by the very people who have most benefited by the opportunities offered by America. The foxes are amongst the chickens and no one seems to realize that the foxes are not the good guys if you are a chicken. Chicken or fox? Which are you because foxes do not breed chickens and unless the chickens get their act together we will soon have no chicken house to call home. All that will be left is blood and feathers and foxes snarling at one another asking where all the chickens went to.

Do we Americans really believe the drivel being dished up by Sarah Palin and Jon Kyl?

Repeal 14th Ammendment | Sarah Palin "Moma Grizzlies"

Use More Color:

2010-07-24T07:33:00.006-05:00

I have watched with increasing dismay what I call the dumbing of America. To put a slightly different twist on this let me say it this way. American minds are being encouraged to think in fewer and fewer colors. I say encouraged rather than taught because teachers if they truly are teachers want their students to think in more colors not fewer colors. So here is an easy test for all Americans: If a commentator or pundit or elected official or someone running for office is encouraging you to think in fewer colors or cannot express themselves using a full palette of colors simply withdraw or withhold your support of such people.

America has always been a country founded on diversity. We were founded by 13 colonies that differed widely in not only their approach to god but in their approach to life. These differences led to problems but the differences led also to a society that was open to new ideas and new ways of thinking.

We have an American today who thinks coining new words is the same as coining new ideas. In fact she has compared herself to none other than the immortal bard William Shakespeare. A single act of one of Shakespeare’s plays contains more colors than all of the tweets this person has ever posted. Truly here we can see the dumbing of America in full bloom as it were. Sadly the flower is gray and will be hard put to attract any followers other than those that think in monochromatic terms.

I would encourage all of my countrymen to think in more colors not in fewer colors. Ockham’s razor always applies but not to the point of exclusion of concepts. Nor should Ockham’s razor be used to shave the corners and make a concept fit a narrow minded bigot.

William of Ockham

The 4th of July:

2010-07-05T07:56:00.004-05:00

America’s birthday has been 234 years ago now yet to me it still seems new. I was struck by the message from our first black president’s wife. It was about the families of those serving America in the military. Peace loving people like me tend to forget that America’s military strength is in fact what made and what keeps us free.

To my grandson who was born many years after our country was born I say thank you Marine for defending my liberty. Thank you and those who served with you and before you.

To all that serve or have served or will serve in America’s military may I say thank you. Thank you for doing your job and doing it well. And to the rest of us I can only remind you that these young men and women stand watch over all that we hold dear. Treat each of them with the respect they have so rightly earned.

Dying Whales and Failed States:

2010-06-27T09:55:00.008-05:00

When the American colonies broke away from English rule in 1776 a document stating why we were doing this was written. This document called the Declaration of Independence has become famed the world over. The basic premise of the document is that Americans can better govern the land and people than the members of the English Parliament. While the words of the declaration struck sparks in the minds of Americans and inspired other people to change their governments the Articles of Confederation which became the blue print for governance of the 13 separate colonies simply did not work.

America was in danger of becoming what we today call a failed state. Rather than failing some of the best minds gathered in Philadelphia and produced a new document known as the Constitution of the United States of America. This document replaced the failed articles of confederation which simply was not working. One would think that the articles would disappear and they did vanish from the scene only to reappear when the American confederacy was established in 1861.

The reason for the unrest which became the American Civil War was a conflict between how American citizens are defined and what rights are to be granted to these citizens. In 1861 part of the country wanted to continue the enslavement of some American citizens. Another part of America wanted to change how these slaves were treated and change the rights that they held as citizens. This conflict had roots in labor vs. management as well as basic citizen rights. After 4 bloody years, in which more Americans died than in any other war, stillness descended over the battlefields and the dying stopped. The American experiment in the breakaway south was ended by force of arms.

The ideas that led to secession did not fade away. Many in the American South continued to believe that some citizens had the right to deny citizenship to other citizens. If these rights could be denied then these citizens could be exploited and wages withheld. This would of course lead to the re-enslavement of these citizens. While the fight over this issue was largely resolved when Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shadows of this conflict remain. Today these ideas of abuse of power are being applied to the new citizens coming across America’s southern border. These abuses are again causing deep divisions in the American body politic.

As a background we have an oil well leaking millions upon millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The problem is no longer dying whales but dying shrimp, oysters and crabs. Dying wet lands will not kill just the creatures that live and breed in these marshes. The death of the marshes may well lead to the failure of America as a viable state. Several storms like Katrina and Ike could this time utterly destroy cities like New Orleans and Houston. I do not think America could withstand such a loss without the central government undergoing radical changes.

Disaster in the Gulf

Rosie Blog:

2010-04-06T14:52:00.003-05:00

You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed energy company officials to dictate energy policy.

You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn't get mad when the PATRIOT Act got passed.

You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn't get mad when we spent over 600 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.

You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

You didn't get mad when we gave a 900 billion dollar tax break to the rich.

You didn't get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

You finally got mad when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you, but helping other Americans...oh hell no.

See: http://www.rosie.com

Mental Acuity:

2010-03-29T18:59:00.004-06:00

Often we are given an eye test to evaluate how well we see. Sadly there is no quick test that will gage how well we think. Such a test is badly needed. Because the process of thinking is more complex than the process of seeing an easy and quick test may not be possible. There are some measures that might give an indication however.

When I was in the Boy Scouts decades ago I can remember how confusing a simple magnetic compass was. The major or cardinal points were of course were fairly simple. The minor points were more difficult but those too were mastered. So at this point the compass had been divided into four sectors and each of those divided in half. The end result was eight reference points. Thinking of this today I realized that approaching a compass this way was how we as humans learn just about anything. First our learning and knowledge concerns large sectors. As we learn more we focus on smaller and smaller fractions of the whole compass.

After learning about the cardinal points and sub points of a compass I learned how to use a compass to orient a map in the same direction that I was looking. Then how to locate land marks on the map and relate those map marks to things I could actually see like radio masts and mountains. More study taught me how to site towards those land marks and from those observations find where I was on the map. My mental acuity was becoming better. I could think more clearly about the process as a whole and understand how powerful this entire process was.

The point of this essay is that knowing the cardinal points of a compass does not mean that you can use a compass to the extent that an expert can. Even knowing how to read a map does not teach you about compensating for compass errors introduced by the fact magnetic north is not true north. So there is more to learn before you can trust your life to an instrument like a compass. You see the nice thing about a compass is that it will point to the north even when it is dark or foggy or both dark and foggy. If you are sailing a boat and you cannot tell which way to point the nose of your boat in order to safely return to harbor a compass can quite literally save your life, but only if you know a lot about how to use it. Surface knowledge is not enough. You must know much more about how to use this tool of guidance. Let us pray that our leaders have an accurate inner compass to guide our nation safely into the future. Let those with mental acuity lead us. Let us follow the best and the brightest not the ones who add to the fog with bigotry and hate.

The Law is Passed:

2010-03-22T13:05:00.001-06:00

America simply must now begin to address many of the issues that have been ignored while the battle over health care was being fought. To me this is perhaps the single greatest reason to not fight wars, other than the cost in blood and treasure. When a war is fought a country or an army loses focus of everything except the war itself. This is true of America as a nation and Americans as a people. What was unprecedented about this last congressional vote was that it was along party lines to the extent that not a single republican voted for this measure.

Now that it is done I would like to remind every republican that while Abe Lincoln was the man who kept America a single nation, the way the Republican Party treated the south following the Civil war was simply atrocious. Financial rape and pillage is exactly what occurred, and does not overstate the events at all. To say that this was done over the objections of the more moderate republicans is also true. What ever happened to moderate republicans anyway? All of those who sought compromise and moderation seem to have been swept away in the rage of battle.

It is I think time for cooler heads to prevail. Far past time some would argue. So this time let us follow Mr. Lincoln’s advice and bind up the wounds of this our nation. Let us permit the angels of our better nature to again take flight. Let the America that has for so long lifted her lamp beside the door to freedom and justice once again beckon those that seek to escape the oppression of governmental intolerance and bigotry. Let us all help to shine a light into a world that is increasingly dark and where people huddle breathing the fetid air of injustice. Let us again show the way towards a brighter tomorrow, for these are the very reasons for America’s existence.

Saving Daylight:

2010-03-13T07:00:00.001-06:00

Some phrases and terms are so astounding that they simply take my breath away. Free lunch, the goodness of mankind, and the Easter bunny are other examples of this strange way of thinking. Let’s take a closer look at daylight savings time and try to discover how we think about it and why it is disconcerting to so many.

To better understand daylight savings we need to understand what measuring time is all about and to do that involves understanding a bit of science. I am going to use some approximate numbers here so let’s not get upset if the math is not sound down to a gnat’s eyebrow. The earth is approximately 24,000 miles around at its fattest point. That imaginary line around the earth is known as the equator. Most of us have never experienced the equator or lived anywhere near it. Increasingly today world commerce is in both the northern and southern parts of the sphere that we call the earth and so in fact more people cross this line than ever before.

Most of us can understand what I have said so far. Now the interesting part starts. We all know that the day is composed of 24 time segments we call hours. By worldwide convention there is what is called local noon. At this point the sun is at its highest point above the horizon. At the equator this high point always divides days that are composed of the same number of hours of daylight and darkness. Days do not get longer in the summer and shorter in the winter at the equator. Year round the number of hours of darkness of night exactly equals the number of hours of light of the day. What is less obvious is that there are no seasons at the equator. There is no summer and winter no spring and fall. Each day of the year is the same. Each month of the year is the same. Each decade of the century is the same. It is as if time stops at the equator. Which of course is not true, what can stop is the incentive to write about days that seem to repeat endlessly.

As I said things are more complex than they appear and so it is with the seasons. The earth is tilted on its axis. What that means is the center of rotation (the imaginary line thru the center of the earth that forms an axis of rotation) is not straight up and down to the rays coming from the sun. This axis is tilted. Because it is tilted the parts above and below the equator receive different amounts of sunlight on any given day. Consider that the shortest day of the year is December 21 in the northern half of the globe. In the southern half of the globe however this is the longest day of the year. If you are thinking it would be the first day summer you are correct. The reason we change the time of the local noon in the summer is so that we more closely track the real local noon. That is we compensate for the fact that our clocks are not providing sound information.

To bring this whole discussion back to politics my question is “Why can’t we adjust our attitude towards political time keeping that also no longer reflects local noon?” Why do we cling to a way of telling time that is clearly wrong? The answer of course is that we are creatures of habit not intellect.

Bloom Box

2010-02-22T06:36:00.031-06:00

Energy generation is at the very foundation of any economic and political entity. I am including this essay on this page because energy is so vital. I have largely excluded technology from these pages other than as a passing reference. My focus was on political and economic issues. There are of course always technology issues. I did not wish to focus on those because I tend to become very passionate about technology. I am in this essay bringing technology to center stage.

Frankly I doubt that this device is any more realistic than was cold fusion. That said I do believe that we must continue to search for some method of accomplishing the generation of large amounts of energy without a continuous outpouring of waste gas that contaminates the atmosphere. Failing that we must concentrate on technology that removes the spent carbon (in the form of CO2) from the atmosphere in a more rapid cycle than is accomplished with living plants. Here algae farms seem to offer the most hope of converting CO2 into something more useful like bio diesel. But once again we are years away from a solution.

Rather than repeat information already presented I will give a link:
60 Minutes | Bloom Energy | Transmission Line Losses | Ziff Davis

Some other ideas to reduce consumption.
Self Tinting Windows

Something that has been overlooked in this discussion is transmission line losses. Adding to the loss from transmission is the simple cost of maintaining the lines themselves. If this technology can be implemented the overall cost of supplying electricity to every home in America will definitely decrease. Add to this the increased security of such a delivery system and the argument for these devices becomes almost compelling.

It is Time to Roll up Your Sleeves:

2010-02-17T16:24:00.003-06:00

My father was a well-dressed man. I remember picking dad up at the train station when he would return from New York City. The first thing dad would do was to change from his business suit into what he called his casual outfit. Casual to my father did not mean jeans. In fact I don’t think I ever saw my father wearing jeans. To dad they were always blue jeans, never just jeans. That simple fact gives you a feel for the properness of my father. Yet my father was a workaholic. I can recall many occasions when dad said let’s get to work. Trust me my father did not mean we would be dilly-dallying. When dad worked it was not a flurry of activity. It was a measured assault on whatever task was at hand.

In the fall we would cut fire wood we had gathered from the beach or split logs we had delivered to the house. Whatever the task it would be proceeded by the phrase let’s roll up our sleeves and just do it. Often that was exactly what we would do. We know what we must do to get America back on track. We must use less and produce more. We must do those jobs that we have traditionally said were so undesirable that they should be performed only by workers considered outcasts. Funny thing about my father was he considered all jobs worthy of his best effort. Not a second hand effort. He insisted that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing well.

I was thinking of my father today and his approach to work. Can we as Americans say we always put out our best effort? I rather think not. Somehow we have lost the ability to roll up our sleeves. We leave a task half undone and then wonder why the work does not satisfy us. We start out with the best of intensions but often it seems we do not give it our best effort and the task is not completed well. My father never declared a job done until the tools were oiled and put away and the work area cleaned up. Dad was a person of order. He was not a neat freak but rather felt that if things were orderly then he had completed the job. He took great pride in whatever he did. Every job from painting to wood splitting had to be done to the best of his and my ability. Even today anything less than my best effort leaves me feeling he would admonish me with his ultimate disapproval which was “you can do better than that.” Yes dad America can do better than that too. So let us roll up our sleeves and get to work fixing America. This time let’s do the job well. Let us do it to the best of our ability. Let us make my father proud.

Failed States and No Cook Rice:

2010-02-09T12:43:00.003-06:00

I read with great interest today about a new strain of rice developed in India. This rice may be made ready to eat by soaking rather than by boiling in water. Now this may seem to be an unimportant development by folks that don’t have a scientific viewpoint. Water you see has a very high specific heat. That is to say it takes quite a bit of heat to raise water to its boiling point. Heat and energy in this example can be used interchangeably. That is to say water requires more energy to be raised to its boiling point than almost any other substance.

Now this fact is not interesting until one connects it with an over populated island like Haiti which just underwent such disastrous earthquakes. Part of the reason that Haiti was so decimated by the earth quakes is because the population of Haiti has cut down most of the trees to make charcoal for cooking. This same thing can be seen to be happening in the poorer parts of Africa. The trees could not hold the land in place when the island was lashed by several hurricanes a few years ago. I will not say this is the only reason Haiti is today experiencing problems. What I am saying is that cooking fires that leave the land barren of trees are an indication of problems that will arise in the future.

I think anyone that does not realize that we have more humans living on the planet than we can safely support has missed the obvious. We are running out of everything including cheap energy. While we lower the overall population and find new sources for energy we simply must actively practice conservation at all levels of society. When we can do that with minimal impact upon those who are currently alive I think we should. I strongly urge that countries that are large energy users help by eating rice that does not require cooking. Of course this assumes a water supply that you do not have to kill the bacteria by boiling. Bacteria in the water supply is of course the other reason one might boil rice.

