I have an interest in economics – so I read various economists’ articles and commentaries. One such economist is Dr. Paul Craig Roberts. I do not necessarily agree with his dominant points of view, but I am still interested, from a technical point of view in his analysis of economic issues of the day. Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Ronald Reagan administration and was and is a supply-side economist.
Roberts also makes commentaries on a number of prevailing social issues of the day, which brought him to the issue of the death of George Floyd. While I summarise and make selective reference to his commentary, I believe it only fair that he can be read in his own words ( see below – first link).
In his article Roberts provides a link to the official Medical Examiner’s Report which, interestingly, does not cite asphyxia as the cause of George Floyd’s death. Asphyxia, of course, is defined as deprivation of oxygen to the body which leads to either unconsciousness or death. Also, it refers to suffocation – so the person might very well say, when still conscious, “ I can’t breathe”. So, let us reason on:-
“ The title says that the ability of the police to deal with Floyd was complicated by Floyd’s undergoing cardiopulmonary arrest …”.
“ Note the extensive heart disease that Floyd had…” ( he goes on to list same).
“ No life-threatening injuries identified” ( very interesting observation this one – to which I shall return).
“ A press release was issued from Hennepin County that lists ‘Manner of death: Homicide.’ This is a puzzle. Homicide is not supported by the medical examiner’s report.”
Let me stop there ( you can read Dr. Roberts full article below at the first link). What I shall now do is make light then get serious. I am not a stranger to arguing cases of murder.
Let us say that a wife is a heavy smoker and a very heavy drinker ( i.e. she ingests two licit substances in excess on a regular basis). She and her husband have an altercation. The dispute escalates into physical violence. The husband grabs the wife by the neck and squeezes tightly. As he squeezes, all is caught on video. The wife is heard repeatedly saying, “I can’t breathe.” The wife is seen to collapse about 9 minutes after the husband first held her neck. She is shortly thereafter pronounced dead.
I am retained to defend the husband on a murder charge. The case is presented and it is time for the defence to address the jury and I rise and say:-
“ Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, the prosecution has argued that my client committed murder. I am stating categorically to you that he did not. I take you directly to the Medical Examiner’s Report which states, “ … that the ability of the ( Defendant) to deal with ( his wife) was complicated…”; “ Note the extensive heart disease that ( the wife) had”; “No life-threatening injuries identified”. In the annals of murder trials – this shall be the shortest address on record, for by reference to the medical report – simply stated the only correct verdict I suggest to you as I appeal to your intelligence and sense of justice is a verdict that – my client did not commit murder. I rest my client’s case in your capable and just hands.”
Now – I accept that Dr. Paul Craig Roberts did not utter the words above – but he might as well just have done so. So, why does he think in the way he does? I shall go wide to come narrow to the point that he is a well educated White Southerner from Georgia. I do not for a moment suggest that all White, well educated persons from Georgia are inclined to think and conclude as Dr. Roberts did. But, I shall share a couple of true experiences and you can then draw your own conclusions.
The man from whom I learned the effective application of law in complex international legal cases: As still a young lawyer in my twenties I had the opportunity to work in International law Chambers in London. The man under whom I worked was exceptionally helpful to me. I learned a lot of my skill set in that arena from him and remain grateful to this day. He later became a commercial Judge in England and is now retired. My loyalty is such that I do not call his name. We became friends and he visited me in Jamaica with his family on vacation. Once he invited me to stay with him on a visit to London and the story I share here relates to that stay.
There was a case of the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wanting to prevent publication of a book entitled ‘Spy Catcher’, written by a retried MI6 agent named Peter Wright. Wright had included some information in the book which Thatcher found embarrassing and she wanted to silence and stop publication in Australia and elsewhere. My friend informed me of a dramatised version of the trial in Australia, faithful to the court proceedings records, which was being broadcast at the time I was staying with him. So, as lawyers, we sat together in his living room and watched the TV and a dramatic portion of which was the cross-examination conducted by Wright’s Counsel, Malcolm Turnbull, who grilled the official representative of Her Majesty’s Government. Turnbull’s thrust was that nothing was new in the book and that all the details which were opposed by Thatcher had previously been cleared by HMG for thatand other books by other authors, had been published and had not been deemed to be in contravention of the UK’s Official Secrets Act. When Turnbull was finished the official, quite frankly, seemed quite stupid in respect of the questions being raised ( see the Guardian on point below). Now, to my point:-
My friend: “Didn’t Sir ( so and so) stand up brilliantly under cross-examination?”
I was taken aback by the comment for the opposite was quite the truth. So, why did he say that? I never replied to him on the point, but did fully understand – White, English, Conservative English pride – my side is never stupid and cannot be seen to be wrong. See: Guardian commentary below.
The next instance I reference was a hearing on the death of the African activist in South Africa under Apartheid, Steve Biko. The lawyers for the deceased Biko brilliantly brought out, by way of cross-examination of the Apartheid authorities and jailers that Biko had been tortured and killed. The official Apartheid medical records directed attention to a hunger strike and ‘suicide.’
By reference to the two instances cited above, in the US in the year 2020, I must therefore ask three questions:-
Is it the medical report upon which we must rely but not ask – if there is a knee of a heavy set man placed on a human being’s windpipe for 9 minutes – is the proximate cause of death asphyxia – or – is it as Dr. Roberts and the Medical Examiner would have us believe?
Is it that George Floyd had decided to commit ‘suicide’ and was fortunate and got a little extra assistance from a police officer the day he died?
Or, is it that in the US in 2020 there is a repressive state which, as in Biko’s case, displays a failure of the government-employed doctors to analyse in a manner which is rational and medically credible and consistent with the known evidence?
__________________________________________
P.S. I well and truly give Dr. Roberts a ‘gold medal’ for this comment in his article:-
“ As far as I can ascertain, these are the prescribed procedures. The reason for Floyd being kept on his stomach is that “fentanyl’s effects include nausea.”
COURTENAY BARNETT is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, and has argued public interest and human rights cases. He has published several articles in the Effective Learning Report. He lives and works in the Caribbean
“If we have World War III, then World War IV will be fought with bows and arrows.”
( Attributed to a General – US Army Chief of Staff Gen. Omar Bradley – also to – Albert Einstein; Bertrand Russel)
I, like many other sentient homo sapiens, am not disconnected from an awareness of the destructive capacities which humankind now possess nor do I rationally think that such forces could be unleashed at full strength and humankind hope to survive.
Let me start with the relevant and applicable science. What is ‘science’? The best answer I have seen to date comes from Eric Blair ( nom de plume – George Orwell):-
“ Science is generally taken as meaning either (a) the exact sciences, such as chemistry, physics, etc., or (b) a method of thought which obtains verifiable results by reasoning logically from observed fact.”
Stated in another way, science is an unrelenting pursuit of accuracy which seeks clarification of material existence to such verifiable level as is humanly possible.
So, it is this mindset which I bring to bear on the topic at hand.
This essay, written in 2020, fully seventy-five (75) years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, reflects on where we came from, and in a brief and selective manner, where, with applied scientific knowledge, we are heading to at present.
To facilitate such brevity, I confine references and examples mainly to America and Russia. Why so?
As best I have ascertained there are nine countries in the world possessing a total of 13, 355 nuclear weapons ( see link at 1 below). The US and Russia are hovering around the 6,000 mark, so these two countries as the two largest holders of these weapons of mass destruction are of particular interest.
Let us take a few steps back in time and then advance in a rational manner, as best we can.
It is 1945 and the Japanese are defeated and have been making overtures to the then US President Harry Truman’s administration. Their attempts at surrender are totally ignored by Truman and the decision is made to conduct an experiment on Japan. The two atomic bombs to be dropped are code-named “Fat man” and “Little Boy.”
These two atomic bombs were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively. The human lives claimed were somewhere between 129,000 and 226,000 and these were mostly civilians. To date that is the only use of such weapons in human history with that amount of destructive force.
Today, by reference to the figures previously citied, humankind has nuclear weapons with far more destructive force. So, how do we handle this situation some 75 years later? Permit me to reference George Kennan and then President Dwight D. Eisenhower in turn.
George Kennan was a diplomat and historian, post WWII, who served a brief period as the US Ambassador in Moscow ( then Soviet Union). He is credited as the chief US architect of the ‘Cold War’. I mention him to use a couple of famous quotes of his to support my thesis:-
“ Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
And he had previously written:-
“ The Soviet government is already aware of the awful risk inherent in any use of these weapons, and there is no current or prospective Soviet ‘superiority’ that would tempt anyone in Moscow toward nuclear adventurism (All four of us are wholly unpersuaded by the argument advanced in recent years that the Soviet Union could ever rationally expect to gain from such a wild effort as a massive first strike on land-based American strategic missiles)”. (co-author, Foreign Affairs, 03.01.82)
I then go back to President Eisenhower’s farewell address ( see: 2 below).
From this leader and a US expert in the field of international relations one can now make some quick links from the 1945 bombings to the present day and raise some rational questions.
First, the nuclear situation in Iran, traced from the 1953 CIA led coup which brought the Shah of Iran to power as a US puppet. Mohammad Mossadgh was a pro-western democracy leader who lawfully had decided to nationalise Iranian oil to benefit the Iranian people. He took his country’s case to the then World Court and as a professor of international law argued and won his country’s case. Then the CIA coup. Interestingly, it was the US which persuaded the Shah to acquire nuclear technology. At first the Shah was sceptical for he was aware of the significant reserves of Iranian oil and so did not initially see the need to acquire nuclear power. The argument which persuaded him was that with nuclear power his country would be able to utilise such energy source domestically and then have an increased surplus of oil to sell on the international market. So, the US was central to introducing Iran to nuclear power. By, 1979 the people of Iran had had enough of the Shah’s dictatorial rule and rose up in a popular revolution and overthrew the Shah and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.
One might briefly reflect on the US led ventures in Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011. By contrast to Iran, Libya had voluntarily relinquished any further attempts at developing a nuclear reactor or nuclear weapons.
Now to the issues and questions.
Question 1: America is the world’s richest and largest economy, then why so much domestic strife, and why the need for and expansion of an ever ballooning military budget? Why such a contrast to a much smaller country such as Norway? Norwegians are all well educated, housed and have fundamental human needs more than adequately met. Why not the same with the needs of the American people? It cannot be said that the resources are not available in abundance at the disposal of the US government – surely?
Question 2: Why not a global de-escalation of nuclear weaponry, for as Kennan accurately observed those several years ago there could be no rational deployment of such weapons. In modern terminology, such use would result in Mutually Assured Destruction ( MAD). Thus, what rational sense in expending resources to produce more of the same which cannot rationally be detonated?
Question 3: Are states such as America, Russia and maybe now China, locked in a cycle of production within their own military-industrial complexes such that there is a self-perpetuating demand for on-going useless over production of nuclear weaponry which cannot rationally be used?
Beyond this point, having laid a base for logical and rational reflection – I proceed to one final question – PEACE?
COURTENAY BARNETT is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, and has argued public interest and human rights cases. He has published several articles in the Effective Learning Report. He lives and works in the Caribbean.https://majestyslotscasino.co.uk/
THE EARTHIAN is a digest of articles containing facts, perspectives, theories, models, analyses, and recommendations concerned about existential states of affairs affecting all species of fauna and flora around Spaceship Earth. Recent relevant articles written and published by intelligent hard-hitting truth-seeking writers in Internet journals about psychological, social, economic, political, military, religious, and ecological states of affairs around Spaceship Earth are linked below as sources, following a usual comment by the editor.
“ASK LESS WHAT YOUR NATION CAN DO FOR YOU—ASK MORE WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR SPACESHIP EARTH”
OR SO IT SEEMS TO ME RIGHT NOW
By Richard John Stapleton
I just watched (8:19 PM, US EST, Saturday, August 7, 2020) Trump on CNN reading somewhere in New Jersey some sort of essay or “speech” someone wrote for him, rambling on about world affairs, such as the recent explosion in Beirut, Lebanon and the Covid plague, which he blamed on China, in which he parenthetically seemed to say in incomprehensible jumbled mumbled verbiage if the Dems do not do what he wants he will by executive order suspend FICA payments for Social Security for six months, “defunding” Social Security by abolishing what he calls “payroll taxes” as if they were some sort of evil, when in fact they are insurance retirement premiums due and paid under the Federal Insurance Contribution Act by the workers of the US and their employers.
Seems to me, fellow USians, if Trump does this it will destroy Social Security. Are you really ready for this? The CNN talking heads were apparently oblivious to this possibility, with no discussion of the real issue, namely that so-called “payroll taxes” do not exist, and calling FICA payments payroll taxes is a lie, a lie told by almost everyone, including the CNN talking heads on this program who told it once again (honestly or dishonestly) to millions of Earthian humans.
