The Hobo Philosopher
Private Property
My zone, your zone, our zone and the ozone.
by Richard E. Noble
We hold sacred the Right to Private Property here in the United States. But this Right has not been without controversy. This notion once included the right to buy and sell other human beings and their children. It was also used by industrialist and Robber Barons alike to shoot their disgruntled workers and to deny them the right to organize and to bargain collectively for better working conditions and higher wages.
At one point in our history it applied to women and children. A man once owned his wife and children.
This Right to Private Property has also conflicted with the State and the Federal Government - Public Domain, Eminent Domain, National and State parks, National and State forests - roads, highways, interstate, damns, reservoirs etc.
On the international level, Private Ownership has been the divisive issue of the last two centuries. We define our current political systems by it:
Capitalism = Democracy + Private ownership
Socialism = Democracy + Public Ownership
Fascism = Dictatorship + Private Ownership
Communism = Dictatorship + Public Ownership
Conflicts with regards to public and private ownership are all around us today because of zoning laws and building codes and, of course, taxes. I’ve often wondered at what dollar amount a property tax turns into a rent. And considering the above definitions, when and if a property tax becomes so large that it is considered a rent; does Capitalism then evolve into Socialism? But even more interesting than that is the question of the basis and foundation of Private Property.
Private Property is based on a principle that, I think, no American would accept as fair, just, or even reasonable today.
Property has always been gained, from the beginnings of mankind’s times, through power, force and military might. The borders of countries have, for the most part, always been determined by conquests, invasions and war. Kings and power lords conquered and doled out property to their favorites. If there were people living on the property, they went with it. If you owned the property, you owned the people who lived on it also.
In the establishment of the American Colonies, we had what were called Patroons. The Patroons owned vast estates that were given to them by charters or grants or purchased from the Crown or others or that they finagled by deceit or fraud. It wasn’t until 1839 in New York that this manorial system was seriously challenged by the tenants who lived on and farmed the land. The land barons were forced by the revolt of the people and the New York Legislature in 1846 to sell off their estates in small farms to the people who lived and worked them. Of course, they sold off these vast estates at exorbitant prices, but nevertheless the tradition of small, individual, property ownership was enhanced.
Then the big money moved to the city. It was here that men like John Jacob Astor and industrialists like William “Billy” Wood and Andrew Carnegie, Pullman and bankers, like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller Jr., turned the development of cities into their personal gold mines. Tenement housing, an apparent monetary triviality, turned into multi-million and billion dollar opportunities for their investment capital. While Astor, and those of his unscrupulous agents and middlemen, got richer and richer, they turned the tenement factory worker communities into death traps for the poor and hard working. Diseases like typhoid fever, tuberculosis, cholera and others spread rapidly throughout the tenement communities. But the millions of dollars rolled in over the bodies of the poor until once again, as the rural tenant farmers had exploded in 1839; rebellion rankled in the streets and the tenement neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York, Philadelphia and Boston. The disgruntled and downtrodden, brought to the end of their faith in tolerance and acceptance, were finally motivated to risk their lives in the streets and back alleys. Somehow their protests were finally able to rouse the politicians, and laws began to evolve to protect the health and well being of the families living in these pits of American industrial revolutional squalor.
Astor and his super-wealthy friends then decided that it was time to give or dump the tenements onto the masses. The investment brokers would liquefy their assets. They sold their uncared for, unhealthy, vermin and rat invested, tenement disease incubators, before laws could be promoted requiring the landlords to spend some of their acquired millions to clean them up. It was a good business move. But once again, through a dark backdoor, the cause of individual ownership and private property was extended.
The prices of the tenements were high and exploitative, but somehow many hard working laboring families were able to become property owners - participants in the prized evolution of the propertied class.
Adolf Hitler dealt with the historical right to national territory and property rights - by way of Power and Might - extensively in his autobiography, Mein Kampf.
Adolf could not accept that a great nation, like his own, could be, cramped in such a tiny space in central Europe, while a much inferior nation like Russia had such a vast expanse of land to the west. He used the history of mankind to make his claim that the borders of any country are determined by the will of their peoples. Those with the will and the power, take; and those without the will and power are destroyed. To Adolf this was the fundamental principle of Civilization and an undeniable law of Nature - the survival of the fittest.
Russia and a good many other nations of the world disagreed. A catchy phrase of the period was - Might does not make Right. As far as I know, nobody wrote a book explaining why Might did not make Right but many people felt that the notion had merit - even if they didn’t know why. Adolf went ahead and tried to prove his point, but failed. At least he failed to prove that his people and his nation had the will and the power to establish their Might as Right. Whether or not Might actually does make Right still remains questionable, but, by no means, absolutely without foundation.
During a period called the Enlightenment, the world seemed to go through a sort of introspection and soul searching. Philosophers, social thinkers, economists, political reformers and the like all began to question the right of Private Property along with a good many other long established notions. William Godwin wrote a book, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793, and in the Colonies a controversial pamphleteer, Thomas Paine, wrote a piece that he entitled Agrarian Justice. Godwin questioned the whole idea of Private Property and Paine, accepting that Private Property was a basic injustice, went on to devise an accommodation for property-less individuals.
An economist, Richard Ricardo, challenged property owners and the negative influence of their rents on the economy and wrote a book, Principles of Political Economy, challenging their moral and economic right to do so. He threw his support behind the new moneyed industrialist, entrepreneur and business community - he was a stockbroker by trade - and against the old, established class of property owner. He fought against the protective Corn Laws that were making land owners wealthy, claiming that these laws only served to increase wages, raise prices and create what is now called inflation. Ricardo, unintentionally, plants the first seeds of the class warfare which followed in later generations.
John S. Mill in his Political Economy - accepting Paine’s notion of the injustice of the un-propertied - tried to devise another solution. Paine had suggested that a tax should be placed on the propertied and that at the age of maturity every man without property would receive a cash inheritance as compensation. Mill suggested that the state would buy back from individuals all property and from then on, property would be rented or leased by the State. Henry George later expanded this idea into his Single Tax notion - but with no buy-back from the present property holders.
Then came Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who espoused an evolutionary theory of property that brought things back to Godwin. Their original idea was that private property would simply dissolve into an egalitarian utopia due to the inevitable collapse of Capitalism which would be prompted by the evolutionary destruction of monopolization. Lenin and others believed that this utopia was truly evolutional and inevitable, but evolution was just too slow. Lenin, and those who believed similarly, decided that the historical evolution of a classless, egalitarian economy needed the prodding of a benevolent dictator. True believing followers, like Joseph Stalin felt that benevolence was over-rated.
We no longer discuss the rights of the un-propertied or the moral justice of inheriting property, or people having too much property. We seem to have come to the notion that as long as a majority of individuals have the opportunity to work, save money, and buy their own piece of the planet - this is fair and just enough. The negative historical roots have all been put to the side, as beyond reclamation and practical justification.
Nevertheless, in recent years a return to introspection and moral and Agrarian Justice and soul searching has been revived. The exploitation and pollution of property and the planet has been suggested as morally unjust. There is now an argument between the property owner and the long term interests of random mankind.
Teddy Roosevelt had his preservation and set-aside notions which have given us our National Parks, forests and monuments. Today, we are now considering morally, environmentally and economically the use of an individual’s or developer’s property in relation to his neighbors - his community, his state, his country, the world - to future generations. It is the tree huggers against the libertarians.
Some go so far as to call this a revolution. The Green Revolution it is called. Peace and goodwill to man via clean water, clean air and socially correct balanced growth. The libertarians say these tree lovers are fanatics who care more about woodpeckers and brown-speckled, sap-sucking, bank climbing beetles than they do people. These people (tree huggers) hold Walt Disney as a god and fantasyland and Disney World in Orlando as a real possibility for the future of mankind and community development – these Libertarians say. And sometimes it is difficult to see if these Green revolutionaries are trying to make the world safer for people or fire ants.
On the other hand, if the libertarian has his way there may not be any more fire ants or people. We could revert back to cesspools of congested living, and rivers, lakes and oceans filled with green dyes, mercury, toxic chemicals and non-edible, deformed, dying and disappearing sea creatures - not to mention, people (including Americans).
The “History of the Great American Fortunes” by Gustavus Myers was used in this essay – a very interesting Radical analysis of this accepted American Right.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Capitalism
Does it really Work?
Or Is It Socialism in Disguise
By Richard E. Noble
I am, and always have been a born and breed Capitalist who has done his best to pursue the American Capitalist dream of financial independence and hopeful luxury.
I believe in my rights as an Individual; I believe in democracy and in the Bill of Rights; I believe in my right to own property, to start my own business, to have money in the bank and to get rich - if at all possible. BUT, I don’t believe that people anywhere should starve to death or that anybody anywhere should work for nothing. And I especially don’t believe that the above such things should happen to other people because of my aspirations to become a wealthy Capitalist. I want everybody to live a comfortable life in a just man-made rational Civilization.
I don’t trust government - any government. But I have a dilemma - I don’t trust businessmen either. I have been in business. I consider myself a business-mined type person. And to be totally honest with you, I don’t trust business any more than I do government.
I have never worked for a boss who I like or admire. And the really sad part about that last sentence is that I have been self-employed for the greater part of my working career. When my wife was in my employ she went on strike several times and quite on multiple occasions. She orchestrated both walk-out and sit-down type strikes. She never resorted to picketing but I did think of locking her out several times. We finally negotiated a verbal contract that we both could agree to and live with. I was not entirely happy with the final agreement but neither was she - and, of course, this is what makes for a truly happy marriage. I only wish that I had been smart enough to negotiate such a contract when we first got married. But as you all know, love is not having to negotiate a contract. So where does that leave me? In my opinion that makes me a typical American. I think that is what being an American is all about - not trusting anybody.
I have been studying and reading about Capitalism ever since I can remember. But before we get into that, let’s say what I think Capitalism to be.
Capitalism is where the means of production along with the natural assets of a nation are owned by people - individuals. Corporations? Stock holders?
Capitalism had its birth in the Industrial Revolution - as I understand it. Before the Industrial Revolution there was no such thing as a “Capitalist.” There were rich people and Kings etc., but no Capitalists.
Capitalism, via industrialization made possible by individual invention and personal investment changed the economic world. It changed the whole structure of things. But has it been successful - did Capitalism work?
I don’t think so; and I’ll tell you why. It might take me a few pages here but bear with me.
Let’s start out with one of the first major Industrial enterprises - the textile industry.
The textile industry started here in the U.S. in the northeast in the early part of the 18th century.
It began rather surreptitiously with some of our enterprising citizens going over to England and stealing what they could of British ingenuity. But it was for a good cause - they wanted to get rich. Actually their intentions were more noble than that. They wanted to get rich and they wanted to screw the British. All in all though they were well intentioned, most of the early pioneers in the U.S. textile industry were good, conscientious Christian types. They wanted to make the world a better place. I think one of the very first entrepreneurs was a wealthy Quaker and he offered to give the entire mill to the British citizen who knew the industry well enough and would stab his homeland in the back and come over here and set up what he had learned over there. This was against the British Law at the time and any man who did so was considered a traitor. Getting rich was not against British law; they just wanted people to get rich in England only. The penalty was death. But one man did the dirty deed nonetheless. He is in our history books but I don’t think he got even honorable mention in the British history books.
In Lowell Massachusetts the first textile mill employed mostly woman and it was designed to be spiritually beneficial and uplifting to all the poor farm girls who came to work there. And for awhile they say that it was. But then as the Capitalistic system dictates, one free enterprise led to another free enterprise and pretty soon we had not only women working at the mills but children also. Pretty soon the local farm girls had enough and the mill owners began to import immigrant laborers from overseas. And as the foreign laborers flowed in, the wages got lower and lower; the working conditions got worse and worse; the housing became deplorable and all these people began dying - the workers that is; the owners and investors became extremely wealthy. A few foremen and some higher-ups got some pretty good wages also. But all in all things got so bad that social upheaval erupted. Police and militia had to be called in and lots of folks were machine-gunned, murdered and killed. Overall from the Society’s point of view, I would say the textile industry was not working.
Now the few people who owned the textile mills disagreed. They had arguments very similar to the tobacco industry of today. They denied that working in a textile mills was hazardous to anybody health - even though most textile workers were dying before the age of thirty; even though children who started working in the mills at nine or ten were dead before they were twenty or twenty-five.
The bi-products of the textile mills was air pollution, water pollution; housing shortages, overcrowding; poverty; disease; and overproduction. But on the other hand, a man of modest means could buy a pretty neat suit of clothes at Brooks Bros. for a reasonable price and the ladies could buy some nice calico prints cheaper than ever before.
In any case for better or worse the textile mills spread all over the northeast and then the Midwest. When they had finally worn out their welcome in those areas they left. They didn’t pack up and leave - they just left. They left all the pollution, all the garbage, all the disease, all the destitution and poverty, all the dead bodies; all the dying people - they even left miles and miles of old redbrick buildings. They took most of the machinery but they left the rest for the taxpayers or the society or the community or whoever it is that is left when these people go. They took the profits and their fortunes - and they left. And now they were “Capitalists.”
At first they just went a little further south - but they did the same thing there. And after awhile most of them left the South and went even south-ER. They went to South America.
In South America they conducted their business exactly the same as they had done in North America.
Today they are all over the world - in Asia and in China - everywhere. And the same thing that happened in North America in the 1800 is happening over there.
But on the other hand we can all buy T-shirts and underwear at a very reasonable price.
The question is as Dr. Phil would say - Is this working for you?
Well, it is working very, very well for a few; it is working very well for some others; and it is working well for a good many others; but then it is working poorly for several millions of others and it doesn’t look like it is ever going to change or be any different. Is this a “good thing”?
In the United States of America I would say that the Textile Industry was a failure. It didn’t work. For one thing, it is gone; and it left a mess. The individuals and stock holders of that industry took the profits and the taxpayers and the citizens of the United States paid the costs. It was Capitalism for the owners of the textile industry but it was Socialism for America. We the people socialized the cost, while they, the Robber Barons, Industrialists, and super wealthy Capitalized the profits
Now let’s look at another Industry - the mining industry.
I don’t know if mining in America began with the 49ers but it seems like a good place to start. Nothing could have been more egalitarian than a mule and a bearded Gabby Hayes type prospector setting off to find his treasure. This led to a lot of “regular” guys becoming very wealthy. It also led to a lot of regular guys getting killed, beaten, robbed and whatever - but that has always been the romantic part of the American Spirit of freedom and independence - so what the hell.
But somewhere along the line mechanization, invention, organization and the Capitalist and Industrialist - and bankers - got into it. It wasn’t long before Gabby Hayes and his mule were a part of the nostalgic past and punch clocks, foremen and business mangers had taken over the pits and holes of the wild, Wild West and elsewhere.
It wasn’t long before everything that I just attributed to the textile industry was now part and parcel of the mining industry - only worse.
The miners were of the independent, rugged type and they didn’t just wander off someplace and die peacefully - they fought back. Colorado was a war zone. Utah and Idaho weren’t much calmer. The mine managers had the militias and the federal troops along with the governments and the legal system - but the miners had courage, blood and guts.
The mine owners couldn’t just move their operations south or to another country - so they fought it out. They killed, framed, murdered, lynched, castrated, slaughtered and starved a good many troublesome miners to an early grave. They bribed, cheated, finagled and infiltrated the Governments - local, state and federal. And eventually they got what they wanted.
They got the land from the government basically for free; they got the gold, silver, copper, coal, and whatever out of the ground at the cheapest possible labor cost; they had no obligations to the land, the environment, the streams, the rivers, the mountains, the hillsides, the country or to the people of the United States.
But even so, eventually most of them left the United States and brought their same tactics to foreign lands where the people were less sophisticated and could be duped more readily. Today these industries are busy doing the very same things in Bolivia and China that were so successful for them here in the U.S.
Strangely enough the people who did these horrible things here in the United States are dead and buried and many of the folks who are carrying out the dastardly deeds of these ancient entrepreneurs are not even descendants. They are a new breed of like minded modern day folks - often homegrown in their own nations. The descendants of many of the murders and killers who had loyal everyday patriots machinegun everyday people right here in America - are now involved in philanthropic trusts, building libraries and funding institutions of higher learning - and some are even running for the Senate and the presidency of the United States of America. And so it goes.
But philosophizing aside, the bottom line is once again, the people of America were left with the pollution and the holes in the ground, the bad memories and the dead bodies, and the managers, investors and Capitalists got the profits. The American Businessmen “capitalized” while the American People Socialized.
From an “individualist” point of view I suppose one could say that this “capitalization” or privatization of natural resources worked. Some individuals did become very, very wealthy. But from a national or democratic perspective; form a societal or national perspective, I wouldn’t say that “we the people” did all that well. I would have to say that mining as well as the textile industry was a failure. They provide few in America with a living today and we the people are still paying for the cleanup or worse yet living with the pollution and ill health effects that these industries left as our “legacy.”
Strangely enough we all - 300 million of us still wear socks and underwear and we still can buy copper tubing at the hardware store - it is just that fewer Americans make any money from the deal. If you use the patriot’s war analogy we could say that all those working people who fought, were starved and died for your right (and my right) to earn a better living here in the U.S.A. - gave their lives in vain.
Let’s quickly review another industry - banking. Banking is a business and it could be considered one of Capitalism’s prime movers.