An Election Lost … a Dream Recalled:

2010-01-21T07:27:00.005-06:00

The seat in the United States Senate so long held by the Kennedy family passed from the Democrats to the Republicans in last Tuesday’s election. It remains to be seen if the dream of greater equality was also passed. For that is really what the election was all about. The analysis showed that the independent voters in Massachusetts went for the Republican candidate by over 60%. These are the same voters that swung both the election in New Jersey and Virginia to Republican candidates last fall.

How did such a thing happen is the question. Was it health care or was it just misguided faith. I feel that the Republican Party does not represent what I wish America to be. So perhaps we should define what it is that Americans want America to be that needs our attention. I want America to remain a land of opportunity where hard work results in social and financial betterment. I oppose slavery because slavery deprives the slave of any chance of improving his status. Why do I raise the issue of slavery you might ask? The reason is simple. I have seen no improvement in the status of the American middle class in the past 15 years. The American middle class in fact has been decimated by frozen wages and job losses and decreased benefits by major corporations.

What exactly is an excessive profit? An excessive profit is when the price of an item consists of more for the owner of the plant producing the item and less for the worker assembling the item. This can be most clearly seen in the factories along the border with Texas. Here 100 feet from America factory girls are paid five dollars a day to work in plants owned by Sony and Samsung. Five dollars a day is what Henry Ford paid his workers in the first decade of the 20th century. It is what I call a slave-wage. In the 1960s an America auto worker earned 25 dollars an hour. Instead of a five dollar day American workers took home 40 times that amount. Recall that this is a wage of only $52,000 per year. Yes I know it is a wage many today would envy. And that is just my point. When we as a people begin to look at wage levels from 50 years ago and think they are better than today something has gone seriously wrong.

The wrongness is not a political issue it is an economic issue you might say. Hog wash politics is all about fairly dividing the profits that a society’s economic system generates. The key word is fairly and here is where political opinion begins to enter the equation. The question is what should be the ratio of salary paid to the corporate employee making the most and the corporate employee making the least. Today that ratio has become very large. I maintain that in fact it has become excessive. The salary of the chief executive officer of Exxon-Mobil is more than 425 times what a newly hired “hand” makes.

A worker bringing home a paycheck looks at his wages as his return on investment. He invests his time at the company working on tasks assigned to him. For doing this he is paid an amount of money. The worker himself has very little say so in determining what that amount will be. Those on the political right say this is the natural order of things. Those on the political left say the wage earner should have some control over what they will be paid. How does the individual worker gain enough power to make this concept a reality? Labor unions have been the traditional method of wresting some measure of control of wages away from management and vesting it in the worker. That my gentle reader is what it all comes down to. Do the workers of America have a right to demand a wage higher than a slave wage? I think that they do. And that is my dream and what I hope was not lost in this last election.

Your Money and Your Life:

2009-12-31T10:16:00.011-06:00

If you are like me you are heartily disgusted by what has been going on at the large Wall Street banks. We average working Americans bailed these banks out by loaning them our tax dollars. Now what may surprise you is that JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion. Enough is enough as my dear old dad would say. We can do something and this makes no difference what your political party affiliation is. The concept is simple move your money from a Wall Street bank to a local bank.

So watch Eugene Jarecki's amazing video, move your money to learn more about how easy it is to move your money. And pass the idea on to your friends (help make this video -- and this idea -- go viral!).

Truly this is an idea whose time has come. This year 2010 resolve to move your money.

Folks it is working see:
Big Banks Want You Back??

On the Green Road Again:

2009-11-10T16:53:00.003-06:00

America and the American Congress are again considering legislation that would bring America more in step with the world and world opinion. And once again there are folks that are opposed to our cooperation with the rest of the human beings that inhabit this planet with America. Once again the opposition is coming from the conservative right in American politics.

The world is watching and while the world watches the Republican Party of America raised objections to limiting the amount of greenhouse gasses America emits. America is tied with China for total carbon dioxide emitted annually. China’s per capita emissions are far lower than America. This severs to emphasize how bad a polluter America is. Fully 20% of the of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere is coming from America. And sad to say the state of Texas is amongst the worst offenders.

What makes these events even more painful is that I feel these are not political decisions but rather moral decisions. The last time the American congress had such a clear cut moral mandate was in December of 1941 when the congress declared war on Japan and hours later on Germany. This was not a political decision but rather a moral decision. The crisis with the damage that is being done to the climate of the earth has in fact made these decisions moral in nature. For what we do now will affect all the generations that come after us.

I do not wish to put the American economy under any more stress than it currently is, however the generation of carbon dioxide simply must be significantly reduced. That may mean for the next 5 winters the citizens of America must keep their houses no warmer than 50 degrees with snow on the ground. That may mean we Americans restrict our driving to 25% of the current miles driven. That may mean that houses in Texas cannot be cooled below 85 degrees in the summer months. In fact it may require that we do all of these things and more.

Just as we did in the Second World War we must not count the cost but rather we must shoulder the burden such that there is a habitable planet for our children and grandchildren to live on. The window of opportunity is closing and the chance for a favorable outcome is diminished with every passing day in which we do nothing. This is too important to be left solely to the corporations and traditional decision makers. Widespread participation must happen for the outcome to be favorable. If you never again become an active participant in global events I strongly urge that you become involved in this struggle. The outcome affects us all each and every one of us. Let us all do our part to keep the earth a green livable home for the race of man.

I shudder to think of America once again opposing these changes based on our own self interest. If we ignore this problem we will pass the point of no return. After that no amount of change will fix what will happen. The earth will of course continue to orbit the sun. It will be a different planet and the dominate species on that planet will not be mankind. At that point we can only wish them well and hope that they do not repeat the mistakes made by the race of man. Perhaps their anthropologists can study the errors we made and by doing so avoid the pit we fell into.

Diversity and Desire:

2009-10-30T18:03:00.008-06:00

Public Broadcasting System better known as PBS from time to time has truly remarkable programming. Such a program happened this past week and more can be found here The Botany of Desire. This is from the book by Michael Pollan. While there are many lessons to be learned from watching this 2 hour show the lesson I learned is that diversity is a good thing. Many folks might not take this lesson away with them but I did.

A short summary can be found here. Some facts that I did not know were presented on apples the seed of which bear almost no resemblance to parent tree. I have grown generations of plants from the seed of the previous year. Needless to say this fact about apples shattered my basic concept of what a seed is. Once I recovered I questioned the whole story of Johnny Appleseed. My worries were nicely anticipated by the author.

The lessons of the potato were perhaps more fundamental. I had not realized the huge impact this divers plant had on agriculture in both the mountains of South America and subsequently on the agriculture of Europe. Without the humble potato the Industrial Revolution simply could not have occurred. Population centers in northern Europe would never have been possible because there would have been nothing for these people to eat. This can be most clearly seen in Ireland. The consequences of over dependence on a single species can also be seen in the Irish Potato Famine. The lessons learned in the 1850s are being ignored in America today. American potato growers almost exclusively plant and harvest Russet Burbank potato. This plant was developed by Luther Burbank in the 1870s. The potato in America has become a monoculture. Monoculture is the opposite of a diverse culture.

The segments on beauty and mind altering are left as an exercise for my readers. There are new facts revealed by both of these segments. But I do not wish to deprive my readers of the fun of discovering these facts.

Plantation Owner Mentality:

2009-09-17T10:12:00.006-05:00

I grew up in what was a border state area during the American Civil War. Then my family moved into what in civil war days was call the Union. Only when I was of age to attend college did I venture into the Deep South. I cannot begin to tell you how profoundly different the mentality is in these two sections of America some 140 years after the civil war. I have tried to understand this difference in attitude and see it from both points of view.

The fundamental difference seems in retrospect to be how labor and the working man are regarded. In the American Deep South there had always been a feeling that leaders did not work and that anyone who earned a living by the “sweat of his brow” was somehow inferior. Some might say that was an off shoot of the main economic engine of the American south since the beginning. The large farm was given a new name of plantation. Plantation owners became the aristocrats at least in their own minds they did. The black slaves and white indentured servants became the new serfs to these would be aristocrats. While this was never spoken out loud it is definitely reflected in everything that was said and done. One major element of this society is that the master is always right.

Coupled with deeply wrong point of view there was the desire to extend westward and so we have America from 1787 until 1860. All the while these aristocrats gave lip service to America’s Constitution. The deep dislike of the working man grew over the years to become intuitionalized into an attitude towards any member of the so called “working class”. I don’t want to pour gasoline on a smoldering fire but much of Smirking Chimp has the ring of truth to it.

What we are seeing in America today we saw in the days leading up to the American Civil War. I pray that the lessons of 1856 to 1860 have not been lost on America. I urge all citizens to cool their rhetoric before such heated talk once again pushes America over the edge of civility and into a conflict that will only serve to tear our nation asunder.

We the People:

2009-09-14T10:23:00.004-05:00

As America grew from a series of independent stand alone city states into a republic and then into a democracy she matured and acted more responsibly in a world that was growing more complex by the decade and century. We changed because change was necessary. We remained the same in many ways most notably our Constitution. Changing the Constitution of the United States is difficult because Americans have over the years come to realize that most of what is written there needs no modification.

There have been threats to add amendments such as we did with the 18th amendment. This amendment forbids the manufacture and distribution of alcohol for the purpose of human consumption. The only way this foolish amendment could be undone was to write and amendment that amended the amendment. The 21st amendment repealed the 18th amendment. Hopefully America has learned something by this whole process. Texas was not so wise with the Texas Constitution of 1876 and this document now fills some 79 volumes. It is to say the least the most complex and cluttered of all state constitutions.

The above paragraphs serve to remind my readers of how foolish we Americans can at times act. In the past several decades I have witnessed proposed amendments to ban gay and lesbian marriage as well as to outlaw the burning of the American flag. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and these silly amendments went nowhere. We are this fall of 2009 engaging in a discussion of health care that has become as heated and as silly as the amendment proposals. I am certain that all Americans know that health care delivery system is broken. All Americans want it fixed. Argument over details is preventing a working solution from being found. What can we Americans do about this?

We cannot make our congressional representative any smarter. We can take matters into our own hands and realize that a large part of the problem is that Americans are too fat and we smoke, drink and consume recreational drugs to excess. I am not trying to say all such action must cease. I am suggesting if we adopt a healthier life style maybe just maybe the load on the health care system would be lightened. A lighter load means lower costs. Lower costs might equate to increased numbers of citizens that could be covered. We the people must make these changes in our individual lives. Let us stop the bickering and do something constructive to increase the lifespan of the average American.

Wealth and Power:

2009-09-08T08:52:00.002-05:00

To restate Karl Marx wealth and the control of wealth governs and controls any political system. If you accept this premise much of history can be better understood. Events such as the American Civil War and the French Revolution can be better understood if you will consider the economics behind these conflicts. The theories of Marx on capital formation can be arrived at through an independent study of history. The reason to do this is to attempt to remove political dogma from the discussion.

The reason there is so much heat and so little light in the current discussions in America is due to some raising the specter of Communism and socialism. These two are the great “boggy men” that some would use to frighten the American citizens at large. Folks get a grip. Communism failed the test of viability. It is a dead issue. Normally when the horse dies you quit beating it. So why you ask is this not the case today. The short answer is that issue is being used to distract the American public from the real struggle that is being fought.

What is the real struggle you might ask? The real struggle is over who will control the economic wealth of the nation. In fact throughout human history that has always been the real struggle. It is a struggle that has always been won by the rich and lost by the poor. You might ask how a rich minority can control a poor majority in a democracy. Short answer is they do that by lying to the majority and if necessary bribing with granting of temporary wealth or power. The goal of the “haves“ remains the same and that goal is preserving what they have by any and all necessary means such that the “have not’s” continue to have not.

What the real struggle comes down to is who will control the wealth and power of America. Some would tell you that things should remain as they have been throughout much of American history. That is the wealthy should rule the nation made up of the poor. To say that another way the plantation owner should continue to tell the slaves what they can and cannot do. Stated a bit differently the owners of the automobile factory can continue to tell the workers in that factory what their wage will be and how many hours per day and per year they must work for these wages. Some of my readers might see that I have picked the two major conflict events one from the 19th century and one from the 20th century.

The American Civil war was largely fought over the issue of slavery. The outcome of that war would suggest that the plantation owners who created slavery lost. I would argue that the battle ground simply shifted from the cotton and corn fields of Virginia to the political and economic capital of Richmond. When these same slaves now “freed men” came north to seek employment in the automobile plants of Michigan the battle again underwent a change. American trade unions had become powerful and were increasingly being used to level the economic playing field. These children of former slaves found economic dignity and economic freedom from want in the factories of the victors of the American Civil war.

In the twenty first century America is once again conflicted by economic issues. At the heart of this issue is who will control the debt of America? You see America has since the Second World War squandered her wealth on oil and drugs. The current service centered economy is thought to require less capital for the actual manufacture of goods and more capital applied to managing the debt of such a nation. The debt is actually owed to other countries but is managed by American banks and credit card companies. This is not wealth in the traditional sense but in the brave new world of twenty first century America debt and wealth has become one in the same much like matter and energy.

Apple Barrels:

2009-09-05T10:25:00.004-05:00

As a child I read Treasure Island and of course wanted very much to become Jim Hawkins and sail off to Hispaniola. For those of you that never wondered there actually exists an island of Hispaniola and today the Dominican Republic is on the east end of the island and Haiti is on the west end of Hispaniola. Of course I never got to sail off into the sunset with Long John Silver spinning yarns about treasure. The scene of Jim crouched in the bottom of the apple barrel remains with me still.

In later years I came to realize that apple barrels were simply a convenient way to store and ship any number of items including apples. Tobacco was shipped in larger barrels called hogsheads. The reason for shipping this way was to protect the contents of the barrel from sea water contamination. Coopers were carpenters who specialized in constructing barrels. A good barrel had a bulge in the middle that permits it to be easily rolled. Barrels also became convenient unit of measurement. In fact the price of oil is still quoted in terms of dollars per barrel.

There has come into use a different connotation for the humble barrel. Here I am speaking of the phrase “Don’t let a single bad apple spoil the barrel”. What is generally meant is that when spoilage occurs in a barrel often if left unattended the barrel is found to contain spoiled product. Two important points are overlooked when this phrase is applied to people. The first is obvious: people are not apples. The second is more subtle and is that the barrel is left sealed and unopened for extended periods of time.

Let us consider for a moment inner city Detroit Michigan. At this time Michigan has the highest unemployment rate of any of the states. While the demise of Chrysler Motors and General Motors added to this rate it was already high in Detroit the acknowledged hub of the automobile industry that has in essence driven the American economy for the past 100 plus years. I hear some speaking about the excessively high wage paid to American auto workers and wonder if they are truly listening to the words leaving their lips.

American wages should be a matter of pride to the American people. But that does not seem to be the case. It seems that a well paying job has become something to be scorned. The labor unions that secured these benefits for the American worker are also singled out for derision often by the very people that should be applauding the collective bargaining that led to these wage and benefit packages. The benefits of a well paying job have eluded most of inner city Detroit.