The CNN talking heads on this program like most media and congress-brainwashed people of the US may really think FICA payments are taxes to be used to pay the ordinary bills of the US govt for political, civil, military, and reserve employees of the US govt, and for other matters, to fight wars with, or whatever, and are apparently oblivious to the possible consequences of Trump’s threat to suspend FICApayments, which surely he has no moral or ethical right to do, the Social Security system being owned by the workers of the US who have paid and pay their FICA retirement insurance premiums.
This Trump insanity and inhumanity could destroy the Social Security system of retirement of the millions of civilian free enterprise workers of the US.
How about Trump destroying the pension plans of rich non-worker USians instead?
It’s not that I have not thought about this social security payroll tax bullshit before. Here is what I had to say about it November 1, 2018 in my Effective Learning Report article “One More Time: ‘Payroll taxes’ ARE NOT TAXES,” at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/one-more-time-payroll-taxes-are-not-taxes/.
Seems to me Trump is getting increasingly erratic and bizarre as the looming presidential election gets closer and closer, about three months away.
On the other hand, as Tom Luongo points out in one of my Sources below the dim Dems are in no better shape with their candidate, Biden, who Luongo says has been rapidly declining recently with memory and thinking problems, and Dem establishment insiders know he is not a good candidate to go up against Trump in a debate, or election. Luongo said the Dems might even substitute someone else for Biden at their convention in about two weeks, also suggesting Biden’s running mate, assuming they don’t replace him at the convention, will be the real Dem candidate for president in the election. I agree.
Since there is a good chance Biden would soon resign for dementia health reasons after being inaugurated, the Dem Vice-President would become president. Therefore it would seem the Dems would make sure a good VP got selected.
How likely is this? It’s not a slam dunk, that’s for sure. Since USian politics is primarily a matter of putting people in office, such as Biden, who will most likely satisfy the vested financial interests of the deep state and various personality and other desires of identity groups, there is no telling who the Dem VP will be, and, unfortunately very likely it won’t be a strong candidate such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who are far and away the best possibilities for we the people and the greater good, or so it seems to me right now.
In the last few weeks I have thought a good bit about why it is USians vote as they do in elections, looking at the matter through a transactional analysis lens, as shown in my articles cited as Sources below.
Unfortunately I am now convinced the art of politics around Spaceship Earth now and always has been based on a psychological Game I call “They Started It” in which politicians, citizens, subjects, and voters continuously and eternally play Games on a Drama Triangle composed of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim roles, switching about from time to time from one role to another, depending on which interest group or identity group they are dealing with, feeling justified in screwing the other because the other screwed them first.
Trump and his Secretary of State Pompeo seem to be enjoying playing NIGYSOB (Now I’ve Got You, You SOB) with the leaders of countries around Spaceship Earth right now, especially Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and China, sanctioning, bullying, threatening, and what have you, having a hi ho good time.
How they stand it I don’t know, but most politicians seem addicted to drama strokes, especially politicians like Donald J. Trump, a former and present TV beauty queen contest host, reality show star, and luxury hotel, casino, and golf club resort owner, who has lived on mostly drama strokes all his life, according to his niece Mary Trump, who has a PhD in clinical psychology, in her new tell-all book about their dysfunctional Trump family scripting.
She thinks her uncle is dangerous and should be removed as president as soon as possible. Seems to me she’s right.
His experience bankrupting six corporations and his very public sleazy personal life prove he lacks the judgment, morals, and ethics required to manage a sustainable large and complex organization such as the US government and to lead equitable and satisfying social and economic systems for everyone. He’s a successful showman, but a poor and untrustworthy leader and manager, caused by his family scripting.
Unfortunately one can build a good case that the USian process of selecting top leaders and managers for many decades has not worked in such a way as to select good leaders and managers who can produce the greater good for the greater number, but I will stop right here, before opening more Pandora’s boxes than I could close in this comment.
Suffice it to say the next three months of USian history will be interesting, probably disgusting, and possibly terrifying.
See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK—You’re OK life position.
This entails Earthians peacefully reducing through natural attrition the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.
This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form
Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet with cloudy and rainy weather below, which would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows but clouds and lightning?
I am indebted to Buckminster Fuller for teaching me in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth the metaphor in the above paragraph and other big ideas in my essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,” such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work that machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what he called mind grants. To my knowledge Fuller was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
As usual this month’s THE EARTHIAN links and cites as SOURCES recent articles written and published by clear deep-thinking hard-hitting independent writers on various Earthian states of affairs.
Some Game playing goes on in the articles, i.e., a writer is psychologically persecuting, rescuing, or victimizing someone, but it seems to me the writers are generally trying to paint accurate pictures of what they think is really going on.
Unfortunately it seems to me one can build a case politicians spend most of their time playing psychological Games, mostly wasting their time and energy pastiming (bullshitting) and engaging in rituals (shuffling paper, filling out unnecessary forms, attending useless meetings with lawyers and others, and the like). Almost everything done in so-called foreign policy is a move in a psychological Game it seems to me.
It’s not easy, impossible some say, to separate relevant from irrelevant focal points in order to comprehend global cases, systems, and processes, while being inundated with fake news and true facts of states of affairs generated daily around Spaceship Earth, made public on the Internet, and elsewhere, to see what’s really going on, using primarily inductive and analogical reasoning, based on probability, not deductive logic. Almost never can anyone prove with deductive logic that a general proposition about psychological, social, economic, or political states affairs is absolutely true. About the best humans can hope for is to develop consensual answers that are generally acceptable and true based on probability.
It’s better to be honestly wrong than dishonestly wrong. Telling someone something you know is fake as if it were true is worse than telling someone something that’s fake because of genuine ignorance. A good case in point these days is most USians calling FICA insurance premium payments “payroll” taxes. It’s hard to know if sayers calling FICA payments payroll taxes really do not know any better or if they really do know better but are overtly lying about it go along with the crowd to get political brownie points for conforming to a group lie.
It seems to me most lying is lying by omission, people not telling people things they know are true that others need to know. Whether lying by omission is more or less harmful than lying by commission, telling people things you know are false and fake, is debatable, as is proving whether it’s getting easier or harder for most people to know what’s fake and what’s not. Political parties, Earthian governments, and Mainstream media lie by omission with alacrity.
Feel free to respond with comments and criticisms about any of the SOURCES listed below using the RESPONSES post on this blog masthead at the top of this page; but please refrain from making ad hominem attacks. Criticize and correct any of the facts, data, evidence, reasoning, and conclusions in any of the articles; but please refrain from slandering and defaming the characteristics and reputations of the authors illogically using slanderous or defamatory comments trying to prove their arguments and conclusions in their articles are wrong, and yours are right.
I have no desire to sell subscriptions or advertising or solicit donations for THE EARTHIAN, but I would like to sell more books. If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN and would like to reciprocate go to our Effective Learning Publications page and purchase one or more copies of my books at https://www.effectivelearning.net/effective-learning-publications.html .
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Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, certified transactional analyst, educator, octogenarian emeritus professor of management, writer, editor and publisher
SOURCES:
August 9, 2020
Well, he may have done it now, and the repugs may have gotten what they wanted all along—the destruction of social security for the working people of the US. They may be thinking they should have been more careful about what they wished for before this is all over. Be sure and read my (Richard’s) comments about this in response to several Sources posted below. The bottom line is that almost the entire country has been hoodwinked into believing, or saying, that payroll taxes actually exist. I have dispelled that notion in several posts below.
No right whatsoever to do this. Another abomination contemplated by Trump. No such thing as payroll tax. He’s talking about suspending FICA premium payments for social security insurance, created by the Federal Insurance Contributions Act of 1935. Surely he’s not this stupid, or anti-social. Only USian workers who have paid into the SSS have a moral and ethical right to decide to eliminate FICA insurance premium payments for their retirement plan, which would destroy Social Security as we know it.
Is it legal for a USian president to suspend FICA premium payments by workers and their employers into the Social Security trust fund for their retirement plans? Or is this just more of Trump’s idiotic incompetent pop-off lying bullshit? If he does have a right to do this, then it is the most insane unfair right I ever heard of. Pure theft pure and simple. Neither Trump nor the USian govt owns the Social Security retirement system for USian workers. USian workers who have paid into the SSS and who now pay into it own it, as provided by the Federal Insurance Contribution Act of 1935. Again, dammit, so-called “payroll taxes” as this dunce of a president calls them here are not taxes. They are FICA retirement insurance premiums paid by workers and their employers into the only retirement system for all civilian USian workers, namely Social Security. Stop this insane theft now! Before it happens illegally! As if USian workers were not poor enough and insecure enough now, this dunce of a president wants to make them even poorer and more insecure, by stripping them of any hope of a retirement income.. Shameless. How about this dunce robbing the retirement plans of the rich instead?
“Retirees vow to ‘fight this attempt to gut Social Security as Trump announces executive order to suspend payroll tax,” by Jake Johnson, INTREPID REPORT, http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/30495.
what the… Does Trump now think he can nationalize the pharmaceutical industry by an executive order? Is this just more of his lyin’ bullshit? If true, yes, I would say it would engender him more than a few enemies, and he might need to lay low for a while. Does he think this might get him reelected? For sure it would get him a lot of votes. But if he is able to shut off FICA premiumpayments and destroy Social Security, as he has also tweeted he wants to do in the last few days, he will lose more votes than this bombast, if enacted, would win him, or so it seems to me.
Nauseating ad infinitum bullshit. No country plays fair with other countries around Spaceship Earth. And the process will probably continue moving right over the cliff, into human extinction. Nations are like agitated immature children playing a “You Started It” Game, infinitely telling one another they are justified in screwing the other because the other screwed them first. There are no good guys in this Game, in which the leaders of large countries always win, since it gives them more power in the short run to exploit their loser underlings in their own countries, a short term win for them regardless of the long term outcome for everyone. And the short term is about all that ever counts for humans.
Biden is not ok as a presidential candidate in my view but he is definitely the lesser evil this time around, thanks to Dem voters and their identity party-line politics in their primaries, setting him up against Trump instead of Bernie Sanders. Both parties would have you believe nobody can think for themselves anymore irrespective of their identity.
Anti-fascists are now the bad guys and the fascists are the good guys under Trump, and democracy be damned, Bush II being a prime instigator of the process, who made it easier for Trump to stifle the first amendment of the Constitution even more, freedom of speech, by signing this legislation, The Homeland Security Act of 2002.
Another great essay by Paul Street, one of the greatest writers alive, pointing out once again that several wrongs do not make a right, and neither right nor might necessarily makes right.
No right whatsoever to do this. Another abomination contemplated by Trump. No such thing as payroll tax. He’s talking about suspending FICA premium payments for social security insurance, created by the Federal Insurance Contributions Act of 1935. Surely he’s not this stupid, or anti-social. Only USian workers who have paid into the SSS have a moral and ethical right to decide to eliminate FICA insurance premium payments for their retirement plan, which would destroy Social Security as we know it.
As a former sailboat owner and captain sailing in the Atlantic Ocean I appreciate Blain’s metaphor here. The longer I sailed the more dangerous I saw it was, so i sold my boat. Over four million humans are now employed by the USian federal government, counting active military, civil service, reserve, judicial, and political employees (such as senators and representatives). On the other hand there are countless millions of USians now dependent on federal government contracts, subsidies, loans, military bases, stimulus plans, and what have you. As more and more insolvent corporations (too big to fail New York banks, General Motors, and many others) get rescued with Fed govt contracts, loans, subsidies, stimulus packages, and what not, a larger and larger percentage of USians will become dependent on the Fed govt for a living, presumably infinitely supplied with Fed Reserve funny money created out of thin air by simply punching digits into Fed Reserve computers and calling the resulting numbers money. A similar process is at play in most other large countries. If the process continues long enough all Earthian govts might as well do what fascist Corporate America has done, merge, and take over larger shares of resources around Spaceship Earth. For more on how this might play out see my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/
Is it legal for a USian president to suspend FICA premium payments by workers and their employers into the Social Security trust fund for their retirement plans? Or is this just more of Trump’s idiotic pop-off lying bullshit? If he does have a right to do this, then it is the most insane unfair right I ever heard of. Pure theft pure and simple. Neither Trump nor the USian govt owns the Social Security retirement system for USian workers. USian workers who have paid into the SSS own it, as provided by the Federal Insurance Contribution Act of 1935. Again, dammit, so-called “payroll taxes” as this dunce of a president calls them here are not taxes. They are FICA retirement insurance premiums paid by workers and their employers into the only retirement system for all civilian USian workers, namely Social Security. Stop this insane theft now! Before it happens illegally! As if USian workers were not poor enough and insecure enough now, this dunce of a president wants to make them even poorer and more insecure, by stripping them of any hope of a retirement income.. Shameless. How about this idiot robbing the retirement plans of the rich instead?
Excellent article by John Pilger one of the greatest investigative reporters of our time. Say it aint so joe, that the bomb was not dropped to save USian lives but to threaten the Russians.
Of course there is no accountability for the us govt. It makes up the truth as it sees fit, and if you propose a different version you are labeled a conspiracy theorist. Under trump, it’s even worse. he just makes up truth he thinks will work in his personal favor, and his supporters gobble it up, sort of like the erstwhile infallibility of catholic popes.