Banking started off very primitive. In the beginning banks were just that - they were banks. They were vaults and safes situated in secure buildings where people paid a rent for the privilege of having their gold or silver watched over under armed guard. There was no trouble with a bank being a bank; it was when banks got into “banking” that the industry began to stagger.
The problem came with the notion that a banker could have his cake and eat it too. It was not with the idea of being a “savings” institution that brought on the problems. It was when the banks became “savings and loan” institutions.
Even good old Jimmy Stewart was hard to believe when he tried to explain to people in the movies that their money was there in the bank when it really wasn’t.
It wasn’t disgruntled employees that wrought havoc by picketing and striking the banks - it was the bank’s customers. They called this type of uprising a “bank run.” People ran down to the bank and said; “I want my money.” This wasn’t all that problematic until lots of customers started showing up at a particular bank at the same time. Very quickly the bank in question was forced to refuse the depositors their money and lock their doors. They could not return to the depositors the money that they had loaned out to their clients because they didn’t have it any longer! People just didn’t understand this.
The first solution that banks devised to deal with this problem was to form co-operatives - a number of banks joined together. They pooled their reserves and when one of their member banks had a “bank run” they rushed cash over to their aid.
But if a run persisted and spread into a “panic” - the party was over and once again everybody had to “lock out” their depositors.
Banking co-operatives got bigger and bigger but so did the runs and panics. Finally during the Wilson administration the bankers got the government involved. Mr. Wilson was a college professor but he admitted that he was no banker - but nevertheless the American people ended up with what was called a Federal Reserve System.
Suffice it to say, it was not only President Wilson who didn’t understand the Federal Reserve System because in 1929 the whole thing came tumbling down - Federal Reserve System and all. The banking industry collapsed - it failed. The financial heart of the Capitalistic system flopped. Once again the Capitalist idea had failed.
The catastrophe was finally solved by adding to the Federal Reserve System the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This informed the customers who deposited their money in a bank covered under this program that even if your bank doesn’t have your money when you want it - we will give it to you. “We” being the Government ... you and I ... the taxpayer. In more political terms, the banks were socialized.
And even today we had two of the biggest socialistic bailouts in our history - the Savings and Loan disaster followed by the Commercial Bank disaster. We even bailed out Mexico and Japan and if we don’t continue to bail out the banking systems around the world, the whole system could have a total collapse. Every banking system in the world including China and Russia, are tied into the “Dollar.” Now I’m not complaining about this Socialism, I would just like to know what “we the people” are getting out of all of this. It looks to me like we are getting lower wages, fewer jobs, higher taxes, inflation of our everyday costs, more poverty, more homeless and Wal-Mart - and Wal-Mart is the best part.
So once again we have an industry that keeps the profits when things are going well and “we the people” absorb the loses when things go wrong. In fact, they charge us (the people of the U.S.) for the privilege of borrowing our own money from them. It is a real good business. Many very, very smart people love the banking business.
I personally don’t mind that we keep this industry solvent and secure but shouldn’t “we the people” get a kick back here, there or somewhere - as opposed to paying a service charge?
Next let’s take a gander at the railroad industry.
In most of our history surveys we will read briefly about how the railroads opened up the West; how the railroads built towns and communities; how the railroads built factories and technology and on and on and on. But the deeper one delves into the history evolution and eventual demise of American railroads - the bigger the horror story grows.
Some historians are truly optimists - they almost always see the glass as full to the brim. I can imagine the historian of a thousand years in the future writing about the Nazi Holocaust and pointing out its advantages to curbing the over expanding population growth and all the new discoveries that were unleashed in the gas and pesticide industries - not to mention, oven technology.
But let’s try to call a spade a spade here - railroads must go down as one of the most corrupt endeavors in American History. The land grab alone by the railroad barons was off the charts. These guys were given enough land around their proposed railroad tracks to start whole countries. Almost all history books will mention this fact.
In relation to their workers they are right there with the textile and mining industries. Workers were killed and maimed on a daily basis by the hundreds. They were used as long as they were strong and healthy and then discarded - to be picked up by charity and the good will of their fellow workers.
The railroads competed themselves right into the ground. They had more dirty bond issues, stock market crooked deals, inflated shares and unscrupulous financial chicanery and political corruption than one could list. On top of everything else they were totally subsidized by the government and for the most part, they still are today. Without further ado or elaboration I think it could be objectively stated that the railroad industry was another capitalist failure. It was more than a failure it was a disaster. Just start reading about it and find out for yourself - don’t take my word for it. It is all over the pages of your own history books. Even the laying of the railroad tracks was an abortion for the workers involved and the taxpayers. When you read historians that can fluff over all these things you realize how brainwashed we all are.
If it weren’t for the government (socialism) from the beginning to the present day - the railroads would never have come about. And what did “we the people” get out of it? We got miles and miles of dilapidated track stretched across this country; we got old abandoned depots; we got below sustenance wages; we got thousands of dead and injured workers, woman and children; and a modest amount of multimillionaires - most of them the exact same folks who prospered from the banking, textiles, and mining.
Once again while the Capitalists capitalized the profits, the American people socialized the costs. We paid for their losses, we paid bonuses for their inadequate tracks; we paid for their cutthroat competition. We paid to get them started and we paid for the clean up when they were done. My God! The American dream!
Where do you want to go next? How about steel? how about oil? how about insurance? how about pharmaceuticals? how about health care? what about automobiles?
Steel and automobiles and oil have been traditional failures in the classical manner that I have just described above. Insurance, healthcare and pharmaceuticals are failures in the making. They are failing right now and my guess is that they will be bailed out in the same old, well-fare (welloff-fare), socialistic manner - “we the people” and the population at large will pay through taxation and inflation while these industries will skim off the profits and leave the losses and the social consequences to us.
At this moment I really don’t see any alternative to socialism. Socialism is what is. It really cannot be denied. It is the a priori fact of the matter. But we should do it all the way not just in the well-fare tradition; “we the people” should also share in the profits as well as the costs and the losses. I would be in favor of a better idea than socialism - but I haven’t read about any such thing nor have I been able to think up an improvement. Communism is not good and as we have seen around the world, it is not working. I have read many books offering various alternatives. But when you study these alternatives they are invariably socialist in nature. The so called capitalist alternative invariably amounts to a good life for the few at the expense of the many - here and around the world. It is like Socialism is the Capitalists security blanket or “idea bank” of last resort. It seems that what we here in America call Capitalism is really a bad joke – and the joke is on us.
Does it really Work?
Or Is It Socialism in Disguise
By Richard E. Noble
I am, and always have been a born and breed Capitalist who has done his best to pursue the American Capitalist dream of financial independence and hopeful luxury.
I believe in my rights as an Individual; I believe in democracy and in the Bill of Rights; I believe in my right to own property, to start my own business, to have money in the bank and to get rich - if at all possible. BUT, I don’t believe that people anywhere should starve to death or that anybody anywhere should work for nothing. And I especially don’t believe that the above such things should happen to other people because of my aspirations to become a wealthy Capitalist. I want everybody to live a comfortable life in a just man-made rational Civilization.
I don’t trust government - any government. But I have a dilemma - I don’t trust businessmen either. I have been in business. I consider myself a business-mined type person. And to be totally honest with you, I don’t trust business any more than I do government.
I have never worked for a boss who I like or admire. And the really sad part about that last sentence is that I have been self-employed for the greater part of my working career. When my wife was in my employ she went on strike several times and quite on multiple occasions. She orchestrated both walk-out and sit-down type strikes. She never resorted to picketing but I did think of locking her out several times. We finally negotiated a verbal contract that we both could agree to and live with. I was not entirely happy with the final agreement but neither was she - and, of course, this is what makes for a truly happy marriage. I only wish that I had been smart enough to negotiate such a contract when we first got married. But as you all know, love is not having to negotiate a contract. So where does that leave me? In my opinion that makes me a typical American. I think that is what being an American is all about - not trusting anybody.
I have been studying and reading about Capitalism ever since I can remember. But before we get into that, let’s say what I think Capitalism to be.
Capitalism is where the means of production along with the natural assets of a nation are owned by people - individuals. Corporations? Stock holders?
Capitalism had its birth in the Industrial Revolution - as I understand it. Before the Industrial Revolution there was no such thing as a “Capitalist.” There were rich people and Kings etc., but no Capitalists.
Capitalism, via industrialization made possible by individual invention and personal investment changed the economic world. It changed the whole structure of things. But has it been successful - did Capitalism work?
I don’t think so; and I’ll tell you why. It might take me a few pages here but bear with me.
Let’s start out with one of the first major Industrial enterprises - the textile industry.
The textile industry started here in the U.S. in the northeast in the early part of the 18th century.
It began rather surreptitiously with some of our enterprising citizens going over to England and stealing what they could of British ingenuity. But it was for a good cause - they wanted to get rich. Actually their intentions were more noble than that. They wanted to get rich and they wanted to screw the British. All in all though they were well intentioned, most of the early pioneers in the U.S. textile industry were good, conscientious Christian types. They wanted to make the world a better place. I think one of the very first entrepreneurs was a wealthy Quaker and he offered to give the entire mill to the British citizen who knew the industry well enough and would stab his homeland in the back and come over here and set up what he had learned over there. This was against the British Law at the time and any man who did so was considered a traitor. Getting rich was not against British law; they just wanted people to get rich in England only. The penalty was death. But one man did the dirty deed nonetheless. He is in our history books but I don’t think he got even honorable mention in the British history books.
In Lowell Massachusetts the first textile mill employed mostly woman and it was designed to be spiritually beneficial and uplifting to all the poor farm girls who came to work there. And for awhile they say that it was. But then as the Capitalistic system dictates, one free enterprise led to another free enterprise and pretty soon we had not only women working at the mills but children also. Pretty soon the local farm girls had enough and the mill owners began to import immigrant laborers from overseas. And as the foreign laborers flowed in, the wages got lower and lower; the working conditions got worse and worse; the housing became deplorable and all these people began dying - the workers that is; the owners and investors became extremely wealthy. A few foremen and some higher-ups got some pretty good wages also. But all in all things got so bad that social upheaval erupted. Police and militia had to be called in and lots of folks were machine-gunned, murdered and killed. Overall from the Society’s point of view, I would say the textile industry was not working.
Now the few people who owned the textile mills disagreed. They had arguments very similar to the tobacco industry of today. They denied that working in a textile mills was hazardous to anybody health - even though most textile workers were dying before the age of thirty; even though children who started working in the mills at nine or ten were dead before they were twenty or twenty-five.
The bi-products of the textile mills was air pollution, water pollution; housing shortages, overcrowding; poverty; disease; and overproduction. But on the other hand, a man of modest means could buy a pretty neat suit of clothes at Brooks Bros. for a reasonable price and the ladies could buy some nice calico prints cheaper than ever before.
In any case for better or worse the textile mills spread all over the northeast and then the Midwest. When they had finally worn out their welcome in those areas they left. They didn’t pack up and leave - they just left. They left all the pollution, all the garbage, all the disease, all the destitution and poverty, all the dead bodies; all the dying people - they even left miles and miles of old redbrick buildings. They took most of the machinery but they left the rest for the taxpayers or the society or the community or whoever it is that is left when these people go. They took the profits and their fortunes - and they left. And now they were “Capitalists.”
At first they just went a little further south - but they did the same thing there. And after awhile most of them left the South and went even south-ER. They went to South America.
In South America they conducted their business exactly the same as they had done in North America.
Today they are all over the world - in Asia and in China - everywhere. And the same thing that happened in North America in the 1800 is happening over there.
But on the other hand we can all buy T-shirts and underwear at a very reasonable price.
The question is as Dr. Phil would say - Is this working for you?
Well, it is working very, very well for a few; it is working very well for some others; and it is working well for a good many others; but then it is working poorly for several millions of others and it doesn’t look like it is ever going to change or be any different. Is this a “good thing”?
In the United States of America I would say that the Textile Industry was a failure. It didn’t work. For one thing, it is gone; and it left a mess. The individuals and stock holders of that industry took the profits and the taxpayers and the citizens of the United States paid the costs. It was Capitalism for the owners of the textile industry but it was Socialism for America. We the people socialized the cost, while they, the Robber Barons, Industrialists, and super wealthy Capitalized the profits
Now let’s look at another Industry - the mining industry.
I don’t know if mining in America began with the 49ers but it seems like a good place to start. Nothing could have been more egalitarian than a mule and a bearded Gabby Hayes type prospector setting off to find his treasure. This led to a lot of “regular” guys becoming very wealthy. It also led to a lot of regular guys getting killed, beaten, robbed and whatever - but that has always been the romantic part of the American Spirit of freedom and independence - so what the hell.
But somewhere along the line mechanization, invention, organization and the Capitalist and Industrialist - and bankers - got into it. It wasn’t long before Gabby Hayes and his mule were a part of the nostalgic past and punch clocks, foremen and business mangers had taken over the pits and holes of the wild, Wild West and elsewhere.
It wasn’t long before everything that I just attributed to the textile industry was now part and parcel of the mining industry - only worse.
The miners were of the independent, rugged type and they didn’t just wander off someplace and die peacefully - they fought back. Colorado was a war zone. Utah and Idaho weren’t much calmer. The mine managers had the militias and the federal troops along with the governments and the legal system - but the miners had courage, blood and guts.
The mine owners couldn’t just move their operations south or to another country - so they fought it out. They killed, framed, murdered, lynched, castrated, slaughtered and starved a good many troublesome miners to an early grave. They bribed, cheated, finagled and infiltrated the Governments - local, state and federal. And eventually they got what they wanted.
They got the land from the government basically for free; they got the gold, silver, copper, coal, and whatever out of the ground at the cheapest possible labor cost; they had no obligations to the land, the environment, the streams, the rivers, the mountains, the hillsides, the country or to the people of the United States.
But even so, eventually most of them left the United States and brought their same tactics to foreign lands where the people were less sophisticated and could be duped more readily. Today these industries are busy doing the very same things in Bolivia and China that were so successful for them here in the U.S.
Strangely enough the people who did these horrible things here in the United States are dead and buried and many of the folks who are carrying out the dastardly deeds of these ancient entrepreneurs are not even descendants. They are a new breed of like minded modern day folks - often homegrown in their own nations. The descendants of many of the murders and killers who had loyal everyday patriots machinegun everyday people right here in America - are now involved in philanthropic trusts, building libraries and funding institutions of higher learning - and some are even running for the Senate and the presidency of the United States of America. And so it goes.
But philosophizing aside, the bottom line is once again, the people of America were left with the pollution and the holes in the ground, the bad memories and the dead bodies, and the managers, investors and Capitalists got the profits. The American Businessmen “capitalized” while the American People Socialized.
From an “individualist” point of view I suppose one could say that this “capitalization” or privatization of natural resources worked. Some individuals did become very, very wealthy. But from a national or democratic perspective; form a societal or national perspective, I wouldn’t say that “we the people” did all that well. I would have to say that mining as well as the textile industry was a failure. They provide few in America with a living today and we the people are still paying for the cleanup or worse yet living with the pollution and ill health effects that these industries left as our “legacy.”
Strangely enough we all - 300 million of us still wear socks and underwear and we still can buy copper tubing at the hardware store - it is just that fewer Americans make any money from the deal. If you use the patriot’s war analogy we could say that all those working people who fought, were starved and died for your right (and my right) to earn a better living here in the U.S.A. - gave their lives in vain.
Let’s quickly review another industry - banking. Banking is a business and it could be considered one of Capitalism’s prime movers.
Banking started off very primitive. In the beginning banks were just that - they were banks. They were vaults and safes situated in secure buildings where people paid a rent for the privilege of having their gold or silver watched over under armed guard. There was no trouble with a bank being a bank; it was when banks got into “banking” that the industry began to stagger.
The problem came with the notion that a banker could have his cake and eat it too. It was not with the idea of being a “savings” institution that brought on the problems. It was when the banks became “savings and loan” institutions.
Even good old Jimmy Stewart was hard to believe when he tried to explain to people in the movies that their money was there in the bank when it really wasn’t.
It wasn’t disgruntled employees that wrought havoc by picketing and striking the banks - it was the bank’s customers. They called this type of uprising a “bank run.” People ran down to the bank and said; “I want my money.” This wasn’t all that problematic until lots of customers started showing up at a particular bank at the same time. Very quickly the bank in question was forced to refuse the depositors their money and lock their doors. They could not return to the depositors the money that they had loaned out to their clients because they didn’t have it any longer! People just didn’t understand this.
The first solution that banks devised to deal with this problem was to form co-operatives - a number of banks joined together. They pooled their reserves and when one of their member banks had a “bank run” they rushed cash over to their aid.
But if a run persisted and spread into a “panic” - the party was over and once again everybody had to “lock out” their depositors.
Banking co-operatives got bigger and bigger but so did the runs and panics. Finally during the Wilson administration the bankers got the government involved. Mr. Wilson was a college professor but he admitted that he was no banker - but nevertheless the American people ended up with what was called a Federal Reserve System.
Suffice it to say, it was not only President Wilson who didn’t understand the Federal Reserve System because in 1929 the whole thing came tumbling down - Federal Reserve System and all. The banking industry collapsed - it failed. The financial heart of the Capitalistic system flopped. Once again the Capitalist idea had failed.