The sad truth is that inner Detroit lacks a single chain super market. One of the major signs of American prosperity is absent from a city that was the fourth largest in America in 1950. Inner city Detroit has become hermetically sealed off from the rest of the American prosperity and the question is has this sealing preserved the apples? My answer is there is no source of fresh produce within the city. And oh yes inner city Detroit is predominately black. I guess these “bad apple Americas” are getting exactly what they deserve. For shame America.

The Question:

2009-08-29T10:16:00.003-05:00

Simply put the question we Americans must ask ourselves is are we better off or worse off today than we were in 2001 when George Bush took office. If you worked for Enron or had a 401k plan or have lost your health coverage or cannot longer afford to pay the monthly premiums perhaps the answer is no. If on the other hand you are a former executive of a large bank or credit card company or even an auto company or airline executive the answer may be yes.

For the average middle class American in almost every instance are now making less real disposable income after adjustments are made for inflation. Last night I heard again how the working American was better off now than in 2001. Folks it simply is not the case. The salary levels have increased at the margin. Inflation has eroded any gains. In 2001 America was at peace and now we find ourselves at war in two countries where it seems the population at large opposes our intervention. Did we learn nothing from View Nam is the question that continues to run through my mind like a broken record?

Do we need to fill the mall in Washington DC with black granite walls inscribed with the names of Americans who died in vain? I for one would vote that we cut the defense department budget by 1/3 and fund the Department of Health and Human Services with those dollars. The benefits will flow quickly to the American people. And while it might not solve the unemployment problem caused by American capitalists and business leaders selling their plants lock stock and barrel to mainland China or to subcontractors in cheap labor markets it might prevent many Americans from going bankrupt due to medical costs in their retirement years.

I fear this proposal will not take effect and America will once again become so tangled up in irrational discussions and lies that finding a solution becomes difficult to imposable. This has happened before in the years 1856 to 1860 when the congress and the American people became hopelessly deadlocked over the issue of slavery. Indeed the issue of civil rights for black Americans was not resolved by the American Civil War. The issue was finally resolved in 1964 (some 100 years later) by Lyndon Baines Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Do we need to wait so long and expend lives and treasure so thoughtlessly? That is the second question that all of this cacophony of dissention has caused me to ask myself.

I sincerely hope that Teddy Kennedy was right when he said “... the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die. ...”

Tale of Two Cities:

2009-07-24T11:36:00.018-05:00

In Houston last December a young black man was shot in his parent’s driveway after parking his parent’s car by members of the Bellaire Police Department. The finding released in February confirms the facts in this racially motivated shooting. Robbie Toland is to me a case of over reaction by police that should have been punished with jail time. Not only were the officers involved not charged they were not disciplined in any way.

Now we have the case of a Harvard professor returning to his home in Cambridge Massachusetts. This nationally honored personal friend of our president was arrested and taken to jail after he had proven that he was standing in his own living room. As of this writing the arresting officer refuses to apologize to the professor for his erroneous and racially motivated actions. On the Henry Louis Gates matter even the President of the United States of America has commented.

I think we have to seriously consider what has happened. In the case of Robbie Toland a young man’s promising baseball career was destroyed. Robbie will carry a bullet in his liver for the rest of his life which was surely shortened by what this arresting officer did. Pain and suffering do not even begin to describe what has happened to this young man and his family.

While the Harvard professor was not shot the very fact that a man could be arrested in his own home for no reason other than the color of his skin should bring every American to their feet protesting. Yet no such thing has happened. Once again the spin doctors are attempting to justify the arrest. How successful will they be? I fear that this incident like so many before it will be whitewashed and forgotten. Driving while black in America in and of itself has become hazardous.

The Massachusetts statute defining "disorderly conduct" used to have a provision that made it illegal to make "unreasonable noise or offensively coarse utterance, gesture or display," or to address "abusive language to any person present." Yet the courts have interpreted that provision to violate the Massachusetts Constitution's guarantee of freedom of speech. So police cannot lawfully arrest a person for hurling abusive language at an officer. ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-winkler/obama-was-right-about-the_b_244888.html ). The charges were dropped because there was no offense committed. If no offense was committed it was in fact “pretty stupid” to arrest Professor Gates as the president so rightly observed.

Both of these events happened in affluent neighbor hoods. Both of these incidents involver persons of color that represented less than 1% of the neighborhood’s population. Police records in Bellaire show that even though less than 1% of the population is black 30%+ of the drivers stopped in this city are black. I cannot prove it yet but I expect the same can be said of Cambridge. Surely the police do not think that their city is being targeted by the criminal element of Houston. Yet I can sense this argument will be put forward.

America for the love of God wake up and begin to correct these injustices.

American Rot:

2009-07-12T09:49:00.009-05:00

American Rot is a condition that I find to be rampant in America today. I am going to give you an illustration that will perhaps help you to understand not only how the problem happens but also a method of identifying this condition. I hope my example is understandable. The example I am going to use is broadcast TV and the switch from analog to digital.

I live south of Houston, Texas on the Gulf Coast. The signal must travel through the air some 37 miles from Missouri City tower farm to my antenna. For the past 40 plus years this has been happening without flaw even during hurricanes and other natural disasters. I have however now experienced a prolonged outage of two of the four major TV stations. After the highly touted switch over to DTV on June 12th things started downhill. At first rescanning seemed to solve most of the problems. The PBS affiliated station announced that they had to leave the air for 13 days to make modifications to their antenna. This was understandable due to their lack of funds. PBS is the least funded of the VHF networks. Without announcement ABC next vanished from my screen soon to be followed by CBS. All the while NBC signal continued to be working perfectly. The higher frequency channels like FOX also continued to broadcast uninterrupted. These channels used the frequencies above channel 13.

For more on VHF vs. UHF click here.

Where the irritant comes is that all the while my signal was not present ABC and CBS continued to be available via cable. That is to say revenues continued to flow into ABC and CBS and they seem to care less about folks that did not contribute to this revenue stream except by viewing advertisements. The fact that I was without service that used the airwaves that belong to me as a citizen of America was blithely ignored, this during the worst financial crisis since 1929. News is not going to make a huge difference to my moral which is admittedly low. However when I cannot see exactly how other parts of America is weathering the storm and what measures are helping or hindering them I feel deprived.

There has been an ongoing erosion of news sources available to the American public. An uninformed public is something I think no American wants. The news paper continues to be delivered. But effectively two thirds of my major TV news stations are no longer casting images to my living room screen. Am I alarmed? You bet I am.

Things like this happen when the decision makers are insulated from suffering the consequences of their actions. Due to the revenue stream from cable TV the broadcasting stations could afford to interrupt the signal to my house and no matter how loudly I ranted they could safely ignore me. In fact they are still ignoring me except for FOX and NBC and a smattering of Spanish speaking channels. I suspect this same logic applies to other problems in America. Health care will not be fixed so long as congress has their own program that is I understand very good and covers you for life even if you only served in congress for 2 years. We saw this with investment banks on Wall Street where golden parachutes insulated upper management from the loss of retirement as their company smashed on the rocks of financial mismanagement. Wake up America. We are getting the shaft and they are getting the mine.

The End of the GOP:

2009-07-06T15:25:00.004-05:00

Events of this past weekend had made me wonder if the Republican Party can survive as a political entity. I do not say this lightly and remind everyone that it has happened before. The American two party system has existed for most of our history as a nation. However the parties are not necessarily the same after the passage of time. Political parties are after all human institutions and as such change with the changing membership that form them.

I tend to look at American history through the lens of labor / management. That is to say the major turning points in American history can be defined in management terms or labor terms. Southern slavery was to me an attempt to get labor at abysmally low cost. Free labor is after all about as cheap as labor gets. We hear folks speak of how southern plantation owners cared for their black labor element. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact many of the children of these plantations were sired by the white overseers and masters. Yet these children were often sold as though they had worth only as beasts of burden. Ask yourself where else in the history of the world parents have sold their children and you get a much clearer picture of the horror of the American system of slavery.

The political party that changed this was in fact the Republican Party and their first successful presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln. So successful did the Republican Party become that it elected every single president from 1860 to 1914 a span of some 54 years. Some remarkable things have occurred in the past several years. When Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law he knew full well that the once solid democratic south would be forever shattered. Events proved that to be the case. I do not think the old guard of the south in the form of the Ku Klux Klan was an all powerful force. But the ideas of black men with no political power certainly remained in the American south alive and well. In fact these ideas were assimilated and in Texas they expanded to include the brown population from Mexico.

Harking back to my earlier proposition that cheap labor is what is at the root of much of the thought processes behind political rhetoric. If labor is too cheap then it becomes abusive. The girls in the electronics assembly plants 100 yards south of the American border make five dollars a day. Just a few steps away the wage rate is ten times that amount. To say that another way a day’s wage for them can be earned in less than an hour by their counterpart in America. Is it any wonder these people will suffer almost any hardship to come to America? The Republican Party has at almost every single juncture opposed increasing the minimum wage. The Republican Party has at almost every juncture opposed better health coverage for the average American. The Republican Party has opposed at almost every juncture more money for education.

And now people ask why the Republican Party is imploding. It is imploding because it is seen to be the voice of reactionary thought. The voice of the Republican Party is no longer the measured tones of Lincoln urging that we bind up the wounds of America. The voice of the Republican Party has become the shrill whine of Sarah Palin and inane ramblings of Rush Limbaugh. Those voices are why I think the demise of the Republican Party is at hand.

Common Threads:

2009-06-21T12:15:00.002-05:00

The whole world has had its eyes focused on Iran this past week. Here the disputed election has led to some demonstrations in the streets but perhaps more importantly there have been arrests of family members of some important men in the ruling Islamic party. It is too early to say if these arrests will quell the voices speaking out against the election results or not. It is however obvious that deviance from the Party line is not tolerated in either China or in Iran.

Now before we Americans get all upset and feeling righteous about how such a thing could never happen here I refer you to the House Un-American Activities hearings of the 1950s. The period immediately following the attack on the World Trade Center could hardly be described as America’s finest hour, freedom wise. Whenever fear becomes rampant people start to do funny things. That is why the phrase “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” still rings true today. Like a swimmer in a strong current panic is the worst possible response.

It will be interesting to see if Iran is willing to use the level of force against the citizens that China was willing to use. Either way I do not think the time is right for a social uprising in Iran. Were Iran to fall into the chaos of a civil war then much would change in the Middle East. I think such a thing is not going to happen. Rather I think the government will quell this uprising with all the brutality needed to accomplish the task. Absolute power simply cannot stand even a hint of disagreement. If the Fundamentalists know nothing else they know this. Disagreement is treason. And treason is punishable by death. And so it goes …

The Arc of Intolerance:

2009-05-31T08:45:00.002-05:00

America is confronting what I call the Arc of Intolerance. The arc is defined as that swath of land beginning in Pakistan and arching west and north to end in Beirut. Here is found the principle set of groups that violently oppose not just America but rather all western thought. These include most of the current strongholds of Islamic Fundamentalism. Make no mistake; with Islamic Fundamentalism there can be no compromise.

Of course the same thing can be said of Jewish fundamentalism or Christian fundamentalism. Essentially all fanatics don’t just think they are right; they know they are right. It is that “knowing” that gives them there appeal and their strength. By knowing a thing as part of an “act of faith” you simply have to reject all reasoning counter thoughts. It is a very strong form of self hypnosis. Some might even say it’s a form of self deception.

Where America comes into the equation is that we are not just the best customers of some of these regional governments we are also the target for their hatred. I have to laugh when I hear America condemned as the Great Devil the same week that OPEC puts up the price of a barrel of crude oil. So my fellow Americans it is not just fundamentalists that border on insanity it is all of us.

The war between liberal thought and conservative thought has been going on continuously for the past 500+ years in the west. There could of course be no awareness of thoughts of the Native peoples living in the new world prior to 1492, simply because Europe had no awareness of these people. In 1517 some 25 years after Columbus sailed to what was to become America Martin Luther attempted to reform what he perceived as errors in the basic thinking on redemption. At issue was what redeems a man’s soul; good works or a personal relationship with Christ. The need for such redemption was of course not considered. Well not at least until Thomas Jefferson and his band of cohorts.

The next greatest document since the Martin Luther document was nailed on the church door in 1517 began as the Deceleration of Independence and grew to become the Bill of Rights to the American Constitution. Many of the intellectuals that conceived the method of governance which America was to use were strongly religious. The sole exception was of course Thomas Jefferson. I have always suspected that Aaron Burr was also what one might call a heretic. Burr had none of the redeeming traits of Jefferson and after the dual in which he shot Alexander Hamilton dead Burr fell out of favor. The deal reached with Jefferson was ignored and Burr never served as co-president. For those of you that think smoke filled back rooms are new to American politics let me assure you that such is not the case.

What America did add that was totally new to the human experience was that government of America could not sponsor or actively support any religion. This is actually the sticking point with not only Islamic fundamentalism but it is a bone of contention with both the Church at Rome and the fundamental Christian Right. In a way we can tell that American government is working when everyone is angry. Dissention is not new to democracy. Indeed the whole process of democracy is a careful balancing of opposing forces and thoughts. Democracy fails when one side or the other becomes too powerful. Elections for the House of Representatives every two years insure that a readjustment of power can be accomplished every two years.

Today comes the news that the cycle of carbon dependence may be broken. To say that another way OPEC may be toast. See:

Laser Energy

Usury and Market Forces:

2009-05-12T10:55:00.010-05:00

Let us first define what we mean by the term usury. Laws regulating the maximum rate of interest that could be charged by a person or agency making a loan did exist in America until relatively recently. These usury laws served to control the avarice of banks and individuals. As part of the mantra of market forces the congress was convinced to repeal these laws. When this happened rates increased rapidly. Another thing increased almost as rapidly. The number of words in the contract between the loan maker and the individual borrowing the money was increased by many fold. All those words were not there to protect the borrower. Far from it in fact he had no rights to refuse to accept the changes.

Any first year law student can tell you that contracts that are unilaterally changed are essentially broken. But if you read the contract closely you will see that part of the wording grants that right to the bank. In fact the credit card contract has become so complex that no one knows what it means. Of one thing we can be sure; all that verbiage is not there to protect the person that is seeking to charge a purchase. Simple math can show you that it will take decades to pay off a credit card balance of $3,000. Yet most credit card holder’s card balance is well in excess of this amount.

So let’s see where this leaves us. You have a credit card company that is affiliated with a bank charging outlandish fees to use a line of credit and remitting a portion of those fees to one of many banks. Now let’s consider the other side of the equation. For you see banks not only loan money they also serve as a repository for funds in the form of CDs and passbook savings accounts. Let’s examine these by doing a Google search of CD rates:

Google Search

Today that looks like an APY of between 2.8% and 1.90%. This at the same time that many of these same banks are charging between 12.0% and 32.5% on credit card debt, clearly there is a discrepancy. Why should there be a spread of 10 to 30 percentage points you might ask. The answer is quite simple that has happened because there was no one regulating the loan industry. In fact if someone tried to sell food as badly tainted as these loan products they would be put in jail. What is true of credit cards is doubly true of mortgage loans. In fact by the banks own words these loans have been deemed “toxic”. What and who made them toxic is the question you have to ask. The answer is painfully simple; the banks made them toxic because the pay off was so onerous than many people simply walked away from their homes. They simply owed more than they could pay.