How the US was taken over in a fascist evolution—1, large corporations and the elite rich decided in 1980 or so another good and easy way to make money was to give money to repug and dem federal politicians to lower their taxes and enact legislation in their favor that would enable said politicians to get reelected over and over, 2, it worked, and another cash cow strategy was enacted, namely appointing right wing supreme court judges who would put laws in place such as Citizens United that defined large corporations as people and therefore having rights of free speech, insuring they could give their bought and paid for lackey politicians even more money to lower their taxes and enact favorable corporate legislation, and, 3, since corporations have always been fascist dictatorships and since they are now running the US govt, we the people of the US are now subjects at the mercy of a relatively fascist government, not citizens willingly obeying the fair laws and legislation of democratic non-career representatives working in our behalf in Washington.
About as wrong as it gets. and to think my father worked on the island of Okinawa during WWII as a Seabee building airstrips for a US airbase there when i was three years old. And the US military is still there. The US military industrial complex is now almost the equivalent of an offshore USian socialistic nation state scattered around Spaceship Earth serving the interests of USian imperialists. not what the USian government was set up to be in its constitution. None of the founding fathers of the US would have ever imagined or approved of what has happened.
Well, apparently he did it today or yesterday August 7 or 8, using an executive order. Can’t believe it. What will happen now. Off the chart shameless. The worst thing he has done in my view. Could be catastrophic.
Been wondering about this sort of thing in Georgia. Read in the last year or so in a newsletter published by the late great Jack Hill our GA state senator here in Statesboro at the time that the Georgia legislature was considering a bill that would allow state retirement systems to invest a higher percentage of state retirement funds in hedge fund type investments and venture capital type investments, a very bad idea in my opinion. Not only would the investments entail higher risks of loss but open the door for corruption, e.g., what sort of board would decide who would get the venture capital retirement investment money using what sort of criteria for various new ventures? Never did read or hear what became of this idea, whether it made its way into law or not. Hope not.
They never let up do they? Another back door to try to get through. Why the hell do the repugs want to destroy the retirement system of US middle and lower income civilians?
One more time! There’s no such thing at US “payroll taxes”. What these thieves are calling payroll taxes are FICA payments, Federal Insurance Contribution Act payments for Social Security. Deferring the FICA payments (in reality partially paying back money the Fed Govt has borrowed from the Social Security trust fund) amounts to defaulting on loans from the Social Security trust fund and stealing current real money FICA payments collected from workers to fund their Social Security retirement systems. A shameless abominable crime in the making. Or, if you want to look at it another way, these thieves are deciding for workers that they no longer need a Social Security retirement system to be paid for with FICA payments.
Another excellent article by Bob Urie. Agree completely. Too bad most USians will never read this. But if they did most likely it would be water running off a duck’s back for most of them. Yes, the situation is dire.
Another political hack appointment doing his right wing duty to temporarily keep his job under Trump. The post office is one of the best things the US has and the repugs are determined to get rid of it. Shame
Absolutely, completely, fully insane. There is no such thing as a payroll tax. The so called payroll taxes are FICA, Financial Insurance Contribution Act, payments into the Social Security System that assures retirement money for US citizens. Calling the FICA payments a payroll tax is a gross misnomer and a consummate con game on the part of people like Trump, who want to further destroy the lives of middle and lower income USian citizens. if these FICA payments are cut most likely it will destroy the Social Security System of the US, just what the elite rich like Trump want. Tying and lying about Social Security with coronavirus stimulus money is criminal.
It’s much easier for the US to bully nations in South America than it is to bully China. Apparently the US state department, pentagon, presidency, etc. think they are powerful enough to bully any and all nation(s) around Spaceship Earth any time they feel like it, however much in debt the US govmint is in, thanks to tax cuts for the rich and more and more military spending. For sure it’s not the fault of workers paying their social security retirement insurance premiums.
Pompeo and the USian state department continue bully policies and tactics in Asia. What a way for a nation to deal with sovereign nations around Spaceship Earth.
Not for the faint of heart. I still say it’s worse than money printing. All they are doing is punching digits into computers and calling the resulting numbers money.
Blind spots? Yes, but also selective memory, denial, lying, and other things. As Upton Sinclair pointed out it’s hard to get people to believe the truth when their livelihood depends on not believing it.
With Donald Trump as president as the Covid-19 plague and civil unrest cripple the economic and cultural functioning of the US internally, as Trump and his Secretary of State Pompeo sanction, bully, and agitate countries externally, fomenting profits for the USian deep state, anxiety levels among USian civilians have got to be near all-time highs.
Trump has now put his own troops on the ground in Portland, Oregon, and according to stories in news media he is plotting to do the same in other places, such as Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
According to the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the mayor of Portland, this action is illegal; but does Trump care? Why is he doing it in the first place? Very likely he’s doing it to decrease his chances of being humiliated in the November presidential election. He probably thinks he can get away with violating the US Constitution for a few months, having had a lifetime of experience violating laws and getting away with it thanks to having inherited enough money to buy the silence of people and hire slick lawyers.
Is Trump evil? Well for sure he is not yet as evil as Adolph Hitler, apparently one of his heroes, according to stories about Trump reading Hitler’s books and keeping one of them handy in his bedroom for nighttime reading.
Hitler is generally considered the most evil human that ever lived, having conducted the most aggressive, egregious, callous, and diabolical cold-blooded genocide against millions of humans than any other mass murderer in history, primarily motivated by bigotry.
Back in the 1970s and 80s I had a transactional analysis colleague who had close relatives who died in the Holocaust who got so obsessed with it that he did some serious research about it. He made several trips to Germany to Auschwitz specifically to see firsthand the physical remains of the crime scene. An expert photographer, he photographed various aspects of the process, where the Jews got off the boxcars, where they got inspected and tattooed, where they slept, where they worked, and where they got gassed. He wound up writing and publishing a long article in the Transactional Analysis Journal titled “Aspects of Survival: Triumph over death and onliness,” by Alan Jacobs, (1991, Volume 21, No. 1).
Jacobs concluded that mass-murdering sociopaths and psychopaths like Hitler harbored a sub-conscious desire to wind up the only person still alive, to be the only one to survive, and while Hitler was among the most pathological he was not the only human harboring desires of this nature. Jacobs researched not only the Holocaust and Hitler but genocide and democide in general, democide being the mass murdering of various demographic groups by governments, who greatly advanced the efficiency of their murder methods and processes during the 20th Century, probably the most murderous century of Earthian human history, counting people killed with gas, guns, and bombs dropped from airplanes in wars and by callous governments deliberately letting humans starve to death, over two hundred million Earthian humans in the 20th Century, according to various researchers.
Jacobs concluded that such inclinations were not confined to obvious sociopaths and psychopaths: he concluded many people harbored sub-conscious desires and inclinations of this nature, albeit in relatively unthreatening doses, deeply submerged in their sub-conscious minds.
There is no doubt that the US has become more fascist under Trump due to his life script and personality. Did he cause himself to be what he is? No, he was scripted to be what he is by his accidental life experiences like everybody else, especially including the peculiar parents he accidentally inherited, relatively dysfunctional inhumane parents, however rich they might have been, who emotionally and intellectually abused him, contaminating his mind at an early age with insane script messages, as Trump’s niece recently divulged in her book, and as numerous writers have alluded to in articles since he became president of the US.
Trump was elected into office by ordinary voters who have fascist sub-conscious desires and fantasies, whom few people would consider evil, however much they are part and parcel of an evil process, not of their intentional making, mostly a function of their accidental life script messages laid on them by their parents, accidentally generated from one generation to another through time in the process of surviving, which was never easy for Earthian humans.
This is not the first time a relatively democratic country has become relatively fascist. It’s common in Earthian history, with relatively democratic large and previously relatively successful countries degenerating into fascist dictatorships in the 20th Century, Germany being a prime example. It’s common for countries to evolve from relative democracies to dictatorships and back to democracies, depending on what percentage of their human inhabitants hold various desires and fantasies about what leaders and countries are supposed to be like and do. Sadly a sizeable percentage of the human race has apparently always considered the entire Earthian human population to be so evil that they too had to do evil things, whether they liked it or not, evil things such as murdering people in cold-blood in wars, genocides, and democides, to survive.
The major governmental evolutionary change in the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries was from monarchies to relative democracies spurred by the American and French revolutions, with socialistic and communistic experiments being conducted in various countries at various times up to now. There aren’t that many hereditary monarchs ruling by divine right left. Kings and queens weren’t perfect by any means, or divine, but they were less murderous than fascist dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.
Yes, fascist leaders can take over countries that consider themselves relatively socialistic or communistic, just like fascist leaders can take over countries that consider themselves relatively democratic; and it’s possible that socialistic or communistic countries can be more democratic than some so-called democracies, depending on what most of the inhabitants of the countries feel, think, and do.
Some humans think corrupt dysfunctional economic systems are the main cause of Earthian evil in general. This is not likely, in my opinion. Economic systems such as capitalism and communism are not like computer programs you put into a computer with consciously thought-out procedures for what to do given historical frequencies and random events; capitalism, socialism, and communism are sets of beliefs and attitudes regarding how selfish people should be and whether humans should be entitled to steal from one another in competitive economic behavior and to what degree. They are rationalizations of human behaviors en masse that naturally evolve through synergistic learning (learning in whole systems not apparent by observing sub-systems). They are not technological systems imposed by intentional intelligent humans.
I have no idea what’s gonna happen now. There is some chance the US will evolve into a fascist dictatorship sooner or later through general inertia, Trump or no Trump, depending upon what ordinary voters feel, think, and decide in presidential elections from here on. On the other hand let’s hope our dear leader sociopath Trump does not declare himself dictator for life before the November presidential election, as his hero did in Germany, assuming there would be any chance the real USian military would back him up, as his Homeland Security and Border Patrol troops are doing now in Portland, Oregon. USian civilians en masse would have no chance of winning a war with Trump’s self-imposed fascist dictatorship if the real USian military establishment followed his orders to suppress, capture, disappear, torture, execute, or imprison rebels, counter-insurgents, or whatever they might be called, using standard fascist dictatorship operating procedures.
Some USian civilians would probably fight for a while to remove the Trump dictatorship with an insurrection with no chance of winning. How long it would take the US society and government to evolve back into a relative democracy would remain to be seen. How many USians would have died in the upheaval is anybody’s guess. Hopefully it would be nothing like the carnage of similar upheavals in the 20th Century.
See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK—You’re OK life position.
This entails Earthians peacefully reducing through natural attrition the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.
This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form
Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet with cloudy and rainy weather below, which would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows but clouds and lightning?
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, is a certified transactional analyst, octogenarian emeritus professor of management, educator, writer, editor and publisher https://luck-of-spins.co.uk/login/
The Group: To Save Spaceship Earth is a work in progress. While settings, plots, theories, objects, and narratives in this novel may be analogous to the same that have happened in various realities around Spaceship Earth, the names, actions, and attributions of characters cast herein are purely fictional, with the exception of a few well known literary and political figures. All parts of this novel will be published in the Effective Learning Report at various intervals on the Internet, subject to revision at any time, hopefully culminating in a final print edition offered for sale to the public.
Copyright 2020 by Effective Learning Publications. All rights reserved. No part of this novel may be copied or printed on paper without permission. Share on the Internet as you wish.
If you want to refresh yourself about what happened in earlier episodes, go to the following website addresses:
Rout was beginning to have serious thoughts about the results of the program. It was obvious the group had improved its psychological and social functioning, agitations had diminished, and the group had become more cohesive. But so what? Was this a sign of significant change and progress or was it disingenuous adapting and flexing to make a buck? The five thousand dollars a month obviously was enough to entice them to attend the meetings but was participating in the meetings producing changes in their group imagoes, scripts, ego states, transactions, and general functioning? Would their experiences in The Group cause them to feel, think, and behave differently in other groups that would tend to cause polarizations to diminish so as to in some way help facilitate causations for the construction of consensual answers that would help solve problems posing existential threats to all species of fauna and flora living around Spaceship Earth?
Rout knew his supporters and donors would not continue to fund The Group indefinitely if there were no credible signs the process was producing significant changes in the feeling, thinking, deciding, and behavior patterns of the group members.
Rout had been concerned from the beginning about when and how to make a definitive judgment about how well the process was achieving its purposes, mission, and goals. While donors had been relatively easy to find to start the process Rout knew there was no assurance the donors would continue to fund the process indefinitely. Although they had said very little up to this point he knew they were bound to be getting curious. The donors had access to the transcripts and tapes and they could see there had already been changes in the feeling, thinking, and behavior of The Group.
For one thing, the donors could see that most of the group members now accepted Rout’s leadership and they had accepted the rules of the process. For sure Rout had already proved the group process could cause group members from disparate backgrounds to at least pretend to change, at least when paid five thousand dollars for one weekend of time and six hours of group participation. It was a good deal for them, even apparently for the wealthy members. If the wealthy members did not need the money as they said, then the process was generating psychological satisfaction for them because they were still attending.