The catastrophe was finally solved by adding to the Federal Reserve System the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This informed the customers who deposited their money in a bank covered under this program that even if your bank doesn’t have your money when you want it - we will give it to you. “We” being the Government ... you and I ... the taxpayer. In more political terms, the banks were socialized.
And even today we had two of the biggest socialistic bailouts in our history - the Savings and Loan disaster followed by the Commercial Bank disaster. We even bailed out Mexico and Japan and if we don’t continue to bail out the banking systems around the world, the whole system could have a total collapse. Every banking system in the world including China and Russia, are tied into the “Dollar.” Now I’m not complaining about this Socialism, I would just like to know what “we the people” are getting out of all of this. It looks to me like we are getting lower wages, fewer jobs, higher taxes, inflation of our everyday costs, more poverty, more homeless and Wal-Mart - and Wal-Mart is the best part.
So once again we have an industry that keeps the profits when things are going well and “we the people” absorb the loses when things go wrong. In fact, they charge us (the people of the U.S.) for the privilege of borrowing our own money from them. It is a real good business. Many very, very smart people love the banking business.
I personally don’t mind that we keep this industry solvent and secure but shouldn’t “we the people” get a kick back here, there or somewhere - as opposed to paying a service charge?
Next let’s take a gander at the railroad industry.
In most of our history surveys we will read briefly about how the railroads opened up the West; how the railroads built towns and communities; how the railroads built factories and technology and on and on and on. But the deeper one delves into the history evolution and eventual demise of American railroads - the bigger the horror story grows.
Some historians are truly optimists - they almost always see the glass as full to the brim. I can imagine the historian of a thousand years in the future writing about the Nazi Holocaust and pointing out its advantages to curbing the over expanding population growth and all the new discoveries that were unleashed in the gas and pesticide industries - not to mention, oven technology.
But let’s try to call a spade a spade here - railroads must go down as one of the most corrupt endeavors in American History. The land grab alone by the railroad barons was off the charts. These guys were given enough land around their proposed railroad tracks to start whole countries. Almost all history books will mention this fact.
In relation to their workers they are right there with the textile and mining industries. Workers were killed and maimed on a daily basis by the hundreds. They were used as long as they were strong and healthy and then discarded - to be picked up by charity and the good will of their fellow workers.
The railroads competed themselves right into the ground. They had more dirty bond issues, stock market crooked deals, inflated shares and unscrupulous financial chicanery and political corruption than one could list. On top of everything else they were totally subsidized by the government and for the most part, they still are today. Without further ado or elaboration I think it could be objectively stated that the railroad industry was another capitalist failure. It was more than a failure it was a disaster. Just start reading about it and find out for yourself - don’t take my word for it. It is all over the pages of your own history books. Even the laying of the railroad tracks was an abortion for the workers involved and the taxpayers. When you read historians that can fluff over all these things you realize how brainwashed we all are.
If it weren’t for the government (socialism) from the beginning to the present day - the railroads would never have come about. And what did “we the people” get out of it? We got miles and miles of dilapidated track stretched across this country; we got old abandoned depots; we got below sustenance wages; we got thousands of dead and injured workers, woman and children; and a modest amount of multimillionaires - most of them the exact same folks who prospered from the banking, textiles, and mining.
Once again while the Capitalists capitalized the profits, the American people socialized the costs. We paid for their losses, we paid bonuses for their inadequate tracks; we paid for their cutthroat competition. We paid to get them started and we paid for the clean up when they were done. My God! The American dream!
Where do you want to go next? How about steel? how about oil? how about insurance? how about pharmaceuticals? how about health care? what about automobiles?
Steel and automobiles and oil have been traditional failures in the classical manner that I have just described above. Insurance, healthcare and pharmaceuticals are failures in the making. They are failing right now and my guess is that they will be bailed out in the same old, well-fare (welloff-fare), socialistic manner - “we the people” and the population at large will pay through taxation and inflation while these industries will skim off the profits and leave the losses and the social consequences to us.
At this moment I really don’t see any alternative to socialism. Socialism is what is. It really cannot be denied. It is the a priori fact of the matter. But we should do it all the way not just in the well-fare tradition; “we the people” should also share in the profits as well as the costs and the losses. I would be in favor of a better idea than socialism - but I haven’t read about any such thing nor have I been able to think up an improvement. Communism is not good and as we have seen around the world, it is not working. I have read many books offering various alternatives. But when you study these alternatives they are invariably socialist in nature. The so called capitalist alternative invariably amounts to a good life for the few at the expense of the many - here and around the world. It is like Socialism is the Capitalists security blanket or “idea bank” of last resort. It seems that what we here in America call Capitalism is really a bad joke – and the joke is on us.
Friday, February 05, 2010
The Hobo Philosopher
On Economics - Private sector jobs vs Public sector jobs
Obama and the Federal Reserve
President Obama has both the Right and the Left in a state of confusion over his economic solutions. Who is correct, the Right, the Left, or president Obama?
The extreme Right basically is advocating what they have always advocated – inaction. Their historical answer in times of economic stress has always been Prayer, Poverty and Providence. Let the banks fail, let Detroit fail, let people lose their homes, let unemployment soar, let charities and soup kitchens take care of the poor and unemployed, let God’s invisible hand inspire and guide the system – Laissez-faire. Despite the general acceptance on the Right that this is a credible answer, history says otherwise and morality and ethics will challenge any movement in that direction.
This conservative notion is a good idea if the goal is to vanquish government and foment a revolution. As the critics of this policy state, “The less we do the worse we will all fair.”
Both the Left and the Right bring up the 1929 Great Depression and the role of the Federal Reserve. Both sides somehow credit the Federal Reserve with wrong doing.
The Right claims that it was the Federal Reserve that caused the 1929 Depression. This is false.
We can argue until the cows come home about what caused the 1929 Depression but the basic arguments are not so complicated.
Some claim that excessive negative competition and overproduction in the marketplace, lead to a negative spiral and thus to the downfall of the general economy. This amounts to a general lack of any controls or regulation on business, labor and production and substantiates the inadequacy of the Lessez-faire policy.
Others claim that the super wealthy fearing a worker revolution pulled their money from industry and investment in an attempt to stifle worker organization and cooperation. This was due to a fear of the spread of the communist and socialist philosophy on the part of the wealthy capitalists. This also negates the Lessez-Faire notion.
Another answer is that this is just the way the capitalist economic system works or that the whole thing was just an accident and couldn’t be helped. This is consistent with the Lessez-faire notion but not consistent with reason, logic history or common sense.
The stock market collapse, most agree, was due to over speculation. A speculative bubble was created. Many contend that this was done by accident in 1929. But other more radical voices of that era claim that the market crashed due to greed and chicanery on the part of the “best, brightest and wealthiest.” When the bubble burst and the smart money pulled out and ran, everything collapsed.
In evaluating today’s stock market crash the radical Right is once again claiming “accident” or at least mass complicity. Others contend that just as in 1929 it was the greed and selfishness of the best, brightest and wealthiest.
The Right goes on to claim that the government is spending too much. This has also been proved wrong by the historical facts and even by their own past evaluations of history.
Both the Right and the Left blame the Federal Reserve in the 1929 fiasco, but what did the Federal Reserve do to warrant this criticism?
Basically it didn’t do anything. It did what the Right is recommending today. Today’s Right blames the Fed for their inaction in 1929 but yet recommends that they do the same today.
Today’s Left agrees that the Fed didn’t do enough in 1929 and that is what they fear is going to happen again today.
The Right says that all of FDR’s social recovery spending was unsuccessful and that it was World War II that cured the Depression.
Well, what happened in World War II that was so influential in curing the Depression?
It was massive government spending for the war effort that made the difference - spending of up to 120 percent of the GDP. So then if there were no World War II what should have been done in 1929?
Obviously FDR should have increased Government social spending instead of cutting spending as was demanded by the Right in 1938 and as is being demanded by the Right in 2009.
After the war Truman, fearing an inevitable post war economic collapse, initiated a continuation of massive war time spending, as preparation for the impending and inevitable war with Russia (cold war) and massive government spending on the Marshall Plan (redistribution of American wealth).
The Korean Conflict then justified more military spending and it has gone on and on – but it is all “government spending.” It could have been medical and health care spending, education spending, infrastructure spending, disease research spending or aid to the impoverished spending.
What is Obama doing? He is recommending massive government spending. This is what was done by FDR in financing World War II. This is what both, the Right and the Left, Galbraith and Milton Friedman, economists past and present and the bulk of historians have analyzed as what should have been done and what was eventually done in the depression years (spending on the war). Only the extreme, radical Right claim that a massive depression is better than government intervention. No Republicans have yet to recommend World War III as a possible solution – but we’ll have to wait and see.
Today many of our Republicans are pushing for depression and a federal government collapse. They are offering the do nothing Rightwing radical response. They would rather have no government than what they term as a socialist government.
By Rightwing standards it is “socialist” if the government money goes to the American people or for social spending but if the government money goes to subsidize or support corporations, big business, banks or war and the pentagon it is “capitalism.” The only big businesses they don’t want to support are those that have labor unions. Money spent to help labor is the equivalent of “social spending” and is therefore socialistic.
They are basically anarchists. But rather than have rule by the aggregate masses, they advocate rule by the aggregate capitalists. In the past it was demanded by rightwing conservatives that anarchists be deported or put in prison.
The less than radical Right wants the government to spend but they want it to spend less and via convoluted methods like tax cuts for the wealthy or even for the middle class, and investments overseas. These policies are what brought us to this present sad state of affairs.
Spending less is not the answer. The answer is creating jobs and employment. Hitler brought Germany out of the Great Depression with no advanced knowledge of economics or the stock market. He simply believed in putting people back to work – 100% employment. He was successful. Once World War II arrived, the U.S. then achieved 100% employment via massive government war spending and our depression ended also.
The answer is spending and creating jobs – any kind of jobs. As far as government jobs versus private sector jobs, it doesn’t matter. One collects taxes off the backs of the masses and the other collects profits off the back of the masses. This is a political argument not an economic argument. It is a political preference as to who saps up the excess. From the “what stimulates the economy” point of view, it is inconsequential. It doesn’t matter - either public sector or private sector jobs will do the trick. The bulk of jobs that saved us from the Great Depression via World War II were public sector jobs – soldiers and military production, procurement, research and development. All the money was coming from the government. Some of it was filtered through private enterprise, but for the most part it was federal taxpayer’s money. And both sectors were loaded with graft, theft, and corruption but not the majority. This is always the case, but it too is inconsequential. The country as a whole would be better off without this human corruptive reality and a more positive and prosperous society would result but it isn’t necessary.
The Right wants anarchism and the Left wants Socialism. Obama is advocating a middle of the road path.
The Left wants a more powerful Federal Reserve. Some want the Federal Reserve to move into hedge funds, insurance companies and credit cards as well as banking. Obama policy is doing this but via a cooperation of responsibility of government and government agencies. Obama is enabling the Federal Reserve but holding back the power for the government and the law makers. This is safer and smarter and much more in tune with American tradition and popular opinion.
The Left wants a take over of banking and financial institutions. Obama is asking for cooperation and voluntary compliance along with new stricter rules and regulations. This is the safe road once again. If it doesn’t work the harsh road of complete takeover is still available.
The left and much of the public want to see some arrests. The administration’s answer to this has been that they must put out the fire before they can go after the arsons. This sounds reasonable unless the arsons continue to light more fires.
Again Obama is taking the middle of the road approach. If this whole problem on the part of banking and finance was just a matter of lax rules or sanctioned misbehavior then it can be corrected by new rules and sanctioned good behavior. If this has been a criminal conspiracy then the fire will continue and some heads will have to roll – jail and no bail for the bad guys and total government control, at least for a limited time.
If Obama goes to the Left he will totally alienate the Right and possibly some of the middle. If he goes to the Right, he will undermine his base and possibly lose the majority. If he continues down the middle, progress may be slower but he will maintain the majority, keep both sides hopeful, though dubious, give the guilty a chance to redeem themselves, and possibly turn the ship in an acceptable direction. All Obama has to do is show a change in direction to be considered successful. He doesn’t have to cure or revamp the entire system.
On Economics - Private sector jobs vs Public sector jobs
Obama and the Federal Reserve
President Obama has both the Right and the Left in a state of confusion over his economic solutions. Who is correct, the Right, the Left, or president Obama?
The extreme Right basically is advocating what they have always advocated – inaction. Their historical answer in times of economic stress has always been Prayer, Poverty and Providence. Let the banks fail, let Detroit fail, let people lose their homes, let unemployment soar, let charities and soup kitchens take care of the poor and unemployed, let God’s invisible hand inspire and guide the system – Laissez-faire. Despite the general acceptance on the Right that this is a credible answer, history says otherwise and morality and ethics will challenge any movement in that direction.
This conservative notion is a good idea if the goal is to vanquish government and foment a revolution. As the critics of this policy state, “The less we do the worse we will all fair.”
Both the Left and the Right bring up the 1929 Great Depression and the role of the Federal Reserve. Both sides somehow credit the Federal Reserve with wrong doing.
The Right claims that it was the Federal Reserve that caused the 1929 Depression. This is false.
We can argue until the cows come home about what caused the 1929 Depression but the basic arguments are not so complicated.
Some claim that excessive negative competition and overproduction in the marketplace, lead to a negative spiral and thus to the downfall of the general economy. This amounts to a general lack of any controls or regulation on business, labor and production and substantiates the inadequacy of the Lessez-faire policy.
Others claim that the super wealthy fearing a worker revolution pulled their money from industry and investment in an attempt to stifle worker organization and cooperation. This was due to a fear of the spread of the communist and socialist philosophy on the part of the wealthy capitalists. This also negates the Lessez-Faire notion.
Another answer is that this is just the way the capitalist economic system works or that the whole thing was just an accident and couldn’t be helped. This is consistent with the Lessez-faire notion but not consistent with reason, logic history or common sense.
The stock market collapse, most agree, was due to over speculation. A speculative bubble was created. Many contend that this was done by accident in 1929. But other more radical voices of that era claim that the market crashed due to greed and chicanery on the part of the “best, brightest and wealthiest.” When the bubble burst and the smart money pulled out and ran, everything collapsed.
In evaluating today’s stock market crash the radical Right is once again claiming “accident” or at least mass complicity. Others contend that just as in 1929 it was the greed and selfishness of the best, brightest and wealthiest.
The Right goes on to claim that the government is spending too much. This has also been proved wrong by the historical facts and even by their own past evaluations of history.
Both the Right and the Left blame the Federal Reserve in the 1929 fiasco, but what did the Federal Reserve do to warrant this criticism?
Basically it didn’t do anything. It did what the Right is recommending today. Today’s Right blames the Fed for their inaction in 1929 but yet recommends that they do the same today.
Today’s Left agrees that the Fed didn’t do enough in 1929 and that is what they fear is going to happen again today.
The Right says that all of FDR’s social recovery spending was unsuccessful and that it was World War II that cured the Depression.
Well, what happened in World War II that was so influential in curing the Depression?
It was massive government spending for the war effort that made the difference - spending of up to 120 percent of the GDP. So then if there were no World War II what should have been done in 1929?
Obviously FDR should have increased Government social spending instead of cutting spending as was demanded by the Right in 1938 and as is being demanded by the Right in 2009.
After the war Truman, fearing an inevitable post war economic collapse, initiated a continuation of massive war time spending, as preparation for the impending and inevitable war with Russia (cold war) and massive government spending on the Marshall Plan (redistribution of American wealth).
The Korean Conflict then justified more military spending and it has gone on and on – but it is all “government spending.” It could have been medical and health care spending, education spending, infrastructure spending, disease research spending or aid to the impoverished spending.
What is Obama doing? He is recommending massive government spending. This is what was done by FDR in financing World War II. This is what both, the Right and the Left, Galbraith and Milton Friedman, economists past and present and the bulk of historians have analyzed as what should have been done and what was eventually done in the depression years (spending on the war). Only the extreme, radical Right claim that a massive depression is better than government intervention. No Republicans have yet to recommend World War III as a possible solution – but we’ll have to wait and see.
Today many of our Republicans are pushing for depression and a federal government collapse. They are offering the do nothing Rightwing radical response. They would rather have no government than what they term as a socialist government.
By Rightwing standards it is “socialist” if the government money goes to the American people or for social spending but if the government money goes to subsidize or support corporations, big business, banks or war and the pentagon it is “capitalism.” The only big businesses they don’t want to support are those that have labor unions. Money spent to help labor is the equivalent of “social spending” and is therefore socialistic.
They are basically anarchists. But rather than have rule by the aggregate masses, they advocate rule by the aggregate capitalists. In the past it was demanded by rightwing conservatives that anarchists be deported or put in prison.
The less than radical Right wants the government to spend but they want it to spend less and via convoluted methods like tax cuts for the wealthy or even for the middle class, and investments overseas. These policies are what brought us to this present sad state of affairs.
Spending less is not the answer. The answer is creating jobs and employment. Hitler brought Germany out of the Great Depression with no advanced knowledge of economics or the stock market. He simply believed in putting people back to work – 100% employment. He was successful. Once World War II arrived, the U.S. then achieved 100% employment via massive government war spending and our depression ended also.