Now comes the truly scary part. Our government is giving these same people tax dollars in the hope that the crooks running the banks will change their ways. Do they truly think this will happen. Let’s see what has in fact happened. The number for foreclosures has increased. The loans to businesses that need credit to keep the doors of American industry open have dried up. The rate charged to tax payers by these same banks on credit card debt has been increased all the while availing themselves of massive amounts of public money from the government.

All of this is happening right before our eyes and all the while we are told that debt holders and American labor must make sacrifices. Enough is enough. Throw these scallywags out and do not give them a single penny more until and unless they increase their rate on passbook savings or lower their credit card rate until the “spread” is returned to historic norms.

Newspapers:

2009-05-06T13:02:00.008-05:00

I have been watching what many bemoan as the death of the American Newspaper and heard many differing opinions on this ongoing event. American Newspapers have a long as interesting history. But once again Americans seem to confuse the thing with what the thing represents. Newspapers do not guarantee truth or freedom. Recall that the leading news publication in Communist Russia was Pravda (Truth in Russian) yet many times that hardly was what those pages contained. Even in America stories in newspapers have been proven to be false and yellow sheet journalism has at times been the norm not the exception. Yet we go on bemoaning the untimely demise of newspapers when we should be doing all in our power to see that what the media tells us is in fact a true reflection of reality. In point of fact it matters little where we as citizens get our information from so long as that information truly represents what is going on in our world.

We must stop confusing issues and opinions with facts that inform us of what is really happening. Americans like to think their press is free to publish the truth. Sadly many times such is not the case. During every major conflict America has been involved in the reporting of that conflict was less than accurate in every case. Truth seems to be the first victim of war - Google Search . In our own time this includes photographs of the dead on the beaches of Normandy being censored to the latest series of sensational reporting about the poor in Washington DC and reports of the enemy dead in the View Nam war. Of course the electronic news media has its own set of problems. I am always struck by the term Eyewitness News. Any lawyer or police detective worth his pay can tell you how unreliable eye witness testimony in fact is. Human memory can often deceive even the person doing the remembering.

Lastly I shall only advise that even when we look at something repeatedly we fail to notice the true essence of the story. Consider slavery in Egypt. No here I am not talking about 2009. I am speaking of slavery that occurred some 3,000+ years ago. The story of Moses and the people he led to what was to become the Kingdom of Israel. This is one of the first “freedom stories” yet many have never viewed it that way. I expect that will not change for we often see what we wish to see and not what is right before our very eyes.

Trust of the Citizens:

2009-04-19T12:26:00.007-05:00

Over the past several decades the American public at large has in my opinion been abused. These abusers vary as to motivation but most are driven by the baser instincts of a desire for money and power. Were I to describe the “dark force” alluded to in the Star Wars Trilogy I think most would agree that greed for power and greed for money are what drove that “dark force”.

The founders of America studied this problem and pondered a series of changes that could be made to the “contract of governance” between the people and the people that govern. We call that The Constitution of the United States of America. In fact we thought so highly of this document in the early days of our republic that the American Navy named its chief warship after this document. But back then America’s leaders were less egomaniacal.

Perhaps I am simply growing old and my eye sight is diminished but it seems to me that these dark forces have begun to control the decision makers in America. Where once a man was considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt many criminal charges made today in the 21th century are greeted by the press and public as proven without necessity of trial. We have seen that the chief executive officer of the country lied about the reasons for a war that has cost thousands upon thousands of lives and billions upon billions of dollars. Yet with all that expenditure of wealth and power America cannot keep the shipping lanes around the Horn of Africa free of pirates.

The right to privacy has become so abridged that one can safely say that a citizen’s privacy no longer exists. Indeed here the Patriot Act was specifically crafted to prevent citizens from bring suit on the grounds of invasion of privacy. I watched the following U-Tube presentation Tapping Your Cell Phone. Maybe you, my readers, can see why I am alarmed. If you are part of Home Land Security you can do such eves dropping without a specific warrant to do so.

There is nothing wrong with technology. I do worry that any new technology will erode liberties of the American citizen at large in the interest of a security that is largely nonexistent. Ben Franklin’s warning rings in my ears: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Carbon Entropy:

2009-03-27T08:04:00.002-06:00

The western world has for the past 175 years fueled what we call the Industrial Revolution by burning carbon fuels. Until recently the resulting carbon dioxide was considered harmless. This is no longer the case. We now realize that the truly massive amounts of carbon dioxide we have produced as a side product to the heat necessary to run the engines of industry can make changes to the climate of the whole planet. Scientists are convinced of this fact even though the lay public is only recently becoming aware of these facts. Indeed some world leaders elected to ignore the problem and there have been some who say global warming is not occurring.

Entropy is the process whereby things tend to their lowest state of energy. Entropy explains why balls roll down hill. The reason is because the ball at the bottom of the hill has less potential energy than it did at the top of the hill. When you burn carbon you get two things: energy in the form of heat and carbon dioxide which has a lower energy state than carbon itself. The oxide part comes from atmospheric oxygen. So what we have done is to combine carbon with oxygen to yield carbon dioxide and heat. Simple enough and we as a race have used fire to warm us and to cook our food all the way back to prehistoric times. But the key fact is that we did not burn massive amounts of carbon. This balance began to shift as soon as our requirement for energy to drive our machines became large.

All things in nature tend to run down. Carbon burns and balls roll down hill. The only way we can reverse carbon entropy is by using living things called plants. Plants you see take carbon from the atmosphere and by using chlorophyll change the carbon into part of their cell structure. Interestingly enough the process uses energy and carbon dioxide to make cellulose and liberate oxygen to the atmosphere. This is functionally the reverse of burning carbon. With the proper engineering of simple plants like algae the output of this process can be modified. That is to say things other than cellulose can be made by these plants.

Our race has only in the past 15 years made enough progress in genetic engineering to modify plant structure. Currently this effort has been to make plants more disease resistant. As our knowledge of genetic modification becomes more extensive we should be able to have better control over plants and how to establish living factories to terra form the planet Earth. The alternative is of course that a large portion of the race perishes on a world that has significantly less land area due to the rise in sea levels. We are the dominate life form on this planet and it is about time we grew up and began to take care of the planet we all call home.

Toxic Assets:

2009-03-24T15:58:00.001-06:00

The current problem centers about the value of loans that very large banks have made. These banks are hesitant to state the true value of the loans they have made. There are reasons why this is so but most of those reasons come down to the fact that these loans have a “true value” of between 18 and 30 cents on the dollar. To say that another way these recorded transactions are worth only a fraction of the amount which they are being carried on the books.

America and the banks of America are in denial. How could this have happened is the question they ask over and over. Like the victim of a horrific traffic accident they are in a state of shock. The shock is causing them to react in a strange manner. Strangest of all is their stubborn refusal to admit the facts and take action to correct the situation as it exists.

So long as the book value of a bank or indeed any business does not reflect the true worth of that business then investors are going to elect to not become involved with that bank or business. When a business appreciates in value everyone quickly knows about that and people respond by buying up some of the outstanding shares of stock in that company. This causes the value of all shares of the company to go up. Stockholders are happy and company managers are happy. Everyone stands to make a profit and that is after all what capitalism strives to do.

However when the owners of a company lie about the value of that company and get caught in that lie as the managers of Enron did the value of the stock plunges and stockholders lose money. If the lies told are big enough the entire company may go into receivership, to say this another way this company is bankrupt. At this point any remaining assets are seized and divided amongst the people to whom this business owed money. In this case almost everyone loses with stockholders and company officers loosing the most. This is the dark side of capitalism and frankly many in America have forgotten this side. The last time we saw this ugly side of capitalism was in the years 1929 to 1933.

There were lessons learned when America went through this last great depression. Those lessons were expensive and the solutions found were expensive. What the current administration is attempting to do is apply the same solutions to this current financial crisis. Will these solutions work this time? If they do not work we will simply modify them and try again. Sitting by and wringing our hands in a state of denial will not solve the problem. Of that I am sure.

Contract Equity:

2009-03-21T06:42:00.004-06:00

The events in congress this past week truly could be called March Madness even though they had nothing to do with basketball. This does not bode well for bringing America back from the edge of the ledge on which my country teeters. This of course refers to the bonuses awarded to AIG account managers.

From a constitutional point of view passing laws that target a specific group is directly in breach of the clause to the constitution that forbids bills of attainment. So it seems to me taxing these bonuses simply will not work from a constitutional point of view. As the government now has a majority stake in AIG it would seem that the government can rescind these bonuses and demand that the money be returned. No need to do anything as silly as passing a questionable tax specifically targeted at financial sector bonuses. When congress passed the legislation to provide assistance to the American car industry they insisted that labor contracts be modified and salary levels reduced for those on the assembly line. Rank and file labor had to and did agree to these reductions. The question becomes why congressional leaders are hesitant to demand the same level of sacrifice from employees in the finance area of the economy.

If we pay close attention to the findings or the study of successful societal decision making as put forward by Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed we can see that the decisions made must put the makers of those decisions at risk. To say that another way if the decision is a bad decision then those making the decision must suffer along with everyone else. We have seen that no attempt has been made to fix social security largely because congress is exempt from social security. The same is true of Medicare. The congress does not participate in the social welfare programs they have their own program which is far more liberal in providing benefits.

I think what we must do as a nation is first of all treat people in an equitable manner. If we ask for sacrifice by one part of our society then all must be asked to share in that suffering. To do anything less is an insult to all the struggles that we as a nation have made. If we don’t behave in an equitable manner to all of our citizens then the light of liberty’s torch has been extinguished and the world becomes truly dark.

Power Sources:

2009-03-17T07:38:00.003-06:00

When it comes to governing people the most basic of questions is where does the power to do this come from. Sooner or later someone is going to ask “Who gave you the power to tell me what to do”? A valid government damn well better have a good answer for this question. The two most accepted sources of power are divine and human. In the first case the populace at large is convinced in some manner to believe that God Almighty approves of the government.

In more recent times two other methods of justification are used. Loosely those can be summed up as power of the bullet and power of the ballet. In many parts of the world the government exists because the power for that rule is force of arms. At the core of this type of government is the implied fact that you do what you are told to do or we will shoot you dead. It is important to note God is not going to strike you dead with lightening. No you are going to be killed by the soldiers who support the government. One might say the uncertainty factor has been removed.

The most modern form of power administration is the government that is elected by the people through voting. This like military rule is a human centered form of government. The government may or may not acknowledge the existence of god. It does not say that god has sanctioned their power. At least the wiser of the governments do not say such things. The problem of course is which god the government should endorse. Because endorsing a god may cause unhappiness in some parts of the population that does not believe in that particular god governments try to avoid the issue.

Where America started to get into trouble was when another form of human centered government evolved and that form was socialism. Socialism was a result of the research of principles put forth by Karl Marx. Socialism is really more of an economic thought process than a governmental thought process. I have heard it said that communism is socialism with electricity. Socialism is really an attempt to determine how the wealth-pie will be cut up and delivered to the citizens. As such socialism should be contrasted with free enterprise not governance. America confused communism and socialism. And that is why “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance.

It will be interesting to see America thread her way through the current set of problems she faces. With leadership that acknowledges that all power flows from the people and not god and definitely not the army I think we shall not only survive we shall prosper. However I remind all my fellow citizen that this government is an ongoing experiment. Only we can determine if the experiment is successful or if it fails. It is our government … let us make it work again for all of us not the chosen few.

The New Teacher:

2009-03-09T08:16:00.005-06:00

From time to time there is a change in how teachers teach. This happens because the consensuses amongst those responsible for broad patterns of education feel they have found a better way to explain the subject matter to the students. This happened back in the 1980s with the introduction of set theory as unifying concept mathematics. Many parents felt that because they did not understand the underlying concept the approach was wrong.

The same thing happened earlier when the biological concepts were expanded to include the theories based on Charles Darwin’s findings. Here however the new theory was clashing with not just parental understanding but the religious establishment felt compelled to enter the resulting discussion. The resulting discussions became composed of more heat than light. In fact this discussion continues thinly veiled as intelligent creationism.

What is currently occurring is far more fundamental and can be far more important to the future. For the first time in human history a major portion of human knowledge is available to a very wide audience. What has brought this change is the most significant invention of the last century. That invention is neither the atomic bomb nor nuclear reactors. The invention that may propel the human race into the future that might well prove to be boundless is the personal computer. The application that is changing teaching is by a company called Google.

For the first time the teacher can teach their students skills that will in fact last a life time. Imagine learning something at age 15 that would serve you well when you were 70. Reading is such a skill. Being able to write clearly in an understandable way is another life time long skill learned when you are young. Add to reading and writing a third skill that can now be taught. That skill is how to query a search engine like Google. Basically once a student learns how to ask meaningful questions and refine those questions he has mastered a universal skill as fundamental as reading itself.

What must happen now is that all of our teachers should embrace the method. Beginning in grade schools the use of computers as knowledge sifting devices must be encourage and the students taught how to use these devices to educate themselves. I think that if the total human knowledge can be easily accessed by all humans everywhere a measure of democracy unimagined in the past might be possible. Because today’s new knowledge rests upon yesterdays known facts and theories having access to the whole of human knowledge will lead to solutions to problems that have not even been conceptualized yet.

Darwin, Lincoln and Diamond:

2009-02-13T19:57:00.005-06:00

The first two of these men were actually born on the same day 200 years ago this year. Both men shook society to its very foundation. Darwin by his observation of natural science and Lincoln by changes he made to a social order. More will be said about Dr. Jared Diamond later in this essay.

Charles Darwin’s seminal work “On the Origin of Species” has stood the test of time and is no longer debated within the scientific community. Among the lay public his ideas still are a source of controversy. I finally heard a good reason why this is so. Essentially the reason folks oppose this idea is because it removes the idea of direct divine intervention in the creation of the human species. No longer can we envision God kneeling in the dust and molding man out of inanimate materials. As warm and fuzzy as that idea may be it is sadly misguided. As long as people want to believe an idea there will be followers of that idea.

When we come to Lincoln the problem is slightly different but Abraham Lincoln was no less of an agent of change than was Charles Darwin. I will not try to compete with the huge number of scholarly essays on this America’s greatest president. Lincoln forever changed the relationship between American citizens. Dred Scott v. Sandford resulted in a ruling that stated “… people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants—whether or not they were slaves—were not legal persons and could never be citizens of the United States, and that the United States Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories. This ruling was rendered in 1857. The first emancipation proclamation was made in September of 1862. The union was committed to ending slavery.

I would like to think that Lincoln’s ideas are widely accepted however there are still people that cling to the belief that all races other than the white race are inherently inferior. Jim Crow laws did not fall in much of America until the 1960s. Indeed Martin Luther King was shot and killed in 1968 by a man called James Earl Ray. This caused James Earl Carter to run as Jimmy Carter. So odious was the first two names. Lester Maddox was elected as governor of Georgia from 1967 to 1971 largely based on his pledge to refuse service to blacks in restaurant he owned.