It was obvious most of the group members were by now gaining some satisfaction from participating in the process, especially being able to get away from their daily grinds to visit different cities. They were getting together in small groups for lunch and dinner, and while the groups initially formed based on verisimilitude with respect to various socio-economic experiences, the informal groups were now including individuals with different characteristics, apparently caused by feelings of liking and respect generated by the discussions, which was a good sign, indicating The Group process would cause polarizations among people to diminish here and yon.
There were now fewer critical parent, adapted child, and rebel child ego states cathected and a higher percentage of the transactions were adult-adult and free child-free child. Every now and then they actually had a little fun in the group.
At the same time the group had become more serious and business-like. The time of the discussions was now consumed with more work and intimacy with fewer rituals and Games. The content of the discussions had become more honest.
Rout now felt that he could make the case to the donors that the program was successful and had achieved what it set out to do. He was confident the donors had seen enough of he video tape and transcripts of the group sessions to enable them to see for themselves what had gone on and happened.
The question now was where to go from here? Disband this group and start new ones? Pay the group members of this group to lead similar groups using Truthers in their communities? Expand to other countries?
On the other hand, Rout had read and heard about a mysterious new virus that had originated in China that was highly contagious and dangerous. Would it spread to the US? If so would it be feasible for The Group to meet face to face?
Rout decided to keep rolling along as they were for a few more sessions before making major changes in the group.
Maybe the best thing to do would be to simply terminate the process now and announce to the world in a book that the process works, in which case the major problem would be where could sufficient funds be found to fund similar groups around Spaceship Earth?
Why waste more time experimenting with this group? On the one hand, it seemed clear that continuing the group process for several months or even several years would produce further improvements in the overall functioning of the group. The knowledge bases and critical thinking skills of most of the members, due to the sharing of information in the dialogical, dialectical, and analogical Game-free Adult discussion process would continue to improve; but would these improvements be worth their cost to the donors, and society at large?
There was no way The Group donors could pay several billion people to attend such meetings, hoping to save Spaceship Earth.
If all governments would contribute funding for large numbers of humans from different countries to attend group meetings conducted in a manner similar to the process used in The Group consensual answers might be found that would save Spaceship Earth from global warming, climate change, and militarization.
Governments would be paying citizens to attend Game-free group meetings to learn how to act like responsible stockholders of Spaceship Earth, Inc., which would entail a transformation of human relationships everywhere, in which there would be no hierarchies with bosses and subordinates, everyone would be equal in terms of rights and responsibilities, with liberty and true dignity for all, since all human Earthians would be an equal owner of Spaceship Earth, Inc., owning one share of stock that would provide dividend checks sufficient for good standards of living for all Earthians.
It was becoming clearer to the donors and others privy to the tapes and videos of the group sessions that feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors in the group were changing for the better. The members were more comfortable and relaxed and were less fearful about honestly participating in the process. OKness levels had increased.
OKness was a major concept in the transactional analysis literature, the whole discipline being based on simple colloquial terms that explained relatively complex problems, issues, and states of affairs. Of the various social, economic, and psychological disciplines Rout had studied, it seemed transactional analysis was most helpful in understanding group dynamics. Not only was it concerned about increasing Okness in organizations and groups but it provided specific tools for assessing different kinds of Okness.
All organizations and groups are relatively ok or not ok depending on circumstances, ok with respect to themselves, other individuals, other groups, and the world, or universe. How individuals, groups, and organizations were caused to wind up at their particular level of Okness is a relevant question. A deeper relevant question is whether individuals, organizations, and groups are actually caused to be what they are in terms of Okness or whether they are just pretending to be at those levels? As with all social and psychological phenomena a major question is whether perceived feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and decisions are real or faked. In other words are phenomena naturally caused to exist or are they constructions created to simulate natural feelings, thoughts, decisions, behaviors, and the like.
Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Psychology, used to say, “Most talking is a lie,” meaning he thought most people were rarely truthful about what they were truly feeling, thinking, doing, etc. Perls called most ordinary conversations chickenshit, most organizational communications bullshit, and most philosophical discussions elephantshit. He thought humans are rarely truly honest about what they feel, think, and do about things because of their vested interests and ulterior motives.
In most organizations and groups people are rewarded not only with strokes but money for conforming to the requirements of the authority structure of the organization. One can build the case that almost no one can be fully honest in organizations and groups, since most appear as they do after having manipulated themselves through various adaptations to conform to the organizational scripts imposed at their level and position in the organizational hierarchy to hold their jobs. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair it’s difficult to convince humans of the real truth of the matter when their livelihoods depend on not believing it.
So it’s not easy to tell by looking just how OK a person, group, or organization really is.
One can observe in groups and organizations how time is being structured, by noting what people are actually doing. TA has five simple categories for describing time structuring—withdrawal, pastiming, rituals, work, Games, and intimacy. Withdrawal means people are not engaged with others or groups. One can tell by looking whether individuals are tuning the group out, daydreaming, etc. In this group Rout’s use of the Truther precludes withdrawal and pastiming, talking about favorite hobbies and such, interests in children, cooking, sports, and the like. The Truther and Rout’s rules require members to do some intellectual work, such as defining problems, figuring out alternatives for dealing with existential problems, figuring out what to do about the problems and opportunities, etc. There are almost no rituals in Rout’s process, routine reciting of dogmas or doctrines and housekeeping duties, such as voting on past business, etc., such as what one finds in most organizational group meetings. Games are outlawed by the Truther and the group rules. No one can legitimately say they have been Rescued, Persecuted, or Victimized when The Truther selects them. Sexual intimacy is also precluded during the group sessions. On the other hand, there is talk about truth. In general intimacy involves telling the truth about what one actually feels, thinks, decides, and does from moment to moment, which rarely occurs. In this sense one can build the case a major objective of this group is to increase time structuring spent in intellectual intimacy and decrease time spent in other types of time structuring, such as withdrawal, pastiming, and Game playing.
Watching the videos of the group sessions and listening to the tapes it’s possible for observers to notice changes in these variables. Other things that can be observed are transactions within the group. Transactions are communication vectors beamed from one ego state in an individual to ego states in others, whether individuals, groups, or organizations. There are three types of ego states, parent, adult, and child. Ego states are emotional and behavioral states of being that are parent-like, adult-like, and child-like. Individuals and groups and organizations transmit messages to others using various combinations of ego states, and individuals and groups respond to what has been transmitted to them using various combinations of the three ego states. The Truther generally fosters or cathects (a word for turning on or energizing ego states) Adult ego states. Parent and Child ego states can be seen in the group by noting facial expressions and body language of various sorts. Parent ego states usually entail general dogmatic statements and stern facial expressions and pointed index fingers used for emphasizing the person is in a Parent ego state and should be listened to.
It has become obvious to Rout and his board of advisors, experts in TA and other social and psychological fields, that the process has increased the use of the Adult ego state in the group and has increased honesty or intimacy within the group. Whether this improvement will transfer to other groups that the members of this group belong to remains to be seen.
This is the hard part. You can have good ok groups but still have not ok governments and economic systems. If not ok people get in control of organizations, regardless of the type of economic system they use, the organization will not produce Okness for everyone. Such is now the case with capitalism, which is producing massive inequality with the rich getting richer while the rest stagnate of decline, while governments do and say things to make lower and middle classes feel, think, and believe they are more ok than they really are. One way to do that is by starting wars, which takes the minds of not ok people off their economic plights and puts them to work fighting and making war equipment and munitions.
The issue is whether to continue The Group process for much longer. One can build the case The Group has already proven it can produce increases in OKness, etc. Would continuing the process for more months or years eventually result in creating consensual answers for society and psychological problems. Most likely it would, but the problem as always is not to have consensual answers for sake of producing consensual answers but to implement them so as to make everyone more OK. One can build a case no one can be fully ok until everyone is OK. Such has never been the case aboard Spaceship Earth. There have always been serious differences among the OK levels of humans. A major purpose of religion has been to make people think they are OK regardless of how not OK their psychological, social, economic, and political positions are, if they publicly profess to believe certain dogmas and doctrines and conform to the dictates of various religious leaders.
This leads to some other TA terms for organizational and and group analysis, such as agitations and cohesions, among and within organizations. To fully analyze organizations and groups one needs to find out whether or how OK people are but also how agitated or cohesive they are at various borders of their organizations, internal and external borders, and whether the agitations and cohesions are between members or between members and leaders, there being three general types of leaders—designated, psychological, and effective. Once such agitations are located various and sundry consensual answers might be developed to deal with them.
Spaceship Earth is now very agitated, probably experiencing more agitations than ever before in history, agitations between nations, between the leaders of nations and leaders of other nations, agitations between leaders of nations and their own group members, and between countless organizations and groups within nations. It appears the root cause of the increased agitation is the economic systems used, and the organizational systems used, which are causing global warming, climate change, and income inequality. No amount of organizational and group therapy will cure these problems, unless you can get OK leaders of nations together to seriously discuss how to create new economic and organizational systems and technologies to solve the real causes of the agitations.
Unfortunately Spaceship Earth is now experiencing negative feedback loops that exacerbate rather than ameliorate the conflict and agitations. Relatively not OK voters is so-called democracies vote for not OK individuals as leaders because the leader reinforces their not OKness, leading to even more not OKness, and so on, and the entire system continues to decline, possibly eventually resulting in the extincton of the Earthian human race.
Since the group has proved its feasibility it would seem more and more similar groups should be established. Problem is where will the money come from. The dismal reality is that this group worked because the donors paid the members to increase their OKness. That is a hell of a note, having to pay people to increase their own OKness, as if they actually enjoy their not OKness.
On the other hand, he decided today to give the group a reading assignment.
Rout—“Before we select a Truther leader, I have decided I would like to make a reading assignment.
“I will allocate thirty minutes for everyone to read this article, and then we will discuss the article. The Truther as usual will select the leader to start the discussion.”
After the elapsing of thirty minutes…
“OK, lets’s move on. Whoever got hit last spin The Truther.”
The Rooster crowed and The Truther selected George.
George—“As we all know Trump has advocated building a new wall to keep not ok illegal immigrants out of the US from the beginning of his presidency, without much success, I am afraid. The Democratic congress has blocked him in every way on this. On the other hand some progress has been made.”
Harrison—“Come on George, you know Trump’s idea for a wall was doomed from the start. Seems to me there is less talk of it now than there was, especially with this new influx of immigrants from Central America. I’m not sure why Rout wanted us to read this fantasy article about Spaceship Earth, but if it did come to pass for sure it would cure immigration problems, since everyone would be paid to stay where they are around earth. On the other hand, the article is worse than socialism, it’s a utopian fantasy showing what great things would happen if artificial intelligence robots took over the management of the entire Earthian economy. Where did you find this article Rout?”
Rout—“I ran across it cruising the Internet. I assigned it because the article ties together several aspects of what we have been talking about in our group sessions and it seems to me if it were implemented it would solve most of Earth’s problems.”
Harrison—“Well I suppose in fantasy it might. But how in hell could people ever implement such a thing. As I understand it it would require internationalizing, or taking over, all corporations around Earth.”
Rout—“No, it would only require taking over corporations directly involved in the production and delivery of the necessities of life. There could be other kinds of corporations in other industries, so long as they did not require the consumption of basic resources needed to feed, clothe, and house humans.”
George—“It’ll never happen. It’s pure socialism or worse. All freedom would be lost and it would entail redistributing incomes in a major way. In fact it would require a super government confiscating and taking by force all the wealth of existing people. What would you do about housing? How could a billionaire afford to live in a mansion he owns if he has to live off some imaginary dividend check from one corporation, called Spaceship Earth, Inc.? It’s crazy. I can’t believe you would have forced us to read it, the only time you ever did such a thing. Its becoming clear to me that what you have really wanted to do all along is brainwash us all with socialism or worse pure communism.”
Noam—“I’ll grant you, the article is a bit radical but it covers a lot of ground and it does make a major point, namely that artificial intelligence and faster and more powerful computers will enable humans to do things that have never been possible before, utilizing data bases that never existed before. And it’s based on solid mathematical theory, linear programing, that has been around for a long time. As to its suggestion about the dividend income for all humans, it is similar to the basic of idea of basic incomes now, sometimes called MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. Some experts are advocating paying or giving citizens a basic income to insure there is enough money in circulation to generate a viable economy. And this idea in this article is based on Buckminster Fuller’s idea to award mind grants to to all humans to eliminate employment overnight, based on the philosophical notion that all people have value, so paying them to think about whatever their talents happened to be might pay off in the long run. For sure it would require massive changes in all countries, not just in the rich countries, but in theory it could work, and something similar to it is probably necessary to stave off global warming and climate change, and human extinction, not to mention the extinction of thousands of species of fauna and flora around spaceship earth.”