The answer is spending and creating jobs – any kind of jobs. As far as government jobs versus private sector jobs, it doesn’t matter. One collects taxes off the backs of the masses and the other collects profits off the back of the masses. This is a political argument not an economic argument. It is a political preference as to who saps up the excess. From the “what stimulates the economy” point of view, it is inconsequential. It doesn’t matter - either public sector or private sector jobs will do the trick. The bulk of jobs that saved us from the Great Depression via World War II were public sector jobs – soldiers and military production, procurement, research and development. All the money was coming from the government. Some of it was filtered through private enterprise, but for the most part it was federal taxpayer’s money. And both sectors were loaded with graft, theft, and corruption but not the majority. This is always the case, but it too is inconsequential. The country as a whole would be better off without this human corruptive reality and a more positive and prosperous society would result but it isn’t necessary.
The Right wants anarchism and the Left wants Socialism. Obama is advocating a middle of the road path.
The Left wants a more powerful Federal Reserve. Some want the Federal Reserve to move into hedge funds, insurance companies and credit cards as well as banking. Obama policy is doing this but via a cooperation of responsibility of government and government agencies. Obama is enabling the Federal Reserve but holding back the power for the government and the law makers. This is safer and smarter and much more in tune with American tradition and popular opinion.
The Left wants a take over of banking and financial institutions. Obama is asking for cooperation and voluntary compliance along with new stricter rules and regulations. This is the safe road once again. If it doesn’t work the harsh road of complete takeover is still available.
The left and much of the public want to see some arrests. The administration’s answer to this has been that they must put out the fire before they can go after the arsons. This sounds reasonable unless the arsons continue to light more fires.
Again Obama is taking the middle of the road approach. If this whole problem on the part of banking and finance was just a matter of lax rules or sanctioned misbehavior then it can be corrected by new rules and sanctioned good behavior. If this has been a criminal conspiracy then the fire will continue and some heads will have to roll – jail and no bail for the bad guys and total government control, at least for a limited time.
If Obama goes to the Left he will totally alienate the Right and possibly some of the middle. If he goes to the Right, he will undermine his base and possibly lose the majority. If he continues down the middle, progress may be slower but he will maintain the majority, keep both sides hopeful, though dubious, give the guilty a chance to redeem themselves, and possibly turn the ship in an acceptable direction. All Obama has to do is show a change in direction to be considered successful. He doesn’t have to cure or revamp the entire system.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
DU Depleted Uranium
By Richard E. Noble
I had heard of Depleted Uranium (DU) but I thought that it was basically harmless. It sounds harmless. It’s uranium but it’s “depleted.” Sounds kind of harmless to me. But wait until you hear what Mr. Rokke has to say about it. It not only doesn’t sound harmless, it sounds catastrophic.
First, what is DU?
Depleted Uranium is a metal. It is made from uranium hexafluoride which is the by-product of the uranium enrichment process. Uranium hexafluoride is the non-fissionable residue or by-product of the uranium enrichment process during which fissionable Uranium 235 and Uranium 234 are separated from natural uranium.
The fissionable products are used to make nuclear explosives and as fuel for nuclear power plants. They precipitate a chain reaction.
The non-fissionable uranium by-product DU is a radioactive waste material.
Depleted uranium is refined from Uranium Hexafluoride (UF6) - from radioactive nuclear waste product. The United States Department of Energy has so much UF6 stored at various sites that any use that increases disposal of this waste product is welcome.
Natural uranium contains 99.2% by weight U-238 while DU contains 99.8% by weight U-238. Recent documents released by the U.S. Department of Energy provide evidence to suggest that a small proportion of other toxic heavy metals such as plutonium also may be present.
Plutonium is fissionable and is used in nuclear explosives.
DU is claimed not to be an external hazard (won’t burn the skin etc.). It is an internal hazard and with constant inhalation, ingestion and wound contamination poses significant and unacceptable risks - the alpha particle emissions (radiation) are not reduced but proportionally increased. Spent penetrators or parts of penetrators cannot be touched or picked up without protection.
A penetrator can be a bullet, missile, or a war head. The U.S. munitions industry produces the following DU munitions 7.62mm, 5Ocal., 20mm, 25mm, 30mm, 105mm, 120mm and other types.
DU is an ideal metal for use as kinetic energy penetrators (armor piercing), counterweights, and shielding or armor. High density and pyrophoric nature are the two most significant properties that guided its selection for use as a kinetic energy penetrator. DU is used to manufacture kinetic energy penetrators.
“DU is an extremely effective weapon,” Mr. Rokke explains. “Each tank round is 10 pounds of solid uranium – 238 contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, americium. It is pyrophoric, generating intense heat on impact, penetrating a tank because of the heavy weight of its metal. When uranium munitions hit, it is like a firestorm inside any vehicle or structure ... It is devastating.”
Besides the above uses DU has been proposed by the U.S. Department of Energy as a component of road and structural materials. All of these current or proposed uses are designed to reduce the huge U.S. Department of Energy stockpiles left over from the uranium enrichment process.
It seems that Mr. Rokke isn’t Mr. Rokke but Major Rokke. He has a Ph.D. in Health Physics and he was trained as a forensic scientist. He is a Vietnam and a Gulf War veteran. He has been in the Military Service for over 35 years and has a box full of awards and medals. Unfortunately he is now radioactive and dying.
“I was recalled to active duty in the U.S. Army and assigned to the U.S. Army Chemical School located at Fort McClellan, Alabama as the DU Project Director and tasked with developing training and management procedures. The project included a literature review; extensive curriculum development project involving representatives from all branches of the U.S. Department of Defense and representatives from England, Canada, Germany and Australia; and basic research at the Nevada Test Site located northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, to validate management procedures.”
Doug’s job during the Gulf War was to prepare soldiers to respond to nuclear, biological and chemical warfare. We all think of that first Gulf War in much the same light as Andrew Jackson’s encounter at the Battle of New Orleans. We beat the bloody Iraqis and sent them scattering back into the damn desert with hardly a blemish on our own side. Of course there were 760 immediate casualties with 294 dead and over 400 wounded but that’s not bad for a War. And Saddam didn’t blow off any nuclear or chemical or biological weapons, so everybody was safe. Right?
Wrong.
“The U.S. Military decided to blow up Saddam’s Chemical, and radiological stockpiles in place,” explained Major Rokke, “which released the contamination back on the US troops and on everybody in the whole region. The chemical agent detectors and radiological monitors were going off all over the place. We had all the various nerve agents. We think there were biological agents, and there were destroyed nuclear reactor facilities. It was a toxic wasteland. And we had DU added to the whole mess ... When we first got assigned to clean up the DU and arrived in northern Saudi Arabia, we started getting sick within 72 hours ... It doesn’t take a long time ... We didn’t know anything about DU when the Gulf War started.
“As a warrior, you’re listening to your leaders, and they’re saying there are no health effects from DU. But, as we started to study this, to go back to what we learned in physics and our engineering - I was a professor of environmental science and engineering - you learn rapidly that what they are telling you doesn’t agree with what you know and observe ... In June of 1991, when I got back to the States, I was sick ... They didn’t do tests on me or my team members ... Any excretion level in the urine above 15 micrograms of uranium per day should result in immediate medical testing ... when you get up to 250 micrograms ... you’re supposed to be under continuous medical care ... I was director of the Depleted Uranium Project for the Department of Defense ... My excretion rate was approximately 1500 micrograms per day ... They didn’t tell me for two and a half years ... (symptoms of exposure to DU are) Fibromyalgia; Eye Cataracts from the radiation. When uranium impacts any type of vehicle or structure, uranium oxide dust and pieces of uranium explode all over the place. This can be breathed in or go into a wound. Once it gets into the body, a portion of this stuff is soluble, which means it goes into the blood stream and all of your organs. The insoluble fraction stays - in the lungs, for example. The radiation damage and the particulates destroy the lungs ... As the director of the Depleted Uranium Project, I developed a 40 hour block training. All that curriculum has been shelved. They turned what I wrote into a 20-minute program that’s full of distortions ... The equipment is defective. The General Accounting Office verified that the gas masks leak. Unbelievably, Defense Department officials recently said the defects can be fixed with duct tape
“The U.S. Army made me their expert. I went into the project with the total intent to ensure they could use uranium munitions in war, because I’m a warrior. What I saw as director of the project doing the research and working with my own medical conditions and everybody else’s, led me to one conclusion:
uranium munitions must be banned from the planet, for eternity, and medical care must be provided for everyone, not just the U.S. or the Canadians or the British or the Germans, or the French but for the Americans of Vieques (testing site for DU weapons), for the residents of Iraq, of Okinawa, of Scotland, of India, of Maryland, and now Afghanistan and Kosovo.
“If you’re going to be sent into a toxic wasteland, and you know you are going to wear gas masks that leak and chemical protective suits that leak, and you’re not going to get any medical care after you’re exposed to all of these things, would you go? Suppose they gave a war and nobody came? You’ve got to start peace sometime...
“Religions say; ‘And a child will lead us to peace.’ But if we contaminate the environment, where will the child come from? The children won’t be there. War has become obsolete, because we can’t deal with the consequences on our warriors or the environment, but more important, on the noncombatants. When you reach a point in war when the contamination and the health effects of war can’t be cleaned up because of the weapons you use, and medical care can’t be given to the soldiers who participated in the war on either side or to the civilians affected, then it is time for peace.”
Since the end of that “easy” victory, a couple of more Gulf War causalities have signed in at the office of Veteran Affairs. It seems that 221,000 soldiers have been awarded disability according to a report released on September 10, 2002. The causality rate for Gulf War #1 is now calculated at 30%. And Major Rokke says that his military ordered investigation has led him to the conclusion that anyone who may have been downwind of any uranium dust, or working around uranium contamination or within a vehicle, structure, or building that was struck with uranium munitions should be seeking care.
The problem is two fold. Not only did we blow up any building or storehouse in which the enemy might have stored something hazardous, we used our own uranium missiles and bombs to blow them up. So if you were a soldier anywhere in the vicinity of any such explosion; or even if you were assigned to clean up after such an explosion you may be in store or already suffering from any of the following: Reactive airway disease, Neurological abnormalities, Kidney stones and chronic kidney pain, Rashes, Vision degradation and night vision losses, Gum tissue problems, Lymphoma, Various forms of skin and organ cancer, Neuro-psychological disorders, Uranium in semen, Sexual dysfunction and birth defects in offspring.
For those not in the military it is interesting to note that adverse health effects of this nature have been documented in employees of and residents living near Puducah, Kentucky; Portsmouth, Ohio; Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington. Also employees at uranium manufacturing or processing facilities in New York, Tennessee and the four corner’s area of southwest Colorado have reported similar health effects.
But, no need to worry, despite all these findings the United States and NATO officials continue to state that there are no known adverse health effects form DU exposure.
Major Rokke has this to say about that: “If you do not provide medical assessment for those with verified exposures and health problems then you can say DU did not cause any adverse health problems. So much for medical science when a cover up is directed by politicians to limit liability for non combatants, warriors, and others.”
As you may readily understand Major Rokke, besides being one of the untreated walking wounded and infected, is also persona non-grata in military circles these days. He is at present urinating and excreting large proportions of radioactive materials. “It is impossible to get proper care and treatment,” says Major Rokke. Several of his old buddies who served with him in his Military mandated DU clean-ups and investigations are already dead.
In the Balkans they are referring to these symptoms as the “Bosnian Crud”.
So far according to major Rokke medical care has not been provided to all DU casualties; environmental remediation has not been completed; DU contamination and damaged equipment and materials have been recycled to manufacture new products; DU training and education has only been partially implemented; DU contamination management procedures have not been distributed.
What should happen next? Mr. Rokke says that the international community and all of the world must raise a unified voice in opposition to future use of Depleted Uranium munitions and force those nations that have used depleted uranium munitions to recognize the immoral consequences of their actions and assume responsibility for medical care and thorough environmental remediation. Specifically: Depleted uranium munitions and the use of depleted uranium must be banned; all individuals who were exposed or who may have been exposed to any form of depleted uranium and its various integral contaminants or other contaminants created during combat, research, or training activities must receive a thorough physical examination and medical care to alleviate or cure the physiological consequences caused by inhalation, ingestion, or uranium wound contamination; all depleted uranium penetrator fragments, depleted uranium contaminated equipment, and depleted uranium oxide contamination must be cleaned up and disposed of at secure sites.
Major Rokke recommends that concerned citizens call their Congressmen and Senators and ask them what is being done about depleted uranium munitions, our sick soldiers, and the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims here in the U.S. and around the world.
By Richard E. Noble
I had heard of Depleted Uranium (DU) but I thought that it was basically harmless. It sounds harmless. It’s uranium but it’s “depleted.” Sounds kind of harmless to me. But wait until you hear what Mr. Rokke has to say about it. It not only doesn’t sound harmless, it sounds catastrophic.
First, what is DU?
Depleted Uranium is a metal. It is made from uranium hexafluoride which is the by-product of the uranium enrichment process. Uranium hexafluoride is the non-fissionable residue or by-product of the uranium enrichment process during which fissionable Uranium 235 and Uranium 234 are separated from natural uranium.
The fissionable products are used to make nuclear explosives and as fuel for nuclear power plants. They precipitate a chain reaction.
The non-fissionable uranium by-product DU is a radioactive waste material.
Depleted uranium is refined from Uranium Hexafluoride (UF6) - from radioactive nuclear waste product. The United States Department of Energy has so much UF6 stored at various sites that any use that increases disposal of this waste product is welcome.
Natural uranium contains 99.2% by weight U-238 while DU contains 99.8% by weight U-238. Recent documents released by the U.S. Department of Energy provide evidence to suggest that a small proportion of other toxic heavy metals such as plutonium also may be present.
Plutonium is fissionable and is used in nuclear explosives.
DU is claimed not to be an external hazard (won’t burn the skin etc.). It is an internal hazard and with constant inhalation, ingestion and wound contamination poses significant and unacceptable risks - the alpha particle emissions (radiation) are not reduced but proportionally increased. Spent penetrators or parts of penetrators cannot be touched or picked up without protection.
A penetrator can be a bullet, missile, or a war head. The U.S. munitions industry produces the following DU munitions 7.62mm, 5Ocal., 20mm, 25mm, 30mm, 105mm, 120mm and other types.
DU is an ideal metal for use as kinetic energy penetrators (armor piercing), counterweights, and shielding or armor. High density and pyrophoric nature are the two most significant properties that guided its selection for use as a kinetic energy penetrator. DU is used to manufacture kinetic energy penetrators.
“DU is an extremely effective weapon,” Mr. Rokke explains. “Each tank round is 10 pounds of solid uranium – 238 contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, americium. It is pyrophoric, generating intense heat on impact, penetrating a tank because of the heavy weight of its metal. When uranium munitions hit, it is like a firestorm inside any vehicle or structure ... It is devastating.”
Besides the above uses DU has been proposed by the U.S. Department of Energy as a component of road and structural materials. All of these current or proposed uses are designed to reduce the huge U.S. Department of Energy stockpiles left over from the uranium enrichment process.
It seems that Mr. Rokke isn’t Mr. Rokke but Major Rokke. He has a Ph.D. in Health Physics and he was trained as a forensic scientist. He is a Vietnam and a Gulf War veteran. He has been in the Military Service for over 35 years and has a box full of awards and medals. Unfortunately he is now radioactive and dying.
“I was recalled to active duty in the U.S. Army and assigned to the U.S. Army Chemical School located at Fort McClellan, Alabama as the DU Project Director and tasked with developing training and management procedures. The project included a literature review; extensive curriculum development project involving representatives from all branches of the U.S. Department of Defense and representatives from England, Canada, Germany and Australia; and basic research at the Nevada Test Site located northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, to validate management procedures.”
Doug’s job during the Gulf War was to prepare soldiers to respond to nuclear, biological and chemical warfare. We all think of that first Gulf War in much the same light as Andrew Jackson’s encounter at the Battle of New Orleans. We beat the bloody Iraqis and sent them scattering back into the damn desert with hardly a blemish on our own side. Of course there were 760 immediate casualties with 294 dead and over 400 wounded but that’s not bad for a War. And Saddam didn’t blow off any nuclear or chemical or biological weapons, so everybody was safe. Right?
Wrong.
“The U.S. Military decided to blow up Saddam’s Chemical, and radiological stockpiles in place,” explained Major Rokke, “which released the contamination back on the US troops and on everybody in the whole region. The chemical agent detectors and radiological monitors were going off all over the place. We had all the various nerve agents. We think there were biological agents, and there were destroyed nuclear reactor facilities. It was a toxic wasteland. And we had DU added to the whole mess ... When we first got assigned to clean up the DU and arrived in northern Saudi Arabia, we started getting sick within 72 hours ... It doesn’t take a long time ... We didn’t know anything about DU when the Gulf War started.