Lastly we come to the third member of this group. The seminal theory that Jared Diamond proposes is that the elite and rich of a society must share the pain of change or real change simply will not occur. He illustrates this by what has happened in New Orleans. He contrasts the levy system with the system of dykes protecting Holland. The reason that the dykes work in Holland is that if the dykes fail the rich will suffer as well as the poor. The rich in New Orleans live on the high ground and were largely immune to the flooding in the rest of the city. Failure of the levies caused no discomfort to the wealthy of New Orleans. This necessity that the rich must have their well being at risk seems to apply to the changes needed in America today. If the rich do not suffer from the change then it can be argued that real change has not occurred.

The Forgotten Man and the Economic Stimulus Bill:

2009-02-06T20:11:00.004-06:00

For those of you who did not read the book mentioned in the title of this essay I refer you to the reviews with this Google Search. While well researched the author rather misses the point when she states that it was World War Two that ended the depression not FDR spending. How exactly does she think world war two was funded? Surely she does not think that war bonds and stamps paid for it. The Second World War was funded by borrowing and spending by the government.

America is now facing a second great depression that may in fact be far more persuasive than the one of 1929 to 1933. Will we work our way through this one as we did through the last one? I think we will but there will be great suffering. Already people are dying because they cannot afford medical treatment. At the moment there are hungry Americans living in cars because they have been foreclosed out of their residence. I am unaware of any American starving to death but frankly I expect that too will happen.

I do not think there will be the horrors of the Second World War such as German death camps and the Battle of Stalingrad to say nothing of the deaths caused by the American bombs dropped in the final days of the war. Yet to say we will avoid this kind of blood bath is slight comfort. The best guess estimate of the cost of the Second World War can be found here: Google Search.

Now I think what we have to ask ourselves is: are we prepared to spend the trillions needed to bring prosperity back to America? And if we are how will we invest such that our own bankers do not cause a third depression. I think that what we must do is invest in the country itself in the form of health care and energy independence. It may be that we can no longer continue to expand our sphere of influence as we have tried to do with our overwhelming but largely target less military.

We can start this process by acknowledging that it is going to cost huge sums to turn this crisis around. The other thing we have to realize is that governmental deficit spending was responsible for the beginning of the end of the depression as well as the final victory that went hand in hand with our victory over German and Japanese military.

Wealth Balance:

2009-02-01T14:28:00.003-06:00

During the past 90 days many Americans have come to realize how little control they have over their financial destiny. This has come as a horrible shock to many who should have known better. Money and the wise use of money frankly seems more than many folks can understand or handle. So let us review some basic facts.

In science we talk about the half life of an isotope. What that means is what period of time must elapse before ½ of the radioactive atoms have decayed into something that is no longer radioactive. This same concept can be used to look at borrowed or loaned money. If we have any kind of loan there are three parameters to that loan: the amount, the rate of interest and the payment. These three factors go into determining the life or half life of the loan. When a rate of 30% is charged as it is on some credit cards the time to repay the loan becomes very long indeed.

Let’s look at several examples:
Repayment Calculator

Loan A is for $3,000 at 30% with a payment of $100 per month.
That means the loan will be paid in 4.8 years (58 payments) total interest cost = $2,614

Loan B is for $3,000 at 30% with a payment of $50 per month.
That means the load will be paid in 10 years (112 payments) with a total interest cost = $6,487.

Cutting our payment in half increased the term of the loan by a factor of two but our interest costs went up by a factor of 2.8 times. What is most distressing is trying to figure out exactly where we will be financially in ten years time. Today’s worker stays at a job for an average of 3 years.

If we consider the loan for a house and look out 30 years we have some even more astounding figures:

Loan C is for $187,000 at 5% for 30 years gives a payment of $1,004 and an interest cost of $174,387. That is our interest costs were almost equal to the amount borrowed.

Load D is for $187,000 at 12% for 30 years gives a payment of $1924 and an interest cost of $505,448. That is our interest costs are some 2.7 times the value of what we borrowed in the first place.

Now consider what has happened in the past 365 days where the value of the average home has fallen by 30 percent or more. The loan amount has not changed but the value is now $130,900 and so your interest cost becomes 3.86 times the value of the home.

How did this happen. In my judgment it happened because too few hands controlled the wealth of this nation. Because too few people made the decisions on these matters they could be convinced to think the same way. Take for example the idea that wealth creates new businesses. And contrast that with the number of jobs that have been sent overseas where labor costs are a fraction of what they are in America. Is this what is meant by job creation? An autoworkers wage of $25 per hour results in a gross income of $52,000 and that is before taxes and insurance and union dues. Contrast that with the CEO who makes $5,000,000 in salary and bonus. The ratio is some 96 times. And that is before the autoworker pays any taxes or health insurance or union dues at all. Contribution to his 401k plan will reduce his available income still further.

Yet I still hear folks saying the wages are fair in America, and that a minimum wage of $6.55 currently or some $13,624 annual gross income is enough. Poverty line for a family of 4 is $19,350 or some $5,726 dollars above this person’s income. Let us say it another way this worker is not paid even what the government has determined to be the minimum required amount. Is that fair? Add to this his credit card debt and you begin to sense how totally hopeless and helpless these folks feel. I say with all due respect to the folks in Houston’s River Oaks fix this problem or this problem will bring you mansion down around your head.

Wealth in America:

2009-01-04T12:40:00.004-06:00

To whom does the wealth of a nation belong? In America we like to believe that person responsible for creating that wealth has a right to a portion of that wealth. Where things get confusing is in defining just what the creative force is. What in fact is the responsibility and definition of creating?

In the early years of America wealth came from agriculture. Crops were grown by individual farmers who owned and worked their soil. That was the model for agriculture in the north states. However in the states starting with Virginia a totally different method of farming developed. Vast acres of crop land were brought under cultivation. Far more acreage than a man and his family could prepare plant, tend and harvest. The missing additional labor was provided by slaves. These Americans were not considered worthy of a wage. The efforts of the American slave went to benefit his owner. Over the years labor came to be regarded as a necessary but unimportant part of the wealth creation process. This thought process remains widely spread throughout the American south. One of the reasons that the American labor movement has never caught on in the south is slavery.

When the concept of the worker as an equal partner in wealth generation was first put forward in the 1800’s by Karl Marx these ideas remained largely unknown in America. With Marx’s death in 1883 the new view of wealth generation began to spread. The worker by this time was essential to not only agriculture but to industry that had been transformed by the industrial revolution. Part of the industrial transformation was the victory of the American industrial North over the agricultural South in the American Civil War. The south lost that war but never gave up the belief that labor was an unimportant part of wealth creation. Ask a southern working man today what he does for a living and he will almost never identify himself as a laborer.

In the industrial north of America the production of coal for heating was where labor made its first demands for a larger slice of the pie. By larger this meant a miniscule wage compared to the profits being made by the mine owners. The mine operators were a separate entity and they seldom benefited to the same extent that the mine owners did. The mine owners were either a steel company or a railroad company. Cross ownership arrangements between steel companies and railroad companies further clouded the mine ownership issue.

Mines in the American south were operated a bit differently. In these mines convict labor was used and the issue of wages was totally bypassed. Convict labor got no wage at all. Any wage that was paid was paid to a middle man who owned a labor contract that had resulted from a court judgment against these largely black Americans. This system became so abusive that in essence slavery was re-imposed upon black mine workers in the American South. This happened in other labor areas most notably in agriculture and timbering. Southern mining, timbering and agriculture all shared a common approach of low or no wages to the worker. All the while huge profits were being made by both southern and northern American capitalists.

Times were changing and the forces of change were the oil companies and the automotive companies. Somehow in the rush to create new wealth the labor component of wealth generation received very little attention and largely did not benefit from this transforming process. The exception was of course were labor unions demanded that labor receive its just due in the form of a adequate wage. This occurred in the automotive industry and in the goods transportation industries of railroads and trucking.

Christmas Chocolate

2008-12-26T07:53:00.009-06:00

Some times you see something that simply can not be improved upon.

This was sent to me by a good friend. After I read it it realized that we in America need to clearly understand the message here. Now more than ever in my lifetime.

Our cups are breaking but the chocolate is still available. Thank God for the chocolate not the cup.

Christmas 2008 Chocolate

Nicaea to Alamogordo:

2008-12-19T16:34:00.004-06:00

How totally odd that the explosion of the first atomic device was given the code name “Trinity.” The Holy Trinity is fundamental to both eastern and western branches of Christianity. It affirms the divinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In fact Trinity has become a lay word.

Trinity Site

To Robert J. Oppenheimer the phrase from Hindu scripture came to mind following the detonation. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

It is interesting to note that no nation that has set out to construct an atomic bomb has failed to cause a nuclear explosion to occur, which is to say that the basic mechanism is rather simple and straightforward. Perhaps Trinity was only a fore taste of how the world will end. We certainly know that nuclear winter will fall if we detonate as few as 7 hydrogen bombs.

As we enter the Christmas season let us remember the positive and life affirming nature of the word Trinity as it applies to God. But let us also note that the specter of the man made trinity remains with us. It is up to us to select which of these two Trinities we select.

Childhood's End

2008-12-16T10:20:00.008-06:00

Our western Holy Book (the Bible) says:
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up my childish ways.

First Corinthians

America’s childhood is ending with a vengeance. The housing bubble has burst, credit card companies are reducing amounts of credit and increasing fees to the maximum permitted, the domestic car manufacturing companies are going bankrupt. America and The United Kingdom say they want Iran to stop developing nuclear capabilities. And over and over we hear the question “How did this happen?”

Simply put when the Second World War ended America and Great Brittan (as it was known then) and Russia (or the USSR as it was known then) went on a binge. We went on a 3 day drunk that lasted for America some 60 years and for the other victors of World War 2 a somewhat lesser period of time.

It might be said America has awoken to find herself sprawled in the gutter. Do we feel bad? Do we feel remorse? To we feel cheap? Yes we do. All drunks feel those things when they finally wake up from a binge. What America did in the past 60 years is not going to be put right by feeling bad. It is not going to be put right by feeling guilty. The only way it is going to be put right is through hard work and sacrifice.

America needs first to stop thinking of themselves as the god given leader of the world. America needs to realize she is a member of the community of nations and while strong she is not infallible. America did make a major contribution to defeating Germany and Japan in their attempt to dominate the world. That was then this is some 63 years later. The world rightly tells America to "Get over themselves." Of course that is just another way of certain nations saying “What have you done for me lately?” The simple truth is if America is going to give up childish ways then she can rightly ask that others join us in that exercise.

America can solve the energy problem if the rest of the world will follow her lead and use less and pollute less. America can attempt free trade if other nations will allow American goods to freely enter their borders. America can sit on the sidelines if nations will agree to not bomb and maim one another in civil wars and decimation between religious groups and indigenous tribes.

So as a the first year of the last year of the first decade of the new millennium dawns let the world note that each year is a new beginning and an ending of something. Let us end those things that hurt great numbers of humans and let us do those things that benefit the greatest number of human beings. For only then will we have truly put away childish things.

Current Events, History and Dirty Tricks:

2008-11-12T15:49:00.004-06:00

Here we are restricting our consideration to the political arena. Wikipedia definitions are in the form of active links.

Wikipedia: Dirty Tricks. As you can see American political dirty tricks go all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. I personally became interested in dirty tricks when Joseph McCarthy used them in the 1950s. See Wikipedia: McCarthyism. As part of my American History course I was encouraged to study recent events that might make their way into the history books. Many of us who did not experience McCarthyism experienced the successor to McCarthyism in the form of Wikipedia: John Birch Society.

These events are now some half a century old. They did occur and they did form the foundation upon which people like Lee Atwater and more recently Karl Rove have built political strategies. Both of these men worked almost exclusively for the Republican Party. In fact when you do a Google search for “dirty tricks” there are only minor references to the Democratic Party. Some might say this is a conspiracy on the part of the liberal press. To this I can only reply get serious.

Dirty tricks in very high places can be best demonstrated by the Nixon Administrations break in to the office of Daniel Ellsberg. Following that there was a more significant Watergate break in conducted at the specific request of a sitting President according to testimony of Jeb Magruder.

The current administration has used dirty tricks as well. As part of the build up to the invasion of Iraq Joseph_C._Wilson was sent to Africa to verify certain facts. When he returned and reported that the facts were in error that information was suppressed. Worse when Joe Wilson published an op-ed document in the New York Times his wife’s identity as covert intelligence agent was leaked to Robert Novak. The last dirty trick of the Republican Party was the swift boat campaign.

The reason I bring this entire issue up is charges during this latest Presidential election campaign. These charges largely come from the Republican Party and accuse the national press corps of bias towards Berack Obama. My reply to this criticism is that perhaps the national press corps has grown tired of Republican Party lies and fabrications.

History and the State of the Nation:

2008-11-04T09:41:00.003-06:00

The study of history some say began with the first written history by Herodotus about the Persian Wars. Of course the bible as a written history also provides a complementary view of the historical narrative. More fundamental to history and underlying all of history is the development of a time scale. The Romans were the first of the western cultures to study and codify the rules of time. In fact the calendar western civilization uses still was developed by Roman mathematicians. It is only fitting that many clocks in churches mark their faces with Roman numerals as a tribute to this work.

Oral tradition does not lend itself to what we have come to regard as historical fact. The legend of King Arthur is an example of myth. Of course once one has a time line one realizes that Arthur was 6th century and the Romans, in what was to become Britain, predate Arthur by some six hundred years. Placing events upon a time line helps establish a historical perspective as it were. Unlike perspective in a drawing events can appear larger even though they are further away in time. This is what one can refer to as historical distortion. An engineer would not try to build a device from a distorted blue print. Social scientists feel no compulsion when using a distorted historical representation to “prove” the validity of their point of view.

While distorting history by circumventing time line constraints is rare a more common error is often introduced. This may be called the point of view error. A point of view error is introduced when a subjective judgment is used to comment upon or establish new rules. This can result in what can only be termed false history. The best example of this is the three fifths clause in the American Constitution. Because almost all of the authors of the American Constitution were slave owners they saw nothing wrong in including this 3/5 rule.

The Civil War tested the concept of slavery and indeed the very documents and concepts upon which America was founded. Lincoln sensed the grave error that had been made by institutionalizing slavery. Lincoln’s speech acknowledges this time line by the famous four score and seven years part of his Gettysburg Address. The 87 years refers to the time between 1863 when Lincoln spoke and 1776 when America declared her independence. By adding the three fifths rule to the constitution written and ratified in 1787 slavery became an integral part of American governance.

In fact this error is the reason for the American Civil War though many southern historians deny this even today. Indecently this war was called the “Civil War” in both the north and the south while it was being fought. Yet historical distortion has permitted the civil war to be referred to as the War Between the States a term that was made up years later in the American South. Often both victims and victors hide the bitterness of defeat in such terms. It is akin to the last refuge of a scoundrel being patriotism.

Today America does something much more insidious; we practice political correctness and conflict avoidance. As if by doing so would somehow make things better. I liken this to another old saying “There is none so blind as he who will not see”. As Jefferson said the teaching of political history will teach Americans “how to judge for themselves what secure or endanger their freedom.” Let us look at history openly and honestly.