Sam—“Good perspective Noam. Yes, radical changes are going to have to happen, and it’s going to require thinkers with more than a little ability to think outside of political and social boxes. Whether a group like this one can do it remains to be seem. There’s a lot of disagreement among the members here. True enough we have learned to respect one another more and I think most of us are more open to differing views and ideas than we were, but I wonder how many of us would vote for something like Spaceship Earth, Inc.”
In the words of the now designated leader of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, “Here’s the deal:”
Ordinary Dem voters in the Dem primaries made a mistake choosing Joe Biden. Had Sanders been chosen he would have had a good shot at uniting the Dem party. Biden has split it into two camps: conservative Dems and progressive Dems.
A united Dem party would be more likely to defeat Trump, the greater evil.
Now, with the Dem party divided, beating Trump is more uncertain.
I, a progressive Independent, will vote for Biden as the lesser evil, much as I hate to; but I am only one progressive vote. There’s no telling how all the progressive Dems will vote.
Dem establishment insiders did not want Bernie Sanders because they were afraid of losing job security and funding, knowing the Deep State—the big banks, the drug companies, the credit card companies, the military industrial complex, the for-profit health care system, the Federal Reserve system, etc.—did not want Sanders—because they knew there was some chance he might actually make systemic changes harmful to their vested interests if he became President.
The Deep State has now won the Game regardless of which political party wins in November. For them it’s head’s they win if the Dems win and tail’s they win if the Repugs win.
While there’s no guarantee the status quo of the disunited USian federal system will work much longer even for the Deep State, given the exploding and ballooning Federal debt, the status quo of the USian federal government system will be maintained if possible for another four and one-half years—to preserve as many vested interests of the Deep State as possible, depending on possible force majeure events.
Biden has already told the Deep State there will be no major changes if he is elected, and we pretty much know what will happen if Trump is re-elected. He has given the Deep State more than they asked for for three and one-half years.
The losers as usual in this deal are lower and middle income civilian voters of both the Dem and Repug parties who made it all possible by not voting in their own best interests in primary elections. Unfortunately they can only see trees, not the forest.
Here is what I have been advocating for several years at
By vocation I am a lawyer; by disposition I am a reader and a thinker.
On the latter limb in the year 2020 A.D. I note that the statues of formerly venerated persons in the personage of U.S. Confederate Generals and slave owners are being toppled – while on the other side of the Anglo-American axis there in Britain Edward Colston’s statue ( got a baptismal wash at the bottom of the Bristol harbour) and even Winston Churchill finds himself boarded up lest he too be toppled from his heroic pedestal. How is all this to be understood or interpreted when the ‘evil ones’ are actually challenging, questioning, even symbolically drowning heroes in the harbour – ‘our heroes’?
This is where the sentinel who guards the otherwise unquestionable issue of ‘meaning’ comes to the fore – and finally is to be questioned as to the true meaning of an assumed role as the guardian of truth, righteousness or even ultimately – divinity. I have not written the foregoing words without deep and careful thought, for that if Western civilization were to examine and conduct profound introspection, then the deeper meaning of what I am saying might then begin to emerge. I shall try to explain.
Meaning
How do we come to understanding and then assign meaning?
Meaning as to – who I am – what is my country as regards its historical expression of an identity – what gave rise to major historical personages and events – and similar cognitive points of reference?
I hazard a guess, from my own experiences, as with anyone else – family – culture – dominant belief systems – formal tuition – discourse – investigation lead to ‘meaning’.
In Jamaica, where I was born, I attended a Catholic school, St. George’s College. By reference to tuition, of my five years there, the third form ( my third year) remains indelibly imprinted in my pedagogic memory. There was a red-haired firebrand of a Scot, a historian by name, Clive Woods. Also, in the same year there were a few young Bostonian Jesuit teachers. Between those teachers they framed and changed my world outlook. It was the 1960s when the Vietnam War was raging and the Bostonians spoke of the horrors of ‘agent orange’, illegal bombings in Laos and Cambodia, defoliates with life destroying chemicals being deployed, the use of ‘napalm’ and other US war crimes. Mr. Woods opened eyes to the real motivational factors behind Columbus, the Conquistadors and the Catholic Church’s role in the ‘civilizing mission’ towards the ‘natives’. On the British side, he went further and informed us of the truth behind the ‘amelioration period’ at the time leading up to emancipation in the Caribbean in 1838. He explained what the payment of 20 million pounds sterling to the slave owners meant as being compensation to the persons who owned ‘chattels’ – the enslaved Africans – without one jot being delivered as compensation to the enslaved people. Mr. Woods only lasted one year at St. George’s and I do believe that he was quietly asked to depart for reason of the impact he was having on the stimulated and excited students. And, to this day the myths and denials persist – despite the best efforts of Mr. Woods who tried to disabuse his Caribbean students of a history that included any benign or caring colonial overlord most concerned with the welfare of the colonised. The other case is told in the status quo accounts, the ‘conventional wisdom’, the official narratives that other than disdain, abuse and exploitation had been colonialism’s handmaiden. Hence 1776 in the United States of America does not surprise and neither should the ever present resistances throughout the British Empire, be it the 1857 Indian Mutiny or the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, so long as the British Empire lasted.
George Floyd in the face of historical facts
I reverted in memory to my years in school for reason of the shock of seeing on video, the killing of George Floyd. The death brought a torrent of early memories to the fore and – as with my recollection of Mr. Woods – I shall explain in broader recall – how so.
When I arrived in England to continue my education at university at the age of sixteen, I was then in the ‘mother country’. The country which had colonised and profited from Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean and built herself tremendous wealth, entire towns, cities ( e.g. Colston’s Bristol), cathedrals, expanded universities, established manufacturing industries from the labour of enslaved Africans. Yet when I spoke to the average English person about from whence I came, quickly I understood their delusional conception of their great and good British Empire. For any human being anywhere living across the globe, simply read Dr. Eric Williams’ tome, ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ which was based on deeply researched historical facts which to this day from the 1940s when first published – not one human being has ever, despite having tried, succeeded in disproving Dr. Williams’ thesis. The Africans, the Asians, the Indian efforts, and all the ‘others’ who contributed to British wealth were largely irrelevant if not historically non-existent so far as my direct participant observations of the British were concerned.
My point can be made quite simply following upon George Floyd’s killing and the dumping of Colston’s statue in the harbour. I have many White European friends of different levels of academic accomplishments. However, it is not whether they have doctorates or are professors or not which distinguishes their level of understanding about the British Empire’s deeds, but the absence of a certain level of economic understanding about what was the British Empire’s methodology. Post Floyd killing, I made the point to a White European friend that the removal of Colston’s statue was perfectly justified in the same way that in Germany today, the idea of honouring Adolph Hitler in effigy in a public place by way of placement of a statue would not be acceptable. I was then chided for comparing Nazi Germany with the British Empire. So, let me ‘double down’ ( to use an Americanism) and then ask:-
When the Boers were corralled in concentration camps during the Boer Wars – was it the British who had invented this practice – or not?
When the British moved into the highlands of Kenya and set up an Apartheid system and banned, in particular, the Kikuyu tribe from their ancestral lands –what then happened? Did the Africans not quite understandably resist their displacement? Yet again, did the British not on a large scale again corral and torture the Africans in these concentration camps? Did the Kenyans not recently win a court case and the British government not have to pay Kenyan survivors for the cruel and inhumane treatment experienced and suffered in these British concentration camps?
So, were the Nazis really the originators of this practice?
Actually, the inventor of the concentration camp was Horatio Herbert Kitchener who first used the term ‘ concentration camp’ during the Boer Wars. Wonderful servant of the British Empire he was.
But now, do not forget just how benign the Empire was:-
The Irish famine of the mid-1800s – due to British colonial policy.
The Bengal famine that resulted in the death of some 3 to 4 million Indians under the British Raj in 1943– was due to British colonial policy. So, we have a loving and oh! so ever caring overall demonstration of concern, in the words of the British leader at the time:-
“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” Winston Churchill ( and you wonder why some people want to tear his statue down).
The death of some 8 million Iranians ( formerly – Persians) in 1917 – 1919 – due to British policy.
And on and on.
Such a wonderful Empire – indeed.
Conclusion
A four time UK Parliamentarian recently made his own observations on the British Empire and he said this:-
“ When I was young I told my Irish grandfather that the teacher had told me that the British had an empire so vast that the Sun never set upon it. He answered “that’s because God would never trust the British in the dark.” I knew he was telling the truth. And now so does Venezuela.”*
Note: The reference to Venezuela at the end of Galloway’s comment relates to the fact that at a point in time when the Venezuelan Government trusted the British ( read: Bank of England) the Venezuelan Government deposited some billions in gold in the Bank of England. When Venezuela required and still requires in 2020 that its gold be paid out – the British Government has refused so to pay.
May I therefore suggest that the contemporary American Empire is actually an outgrowth from the former British Empire. Elements of abusive use of power do exist within the American Empire. So far as the 4th of July is concerned the American people could well do with a few gifts. Maybe the American Government can start to live up to the ideals of the well drafted US Constitution; maybe instead of invading, bombing and manipulating internal political events in so many countries around the world in the name of ‘democracy’ – the U.S.of A. might now start a genuine commitment to pursue justice and equality and fight discrimination within America. It should be noted that nothing teaches better than a good example ( by which I mean – start at home) and leave other countries to determine their own future without continually interfering in their internal political processes.
Anglo-Americans have a lot to account and answer for. George Floyd’s killing is just “child’s play”, when one seriously considers the murderous horrors which as a matter of historical fact, did precede that day and continues unabated this 4th July, 2020.
Footnote: What is the 4th July – a speech by Frederick Douglass – as relevant as ever:-
______________________________________
* COURTENAY BARNETT is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, and has argued public interest and human rights cases. He lives and works in the Caribbean.
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Hello Courtenay
Thanks for this well reasoned and presented response. Got to go to town early to get some groceries while it’s fairly early and fewer possible Covid 19 virus carriers in the store. Will get this posted to the article when I get back.
Richard,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
Obviously you have given more than a small amount of attention to the issue at hand.
For purposes of argument, we could just confine ourselves to the situation in the US:-
Highly regressive tax system.
Many large corporations pay little to sometimes zero taxes relative to their huge earnings.
The socio-economic system is highly discriminatory, such as in housing in both the private and public sectors.
The justice system is skewed against minorities.
Just a few of the realities the ‘Earthians’ in the US face. So, at least there in the US the prospects of equity are not promising at present, for as you correctly observe: “ But if humans should co-construct decent dependable social, economic, and political systems in the future along the lines of what I outline in my essay.”
My mind focuses on equity, for a quite obvious reason – I am a lawyer who defends people’s rights. However, I do not think along ‘utopian’ lines. By that I mean that I am not wedded to an ideological camp within which I hermetically seal my mind thinking that here resides the true solution. Utilitarianism, although not much in vogue these days in intellectual circles, does have a core appeal – the greatest good for the greatest number. In more concrete terms my mind flashes back to a speech of Dr. Martin Luther King in which he drew a contrast between the US and Norway. He was lamenting the high level of riches in the US with some seriously high levels of poverty such as in Appalachia. In Norway we find a high living standard accompanied by high levels of taxation which serves well to provide for the needs of the populace. Therein is the formula, for albeit it a totally different political order had existed in Libya, they too had achieved the highest standard of living on the continent of Africa ( until bombed away in 2011). In both countries the source of the wealth was from oil. The challenge is a will to structure a system which both generates wealth and ensures a social safety next accompanied by fairness within the social order. You encapsulate what I have just expressed when you say this: “Capitalism in recent decades has led to the creation of a new aristocracy far richer than ever existed and inequality this has created will exist forever barring changes in tax laws, precluding any chance of Earthian peace.”
To bring things right down to earth, so to speak, the combinations of the unsustainable deficit, over expenditure on the military and the determination to print money in the trillions will be the undoing of America.
You have answered my concern about intergenerational wealth transfer, by permitting a portion to be bequeathed to the next generation. However, as a lawyer, I already have a way around your system for I simply effect an inter vivos transfer and that negates the death tax.
More to the point is the concerns which I sense we both share of a need for some sanity being visited upon human societies, in the sense of provision for all in a world which actually has wealth in abundance. Just reflect for a moment on the Congo ( which I consider the world’s most resource rich piece of real estate). Name it and the minerals are there and consider the use of cobalt in cell phones and where much of it originates. Then reflect on the appalling living standards in the Congo past and present day. Welcome to the world.
We both can live in hope.
Cheers,
Courtenay
From: Richard Stapleton <rjstapleton@bulloch.net> Sent: Friday, June 26, 2020 9:11 PM To: Courtenay barnett <barnett46@hotmail.com> Subject: Re: In blunt and forceful format – and yes – I challenge.