“As a warrior, you’re listening to your leaders, and they’re saying there are no health effects from DU. But, as we started to study this, to go back to what we learned in physics and our engineering - I was a professor of environmental science and engineering - you learn rapidly that what they are telling you doesn’t agree with what you know and observe ... In June of 1991, when I got back to the States, I was sick ... They didn’t do tests on me or my team members ... Any excretion level in the urine above 15 micrograms of uranium per day should result in immediate medical testing ... when you get up to 250 micrograms ... you’re supposed to be under continuous medical care ... I was director of the Depleted Uranium Project for the Department of Defense ... My excretion rate was approximately 1500 micrograms per day ... They didn’t tell me for two and a half years ... (symptoms of exposure to DU are) Fibromyalgia; Eye Cataracts from the radiation. When uranium impacts any type of vehicle or structure, uranium oxide dust and pieces of uranium explode all over the place. This can be breathed in or go into a wound. Once it gets into the body, a portion of this stuff is soluble, which means it goes into the blood stream and all of your organs. The insoluble fraction stays - in the lungs, for example. The radiation damage and the particulates destroy the lungs ... As the director of the Depleted Uranium Project, I developed a 40 hour block training. All that curriculum has been shelved. They turned what I wrote into a 20-minute program that’s full of distortions ... The equipment is defective. The General Accounting Office verified that the gas masks leak. Unbelievably, Defense Department officials recently said the defects can be fixed with duct tape
“The U.S. Army made me their expert. I went into the project with the total intent to ensure they could use uranium munitions in war, because I’m a warrior. What I saw as director of the project doing the research and working with my own medical conditions and everybody else’s, led me to one conclusion:
uranium munitions must be banned from the planet, for eternity, and medical care must be provided for everyone, not just the U.S. or the Canadians or the British or the Germans, or the French but for the Americans of Vieques (testing site for DU weapons), for the residents of Iraq, of Okinawa, of Scotland, of India, of Maryland, and now Afghanistan and Kosovo.
“If you’re going to be sent into a toxic wasteland, and you know you are going to wear gas masks that leak and chemical protective suits that leak, and you’re not going to get any medical care after you’re exposed to all of these things, would you go? Suppose they gave a war and nobody came? You’ve got to start peace sometime...
“Religions say; ‘And a child will lead us to peace.’ But if we contaminate the environment, where will the child come from? The children won’t be there. War has become obsolete, because we can’t deal with the consequences on our warriors or the environment, but more important, on the noncombatants. When you reach a point in war when the contamination and the health effects of war can’t be cleaned up because of the weapons you use, and medical care can’t be given to the soldiers who participated in the war on either side or to the civilians affected, then it is time for peace.”
Since the end of that “easy” victory, a couple of more Gulf War causalities have signed in at the office of Veteran Affairs. It seems that 221,000 soldiers have been awarded disability according to a report released on September 10, 2002. The causality rate for Gulf War #1 is now calculated at 30%. And Major Rokke says that his military ordered investigation has led him to the conclusion that anyone who may have been downwind of any uranium dust, or working around uranium contamination or within a vehicle, structure, or building that was struck with uranium munitions should be seeking care.
The problem is two fold. Not only did we blow up any building or storehouse in which the enemy might have stored something hazardous, we used our own uranium missiles and bombs to blow them up. So if you were a soldier anywhere in the vicinity of any such explosion; or even if you were assigned to clean up after such an explosion you may be in store or already suffering from any of the following: Reactive airway disease, Neurological abnormalities, Kidney stones and chronic kidney pain, Rashes, Vision degradation and night vision losses, Gum tissue problems, Lymphoma, Various forms of skin and organ cancer, Neuro-psychological disorders, Uranium in semen, Sexual dysfunction and birth defects in offspring.
For those not in the military it is interesting to note that adverse health effects of this nature have been documented in employees of and residents living near Puducah, Kentucky; Portsmouth, Ohio; Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington. Also employees at uranium manufacturing or processing facilities in New York, Tennessee and the four corner’s area of southwest Colorado have reported similar health effects.
But, no need to worry, despite all these findings the United States and NATO officials continue to state that there are no known adverse health effects form DU exposure.
Major Rokke has this to say about that: “If you do not provide medical assessment for those with verified exposures and health problems then you can say DU did not cause any adverse health problems. So much for medical science when a cover up is directed by politicians to limit liability for non combatants, warriors, and others.”
As you may readily understand Major Rokke, besides being one of the untreated walking wounded and infected, is also persona non-grata in military circles these days. He is at present urinating and excreting large proportions of radioactive materials. “It is impossible to get proper care and treatment,” says Major Rokke. Several of his old buddies who served with him in his Military mandated DU clean-ups and investigations are already dead.
In the Balkans they are referring to these symptoms as the “Bosnian Crud”.
So far according to major Rokke medical care has not been provided to all DU casualties; environmental remediation has not been completed; DU contamination and damaged equipment and materials have been recycled to manufacture new products; DU training and education has only been partially implemented; DU contamination management procedures have not been distributed.
What should happen next? Mr. Rokke says that the international community and all of the world must raise a unified voice in opposition to future use of Depleted Uranium munitions and force those nations that have used depleted uranium munitions to recognize the immoral consequences of their actions and assume responsibility for medical care and thorough environmental remediation. Specifically: Depleted uranium munitions and the use of depleted uranium must be banned; all individuals who were exposed or who may have been exposed to any form of depleted uranium and its various integral contaminants or other contaminants created during combat, research, or training activities must receive a thorough physical examination and medical care to alleviate or cure the physiological consequences caused by inhalation, ingestion, or uranium wound contamination; all depleted uranium penetrator fragments, depleted uranium contaminated equipment, and depleted uranium oxide contamination must be cleaned up and disposed of at secure sites.
Major Rokke recommends that concerned citizens call their Congressmen and Senators and ask them what is being done about depleted uranium munitions, our sick soldiers, and the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims here in the U.S. and around the world.
Monday, February 01, 2010
The National Debt
The National Debt
With a “Noble” Solution
Richard E. Noble
A few presidents ago the National Debt was the most pressing thing that our political leaders and political hopefuls had on their minds. Ronald Reagan in his campaign for the presidency in 1980 told us all about a stack of dollar bills stretching from the planet earth to the moon. This stack of paper money was to represent the one trillion dollar mark in our advance to national bankruptcy. Our National Debt had not yet reached this benchmark in fiscal irresponsibility and Ronald Reagan was to be our knight in shining economic armor who would stop this catastrophe from happening.
Today this stack of dollar bills is probably bumping up against the planet Pluto but we hardly hear a murmur of the once prophesied impending catastrophe. I wonder why? Was the National Debt not really a legitimate problem? Was the Great Communicator merely communicating greatly or grandiosely? What the heck is the National Debt anyway?
The National Debt is the total amount that the government currently owes from all of its past borrowing. I guess that we could safely say that it is the mortgage that our governments, past and present, have borrowed on the United States of America. A budget deficit, on the other hand, is the amount by which expenditures exceed receipts in a single year. Today there is a simple way for the lay person to distinguish between these two things - the deficit is tabulated in Billions and the National Debt is now tabulated in Trillions.
In the two hundred years B.R. (before Ronald Reagan) the entire accumulated debt of all of our previous presidents amounted to 909.1 Billion dollars. So B.R., our country’s National Debt had not yet reached one trillion dollars - that stack of dollar bills had not yet reached the moon. Now, remember, that figure included all the debt accumulated from George Washington through Jimmy Carter. That 909.1 Billion dollars included all the monies borrowed for the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
By the time that Ronald Reagan left office in 1988 the National Debt was 2,601.3 Billion or 2.6 Trillion. In just eight years Ronald Reagan had more than doubled what all the previous presidents from Washington through Carter had accumulated in the prior 200 years.
Okay, let’s give Ronnie a break. Let’s kick it up a notch. Let’s go to George H. W. Bush - Number Forty-One, as he is so lovingly referred to today.
Number Forty-One is the Yale graduate who accused Ronald Reagan of advocating Voodoo economics. By the time Number Forty-One left office in 1992 the National Debt was 4,002.1 Billion or approx. 4.0 Trillion dollars. If Ronald Reagan was practicing Voodoo, one must hesitate to ask what Number Forty One’s economic principles were based on. And, you know, these presidents today have a Council of Economic Advisers. The only problem with the Council of Economic Advisers is that when a Council member disagrees with the president or speaks out publicly against a president’s economic policy, he suddenly finds himself in search of a new Council to counsel.
But this is all beginning to sound like Republican bashing. Let’s go to B. J. Clinton. In my neighborhood B. J. stood for something other than Billy Jefferson, but we won’t get into that. So B. J. came into office in 1992 and by the time that he left, the National Debt was 5,606.1 Billion or 5.6 Trillion dollars. So Reagan gave us 2.6 Trillion, Number Forty-One gave us 4.0 Trillion, and B. J. gave us 5.6 Trillion.
Everyone says that what B. J. accomplished was good. Well, when it is compared to what Ronnie and Number Forty-One did, I suppose? Sounds to me like saying; Well, my Grandfather was hanged, my Daddy got the electric chair and now I’m serving life in prison. Guess that I am doing better than they did, huh? - I suppose, but most of us wouldn’t consider life in prison all that much of an accomplishment.
Today we have Bush Number Forty-Three.
Number Forty-Three has the debt up to somewhere between 7 and 8 Trillion. It is estimated that by the time that Number Forty-Three leaves office the National Debt will be somewhere around 10 Trillion dollars - give or take a Trillion. Like some famous politician once said; “A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking some real money.” Billions no longer matter, it’s trillions now.
So there you go. And what does this all mean? I was listening to one economist on the TV the other day and he said;
“Economically, we are like the man who just jumped off the top of a one hundred storey building. The falling man passes the eightieth storey and a guy sticks his head out of a window and screams to the falling man; ‘How’s everything going?’
‘Everything is O.K. so far,’ the falling man replies.”
But, let’s not be pessimistic about this - you know - is the glass half-empty or is it half-full. Let us be “half-full” about all of this. It does no good to be half-empty because we are a lot worse off than half-empty. If we were only half-empty that would mean that we would still have something in our glass. At 10 Trillion dollars in debt we don’t even have a glass anymore. But whatever - let’s be positive.
Some politicians claim that the National Debt doesn’t really matter because it is money that we owe to ourselves. So even when the federal government just pays the interest on the National Debt it is infusing dollars into our economy - like giving a tax cut to the rich. But since Reagan, unfortunately, this is no longer true.
Before Reagan our government’s borrowing was financed by Americans. After Reagan our National Debt became so enormous that Americans didn’t have enough money to finance the Government’s borrowing - so we borrowed from foreign countries. Or would it be more economic to say that we sold our debt to foreign countries. In other words, we sold the mortgage, or foreigners bought our mortgage. Now countries like Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, the U.K etc. own a good part of our mortgage. If in the last few decades, it has appeared to you that your government has been acting like a foreign country, this may be a part of the reason.
But certainly, one day, we will pay off this mortgage and the American people will once again own their country?
This does not even seem to be in the realm of possibility. Politicians talk of balancing the budget as they did in the year 1999 for the first time in many decades. By the way, this supposed surplus that we had, momentarily, was only accomplished by pilfering money from the Social Security Trust Fund. Excess monies had been accumulated in the Social Security Trust Fund because of an increase in the Social Security tax in 1983. An increase was mandated to compensate for the baby boomers. From that year on, the Social Security had a surplus but everybody from Reagan to Clinton used the Social Security surpluses for other general fund spending purposes.
Balancing the budget - or having a year in which the government does not produce a deficit by spending more money than it receives - only manages to pay the interest on the National Debt. A balanced budget pays nothing on the principal or the debt itself. In order to pay down the debt itself, the government must create a surplus - spend less money than what it takes in every year. And then use those surplus monies to buy back Debt (treasury bonds).
Is this a possibility? Seems not. I have never heard a politician in my lifetime talk of paying down the principal on the National Debt. The political answer to the National Debt seems to be like our policy towards gays in the military - don’t ask; don’t tell.
So, I was thinking, why don’t we sell all of our mortgage to foreign countries and then claim bankruptcy. The only way these countries could get their money is if they have a bigger army than ours.
Or maybe these foreign countries who own our debt would forgive our debt like the World Bank sometimes does for under-developed countries - or like we did after World War II for a number of countries. But, of course, this is all ridiculous - we’re the richest country in the world, remember? Well, if we are the richest country in the world, why don’t we just pay everybody off?
Because we don’t have the money. So we are the richest country in the world but we don’t have the money to pay our debts - our mortgage anyway. I have many friends who are rich in a similar manner. How can we be rich and, at the same time, be the biggest debtor nation in the world? Are we rich, or aren’t we?
But don’t despair, I have more realistic solutions to this problem than depending on the charity of the rest of the world. I wouldn’t expect or hold my hope out for a European Marshall Plan for the U.S.A. either folks. My solutions are dynamic and they don’t involve raising taxes.
Today we have approximately 200 million working people, or tax paying people in America. These 200 million people pay about 1.2 trillion dollars in taxes each year. If we can increase the working population of the United States about 10 times its present number and we tax them all at the present rate, we would have a national income of 10 or 11 trillion a year. So then, if we could get our government to put one trillion aside each year, we could pay off the National Debt in about 10 or 11 years. I admit, this solution has its problems but, come on - is the glass half-empty or is it half-full? This would take care of any Social Security short fall also, I might add.
My second idea is even better. We don’t need any new taxes or new workers. This idea is a classic.
We simply continue with Number Forty-Three’s borrow and spend policies. As all of us economists know this can do nothing but increase the rate of inflation - but that’s good. If we can get the inflation rate to rise faster than the rate at which Number Forty-Three and his successors can borrow, one day we will have more pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents on them than we have debt to pay.
This is that same idea that they told you about a few years ago. Remember they said; Buy yourself a big house that you can barely afford now, and pay off your balloon mortgage – twenty years later - with cheap, inflated money from your naturally escalating high paying job.
The Germans tried this print-more-money idea after World War I. It worked real well. They had a few minor problems. Like trying to figure out how many wheelbarrows full of paper money it would take to buy a loaf of bread. But so what, I mean, look at Germany today? They’re doing all right.
So there you go - is the glass half-empty or is it half-full. What me worry? Just call me Alfred E. Newman. To tell you the truth when I look at the past illegal immigration rate and the true rate of inflation over the last few decades, I think that my two suggestions are the government’s plan - or has been anyway. In 1974 I bought a Chevy van for $3,400, today a similar van sells for $34,000. I think that the inflation rate has been somewhat greater than the presently claimed 2.2%.
My advise to the next two generations of Americans is - buy wheelbarrows.
I have one other idea.
When the government spends more than it collects every year - it borrows. It prints up Treasury Notes and Bonds etc. Then it has the Federal Reserve - its personal banker - sell them to Americans and foreigner investors and foreign countries, at a specified interest rate. This is what makes our National Debt. This puts the government in a catch-22 situation. It can’t raise taxes - nobody likes that. It can’t charge tariffs on products coming into the country and put the cost of our government onto foreign countries and foreign manufactures. It could do this, especially when one considers that we now import 80% of what is sold here domestically - but it can’t, because we believe in “free trade”. Besides, most of our imports are from American based companies who went over seas to avoid paying taxes and hire cheaper labor in the fist place. Raising tariff rates would spoil their whole plan. So then how else could the government earn some money to pay its bills?
It could rent out rooms at the White House - but that is how we finance our political campaigns. So what can the government do?
Well, how about just printing up so much money every year and buying back some reasonable portion of our debt, without going through the debt making process of selling Treasury Notes, Bonds and Bills etc. via the Federal Reserve?
The first thing that everybody yells and screams about this idea is that it is inflationary. Yeah? And borrowing and creating more debt via the Federal Reserve and selling our country to China is better and un-inflationary? I suggest that we pass a law allowing only a certain percentage to be printed up in this manner - taking into consideration GNP and Inflation and the predictable population and economic growth.
The second problem with this idea is that it is against the Constitution. Yeah! So who gives a flying flip? This hasn’t stopped the last five or seven administrations from doing anything. Why should it stop us on anything as important as this? Besides, the Constitution on this particular point could very easily be reinterpreted - we wouldn’t even be forced to change anything or seek a Constitutional Amendment.
The next complaint with this idea is that when the American people and the other nations of the world find out about this shenanigans they will lose faith in our government.
I don’t think so - no one understands economics anyway. And if you think that will be the case, don’t tell them. As the debt miraculously goes down gradually every year, just tell everybody that it is because of good business management on the part of that particular administration - cook the books; or just add it to the total of taxes collected, nobody will know the difference; or tell everybody that it is a miracle. Everybody believes in miracles these days. When the press investigates and discovers that what is happening is economically impossible - just lie to them, like we do on everything else. What is the problem here?
As for the American people? What the heck do they care? They’re too busy trying to make a living to start trying to comprehend economics - least of all the Federal Reserve System. And need I point out that at this point in world economics – if the U.S. currency fails – the entire world economy fails. U.S. dollars are now used around the world in place of Gold. The U.S. dollar is today’s gold.
The bottom line is this: Printing money and skipping the Federal Reserve will no doubt create some inflation. But, using that money to buy back Treasury Bonds (Debt.) will be anti-inflationary. On the one hand, we are printing money to put into circulation, but using it to take money out of circulation by reclaiming debt on the other. If it is done properly - with due diligence - the one will cancel out the other and America will one day be debt free and it will cost nobody anything. This will not be a loss or gain - it will simply be a monetary transfer. We will transfer a bunch of one type of paper for another type of paper. If it is done right, nobody will know the difference. And if we want to add an additional check on inflation, when we start buying back our treasury bonds from the Federal Reserve with our “free paper”, temporarily raise the required reserve security demands. In other words, if the banks are required to hold 10% in reserve - raise that requirement to 12% or whatever. Then as time goes on and we see that inflation is under control, lower the requirement.