Nat Turner and John Brown:

2008-10-23T10:36:00.001-05:00

The struggle for Black freedom does not begin in 1831 with Nat Turner. But the rebellion he sparked is the first to reach regional and national level of awareness. The weaknesses and abuse of the then wide spread practice of human slavery was exposed to the light of day. The fact that many areas of Virginia were overwhelming populated by black slaves is of crucial interest. This fact insured that fear of other uprisings became a driving force from 1831 forward in American race relations. Indeed fear not tranquility underlies the entire South from 1831 until as late as 2008. Long term fear will over time extract a dreadful toll.

How is the story of Nat Turner recounted? In almost every history text book he is described as a Black religious fanatic and portrayed as being totally or partially insane. The term brutal and the famous quotation of Patrick Henry both appear in research material. Nat was found guilty of the capital offense of murder on November, 5 1831 and hung on November 11 some 6 days later. After death his body was flayed beheaded and quartered. No burial location is given.

The result of this unsuccessful revolution was that both abolitionists and slavers became more entrenched and more bitter and fearful. Some 55 Black persons were executed by the state as being suspect in Nat Turners rebellion. An addition 200 Black people many completely innocent we set upon by angry white mobs and beaten to death or lynched.

As a direct result of the events of 1831 the events leading up to Harper’s Ferry in 1859 occurred. John Brown became convinced that he must help his children defend their land in Kansas against attack by slavery supporting white southerners. Lawrenceville Kansas was attacked by a roving band of what amounted to white terrorists. Five people died in this attack. John Brown led a counter attack that killed 5 white southern ruffians some 5 days later.

The Kansas Nebraska Act attempted to resolve the expansion of slavery issue. Stephen A Douglas US Senator from Illinois and friend to railroad interests crafted this bill. Essentially it repealed the Missouri Act of 1820 and permitted the residents of either of these new territories to decide if they would enter the union as free or slave states. After some months in congress the bill was passed by both houses and signed into law by President Pierce on May 30, 1854. Interestingly enough both Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and Sam Houston of Texas opposed this Law. Though the die was cast another result was the Lincoln-Douglas Debates which placed Lincoln in center stage for the presidential nomination of a new political party.

Events continued to spin out of control and what Abraham Lincoln was to complete; John Brown began when he attacked a federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry Virginia in October of 1859 with the express purpose being to arm Black slaves in and about this location on the border of Maryland and Virginia. John Brown hoped that armed slaves could and would preserve their freedom by force of arms. This did not in fact come to pass and John Brown was executed for the crime of treason on December 2, 1859 some 11 months before Abraham Lincoln was elected to the office of President.

These two men were not the first to die and countless thousands more would die in the struggle that followed. The struggle is still going on in such places as Jasper Texas. Truly the vintage that John Brown’s boots trampled from the grapes of wrath is still being drunk by both sides in this ongoing conflict.

Complexity and Chaos:

2008-10-23T08:09:00.001-05:00

There were several ideas presented on TV the other night that really held my attention. The first was chaos theory as applied to the current financial crisis. The point of view being that the system may have become so complex that its reaction to an input has become unpredictable. I am not a first rate theoretical mathematician but it seems to me that if this is true we might have to treat market disturbances in a statistical manner. That is to say that cause and effect are not clearly linked in all cases.

Using statistics to relate inputs to system responses is exactly what one does in quantum physics. Where things become truly worrisome is when one realizes that the financial system may have become an example of a chaotic system. In a chaotic system all of the relationships between inputs and outputs are not known. To say that another way it is impossible to predict with any certainty the outcome of a given stimulus. The best example of this is attempts to predict the weather. Prediction further out in time than 3 days become simply a guess or a wish.

I think everyone would agree that one wants to have a fairly tight control over what happens to financial systems on a national level. When a government looses control of its financial destiny then that government normally falls or becomes a vassal state to which ever government is controlling its financial destiny. Today one can argue that America has become a vassal state to the producers of petroleum. If you do not understand this concept somehow you have slumbered through events of the past 35 years. In fact you have been encouraged to slumber. Those that would deprive you of your wealth and free agency did not slumber however.

Today America is in the throws of a financial crisis that was brought on principally because we were not paying attention to world events. Nor were we taking steps to curb our own American greed. Frankly we consumed more than what we were entitled to. Only a very few saved for a rainy day. Folks it is raining and most people don’t have an umbrella. Many more have found their umbrella is in tatters.

The wealth of a nation is best gauged in the 21st century by that nation’s independence in energy generation. To me that should be the guiding law and principle of governance for America for the next 30 years. Until and unless America can satisfy her energy requirements domestically or with a financially balanced series of trade agreements coupled with domestic energy production America will be doomed to second class nationhood.

Cherry Picking History:

2008-10-19T05:48:00.001-05:00

We Americans do a strange thing. I call it cherry picking history. But one could as easily call it gerrymandering history. We pick and choose what we want to remember. It is as though we move forward through time by looking constantly in a rear view mirror. But it is more than just that we look to the past we constantly change the record of the past. Over the past 140 odd years the seminal events of the mid part of the 19th century have become hopelessly blurred in the minds of most Americans.

Now this follows on top of the already fractured view that most if not all Americans hold of the past as it regards the Native Americans. To better see that distortion ask yourself who settled America and when was it settled. Words begin to flow from the mouths of our citizens perhaps describing the landings of the Spanish in the Caribbean Islands. Others begin their narrative in what was to become Virginia. Still others begin to tell the tale of the Plymouth colony. The trek made from Asia across the Bering Sea is forgotten completely.

If the true origins of the true settlers of America have been forgotten so too have the struggles of the remnants of the black slaves so unhappily forced to plant, chop and harvest the major export of America cotton. The north never grew cotton to any extent. Cotton remains largely a southern crop, with the exception of California and Arizona. Cotton and slaves are chained together forever in my mind. Black hands picking white strands in the heat of a southern autumn. I can almost hear the circadian throb in the air. Do not let this tranquil image blur your mind to the flow of blood and tears and gun powder that have watered and fertilized these cotton fields. The pivotal events that still shape us as a nation today were played out upon these very hills and valleys.

The struggles and losses of the American Native have to a large extent been forgotten. Only today are the last vestiges of Indian heritage being removed by gambling establishments in places like Kinder Louisiana. The Indian reservation provides the land and law that permits the white America to once again speak out of both sides of his mouth. He may pray in church and gamble the Saturday night before both with ease if not grace.

We are in the closing days of a presidential race. Somehow it seems fitting that as this race draws to a close the folly of the almost totally white dominated banking system of America and Wall Street itself is in chaos. Are there signs in all of this? Is a chapter of American history drawing to a close? Is it American history that is ending or is it just changing into the history of the many diverse peoples that have always composed America? Will our history begin to reflect the struggles and contributions of all of the people all of the time. Or will we once again turn our backs upon the truth and continue to live in a haze of drugs and petroleum.

Who Do You Trust?

2008-10-06T09:02:00.004-05:00

My father lived through the Great Depression that began in 1929. His small hardware business went broke and dad accepted a position with a large company selling in China. Dad largely missed the day to day horror experienced by most other Americans; the soup kitchens, the bread lines, the American citizens (largely male) wandering aimlessly seeking employment. All of this dad missed while in China. Of the many blessing my father counted this missing of events was quite high on his list. In fact my father upon his return to America was confused by the changes he observed. These had to be explained to dad by his brother.

I am struck by the fact that the years 1929 to 1932 are still referred to as the Great Depression. In late 2008 America (and the rest of the world) was struck with a second great depression that started with bank failures. These failures quickly spread around the world. What is bothersome is that like New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Katrina America’s banking system is composed of weakened levees to help defend the system. Chief amongst these was the Glass-Steagall Act. This act was unraveled starting in 1970 and repealed by a Republican controlled congress by such a large margin that President Clinton could not veto it.

Glass-Steagall Act - Wikipedia

A very prophetic article appeared the fall of 2007. This post by a fellow Blogger strangely enough.

None of this answers the question posed by the title of this writing. When I was young enough to earn a living practicing my trade I did invest 10% of my gross into investments for my retirement. Over a number of years I managed to amass I nice amount. Now a strange thing happened on my way to retirement. Following several bubble-bursts my funds had decreased by a remarkable amount. You see I was by this time in transition to a retired state. My job had been outsourced. The people who worked for me were let go with almost no notice. So I was at least not able to send good money after bad money by purchasing additional equity instruments.

I did not think at the time these moneys were lost, that anyone was acting in a criminal manner. It took the Enron collapse to realize that crooks are not easy to spot when it comes to Grand Larceny and I use “grand” as an understatement. Much the same fraud was perpetrated upon the American public at large that occurred at Enron. The deeper lesson of the ease and wide spread nature of the corruption at Enron was overlooked when a very few of these folks were brought to trial.

If you cannot trust corporate officers and officers of large banks just exactly who can you trust? This realization is at the very heart of this issue. Drugs have corrupted the American system of justice. Greed has corrupted the American corporations and banks. Where does the American public turn to now? Who is honest enough to be worthy of leading our nation? For whom will you vote on November 4, 2008? It matters.

Bailout or Investment:

2008-10-02T09:40:00.005-05:00

The real problem that the people of America have with the current proposal is that government seems unable to administer programs well. This is not said lightly. The current administration managed to bungle its way into a war in the Middle East. Not only were there no weapon of mass destruction but intervention by the United States seems to have caused far many more problems than it solved.

Now the Department of the Treasury is asking for a blank check with which to purchase “toxic loans”. If these loans are purchased at a severely discounted price I can’t oppose the bill. My problem is that there is very limited oversight to assure that market values of the loans will be applied. It is just as foolish for the government to pay $100,000 for a house worth $30,000 as it is for an individual to do something that stupid. Recall doing exactly that is what brought Freddy Mac and Fannie Mea down.

So the real question is do you trust the government to purchase the loans and by doing so assess a correct value to these financial instruments. Such purchase could be considered an investment in the future of America or conversely it could become a rat hole into which many billions of dollars are wasted. The congress of America is charged with making this decision. Overwhelmingly the people of America think that to purchase these loans would be a colossal mistake.

Do we trust the judgment of everyday Americans? Or should we trust the experts and fund the purchase of these loans. Either way the real problem is to get the credit markets flowing. At the moment those markets have become clogged like an artery and the life blood of the country simply can’t get past the blockage. America has suffered a stroke. It is that simple. It remains to be seen exactly how crippling the stroke is and what parts of the economy recover and what parts do not recover.

These things are in the future and cannot be seen or foretold. The real problem is to break up the clot and get the blood flow of credit flowing again in the capital markets.

Bail Out:

2008-09-26T09:48:00.005-05:00

Now comes the reckoning. America has sown the wind and reaped a whirl wind. And the truly astounding part is every one is surprised. Or everyone acts surprised in any event. Let us recount what America has done over the past say 30 years.

We saw in 1973 oil prices jump from $3 a barrel to $8 a barrel and the oil producing nations stitched together a cartel to market their product. America should have had the sense to realize that oil cartels were exactly why Teddy Roosevelt directed the department of justice to break up Standard Oil of New Jersey. And that was quite a few years ago. Oil is what America’s economy is based upon.

One of the reasons why Teddy did as he did was so that no one oil company could dominate and set the price for crude oil. The world is not however governed by American law. So guess what; it is not illegal to operate a cartel anywhere but in America. Does that put us at a competitive disadvantage? Some would say it does. Domestic cartels are still not permitted, though more and more American businesses are merging to the peril of the American consumer.

That is not the real failing of America in my judgment. The real failing is we have based our economy on the concept that when it breaks throw it away. Often times some years ago things that broke could be fixed. There were even places where you could take things to be repaired. Cobblers repaired shoes and tailors resized clothes. There were even people who could fix your TV.

Shoes wear out over about the same time period but now they are discarded rather than resoled. That is if they have not gone out of style and were discarded when almost new so that the owner of the shoes could continue to look stylish. This thought process extended to everything. New was always better than old. New car, new TV, new computer and new cell phone. No thought given to where all the old devices went. And so we began to pollute the environment and a whole group of folks sprang up that opposed that. Largely these people were ignored and labeled tree huggers and other terms of derision.

Where the trouble got unmanageable was with very large assets. To most Americans their house/home is their largest asset. But more and more a home became a disposable asset. As your earnings increased you did not fix up your house. You sold it and moved into a bigger and better house. There would always be a market for your old house. And it seemed that there was an endless supply of money to make the purchase with.

Suddenly America found out that loaning money to purchase over priced houses did not make a lot of sense when you were spending $800 a month on gas to drive from your job to your home. No problem because the house is worth less than the mortgage on it so the homeowner can just walk away from his loan right. The homeowner can discard the house like he would a cell phone that was not the right color. Right?

These loans on over priced houses form the core of the current banking problems. That the loans should never have been made in the first place is being ignored. These worthless loans were made in the form of adjustable rate mortgages. Lovingly referred to by those in the know as “sucker loans”. You hook a sucker and then suck them dry. When the person who made the loan tries to declare bankruptcy you block that too. When a lot of these people just flat out tell you they are not going to pay the bank goes under. The difference is the bank can afford lobbyists who go to the government and say if you don’t help us the economy will go in the crapper.

Now the government seems to be listening to these same fine folks who got us in this mess in the first place. By loaning these folks money the government is saying that they can separate the horseshit from the cornmeal after the cornbread is baked. I rather think not. Its done its done. Just take $500 from every American citizen and give it to the bankers so their banks can continue to make loans to bad credit risks.

Or you might just remind the bankers that they were the ones that loaned the money in the first place and if the loan goes bad tough titty kitty. Nagh .. far to simple a solution.

Housing and the Galveston Hurricane of 2008:

2008-09-22T07:49:00.003-05:00

I have, over the past 9 days, watched first hand the response of the Texans in this part of Texas. It has been interesting to say the very least. As of this morning there were a number of points of distribution (PODs) still handing out needed supplies to the public. Initially these handed out ice and water … a day or two later meals ready to eat (MREs) became available.

Ike Photos

Power outage was something approaching 2.3 million customer accounts or 4,000,000 people without power. This from a category 2 hurricane that hit the Houston / Galveston beginning about 2 am September 13th. 2008. This storm had hurricane force winds that extended 120 miles out from the center. The sheer size of the storm meant the wind blew for a number of hours. Several areas were a total loss and there was much damage done.

Now as Houston / Galveston begin to enter the rebuilding phase of the recovery effort, a very different type of storm has appeared on the financial radar. This is a storm of confidence. The folks who lost their homes to Ike are going to be hard pressed to borrow the dollars to rebuild because their line of credit is maxed out to credit card companies. Many banks are holding customer IOUs (in the form of adjustable rate mortgages) that frankly are not worth the paper they are printed on.

All of this has come to a boil in the past 7 days. Yet we lack the political will to acknowledge that America is poised at the edge of a very ugly fall. Once again there is finger pointing and a lot of “I told you” going on. The facts are simple. America has been running on borrowed money for at least 16 years. Yet taxes continue to be cut and regulation of the critical financial markets continues to be lacking.

Loan clients who lacked both the desire and the ability to repay the loans were extended credit. This largely done because the bonus of loan officers was based on the dollar volume of the loans they made. And not just the loan officer was rewarded this way. Bank managers were compensated in many cases based upon their loan volume not the soundness of the loans made.