I believe the taxing away of family wealth (at least some percent of it) is necessary if Earth is to ever have a level playing field where all humans have decent lives. Inheritance taxes in the US for the richest used to be about eighty percent. Thanks to Republicans it’s now about thirty percent as I understand it for the richest. Capitalism in recent decades has led to the creation of a new aristocracy far richer than ever existed and inequality this has created will exist forever barring changes in tax laws, precluding any chance of Earthian peace. Why should any human be advantaged because of inherited characteristics of any sort, racial, intellectual, physical, or economic merely because of being lucky enough to have been born to certain parents and inheriting genes, messages, and money? The bottom line is that no one should have unfair lifetime advantages due to inheritance if fair and dependable social, economic, and political systems exist, which has never happened. The world has always been a screwed up place, poorly managed, or not managed at all, dog eat dog, every person for her or his self, and yes it’s been much more unfair for some than others, especially enslaved Africans and native aboriginals, and people of all races with physical, emotional, and behavioral disorders, and low intelligence. If humans could somehow co-construct truly fair, efficient, and effective social, economic, and political systems, unlike what we have now, where one’s life is largely a function of the parents they had due to pure luck, there would be no need for inheritances. As an entrepreneurship and small business professor I have done research with a national survey attempting to find out how successful entrepreneurs will their wealth to their children. I assumed that almost all would will their wealth to their children on an equal share basis. Not so. I asked them in the questionnaire in a strongly agree to strongly disagree question whether they agreed with the statement “Anything I will my children will depend on my feelings at the time I make out my last will.” A clear majority agreed with the statement. I documented it in my book Business Voyages. Not only is life not fair, many parents are not fair to their children and you can build a case that life will never be fair and the same insanity that has always existed will continue until Earth becomes a dead planet. No, I do not think everything you personally have should be taxed away and given to the common good as matters now stand. Given the sorry state of social, religious, economic, and political systems now I believe willing family estates to children is right and proper (at least some percentage of them). Given the fact parents caused their children to be brought into this sorry world it is morally right that parents should do what they can to protect their own children. But if humans should co-construct decent dependable social, economic, and political systems in the future along the lines of what I outline in my essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” there will be no need for parents to will wealth to their children because all children will be born rich, just like a few lucky children born to billionaires are now. And then there is the matter of free will. If it does not exist, as I believe, and thousands of others believe, then no one is to blame or praise for anything, including how much or little wealth they have. If you don’t believe me on this just ask Google “Does free will exist?” You will find thousands of references. I believe everything is caused by infinitely-regressive cause-effect chains.
I have not yet shared the Internet Conversation article with my personal mailing list or any social media. Most likely no one but you has read it. Should I delete it? Or delete your name as a co-author? Or should I add what you and I have said here to it?
Dear Richard, I initially went to the religious part of the discussion. Now I go into the economics of the situation we in the world face:- You are ultimately saying that everything my father made should be taxed away to be applied to the general good and other people should be allowed to make and enjoy what they are able to during my lifetime – to hold for their own. Then any wealth I have accumulated on my own should be taxed away and when I die then have applied to the general good, but my offspring ( after over 300 years of free planation slavery and Indian ( on my Mom’s side – servitude) should then be allowed to make and enjoy whatever they are able to have on our returns)? That’s how I read it anyway. Not to pass wealth from generation to generation to provide anyone a fair advantage – despite the undisputable fact that Whites have overwhelmingly generated intergenerational wealth to eternity and beyond – and – at whose expense? Answer if you can. CB
On Jun 26, 2020, at 1:19 PM, Courtenay barnett <barnett46@hotmail.com> wrote:Yeah – no problem there Richard – we get on pretty well and the world can learn that it ain’t necessarily all black and white. Cheers. Courtenay
From: Richard Stapleton <rjstapleton@bulloch.net> Sent: Friday, June 26, 2020 10:01 AM To: Courtenay barnett <barnett46@hotmail.com> Subject: Re: The USA – cause and effect – REPLY
Excellent response and article in Danielle’s Garden. I basically agree with you on myths but it still seems to me that religious symbols, pictures, crosses, statues and whatnot will perpetuate historical suspicion, agitations, intolerance, competitions, and hatred among various religious groups. What do you think of the idea of my publishing this conversation in this thread verbatim in the Effective Learning Report? In an article entitled “An Internet Conversation on Reparations and Statues.” I’m sure it would be interesting and enlightening for a lot of folks, but would it be worth the risk?
I agree with you in the main but beg to differ on just – one point. That is ‘religion’.
I am not a religious person. I attended St. Georges College in Jamaica and before I departed at age 16 for further education in England, I came to understand a lot. By the age of 14, I raised questions about this ‘God’ – the white portrayed ‘God’ as Jesus and there my intellectual pursuits commenced from the embryo.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, because my mother was a devout believer and I was not, but she loved me dearly and so did I too of her, we agreed to disagree when at a certain point we debated. Maybe that is what led to me writing this nuanced essay: http://www.daniellesgarden.org/dw-myth.htm
Myth – Danielle’s GardenDanielle’s Garden. TOWER HILL EDUCATIONAL FUND A/C 20067 Bank of Nova Scotia 1-3 Knutsford Blvd. kingston 5, Jamaica. E-mail: INFO@ DaniellesGarden.org . MYTH AS WORLD INSPIRATION. Each person is faced in life with certain primal existential questions.www.daniellesgarden.org
Always happy to hear a learned voice in response. Kind regards. Courtenay
Hello Courtenay I agree serious apologies and reparations to descendants of African slaves and native aboriginals who had lands stolen and were subjected to genocide and inhumane callous and mean exploitation are ethically required and appropriate. Regarding statues being taken down, I think all statues of religious, political, and military figures and characters of any sort should be taken down so as not to glorify past competitive conquests, victories, and losses, of any sort to set the Earthian human race on the march to a truly sustainable and peaceful existence devoid of superstitious tribalisms, which entails abolishing competitive capitalism from the production of the necessities of life around Earth. Competitive capitalism in small business environments can be retained as a form of sport and entertainment provided all booty taken in by winners is taxed away upon their deaths to maintain a level competitive playing field every generation. Plus Earthians must co-construct policies to peacefully reduce the Earthian human population for several generations to eliminate the need for dog eat dog win-lose economic competition around Earth and to put Earthian human production and consumption systems on a sustainable rational footing that will indefinitely protect the Earthian environment and existing species of fauna and flora living aboard Spaceship Earth. Toward the Co-Constructing of Spaceship Earth, Inc. https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ Cheers, Richard
I agree with you that it is well argued and presented. Some years ago I had watched a documentary on Levitz Town which was making similar points. However, this video welds together a lot more ideas which are clearly explained. Sorry, I only have the video as forwarded to me by a friend and do not have a link. Since we are on the topic of race, I note that quite a stir has been caused by the question of whether or not certain statues should be removed. On that topic I share with you some thoughts I sent to another friend. ” I believe that the sentiments expressed( below – Gleaner letter) might not be as clear as one may state the issues:-
There are potentially different narratives coming from ‘victor’ versus ‘vanquished’ and this is quite evident in how the British have written their history.
A ‘villain’ such as Nelson Mandela, once labelled a ‘terrorist’ – versus a world renowned statesman well exemplifies the division of perspectives.
As with the absence of any statue in honour of Adolph Hitler right across Germany – the idea of not honouring any genocidal maniac or any enslaver is not actually a ridiculous or outlandish idea.
It is a meme where there is the honouring of those who committed genocide or enriched themselves through the enslavement and trading in human beings; its alternative is to have the direct acknowledgement of such persons by removing their place of honour in form of effigy – a statue.
The issue is not the rewriting of history, since the documentation of historical events is an interpretative process within which the writer in actuality defines who is or is not the ‘villain’, the ‘savage’ , the ‘hero’ etc. By pointing to the misdeeds of an individual and factually recording that aspect of the person’s conduct ( person in question Cecil Rhodes) is therefore not at all any denial of nor rewriting of history – it is stating history is a fuller and more accurate and factual manner.
Many examples of reparations being paid/allocated do exist – e.g. Germany to Jews; Native American/Canadians lands grant in America and Canada; Maoris apology and compensation in New Zealand etc. – so a Caribbean call for reparations does have legal precedent.
Then we now have the Shaun King challenge from political iconoclastic to an actual iconoclastic challenge to the portrayal of Jesus. Another debate for another time. Cheers, Courtenay
Best video I have seen about what went wrong with race relations, especially in the US. Agree completely with the analysis here. Jim Crow was bad enough, but the war on drugs was even worse. Well presented information, very relevant information. Yes, we should care. But most of all we should figure out why and how it happened and make it stop. Do you have a web address for it? I would like to post it.
On Jun 24, 2020, at 9:43 AM, Courtenay barnett <barnett46@hotmail.com> wrote: Genocide.
<VIDEO-2020-06-24-07-09-09.mp4>
RICHARD JOHN STAPLETON is the Editor & Publisher of the Effective Learning Report, a certified transactional analyst, and an octogenarian emeritus professor of management, living and working in the United States
COURTENAY BARNETT is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, and has argued public interest and human rights cases. He has published several articles in the Effective Learning Report. He lives and works in the Caribbean.
THE EARTHIAN is a digest of articles containing facts, perspectives, theories, models, analyses, and recommendations concerned about existential states of affairs affecting all species of fauna and flora around Spaceship Earth. Recent relevant articles written and published by intelligent hard-hitting truth-seeking writers in Internet journals about psychological, social, economic, political, military, religious, and ecological states of affairs around Spaceship Earth are linked below as sources, following a comment by the editor.
“ASK LESS WHAT YOUR NATION CAN DO FOR YOU—ASK MORE WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR SPACESHIP EARTH”
OR SO IT SEEMS TO ME RIGHT NOW
By Richard John Stapleton
The Covid 19 virus is far from conquered, still thriving it seems, despite various countries, including the US, saying it’s not that bad, and therefore the economy should be opened back up. And then you can find numbers on the Internet saying just the opposite, another one hundred thousand deaths in the US by September, etc.
And there’s more climate change bad news, such as the recent cyclone in India-Bangladesh, the first of their season, causing three million people to be evacuated, hopefully not a harbinger of what the 2020 hurricane season has in store for the US.
And then there’s the stock market crash and federal government and Federal Reserve System monetary policy actions trying to stave off another Great Depression, with trillions of dollars of new funny money pumped into markets to stabilize them. Want to buy a little more stock now that the market has gone back up some? Go ahead and do it, may be the thing to do. But maybe not. You’ll lose your shirt some say, just like in the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
And a police squad of three Caucasians and one Oriental in the US killed George Floyd, a US citizen of African descent, callously, heedlessly, and brutishly, whether intentionally or otherwise, and got caught on a bystander’s cell phone video, that went viral. And riots and protests erupted in violence and flames across the US, and around Spaceship Earth.
And then Trump threatened to turn the US into a military dictatorship with himself, Mussolini-like, in “total domination” of the situation, to control the protests, demonstrations, riots, and looting.
And the US state department and military continue to play Games around Spaceship Earth, from eight hundred or so USian military bases, constructed near the borders of countries such as Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Yemen, China, and North Korea, and in Africa, and South America, acting as if the US had nobly and virtuously won World Wars I and II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and its recent Middle Eastern wars, and thus has a sacred right to make sure USians and and other Earthian humans stay safe from all economic and political operations on foreign soil not acceptable to the US government.
Yes, of course, capitalism is the right and best economic system. Dog eat dog capitalism really works, doesn’t it, especially for the richest, the too big to fail, and the most powerful.
And just let the USian Federal Reserve System, and other Earthian central banking systems, keep punching more digits into computers and calling the resulting numbers money, and use the resulting funny money to pay military bills, pensions, and salaries for all government and military employees, and contractors, and provide subsidies for anyone who needs one, of whatever wealth level, occupation, race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, or whatever, MMT it’s called, Modern Monetary Theory, so we can all live happily ever after. Whoopee.
It’s largely a psychological Game, rescuing, persecuting, or victimizing someone or some group or organization, or nation, whatever seems most profitable. Round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows.
See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK—You’re OK life position.
This entails Earthians peacefully reducing through natural attrition the human population aboard Spaceship Earth for several generations, not doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.
This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form
Riding aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet with cloudy and rainy weather below, which would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s computer system or the pilot and co-pilot looking out their windows at clouds and lightning below with their hands clutching their steering wheels?
In the interests of full disclosure some of these ideas were learned from Buckminster Fuller reading his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
TO RESPOND:
As usual this edition of THE EARTHIAN links and cites as SOURCES recent articles written and published by clear deep-thinking hard-hitting independent writers on various Earthian states of affairs.
Some Game playing goes on in the articles, i.e., a writer may be psychologically persecuting, rescuing, or victimizing someone, but it seems to me the writers are generally trying to paint accurate pictures of what they think is really going on.
Unfortunately it seems to me one can build a case politicians spend most of their time playing psychological Games, also wasting time and energy pastiming, and doing rituals (shuffling paper, filling out forms, attending unproductive meetings), and raising money to buy advertising to get reelected. Almost everything done in so-called foreign policy around Earth is a move in a psychological Game it seems to me.