The last criticism that I can think of is that this idea would be putting trust in our government to do the right thing and keep things under control. In other words, somebody has to be sure that they don’t print up too much money every year. So set up an oversight committee - with the Federal Reserve Board, if that will make you happy. They will not like the basic idea in the first place - but they will just have to deal with it. As it is now, they (the Banks) are the only ones who profit from this National Debt business - so they like it; but if the debt is allowed to continue growing, it will mean possible bankruptcy for them and everybody else. As it is now the only hope for the world economy is continued projected economic growth, coupled with reasonable inflation. Today we have inflation and debt. With this suggestion we will still have the inflation - but we will eliminate the debt. And it is the Debt that will eventually kill us, not the inflation. The world can live with a controlled inflation - it has for centuries. And if this is done correctly we will have no more inflation than what is currently being created. Besides, there aren’t any good choices here; you can trust your government or you can trust the Federal Reserve and the International Banking community.
As I said earlier, facetiously, Germany did this but failed and bankrupted their country after World War I. But the Germans wanted to bankrupt their currency. They didn’t want to pay off their war debts and the smart money wanted to turn the middle class against the occupation government. So they simply printed up paper until it filled wheelbarrows. They did not use due diligence and have proper controls. They didn’t care. What they did was not an accident. It was a planned bankruptcy. You can be sure that the big boys in German currency had all their cash in something other than the Mark. Of course, there is the possibility that our National Debt is also planned. The design of the plan being to keep the general population thinking that they are broke, so that they won’t be suggesting any “free” social programs for the “welfare” state. I mean, you must have noticed that no matter how large the National Debt, we always have enough money for another war.
With a “Noble” Solution
Richard E. Noble
A few presidents ago the National Debt was the most pressing thing that our political leaders and political hopefuls had on their minds. Ronald Reagan in his campaign for the presidency in 1980 told us all about a stack of dollar bills stretching from the planet earth to the moon. This stack of paper money was to represent the one trillion dollar mark in our advance to national bankruptcy. Our National Debt had not yet reached this benchmark in fiscal irresponsibility and Ronald Reagan was to be our knight in shining economic armor who would stop this catastrophe from happening.
Today this stack of dollar bills is probably bumping up against the planet Pluto but we hardly hear a murmur of the once prophesied impending catastrophe. I wonder why? Was the National Debt not really a legitimate problem? Was the Great Communicator merely communicating greatly or grandiosely? What the heck is the National Debt anyway?
The National Debt is the total amount that the government currently owes from all of its past borrowing. I guess that we could safely say that it is the mortgage that our governments, past and present, have borrowed on the United States of America. A budget deficit, on the other hand, is the amount by which expenditures exceed receipts in a single year. Today there is a simple way for the lay person to distinguish between these two things - the deficit is tabulated in Billions and the National Debt is now tabulated in Trillions.
In the two hundred years B.R. (before Ronald Reagan) the entire accumulated debt of all of our previous presidents amounted to 909.1 Billion dollars. So B.R., our country’s National Debt had not yet reached one trillion dollars - that stack of dollar bills had not yet reached the moon. Now, remember, that figure included all the debt accumulated from George Washington through Jimmy Carter. That 909.1 Billion dollars included all the monies borrowed for the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
By the time that Ronald Reagan left office in 1988 the National Debt was 2,601.3 Billion or 2.6 Trillion. In just eight years Ronald Reagan had more than doubled what all the previous presidents from Washington through Carter had accumulated in the prior 200 years.
Okay, let’s give Ronnie a break. Let’s kick it up a notch. Let’s go to George H. W. Bush - Number Forty-One, as he is so lovingly referred to today.
Number Forty-One is the Yale graduate who accused Ronald Reagan of advocating Voodoo economics. By the time Number Forty-One left office in 1992 the National Debt was 4,002.1 Billion or approx. 4.0 Trillion dollars. If Ronald Reagan was practicing Voodoo, one must hesitate to ask what Number Forty One’s economic principles were based on. And, you know, these presidents today have a Council of Economic Advisers. The only problem with the Council of Economic Advisers is that when a Council member disagrees with the president or speaks out publicly against a president’s economic policy, he suddenly finds himself in search of a new Council to counsel.
But this is all beginning to sound like Republican bashing. Let’s go to B. J. Clinton. In my neighborhood B. J. stood for something other than Billy Jefferson, but we won’t get into that. So B. J. came into office in 1992 and by the time that he left, the National Debt was 5,606.1 Billion or 5.6 Trillion dollars. So Reagan gave us 2.6 Trillion, Number Forty-One gave us 4.0 Trillion, and B. J. gave us 5.6 Trillion.
Everyone says that what B. J. accomplished was good. Well, when it is compared to what Ronnie and Number Forty-One did, I suppose? Sounds to me like saying; Well, my Grandfather was hanged, my Daddy got the electric chair and now I’m serving life in prison. Guess that I am doing better than they did, huh? - I suppose, but most of us wouldn’t consider life in prison all that much of an accomplishment.
Today we have Bush Number Forty-Three.
Number Forty-Three has the debt up to somewhere between 7 and 8 Trillion. It is estimated that by the time that Number Forty-Three leaves office the National Debt will be somewhere around 10 Trillion dollars - give or take a Trillion. Like some famous politician once said; “A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking some real money.” Billions no longer matter, it’s trillions now.
So there you go. And what does this all mean? I was listening to one economist on the TV the other day and he said;
“Economically, we are like the man who just jumped off the top of a one hundred storey building. The falling man passes the eightieth storey and a guy sticks his head out of a window and screams to the falling man; ‘How’s everything going?’
‘Everything is O.K. so far,’ the falling man replies.”
But, let’s not be pessimistic about this - you know - is the glass half-empty or is it half-full. Let us be “half-full” about all of this. It does no good to be half-empty because we are a lot worse off than half-empty. If we were only half-empty that would mean that we would still have something in our glass. At 10 Trillion dollars in debt we don’t even have a glass anymore. But whatever - let’s be positive.
Some politicians claim that the National Debt doesn’t really matter because it is money that we owe to ourselves. So even when the federal government just pays the interest on the National Debt it is infusing dollars into our economy - like giving a tax cut to the rich. But since Reagan, unfortunately, this is no longer true.
Before Reagan our government’s borrowing was financed by Americans. After Reagan our National Debt became so enormous that Americans didn’t have enough money to finance the Government’s borrowing - so we borrowed from foreign countries. Or would it be more economic to say that we sold our debt to foreign countries. In other words, we sold the mortgage, or foreigners bought our mortgage. Now countries like Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, the U.K etc. own a good part of our mortgage. If in the last few decades, it has appeared to you that your government has been acting like a foreign country, this may be a part of the reason.
But certainly, one day, we will pay off this mortgage and the American people will once again own their country?
This does not even seem to be in the realm of possibility. Politicians talk of balancing the budget as they did in the year 1999 for the first time in many decades. By the way, this supposed surplus that we had, momentarily, was only accomplished by pilfering money from the Social Security Trust Fund. Excess monies had been accumulated in the Social Security Trust Fund because of an increase in the Social Security tax in 1983. An increase was mandated to compensate for the baby boomers. From that year on, the Social Security had a surplus but everybody from Reagan to Clinton used the Social Security surpluses for other general fund spending purposes.
Balancing the budget - or having a year in which the government does not produce a deficit by spending more money than it receives - only manages to pay the interest on the National Debt. A balanced budget pays nothing on the principal or the debt itself. In order to pay down the debt itself, the government must create a surplus - spend less money than what it takes in every year. And then use those surplus monies to buy back Debt (treasury bonds).
Is this a possibility? Seems not. I have never heard a politician in my lifetime talk of paying down the principal on the National Debt. The political answer to the National Debt seems to be like our policy towards gays in the military - don’t ask; don’t tell.
So, I was thinking, why don’t we sell all of our mortgage to foreign countries and then claim bankruptcy. The only way these countries could get their money is if they have a bigger army than ours.
Or maybe these foreign countries who own our debt would forgive our debt like the World Bank sometimes does for under-developed countries - or like we did after World War II for a number of countries. But, of course, this is all ridiculous - we’re the richest country in the world, remember? Well, if we are the richest country in the world, why don’t we just pay everybody off?
Because we don’t have the money. So we are the richest country in the world but we don’t have the money to pay our debts - our mortgage anyway. I have many friends who are rich in a similar manner. How can we be rich and, at the same time, be the biggest debtor nation in the world? Are we rich, or aren’t we?
But don’t despair, I have more realistic solutions to this problem than depending on the charity of the rest of the world. I wouldn’t expect or hold my hope out for a European Marshall Plan for the U.S.A. either folks. My solutions are dynamic and they don’t involve raising taxes.
Today we have approximately 200 million working people, or tax paying people in America. These 200 million people pay about 1.2 trillion dollars in taxes each year. If we can increase the working population of the United States about 10 times its present number and we tax them all at the present rate, we would have a national income of 10 or 11 trillion a year. So then, if we could get our government to put one trillion aside each year, we could pay off the National Debt in about 10 or 11 years. I admit, this solution has its problems but, come on - is the glass half-empty or is it half-full? This would take care of any Social Security short fall also, I might add.
My second idea is even better. We don’t need any new taxes or new workers. This idea is a classic.
We simply continue with Number Forty-Three’s borrow and spend policies. As all of us economists know this can do nothing but increase the rate of inflation - but that’s good. If we can get the inflation rate to rise faster than the rate at which Number Forty-Three and his successors can borrow, one day we will have more pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents on them than we have debt to pay.
This is that same idea that they told you about a few years ago. Remember they said; Buy yourself a big house that you can barely afford now, and pay off your balloon mortgage – twenty years later - with cheap, inflated money from your naturally escalating high paying job.
The Germans tried this print-more-money idea after World War I. It worked real well. They had a few minor problems. Like trying to figure out how many wheelbarrows full of paper money it would take to buy a loaf of bread. But so what, I mean, look at Germany today? They’re doing all right.
So there you go - is the glass half-empty or is it half-full. What me worry? Just call me Alfred E. Newman. To tell you the truth when I look at the past illegal immigration rate and the true rate of inflation over the last few decades, I think that my two suggestions are the government’s plan - or has been anyway. In 1974 I bought a Chevy van for $3,400, today a similar van sells for $34,000. I think that the inflation rate has been somewhat greater than the presently claimed 2.2%.
My advise to the next two generations of Americans is - buy wheelbarrows.
I have one other idea.
When the government spends more than it collects every year - it borrows. It prints up Treasury Notes and Bonds etc. Then it has the Federal Reserve - its personal banker - sell them to Americans and foreigner investors and foreign countries, at a specified interest rate. This is what makes our National Debt. This puts the government in a catch-22 situation. It can’t raise taxes - nobody likes that. It can’t charge tariffs on products coming into the country and put the cost of our government onto foreign countries and foreign manufactures. It could do this, especially when one considers that we now import 80% of what is sold here domestically - but it can’t, because we believe in “free trade”. Besides, most of our imports are from American based companies who went over seas to avoid paying taxes and hire cheaper labor in the fist place. Raising tariff rates would spoil their whole plan. So then how else could the government earn some money to pay its bills?
It could rent out rooms at the White House - but that is how we finance our political campaigns. So what can the government do?
Well, how about just printing up so much money every year and buying back some reasonable portion of our debt, without going through the debt making process of selling Treasury Notes, Bonds and Bills etc. via the Federal Reserve?
The first thing that everybody yells and screams about this idea is that it is inflationary. Yeah? And borrowing and creating more debt via the Federal Reserve and selling our country to China is better and un-inflationary? I suggest that we pass a law allowing only a certain percentage to be printed up in this manner - taking into consideration GNP and Inflation and the predictable population and economic growth.
The second problem with this idea is that it is against the Constitution. Yeah! So who gives a flying flip? This hasn’t stopped the last five or seven administrations from doing anything. Why should it stop us on anything as important as this? Besides, the Constitution on this particular point could very easily be reinterpreted - we wouldn’t even be forced to change anything or seek a Constitutional Amendment.
The next complaint with this idea is that when the American people and the other nations of the world find out about this shenanigans they will lose faith in our government.
I don’t think so - no one understands economics anyway. And if you think that will be the case, don’t tell them. As the debt miraculously goes down gradually every year, just tell everybody that it is because of good business management on the part of that particular administration - cook the books; or just add it to the total of taxes collected, nobody will know the difference; or tell everybody that it is a miracle. Everybody believes in miracles these days. When the press investigates and discovers that what is happening is economically impossible - just lie to them, like we do on everything else. What is the problem here?
As for the American people? What the heck do they care? They’re too busy trying to make a living to start trying to comprehend economics - least of all the Federal Reserve System. And need I point out that at this point in world economics – if the U.S. currency fails – the entire world economy fails. U.S. dollars are now used around the world in place of Gold. The U.S. dollar is today’s gold.
The bottom line is this: Printing money and skipping the Federal Reserve will no doubt create some inflation. But, using that money to buy back Treasury Bonds (Debt.) will be anti-inflationary. On the one hand, we are printing money to put into circulation, but using it to take money out of circulation by reclaiming debt on the other. If it is done properly - with due diligence - the one will cancel out the other and America will one day be debt free and it will cost nobody anything. This will not be a loss or gain - it will simply be a monetary transfer. We will transfer a bunch of one type of paper for another type of paper. If it is done right, nobody will know the difference. And if we want to add an additional check on inflation, when we start buying back our treasury bonds from the Federal Reserve with our “free paper”, temporarily raise the required reserve security demands. In other words, if the banks are required to hold 10% in reserve - raise that requirement to 12% or whatever. Then as time goes on and we see that inflation is under control, lower the requirement.
The last criticism that I can think of is that this idea would be putting trust in our government to do the right thing and keep things under control. In other words, somebody has to be sure that they don’t print up too much money every year. So set up an oversight committee - with the Federal Reserve Board, if that will make you happy. They will not like the basic idea in the first place - but they will just have to deal with it. As it is now, they (the Banks) are the only ones who profit from this National Debt business - so they like it; but if the debt is allowed to continue growing, it will mean possible bankruptcy for them and everybody else. As it is now the only hope for the world economy is continued projected economic growth, coupled with reasonable inflation. Today we have inflation and debt. With this suggestion we will still have the inflation - but we will eliminate the debt. And it is the Debt that will eventually kill us, not the inflation. The world can live with a controlled inflation - it has for centuries. And if this is done correctly we will have no more inflation than what is currently being created. Besides, there aren’t any good choices here; you can trust your government or you can trust the Federal Reserve and the International Banking community.
As I said earlier, facetiously, Germany did this but failed and bankrupted their country after World War I. But the Germans wanted to bankrupt their currency. They didn’t want to pay off their war debts and the smart money wanted to turn the middle class against the occupation government. So they simply printed up paper until it filled wheelbarrows. They did not use due diligence and have proper controls. They didn’t care. What they did was not an accident. It was a planned bankruptcy. You can be sure that the big boys in German currency had all their cash in something other than the Mark. Of course, there is the possibility that our National Debt is also planned. The design of the plan being to keep the general population thinking that they are broke, so that they won’t be suggesting any “free” social programs for the “welfare” state. I mean, you must have noticed that no matter how large the National Debt, we always have enough money for another war.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Jack Sprat
The Eastpointer
JACK SPRAT
by Richard E. Noble
I knew Jack for a number of years. I always felt that Jack could have been the inspiration for the original Sad Sack cartoon strip. He was a “sorry” type fellow. He seemed to have just enough ambition to keep breathing. That's providing there was no serious obstruction to that circumstance. He was kind of like Forest Gump, but without the good fortune. He did some commercial shrimping, some oystering. He liked to fish with nets, poles or whatever. He fished the gulf, the bay, the rivers, the creeks, and the ditches. He enjoyed fishing with a cane pole, and had a passion for Bream.
I lived next to him at this campground. He rented an old camper – the kind that slid onto the bed of a pickup truck. This one didn't have a pickup truck; it just sat on an array of concrete blocks.
This poem began at the Eastpoint, post office. He was picking up his mail ... general delivery. He couldn't afford a box. He told me that he wasn't feeling well. He had been to the V. A. hospital. He couldn't go there often because it was too far away. Jack was a veteran of the Vietnam War. From then on I saw him here and there fishing, but each time I saw him he got thinner, and he looked worse and worse. He was like a stray cat with a deathly virus - everybody looked at him, but nobody ever stopped to pet him.
Jack, I always felt, was the kind of guy who didn't really deserve to die. I mean, for some people, death is a conclusion. As they say today, their death was a sort of justification, a closure. For some their death seems to serve as some sort of example, or moral lesson. For others death seems to be just what they have been looking for. Then there are those of whom we say there was no person that we ever met who was more deserving. But Jack didn't deserve to die one way or another. He was just here. He wasn't in anybody's way, and if he was, I am sure that he would have moved. He didn't bother anybody. He drank a little and fished a lot. He had no real opinions on anything, and always seemed to have a reasonable amount of compassion for anybody and anything. His dying served no real purpose, but I suppose, some would say, neither did his living. In this respect, I guess, he was pretty much like the most of us.