What happened was that Lehman Brothers founded in 1850 filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. The following day Merrill Lynch was sold to the Bank of America. This comes within days of the government announcing that it had taken over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae the major buyers of junk status loans. I have no idea what the American government’s exposure is but we are all ready fighting two very expensive wars in Middle East. Add to those costs the cost of this bail out; and the total costs become truly astronomical. Can we weather these storms or will the nation become as crippled as Galveston Texas or New Orleans Louisiana? The next four years are indeed going to be a challenge for those seeking elected office this fall.

Slavery by Another Name:

2008-09-02T16:13:00.002-05:00

This is the title of perhaps the most important book published in 2008. To those of us that lived through the civil rights movement and never quite got it this book is essential reading. Until you read this book you might still hold to the belief that the antebellum South was benign. Nothing could be further from the truth. This well researched work reveals the ugliness that was the industrial south of the 1880 to 1943. In fact the abuse did not begin to end until Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Monterrey Alabama bus in December of 1955.

Without the perspective provided by this book understanding the continuing racial and political divisions in America simply can not be grasped. Things as simple as distrust of the criminal justice system I now understand. But more subtle points such as State’s Rights are brought into clear focus. The pivotal decisions are Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Under the guise of “separate but equal” (Plessy v. Ferguson) southern abuse of freed slaves continued despite the fact that debtor involuntary servitude had been outlawed by federal peonage statue of 1867 as well as the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

The 13th Amendment was the first amendment to the US Constitution in 60 years and was rapidly followed by the 14th and 15th Amendment. These amendments finally stated the federal government’s position on slavery and corrected the oversights made in the original Constitution. The 13th was ratified by the legislatures of twenty-seven of the then thirty-six states within a year of its proposal. While the 13th Amendment had been passed in December 1865 it was largely ignored by many in the south.

In 1903 the reformist administration of Teddy Roosevelt attacked the new form of slavery using an 1867 law that forbid peonage rather than the hated 13th Amendment. In a split decision the peonage statute had been upheld by the Supreme Court. Federal prosecutors were directed to frame their charges against neo-slavers in terms of this statute. However active prosecutions of southern landowners and factory owners were not actively pursued. The practice of debtor servitude was continued in the American South until the outbreak of World War Two.

The “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 did not fall until Brown v. Board in 1954. Brown v. Board in fact became the pivotal decision that compelled abandonment of the Montgomery Alabama City public transit system’s segregation in 1956. The winds of change were beginning to blow even in Montgomery Alabama the last bastion of segregation. These efforts culminated with the civil rights act of 1964.

America is not a land of fools and bigots. We are slow to change as are many human beings. Change is always unsettling. All people seek the comfort of things known and things familiar. Where change must occur is when one group deprives a second group of their rights of citizenship. In such cases the duty of the government is to restore those rights.

I think the best summary of this work was proposed by the author himself:

“Let us define this period (1865 until 1945) of American life plainly and comprehensively. It was the Age of Neoslavery. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery’s grip on U.S. society – its intimate connections to present-day wealth and power, and the depth of it injury to millions of Black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end – can we reconcile the paradoxes of current day American life.

I personally have thought that slavery was a black mark on American history. I too thought much of this was in the distant past of my country. What a personal shock to realize that I was alive while Neoslavery continued. I will not sleep well for many, many nights.

I Have a Dream Redo:

2008-08-29T22:21:00.005-05:00

August 28, 1963 Martin Luther King speaks at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Some 45 years later to the day Barak Obama accepts the nomination of the Democratic Party as the nominee for President of the United States of America. These two events are related.

The whole issue of race relations in America is fraught with difficulty and emotion. When the 55 sage men met in Philadelphia in 1787 to design the American Constitution the issue of slavery was in fact not resolved but rather deferred. For the sake of population counting slaves were counted as 3/5 of a citizen. But additional restrictions were imposed. Congress was forbidden from prohibiting importation of slaves for the following 20 years. A “person held to service of labor” in one state be “delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor shall be due”.

Congress did in fact forbid the importation of slaves in 1807 some 20 years after ratification. However this was more of a concession to Great Britain who had outlawed slavery on March 25, 1807 by Act of Parliament. While the importation of slaves from Africa was forbidden no attempt was made to abolish slavery by either Great Britain or the United States.

The struggle continued throughout the years leading up to the American Civil War. In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Law required individuals to return fugitive slaves to their owners. The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision by the Supreme Court further divided the nation. It 1857 Chief Justice Taney read the majority opinion that stripped all slaves of any and all protections of the law. On October 16, 1859 John Brown a radical abolitionist lead 22 men in a raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. The plan was to use the captured weapons to arm slaves in the American South. It is interesting to note that Robert E. Lee led the federal troops retook the Arsenal.

By two executive orders issued by President Abraham Lincoln freed all slaves in states that did not rejoin the union by January 1, 1863. This order did not free the slaves in the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia. Several acts of congress and the second part of the executive order and the Dred Scott decision was effectively reversed.

However Sothern Blacks had 100 more years of slavery by another name to endure. Jim Crow laws and warrantless arrests and total disregard of habeas corpus coupled with the KKK enforced the re-enslavement of southern blacks. In fact until Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 black America was not free. LBJ well knew that his signing of that act would in fact cost the Democratic Party their power in the South. Today the Democratic south remains almost totally Republican. So much so that only in northern Virginia and areas around Atlanta and Dade County Florida can a Democrat stand a chance of being elected.

The dream lives on. The struggle for the laboring worker vs. the corporate owners continues. Those who are without medical coverage continue to work and hope that they do not fall victim to an accident or illness. The ranks of those who cannot afford to purchase a home or who have purchased a home only to lose it to a foreclosure swells week by week. Compounding these problems is a rapidly increasing rate of inflation. These are the problems that try the souls of the American Common Man.

Against this troubled backdrop we have the vision of a Black man who has overcome all obstacles to become the first Black to be nominated for President of the United States of America by a major party. May god bless America Black, White and Brown.

Money and Power:

2008-08-16T10:19:00.001-05:00

There seems to be some confusion with some people asking which came first money or power. Maybe this will help. Asking which came first the chicken or the egg is a dodge and asking a question like this prevents knowledge rather than helping. The chicken and the egg are the same critter that is to say both are different forms of a chicken. So it is with money and power. Money and power are really different forms of the same thing.

If you stop and think about many of the questions being asked today you will see that many of those questions are not designed to illicit information but rather to serve as points over which people can endlessly argue. The argument serves to prevent a consensus being reached and real and meaningful solutions being found and applied.

Consider the different sentencing guide lines for cocaine possession. Rock cocaine is the form most often used by Black America. White Americans prefer their cocaine as a powder. Now consider that having the same amount of cocaine in different forms carry different mandatory sentences. Is this the height of stupidity or not. Yet folks will argue over this very point.

Today American education system is in a state of disrepair. In many school districts the schools themselves are in desperate need of repair. Do we fix them? We do not we argue about whether or not prayer in schools should be permitted. Or we argue if the teachers are doing their job. The answer is simple. If the students are not able to read and they are in the seventh grade someone has failed to do their job. If the roof leaks we as citizens have an obligation to fix the leak.

Tonight there will be a question and answer session between Pastor Rick Warren and presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain. Already the Christian right is confusing things by saying that Rick Warren will not ask their stance on Abortion. I for one am far more interested in each mans approach to energy sources for America in the 21 century. Abortion issues do not bring knowledge to this they just serve to cloud the stage with emotion not logic.

Let us all see how clearly issues can be addressed and true solutions proposed to America’s problems. Let us quit bickering over issues that matter little and address issues that matter a lot.

Carbon Cycle:

2008-08-10T08:41:00.003-05:00

Oil shale fascinated me back when I was a kid. I actually used a Fresnel lens to heat a lump of oil shale and could smell the crude oil that hot spot was generating. The problem with oil shale is that some of the oil has to be consumed in order to free the remaining oil. Canada is continuing to expand its shale oil production. It is definitely something that America will have to do. However if you think strip mining leaves the land a mess I assure you that mining oil shale is even more destructive to the landscape.

See: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=bakken+oil&spell=1

As I see it we have two limits on carbon based fuels. The first is their decreasing availability and their escalating cost. The second is the environmental considerations. The level of atmospheric CO2 is far higher than it should be and control of CO2 levels simply must be part of any overall energy policy.

I have been trying to establish the parameters for using high growth algae to harvest the CO2 and turn it into cells. These algae cells could be sun dried and then burned as fuel in a generating plant. There is of course a lot of math and some genetic work that must be done. Such an approach creates a solar driven carbon dioxide recycling energy generation system. The overall carbon foot print would be zero and yet energy would be generated. Such a system would continue to generate energy on cloudy days.

Over sizing the algae ponds initially would mean the carbon footprint could become negative until these ponds brought better balance to the earth’s atmosphere. Where we store the excess dried algae might become a problem. Perhaps it could be formed into sludge and pumped back into the oil fields we have depleted.

A Look Back:

2008-07-26T05:15:00.001-05:00

Often I wonder how we got where we are. The steps to getting anywhere are first you dream, then you plan, then you implement that plan. I am not the only person who thinks this way. Almost all rational people think this way. Very little happens with out a plan. Many may not have heard about The Project for the New American Century. The following will give you a sample:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=The+Project+for+the+New+American+Century&btnG=Search

Looking back we see many of the supporters of this plan are names from the Iraq War. These include Dick Cheney George W. Bush; Jeb Bush was also a PNAC signatory. Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz also signed this document. What the Wikipedia article presents is a brief look at the documents content and who supported the ideas put forward in the document.

If you have read some of the source documents included in the above URL then I think you can see the flaw in the plan. This flaw is only recently apparent. The flaw is of course that no country no matter how strong or willful can for long dominate the entire planet. Basically America’s war machine is fueled by imported oil. The folks in the Middle East have become all too aware of this reality. As they have the oil; and can control the price is it any wonder that America is hemorrhaging dollars at an unsustainable rate? American banks and monetary credit sources attempted to shore up this dollar flow by marketing securities that were essentially junk bonds. Suddenly American securities threatened to pollute the global credit markets.

America is facing an election which can select the course that America will follow for the next 4 years. Will we select the path of an American Empire? Is this the future that we wish for America? Do we as Americans wish to control the world? Quite obviously some American’s have this as a goal. Just as obviously many Americans reject this as a vision for the future. America is still a democracy. Your vote counts still. The future of America may be decided in the election of 2008.

Starting Over:

2008-07-05T10:05:00.001-05:00

I was thinking about America yesterday and wondering what it is that seems to make America different from almost every other country in the world. Part of that difference is America’s ability to start over. Part of starting over is a desire to do things right this time. When America was founded the basic goal of the founders was to make a new country that had better policies than did Mother England. England of course did not see things quite the same way and so a revolutionary war followed.

The difference between a revolution and a rebellion is that no one ever heard of a successful rebellion. America was to learn this lesson all too well in the years 1860 to 1865. The American Civil war was the second great change and attempt at remaking America. In the process some of America was left behind and to this day there remain thoughts and traditions that continue to haunt America.

Early in the Twentieth Century the seeds of a new liberalism were planted by the first of the Roosevelt’s. Teddy Roosevelt responded to what he sensed correctly as the winds of change blowing across America. American workers desired a greater share of the wealth of America. Some would say they had no right to this. Some would also say that the Black American slave also had no right to expect freedom. Indeed much of the same mind set is shared by the people who oppose trade unionism and those that oppose civil liberties. Trade unionism propelled the American worker into the American middle class. Indeed it can be argued that there would be no middle class with out the unions.

Time has passed and the tides of fortune have again shifted. America must again change herself. Getting a grip on what changes need to be made and how to make those changes will occupy America for at least the next 20 years. How well we select the faltering first steps down this new path will be closely watched by the rest of the world. Our 232nd birthday was yesterday. I think it is past time for America to act in a more mature fashion. Don’t you?

A Texas Energy Proposal:

2008-06-14T10:32:00.002-05:00

Texas is one of the few states that have all the flavors of power generation with in her state borders. We have coal and natural gas power generation as well as several nuclear power plants. We also have wind farms and limited use local solar panels.

What Texas lacks is a side by side approach to power generation. If the state of Texas were to build solar generation power plants using the parabolic trough approach and locate those plants side by side with the coal and natural gas plants in far west Texas duplicating the connections to the grid could be reduced. Parabolic troughs is where long, curved mirrors that concentrate sunlight on a liquid inside a tube that runs parallel to the mirror are used as a source of thermal energy.

See this URL:

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/renewable_energy_basics/how-solar-energy-works.html#Solar_Thermal_Concentrating_Systems

Because the sun does not shine 24 hours a day even in West Texas the side by side locating of this new solar plant would insure on cloudy days the energy from fossil fuel burning could still be pumped onto the power transmission grid. The same approach could be used after sunset until the engineers can come up with an efficient way of storing vast amounts of electrical energy.

Texas has the right to tax her citizens and I for one would like to see an additional energy tax added to all consumption of fossil fuels. These tax dollars to directly fund solar power plant construction in this side be side approach. I think TXU would jump at a chance to receive additional funding and at the same time be branching out in their basic industry.

Attention Politicians:

2008-06-14T07:44:00.000-05:00

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does.

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices

545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? She is the leader of the majority party, and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red.

If the Marines are in IRAQ, it's because they want them in IRAQ.

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like 'the economy,' 'inflation,' or 'politics' that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses, provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees. We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

This was by:
Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper.

What you do with this article now that you have read it is up to you.

Use this URL to find your Congress persons Email address:
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/

The Mindset of Slavery:

2008-06-10T11:09:00.000-05:00

Just when you think it is over it is not. America today faces a crisis of leadership again. The fundamental question is can a Black man be elected to the office of President of the United States of America. I think if we look back at America and the history of the Black race’s contributions the answer is that such a thing is long over due. Some will say Barack Obama is not the right man at the right time. To those folks I say Herbert Hoover might have been the worst possible choice when elected.

If we are ever to bind up the wounds that racial hatred and racial violence has caused I fear it will not be accomplished by a white president. As enlightened as LBJ was he served in Congress when there was an occasional lynching in Texas. White Texans even today can not understand how terrified both the Black and the Brown citizens of Texas were in those days.

Most of this was due to what I call the Mindset of Slavery. This type of thinking corrupts both the slave and the master. The slave learns to do those things required to get along and the master learns to become arrogant and uncaring. Neither attitude is helpful to build a strong democracy. I would argue that the wedge driven in the society of Texas is only now being addressed and is far from just or equitable at this point in time.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1810307/posts

The above URL has quotes from the Lynch manual on slave training. The word lynching is derived from this man’s last name. The incidents occurred not 200 years ago in Virginia but rather last spring in Paris Texas. Such events are enough or should be enough to make any citizen of Texas see red and write letters to the state and federal authorities.

To all this talk of not ready I say as is attributes to William E. Gladstone “Justice delayed is justice denied.” Gladstone also said "Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.” I think both apply in America today. I despair that we are becoming or have become uncaring and unjust.