It’s not easy, impossible possibly, to separate relevant from irrelevant focal points in order to comprehend global cases, systems, and processes, while being inundated with fake news and true facts of states of affairs generated daily around Spaceship Earth, made public on the Internet, and elsewhere, to see what’s really going on, using primarily inductive and analogical reasoning, based on probability, not deductive logic. Almost never can anyone prove with deductive logic that a general proposition about psychological, social, economic, or political states of affairs is absolutely true. About the best humans can hope for is to develop consensual answers that are generally acceptable and true based on probability.
It’s better to be honestly wrong than dishonestly wrong. Telling someone something you know is fake as if it were true is worse than telling someone something that’s fake because of genuine ignorance.
It seems to me most lying is lying by omission, people not telling people things they know are true to gain some sort of psychological, social, economic, or political advantage. Whether lying by omission is more or less harmful than lying by commission, telling people things you know are false and fake, is debatable, as is proving whether it’s getting easier or harder for most people to know what’s fake and what’s not. Political parties, Earthian governments, and mainstream media lie by omission with alacrity.
Feel free to respond with comments and criticisms about any of the SOURCES listed below using the RESPONSES post on this blog masthead at the top of this page; but please refrain from making ad hominem attacks. Criticize and correct any of the facts, data, evidence, reasoning, and conclusions in any of the articles; but please refrain from slandering and defaming the characteristics and reputations of the authors illogically using slanderous or defamatory comments trying to prove their arguments and conclusions in their articles are wrong, and yours are right.
I have no desire to sell subscriptions or advertising or solicit donations for THE EARTHIAN, but I would like to sell more books. If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN and would like to reciprocate go to the Effective Learning Publications page and purchase one or more copies of my books at https://www.effectivelearning.net/effective-learning-publications.html .
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Richard John Stapleton, certified transactional analyst, educator, writer, editor, publisher, and octogenarian emeritus professor of management. A full career vita is provided on the RJS Academic Vita page posted on this blog’s masthead at the top of this page.
Several wrongs do not make a right. Kneeling on the man’s neck and killing him while handcuffed was off the chart cruel and inhumane, and punishments for the crime should ensue; but as this article points out there are other considerations. Things have been taken out of context to serve various purposes. Here is a quote from the Berkeley article posted below:
“In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.
“Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or ‘Uncle Toms’. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.”
What is “agency”? Basically it’s believing that humans have the capacity to make independent decisions, which is not the same as saying free will exists and humans consciously choose to do what they do on the spot, poof, as if my magic, deciding what to do instantaneously, instead of being caused to decide and do what they do by preexisting causes linked in unbroken cause-effect regressive chains. If you ask Google “does free will exist?” you will find thousands of references for and against the idea that free will exists. No one can prove that free will exists, for Earthian humans of any sort, race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever.
One can build a case that no race is more to blame for what has happened than any other since all were caused to do what they did, or, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Prototractatus, “Everything that happens happens by accident.” I discussed this problem in my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds.
If free will does not exist then no one is to blame or praise.
No telling what kinds of considerations for money making are happening within pharmaceutical corporations caused by the need for a vaccine to prevent Covid 19.
Seems true to me. I have been saying for fifteen years the US needs more fiscal policy action rather than monetary policy action at the macro level, as this article points out. Chickens are comin’ home to roost. It’s past time to start using fiscal policy to enrich the poor by significantly increasing the taxes of the rich to create infrastructure jobs rather than continue to enrich the rich using monetary policy. Rabobank is a large international bank headquartered in the Netherlands.
Saying lowlifes and losers caused the riots is appallingly low class and low life-like loser language for a president of the US to use, especially when irresponsibly Tweeted when the US is in a serious crisis, as if trying to fan the flames of fires already lit. It’s hard to believe someone like this got elected president of the US. He’s got to go. Joe Biden will probably be a disaster as president but surely not be as disastrous as Trump, thanks to Dem voters in their primary not having enough sense to vote in their own best interests for Bernie Sanders, in a rigged corrupt primary from the git-go.
Seems to me fascism similar to that of Franco that grew in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s is more likely to happen in the US than fascism similar to that of Hitler that grew out of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
Massive personal article artfully written and informative about environmental threats caused by climate change, based on the first cyclone this year in India-Bangladesh, hopefully not a harbinger of what the 2020 hurricane season has in mind for the US.
Largely nonsense. First of all governments and central banks are not printing money: They are just just punching digits into computers and calling the resulting numbers money, and then putting resulting funny money one way or another into banking systems and government treasuries, to be used to pay for military bills, pensions, and other things causing huge national deficits and debts. As to capitalism not being to blame for the whole problem, yes that’s right. It’s not to blame for the whole problem, but a lot of it. Capitalism, is nothing but a dog eat dog system of competition, which in some cases can motivate corporations and people to work harder and better, producing more. True, there has never been a fully successful socialistic or communistic system; but nor has there ever been a fully successful capitalistic system.
Capitalism has not been destroyed by federal governments, however much they contributed: The major culprit is large corporations, especially large too big to fail banks, that sold their workers down the river outsourcing jobs and who gambled their way to ruin in so-called “markets”, requiring federal governments to bail them out and rescue them with funny money, Yeah, right, dog eat dog competition for everyone but the biggest, the most powerful, and the richest, that’s capitalism for you. Capitalists at the top, not labor unions, worker-owned cooperatives, and welfare recipients at the bottom, are destroying capitalism.
Revolution into what if not socialism, communism, or capitalism? No, there won’t be any real revolutions, because there is nothing that has not been tried to revolt into. Any economic system would work if it was well managed, but that has never happened. All large economic systems have collapsed, most winding up run by fascist dictators near the end before they fully collapsed, which is where they are all heading now, once again, as in the 1930s, around Spaceship Earth.
Tradeoffs, tradeoffs, tradeoffs, including freedom of speech to decrease hate communications of all sorts that might dehumanize and militarize countries. Switzerland is probably the most democratic and peaceful nation on Earth and now it is having problems with hate communications. Do we need something like an American ECRI, an ACRI, to decrease hate speech, especially coming from US presidents?
The acronym ECRI in this article stands for European Commission against Racism and Intolerance.
Unfortunately Trump is the most read journalist in the US. All he has to do is impulsively tweet something, no matter how dumb and lowlife-like, and millions will read it. No other Internet journalist comes close to being that successful as a writer.
In Japan the Bank of Japan, owned by Japanese citizens, will wind up owning more stock in large corporations than anyone else in Japan. In the US the Federal Reserve System, owned by private banks, will wind up owning more stock of US corporations than anyone else, if current policies should continue indefinitely. Is this a good way to nationalize all large corporations to run them to benefit all citizens? If so the US needs to set up a Bank of the United States to buy stock and other corporate assets to stabilize markets rather than let the Federal Reserve System do it.
Mainly caused by Repugs and neoliberal Dems relentlessly cutting taxes for the rich and gutting every social program they could get their hands on while relentlessly increasing military expenditures and giving funny money bail-out money to the big banks, while aiding and abetting large corporations sending USian jobs overseas to low wage countries.
The Group: To Save Spaceship Earth is a novel work in progress. While settings, plots, theories, objects, and narratives in this novel may be analogous to what has happened in various realities around Spaceship Earth, the names of characters cast herein are fictional. All parts of this novel will be published in the Effective Learning Report at various intervals on the internet, subject to revision at any time, hopefully culminating in a final print edition offered for sale to the public.
Richard John Stapleton, Writer, Editor, and Publisher
Copyright 2020 by Effective Learning Publications. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be copied or printed on paper without permission. Share on the internet as you wish.
If you want to refresh yourself about what supposedly happened in earlier episodes, go to the following website addresses:
Henry—“Before we change the subject I would like to say there are plenty of folks these days who do not believe in any kind of god or religion, at least not a normal kind of religion. Apparently some scientists believe it is possible the universe just happened from, poof, a big bang, caused by nothing, a spontaneous explosion, ten to twelve billion years ago, spewing gases, matter, electrons and what have you in all directions causing billions of galaxies of stars to form, some with planets, including ours, Earth. I cannot imagine how such a thing could have happened but we know for a fact the universe exists and contains billions of stars and probably millions of planets. It seems obvious to me a human-like creature called god could not have possibly created the universe. If a god did it he, she or it had to be nothing like a human being. There is no way in hell a human-like creature could do such a thing.”
Rout—“Ok, any other comments about religion before we move on?”
Matilda—“There are people who believe there is a god but it is nothing like the typical god of a mainstream religion, a jealous, vengeful father-like figure making his children obey and love him to earn the privilege living with him in heaven forever.
“They believe this god is rational and loves people unconditionally. They believe this god really understands why people do what they do, how they are caused to be what they are and do what they do, feeling sorry for humans, but not judging them, making no pretense of being all-powerful or all-loving, that sort of thing.
“Some of these people also believe in an afterlife of total bliss and happiness. Frankly, I don’t believe in this sort of thing. I think when you die the electricity in your brain is shut off and nothing works from then on. You are like an unplugged computer, except your biological parts disintegrate and decay to nothing. It’s like having a dreamless sleep from then on.”
Luke—“I now see, my lord, with all my heart, I am in the midst of unbelievers and deceivers, foolish men and women who dare to question your holy word thinking in their hearts they are superior to your word and your sacred gospels, full of pride and vainglory, on the road to hell. I pray for their immortal souls and I beseech you to have mercy upon them. In Jesus’s name. Amen.”
Steve—“For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think it does any good to talk about religion. Seems like no one ever really changes his mind about religion. People believe whatever their parents believed, they get brainwashed into it at an early age, and they pretend to believe it from then on, however simple minded it might have been. I don’t think most people professing to be religious really know diddly-squat about religions, or anything else for that matter. All they know are a few sayings they have picked up here and there, such as Jesus loves you and such, or hell is hot and you better get right with god. Almost none of them ever read the Bible they hold so sacred to see what it really says.
“I would like to bring our discussion down to earth and talk about what I consider the most relevant problem facing us today, the erosion and decay of family-owned small businesses in the US. I work in our family business. We manufacture metal stock tanks, hog feeders and other products for farmers. We have been in business over 50 years. I have a degree in business and I would like to continue the family business and pass it on to my children.
“Up to the past few years we did not have that much foreign competition, for various reasons, transportation costs were too high, foreigners did not understand our technology and processes, whatever. But now we do have serious foreign competition, thanks to NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and we may not be around much longer. We still make a profit, albeit a declining one, and our sales are going down. It’s almost impossible for small American manufacturers to compete with products made in low-wage countries.
“Thousands of small manufacturing businesses like ours have been driven out of business in the US since 1980, and especially since NAFTA was passed in 1993. And now we have to contend with problems caused by Trump’s trade war that caused the price of some of our raw materials to go up, while giving little relief from our foreign competition in our markets.
“It may get to where there are no small family owned manufacturing businesses like ours left in the US. Thousands have been wiped out in the last 30 years. I’m worried sick about it, worried about my future and our family and worried about the future of our employees, who we really do care about.
“Seems like there are no answers. The problem has been getting worse and worse for years and it just keeps getting worse. As much as I hate to say it, I think we would be better off with tariffs to protect our manufacturers and workers. There are billions of poor people in the world willing to work for a pittance compared to what Americans have been paid, and if you allow free trade around the world American wages will inevitably gravitate down to the lowest level, if the companies they work for can stay in business.
“This is already going on. We still have some car manufacturing in the US, but wages for automobile workers are now about half what they used to be. I read the other day an Indian textile company with 12 plants in India is now setting up a textile mill in a small Georgia town in the US to make yarn using American workers, in a town that had an American-owned textile mill up until five or so years ago. At the ground breaking ceremony with the Georgia governor the Indian owner of the new plant, to be built from scratch on some industrial park, said his people had figured out with tax breaks, low land cost, and transportation advantages they could make a profit using American workers still living in the town that were laid off five years ago. No mention was made of what kind of wages are to be paid, but you can bloody well bet they won’t be as high as they were in the American mill that shut down.
“America is being thirdworldized. Wages in US manufacturing are being driven down toward the average level of the whole world, apparently now on a par with India. Maybe manufacturing will return to the US, but if it does, America will begin to look more and more like India, with a rich corrupt political and economic elite at the top, a small percentage of doctors, lawyers, engineers and such and untold millions of poor people living in abject poverty and squalor.
“Things got better in the US from about 1950 to 1980, but it’s been downhill ever since for everyone but the elite rich, and it remains to be seen how far we’ll fall before we hit bottom.
“I recommend bringing back tariffs to protect US wages and manufacturing, and punishing US companies with much higher taxes for abandoning their employees and facilities in the US and sending US jobs overseas.”