JACK SPRAT
Jack Sprat could eat no lean.
He didn't have money for a packet of beans.
He worked enough to live in a truck,
And he drank a bit when he was down on his luck.
He was up or down, and roved about town.
He wore old clothes, but never a frown.
Jack Sprat, he ate no fat,
And his mother doesn't know or care where he's at.
Jack had no use for fancy things,
Diamonds, or jewels, or sapphire rings.
He sat on the bank and fished for Bream,
And the cancer made him slim and trim.
And when he died, no one cried.
Some shook their heads, and a few of them lied.
"He was a hell of a man, a really brave fellow."
But the truth was
He was kind of 'wussy' and rather mellow.
Jack rarely sat in a pew with a hymn.
He just sat on the bank and tried to catch Bream.
He never owned, himself, a good pair of shoes,
And he never got done payin' his dues.
He was always going to get him a car,
But, really, he had no need to travel that far.
He mostly stayed on the unpaved street,
With sand in his toes and dirt on his feet.
He never went out to try to win.
He mostly sat on the bank and tried to catch Bream.
And when the cancer caught him and made him so thin,
He just sat on the bank and caught some Bream.
And when he died ... no one cried.
Oh his mother frowned, and his father sighed.
But I swear, when I saw him in his box,
He had a little grin, and, I know darn straight,
He was sitting on some bank,
Trying to catch him some Bream.
JACK SPRAT
by Richard E. Noble
I knew Jack for a number of years. I always felt that Jack could have been the inspiration for the original Sad Sack cartoon strip. He was a “sorry” type fellow. He seemed to have just enough ambition to keep breathing. That's providing there was no serious obstruction to that circumstance. He was kind of like Forest Gump, but without the good fortune. He did some commercial shrimping, some oystering. He liked to fish with nets, poles or whatever. He fished the gulf, the bay, the rivers, the creeks, and the ditches. He enjoyed fishing with a cane pole, and had a passion for Bream.
I lived next to him at this campground. He rented an old camper – the kind that slid onto the bed of a pickup truck. This one didn't have a pickup truck; it just sat on an array of concrete blocks.
This poem began at the Eastpoint, post office. He was picking up his mail ... general delivery. He couldn't afford a box. He told me that he wasn't feeling well. He had been to the V. A. hospital. He couldn't go there often because it was too far away. Jack was a veteran of the Vietnam War. From then on I saw him here and there fishing, but each time I saw him he got thinner, and he looked worse and worse. He was like a stray cat with a deathly virus - everybody looked at him, but nobody ever stopped to pet him.
Jack, I always felt, was the kind of guy who didn't really deserve to die. I mean, for some people, death is a conclusion. As they say today, their death was a sort of justification, a closure. For some their death seems to serve as some sort of example, or moral lesson. For others death seems to be just what they have been looking for. Then there are those of whom we say there was no person that we ever met who was more deserving. But Jack didn't deserve to die one way or another. He was just here. He wasn't in anybody's way, and if he was, I am sure that he would have moved. He didn't bother anybody. He drank a little and fished a lot. He had no real opinions on anything, and always seemed to have a reasonable amount of compassion for anybody and anything. His dying served no real purpose, but I suppose, some would say, neither did his living. In this respect, I guess, he was pretty much like the most of us.
JACK SPRAT
Jack Sprat could eat no lean.
He didn't have money for a packet of beans.
He worked enough to live in a truck,
And he drank a bit when he was down on his luck.
He was up or down, and roved about town.
He wore old clothes, but never a frown.
Jack Sprat, he ate no fat,
And his mother doesn't know or care where he's at.
Jack had no use for fancy things,
Diamonds, or jewels, or sapphire rings.
He sat on the bank and fished for Bream,
And the cancer made him slim and trim.
And when he died, no one cried.
Some shook their heads, and a few of them lied.
"He was a hell of a man, a really brave fellow."
But the truth was
He was kind of 'wussy' and rather mellow.
Jack rarely sat in a pew with a hymn.
He just sat on the bank and tried to catch Bream.
He never owned, himself, a good pair of shoes,
And he never got done payin' his dues.
He was always going to get him a car,
But, really, he had no need to travel that far.
He mostly stayed on the unpaved street,
With sand in his toes and dirt on his feet.
He never went out to try to win.
He mostly sat on the bank and tried to catch Bream.
And when the cancer caught him and made him so thin,
He just sat on the bank and caught some Bream.
And when he died ... no one cried.
Oh his mother frowned, and his father sighed.
But I swear, when I saw him in his box,
He had a little grin, and, I know darn straight,
He was sitting on some bank,
Trying to catch him some Bream.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Adirondack Gold II
A Summer of Strangers
by Persis Granger
Book Review
By Richard E. Noble
Adirondack Gold II, A Summer of Strangers, doesn’t have a nasty character in it. It is “sweet and loveable.” No mean people, no dirty words … no demons, no devils, nobody flying around on broomsticks. It is wholesome and it’s real. Real live people in real life situations.
It’s FFA, FHA, and 4H – if you know what those initials symbolize, you will love this book even more.
It’s bringing in the crops, cutting and drying the hay, milking cows, gathering eggs, a boy raising and loving a colt.
It’s poor country living and all those troublesome economic decisions that go along with working the land and being raised on a small farm.
It is also history. It’s about life in a rural community called Thurman, in the Adirondack Mountains a hundred and fifty years ago. It takes the reader back to a time when hard work was understood and “struggle” was a part of every day. The author obviously put a lot of work into researching this period and it shows.
Hollis and his mom came there with a mountain of troubles in Adirondack Gold I, but you don’t have to know Adirondack Gold I to get Adirondack Gold II. It is better if you have read both books but not necessary.
Hollis is a young boy. He has ability and aspires to become an artist. He loves drawing. He is surrounded by a Walton-esque barrage of wonderful homegrown country folk – adopted family and neighbors. He meets a mysterious stranger in the woods and struggles with his new city cousin rival.
The problems and obstacles in this book are not supernatural monsters from another planet or blood sucking vampires but Mother Nature and life – old age, growing up, childhood jealousies, giving birth, dying and dreams where the reach seems to exceed the grasp – and the pocket book.
Everything gets difficult and involves a lot of growing up sacrifices on the part of young Hollis but a surprise ending ties all the pieces together and leaves the reader sitting in his reading chair with a big, warm smile.
Persis ("Perky") Granger: Perky is an avid reader and a writer of fiction and nonfiction, including Adirondack Gold, A Summer of Strangers and Shared Stories from Daughters of Alzheimer's: Writing a path to peace. She studied at the College of Wooster (OH) and the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), earning a BA at the latter. She later completed her Master of Science in Teaching at SUNY Plattsburgh.
She presents programs to adults and youth, and hosts writers’ retreats in New York and Florida. Learn more at www.PersisGranger.com
A Summer of Strangers
by Persis Granger
Book Review
By Richard E. Noble
Adirondack Gold II, A Summer of Strangers, doesn’t have a nasty character in it. It is “sweet and loveable.” No mean people, no dirty words … no demons, no devils, nobody flying around on broomsticks. It is wholesome and it’s real. Real live people in real life situations.
It’s FFA, FHA, and 4H – if you know what those initials symbolize, you will love this book even more.
It’s bringing in the crops, cutting and drying the hay, milking cows, gathering eggs, a boy raising and loving a colt.
It’s poor country living and all those troublesome economic decisions that go along with working the land and being raised on a small farm.
It is also history. It’s about life in a rural community called Thurman, in the Adirondack Mountains a hundred and fifty years ago. It takes the reader back to a time when hard work was understood and “struggle” was a part of every day. The author obviously put a lot of work into researching this period and it shows.
Hollis and his mom came there with a mountain of troubles in Adirondack Gold I, but you don’t have to know Adirondack Gold I to get Adirondack Gold II. It is better if you have read both books but not necessary.
Hollis is a young boy. He has ability and aspires to become an artist. He loves drawing. He is surrounded by a Walton-esque barrage of wonderful homegrown country folk – adopted family and neighbors. He meets a mysterious stranger in the woods and struggles with his new city cousin rival.
The problems and obstacles in this book are not supernatural monsters from another planet or blood sucking vampires but Mother Nature and life – old age, growing up, childhood jealousies, giving birth, dying and dreams where the reach seems to exceed the grasp – and the pocket book.
Everything gets difficult and involves a lot of growing up sacrifices on the part of young Hollis but a surprise ending ties all the pieces together and leaves the reader sitting in his reading chair with a big, warm smile.
Persis ("Perky") Granger: Perky is an avid reader and a writer of fiction and nonfiction, including Adirondack Gold, A Summer of Strangers and Shared Stories from Daughters of Alzheimer's: Writing a path to peace. She studied at the College of Wooster (OH) and the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), earning a BA at the latter. She later completed her Master of Science in Teaching at SUNY Plattsburgh.
She presents programs to adults and youth, and hosts writers’ retreats in New York and Florida. Learn more at www.PersisGranger.com
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Mr. Noble Goes to Washington
Mr. Noble Goes to Washington
Commentary
By Richard E. Noble
I was in Washington D.C. once in my life. I was a teenager, so I am rather amazed that I can remember anything at all about the whole experience. But strangely enough, I have vivid memories that have lodged in my mind and for some reason they have never gone away.
It is my opinion as a wannabe writer for most of my adult life that when and if memories won’t disappear that is because somebody “up there” wants me to write about them. [I think sometimes I have been watching too much Oprah.]
My older sister was a rather daring young woman. She ran off, in her early twenties, with her coat and hat, a couple of five dollar suitcases, a 55 Mercury with a smashed in driver’s side door - compliments of her little brother - and got herself a job in Washington D.C.
She had been there for a few years and the only way we knew that she was alive was via her weekly letters home and the small regular check she sent to help out at home. She had been doing well; in fact, she was now an executive secretary for some big-shot in a newspaper. She had moved out of the YWCA and into some fancy apartment up on the tenth floor of this big apartment complex in one of the better parts of town. She was very proud of herself and she begged me and my older brother to come for a visit.
Neither my brother nor I had a pot to pee in and he had this old clunker of a car - but we decided to go anyway. It might be the only chance that either of us would ever get to go to the nation’s capital.
It was a beautiful apartment building with elevators, carpeting in the halls - the whole works. Everything on the inside of the apartment was the latest stuff - new refrigerator and stove, fancy sink, spiffy bathroom, a dinning room table; my sister had bought all the furniture and the whole place looked like something out of a slick decorator magazine. It was a far cry from what we had back home or anything that we had grown up with.
But my first big memory came that evening at bedtime. My sister rolled this fold-up bed out of one of the closets and proceeded to set up this make-shift contraption in the efficiency kitchen. My brother and I both looked at one another. My sister had spent her whole life on a hide-a-bed in our tiny parlor back home in Lawrence. My brother and I had a room with one big bed off the kitchen but my sister never had her own room. Now here we were visiting her in her fancy upscale apartment in Washington D.C. and she was going to sleep on a pull-out bed in the efficiency kitchen. Immediately my brother stepped forward.
“This will be perfect,” he said. “But where is Richard going to sleep?”
“No, no, no!” my sister said laughing. “You guys are the guests - you get the bedroom.”
We went round and round but my sister would have none of it. We would sleep in her new deluxe king-sized bed with the designer bedspread and all the big city fancy things.
So that is the first memory that I can’t get out of my mind - my sister in her million dollar apartment sleeping in the “pantry” or whatever.
My next memory has several facets.
We went to see Charlie Byrd, the famous jazz guitarist and June Christy, a great ex-vocalist for the Stan Kenton orchestra. The show was taking place at some famous jazz club in the D.C. area - naturally the jazz club was smack-dab in the middle of a section of town that looked like downtown Baghdad circa 2007. We had met one of my big brother’s college buddies and he drove. He had rented a new model car for the weekend.
The show was unbelievable. To this day I can still picture both Charlie Byrd and June Christy up on that tiny stage in this rather cozy, low rent nightclub. When I looked up at June Christy standing there, so beautiful and so talented, on that inadequate stage in this back-street dive - I thought of my sister sleeping in the pantry.
Why was this phenomenal talent, here, in the country that gave birth to this super-creative music, standing up there in the latter years of her career, in a beautiful presidential gown singing her heart out in a back room speakeasy down in the combat zone of Washington D.C.?
When we left the show and returned to our rented car, the side window had been shattered and the glove compartment ransacked.
So that’s memory number two.
Memory number three was a curious happenstance. We were downtown seeing the sites. Being about eighteen, I was in love at every street corner. I never saw so many beautiful young women in all my life. There was a crowd of what appeared to me to be movie starlets waiting at every crosswalk. And they were speaking and talking to me as if I was actually alive and on their level of existence. I felt like The Great Impostor - a book I had just finished that was written by this guy from my hometown.
One of these beautiful starlets dressed in a women’s business suit looked me right in the eye and asked me how to get someplace.
All that I could see was this lovely, smooth complicated face draped in auburn curls and these two, big, brown eyes fluttering at me. My brother saw my dilemma and began speaking on my behalf. I wanted to start signing something at her with my hands so that she wouldn’t think that I was some kind of idiot.
But that is not the third memory.
We were standing in front the White House or the Capital Building or whatever and I wanted to take a picture of one or the other of those buildings. I had a little Kodak view finder type camera and I couldn’t get the entire building in my site thing-a-ma-gig. So I began hiking up Pennsylvania Ave. - every now and then stopping to take a peek into my view finder.
Finally I had the whole building in my sights. Just as I was about to snap my picture I heard a clatter off to the right of me. I turned with a start and there in an alley besides an abandoned boarded-up building was a small colony of tramps. One guy, in his Salvation Army, give-away overcoat was holding up the lid to a garbage can and foraging. Another guy was sitting on the ground with his back up against the building finishing off the last swallow of a bottle of whiskey, or wine or rubbing alcohol or something. There were several others guys just laying around on the ground sleeping it off. There were two other equally destitute guys sitting on the cement steps in front of the boarded up building.
I had been to Skid Row once in New York City. This scene was reminiscent of any number of the visions I had been privileged to on that occasion. But what I could never forget was this skid-row vision on Pennsylvania Ave. which was a modest number of paces from the center of the “Greatest Nation in the Modern World.”
That picture of the Capital of the United States of America has never left my mind.
In later readings I stumbled onto the historical fact that the first wife of President Woodrow Wilson, Ellen Louise Axson, had taken it upon herself - as the “project” for the first lady - to clean up the embarrassing streets and neighborhood surrounding the White House. That was in 1914. Then I think Eleanor Roosevelt started a similar project in the 1940’s. And then in the late sixties or early seventies there was a story on the nightly news about a group of Vietnam Veterans who had set up a homeless shelter in an abandoned building right around the corner on down the road from the White House. It seems that the government was trying to have them evicted but they refused to leave without the government promising them a space to set up their operations elsewhere.
I haven’t been back to Washington D.C. but I have always wondered if they ever got that disgraceful business cleaned up.
I’ve got the Lawrence, Massachusetts curse – I see slums everywhere I go. I see the garbage in the alleys, the paint chipping and peeling on the dwellings and businesses, the desperate people. I see poverty. I see poverty everywhere. I see broken windows and abandoned buildings. I see unkempt parks and deserted playgrounds. But most of all I see people struggling, scrounging, selling themselves for nickels and dimes. It is like something out of Kafka. One day I woke up in Lawrence and realized that I was living in a slum. Now I see slums everywhere. And the slums are filled with slum dwellers … millions of them.
Commentary
By Richard E. Noble
I was in Washington D.C. once in my life. I was a teenager, so I am rather amazed that I can remember anything at all about the whole experience. But strangely enough, I have vivid memories that have lodged in my mind and for some reason they have never gone away.
It is my opinion as a wannabe writer for most of my adult life that when and if memories won’t disappear that is because somebody “up there” wants me to write about them. [I think sometimes I have been watching too much Oprah.]
My older sister was a rather daring young woman. She ran off, in her early twenties, with her coat and hat, a couple of five dollar suitcases, a 55 Mercury with a smashed in driver’s side door - compliments of her little brother - and got herself a job in Washington D.C.
She had been there for a few years and the only way we knew that she was alive was via her weekly letters home and the small regular check she sent to help out at home. She had been doing well; in fact, she was now an executive secretary for some big-shot in a newspaper. She had moved out of the YWCA and into some fancy apartment up on the tenth floor of this big apartment complex in one of the better parts of town. She was very proud of herself and she begged me and my older brother to come for a visit.
Neither my brother nor I had a pot to pee in and he had this old clunker of a car - but we decided to go anyway. It might be the only chance that either of us would ever get to go to the nation’s capital.
It was a beautiful apartment building with elevators, carpeting in the halls - the whole works. Everything on the inside of the apartment was the latest stuff - new refrigerator and stove, fancy sink, spiffy bathroom, a dinning room table; my sister had bought all the furniture and the whole place looked like something out of a slick decorator magazine. It was a far cry from what we had back home or anything that we had grown up with.
But my first big memory came that evening at bedtime. My sister rolled this fold-up bed out of one of the closets and proceeded to set up this make-shift contraption in the efficiency kitchen. My brother and I both looked at one another. My sister had spent her whole life on a hide-a-bed in our tiny parlor back home in Lawrence. My brother and I had a room with one big bed off the kitchen but my sister never had her own room. Now here we were visiting her in her fancy upscale apartment in Washington D.C. and she was going to sleep on a pull-out bed in the efficiency kitchen. Immediately my brother stepped forward.