Energy what can I do:

2008-05-30T13:09:00.000-05:00

Most of us can not come up with new ways of converting sunlight to energy. At best what we can do is perhaps even more important. We can conserve energy and thereby reduce our “carbon footprint”. As we live our day to day lives we are all net consumers of energy. That is to say we consume more energy than we produce. This has given rise to corporations whose purpose is to supply us with the energy we require. Initially these corporations were coal companies that mined coal in Pennsylvania and distributed it to cities in the northeast and Midwest. Today there are a number of companies distributing energy in many forms.

Regardless of the form energy takes it is today largely based upon the burning of carbon with the accompanying release of energy and carbon dioxide. This is where the carbon footprint comes in. The footprint is an attempt to quantify the amount of carbon required to be burned to accomplish the energy release. Obviously solar and wind generated electricity has almost no carbon footprint.

For the health of the planet we desire to lower the carbon footprint of the nation as a whole. The reasons for this is that scientific opinion seems agreed that higher levels of carbon dioxide are causing the average global temperature to rise. As temperatures rise polar ice will melt and cause elevated sea levels. Some would argue that the polar ice is a driving mechanism for the ocean currents which circulate the oceans and move heat from the equatorial zones to the cooler polar regions.

As anyone who has not been lost in space for the past 15 years can tell you this concept is rejected in some sections of the economy. America has joined in discussions but has not signed treaties like the Kyoto accords. There are legitimate reasons for not signing such treaties. There is no reason to not conserve energy where ever and when ever we can.

We are not going to conserve our way into energy independence. However as we transition to a solar based energy infrastructure we simply must husband our remaining supply of energy. That is to say we must all reduce out carbon footprint. We can do this by driving more fuel efficient cars and driving those cars less. We can do this by using more efficient light sources such as florescent lighting. We can do this by keeping our homes warmer in summer and cooler in winter. Individually these are small changes collectively they add up to large savings.

Solar panels: http://sharp-world.com/solar/

One last thing we can all do is to insist that basic research be funded to address these issues at a national level. I don’t care who does the research and ultimately I don’t care if Exxon becomes an electricity producer. So long as the energy produced is not based on fossil fuel burning. And that is it cheap enough for me to afford it.

More on solar:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=solar+energy+production&btnG=Google+Search

Sustainable Competitive Advantage:

2008-05-29T06:54:00.000-05:00

America has done some very strange things with her natural resources over the years. During the Second World War we pretty much mined out the Missabe Range in Minnesota. We pumped a huge amount of oil from beneath Texas and other locations. Most of these resources went to defeat Germany and Japan.

Within several years of the end of that war a cold war with communist Russia and communist China was begun. Many can argue that those struggles were necessary and I am not going to get into that argument. I will only observe that America continued to use her resources at an alarming rate over the next several decades.

With the dawn of the new millennium America found herself running on empty. Actually the tank had run dry years before but the economy continued on the inertia of excessive spending by people who did not realize that they were bankrupt. America’s competitive advantage was a thing of the past. We were using other peoples resources to sustain the American way of life as though we had a god given right to do that.

Now comes the oil price shock of 2008. Actually I am of two minds on this whole higher price issue. I say this because there is no doubt in my mind that the burning of fossil fuels is in fact causing global warming. To slow and stop this phenomenon we simply have to reduce the amount burned. Given those facts how do you accomplish that task? One way to do that is to increase the cost of the thing you are burning to the point that the average citizen sees that he is throwing away a major part his paycheck. Then and only then will he support efforts to replace fossil fuels with some source that is more sustainable and less damaging.

Would it not be ironic if the very people we are pissing and moaning at for being religious children who bicker incessantly among them selves prove to be the very people that force the west to change (mend is a better word) their ways and take care of the earth as humanity’s home.

I feel we have not seen the worst of this crisis so long in coming. The triage of the American economy is going to be very ugly and very brutal. Can the country survive as we know it? This crisis is so deep and so important that in fact it may change the very nature of America.

China Earthquake vs. New Orleans Hurricane:

2008-05-24T18:20:00.001-05:00

Natural disasters almost invite comparisons. There are many reasons why this is so and almost as many reasons why we should not make such comparisons. America has long portrayed China as an government that is ungodly at best and spawn of the devil at worst, all the while touting the vaunted ability of capitalism to care compassionately for the least regarded of her citizens.

Now comes a test for all the world to see. America went first as the hurricane struck a mighty blow against the city and people of New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Large sections of New Orleans remain uninhabited now some 34 months later. On May 12, 2008 the ground shook in the northeastern Chinese city of Chengdu the Sichuan provincial capital. The 7.9 magnitude quake left an immediate death toll of 5,000 to 9,000 souls. Days later this had grown to tens of thousands and continues to rise.

Clearly the death toll in China far exceeded the death toll in New Orleans. This somewhat invalidates the relief effort appraisal that will follow in days and weeks to come. However both tragedies serve to highlight the helplessness of the man in the street regardless of the form of the government in power. What I will be watching closely as will the rest of the world is how China deals with this crisis. How well or how poorly she addresses the needs of the average Chinese citizen will speak volumes to the effectiveness of the Chinese government and their “fitness to rule.”

I do not know if meaningful parallels can be drawn between these two natural disasters. I know I for one in this year of Olympic competition will watch closely this non Olympic competition closely. Perhaps even more closely than I will watch the athletes of these two countries compete on the playing fields of the Olympics. To me and to many the out come of the relief effort is far more important than any athletic records that may be set.

Picking Up the Pieces:

2008-05-24T05:23:00.000-05:00

We oldsters have a huge investment in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That investment is our children. And these children are returning with injuries of a nature largely unseen before this war. For many American parents hopes of a fulfilling retirement in which I lifetime of hard work can pay dividends has vanished. These lost dreams have been replaced with the bitter reality of providing extended care for war wounded adult children.

This video clip and associated article gives a glimpse into the lives of some of these AARP families. It is narrated by Jane Pauley.

http://www.aarp.org/family/caregiving/iraq_vets_tv/?NLC-WBLTR-CTRL=F4-52308

An astounding fact is that one in four homeless people are Viet Nam veterans. The cost to America of ignoring the problems of this new group of war survivors will be far larger than the enormous costs that it will take to ensure that these fallen warriors are returned to useful lives.

It makes no difference if you are for or against the conflict in the Middle East. These people and their problems are with us now and will be with us for years to come because they are our sons and daughters and in some cases our grand sons and grand daughters.

Remember Them All

2008-05-22T08:01:00.000-05:00

We all tend to forget the young men and women who fight and die every day.

Regardless of your political stripe these young people are the Hero’s of America.

Let us be resolved that they shall not have died in vain.

http://s259.photobucket.com/albums/hh289/Impish_Dragon/?action=view&current=Untitled.flv

Let us take a moment to remember them all including my Marine Corp grandson.

Lee Iacocca an American Engineer

2008-05-22T06:06:00.000-05:00

A bit of background first. Scotland has always provided the engineers that made the machines work in England. England became a Great Power (this has become a very dated term in today’s parlance) by using Scottish engineering coupled with English labor. My mother’s people all came from up close to the border with Scotland.

I went into engineering initially when I entered university. I quit before I finished a degree plan but returned some years later and got a degree not in engineering but in computer science because I could even back then see that computers would be the guiding force controlling the factories of the future.

I left science for a short period to learn more about the business side of corporations. I returned to my roots in research and development some 8 years later. This time in charge of the personal computers (there were 2 of them in the whole of the research center) section of the computer group. Some 11 years later I took early retirement as the company had decided to out source my group entirely. When I left there were 1,200 personal computers and my staff of 5 (6 including myself because I hate sitting on my ass as a manager) was responsible for their care and feeding.

This short biography is not meant to do anything other than to show that even dumb heads like me can solve large problems if given a chance. America engineers made America great not the bankers not the Generals and certainly not the politicians. But only those engineers that tinkered and kept getting their hands dirty. Men like Edison and Westinghouse and yes Lee Iacocca.

I too feel that America can and will solve the major problem she faces. That problem frankly is dependence upon fossil fuels for energy. Ultimately we must harness solar power for it is the only limitless supply of clean energy. I am not particularly godly but I might even say god made the sunshine for us to use. And hope a bolt of lighting does not strike me dead at the keyboard.

There are many other things that are wrong with America starting with racial divisions and drugs and continuing all the way down to too many wanting to sit on their collective asses and do nothing. All of those can and must be addressed in due time. First things first. America must solve once and for all the energy problem. I honestly feel given America expertise at problem solving and knowing that we have produced fine solutions before think it can be solved.

Simply put energy is wealth. If American engineers can crack this energy-nut wealth will flow back to America as will jobs and hopefully a strong middle class to help the poor and restrain excesses of the rich. Then and only then will you see an America fit to be a world leader. Currently I am ashamed of the example America is setting.

More at:
http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/04/13213.html

Black vs. White

2008-05-13T18:16:00.000-05:00

Black vs. White

And now comes the election and America is facing suck it up time. Let us review in June Hillary Clinton dropped out of the race and was nominated for Vice President on the 5th vote. Mc Cain picked Romney several weeks later. This after introducing senate Bill 408 putting an amnesty in effect for illegal aliens already living with in the nation’s borders.

Could such a scenario happen? I seriously wonder. Many have asked about slavery in America and the black man’s role in governance. To understand this a bit better you need to examine American history closely. Black slaves were important into the south because no white immigrants were available to work the vast southern plantation system that began to develop. The law is shaky at best and really has no basis in what we call common law.

In fact England outlawed the importation of slaves in 1807. This event marks the beginning of the horrors of what came to be called the middle passage. In 1808 as a concession to England and in the hope of stopping the impressments of American sailors and stopping capture of their ships Congress forbids importation of slaves. England was having none of it however and American slave ships with a living cargo of slaves in transit to the sugar islands of the Caribbean continued.

An interesting ploy was developed by ship’s captains when pursued by ships of the British navy. Without the evidence of the slaves on board the captain could argue that his ship was not carrying on business in the slave trade.

So the chained slaves simply had several cannon balls attached to the first member of the upwards of 100 slaves chained together. This man was tossed over board and the rest of the helplessly bound slaves followed into the depths of the ocean. Their cries muffled by a blanket of sea water. The cries were however not muffled in the minds of the New England crew and explain the high incidence of insanity amongst those who returned to New England. The entire time-line of these events and the events that lead up to slavery can be found at:

http://www.yale.edu/glc/curriculum/amistad/abolitionism.html

As you can clearly see there is no single defining event that can be pointed to as seminal to the establishment of slavery. No America more or lest drifted into becoming a slave nation. It remained for a terrible amount of loss of life by both the north and the south before this practice was stopped. In fact the practice of share cropping continued until well into the 20th century. Poll taxes were used to deny the Black citizen the fundamental right of every citizen to vote. Black protest was as surly stifled as the cries of the hapless slaves in mid ocean were stifled in earlier years.

Now let us fast forward to the election of 2008. Can America accept an elected black man as president of the United States of America? Remember this is the same America where female tennis players’ from one of the most prestigious Eastern universities were referred to as “nappy headed little hos” considering this can you understand my doubts? I do not support such rhetoric by Don Imus or anyone else. But to ignore the fact that it happened is to over look an important clue.

I personally feel mister Obama has his work cut out for him. I hope that I am wrong but I fear that I am not.

Anti Mexican Screed:

2008-05-12T14:48:00.000-05:00

There is an email that rivals anything produced by Karl Rove and his group of divisive boys and girls. I read this piece of trash a number of weeks ago and frankly had this reaction:

If that is how the government decides to spend its treasure then so be it. You see I have always thought it is far better for a government to spend money on its citizens than to spend the same moneys blowing up citizens of another country.

Now you and some others may feel that illegal aliens are not citizens and so are entitled to nothing. You answer to such criticism is if you wish to spend the billions upon billions of dollars required to deport these people. Please do NOT expect my support for such foolishness.

What we have here is a disagreement on how the treasure of the country is to be spent. I for one would like to see those dollars spent to better the lot of people who reside in the USA. I feel the fundamental goal of government is to redress inequalities amongst the citizens. If that requires expenditure of vast sums of dollars raised by taxing rich and poor alike then so be it. In fact the rich do not now pay their fair share and this is increasingly the case.

I guess my fundamental question is what have you got against Mexicans? They did after all own all of the land we currently call Texas. They did until the white Anglo Saxons came to Texas and stole that land by force of arms. All of a sudden the Mexicans found them selves strangers in what had been their land. The same can be said of the Plains Indians.

All I know is that the American public was lied to by the current administration. Iraq had nothing to do with the attack upon the World Trade Center. The then leader of Iraq was indeed a very bad man. That however did not give America the right to invade his country. Indeed most of the rest of the world was opposed to American intervention in Iraq. With arrogance seldom equaled America told the rest of the world to “Bugger off”. Which is fine and dandy except do not expect those you have just shot a rod at to embrace your actions.

We are now facing the reality of gas prices that are on par with the rest of the world and we are sniveling like a bunch of overgrown spoiled brats which is in fact just what many Americans have become. Well we lash out and punish our fellow Americans? I expect we will. We did after all expropriate the businesses and homes of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, with no justification what so ever.

No where in this document were the actions called criminal. So I guess if it’s not criminal it becomes a case of citizens saying “Gee whiz I wish you all would not do that”

America at the Crossroads:

2008-05-11T19:22:00.000-05:00

Perhaps not since 1860 has America been in so much peril. The reason I pick 1860 and not 1940 is because the forces that most threaten America are not external. They are home grown perils. Let us consider them one by one.

We are told there is a banking crisis. How did this happen. Was it because banks external to America were being poorly managed? It was not. Simply put American banks got into trouble when they permitted Wall Street brokers to roll good loans with bad loans and market the resulting product. Now when you mix horse-shit and corn meal the result is not that you make the horse shit more editable. The result is that you make the corn meal uneatable.

What these fine folks have forgotten is that America has run for the past 20 or 30 years on the sweat of the rest of the world. America is a debtor nation running on borrowed money or to use the fancy term borrowed capital. When horse-shit got mixed in with the corn meal the backing for the massive borrowing America must do on a daily basis went to hell in a hand basket. No one wanted American IOUs.

How does one make good on a promise to repay? Generally speaking one does that by having a job. But a funny thing happened over the last 2 decades. All the well paying jobs left America. Not only did the jobs leave in many cases the machines of production were sold lock, stock and barrel. The former American factory is an empty shell both jobs and machines are most likely now in China or Mexico. Who did this you might well ask. Was it nasty ayatollahs from Iran? No folks this was done by American business men in their eternal quest for ever larger profits.

Today a greater percentage of Americans are incarcerated than any other nation on earth. Yes folks America has finally drawn ever with and surpassed such nations as Russia and China with regard to this important statistical measurement. How can this have happened? There are many answers to this but none of those answers can be laid at the doorstep of other nations. I myself feel that drugs have so thoroughly and persuasively penetrated the American system of justice that it has become incapable of delivering justice.

There is a moral to all of this and it is best summarized in the words of Pogo from back in the 1970s. “We have met the enemy … and he is us.” America is at a crossroads. Which road will we choose? Corn meal for starving African and American children or gas-a-hol for American Hummers. Vote carefully this fall. The republic is in jeopardy. Never so much since the year before the American Civil War.

first post

2006-05-09T14:15:00.000-05:00

This is a test