Helen—“As you know nurses don’t make that much money, and we work hard for our money. My take home pay has stayed about the same for a long time. I get a raise every now and then and I don’t complain. I enjoy helping people. But I also don’t need higher taxes and tariffs to keep my job. I worked to get an education and built my skill set to where I was worth something to an employer. Anybody in America can still do that. All it takes is being willing to work hard and get yourself the training you need to make yourself worth something to an employer. I don’t understand why people expect taxpayers to keep on spending more and more money on welfare to help people when they can help themselves. I think we should lower taxes, not make them worse. And I don’t think we need a minimum wage. You ought to be paid what you’re worth, not what the government says you’re worth.”
Steve—“I agree with you about the minimum wage but I don’t think the problem is people not being able to work hard and get training. It does no good to get training for a job that does not exist.”
Jimmy—“I agree with you, Steve, about the working hard part, but I strongly disagree about the minimum wage part. As you may recall from our initial introductions, I am a labor union organizer. I deal with these problems day in and day out, and I agree with much of what Steve said about the most relevant problem today being the outsourcing of American jobs. Whew, where do you start? This problem has been around in some form, but got going in earnest after Ronald Reagan got elected in 1980. The root cause is greed and inhumanity to man on the part of rich capitalists, not caring about your fellow man, only caring about your own selfish hide. On the other hand, you have the satisfied bystanders like Helen who do not have a clue what it is like to work in an industrial or big business setting as a wage earner alongside thousands of other workers doing jobs requiring specialized skills that can only be learned on the job. Most people who have never worked in places like this have no idea what it feels like to be treated like a machine and watched over constantly by a supervisor who is paid for his blind obedience to a boss who is paid a salary to force those below him, or her, to work as hard and long as possible, for as little money as possible.
“Skill sets, my ass, you don’t need a damn skill set to work in most businesses as a worker. All you need is the ability to remember a few mental and manual manipulations peculiar to your job. And this is true pretty much all the way up to the top, except in staff areas, such as engineering, accounting, marketing, law and such. All general supervisors and managers all the way to the top spend the vast majority of their time simply watching others, bullshooting with cronies, brownnosing with bosses, and enforcing rules and regulations passed down to them by their bosses. About the only skill set you need is the ability to talk and do what you are told. As to so-called higher order thinking skills, forget that. Nobody thinks in a corporation, except maybe those at the very top at times, but even they spend most of the time bullshootng and brownnosing, which are, I suppose, skills, the most important skills there are in business for those making the most money.
“As to being paid what you are worth, who the hell knows how much someone is worth? Do you really think you’re worth $5,000 a month to sit here and bullshit six hours one day a month? Give me a break! You are paid what you are paid because some idiot has decided to pay you that much, and this has nothing to do with what you are really worth. Do you really think a corporate CEO can be worth $20 million a year? You think you are well paid at $5,000 a day? Some CEOs are paid $100,000 a day for bullshooting and brownnosing.
“Worth what to whom? You are worth a lot to your children and pets if you have any, since they depend on you and need you, but how much are you really worth? Especially to a large corporation that could care less what you’re really worth, a heartless, soulless institution existing for the sole purpose of enriching its stockholders and higher management as much as possible by paying everyone else working for the place as little as possible, with every manager and supervisor in the joint being rewarded for putting the screws to everyone below them in the chain of command, or what I call the chain of obedience. You think corporations are free and democratic? Think again. There’s almost no freedom in a corporation. Prisons are freer than corporations, since inmates in prison can think for themselves. Inmates in corporations can only think for the corporation. The corporation owns your mind and brain when you are supposedly at work, even after work sometimes.
“Corporations are freer than prisons mainly in the sense workers can go home at night, and move around in corporate facilities during the day in some cases, and do whatever they want after they get home, and they can quit any time they want, assuming they can find another job, which is damn near impossible for about half the people in the US right now who would like to work if they could find a job paying a livable wage. So most people working for corporations are not free to quit any time they might want to. Sure, they can quit any time they want to, and ruin themselves financially.
“And those unemployed people are not able to find jobs because they are lazy and don’t have ‘skill sets’. No, they can’t find jobs because jobs do not exist. Some jobs do require so-called skilled sets, such as nursing jobs, and there might be some openings for those kinds of jobs now in the US, but I’ll assure you there aren’t enough of them. No, dammit, we don’t need jobs requiring skill sets, we need jobs anyone can learn on the job that provide a decent income, like we used to have, if we are to have a decent country, like we used to have in the US.
“And I’ll assure you, you need people like me who will work to make sure ordinary workers are paid as much as possible by people who are out to pay them as little as possible, and your real worth be damned.
“That’s just the way the system works, my friends. The capitalist system that is.”
Harrison—“I’m angry and insulted. I happen to be a corporate CEO and I can tell you this fellow is straight out of lulu land. Sounds like a commie. Yes, corporate CEOs are paid a lot because they are worth a lot. Most of them are so valuable they could leave at any time and find similar paying jobs working for competitors. The market sets the price for anyone in the real world. You are paid what you are worth in the market, and the only way you can find out what you are worth is try to sell yourself in the market. Whatever you are able sell yourself for is what you are worth in reality.
“On the other hand I don’t think any CEO is worth $100,000 a day, as this union sympathizer just told you.
“As to a union sympathizer like you being able to raise the wages of workers, you might be able to raise them to some extent in a company that has excess profits, but in a competitive business with a standard profit margin there is no way you can go in there and significantly raise wages without ruining the company. Significantly higher wages all of a sudden will cause the company to significantly raise prices for what it produces which will cause it to go broke because it will not be able to sell what it produces.
“If a company is producing something in global markets its labor costs can’t be significantly higher than the labor costs of any competing company in any country or it will go out of business because nobody will buy what they produce. Too expensive. If wages are lower in other countries than US living standards if you have free competition then goods in that industry cannot be produced in the US or the living standards of US workers must be reduced to the level of the foreign workers they are competing with. That is the truth of the matter, my friends.
Jimmy—“I’m so sorry you’re angry Harrison. It’s a real shame someone as high and mighty as you would be subjected to my opinions.
“By the way, I’m a union organizer not a union sympathizer. As to your monetary pay being what you can sell yourself for in the market, I agree completely. If there are plenty of jobs your pay will go up. If there are no jobs you receive nothing, but that is not what you are worth as a human being, and what you receive has nothing to do with skill sets or what you are really worth. You are a mere commodity paid what supply and demand in the market determines. Corporate CEOs are not paid millions of dollars per year for skill sets. They are paid as much as they are as bribes and hush money to make sure they enforce rules, regulations, policies and procedures that enrich their higher ups writing their paychecks, making sure the higher ups are paid what they want at the expense of underlings in the system. In other words CEOs are paid as much as they are for having a greedy grasping dependable loyal system, with respect to those who write the checks, not skill sets.
“As to no CEO being worth $100,000 a day, I could not agree more, but I happen to know some of them are paid more than that, counting all their pay, salary, stock options, profit sharing, what have you. I saw in USA Today several years ago an article in which they reported a CEO had been paid $33 million that year. I figured out that was about $100,000 a day. How many days a year do they work, 300 maybe? You do the math.”
Helen—“I don’t believe it. Nobody could be paid that much.”
Steve—“Well, I can tell you nobody in our family subchapter S corporation makes anywhere near that much. I’ll be lucky to take out $100,000 this year, as president, CEO, and owner for a year’s work.
“I agree part of the problem is that people at the top are paid too much, but that is a minor part of the overall problem I brought up. CEOs being paid too much is not causing family-owned manufacturing businesses to be wiped out.”
Bob—“A lot of people think we physicians make a lot of money, but it’s nothing compared to what some of these CEOs make. I saw on the Internet the other day that the CEO of Walmart had been paid some $116 million dollars in one year in what they called performance pay. That would work out to over $300,000 per day..
“The highest paid physician I ever knew was an old fraternity brother of mine, a cardiologist. He developed such a reputation as a chest surgeon that he could sit in his office and cut deals with rich prospective patients. He said a billionaire once offered him so much money to travel to the home country of the billionaire to operate on him that it took his breath away. I assume it must have been a million or more dollars for one surgery.
“But I assure you that is not going to happen to most doctors. In fact some of them are having a hard time of it now, paying back their student loans and finding good situations.”
Julia—“That can’t be right. Why that’s insane! Nobody could be paid that much for one day’s work. You must have made some sort of arithmetic mistake.”
Mikhail—“I happen to be an accountant, and I have my calculator with me, which I just used to do the math. If you divide $116 million by 300, which is probably about all the days a CEO works per year, the answer comes out to be $386,666 per day.”
Adam—“I think you have a pretty good grasp of things, Steve, especially your thesis that the worst hit of all have been small manufacturing operations in the US, that were essentially sold down the river by NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, and, I might add, by most economists and politicians.
“Adam Smith back in the eighteenth century published his seminal economics book An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in which he discussed the benefits of free trade among nations. He essentially argued all nations and peoples would become wealthier if free trade, and unfettered competition, existed among nations, since this would cause all nations to specialize in producing raw materials, goods and services at the lowest prices since competition would force them to produce what they had the greatest comparative advantage for producing, which would also cause the yearly output to be maximized, the assumption being the more goods and services produced, the greater the wealth of nations, and, presumably, the citizens therein.
“This makes for a good story and it made The Wealth of Nations one of the most famous books in history, the most famous economics book. It may be true that free trade and unfettered competition would maximize production, but we will never know for sure because it will never happen and never has happened. There have always been trade restrictions, tariffs, subsidies, quotas and what have you, in the US and whereever. Recent trade agreements have reduced or eliminated some of them, but free trade, even today is a myth. The US has all sorts of tariffs and so does every other country. NAFTA, the North America Free Trade Agreement eliminated some of them and bilateral trade agreements with China and others have eliminated some of them, and, it seems this has caused the problem Steve alerted us to, namely the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US, caused by smaller US manufacturing businesses forced into bankruptcy by foreign competition, and by the outsourcing of US manufacturing jobs by large corporations.
“Whether the elimination of trade restrictions has caused the wealth of nations to be reduced is doubtful. It may they have actually increased the wealth of nations and people. More goods may actually have been produced for more people.
“The problem for Steve and people like him in the US is that they paid the price of the progress. Their incomes and wealth went down so the incomes of and wealth of the poor in third world countries could go up, and so the incomes and wealth of American CEOs and stockholders could go up. The incomes and wealth of CEOs and stockholders of large corporations went up because of the outsourcing of US manufacturing jobs brought about by replacing high wage blue collar jobs in the US with slave-labor-equivalent blue collar jobs in impoverished countries.
“Was this fair? Well, it turns out, fairness is in the eye of the beholder. Was it fair some of the dirt poor of poor countries should have their incomes increased by freer trade and competition between the US and its trading partners? Yes, of course. Was it fair the US CEOs and their bosses and stockholders who made this happen should have their incomes and wealth increased significantly, while workers of the US had theirs decreased? No, it’s not fair, but that’s the way things go under dog-eat-dog capitalism.
“Obviously, something went wrong, or maybe a lot of things went wrong. Should US tariffs be reinstated as Steve recommends to correct this unfairness? That is a tough one. Maybe a little, maybe not, depending on how you look at it. But one thing is for sure; we need new rules and regulations to deal with this in the US, such as higher taxes on large corporations and the rich who reaped the windfall they fostered, and something should be done to improve the plight of those cast aside. We need a jobs program to provide decent jobs providing decent incomes in the US for those cast aside, ordinary workers, as Jimmy called them.
“I agree there is no way millions of unemployed people are going to learn new skills and magically find millions of unfilled job openings out there. This is absurd. Those openings do not exist. The jobs do not exist because aggregate demand is not high enough to cause entrepreneurs to create new products and services that would make enough jobs happen. The major problem since 1980 or so is that US economic policies enacted by US politicians have kept aggregate demand low, by decreasing the taxes of the rich and increasing military expenses, and not investing in domestic infrastructure and social programs, which has caused federal debt to explode. Monetary policy has been used instead of fiscal policy to take care of the Wall Street economy, not the main street economy.
“The unemployment problem is actually much worse than the officially stated employment rate, since the number of people officially defined as unemployed by the US government is people currently looking for work, not counting those who know it would do no good to look for jobs that do not exist. There are millions of unemployed people in the US who have given up looking for a job, who are not counted as unemployed. And there are millions more who would work if jobs existed. The actual labor force participation rate in the US for over ten years has been about 60 percent.
“The only way this can be cured anytime soon is by creating a massive government funded jobs program in the US creating infrastructure jobs that will put incomes in the hands of ordinary workers who will spend the money with small businesses, including small manufacturers and construction companies, that will create a multiplier effect sufficient to produce economic growth and full employment.
“Economic conditions during the Obama and Trump administrations markedly improved for the rich, and some jobs have been created for the poor, but the situation for millions remains dire. What’s especially ominous is there are no signs the situation will be significantly improved for the middle and lower classes anytime soon.
“Unfortunately most of the new money created by the Fed wound up in the hands of bankers and the rich, who saved the money, much of it being moved offshore to tax havens in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere. If you want to significantly stimulate economic growth and help the poor you need to put new money in the hands of the poor, not the rich.