“This will be perfect,” he said. “But where is Richard going to sleep?”
“No, no, no!” my sister said laughing. “You guys are the guests - you get the bedroom.”
We went round and round but my sister would have none of it. We would sleep in her new deluxe king-sized bed with the designer bedspread and all the big city fancy things.
So that is the first memory that I can’t get out of my mind - my sister in her million dollar apartment sleeping in the “pantry” or whatever.
My next memory has several facets.
We went to see Charlie Byrd, the famous jazz guitarist and June Christy, a great ex-vocalist for the Stan Kenton orchestra. The show was taking place at some famous jazz club in the D.C. area - naturally the jazz club was smack-dab in the middle of a section of town that looked like downtown Baghdad circa 2007. We had met one of my big brother’s college buddies and he drove. He had rented a new model car for the weekend.
The show was unbelievable. To this day I can still picture both Charlie Byrd and June Christy up on that tiny stage in this rather cozy, low rent nightclub. When I looked up at June Christy standing there, so beautiful and so talented, on that inadequate stage in this back-street dive - I thought of my sister sleeping in the pantry.
Why was this phenomenal talent, here, in the country that gave birth to this super-creative music, standing up there in the latter years of her career, in a beautiful presidential gown singing her heart out in a back room speakeasy down in the combat zone of Washington D.C.?
When we left the show and returned to our rented car, the side window had been shattered and the glove compartment ransacked.
So that’s memory number two.
Memory number three was a curious happenstance. We were downtown seeing the sites. Being about eighteen, I was in love at every street corner. I never saw so many beautiful young women in all my life. There was a crowd of what appeared to me to be movie starlets waiting at every crosswalk. And they were speaking and talking to me as if I was actually alive and on their level of existence. I felt like The Great Impostor - a book I had just finished that was written by this guy from my hometown.
One of these beautiful starlets dressed in a women’s business suit looked me right in the eye and asked me how to get someplace.
All that I could see was this lovely, smooth complicated face draped in auburn curls and these two, big, brown eyes fluttering at me. My brother saw my dilemma and began speaking on my behalf. I wanted to start signing something at her with my hands so that she wouldn’t think that I was some kind of idiot.
But that is not the third memory.
We were standing in front the White House or the Capital Building or whatever and I wanted to take a picture of one or the other of those buildings. I had a little Kodak view finder type camera and I couldn’t get the entire building in my site thing-a-ma-gig. So I began hiking up Pennsylvania Ave. - every now and then stopping to take a peek into my view finder.
Finally I had the whole building in my sights. Just as I was about to snap my picture I heard a clatter off to the right of me. I turned with a start and there in an alley besides an abandoned boarded-up building was a small colony of tramps. One guy, in his Salvation Army, give-away overcoat was holding up the lid to a garbage can and foraging. Another guy was sitting on the ground with his back up against the building finishing off the last swallow of a bottle of whiskey, or wine or rubbing alcohol or something. There were several others guys just laying around on the ground sleeping it off. There were two other equally destitute guys sitting on the cement steps in front of the boarded up building.
I had been to Skid Row once in New York City. This scene was reminiscent of any number of the visions I had been privileged to on that occasion. But what I could never forget was this skid-row vision on Pennsylvania Ave. which was a modest number of paces from the center of the “Greatest Nation in the Modern World.”
That picture of the Capital of the United States of America has never left my mind.
In later readings I stumbled onto the historical fact that the first wife of President Woodrow Wilson, Ellen Louise Axson, had taken it upon herself - as the “project” for the first lady - to clean up the embarrassing streets and neighborhood surrounding the White House. That was in 1914. Then I think Eleanor Roosevelt started a similar project in the 1940’s. And then in the late sixties or early seventies there was a story on the nightly news about a group of Vietnam Veterans who had set up a homeless shelter in an abandoned building right around the corner on down the road from the White House. It seems that the government was trying to have them evicted but they refused to leave without the government promising them a space to set up their operations elsewhere.
I haven’t been back to Washington D.C. but I have always wondered if they ever got that disgraceful business cleaned up.
I’ve got the Lawrence, Massachusetts curse – I see slums everywhere I go. I see the garbage in the alleys, the paint chipping and peeling on the dwellings and businesses, the desperate people. I see poverty. I see poverty everywhere. I see broken windows and abandoned buildings. I see unkempt parks and deserted playgrounds. But most of all I see people struggling, scrounging, selling themselves for nickels and dimes. It is like something out of Kafka. One day I woke up in Lawrence and realized that I was living in a slum. Now I see slums everywhere. And the slums are filled with slum dwellers … millions of them.
Monday, January 11, 2010
You Might As Well Live
The Hobo Philosopher
"You Might as Well Live" - Dorothy Parker
A Biography by John Keats
Book Review
By Richard Edward Noble
Prior to reading this biography most of what I knew of Dorothy Parker came from reading quotations attributed to her in one book or another. While reading this biography, I have also been reading selections from “The Portable Dorothy Parker” trying to get a first hand taste of what she sounded like.
As always seems to be the case with people noted for humor, Dorothy’s life is not very funny.
She was often financially prosperous and somehow always seemed to have money – or patrons. When she was wealthy, she spent her money, more often than not, foolishly. It seems that the consensus is that she was an attractive and fascinating woman. There is a picture on the cover of the book that testifies to that fact.
But as I lay the book down completed, I can’t help thinking of Marilyn Monroe. Dorothy was certainly Marilyin-ish in her confusion and insecurity with men. She was obviously lucky enough to find a loving man in the person of Alan Campbell. But it seems that she was not very deserving of his loyalty. She treated him horribly but yet he stuck with her. They separated off and on but eventually spent their last years together.
She was an anti-Nazi. She lived through the McCarthy Era and was labeled a PAF – a premature anti-Fascist. She, like many other intellectuals of her day, hated Adolf Hitler before the U.S. government declared such an attitude to be appropriate. She had difficulty getting work for a period but she was already established and had income from her royalties. At one point she was refused a passport due to her Leftist attitudes, writings and associations.
It is very clear that she was an alcoholic.
In reading a few of her short stories and some of her poems there is no doubt that she was intelligent. Her writing is thoughtful and I think that her stories and poetry will turn out to be more enjoyable than reading about her life. Her reviews of plays and other writers are much like all the others in that profession – they are accurate some of the time and totally inaccurate at other times. They are simply opinions.
I will continue reading her anthology – giving special attention to the poetry and the short stories.
As a male I feel that I have met Dorothy Parker type women. She loves you – she loves you not, is the problem. Women like her are so insecure in themselves that it permeates all their relationship. When they have you, they don’t want you; and when you leave, they long and whimper for the day that you will return. They are like the old Punch and Judy game.
For myself, I am very happy that at some point, I outgrew this type woman. They can’t be happy themselves. There is no right way to treat them. And to be a part of their life is to be continually involved in an emotional calamity. They can never make themselves happy and they can’t make their men happy either. Dorothy was extremely fortunate to have found Alan Campbell from what I have read in this biography. Nevertheless for some strange reason Dorothy Parker still manages to draw my pity and my curiosity.
"You Might as Well Live" - Dorothy Parker
A Biography by John Keats
Book Review
By Richard Edward Noble
Prior to reading this biography most of what I knew of Dorothy Parker came from reading quotations attributed to her in one book or another. While reading this biography, I have also been reading selections from “The Portable Dorothy Parker” trying to get a first hand taste of what she sounded like.
As always seems to be the case with people noted for humor, Dorothy’s life is not very funny.
She was often financially prosperous and somehow always seemed to have money – or patrons. When she was wealthy, she spent her money, more often than not, foolishly. It seems that the consensus is that she was an attractive and fascinating woman. There is a picture on the cover of the book that testifies to that fact.
But as I lay the book down completed, I can’t help thinking of Marilyn Monroe. Dorothy was certainly Marilyin-ish in her confusion and insecurity with men. She was obviously lucky enough to find a loving man in the person of Alan Campbell. But it seems that she was not very deserving of his loyalty. She treated him horribly but yet he stuck with her. They separated off and on but eventually spent their last years together.
She was an anti-Nazi. She lived through the McCarthy Era and was labeled a PAF – a premature anti-Fascist. She, like many other intellectuals of her day, hated Adolf Hitler before the U.S. government declared such an attitude to be appropriate. She had difficulty getting work for a period but she was already established and had income from her royalties. At one point she was refused a passport due to her Leftist attitudes, writings and associations.
It is very clear that she was an alcoholic.
In reading a few of her short stories and some of her poems there is no doubt that she was intelligent. Her writing is thoughtful and I think that her stories and poetry will turn out to be more enjoyable than reading about her life. Her reviews of plays and other writers are much like all the others in that profession – they are accurate some of the time and totally inaccurate at other times. They are simply opinions.
I will continue reading her anthology – giving special attention to the poetry and the short stories.
As a male I feel that I have met Dorothy Parker type women. She loves you – she loves you not, is the problem. Women like her are so insecure in themselves that it permeates all their relationship. When they have you, they don’t want you; and when you leave, they long and whimper for the day that you will return. They are like the old Punch and Judy game.
For myself, I am very happy that at some point, I outgrew this type woman. They can’t be happy themselves. There is no right way to treat them. And to be a part of their life is to be continually involved in an emotional calamity. They can never make themselves happy and they can’t make their men happy either. Dorothy was extremely fortunate to have found Alan Campbell from what I have read in this biography. Nevertheless for some strange reason Dorothy Parker still manages to draw my pity and my curiosity.
Monday, January 04, 2010
The Bay is Dead
The Eastpointer
The Bay is Dead
By Richard E. Noble
When we first arrived in Eastpoint many were saying that the bay was dead. Even when the bay was extremely productive and there were 1000 or 1500 oyster permits sold, some people told us that things weren't like they used to be. There was a time, we were told, when the bay was so full of oyster boats that you could walk from boat to boat and never get your feet wet. Old fishermen told us that when they were kids all they needed to go fishing was a pointed stick. They would whittle the end of a stick with their pocket knife and spear spotted trout from the bank. I was told that there was a time when every oyster in the bay was the size of a grown man's hand and that there were so many shrimp in the bay that they couldn't sell all they could catch.
All the bass in the Island ponds were "clunkers" - four and five pounds each.
But whether great, good, fair or poor the bay has always been there for the local seafood workers while all other types of employment came and went.
I truly thought with this recent real-estate boom and building spree that the seafood industry was a goner – maybe gone for good. But the other week driving through Eastpoint I saw pickup trucks waiting in line with their beds full of bags of oysters. That brought back some memories. Once again, it seems when all else fails locals are pushing their old oyster boats back into the water and chugging out to the bay to scratch up a few dollars.
But I must admit if the bay isn't dead today, it is the deadest that I have ever seen it. I haven't seen any bay shrimpers out on the bay at night for years. One shrimper told me that there haven't been any shrimp in the bay for five years now. There were never a multitude of crabbers here, but there were usually enough to speckle and dot the bay with bobbers periodically. I see very few crab traps bobbing around out there in recent years. And of course even with the line of pickups at one oyster house in Eastpoint the oyster boats are sparse.
Every building along the bay in Eastpoint was once a functioning oyster house. Today there might be three or four – and some of them are selling nick-nacks or peddling trucked in seafood to the tourists. As they used to say in Eastpoint – mighty sorry, mighty sorry.
The water war with Atlanta certainly isn't helping. I hear the Governor of Atlanta was out on the steps of city hall with a group of his supporters praying for rain. Wow, now we're back to the days of Elmer Gantry.
I've read that the people in Atlanta are saving their bath water to flush their toilets. On the other hand they opened their public swimming pools when Lake Lanier was at its lowest level in history and though they are not allowed to wash their cars in their driveways, they can still go to a pay carwash – supposedly the pools and carwashes recycle their water. The Coca-Cola bottling plant that is making big bucks bottling up Dansani bottled tap water has agreed to cut back 5 or 10%.
The author that I was reading does not attribute Atlanta's problems to global warming or even to the drought. He claims that Atlanta's biggest problem is that they keep electing conservative Republicans – eight out of the last ten governors of Atlanta have been Republicans. And even the two that weren't were Dixie-crats. Those are Southern Democrats who this author claims are really red-neck Republicans and not Democrats at all.
It does seem that all groups except the governor of Atlanta and his chums are in agreement that the water problems in Atlanta are for the most part the result of poor planning or no planning at all.
But nevertheless I do see a ray of hope in all the dreariness. We still have oyster boats and shrimp boats and a fisherman here and there in Eastpoint and Franklin County. You can still catch fish in the bay – whether off the old bridge, the bank (or the hill) or the side of your boat.
I know that there are places in the US where there is water with no fish at all.
There are parts of the ocean that are completely devoid of all life – plant, fish or other, I've read. But there is still life in Apalachicola Bay.
I doubt that Apalachicola bay will ever return to a time when you could walk from oyster boat to oyster boat without getting your feet wet or the days when you could catch spotted trout with a pointed stick or when the oysters were all as big as a man's hand or the ponds on the islands were filled with four and five pound bass – but we're still alive, maybe just barely alive but still alive.
Richard E. Noble has published 16 books. They are all for sale on Amazon.com. Richard Noble is a freelance writer and has been a resident of Eastpoint for 30 years. If you would like to stock his books in your store or business he can be contacted at richardedwardnoble@gtcom.net.
The Bay is Dead
By Richard E. Noble
When we first arrived in Eastpoint many were saying that the bay was dead. Even when the bay was extremely productive and there were 1000 or 1500 oyster permits sold, some people told us that things weren't like they used to be. There was a time, we were told, when the bay was so full of oyster boats that you could walk from boat to boat and never get your feet wet. Old fishermen told us that when they were kids all they needed to go fishing was a pointed stick. They would whittle the end of a stick with their pocket knife and spear spotted trout from the bank. I was told that there was a time when every oyster in the bay was the size of a grown man's hand and that there were so many shrimp in the bay that they couldn't sell all they could catch.
All the bass in the Island ponds were "clunkers" - four and five pounds each.
But whether great, good, fair or poor the bay has always been there for the local seafood workers while all other types of employment came and went.
I truly thought with this recent real-estate boom and building spree that the seafood industry was a goner – maybe gone for good. But the other week driving through Eastpoint I saw pickup trucks waiting in line with their beds full of bags of oysters. That brought back some memories. Once again, it seems when all else fails locals are pushing their old oyster boats back into the water and chugging out to the bay to scratch up a few dollars.
But I must admit if the bay isn't dead today, it is the deadest that I have ever seen it. I haven't seen any bay shrimpers out on the bay at night for years. One shrimper told me that there haven't been any shrimp in the bay for five years now. There were never a multitude of crabbers here, but there were usually enough to speckle and dot the bay with bobbers periodically. I see very few crab traps bobbing around out there in recent years. And of course even with the line of pickups at one oyster house in Eastpoint the oyster boats are sparse.
Every building along the bay in Eastpoint was once a functioning oyster house. Today there might be three or four – and some of them are selling nick-nacks or peddling trucked in seafood to the tourists. As they used to say in Eastpoint – mighty sorry, mighty sorry.
The water war with Atlanta certainly isn't helping. I hear the Governor of Atlanta was out on the steps of city hall with a group of his supporters praying for rain. Wow, now we're back to the days of Elmer Gantry.
I've read that the people in Atlanta are saving their bath water to flush their toilets. On the other hand they opened their public swimming pools when Lake Lanier was at its lowest level in history and though they are not allowed to wash their cars in their driveways, they can still go to a pay carwash – supposedly the pools and carwashes recycle their water. The Coca-Cola bottling plant that is making big bucks bottling up Dansani bottled tap water has agreed to cut back 5 or 10%.
The author that I was reading does not attribute Atlanta's problems to global warming or even to the drought. He claims that Atlanta's biggest problem is that they keep electing conservative Republicans – eight out of the last ten governors of Atlanta have been Republicans. And even the two that weren't were Dixie-crats. Those are Southern Democrats who this author claims are really red-neck Republicans and not Democrats at all.
It does seem that all groups except the governor of Atlanta and his chums are in agreement that the water problems in Atlanta are for the most part the result of poor planning or no planning at all.
But nevertheless I do see a ray of hope in all the dreariness. We still have oyster boats and shrimp boats and a fisherman here and there in Eastpoint and Franklin County. You can still catch fish in the bay – whether off the old bridge, the bank (or the hill) or the side of your boat.
I know that there are places in the US where there is water with no fish at all.
There are parts of the ocean that are completely devoid of all life – plant, fish or other, I've read. But there is still life in Apalachicola Bay.
I doubt that Apalachicola bay will ever return to a time when you could walk from oyster boat to oyster boat without getting your feet wet or the days when you could catch spotted trout with a pointed stick or when the oysters were all as big as a man's hand or the ponds on the islands were filled with four and five pound bass – but we're still alive, maybe just barely alive but still alive.
Richard E. Noble has published 16 books. They are all for sale on Amazon.com. Richard Noble is a freelance writer and has been a resident of Eastpoint for 30 years. If you would like to stock his books in your store or business he can be contacted at richardedwardnoble@gtcom.net.
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